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WikiLeaks released about 300,000 e-mails styled to Turkey’s ruling AKP. While no link to the “failed” military coup on July 15 was discovered, the cache contains mails suggesting that Libyan Al-Qaeda leader AbdelHakim Belhaj reached out to acquire help with laundering and investing funds stolen from the ousted Libyan government in 2011. The former “victim of US rendition” later hobnobbed with celebrities like U.S. Senator John McCain.

WikiLeaks released a cache with 294,548 emails on Tuesday. All of the emails which were released were attributed to Turkey’s AKP at akparti.org.tr, which is the primary domain of Turkey’s ruling party. The mails cover a period from 2010 up until July 6, 2016. That is, a few days before the “failed” military coup on July 15. An initial search has not resulted in the discovery of mails that would suggest foreknowledge about the coup and it is not sure that it will. After all, who would post mails about such a highly sensitive issue over a relatively unsecured party server, or over the internet in general. Although, after the FBI concluded that former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent and received mails on issues that were classified Top Secret / Compartmentalized via a personal e-mail server, one would not be surprised if there were mails about the upcoming coup in the cache. Time will show. A brief search for “buzz words” that reflect Turkey’s role in the so-called Arab Spring and the wars in and against Libya and Syria, however, gave an immediate “bonus” result.

One of the mails styled to a AKP member via the party server appears to have been sent from AbdelHakim Belhaj. Belhaj was up until the overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011 the chief of the Libyan Al-Qaeda franchise the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). After the overthrow of the Libyan government, Belhaj (Belhadj) would become the chief of the Tripoli Military Council and hobnob with celebrities like U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and US. Senator John McCain. Not bad, for someone who previously has been through the treadmill of the United States’ illegal extraordinary rendition program. Belhadj is today one of the most controversial figures in Libyan politics and, according to many, one of the main stumbling blocks on a road to peace and reconciliation. It is noteworthy that Abdelhakim Belhaj (Belhadj) and his second in command in the LIFG, Mahdi Al-Harati, have been linked to the British intelligence service MI6. Al-Harati would after 2011 move on to Syria. In 2012 al-Harati led two major campaigns of the so-called Libyan Brigade against the Syrian Arab Army from Jordan. Both campaigns failed at ousting the Syrian government, but increased the chaos in the country.

Privacy advocates pressed Barack Obama to end the bulk collection of Americans’ communications data at a series of meetings at the White House on Thursday, seizing their final chance to convince him of the need for meaningful reform of sweeping surveillance practices. A key US senator left one meeting at the White House with the impression that President Obama has yet to decide on specific reforms. “The debate is clearly fluid,” senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a longtime critic of bulk surveillance, told the Guardian after the meeting. “My sense is the president, and the administration, is wrestling with these issues,” Wyden said. Other groups were meeting presidential aides on Thursday afternoon, including the representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic) and the Open Technology Institute. Expectations were mounting that Obama will propose changing the National Security Agency’s controversial database of all domestic phone call records.

Wyden, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said he viewed the coming days and weeks, ahead of an announcement by Obama about the future scope of surveillance, to be decisive for the debate triggered by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.  “What I’d say to Americans is that the future of these programs is being determined now,” Wyden said. “For those like me, who believe that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive, this is the time to weigh in.”

Speaking after the meeting with legislators, White House spokesman Jay Carney described the conversation as an opportunity for Obama to “solicit their input”, rather than brief them on his decisions about the future scope of surveillance activities.  The White House held meetings on Wednesday with the leadership of the intelligence agencies, including NSA director Keith Alexander and director of national intelligence James Clapper, as well as with Obama’s privacy and civil liberties advisory group. On Friday, Obama’s staff is expected to meet representatives of major technology firms, ostensibly to continue deliberations.  Shortly before the legislators’ meeting began, two of the attendees, House intelligence committee leaders Mike Rogers of Michigan and Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, issued a statement describing a classified Defense Department report that they said alleged that Snowden’s leaks –which they said totaled 1.7m intelligence files and impacted intelligence operations of all military branches – could “gravely impact” US national security. 

Senators on Wednesday expressed alarm at explosive allegations that the CIA might have spied on their computers to keep tabs on their controversial review of Bush-era “enhanced interrogation” techniques.ADVERTISEMENTLawmakers from both parties said that if the allegations against the CIA prove true, intelligence officials might have violated the law — and certainly violated the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.“I’m assuming that’s it’s not true, but if it is true, it should be World War III in terms of Congress standing up for itself against the CIA, ” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told The Hill.Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) confirmed Wednesday that the CIA inspector general was investigating accusations that the covert agency had peered into the panel’s computers. But she didn’t comment on reports that the investigator has referred the matter to the Justice Department.Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.), an ex officio member of the Intelligence panel, said the charge of spying is “extremely serious.”“There are laws against intruding and tampering, hacking into, accessing computers without permission. And that law applies to everybody,” he said.Brennan in a statement said he was "dismayed" by the “spurious allegations,” which he said were "wholly unsupported by the facts."

His statement was released Wednesday evening as McClatchy reported that the computer spying was allegedly discovered when the CIA confronted the Senate Intelligence panel about documents removed from the agency’s headquarters."I am very confident that the appropriate authorities reviewing this matter will determine where wrongdoing, if any, occurred in either the Executive Branch or Legislative Branch," Brennan said.“Until then, I would encourage others to refrain from outbursts that do a disservice to the important relationship that needs to be maintained between intelligence officials and congressional overseers."The allegations escalated a long-simmering feud between Democrats on the Intelligence panel and the CIA over the committee’s classified interrogation report, which provides an exhaustive look at the treatment of detainees in the years after Sept. 11.Sen. Mark Udall (Colo.) and two other Democrats on the Intelligence panel have criticized the CIA and its director, John Brennan, for blocking their efforts to declassify the 6,300-page investigation.“The CIA tried to intimidate the Intelligence Committee, plain and simple,” Udall said. “I’m going to keep fighting like hell to make sure the CIA never dodges congressional oversight again.”

Senators have said their review, which was completed in December 2012, is harshly critical of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, concluding that they were ineffective and did not contribute to the capture of Osama bin Laden.Udall and other Democrats say the report needs to be released because it will "set the record straight" about the use of techniques that critics say amount to torture.While Democrats on the panel backed the report’s findings, most of the Intelligence Committee Republicans dissented.The CIA has objected to some of the report’s conclusions as well, though Udall says its internal review contradicts the agency’s public statements.Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), who has joined Udall in pressing for the release of the report, said the allegations about CIA spying show the lengths that the agency will go to protect itself.“I think it’s been pretty clear that the CIA will do just about anything to make sure that this detention and interrogation report doesn’t come out,” Heinrich told The Hill.

Previously, with narrow exceptions, an intelligence agency was permitted to disseminate information gathered from court-approved wiretaps only after deleting irrelevant private details and masking the names of innocent Americans who came into contact with a terrorism suspect. The Raw Take order significantly changed that system, documents show, allowing counterterrorism analysts at the N.S.A., the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. to share unfiltered personal information.

The leaked documents that refer to the rulings, including one called the “Large Content FISA” order and several more recent expansions of powers on sharing information, add new details to the emerging public understanding of a secret body of law that the court has developed since 2001. The files help explain how the court evolved from its original task — approving wiretap requests — to engaging in complex analysis of the law to justify activities like the bulk collection of data about Americans’ emails and phone calls.“These latest disclosures are important,” said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “They indicate how the contours of the law secretly changed, and they represent the transformation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into an interpreter of law and not simply an adjudicator of surveillance applications.”

The number of Americans whose unfiltered personal information has been shared among agencies is not clear. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the court has approved about 1,800 FISA orders each year authorizing wiretaps or physical searches — which can involve planting bugs in homes or offices, or copying hard drives — inside the United States. But the government does not disclose how many people had their private conversations monitored as a result.

A Senate bill promoted as a surveillance reform would codify the ability of the National Security Agency to search its troves of foreign phone and email communications for Americans’ information, and permit law enforcement agencies to search the vast databases as well. The Fisa Improvements Act, promoted by Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, would both make permanent a loophole permitting the NSA to search for Americans’ identifying information without a warrant – and, civil libertarians fear, contains an ambiguity that might allow the FBI, the DEA and other law enforcement agencies to do the same thing. “For the first time, the statute would explicitly allow the government to proactively search through the NSA data troves of information without a warrant,” said Michelle Richardson, the surveillance lobbyist for the ACLU.

“It may also expand current practices by allowing law enforcement to directly access US person information that was nominally collected for foreign intelligence purposes. This fourth amendment back door needs to be closed, not written into stone.” Feinstein’s bill passed the committee on an 11 to 4 vote on 31 October. An expanded report on its provisions released by the committee this week added details about the ability of both intelligence and law enforcement to sift through foreign communications databases that it accumulates under section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008. Section 6 of Feinstein’s bill blesses what her committee colleague Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat and civil libertarian, has called the “backdoor search provision,” which the Guardian revealed thanks to a leak by Edward Snowden.  The section permits intelligence agencies to search “the contents of communications” collected primarily overseas for identifying information on US citizens, resident aliens and people inside the US, provided that the “purpose of the query is to obtain foreign intelligence information or information necessary to understand foreign intelligence information or to assess its importance.”

Section 6 bills itself as a “restriction,” but it would not stop the NSA from performing the warrantless search, merely requiring intelligence agencies to log their queries and make them “available for review” to Congress, the Fisa court, the Justice Department and inspectors general inside the executive branch. Additionally, the report on Section 6 explicitly states that the provision “does not limit the authority of law enforcement agencies to conduct queries of data acquired pursuant to Section 702 of Fisa for law enforcement purposes.” There is ambiguity surrounding whether the FBI can currently search through the NSA’s foreign communications databases, or is reliant on the NSA to pass on information from the databases relevant to the bureau. A declassified Fisa court document from 2011 refers to “FBI minimization procedures,” but it is unclear what those procedures are. A copy of the FBI minimization procedures from 2009, acquired by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act is almost completely redacted. So is the section in the government’s most recent report on its Section 702 collection dealing with the FBI’s role, though it contains references to how the FBI “receive[s] … unminimized Section 70 acquired communications” from the NSA. 

A top secret document retrieved by American whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals Canada has set up covert spying posts around the world and conducted espionage against trading partners at the request of the U.S. National Security Agency. The leaked NSA document being reported exclusively by CBC News reveals Canada is involved with the huge American intelligence agency in clandestine surveillance activities in “approximately 20 high-priority countries."

Sections of the document with the highest classification make it clear in some instances why American spymasters are particularly keen about enlisting their Canadian counterparts, the Communications Security Establishment Canada. "CSEC shares with the NSA their unique geographic access to areas unavailable to the U.S," the document says. The briefing paper describes a "close co-operative relationship" between the NSA and its Canadian counterpart, the Communications Security Establishment Canada, or CSEC — a relationship "both sides would like to see expanded and strengthened. "The intelligence exchange with CSEC covers worldwide national and transnational targets."

The briefing notes make it clear that Canada plays a very robust role in intelligence-gathering around the world in a way that has won respect from its American equivalents.

WikiLeaks search now includes all published #NSA #Snowden documents from all sources http://search.wikileaks.org/ 

In early 2012, members of the hacking collective Anonymous carried out a series of cyber attacks on government and corporate websites in Brazil. They did so under the direction of a hacker who, unbeknownst to them, was wearing another hat: helping the Federal Bureau of Investigation carry out one of its biggest cybercrime investigations to date. A year after leaked files exposed the National Security Agency's efforts to spy on citizens and companies in Brazil, previously unpublished chat logs obtained by Motherboard reveal that while under the FBI's supervision, Hector Xavier Monsegur, widely known by his online persona, "Sabu," facilitated attacks that affected Brazilian websites. The operation raises questions about how the FBI uses global internet vulnerabilities during cybercrime investigations, how it works with informants, and how it shares information with other police and intelligence agencies. 

After his arrest in mid-2011, Monsegur continued to organize cyber attacks while working for the FBI. According to documents and interviews, Monsegur passed targets and exploits to hackers to disrupt government and corporate servers in Brazil and several other countries. Details about his work as a federal informant have been kept mostly secret, aired only in closed-door hearings and in redacted documents that include chat logs between Monsegur and other hackers. The chat logs remain under seal due to a protective order upheld in court, but in April, they and other court documents were obtained by journalists at Motherboard and the Daily Dot. 

A veteran Washington D.C. investigative journalist says the Department of Homeland Security confiscated a stack of her confidential files during a raid of her home in August — leading her to fear that a number of her sources inside the federal government have now been exposed. In an interview with The Daily Caller, journalist Audrey Hudson revealed that the Department of Homeland Security and Maryland State Police were involved in a predawn raid of her Shady Side, Md. home on Aug. 6. Hudson is a former Washington Times reporter and current freelance reporter. A search warrant obtained by TheDC indicates that the August raid allowed law enforcement to search for firearms inside her home.

But without Hudson’s knowledge, the agents also confiscated a batch of documents that contained information about sources inside the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, she said. Outraged over the seizure, Hudson is now speaking out. She said no subpoena for the notes was presented during the raid and argues the confiscation was outside of the search warrant’s parameter. “They took my notes without my knowledge and without legal authority to do so,” Hudson said this week. “The search warrant they presented said nothing about walking out of here with a single sheet of paper.”

Saudi Arabia has urged its citizens not to distribute "documents that might be faked" in an apparent response to WikiLeaks' publication on Friday of more than 60,000 documents it says are secret Saudi diplomatic communications. The statement, made by the foreign ministry on its Twitter account on Friday, did not directly deny the documents' authenticity, Reuters news agency reported. But on Sunday, foreign ministry spokesperson Osama Naqli warned the country not to "allow enemies of the state to achieve their intentions in regards to exchanging or publishing any documents" and said "many of them had been fabricated in a very obvious manner". Naqli said investigations were under way and that the ministry would prosecute those involved, a statement on the Saudi news agency said.

The released documents, which WikiLeaks said were embassy communications, emails between diplomats and reports from other state bodies, include discussions of Saudi Arabia's position regarding regional issues and efforts to influence media.

WikiLeaks said the released documents were a batch of more than half a million Saudi documents it has obtained and plans to publish. WikiLeaks did not say where it obtained the documents, but it referred in a press release to Riyadh's statement in May that it had suffered a breach of its computer networks, an attack later claimed by a group calling itself the Yemeni Cyber Army.

Greenwald’s plans for the many Snowden documents yet to be released to the public:I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There’s a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I’m saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it. Afterwards, there’ll be more to release—I made a promise to Snowden that we’d get as much of the archive out as possible—but I think the big media splashes will probably be over. But it takes time. We’re reporting on stories right now, finding things in the archive still that we’re trying to corroborate. We have one reporter who has done nothing but read documents, trying to cross-reference and make connections, every day since November.

And what he expects for 2016:Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she’s been around forever, the Clinton circle. She’s a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She’s surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere. But she’s going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist. It’s going to be this completely symbolic messaging that’s going to overshadow the fact that she’ll do nothing but continue everything in pursuit of her own power. They’ll probably have a gay person after Hillary who’s just going to do the same thing. I hope this happens so badly, because I think it’ll be so instructive in that regard. It’ll prove the point. Americans love to mock the idea of monarchy, and yet we have our own de facto monarchy. I think what these leaks did is, they demonstrated that there really is this government that just is the kind of permanent government that doesn’t get affected by election choices and that isn’t in any way accountable to any sort of democratic transparency and just creates its own world off on its own.

The latest revelation regarding the National Security Agency doesn't come courtesy of Edward Snowden. A Freedom of Information Act request has confirmed the NSA contracted a French company that makes its money by hacking into computers. It's no secret that the United States government relies on an arsenal of tactics to gather intelligence and wage operations against its adversaries, but a FOIA request filed by Muckrock's Heather Akers-Healy has confirmed that the list of Uncle Sam's business partners include Vupen, a French-based security company that specializes in selling secret codes used to crack into computers. Documents responsive to my request to #NSA for contracts with VUPEN, include 12/month exploit subscription https://t.co/x3qJbqSUpa — Heather Akers-Healy (@abbynormative) September 16, 2013 Muckrock published on Monday a copy of a contract between the NSA and Vupen in which the US government is shown to have ordered a one-year subscription to the firm's “binary analysis and exploits service” last September.

That service, according to the Vupen website, is sold only to government entities, law enforcement agencies and computer response teams in select countries, and provides clients with access to so-called zero-day exploits: newly-discovered security vulnerabilities that the products' manufacturers have yet to discover and, therefore, have had zero days to patch-up. “Major software vendors such as Microsoft and Adobe usually take 6 to 9 months to release a security patch for a critical vulnerability affecting their products, and this long delay between the discovery of a vulnerability and the release of a patch creates a window of exposure during which criminals can rediscover a previously reported but unpatched vulnerability, and target any organization running the vulnerable software,” Vupen says elsewhere on their website. Last year, Vupen researchers successfully cracked Google's Chrome browser, but declined to show developers how they did so — even for an impressive cash bounty. “We wouldn’t share this with Google for even $1 million,” Vupen CEO Chaouki Bekrar told Forbes' Andy Greenberg of the Chrome hack in 2012. “We don’t want to give them any knowledge that can help them in fixing this exploit or other similar exploits. We want to keep this for our customers.”

And why the NSA and other clients may benefit from being privy to these vulnerabilities, knowing how to exploit security holes in adversarial systems is a crucial component to any government's offensive cyber-operations. Last month, the Washington Post published excerpts from the previously secretive “black budget,” a closely guarded ledger listing the funding requests made by America's intelligence community provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. According to that document, a substantial goal of the US in fiscal year 2013 was to use a portion of $52.6 billion in secretive funding towards improving offensive cyber-operations.

Freelance video journalist Jason Parkinson returned home from vacation this year to find a brown paper envelope in his mailbox. He opened it to find nine years of his life laid out in shocking detail.Twelve pages of police intelligence logs noted which protests he covered, who he spoke to and what he wore - all the way down to the color of his boots. It was, he said, proof of something he'd long suspected: The police were watching him."Finally," he thought as he leafed through documents over a strong black coffee, "we've got them."Parkinson's documents, obtained through a public records request, are the basis of a lawsuit being filed by the National Union of Journalists against London's Metropolitan Police and Britain's Home Office. The lawsuit, announced late Thursday, along with recent revelations about the seizure of reporters' phone records, is pulling back the curtain on how British police have spent years tracking the movements of the country's news media.

Parkinson, three photographers, an investigative journalist and a newspaper reporter are filing the lawsuit after obtaining their surveillance records. Parkinson, a 44-year-old freelancer who has covered hundreds of protests - some of them for The Associated Press - said he and his colleagues had long suspected that the police were monitoring them."Police officers we'd never even met before knew our names and seemed to know a hell of a lot about us," he said.Several journalists told AP the records police kept on them were sometimes startling, sometimes funny and occasionally wrong.

Jess Hurd, a 41-year-old freelance photographer and Parkinson's partner, said she was worried the intelligence logs were being shared internationally."I go to a lot of countries on assignment," she said. "Where are these database logs being shared? Who with, for what purpose?"The revelations add to public disclosures about British police secretly seizing journalists' telephone records in leak investigations. Several senior officers have recently acknowledged using anti-terrorism powers to uncover journalists' sources by combing through the records.

Today, 21 December 2014, WikiLeaks releases two classified documents by a previously undisclosed CIA office detailing how to maintain cover while travelling through airports using false ID – including during operations to infiltrate the European Union and the Schengen passport control system. This is the second release within WikiLeaks' CIA Series, which will continue in the new year. The two classified documents aim to assist CIA undercover officials to circumvent these systems around the world. They detail border-crossing and visa regulations, the scope and content of electronic systems, border guard protocols and procedures for secondary screenings. The documents show that the CIA has developed an extreme concern over how biometric databases will put CIA clandestine operations at risk – databases other parts of the US government made prevalent post-9/11.

The CIA manual "Surviving Secondary", dated 21 September 2011, details what happens in an airport secondary screening in different airports around the world and how to pass as a CIA undercover operative while preserving one's cover. Among the reasons for why secondary screening would occur are: if the traveller is on a watchlist (noting that watchlists can often contain details of intelligence officials); or is found with contraband; or "because the inspector suspects that something about the traveler is not right".

The second document in this release, "Schengen Overview", is dated January 2012 and details guidelines for border officials in the EU's Schengen zone and the threats their procedures might pose in exposing the "alias identities of tradecraft-conscious operational travelers", the CIA terminology for US spies travelling with false ID during a clandestine operation. It outlines how various electronic systems within Schengen work and the risks they pose to clandestine US operatives, including the Schengen Information System (SIS), the European fingerprint database EURODAC (European Dactyloscopie) and FRONTEX (Frontières extérieures) – the EU agency responsible for easing travel between member states while maintaining security.

Uncle Sam’s Databases of Suspicion A Shadow Form of National ID

We do know that the nation’s domestic-intelligence network is massive, including at least 59 federal agencies, over 300 Defense Department units, and approximately 78 state-based fusion centers, as well as the multitude of law enforcement agencies they serve. We also know that local law enforcement agencies have themselves raised concerns about the system’s lack of privacy protections.

The SAR database is part of an ever-expanding domestic surveillance system established after 9/11 to gather intelligence on potential terrorism threats. At an abstract level, such a system may seem sensible: far better to prevent terrorism before it happens than to investigate and prosecute after a tragedy. Based on that reasoning, the government exhorts Americans to “see something, say something” -- the SAR program’s slogan. Indeed, just this week at a conference in New York City, FBI Director James Comey asked the public to report any suspicions they have to authorities. “When the hair on the back of your neck stands, listen to that instinct and just tell somebody,” said Comey. And seeking to reassure those who do not want to get their fellow Americans in trouble based on instinct alone, the FBI director added, “We investigate in secret for a very good reason, we don't want to smear innocent people.”

But a close look at the nature of the information Tsarnaev’s defense team has repeatedly requested from prosecutors in motions to the court suggests Tsarnaev’s lawyers are trying to pry loose something about the government’s relationship with the Tsarnaevs prior to the bombing on April 15, 2013.The key to this relationship may lie in a store of information that the Russians delivered to U.S. investigators in the days after the bombing. Equally, it may be found in warnings Moscow delivered to U.S. investigators before the attack. Either way, the U.S. government has fought hard to keep the lid on what it knows.The defense team’s motive in asking for such information is clear enough: they are angling for anything that might convince jurors to spare their client’s life. But the government’s stonewalling raises serious questions about why it wants to keep secret what the Russians knew about the Tsarnaevs, and how and when this information reached the FBI and the CIA.

Already, Tsarnaev is facing an uphill battle because of a widespread presumption of his guilt—a presumption fed, in large part, by law enforcement leaks and an unquestioning media. The FBI has been waging an apparent war on witnesses, characterized by the scorched-earth tactic of intimidating, arresting, deporting, and, in one case, killing them. That has rendered them inaccessible to Tsarnaev’s defense.These hardball tactics appear to be just part of the government strategy of suppressing information in the case. The Justice Department’s trump card is the ability to withhold information based on national security claims. That is in addition to an overwhelming financial advantage.

The defense team has thus repeatedly had to ask U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. to compel the government to release information. That has eaten up a lot of time critical in preparing the defense case.Not that Tsarnaev has been given much of it. One statistic tells the story: Tsarnaev’s team has had about half of the preparation time that defense lawyers in federal death penalty cases have been granted over the past decade—18 months versus a median of 36. So the prospects for getting the whole story behind the bombing laid out in open court look bleak.

What is really behind the deep-state infighting over the U.S. elections and the "wire tapping" of the Trump campaign? Why was the CIA-Neocon axis vehemently lobbying against Trump? What foreign interests and what money is involved in this? Answers to these questions are now emerging. The former director of the CIA under Clinton, James Woolsey, went to the Wall Street Journal and offered some information (likely some true and some false) on the retired General Flynn and the lobbying businesses he was involved in. Woolsey is an arch-neoconservative. He had worked on the transition team of Trump but got fired over "growing tensions over Trump’s vision for intelligence agencies." Flynn is the former National Security Advisor of Trump who later also got fired. Woolsey was a board member of Flynn's former lobbying company FIG. Woolsey claims: In September 2016 he took part in a meeting between Flynn and high level Turkish officials, including the Turkish foreign minister and the energy minister who is the son-in-law of the Turkish president Erdogan. During the meeting, Woolsey claims, a brainstorming took place over how the Turkish cult leader Fethullah Gülen could -probably by illegal means- be removed from the U.S. and handed over to Turkey. Gülen is accused by the Erdogan mafia of initiating a coup attempt against it. The U.S. claims officially that there is no evidence for such an accusation and that Gülen can therefore not be rendered to Turkey. Gülen is an old CIA asset that helped the U.S. deep state to control Turkey.  Erdogan divorced from the Gülen organization after it became useless for his neo-Ottoman project. Here is the WSJ report on the Woolsey claims and a video clip with parts of his WSJ interview. Woolsey also went on CNN where he repeated his WSJ story. Flynn was accused by the anti-Trump campaign to have worked for Russia. He had taken several $10,000 for speeches he gave in Moscow. He also, at times, had argued for better U.S. relations with Russia. But Flynn's pro-Russia stand was probably honest. (Or the bribes involved were just smaller than the ones paid by others.) The money he got on the speaker circus was rather small for a man in his position. Flynn's real corruption was on another issue. After having been fired from the Trump administration, Flynn retroactively filed under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). His lobbying firm had a contract over $530,000 to work for a company near to the Turkish president Erdogan: In its filing, Mr. Flynn’s firm said its work from August to November “could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.” The filing said his firm’s fee, $530,000, wasn’t paid by the government but by Inovo BV, a Dutch firm owned by a Turkish businessman, Ekim Alptekin.

This lobbying, not the alleged Flynn-Putin relation, is the real scandal and part of the Trump/CIA/Clinton deep-state in-fighting. The meeting Woolsey described was under the "Turkish" Flynn contract. The Turkish business man, and owner of Inovo, Ekim Alptekin is a member of the Erdogan gang. But hidden at the very end of the WSJ story is the real key to understand the shady network: Inovo hired Mr. Flynn on behalf of an Israeli company seeking to export natural gas to Turkey, the filing said, and Mr. Alptekin wanted information on the U.S.-Turkey political climate to advise the gas company about its Turkish investments. It was the Israeli gas company, not the Alptekin outlet, that drove the issue. The Leviatan (and Tamar) gas fields in the Mediterranean along the Israeli coast are a huge energy and profit resource IF the gas from them can be exported to Europe. Several companies are involved in the exploration and all are looking for ways to connect the fields to the European gas network. There are (likely true) rumors that huge bribes have been payed in Israel, Jordan and elsewhere to win exploration contracts and to sell the gas. Negotiations between Israel and Turkey over the pipeline have been on and off. They depend on a positive climate towards Israel in the Turkish government which again depends on the often changing political position of the Erdogan gang.

The picture evolving here (lots of sleuthing and sources) is this: An Israeli company (or whoever is behind it) wants a gas pipeline to Turkey. It hires Flynn and Alptekin to arrange a positive climate for the Leviathan pipeline within the Turkish government. It offers Flynn more than half a million for a little (4-month long) influence work. His job is to create a "friendly atmosphere" for the deal by using his influence in the U.S. to accommodate Erdogan. A major point that is expected from Flynn is to arrange the handover of Gülen, by whatever means, from the U.S. to Erdogan. After accepting the (lobbying) bribe Flynn-the-whore suddenly changes his former anti-Turkish, pro-Russian, pro-Kurdish political position into a pro-Turkish, neutral-Russian and anti-Kurdish one. (His lobbying firm also makes some smaller payments related to the Clinton email-server scandal. This may be related to links between the Clinton family and the Gülen school empire.) He has a meeting with the Turkish government/Erdogan officials part of which is a discussion of a removal of Gülen to Turkey. He pens a pro Erdogan anti-Gülen op-ed which is published on the day of the election and he denigrates the Pentagon plan to work with the Kurds in Syria. The NSA, CIA and the FBI are listening to Flynn's conversations with Turkish and Israeli interests. (For the old and long history of such "wiretapping" of Turkish and Israeli connections and various dirty and criminal deals they revealed read and ask Sibel Edmonds.) The projects which Flynn is involved in, especially removing Gülen, are against the long term interests of the (neoconservative-driven) CIA. Selected tapes of his talks are transcribed and distributed within the anti-Trump campaign. This is the origin of the "wiretapping" of the Trump Tower the U.S. president lamented about. The stuff the CIA dug up about Flynn's dealing was and is used against Trump. Woolsey is caught up in this as he also worked for Flynn's lobbying firm. (His neocon-pro-Zionist history suggests that he is the senior Israeli watchdog over Flynn in all this.) He is now engaged in damage control and is "coming clean" and selectively leaking his anti-Flynn stuff to exculpate himself. (There is probably also some new, better deal involved that will pay off from him.) The Israeli-Turkish pipeline and the related deep-state fight are not the only issue involved in the campaign against Trump. There are also British interests and British intelligence involvement especially with the accusations against Russia of "hacking" of the DNC. If and how these fit in with above has not yet been revealed.