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Gary Edwards

'Clinton death list': 33 spine-tingling cases - 0 views

www.wnd.com/...-list-33-most-intriguing-cases

Clinton-Body-Count

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Feb 17
     
    "(Editor's note: This list was originally published in August 2016 and has gone viral on the web. WND is running it again as American voters cast their ballots for the nation's next president on Election Day.) How many people do you personally know who have died mysteriously? How about in plane crashes or car wrecks? Bizarre suicides? People beaten to death or murdered in a hail of bullets? And what about violent freak accidents - like separate mountain biking and skiing collisions in Aspen, Colorado? Or barbells crushing a person's throat? Bill and Hillary Clinton attend a funeral Apparently, if you're Bill or Hillary Clinton, the answer to that question is at least 33 - and possibly many more. Talk-radio star Rush Limbaugh addressed the issue of the "Clinton body count" during an August show. "I swear, I could swear I saw these stories back in 1992, back in 1993, 1994," Limbaugh said. He cited a report from Rachel Alexander at Townhall.com titled, "Clinton body count or left-wing conspiracy? Three with ties to DNC mysteriously die." Limbaugh said he recalled Ted Koppel, then-anchor of ABC News' "Nightline," routinely having discussions on the issue following the July 20, 1993, death of White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster. In fact, Limbaugh said, he appeared on Koppel's show. "One of the things I said was, 'Who knows what happened here? But let me ask you a question.' I said, 'Ted, how many people do you know in your life who've been murdered? Ted, how many people do you know in your life that have died under suspicious circumstances?' "Of course, the answer is zilch, zero, nada, none, very few," Limbaugh chuckled. "Ask the Clintons that question. And it's a significant number. It's a lot of people that they know who have died, who've been murdered. "And the same question here from Rachel Alexander. It's amazing the cycle that exists with the Clintons. [Citing Townhall]: 'What it
Paul Merrell

Dutch MH17 Investigation Omits US "Intel". Fabrications and Omissions Supportive of US-... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5402970

war & peace Ukraine MH17-dbunking Russia U.S.-sanctions

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • The absence of America’s so-called “intelligence” regarding the downing of Malaysia Airlines MH17 over Ukraine in a 34 page Dutch Safety Board preliminary report raises serious questions about the credibility and legitimacy of both America’s political agenda, and all agencies, organizations, and political parties currently behind it. The report titled, “Preliminary Report: Crash involving Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 flight MH17″ (.pdf), cites a wide variety of evidence in its attempt to determine the cause of flight MH17′s crash and to prevent similar accidents or incidents from occurring again in the future. Among this evidence includes the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), the flight data recorder (FDR), analysis of recorded air traffic control (ATC) surveillance data and radio communication, analysis of the meteorological circumstances, forensic examination of the wreckage (if recovered and possible foreign objects if found), results of the pathological investigation, and analysis of the in-flight break up sequence.
  • Satellite images are referenced in regards to analyzing the crash site after the disaster, however, no where in the report is mentioned any evidence whatsoever of satellite images of missile launchers, intelligence from the United States regarding missile launches, or any information or evidence at all in any regard suggesting a missile had destroyed MH17. In fact, the report concludes by stating: This report is preliminary. The information must necessarily be regarded as tentative and subject to alternation or correction if additional evidence becomes available. Further work will at least include the following areas of interest to substantiate the factual information regarding:
  • The report specifically mentions information collected from Russia, including air traffic control and radar data – both of which were publicly shared by Russia in the aftermath of the disaster. The report also cites data collected from Ukraine air traffic controllers. The United States however, apart from providing technical information about the aircraft itself considering it was manufactured in the US, provided absolutely no data in any regard according to the report.
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  • In the wake of the MH17 tragedy, the West would rush through a series of sanctions against Russia as well as justify further military aid for the regime in Kiev, Ukraine and the literal Neo-Nazi militant battalions serving its pro-Western agenda amid a brutal civil war raging in the country’s eastern most provinces. With sanctions in hand, and the war raging on in earnest, the MH17 disaster dropped entirely out of Western narratives as if it never occurred. Surely if the West had solid evidence implicating eastern Ukrainian rebels and/or Russia, the world would never have heard the end of the MH17 disaster until the truth was fully aired before the public. When Dutch investigators published their preliminary report, the West merely reiterated its original claims, simply imposing their contradictory nature upon the report – most likely believing the public would never actually read its 34 pages. For example, Reuters in a report titled, “Malaysia: Dutch report suggests MH-17 shot down from ground,” would brazenly claim:
  • Had the US actually possessed any credible information to substantiate its claims that MH17 was shot down by a missile, such evidence surely would have been submitted to and included in the Dutch Safety Board’s preliminary reporting. That it is predictably missing confirms what commentators, analysts, and politicians around the world had long since suspected – the West’s premature conclusions regarding MH17′s demise were driven by a political agenda, not a factually based search for the truth. The evidence that MH17 was shot down by a missile as the West insisted is missing because it never existed in the first place. That the Dutch Safety Board possesses such a vast amount of information but is still unable to draw anything but the most tentative conclusions, exposes the alleged certainty of Western pundits and politicians in the hours and days after MH17′s loss as an utterly irresponsible, politically motivated, exploitation of tragedy at best, and at worst, exposing the West – NATO in particular – as possible suspects in a crime they clearly stood the most to benefit from.
  • Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 broke apart over Ukraine due to impact from a large number of fragments, the Dutch Safety Board said on Tuesday, in a report that Malaysia’s prime minister and several experts said suggested it was shot down from the ground. The title of Reuters’ propaganda piece directly contradicts its first paragraph which reveals “experts,” not the actual Dutch Safety Board report, claimed it was “shot down from the ground,” while the report itself says nothing of the sort. The experts cited by Reuters in fact had no association whatsoever with the preliminary report and instead are the same mainstay of cherry picked commentators the West constantly defers to while building up and perpetuating utterly fabricated narratives to advance its agenda globally.
Paul Merrell

Activist Post: 5 Reasons The Latest Report On Syria War Crimes Might Not Be True - 0 views

www.activistpost.com/...atest-report-on-syria-war.html

war & peace Syria Qatar negotgiations war-crimes allegations

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In a recently released and conveniently timed report, complete with references to Nazi Germany and concentration camps, efforts to ramp up support for a “tough line” against Syria at the upcoming Geneva II conference and even possible military intervention, are once again moving into high gear. The report, compiled by three British war crime prosecutors and three “forensic experts” claims that it has demonstrable proof that the Assad government is guilty of torturing and killing over ten thousand people. The report (accessed here) claims to show evidence of physical torture, murder, and starvation. Of course, the Syrian government denies the veracity of the claims of the report and Western media outlets repeat the claims as incontrovertible proof.
  • However, while the final determination of whether or not these claims are accurate is yet to be made, there exist ample reasons to question the assertions made in the report. 1. The Gulf State Feudal Monarchy Qatar is the sponsor of the report. Qatar is, of course, one of the major sponsors of the Syrian invasion (aka the Syrian “rebels”) and has played a massively important role in financing, training, arming, and directing the death squads currently being mopped up by the Assad government. 2. The source of the report. One would be justified in questioning the nature of the report since the sole source of the material comes by virtue of an allegedly “defected Syrian military police officer” who was apparently fine with photographing thousands of dead victims for over a year until now. Regardless of the possibility for such a “moral” conversion, taking information from a “defected” member of government forces once again returns us to the realm of the “activists say” school of journalism – a notorious method used by Western media outlets to promote the side of the death squads and only the side of the death squads as fact in popular reports.
  • 3. Past claims of Assad’s “Crimes Against Humanity.” It is important to remember past experiences with Western claims against Assad for alleged “crimes against humanity,” all of which turned out to have been committed by the death squads, not the Syrian government. From the Houla massacre to the Ghouta chemical weapons attacks, the Syrian government has been exonerated by all credible evidence. The death squads, however, have been proven guilty by virtue of their own video tapes and Youtube accounts, guilty of some of the most horrific acts imaginable. While many innocent people have no doubt been killed in the crossfire between the military and the death squads, the Western media has done everything in its power to place the blood of each and every death inside Syria in the hands of the government. Let us also not forget the other famous Codename, “Curveball,” that played a major role in the initiation of a previous and still ongoing conflict that was later admitted to be a fabrication. Being fooled by the same type of propaganda twice in ten years is indeed a humiliation too great for a country to bear.
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  • 4.) Possibility that the death squads could have killed the victims shown in the report. The victims shown in the report have clearly been abused and starved. However, before jumping to conclusions about just how these unfortunate individuals met their fate, perhaps it would be a good idea to look back at the context of the victims. As mentioned earlier, the death squads operating in Syria are no strangers to crimes against humanity, murder, and torture. In fact, they have been both the initiators of such depravity and overwhelmingly the largest proprietors of it. Furthermore, the fact that the victims were starved does not necessarily mean that they were starved by the government. Indeed, it is important to remember that, due to the siege of a number of cities by both the military and the death squads as well as due to death squad cruelty and attempted cordoning off of specific areas, food shortage has been a serious concern in some areas for some time. There is also plentiful evidence of death squad groups killing innocent people and shipping their bodies to the places where cameras are set up, waiting for the recording of the propaganda piece. The Ghouta chemical attack is just one instance in which innocent civilians were captured and killed by the death squads and used as stage props for propaganda purposes.
  • Indeed, it is also important to remember that the death squads themselves are quite adept at keeping prisoners in atrocious conditions. Only a few months back, it was reported that the Syrian military was able to free a number of captive Syrian women from the hands of the death squads who had kept them in captivity in underground tunnels for months on end for the purposes of using them as sex slaves. 5.) The report was conveniently released just two days before the Geneva II Peace Conference meeting on Syria. After the retraction of an invitation to Iran to attend the peace conference, the Qatari-funded report was released just two days before the peace conference was scheduled to take place. With such evidence being studied and analyzed and a report being compiled, to believe that it was only a coincidence that the information was released two days before the conference is absurd. If this evidence was real and of such grave importance why are world leaders only learning of it now? If world leaders knew, why are we only learning of it now? Considering all of the information provided in this article, taken in conjunction with the “convenient” timing of the release of the reports (convenient, at least, for the enemies of Syria), such reports should be taken with a large grain of salt. The Western media has not only been wrong, but has lied on so many occasions in the past, that it cannot be expected to tell the truth now.
Paul Merrell

Fukushima - A Global Threat That Requires a Global Response - 0 views

www.truth-out.org/...hat-requires-a-global-response

environment pollution radiation Fukushima disaster

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The story of Fukushima should be on the front pages of every newspaper. Instead, it is rarely mentioned. The problems at Fukushima are unprecedented in human experience and involve a high risk of radiation events larger than any that the global community has ever experienced. It is going to take the best engineering minds in the world to solve these problems and to diminish their global impact. When we researched the realities of Fukushima in preparation for this article, words like apocalyptic, cataclysmic and Earth-threatening came to mind. But, when we say such things, people react as if we were the little red hen screaming "the sky is falling" and the reports are ignored. So, we’re going to present what is known in this article and you can decide whether we are facing a potentially cataclysmic event.
  • There are three major problems at Fukushima: (1) Three reactor cores are missing; (2) Radiated water has been leaking from the plant in mass quantities for 2.5 years; and (3) Eleven thousand spent nuclear fuel rods, perhaps the most dangerous things ever created by humans, are stored at the plant and need to be removed, 1,533 of those are in a very precarious and dangerous position. Each of these three could result in dramatic radiation events, unlike any radiation exposure humans have ever experienced.  We’ll discuss them in order, saving the most dangerous for last.
  • Missing reactor cores:  Since the accident at Fukushima on March 11, 2011, three reactor cores have gone missing.  There was an unprecedented three reactor ‘melt-down.’ These melted cores, called corium lavas, are thought to have passed through the basements of reactor buildings 1, 2 and 3, and to be somewhere in the ground underneath.  Harvey Wasserman, who has been working on nuclear energy issues for over 40 years, tells us that during those four decades no one ever talked about the possibility of a multiple meltdown, but that is what occurred at Fukushima.  It is an unprecedented situation to not know where these cores are. TEPCO is pouring water where they think the cores are, but they are not sure. There are occasional steam eruptions coming from the grounds of the reactors, so the cores are thought to still be hot. The concern is that the corium lavas will enter or may have already entered the aquifer below the plant. That would contaminate a much larger area with radioactive elements. Some suggest that it would require the area surrounding Tokyo, 40 million people, to be evacuated. Another concern is that if the corium lavas enter the aquifer, they could create a "super-heated pressurized steam reaction beneath a layer of caprock causing a major 'hydrovolcanic' explosion." A further concern is that a large reserve of groundwater which is coming in contact with the corium lavas is migrating towards the ocean at the rate of four meters per month. This could release greater amounts of radiation than were released in the early days of the disaster.
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  • Radioactive water leaking into the Pacific Ocean:  TEPCO did not admit that leaks of radioactive water were occurring until July of this year. Shunichi Tanaka the head of Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority finally told reporters this July that radioactive water has been leaking into the Pacific Ocean since the disaster hit over two years ago. This is the largest single contribution of radionuclides to the marine environment ever observed according to a report by the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety.  The Japanese government finally admitted that the situation was urgent this September – an emergency they did not acknowledge until 2.5 years after the water problem began. How much radioactive water is leaking into the ocean? An estimated 300 tons (71,895 gallons/272,152 liters) of contaminated water is flowing into the ocean every day.  The first radioactive ocean plume released by the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster will take three years to reach the shores of the United States.  This means, according to a new study from the University of New South Wales, the United States will experience the first radioactive water coming to its shores sometime in early 2014.
  • One month after Fukushima, the FDA announced it was going to stop testing fish in the Pacific Ocean for radiation.  But, independent research is showing that every bluefin tuna tested in the waters off California has been contaminated with radiation that originated in Fukushima. Daniel Madigan, the marine ecologist who led the Stanford University study from May of 2012 was quoted in the Wall Street Journal saying, "The tuna packaged it up (the radiation) and brought it across the world’s largest ocean. We were definitely surprised to see it at all and even more surprised to see it in every one we measured." Marine biologist Nicholas Fisher of Stony Brook University in New York State, another member of the study group, said: "We found that absolutely every one of them had comparable concentrations of cesium 134 and cesium 137." In addition, Science reports that fish near Fukushima are being found to have high levels of the radioactive isotope, cesium-134. The levels found in these fish are not decreasing,  which indicates that radiation-polluted water continues to leak into the ocean. At least 42 fish species from the area around the plant are considered unsafe.  South Korea has banned Japanese fish as a result of the ongoing leaks.
  • As bad as the ongoing leakage of radioactive water is into the Pacific, that is not the largest part of the water problem.  The Asia-Pacific Journal reported last month that TEPCO has 330,000 tons of water stored in 1,000 above-ground tanks and an undetermined amount in underground storage tanks.  Every day, 400 tons of water comes to the site from the mountains, 300 tons of that is the source for the contaminated water leaking into the Pacific daily. It is not clear where the rest of this water goes.   Each day TEPCO injects 400 tons of water into the destroyed facilities to keep them cool; about half is recycled, and the rest goes into the above-ground tanks. They are constantly building new storage tanks for this radioactive water. The tanks being used for storage were put together rapidly and are already leaking. They expect to have 800,000 tons of radioactive water stored on the site by 2016.  Harvey Wasserman warns that these unstable tanks are at risk of rupture if there is another earthquake or storm that hits Fukushima. The Asia-Pacific Journal concludes: "So at present there is no real solution to the water problem."
  • The most recent news on the water problem at Fukushima adds to the concerns. On October 11, 2013, TEPCO disclosed that the radioactivity level spiked 6,500 times at a Fukushima well.  "TEPCO said the findings show that radioactive substances like strontium have reached the groundwater. High levels of tritium, which transfers much easier in water than strontium, had already been detected." Spent Fuel Rods:  As bad as the problems of radioactive water and missing cores are, the biggest problem at Fukushima comes from the spent fuel rods.  The plant has been in operation for 40 years. As a result, they are storing 11 thousand spent fuel rods on the grounds of the Fukushima plant. These fuel rods are composed of highly radioactive materials such as plutonium and uranium. They are about the width of a thumb and about 15 feet long. The biggest and most immediate challenge is the 1,533 spent fuel rods packed tightly in a pool four floors above Reactor 4.  Before the storm hit, those rods had been removed for routine maintenance of the reactor.  But, now they are stored 100 feet in the air in damaged racks.  They weigh a total of 400 tons and contain radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
  • The building in which these rods are stored has been damaged. TEPCO reinforced it with a steel frame, but the building itself is buckling and sagging, vulnerable to collapse if another earthquake or storm hits the area. Additionally, the ground under and around the building is becoming saturated with water, which further undermines the integrity of the structure and could cause it to tilt. How dangerous are these fuel rods?  Harvey Wasserman explains that the fuel rods are clad in zirconium which can ignite if they lose coolant. They could also ignite or explode if rods break or hit each other. Wasserman reports that some say this could result in a fission explosion like an atomic bomb, others say that is not what would happen, but agree it would be "a reaction like we have never seen before, a nuclear fire releasing incredible amounts of radiation," says Wasserman. These are not the only spent fuel rods at the plant, they are just the most precarious.  There are 11,000 fuel rods scattered around the plant, 6,000 in a cooling pool less than 50 meters from the sagging Reactor 4.  If a fire erupts in the spent fuel pool at Reactor 4, it could ignite the rods in the cooling pool and lead to an even greater release of radiation. It could set off a chain reaction that could not be stopped.
  • What would happen? Wasserman reports that the plant would have to be evacuated.  The workers who are essential to preventing damage at the plant would leave, and we will have lost a critical safeguard.  In addition, the computers will not work because of the intense radiation. As a result we would be blind - the world would have to sit and wait to see what happened. You might have to not only evacuate Fukushima but all of the population in and around Tokyo, reports Wasserman.  There is no question that the 1,533 spent fuel rods need to be removed.  But Arnie Gundersen, a veteran nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy Education, who used to build fuel assemblies, told Reuters "They are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods." He described the problem in a radio interview: "If you think of a nuclear fuel rack as a pack of cigarettes, if you pull a cigarette straight up it will come out — but these racks have been distorted. Now when they go to pull the cigarette straight out, it’s going to likely break and release radioactive cesium and other gases, xenon and krypton, into the air. I suspect come November, December, January we’re going to hear that the building’s been evacuated, they’ve broke a fuel rod, the fuel rod is off-gassing."
  • Wasserman builds on the analogy, telling us it is "worse than pulling cigarettes out of a crumbled cigarette pack." It is likely they used salt water as a coolant out of desperation, which would cause corrosion because the rods were never meant to be in salt water.  The condition of the rods is unknown. There is debris in the coolant, so there has been some crumbling from somewhere. Gundersen  adds, "The roof has fallen in, which further distorted the racks," noting that if a fuel rod snaps, it will release radioactive gas which will require at a minimum evacuation of the plant. They will release those gases into the atmosphere and try again. The Japan Times writes: "The consequences could be far more severe than any nuclear accident the world has ever seen. If a fuel rod is dropped, breaks or becomes entangled while being removed, possible worst case scenarios include a big explosion, a meltdown in the pool, or a large fire. Any of these situations could lead to massive releases of deadly radionuclides into the atmosphere, putting much of Japan — including Tokyo and Yokohama — and even neighboring countries at serious risk."  
  • This is not the usual moving of fuel rods.  TEPCO has been saying this is routine, but in fact it is unique – a feat of engineering never done before.  As Gundersen says: "Tokyo Electric is portraying this as easy. In a normal nuclear reactor, all of this is done with computers. Everything gets pulled perfectly vertically. Well nothing is vertical anymore, the fuel racks are distorted, it’s all going to have to be done manually. The net effect is it’s a really difficult job. It wouldn’t surprise me if they snapped some of the fuel and they can’t remove it." Gregory Jaczko, Former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission concurs with Gundersen describing the removal of the spent fuel rods as "a very significant activity, and . . . very, very unprecedented." Wasserman sums the challenge up: "We are doing something never done before – bent, crumbling, brittle fuel rods being removed from a pool that is compromised, in a building that is sinking, sagging and buckling, and it all must done under manual control, not with computers."  And the potential damage from failure would affect hundreds of millions of people.
  • The first thing that is needed is to end the media blackout.  The global public needs to be informed about the issues the world faces from Fukushima.  The impacts of Fukushima could affect almost everyone on the planet, so we all have a stake in the outcome.  If the public is informed about this problem, the political will to resolve it will rapidly develop. The nuclear industry, which wants to continue to expand, fears Fukushima being widely discussed because it undermines their already weak economic potential.  But, the profits of the nuclear industry are of minor concern compared to the risks of the triple Fukushima challenges. 
  • The second thing that must be faced is the incompetence of TEPCO.  They are not capable of handling this triple complex crisis. TEPCO "is already Japan’s most distrusted firm" and has been exposed as "dangerously incompetent."  A poll found that 91 percent of the Japanese public wants the government to intervene at Fukushima. Tepco’s management of the stricken power plant has been described as a comedy of errors. The constant stream of mistakes has been made worse by constant false denials and efforts to minimize major problems. Indeed the entire Fukushima catastrophe could have been avoided: "Tepco at first blamed the accident on ‘an unforeseen massive tsunami’ triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. Then it admitted it had in fact foreseen just such a scenario but hadn’t done anything about it."
  • The reality is Fukushima was plagued by human error from the outset.  An official Japanese government investigation concluded that the Fukushima accident was a "man-made" disaster, caused by "collusion" between government and Tepco and bad reactor design. On this point, TEPCO is not alone, this is an industry-wide problem. Many US nuclear plants have serious problems, are being operated beyond their life span, have the same design problems and are near earthquake faults. Regulatory officials in both the US and Japan are too corruptly tied to the industry. Then, the meltdown itself was denied for months, with TEPCO claiming it had not been confirmed.  Japan Times reports that "in December 2011, the government announced that the plant had reached ‘a state of cold shutdown.’ Normally, that means radiation releases are under control and the temperature of its nuclear fuel is consistently below boiling point."  Unfortunately, the statement was false – the reactors continue to need water to keep them cool, the fuel rods need to be kept cool – there has been no cold shutdown.
  • TEPCO has done a terrible job of cleaning up the plant.  Japan Times describes some of the problems: "The plant is being run on makeshift equipment and breakdowns are endemic. Among nearly a dozen serious problems since April this year there have been successive power outages, leaks of highly radioactive water from underground water pools — and a rat that chewed enough wires to short-circuit a switchboard, causing a power outage that interrupted cooling for nearly 30 hours. Later, the cooling system for a fuel-storage pool had to be switched off for safety checks when two dead rats were found in a transformer box."  TEPCO has been constantly cutting financial corners and not spending enough to solve the challenges of the Fukushima disaster resulting in shoddy practices that cause environmental damage. Washington’s Blog reports that the Japanese government is spreading radioactivity throughout Japan – and other countries – by burning radioactive waste in incinerators not built to handle such toxic substances. Workers have expressed concerns and even apologized for following order regarding the ‘clean-up.’
  • Indeed, the workers are another serious concern. The Guardian reported in October 2013 the plummeting morale of workers, problems of alcohol abuse, anxiety, loneliness, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression. TEPCO cut the pay of its workers by 20 percent in 2011 to save money even though these workers are doing very difficult work and face constant problems. Outside of work, many were traumatized by being forced to evacuate their homes after the Tsunami; and they have no idea how exposed to radiation they have been and what health consequences they will suffer. Contractors are hired based on the lowest bid, resulting in low wages for workers. According to the Guardian, Japan's top nuclear regulator, Shunichi Tanaka, told reporters: "Mistakes are often linked to morale. People usually don't make silly, careless mistakes when they're motivated and working in a positive environment. The lack of it, I think, may be related to the recent problems." The history of TEPCO shows we cannot trust this company and its mistreated workforce to handle the complex challenges faced at Fukushima. The crisis at Fukushima is a global one, requiring a global solution.
  • In an open letter to the United Nations, 16 top nuclear experts urged the government of Japan to transfer responsibility for the Fukushima reactor site to a worldwide engineering group overseen by a civil society panel and an international group of nuclear experts independent from TEPCO and the International Atomic Energy Administration , IAEA. They urge that the stabilization, clean-up and de-commissioning of the plant be well-funded. They make this request with "urgency" because the situation at the Fukushima plant is "progressively deteriorating, not stabilizing." 
  • The problems at Fukushima are in large part about facing reality – seeing the challenges, risks and potential harms from the incident. It is about TEPCO and Japan facing the reality that they are not equipped to handle the challenges of Fukushima and need the world to join the effort. 
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Oct 13
     
    Excellent roundup of evidence that the Fukushima disaster recovery process has gone badly awry and is devolving quickly to looming further disasters. Political momentum is gathering to wrest the recovery efforts away from the Japanese government and to place its leadership in the hands of an international group of experts. The disaster was far worse than its portrayal in mainstream media, is continuing, and even worse secondary disasters now loom. 
Gary Edwards

Comey has Long History of Cases Ending Favorable to Clintons - Tea Party News - 0 views

www.teaparty.org/ding-favorable-clintons-174947

Clinton Hillary

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • Messages found stored on Clinton’s private email server show that Berger – a convicted thief of classified documents – had been advising Clinton while she served as secretary of state and had access to emails containing classified information. For example, in an email dated Sept. 22, 2009, Berger advised Clinton advised how she could leverage information to make Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more cooperative in discussions with the Obama administration over a settlement freeze.
  • Law firm ties Berger, Lynch, Mills Berger worked as a partner in the Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson from 1973 to 1977, before taking a position as the deputy director of policy planning at the State Department in the Carter administration. When Carter lost his re-election bid, Berger returned to Hogan & Hartson, where he worked until he took leave in 1988 to act as foreign policy adviser in Gov. Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign. When Dukakis was defeated, Berger returned to Hogan & Hartson until he became foreign policy adviser for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992. On March 28, WND reported Lynch was a litigation partner for eight years at Hogan & Hartson, from March 2002 through April 2010. Mills also worked at Hogan & Hartson, for two years, starting in 1990, before she joined then President-elect Bill Clinton’s transition team, on her way to securing a position as White House deputy counsel in the Clinton administration. According to documents Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign made public in 2008, Hogan & Hartson’s New York-based partner Howard Topaz was the tax lawyer who filed income tax returns for Bill and Hillary Clinton beginning in 2004. In addition, Hogan & Hartson in Virginia filed a patent trademark request on May 19, 2004, for Denver-based MX Logic Inc., the computer software firm that developed the email encryption system used to manage Clinton’s private email server beginning in July 2013. A tech expert has observed that employees of MX Logic could have had access to all the emails that went through her account.
  • In 1999, President Bill Clinton nominated Lynch for the first of her two terms as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, a position she held until she joined Hogan & Hartson in March 2002 to become a partner in the firm’s Litigation Practice Group. She left Hogan & Hartson in 2010, after being nominated by President Obama for her second term as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, a position she held until Obama nominated her to serve in her current position as attorney general. A report published April 8, 2008, by The American Lawyer noted Hogan & Hartson was among Hillary Clinton’s biggest financial supporters in the legal industry during her first presidential campaign. “Firm lawyers and staff have donated nearly $123,400 to her campaign so far, according to campaign contribution data from the Center for Responsive Politics,” Nate Raymond observed in The American Lawyer article. “Christine Varney, a partner in Hogan’s Washington, D.C., office, served as chief counsel to the Clinton-Gore Campaign in 1992.” While there is no evidence that Lynch played a direct role either in the tax work done by the firm for the Clintons or in linking Hillary’s private email server to MX Logic, the ethics of the legal profession hold all partners jointly liable for the actions of other partners in a business. “If Hogan and Hartson previously represented the Clintons on tax matters, it is incumbent upon U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to [disclose] what, if any, role she had in such tax matters,” said Tom Fitton, president of Washington-based Judicial Watch.
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  • HSBC link When Lynch’s nomination as attorney general was considered by the Senate one year ago, as WND reported, the Senate Judiciary Committee examined her role in the Obama administration’s decision not to prosecute the banking giant HSBC for laundering funds for Mexican drug cartels and Middle Eastern terrorists. WND was first to report in a series of articles beginning in 2012 money-laundering charges brought by John Cruz, a former HSBC vice president and relationship manager, based on his more than 1,000 pages of evidence and secret audio recordings. The staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee focused on Cruz’s allegations that Lynch, acting then in her capacity as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, engaged in a Department of Justice cover-up. Obama’s attorney general nominee allowed HSBC in December 2011 to enter into a “deferred prosecution” settlement in which the bank agreed to pay a $1.9 billion fine and admit “willful criminal conduct” in exchange for dropping criminal investigations and prosecutions of HSBC directors or employees. Cruz called the $1.92 billion fine the U.S. government imposed on HSBC “a joke” and filed a $10 million lawsuit for “retaliation and wrongful termination.” From 2002 to 2003, Comey held the position of U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the same position held by Lynch. On March 4, 2013, he joined the HSBC board of directors, agreeing to serve as an independent non-executive director and a member of the bank’s Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee, positions he held until he resigned on Aug. 3, 2013, to become head of the FBI.
  • Comey, Fitzgerald and Valerie Plame On Jan. 1, 2004, the Washington Post reported that after Attorney General John Aschroft recused himself and his staff from any involvement in the investigation of who leaked the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame after journalist Robert Novak named her in print as a CIA operative, Comey assumed the role of acting attorney general for the purposes of the investigation. Comey appointed Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a U.S. attorney in Chicago, to act as special counsel in conducting the inquiry into what became known as “Plamegate.” At the time Comey made the appointment, Fitzgerald was already godfather to one of Comey’s children. On April 13, 2015, co-authoring a USA Today op-ed piece, Plame and her husband, retired ambassador Joseph Wilson, made public their support for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, openly acknowledging their political closeness to both Hillary and Bill Clinton. The first two paragraphs of the editorial read: We have known Hillary Clinton both professionally and personally for close to 20 years, dating back to before President Bill Clinton’s first trip to Africa in 1998 — a trip that they both acknowledge changed their lives, and gave considerable meaning to their post-White House years and to the activities of the Clinton Foundation. Joe, serving as the National Security Council Senior Director for African Affairs, was instrumental in arranging that historic visit. Our history became entwined with Hillary further after Valerie’s identity as a CIA officer was deliberately exposed. That criminal act was taken in retribution for Joe’s article in The New York Times in which he explained he had discovered no basis for the Bush administration’s justification for the Iraq War that Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake uranium to develop a nuclear weapon.
  • In January 2016, Chuck Ross in the Daily Caller reported that Hillary Clinton emails made public made clear that one of her “most frequent favor-seekers when she was secretary of state was former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a longtime Clinton friend, an endorser of Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and an Africa expert with deep business ties on the continent.” Ross noted that Wilson emailed Clinton on Dec. 22, 2009, seeking help for Symbion Power, an American engineering contractor for whom Wilson consulted, in the company’s bid to pursue a U.S. Agency of International Development contract for work in Afghanistan. In the case of the Afghanistan project, Ross noted, Clinton vouched for Wilson and Symbion as she forwarded the request to Jack Lew, who served then as deputy secretary of state for management and resources. Ross further reported Wilson’s request might also have been discussed with President Obama, as one email indicates. In 2005, Fitzgerald prosecuted Libby, a prominent adviser to then Vice President Dick Cheney, in the Plame investigation, charging him with two counts of perjury, two counts of making false statements to federal prosecutors and one count of obstruction of justice. On March 6, 2007, Libby was convicted of four of the five counts, and on June 5, 2007, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton to two and a half years in federal prison. On April 6, 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported the publication of New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s memoir “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey” exposed “unscrupulous conduct” by Fitzgerald in the 2007 trial of Libby.
  • WSJ reporter Peter Berkowitz noted Miller “writes that Mr. Fitzgerald induced her to give what she now realizes was false testimony.” “By withholding critical information and manipulating her memory as he prepared her to testify, Ms. Miller relates, Mr. Fitzgerald ‘steered’ her ‘in the wrong direction.’” http://www.wnd.com/2016/07/comey-has-long-history-of-clinton-related-cases/
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Jul 16
     
    Bend over and grab your ankles. The rats nest of Clinton operatives in Washington DC is far deeper than anyone ever imagined. "FBI Director James Comey has a long history of involvement in Department of Justice actions that arguably ended up favorable to the Clintons. In 2004, Comey, then serving as a deputy attorney general in the Justice Department, apparently limited the scope of the criminal investigation of Sandy Berger, which left out former Clinton administration officials who may have coordinated with Berger in his removal and destruction of classified records from the National Archives. The documents were relevant to accusations that the Clinton administration was negligent in the build-up to the 9/11 terrorist attack. On Tuesday, Comey announced that despite evidence of "extreme negligence by Hillary Clinton and her top aides regarding the handling of classified information through a private email server, the FBI would not refer criminal charges to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Justice Department. Curiously, Berger, Lynch and Cheryl Mills all worked as partners in the Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson, which prepared tax returns for the Clintons and did patent work for a software firm that played a role in the private email server Hillary Clinton used when she was secretary of state. Lynch and Comey both served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. They crossed paths in the investigation of HSBC bank, which avoided criminal charges in a massive money-laundering scandal for which the bank paid a $1.9 billion fine. After Attorney General John Aschroft recused himself in the Valerie Plame affair in 2004, Comey appointed as special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who ended up convicting "Scooter" Libby, a top aide to then Vice President Dick Cheney, of perjury and obstruction of justice. The charge affirmed the accusations of Plame and her former ambassador husband, Joe Wilson - both partisan supporters of Bill and
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Jul 16
     
    The "ethical" situation is far worse than described. Attorney disciplinary rules require that a lawyer, including all lawyers in the same firm, owe a lifetime duty of loyalty to a client, a duty that does not end with representation in a particular matter. Accordingly, Lynch had what the disciplinary rules refer to as an "actual conflict of interest" between her duties of loyalty to both Hillary and the U.S. government that required her withdrawal from representing either in the decision whether to prosecute Hillary. Saying that she would rubber stamp what Comey recommended was not the required withdrawal. Comey is an investigator, not a prosecutor. This was a situation for appointment of a special counsel to represent the Department of Justice in the decision whether to prosecute, not satisfied by rubber stamping Comey's recomendation,.
Paul Merrell

Senate CIA torture report could throw Gitmo hearings into chaos | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

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war & peace torture CIA Gitmo-detainees

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • The possible declassification and release of a Senate report into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program — begun in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks — could have a huge impact on the controversial military tribunals happening at Guantánamo Bay, experts and lawyers believe. The proceedings have been moving at a snail’s pace at the U.S.-held military base on the island of Cuba, amid widespread condemnation that they are being held in a legal limbo and outside the U.S. criminal justice system. Details surrounding the CIA’s activities have been one of the most contentious issues concerning the commissions at Guantánamo, where the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and his co-defendants are on trial. Their alleged treatment while in CIA custody has been a key stumbling block in the hearings’ progress. The same goes for the man alleged to be behind the USS Cole bombing, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, another former CIA captive. In both cases, there have been dozens of delays — mainly due to the fact that the attorneys have been battling military prosecutors over access to classified information about the CIA interrogation program that the attorneys want to use as evidence. Both cases have been dragging on for two years and are still in the pretrial evidentiary phase.
  • But now that the Senate Intelligence Committee appears set to vote on releasing its long-awaited 6,300-page, $50 million study — or at least some portion of it — the defense attorneys will finally get the opportunity to talk openly at the military commissions about torture. That could prove disastrous for military prosecutors. According to defense attorneys and human rights observers who have been monitoring the proceedings, it might also derail the government’s attempts to convince a jury that the detainees, if convicted, deserve to be executed. “The U.S. government has gone to great lengths to classify evidence of crimes — crimes committed by U.S. actors,” said Army Maj. Jason Wright, one of Mohammed’s military defense attorneys. “Were this information in this Senate report to be revealed … it would completely gut the classification architecture currently in place before the commissions.” The panel is expected to vote April 3, and it is widely believed the panel will approve release of its 400-page executive summary. If that happens, Wright said, he anticipates petitioning the military court to amend the protective order that treats all information about the CIA torture program as classified.
  • The report is likely to contain reams of information that has not yet come to light. Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein has said the report “includes details of each detainee in CIA custody, the conditions under which they were detained, how they were interrogated, the intelligence they actually provided and the accuracy — or inaccuracy — of CIA descriptions about the program to the White House, Department of Justice, Congress and others.” Wright said that in addition to seeking a change to the protective order, he would file discovery motions to gain access to the 6.2 million pages of documents the Senate had. Such a move would lead to further legal wrangling and delay the start of the trial, which the government hopes will get underway in September. “We have an absolute right to review that and have it produced in discovery,” Wright said.
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  • Richard Kammen, al-Nashiri’s civilian defense attorney, meanwhile, has already filed a motion with the military court to obtain a complete, unredacted copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report. The motion, submitted in September prior to the revelations that have surfaced about infighting between the CIA and Senate committee investigators, said the report “will be central to the accused’s defense on the merits, in impeaching the credibility of the evidence against him and in mitigation of the death sentence the government is seeking to impose.” If the entire report were declassified by the Intelligence Committee, it “would be huge because it would really eliminate the ‘need’ for military commissions, which are in my view mainly a vehicle to have what will look like trials but will keep whatever evidence of torture the judge ultimately allows secret from or sanitized to the public,” Kammen said.
  • But not everyone expects the report to be released in great detail. Air Force Capt. Michael Schwartz, the attorney for alleged 9/11 co-conspirator Walid bin Attash, doesn’t believe the Senate committee’s report will ever see the light of day. If it is released, he said it will be highly redacted, rendering it useless to the public and Attash’s defense team. “This whole military commissions system is designed to make sure this information is never known to the public,” Schwartz said. “No one in my office is naive enough to think this report will come out in any unredacted form. Certainly that report contains a lot of mitigating information that would be relevant to the defense of this case. But I don’t believe for a second that we will see anything in that report that actually sheds light on the crimes committed by the CIA against our clients between 2003 and 2006.” Air Force Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo and a staunch critic of the military commissions, doesn’t believe the Senate committee’s report “is legally relevant” to the military commission trial of Mohammed and the other high-value detainees. But he does believe it will force the hearings more into the public.
  • “Where I do think it will have an impact is in the assessment of whether those legal relevance proceedings take place in open court or in secret closed sessions,” he said. “The report is likely to officially reinforce and amplify what the public already knows about this regrettable chapter in our history. It should further undercut the government’s claim that all this absolutely must stay hidden behind closed doors or else cataclysmic things will happen.” Army. Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman who deals with detainee matters at Guantánamo, declined to discuss the Senate report or how its release may affect the commissions. "I can't imagine a world where competent counsel — be they from the government or defense — would announce in advance, any strategy they might pursue or make predictions on how any given issue might affect the progress of their case," Breasseale said.
  • Daphne Eviatar, a lawyer for Human Rights First who has closely observed and written about the military commission proceedings, said whether the Senate’s report is a game changer will ultimately depend on what is declassified. Perhaps details of the interrogations will be released, or they may be heavily redacted. “Either way, you can be sure the defense lawyers will try to reopen this issue, and the government will fight it, and the case will get bogged down once again in months of argument in pretrial hearings that are already taking forever,” she said.
  • Paul Merrell on 03 Apr 14
     
    A ray of sunlight ahead in the Gitmo detainee prosecutions?
Paul Merrell

​CIA lied about torture's effectiveness, according to unreleased Senate repor... - 0 views

rt.com/...cia-torture-senate-report-489

war & peace torture CIA lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • A Senate report found that CIA officials lied to the government and public about its post-9/11 torture program, most notably by distorting intelligence gleaned from traditional interrogations as that attained by far more brutal methods. The Washington Post reported Monday that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report outlines a long list of “unsubstantiated claims” from CIA officials in the agency’s pursuit of a global torture regime that resulted in little, if any, substantive intelligence, according to US officials who have reviewed the document. “The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one US official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is ‘no’.”
  • Officials told the Post that some of the most damning findings in the Committee’s report pertain to differences between statements senior CIA officials in Washington have made as opposed to written notes from CIA employees involved in the interrogations. According to the Post’s anonymous sources, millions of records make clear that the CIA was able to obtain most of its valuable intelligence against Al-Qaeda, including the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, without use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” As has been reported elsewhere, intelligence gathered from a detainee known as Abu Zubaydah was obtained by FBI sources, mainly agent Ali Soufan, in a hospital in Pakistan, before the CIA waterboarded Zubaydah 83 times. Yet Soufan’s work was passed through US intelligence sources as though it was part of CIA interrogators’ work, the Committee’s report found. “The CIA conflated what was gotten when, which led them to misrepresent the effectiveness of the program,” said another US official who has access to the report. The officials described the continued repetition of these misstatements as “the most damaging” of the Committee’s conclusions.
  • In addition, the report found that detainees’ credentials were often distorted. Zubaydah, for example, was called a senior Al-Qaeda operative, yet experts later found him to be a simple facilitator who would guide recruits to Qaeda training camps. Likewise, Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri was called “mastermind” by CIA officials of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, yet the title was found to be an overstatement. An Al-Qaeda operative, Hassan Ghul, who provided critical insight into finding Osama bin Laden had offered his most critical intelligence during an interrogation with Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq, not during his later stint in a black site prison in Romania, officials said.
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  • The Committee is expected to vote Thursday to send an executive summary of the report to President Obama for eventual declassification.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Apr 14
     
    "The Committee is expected to vote Thursday to send an executive summary of the report to President Obama for eventual declassification." Looks like a deal has been struck. Only an "executive summary," not the full report. 
Gary Edwards

Can Americans Escape the Deception? - 0 views

www.paulcraigroberts.org/...can-americans-escape-deception

Paul-Craig-Roberts

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Jul 12
     
    I've been reading Paul Craig Roberts since high school, when i used to clip his backpage columns in NewsWeek magazine. These days, you have to go to his blog to get the truth. But what a truth it is! Incredible, forceful but presented only as PCR can do. His wake up call to America is not about Republicans or Democrats. It's about our liberty and the all out assault our government, socialist and conservatives alike, has launched on the Constitution. Amerika! This is what it comes to. It's also why i'm a libertarian. Read it and weep. Excerpt is from the 9/11 section. excerpt: In a real investigation, the 9/11 evidence would not have been illegally destroyed, and the investigation would have been conducted by experts, not by government agencies assigned a cover-up and by political hacks. The NIST report is abject nonsense. It explains nothing. It is a fabricated computer simulation of a non-event. The co-chairmen and legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission later wrote books in which they stated that information was withheld from the commission, the military lied to the commission, and the commission "was set up to fail." Yet, these astounding admissions by the leaders of the 9/11 Commission had no impact on Congress, the presstitute media, or the public. All heads were in the sand. Please, whatever you do, don't make us emotional weaklings face the facts. More than one hundred firefighters, police, first responders, and building maintenance personnel report hearing and experiencing scores of explosions in the twin towers, including powerful explosions in the sub-basements prior to the collapse of the towers. Distinguished scientists, authors of many peer-reviewed scientific papers, report finding unreacted nano-thermite in the dust from the towers, tested it for its explosive and high-heat producing ability, and reported the unequivocal results. Seventeen hundred architects and engineers have testified in a petition to Congress that the th
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Jul 12
     
    For a detailed and fully referenced study of how 9-11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow's conflict of interest and how he kept Commission members in the dark and sabotaged the Commission report, see http://tinyurl.com/6tdfc56
Gary Edwards

Intelligence Warnings On Benghazi Were Loud And Clear - Investors.com - 0 views

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Benghazi-coverup

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Nov 13
     
    excerpt: "Months before the murder of a U.S. ambassador in Benghazi, American intelligence analysts documented a massive al-Qaida rally a few miles from the ambassador's residence. At that rally, terror leaders called for the murder of American diplomats. Three U.S. intelligence reports, unearthed by the American Media Institute and detailed here for the first time, offer vivid descriptions of the al-Qaida meeting. Flying the black flag of al-Qaida, some 300 armed men gathered in Benghazi's Al-Tahrir Square on June 7 and 8, 2012. They brandished machine guns, rocket launchers and a truck mounted with an anti-aircraft cannon. The two-day meeting, which included outdoor prayers and a parade of armed vehicles, was attended by a baker's dozen of North African al-Qaida affiliates. "It was like a team pep rally before the game, only for jihad," said a U.S. intelligence analyst who monitors North Africa. "Organized and deadly. You saw what followed. People died." In the face of these three reports, the State Department continued to deny requests for additional security for the U.S. ambassador in Libya. At the same time, the State Department issued a travel advisory warning Americans against going to Libya in August 2012. Obama administration officials have long denied any warning before the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi attacks. On the campaign trail, the president insisted that al-Qaida was "decimated" and "on the run," while intelligence reports prepared for the president's advisers told a different story - that al-Qaida's menace was growing in Libya and elsewhere. Al-Qaida itself publicly displayed its strength. Al-Qaida posted pictures of the June 2012 Benghazi meeting on its Arabic-language Facebook page and invited the Arabic-language media to cover the event, which many did. The three U.S. intelligence reports documenting the al-Qaida gathering in Benghazi were circulated in August 2012 and earlier among Defense and State Department officials, as well as Americ
Paul Merrell

WASHINGTON: CIA's use of harsh interrogation went beyond legal authority, Senate report... - 0 views

www.mcclatchydc.com/...se-of-harsh-interrogation.html

war & peace torture CIA lies Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • A still-secret Senate Intelligence Committee report calls into question the legal foundation of the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists, a finding that challenges the key defense on which the agency and the Bush administration relied in arguing that the methods didn’t constitute torture.The report also found that the spy agency failed to keep an accurate account of the number of individuals it held, and that it issued erroneous claims about how many it detained and subjected to the controversial interrogation methods. The CIA has said that about 30 detainees underwent the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.
  • The CIA’s claim “is BS,” said a former U.S. official familiar with evidence underpinning the report, who asked not to be identified because the matter is still classified. “They are trying to minimize the damage. They are trying to say it was a very targeted program, but that’s not the case.”The findings are among the report’s 20 main conclusions. Taken together, they paint a picture of an intelligence agency that seemed intent on evading or misleading nearly all of its oversight mechanisms throughout the program, which was launched under the Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and ran until 2006.
  • Some of the report’s other conclusions, which were obtained by McClatchy, include:_ The CIA used interrogation methods that weren’t approved by the Justice Department or CIA headquarters._ The agency impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making regarding the program._ The CIA actively evaded or impeded congressional oversight of the program._ The agency hindered oversight of the program by its own Inspector General’s Office.
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  • The investigation determined that the program produced very little intelligence of value and that the CIA misled the Bush White House, the Congress and the public about the effectiveness of the interrogation techniques, committee members have said.The techniques included waterboarding, which produces a sensation of drowning, stress positions, sleep deprivation for up to 11 days at a time, confinement in a cramped box, slaps and slamming detainees into walls. The CIA held detainees in secret “black site” prisons overseas and abducted others who it turned over to foreign governments for interrogation.The CIA, which contends that it gained intelligence from the program that helped identify al Qaida terrorists and averted plots against the United States, agreed with some of the report’s findings but disputed other conclusions in an official response sent to the committee in June 2013.
  • Some current and former U.S. officials and military commanders, numerous experts and foreign governments have condemned the harsh interrogation methods as violations of international and U.S. laws against torture, a charge denied by the CIA and the Bush administration.They’ve based their defense on a series of top-secret legal opinions issued by the Justice Department beginning in August 2002. At that time, the agency sought advice on whether using the harsh techniques on Zayn al Abidin Muhammad Husayn, a close aide to Osama bin Laden who went by the nom de guerre Abu Zubaydah, would violate U.S. law against torture.The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel found that the methods wouldn’t breach the law because those applying them didn’t have the specific intent of inflicting severe pain or suffering.The Senate report, however, concluded that the Justice Department’s legal analyses were based on flawed information provided by the CIA, which prevented a proper evaluation of the program’s legality.
  • “The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” the report found.Several human rights experts said the conclusion called into question the program’s legal foundations.“If the CIA fundamentally misrepresented what it was doing and that was what led (Justice Department) lawyers to conclude that the conduct was legal, then the legal conclusions themselves were inaccurate,” said Andrea Prasow, senior national security counsel for Human Rights Watch. “The lawyers making those assessments were relying on the facts that were laid before them.”“This just reinforces the view that everyone who has said the torture program was legal has been selling a bill of goods and it’s time to revisit the entire conventional wisdom being pushed by those who support enhanced interrogation that this program was safe, humane and lawful,” said Raha Wala, a lawyer with Human Rights First’s Law and Public Safety Program.
  • Among other findings, the report said that CIA personnel used interrogation methods that weren’t approved by the Justice Department or their headquarters.The conclusion that the CIA provided inaccurate information to the Justice Department reflects the findings of a top-secret investigation of the program by the CIA Inspector General’s Office that was triggered by allegations of abuse.The CIA inspector general’s May 7, 2004, report, which was declassified, found that in waterboarding Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, deemed the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks, the CIA went beyond the parameters it outlined to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which wrote the legal opinions.Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times, while Mohammad underwent the procedure 183 times.Those cases clashed with the CIA’s assertion _ outlined in the now-declassified top-secret August 2002 Office of Legal Counsel opinion _ that repetition of the methods “will not be substantial because the techniques generally lose their effectiveness after several repetitions.”
  • The Office of Legal Counsel opinion stated that its finding that the harsh interrogation techniques didn’t constitute torture was based on facts provided by the CIA, and that “if these facts were to change, this advice would not necessarily apply.”The CIA inspector general’s report found that the “continued applicability of the DOJ opinion” was in question because the CIA told the Justice Department that it would use waterboarding in the same way that it was used in training U.S. military personnel to evade capture and resist the enemy. In fact, the inspector general’s report continued, the CIA used waterboarding in a “manner different” from U.S. military training.The CIA also failed to keep track of the number of individuals it captured under the program, the Senate report concluded. Moreover, it said, the agency held people who didn’t meet the legal standard for detention. The report puts that number at 26, McClatchy has learned.
  • “The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention,” it found. “The CIA’s claims about the number of detainees held and subjected to its enhanced interrogation techniques were inaccurate.”“The CIA’s records were hazy, inconsistent and at times inaccurate,” said the former U.S. official.
Paul Merrell

Aleksej Gubarev, of Russia's Webzilla, says hacking charges false | McClatchy DC - 0 views

www.mcclatchydc.com/...article125910774.html

Trump 35-pages Gubarev

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • A Russian venture capitalist and tech expert whose name and company are mentioned in the now-notorious document alleging connections between the Donald Trump campaign and Russian hackers says no intelligence officers have ever contacted him about the accusations, which he says are false.A report compiled by a former Western intelligence official as opposition research against Trump was made public Tuesday when BuzzFeed posted its 35 pages. The document included unsubstantiated claims of collusion between the Trump campaign team and the Kremlin.
  • It also alleged that global tech firm XBT Holding, with operations in Dallas, was instrumental in the hack of leaked Democratic Party emails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton and fellow Democrats.XBT, owner of Dallas-based enterprise-hosting company Webzilla, is run by a successful Russian tech startup expert, Aleksej Gubarev. In a phone interview from Cyprus, where he said he’d lived since 2002, Gubarev said he was surprised to see his name in the report.“I don’t know why I was there,” Gubarev said, adding that perhaps a competitor sought to discredit him. “I still don’t understand the true reason for this report.”The salacious innuendoes in the periodic reports about Trump’s personal life dominated social media headlines. The mention of Webzilla and Gubarev was among the more specific allegations: that XBT and affiliates “had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘altering operations’ against the Democratic Party leadership.” Gubarev said he operated 75,000 servers across the globe and got real-time information if there had been hacking or illicit activity tied to his businesses. There is no evidence of that, he said, adding that no one has contacted him.“I have a physical office in Dallas. Nobody contacted me,” said Gubarev, adding that 40 percent of his business is handled over the servers it runs in Dallas and the United States accounts for about 27 percent of his global business.
  • McClatchy has reported that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., gave the bulk of the report to FBI Director James Comey on Dec. 9. The final pages of the report are dated Dec. 11. McClatchy had the report earlier but couldn’t verify any of its allegations. A federal law enforcement source told McClatchy that the document was being examined as part of a broader FBI inquiry into Russia’s influence on the U.S. election but wouldn’t characterize its credibility. A source familiar with the former Western intelligence expert who compiled the dossier told McClatchy that the ex-spy has extensive experience in tracking activities in the Kremlin.The report alleges that Gubarev and another hacking expert were recruited under duress by the FSB, the Russian intelligence-agency successor to the KGB. Gubarev said he had not been threatened or blackmailed, nor had his mother, who lives in Russia.
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  • XBT offers an array of tech services, from dedicated hosting of servers and cloud-based storage to developing apps for mobile phones and offering virtual private servers. His company advertises specialized services to software developers, advertisers, gaming companies and electronic-commerce enterprises. It also operates data centers in Russia, Asia, Europe and Dallas.
  • If law enforcement wants to talk with him, Gubarev said, his door is open.“I’m ready for any investigation. I’m ready to cooperate with everybody, he said.
Paul Merrell

Scientists Challenge EPA On Claim That Fracking Doesn't Contaminate Water - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...219429

environment fracking EPA-report criticism

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • An independent board of scientists said Thursday the Environmental Protection Agency should clarify why it said in a landmark draft report on fracking that there is a lack of evidence of widespread impacts on water. In a much-awaited report submitted to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, the agency’s independent Science Advisory Board (SAB) said it was concerned about the clarity and adequacy to support “several major findings” found in a draft assessment report on fracking the EPA first published last year.
  • “The EPA did not support quantitatively its conclusion about lack of evidence for widespread, systemic impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking water resources, and did not clearly describe the system(s) of interest (e.g., groundwater, surface water), the scale of impacts (i.e., local or regional), nor the definitions of “systemic” and “widespread,” the report reads. The SAB report is a blow to the oil and gas industry which had backed the EPA’s draft conclusions ever since the preliminary report included the landmark statement that emboldened the industry’s position that fracking is safe. It comes just weeks after thousands of environmentalists marched ahead of the Democratic National Convention, calling for a nationwide ban on fracking. The EPA developed the draft assessment report on fracking in response to a request in 2009 from Congress, which urged the EPA to review the relationship between hydraulic fracturing and drinking water. Experts havetold ThinkProgress in the past that the study process could be the preamble to a federal fracking rule, given that the embattled Mercury Air Toxics Standard — commonly referred to as MATS — started in a similar fashion. The SAB, comprised of 30 experts, also recommended the EPA discuss “significant data limitations and uncertainties” when presenting major findings on the fracking report, a document that condenses available scientific literature and data on the potential impacts of fracturing. It furthermore said the EPA should compile toxicological information on the chemicals employed in fracturing in “a more inclusive manner,” and recognize the many stresses fracking has on surface or groundwater resources.
  • Environmental groups quickly applauded the SAB review and said they would push for the EPA to adopt the recommendations that the agency could theoretically dismiss. “By choosing politics over science, the EPA failed the public with its misleading and controversial line, dismissing fracking’s impacts on drinking water and sacrificing public health and welfare along the way,” said Hugh MacMillan, senior researcher at Food & Water Watch. “We are calling on the EPA to act quickly on the recommendations from the EPA SAB and be clear about fracking’s impacts on drinking water resources.” The final EPA report could be published as early as next year.
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Aug 16
     
    When Richard Nixon created the EPA by executive order, he chose the wrong name: it should be the Environmental Puppydog Agency. Like most federal agencies, EPA was quickly captured by the same interests it is supposed to regulate. It has been in thrall to industry ever since.
Paul Merrell

Media Blackout over Syria | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5376861

war & peace Syria media-blackout

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • On April 6, The London Review of Books published in its online journal Seymour Hersh’s “The Red Line and the Rat Line.” Hersh continues to expose details surrounding the staged August 21 chemical attack incident in Syria, which apparently pretty much everyone in Washington’s intelligence bureaucracy suspected was carried out by the rebels as soon as it happened. Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist whose 40+ years career includes the exposing of the My Lai Massacre  and its cover-up, as well as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. His December 19 report, “Whose Sarin?” -was his first report to expose the Syria chemical attack hoax based on close contact with US Intelligence officials. While “Whose Sarin” was originally prepared for the Washington Post, the newspaper rejected it and a media blackout followed in American press. Currently, Hersh’s newest investigative findings are going unacknowledged in mainstream US media.
  • Hersh’s report confirms the following: Obama’s push for attack on Syria was halted last minute when evidence that the Syrian government had nothing to do with the August 21 chemical attack became too overwhelming It had been well known to US government officials throughout the summer of 2013 that Turkish PM Erdogan was supporting al-Nusra Front in attempts to manufacture Sarin US military knew of Turkish and Saudi program for bulk Sarin production inside Syria from the spring of 2013 UN inspectors knew the rebels were using chemical weapons on the battlefield since the spring of 2013 As a result of the staged chemical incident, the White House ordered readiness for a “monster strike” on Syria, which included “two B-22 air wings and two thousand pound bombs” -and a target list which included military and civilian infrastructure targets (note: most of these are in densely populated civilian areas)
  • Full military strike was set for September 2 UK defense officials relayed to their American counterparts in the lead up to planned attack: “We’re being set up here.” CIA, MI6, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey set up a “rat line” back in 2012 to run Libyan weapons into Syria via Turkey, including MANPADS; the Benghazi consulate was headquarters for the operation Obama OK’ed Turkish-Iranian gold export scam (that went from March 2012 to July 2013) which erupted in a Turkish scandal that nearly brought down the Erdogan government US Intelligence community had immediate doubts about Syrian regime responsibility for Aug. 21 attack, yet “reluctant to contradict the president” US government will not expose continued Turkey support of terrorism simply because “they’re a NATO ally”
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  • In addition, last Thursday freelance Middle East journalist Sara Elizabeth Williams broke the story of a CIA/US Military run training camp for Syrian rebels in the Jordanian desert. VICE UK ran her story, “I Learned to Fight Like an American at the FSA Training Camp in Jordan,” yet it too failed to make it across the Atlantic into American reporting. International Syria experts thought her story hugely significant, but it got little attention. Top Syria expert in the US, Joshua Landis, announced on his Twitter account Thursday: “Sara Williams gets the scoop on the top secret FSA Training Camp in Jordan.” This courageous young freelancer revealed, with photos, the ins and outs of this secretive facility -yet the mainstream carefully shielded Americans from knowledge of the explosive report. In email conversation with her this weekend, Williams told me: “The access was tough to get, but I think it was worth the effort: to my mind, it’s important that people know what their government is doing in their name, with their tax dollars.” According to her investigative report:
  • Confirmed: “US-run training camp” for Syrian rebels in Northern Jordan Rebel recruits go “off the grid” while in secretive training camp Rebel fighter: “The Americans who taught us wore military uniforms I did not recognize. We called them by their first names and they spoke English to us.” Camp awash with “American food and American dollars”: recruits eat Kentucky Fried Chicken and live in temporary “pre-fabricated housing” units Recruits sent through intense 40 day program, which includes exercise, training in anti-tank missiles, and boot camp style atmosphere with orders given by US military instructors Upon graduation, US trained insurgents slip back across Syria’s southern border Experts say there are more camps like this one American trained rebel insurgent says: “America is benefiting from the destruction and the killing in order to weaken both sides.”
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 14
     
    It really says something about mainstream media when a story as explosive as Sy Hersh's new report on Obama's decision to postpone and then cancel military strikes on Syria is ignored by mainstream media. Hersh is one of the most respected of American war and intelligence journalists. 
Paul Merrell

Tikkun Daily Blog » Blog Archive » Obama Suppressing 6,000-Page Report on CIA... - 0 views

www.tikkun.org/...-senate-intelligence-committee

tyranny CIA extraordinary rendition torture Senate-Intelligence-Committee

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Over a year ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to adopt a historic, 6,000-page report which contains “startling details” about CIA misdeeds related to its torture program. The report, which cost $40 million to produce and appears to pose no national security threats, has been set for release since December 13, 2012. However, it has yet to see the light of day. The reason: the Obama administration continues to suppress its release, apparently for no reason other than to protect the reputations of the guilty. Per The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf:
  • [Over a year ago], the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to adopt a 6,000-page report on the CIA rendition, detention, and interrogation program that led to torture. Its contents include details on each prisoner in CIA custody, the conditions of their confinement, whether they were tortured, the intelligence they provided, and the degree to which the CIA lied about its behavior to overseers. Senator Dianne Feinstein declared it one of the most significant oversight efforts in American history, noting that it contains “startling details” and raises “critical questions.” But all these months later, the report is still being suppressed. The Obama Administration has no valid reason to suppress the report. Its contents do not threaten national security, as evidenced by the fact that numerous figures who normally defer to the national-security state want it released with minor redactions. The most prominent of all is Vice President Joe Biden. The Center for Victims of Torture, in advocating for the public’s right to fully understand the CIA’s lawless torture program during the Bush administration, has procured the signatures of 58 national security experts and officials. These signatures include U.S. senators, former Obama administration officials and retired military leaders. President Obama once promised that his White House would be the most transparent in history, and went so far in February to claim that such is indeed the case. This most-transparent-ever administration is now
  • marking the CIA report as classified, determined “to keep secret the most thorough accounting we have of the agency’s lawless, immoral behavior.” Is President Obama bowing to factions within the CIA? Shielding the powerful from rebuke during his own illegal drone program? Protecting past criminals as a down payment on future investigations? To answer those questions would be to speculate. However, what is known is this: if we don’t fully understand those CIA abuses perpetrated in the name of the State and national security, we are more likely to allow those abuses to happen again.
Paul Merrell

CIA misled on interrogation program, Senate report says - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...3-96ae-f2c36d2b1245_story.html

war & peace CIA torture Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques. The report, built around detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees, documents a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims as agency officials sought permission to use — and later tried to defend — excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little, if any, significant intelligence, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document.
  • “The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one U.S. official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is no.”
  • Several officials who have read the document said some of its most troubling sections deal not with detainee abuse but with discrepancies between the statements of senior CIA officials in Washington and the details revealed in the written communications of lower-level employees directly involved.Officials said millions of records make clear that the CIA’s ability to obtain the most valuable intelligence against al-Qaeda — including tips that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 — had little, if anything, to do with “enhanced interrogation techniques.”The report is divided into three volumes — one that traces the chronology of interrogation operations, another that assesses intelligence officials’ claims and a third that contains case studies on virtually every prisoner held in CIA custody since the program began in 2001. Officials said the report was stripped of certain details, including the locations of CIA prisons and the names of agency employees who did not hold ­supervisor-level positions.One official said that almost all of the critical threat-related information from Abu Zubaida was obtained during the period when he was questioned by Soufan at a hospital in Pakistan, well before he was interrogated by the CIA and waterboarded 83 times.Information obtained by Soufan, however, was passed up through the ranks of the U.S. intelligence community, the Justice Department and Congress as though it were part of what CIA interrogators had obtained, according to the committee report.
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  • The Senate Intelligence Committee is expected to vote Thursday to send an executive summary of the report to Obama for declassification. U.S. officials said it could be months before that section, which contains roughly 20 conclusions and spans about 400 pages, is released to the public. The report’s release also could resurrect a long-standing feud between the CIA and the FBI, where many officials were dismayed by the agency’s use of methods that Obama and others later labeled torture. CIA veterans have expressed concern that the report reflects FBI biases. One of its principal authors is a former FBI analyst,
  • “The CIA conflated what was gotten when, which led them to misrepresent the effectiveness of the program,” said a second U.S. official who has reviewed the report. The official described the persistence of such misstatements as among “the most damaging” of the committee’s conclusions.Detainees’ credentials also were exaggerated, officials said. Agency officials described Abu Zubaida as a senior al-Qaeda operative — and, therefore, someone who warranted coercive techniques — although experts later determined that he was essentially a facilitator who helped guide recruits to al-Qaeda training camps.The CIA also oversold the role of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. CIA officials claimed he was the “mastermind.” The committee described a similar sequence in the interrogation of Hassan Ghul, an al-Qaeda operative who provided a critical lead in the search for bin Laden: the fact that the al-Qaeda leader’s most trusted courier used the moniker “al-Kuwaiti.” But Ghul disclosed that detail while being interrogated by Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq who posed questions scripted by CIA analysts. The information from that period was subsequently conflated with lesser intelligence gathered from Ghul at a secret CIA prison in Romania, officials said. Ghul was later turned over to authorities in Pakistan, where he was subsequently released. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in 2012.
  • Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has previously indicated that harsh CIA interrogation measures were of little value in the bin Laden hunt. “The CIA detainee who provided the most significant information about the courier provided the information prior to being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques,” Feinstein said in a 2013 statement, responding in part to scenes in the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” that depict a detainee’s slip under duress as a breakthrough moment.
  • As with Abu Zubaida and even Nashiri, officials said, CIA interrogators continued the harsh treatment even after it appeared that Baluchi was cooperating. On Sept. 22, 2003, he was flown from Kabul to a CIA black site in Romania. In 2006, he was taken to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His attorneys contend that he suffered head trauma while in CIA custody. Last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Baluchi’s attorneys for information about his medical condition, but military prosecutors opposed the request. A U.S. official said the request was not based solely on the committee’s investigation of the CIA program.
  • Officials said a former CIA interrogator named Charlie Wise was forced to retire in 2003 after being suspected of abusing Abu Zubaida using a broomstick as a ballast while he was forced to kneel in a stress position. Wise was also implicated in the abuse at Salt Pit. He died of a heart attack shortly after retiring from the CIA, former U.S. intelligence officials said.
Gary Edwards

You Won't BELIEVE What's Going On with Government Spying on Americans - BlackListedNews... - 1 views

www.blacklistednews.com/...M.html

NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA NSA-Whistleblower Edward-Snowden Tyranny-by-Executive-Order spying

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 13
     
    "New Revelations Are Breaking Every Day" This web page is very well sourced and filled with links where you will get lost for hours. Excellent reference document ............................ Revelations about the breathtaking scope of government spying are coming so fast that it's time for an updated roundup: - Just weeks after NSA boss Alexander said that a review of NSA spying found not even one violation, the Washington Post published an internal NSA audit showing that the agency has broken its own rules thousands of times each year - 2 Senators on the intelligence committee said the violations revealed in the Post article were just the "tip of the iceberg" - Glenn Greenwald notes:  "One key to the WashPost story: the reports are internal, NSA audits, which means high likelihood of both under-counting & white-washing".(Even so, the White House tried to do damage control by retroactively changing on-the-record quotes) - The government is spying on essentially everything we do. It is not just "metadata" … although that is enough to destroy your privacy - The government has adopted a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act which allows it to pretend that "everything" is relevant … so it spies on everyone - NSA whistleblowers say that the NSA collects all of our conversations word-for-word - It's not just the NSA … Many other agencies, like the FBI and IRS - concerned only with domesticissues - spy on Americans as well - The information gained through spying is shared with federal, state and local agencies, and they are using that information to prosecute petty crimes such as drugs and taxes.  The agencies are instructed to intentionally "launder" the information gained through spying, i.e. to pretend that they got the information in a more legitimate way … and to hide that from defense attorneys and judges - Top counter-terror experts say that the government's mass spying doesn't keep us
Paul Merrell

Kerry portrait of Syria rebels at odds with intelligence reports | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...a-rebels-idUSBRE98405L20130905

war & peace Syria U.S. Kerry lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Secretary of State John Kerry's public assertions that moderate Syrian opposition groups are growing in influence appear to be at odds with estimates by U.S. and European intelligence sources and nongovernmental experts, who say Islamic extremists remain by far the fiercest and best-organized rebel elements. At congressional hearings this week, while making the case for President Barack Obama's plan for limited military action in Syria, Kerry asserted that the armed opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad "has increasingly become more defined by its moderation, more defined by the breadth of its membership, and more defined by its adherence to some, you know, democratic process and to an all-inclusive, minority-protecting constitution."And the opposition is getting stronger by the day," Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday.U.S. and allied intelligence sources and private experts on the Syrian conflict suggest that assessment is optimistic.
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Sep 13
     
    The linked article points to multiple intelligence reports and disagreeing opinions by experts, both inside government and out.  To top it off, Kerry's stated source of information, the author of a Wall Street Journal article, concealed her ties to a Syrian opposition lobbying group along with her own prior inconsistent statements. See e.g., Daniel Greenfield, The Wall Street Journal's Misleading Report on the "Moderate" Syrian Opposition, Front Page Mag (2 September 2013), http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-wall-street-journals-misleading-report-on-the-moderate-syrian-opposition/ (debunking Journal article using its author's own prior statements) Charles C. Johnson, Woman informing Kerry, McCain's opinions on Syria also an advocate for Syrian rebels, The Daily Caller (5 September 2013), http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/05/woman-informing-kerry-mccains-opinions-on-syria-also-an-advocate-for-syrian-rebels/ Michael Calderone, Wall Street Journal Op-Ed Draws Scrutiny Over Writer's Ties To Syrian Rebel Advocacy Group, Huffington Post (6 September 2013), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/wall-street-journal-syria-elizabeth-obagy_n_3881477.html Max Blumenthal, Shady PR operatives, pro-Israel ties, anti-Castro money: Inside the Syrian opposition's DC spin machine, Mondoweiss (7 September 2013), nofollow
Paul Merrell

Meet Alfreda Bikowsky, the Senior Officer at the Center of the CIA's Torture Scandals -... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ture-scandals-alfreda-bikowsky

war & peace CIA torture outing-Bikowsky

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • NBC News yesterday called her a “key apologist” for the CIA’s torture program. A follow-up New Yorker article dubbed her “The Unidentified Queen of Torture” and in part “the model for the lead character in ‘Zero Dark Thirty.’” Yet in both articles she was anonymous. The person described by both NBC and The New Yorker is senior CIA officer Alfreda Frances Bikowsky. Multiple news outlets have reported that as the result of a long string of significant errors and malfeasance, her competence and integrity are doubted — even by some within the agency. The Intercept is naming Bikowsky over CIA objections because of her key role in misleading Congress about the agency’s use of torture, and her active participation in the torture program (including playing a direct part in the torture of at least one innocent detainee). Moreover, Bikowsky has already been publicly identified by news organizations as the CIA officer responsible for many of these acts.
  • The executive summary of the torture report released by the Senate last week provides abundant documentation that the CIA repeatedly and deliberately misled Congress about multiple aspects of its interrogation program. Yesterday, NBC News reported that one senior CIA officer in particular was responsible for many of those false claims, describing her as “a top al Qaeda expert who remains in a senior position at the CIA.” NBC, while withholding her identity, noted that the same unnamed officer “also participated in ‘enhanced interrogations’ of self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, witnessed the waterboarding of terror suspect Abu Zubaydah and ordered the detention of a suspected terrorist who turned out to be unconnected to al Qaeda, according to the report.” The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer, writing yesterday about the NBC article, added that the officer “is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.” This officer, Mayer noted, is the same one who “dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.” Mayer also wrote that the officer is “the same woman” identified in the Senate report who oversaw “the months-long rendition and gruesome interrogation of another detainee whose detention was a case of mistaken identity.”
  • Both news outlets withheld the name of this CIA officer even though her identity is widely known among journalists, and her name has been used by various media outlets in connection with her work at the CIA. Both articles cited requests by the CIA not to identify her, even though they provided details making her identity clear. In fact, earlier this year, The Washington Post identified Bikowsky by name, describing her as a CIA analyst “who was tied to a critical intelligence-sharing failure before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the botched 2003 ‘rendition’ of an innocent German citizen thought to be an al-Qaeda operative.” That Post report led to both McClatchy and independent journalist Marcy Wheeler raising questions about the propriety of Bikowsky’s former personal lawyer, Robert Litt, playing a key role in his current capacity as a top government lawyer in deciding which parts of the torture report should be released. The McClatchy article identified Bikowsky by name as the officer who “played a central role in the bungled rendition of Khaled el-Masri. El-Masri, who was revealed to be innocent, claimed to have been tortured by the agency.” El-Masri, a German citizen who was kidnapped from Macedonia and tortured by the CIA in Afghanistan, was released in 2003 after it was revealed he was not involved in al Qaeda.
Paul Merrell

The Woman at the Center of the C.I.A.'s Torture Report - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...unidentified-queen-torture

war & peace CIA torture Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report accountability

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • or the past eight months, there has been a furious battle raging behind closed doors at the White House, the C.I.A., and in Congress. The question has been whether the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence would be allowed to use pseudonyms as a means of identifying characters in the devastating report it released last week on the C.I.A.’s abusive interrogation and detention program. Ultimately, the committee was not allowed to, and now we know one reason why. The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.
  • Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done.” Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch, she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was also, in part, the model for the lead character in “Zero Dark Thirty.”)
  • Amazingly, perhaps, more than thirteen years after the 9/11 attacks, no one at the C.I.A. has ever been publicly held responsible for this failure. Evidently, the C.I.A. was adamant in its negotiations with the White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee that the American public never learn the names of anyone directly involved in this failure.
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  • According to sources in the law-enforcement community who I have interviewed over the years, and who I spoke to again this week, this woman—whose name the C.I.A. has asked the news media to withhold—had supervision over an underling at the agency who failed to share with the F.B.I. the news that two of the future 9/11 hijackers had entered the United States prior to the terrorist attacks.
  • As NBC recounts, this egregious chapter was apparently only the first in a long tale, in which the same C.I.A. official became a driving force in the use of waterboarding and other sadistic interrogation techniques that were later described by President Obama as “torture.” She personally partook in the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, at a black site in Poland. According to the Senate report, she sent a bubbly cable back to C.I.A. headquarters in 2003, anticipating the pain they planned to inflict on K.S.M. in an attempt to get him to confirm a report from another detainee, about a plot to use African-American Muslims training in Afghanistan for future terrorist attacks. “i love the Black American Muslim at AQ camps in Afghanuistan (sic). … Mukie (K.S.M.) is going to be hatin’ life on this one,” she wrote, according to the report. But, as NBC notes, she misconstrued the intelligence gathered from the other detainee. Somehow, the C.I.A. mistakenly believed that African-American Muslim terrorists were already in the United States. The intelligence officials evidently pressed K.S.M. so hard to confirm this, under such physical duress, that he eventually did, even though it was false—leading U.S. officials on a wild-goose chase for black Muslim Al Qaeda operatives in Montana. According to the report, the same woman oversaw the extraction of this false lead, as well as the months-long rendition and gruesome interrogation of another detainee whose detention was a case of mistaken identity. Later, in 2007, she accompanied then C.I.A. director Michael Hayden to brief Congress, where she insisted forcefully that the torture program had been a tremendous and indispensable success.
  • Readers can speculate on how the pieces fit together, and who the personalities behind this program are. But without even pseudonyms, it is exceedingly hard to connect the dots. It seems entirely possible—though, again, one can only speculate—that the C.I.A. overcompensated for its pre-9/11 intelligence failures by employing overly harsh measures later. Once they’d made a choice that America had never officially made before—of sanctioning torture—it seems possible that they felt they had to defend its efficacy, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. If so, this would be worth learning. But without names, or even pseudonyms, it is almost impossible to piece together the puzzle, or hold anyone in the American government accountable. Evidently, that is exactly what the C.I.A. was fighting for during its eight-month-long redaction process, behind all those closed doors.
Paul Merrell

WASHINGTON: CIA admits it broke into Senate computers; senators call for spy chief's ou... - 0 views

www.mcclatchydc.com/...-staffers-accessed-senate.html

surveillance state CIA torture Senate-Intelligence_Committee-Report Brennan

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • An internal CIA investigation confirmed allegations that agency personnel improperly intruded into a protected database used by Senate Intelligence Committee staff to compile a scathing report on the agency’s detention and interrogation program, prompting bipartisan outrage and at least two calls for spy chief John Brennan to resign.“This is very, very serious, and I will tell you, as a member of the committee, someone who has great respect for the CIA, I am extremely disappointed in the actions of the agents of the CIA who carried out this breach of the committee’s computers,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., the committee’s vice chairman.
  • The rare display of bipartisan fury followed a three-hour private briefing by Inspector General David Buckley. His investigation revealed that five CIA employees, two lawyers and three information technology specialists improperly accessed or “caused access” to a database that only committee staff were permitted to use.Buckley’s inquiry also determined that a CIA crimes report to the Justice Department alleging that the panel staff removed classified documents from a top-secret facility without authorization was based on “inaccurate information,” according to a summary of the findings prepared for the Senate and House intelligence committees and released by the CIA.In other conclusions, Buckley found that CIA security officers conducted keyword searches of the emails of staffers of the committee’s Democratic majority _ and reviewed some of them _ and that the three CIA information technology specialists showed “a lack of candor” in interviews with Buckley’s office.
  • The inspector general’s summary did not say who may have ordered the intrusion or when senior CIA officials learned of it.Following the briefing, some senators struggled to maintain their composure over what they saw as a violation of the constitutional separation of powers between an executive branch agency and its congressional overseers.“We’re the only people watching these organizations, and if we can’t rely on the information that we’re given as being accurate, then it makes a mockery of the entire oversight function,” said Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats.The findings confirmed charges by the committee chairwoman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that the CIA intruded into the database that by agreement was to be used by her staffers compiling the report on the harsh interrogation methods used by the agency on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons under the George W. Bush administration.The findings also contradicted Brennan’s denials of Feinstein’s allegations, prompting two panel members, Sens. Mark Udall, D-Colo., and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., to demand that the spy chief resign.
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  • Another committee member, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and some civil rights groups called for a fuller investigation. The demands clashed with a desire by President Barack Obama, other lawmakers and the CIA to move beyond the controversy over the “enhanced interrogation program” after Feinstein releases her committee’s report, which could come as soon as next weekMany members demanded that Brennan explain his earlier denial that the CIA had accessed the Senate committee database.“Director Brennan should make a very public explanation and correction of what he said,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. He all but accused the Justice Department of a coverup by deciding not to pursue a criminal investigation into the CIA’s intrusion.
  • “I thought there might have been information that was produced after the department reached their conclusion,” he said. “What I understand, they have all of the information which the IG has.”He hinted that the scandal goes further than the individuals cited in Buckley’s report.“I think it’s very clear that CIA people knew exactly what they were doing and either knew or should’ve known,” said Levin, adding that he thought that Buckley’s findings should be referred to the Justice Department.A person with knowledge of the issue insisted that the CIA personnel who improperly accessed the database “acted in good faith,” believing that they were empowered to do so because they believed there had been a security violation.“There was no malicious intent. They acted in good faith believing they had the legal standing to do so,” said the knowledgeable person, who asked not to be further identified because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly. “But it did not conform with the legal agreement reached with the Senate committee.”
  • Feinstein called Brennan’s apology and his decision to submit Buckley’s findings to the accountability board “positive first steps.”“This IG report corrects the record and it is my understanding that a declassified report will be made available to the public shortly,” she said in a statement.“The investigation confirmed what I said on the Senate floor in March _ CIA personnel inappropriately searched Senate Intelligence Committee computers in violation of an agreement we had reached, and I believe in violation of the constitutional separation of powers,” she said.It was not clear why Feinstein didn’t repeat her charges from March that the agency also may have broken the law and had sought to “thwart” her investigation into the CIA’s use of waterboarding, which simulates drowning, sleep deprivation and other harsh interrogation methods _ tactics denounced by many experts as torture.
  • Buckley’s findings clashed with denials by Brennan that he issued only hours after Feinstein’s blistering Senate speech.“As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s _ that’s just beyond the _ you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do,” he said in an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations.White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest issued a strong defense of Brennan, crediting him with playing an “instrumental role” in the administration’s fight against terrorism, in launching Buckley’s investigation and in looking for ways to prevent such occurrences in the future.Earnest was asked at a news briefing whether there was a credibility issue for Brennan, given his forceful denial in March.“Not at all,” he replied, adding that Brennan had suggested the inspector general’s investigation in the first place. And, he added, Brennan had taken the further step of appointing the accountability board to review the situation and the conduct of those accused of acting improperly to “ensure that they are properly held accountable for that conduct.”
  • The allegations and the separate CIA charge that the committee staff removed classified documents from the secret CIA facility in Northern Virginia without authorization were referred to the Justice Department for investigation.The department earlier this month announced that it had found insufficient evidence on which to proceed with criminal probes into either matter “at this time.” Thursday, Justice Department officials declined comment.
  • In her speech, Feinstein asserted that her staff found the material _ known as the Panetta review, after former CIA Director Leon Panetta, who ordered it _ in the protected database and that the CIA discovered the staff had it by monitoring its computers in violation of the user agreement.The inspector general’s summary, which was prepared for the Senate and the House intelligence committees, didn’t identify the CIA personnel who had accessed the Senate’s protected database.Furthermore, it said, the CIA crimes report to the Justice Department alleging that panel staffers had removed classified materials without permission was grounded on inaccurate information. The report is believed to have been sent by the CIA’s then acting general counsel, Robert Eatinger, who was a legal adviser to the interrogation program.“The factual basis for the referral was not supported, as the author of the referral had been provided inaccurate information on which the letter was based,” said the summary, noting that the Justice Department decided not to pursue the issue.
  • Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, criticized the CIA announcement, saying that “an apology isn’t enough.”“The Justice Department must refer the (CIA) inspector general’s report to a federal prosecutor for a full investigation into any crimes by CIA personnel or contractors,” said Anders.
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Aug 14
     
    And no one but the lowest ranking staffer knew anything about it, not even the CIA lawyer who made the criminal referral to the Justice Dept., alleging that the Senate Intelligence Committee had accessed classified documents it wasn't authorized to access. So the Justice Dept. announces that there's insufficient evidence to warrant a criminal investigation. As though the CIA lawyer's allegations were not based on the unlawful surveillance of the Senate Intelligence Committee's network.  Can't we just get an official announcement that Attorney General Holder has decided that there shall be a cover-up? 
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