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The Story of Bush 41 the Establishment Won’t Publish

A particular memo caught his eye, and he leaned in for a closer look. Practically jumping off the screen was a memorandum from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, dated November 29, 1963. Under the subject heading “Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” Hoover reported that, on the day after JFK’s murder, the bureau had provided two individuals with briefings. One was “Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency.” The other: “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

McBride shook his head. George H.W. Bush? In the CIA in 1963? Dealing with Cubans and the JFK assassination? Could this be the same man who was now vice president of the United States? Even when Bush was named CIA director in 1976 amid much agency-bashing, his primary asset had been the fact that he was not a part of the agency during the coups, attempted coups, and murder plots in Iran, Cuba, Chile, and other hot spots about which embarrassing information was being disclosed every day in Senate hearings.

Jonathan J. Pollard, the American convicted of spying on behalf of Israel, will walk out of prison on Friday after 30 years, but the Obama administration has no plans to let him leave the country and move to Israel as he has requested. Mr. Pollard, who as a Navy intelligence analyst passed classified documents to Israeli handlers, was due to be released from a federal prison in Butner, N.C., after receiving parole on a life sentence, ending a long imprisonment that has been a constant irritant in relations between the United States and Israel.Under federal parole rules, Mr. Pollard cannot leave the country without permission for at least five years. But his wife, Esther, lives in Israel and he has asked to be reunited with her there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel personally raised the request in a meeting with President Obama earlier this month, but the president was unmoved, according to American officials and the Israeli news media.

But the White House has said it would not intervene in the matter. Senior administration officials said on Thursday that the Justice Department was not considering Mr. Pollard’s request and had no plans to consider it. Administration officials have been loath to appear to grant Mr. Pollard special consideration in the face of strong opposition by intelligence agencies that call his actions a grievous betrayal of national security.“They don’t want to make it look like they were being too lenient,” said Joseph E. diGenova, the former United States attorney who prosecuted Mr. Pollard. If Mr. Pollard were allowed to go to Israel, where his case has been a cause célèbre for years, Mr. diGenova said there would be a “parade” and “events just rubbing it in the United States’ face.”The Israeli news media reported that Mr. Netanyahu and supporters of Mr. Pollard were discouraging public signs of celebration at his release to avoid antagonizing Washington. Supporters said it was churlish to deny Mr. Pollard the chance to leave the country now that he has completed his sentence.

Less than a week after the attacks in Paris — while the public and policymakers were still reeling, and the investigation had barely gotten off the ground — Cy Vance, Manhattan’s District Attorney, released a policy paper calling for legislation requiring companies to provide the government with backdoor access to their smartphones and other mobile devices. This is the first concrete proposal of this type since September 2014, when FBI Director James Comey reignited the “Crypto Wars” in response to Apple’s and Google’s decisions to use default encryption on their smartphones. Though Comey seized on Apple’s and Google’s decisions to encrypt their devices by default, his concerns are primarily related to end-to-end encryption, which protects communications that are in transit. Vance’s proposal, on the other hand, is only concerned with device encryption, which protects data stored on phones. It is still unclear whether encryption played any role in the Paris attacks, though we do know that the attackers were using unencrypted SMS text messages on the night of the attack, and that some of them were even known to intelligence agencies and had previously been under surveillance. But regardless of whether encryption was used at some point during the planning of the attacks, as I lay out below, prohibiting companies from selling encrypted devices would not prevent criminals or terrorists from being able to access unbreakable encryption. Vance’s primary complaint is that Apple’s and Google’s decisions to provide their customers with more secure devices through encryption interferes with criminal investigations. He claims encryption prevents law enforcement from accessing stored data like iMessages, photos and videos, Internet search histories, and third party app data. He makes several arguments to justify his proposal to build backdoors into encrypted smartphones, but none of them hold water.

Before addressing the major privacy, security, and implementation concerns that his proposal raises, it is worth noting that while an increase in use of fully encrypted devices could interfere with some law enforcement investigations, it will help prevent far more crimes — especially smartphone theft, and the consequent potential for identity theft. According to Consumer Reports, in 2014 there were more than two million victims of smartphone theft, and nearly two-thirds of all smartphone users either took no steps to secure their phones or their data or failed to implement passcode access for their phones. Default encryption could reduce instances of theft because perpetrators would no longer be able to break into the phone to steal the data.

Vance argues that creating a weakness in encryption to allow law enforcement to access data stored on devices does not raise serious concerns for security and privacy, since in order to exploit the vulnerability one would need access to the actual device. He considers this an acceptable risk, claiming it would not be the same as creating a widespread vulnerability in encryption protecting communications in transit (like emails), and that it would be cheap and easy for companies to implement. But Vance seems to be underestimating the risks involved with his plan. It is increasingly important that smartphones and other devices are protected by the strongest encryption possible. Our devices and the apps on them contain astonishing amounts of personal information, so much that an unprecedented level of harm could be caused if a smartphone or device with an exploitable vulnerability is stolen, not least in the forms of identity fraud and credit card theft. We bank on our phones, and have access to credit card payments with services like Apple Pay. Our contact lists are stored on our phones, including phone numbers, emails, social media accounts, and addresses. Passwords are often stored on people’s phones. And phones and apps are often full of personal details about their lives, from food diaries to logs of favorite places to personal photographs. Symantec conducted a study, where the company spread 50 “lost” phones in public to see what people who picked up the phones would do with them. The company found that 95 percent of those people tried to access the phone, and while nearly 90 percent tried to access private information stored on the phone or in other private accounts such as banking services and email, only 50 percent attempted contacting the owner.

Venezuelan Oil Minister Eulogio del Pino indicated Saturday that the country’s state oil company PDVSA could open a lawsuit in US courts over new revelations of National Security Agency (NSA) spying on top company executives and internal communications.

The announcement comes after leaked documents released to TeleSUR last Wednesday by ex-NSA analyst Edward Snowden exposed that US intelligence officials posing as diplomats had hacked PDVSA’s internal network, monitoring the communications of at least 900 employees since 2010, including former company president Rafael Ramirez. “This is unacceptable and we are going to file a claim and seek redress for damages under US law,” stated Del Pino, who is also the current president of PDVSA. “We are evaluating legal actions, not moral ones. Delving into the personal information of our workers, our strategies, our plans, [and] our operations is a violation, that is unacceptable,” the oil minister added, speaking from the Third Summit of Gas-Exporting Nations in Tehran.

The comments follow an announcement by President Maduro last week calling for a meeting with the US charge d’affaires in Caracas to review bilateral ties in the wake of the scandal. Speaking on Thursday, US State Department spokesperson John Kirby did not deny the evidence contained in the leaked documents, though he did reject claims that US spy agencies engage in industrial espionage on behalf of US corporations.

Daniel Kaye, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, recently submitted a report to the General Assembly on the protection of whistleblowers and sources. The report highlights key elements of protections for whistleblowers, and is based in part on participation by 28 States as well as individuals and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Among a host of best-practice protections featured in the report, the Special Rapporteur focuses particular attention on national security whistleblowers and sources, those whistleblowers who are often subject to criminal prosecution for exposing serious problems. Notably, the report recommended a public interest balancing test for disclosures in the national security field that could be used to claim protection from retaliation or as a defense when facing prosecution. This balancing test would promote disclosures where the public interest in the information outweighs any identifiable harm to a legitimate national security interest, and requires that the whistleblower disclose no more information than reasonably necessary to expose wrongdoing. A defense for blowing the whistle in the national security field would be a welcome one, as these whistleblowers often face prosecution under the Espionage Act, which could mean years of costly litigation for simply trying to expose practices that make us less secure. This balancing test is similar to one proposed last year by Yochai Benkler, a law professor and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and supported by the Project On Government Oversight. The full report contains many best-practice recommendations that our Congress should consider to strengthen whistleblower protections domestically.

Arabesque$: Enquête sur le rôle des États-Unis dans les révoltes arabes (Investigation into the US Role in the Arab Uprisings) is an update of Ahmed Bensaada’s 2011 book L’Arabesque Américaine. It concerns the US government role in instigating, funding and coordinating the Arab Spring “revolutions.” Most of this history has been carefully suppressed by the western media.The new book devotes much more attention to the personalities leading the 2011 uprisings. Some openly admitted to receiving CIA funding. Others had no idea because it was deliberately concealed from them. A few (in Egypt and Syria) were officially charged with espionage. In Egypt, seven sought refuge in the US embassy in Cairo and had to be evacuated by the State Department.

According to Bensaada, the MENA Arab Spring revolutions have four unique features in common: None were spontaneous – all required careful and lengthy (5+ years) planning, by the State Department, CIA pass through foundations, George Soros, and the pro-Israel lobby.1 All focused exclusively on removing reviled despots without replacing the autocratic power structure that kept them in power. No Arab Spring protests made any reference whatsoever to powerful anti-US sentiment over Palestine and Iraq. All the instigators of Arab Spring uprisings were middle class, well educated youth who mysteriously vanished after 2011.

Follow the Money Relying mainly on Wikileaks cables and the websites of key CIA pass through foundations (which he reproduces in the appendix), Bensaada methodically lists every State Department conference and workshop the Arab Spring heroes attended, the dollar amounts spent on them by the State Department and key “democracy” promoting foundations3, the specific involvement of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Obama’s 2008 Internet campaign team in training Arab Spring cyperactivists in encryption technologies and social media skills, US embassy visits, and direct encounters with Hillary Clinton,  Condoleezza Rice, John McCain, Barack Obama and Serbian trainers from CANVAS (the CIA-backed organization that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic in 2000). Bensaada focuses most heavily on the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt. TheWashington Post has estimated approximately 10,000 Egyptians took part in NED and USAID training in social media and nonviolent organizing techniques. For me the most astonishing information in this chapter concerned the role of an Egyptian exile (a former Egyptian policeman named Omar Afifi Suleiman) in coordinating the Tahrir Square protests from his office in Washington DC. According to Wikileaks, NED paid Suleiman a yearly stipend of $200,000+ between 2008-2011.

Two Turkish generals and a colonel were detained on Saturday for intercepting Syria-bound trucks that belonged to Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT), the newspaper Today’s Zaman reported. In January 2014, Ankara Gendarmerie Major-General Ibrahim Aydin, former Adana Gendarmerie Brigadier-General Hamza Celepoglu and former Gendarmerie Criminal Laboratory Head Colonel Burhanettin Cihangiroglu stopped Syrian-bound trucks in southern Turkey after they received information from an anonymous source that the trucks were illegally carrying weapons to militants in Syria. When the information about the trucks became public, MIT officials and high-ranking Turkish politicians, including President Recep Teyyip Erdogan, who was Prime Minister back then, and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, then the country’s foreign minister, were furious that the gendarmes stopped the trucks and said the Syria-bound trucks were carrying “humanitarian aid” to Turkmen living just south of Turkey, the newspaper said: “Yes, I’m saying this without any hesitation. That aid was going to the Turkmens. There will be a war next door and we will watch our Turkmen, Arab and Turkish brothers being massacred,” Davutoglu said, as cited by Today’s Zaman.

However, members of opposition parties and some Turkish media said the trucks were indeed transporting weapons to Islamic extremists in Syria. The gendarmes involved in the interception confirmed that the Syria-bound trucks weren’t going to an area where the Turkmen lived, but to an area populated by radical groups, the Turkish newspaper said. When an investigation into the MIT case was launched, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) called the probe as “treason and espionage” on the part of prosecutors.

New developments on the issue took place recently. Last Tuesday, Erdogan answered claims previously made by critics, who said the trucks were filled with weapons, by sarcastically asking them: “What if the MIT trucks were filled with weapons?” Then on Saturday, contrary to his earlier claims that the MIT trucks were carrying humanitarian aid to Turkmen, Erdogan said the trucks were actually heading on their way to help the Free Syrian Army (FSA). “They [the gendarmes who revealed the transfer] also exposed those going to the FSA in that way,” Erdogan said on Saturday while addressing his supporters in Balikesir, as cited by Today’s Zaman. Well, that’s getting pretty confusing — were the trucks delivering “humanitarian aid” to the Turkmen or the FSA then? Just make up your mind, Mr. Erdogan. Where the trucks were heading and what were they carrying after all? Meanwhile, some very high-ranking Turkish officials, including then-president Abdullah Gul, revealed that the Syria-bound trucks were a “state-secret,” leading to more speculations that the trucks were indeed filled with weapons. The recent developments are taking place in the wake of a major government crackdown on two Turkish journalists of the Cumhuriyet newspaper, Can Dunbar and Erdem Gul, who we arrested for covering a story and releasing pictures, claiming that Turkish trucks provided weapons to Syrian opposition rebels.

After removing the extremist organization Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) from its list of terrorist organizations in 2012, the US State Department has been unsuccessfully trying to move militants from this group out of Iraq and closer to sites that are being readied for future armed hostilities.

Washington seems to feel that Romania would be an auspicious location for 3,000 of these militants, specifically the city of Craiova, which is located near the Bulgarian border. Massoud Khodabandeh, who was previously a highly placed leader within the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, referred to the Bulgarian press in his claims that the issue of their resettlement was discussed during the meeting between the American secretary of state, John Kerry, and the Romanian foreign minister, Titus Corlatean, in Brussels in early December 2013. Early last year, Albania and Germany announced their willingness to accept a few hundred of the 3,000 fighters. However, the MEK insists that all the members of the group be resettled together in one area, something to which the governments of these countries have not been prepared to agree. Despite Hillary Clinton’s decision to the contrary, the MEK is still considered a terrorist organization in Iraq and Iran.  Iraq’s Shiite government, which rose to power after the US invasion in 2003, has an adversarial relationship with the members of the Mojahedin-e-Khalq and insists that any countries that provide the group with support also be willing to accept its members for resettlement within their own borders. At present, MEK militants are being housed at a former American military base near Baghdad, and their camp has more than once been the target of rocket attacks in recent months (the latest incident was on Dec. 27, 2013).  Mojahedin-e-Khalq militants blame the Iraqi authorities for the attacks, but the latter have denied any involvement.

The MEK is a militant organization that is waging an armed struggle against the Iranian regime.  The group has been responsible for the deaths of about 50,000 people, including the assassination of the president, prime minister, and dozens of senior Iranian officials.  After its relocation to Iraq in 1986, Saddam Hussein often received assistance from the organization’s members during the Iran-Iraq war and also employed them to suppress the Kurdish separatist movement. From the beginning of the US campaign against Saddam Hussein, the organization became a focus of interest of the American government.  In 1994 the State Department sent Congress a damning 41-page report conclusively proving the MEK’s status as a terrorist organization, and as a result, the group was included in the State Department’s 1997 list of terrorist organizations.  The report specifically stated, “It is no coincidence that the only government in the world that supports the Mujahedin politically and financially is the totalitarian regime of Saddam Hussein.” After the American military invasion in 2003, the group came under US control.  The MEK actively lobbied to be removed from the official list of terrorist organizations, and the US put its members to use as part of America’s clandestine commando operations against Iran. It has now emerged that the Bush administration secretly brought members of the MEK to the US for military training that included signals intelligence and other skills related to covert espionage.  Presumably the program ended just before the Obama administration took office.  Apparently, the MEK was then placed under the control of Mossad, which utilized it to kill Iranian nuclear scientists.  Thanks to an article by Justin Raimondo, the writer and founder of the Antiwar.com website, the group was dubbed “Hillary’s Terrorists.”

A contractor working for the National Security Agency (NSA) was arrested by the FBI following his alleged theft of “state secrets.” More specifically, the contractor, Harold Thomas Martin, is charged with stealing highly classified source codes developed to covertly hack the networks of foreign governments, according to several senior law enforcement and intelligence officials. The Justice Department has said that these stolen materials were “critical to national security.” Martin was employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, the company responsible for most of the NSA’s most sensitive cyber-operations. Edward Snowden, the most well-known NSA whistleblower, also worked for Booz Allen Hamilton until he fled to Hong Kong in 2013 where he revealed a trove of documents exposing the massive scope of the NSA dragnet surveillance. That surveillance system was shown to have targeted untold numbers of innocent Americans. According to the New York Times, the theft “raises the embarrassing prospect” that an NSA insider managed to steal highly damaging secret information from the NSA for the second time in three years, not to mention the “Shadow Broker” hack this past August, which made classified NSA hacking tools available to the public.

Snowden himself took to Twitter to comment on the arrest. In a tweet, he said the news of Martin’s arrest “is huge” and asked, “Did the FBI secretly arrest the person behind the reports [that the] NSA sat on huge flaws in US products?” It is currently unknown if Martin was connected to those reports as well.

It also remains to be seen what Martin’s motivations were in removing classified data from the NSA. Though many suspect that he planned to follow in Snowden’s footsteps, the government will more likely argue that he had planned to commit espionage by selling state secrets to “adversaries.” According to the New York Times article on the arrest, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are named as examples of the “adversaries” who would have been targeted by the NSA codes that Martin is accused of stealing. However, Snowden revealed widespread US spying on foreign governments including several US allies such as France and Germany. This suggests that the stolen “source codes” were likely utilized on a much broader scale.