The Operation Bandit, in which then-President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Vojislav Kostunica was to be assassinated by the sniper hit in Sarajevo on July 15, 2002, was planned and organized by the Western intelligence services.

According to Belgrade daily Kurir, Vojislav Kostunica was to be assassinated by the sniper hit on July 15, 2002 in Sarajevo, ahead of the start of the tripartite conference of the leaders of Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina [BiH] and Croatia. The assassination was planned by the western intelligence services, and the operation was codenamed “Bandit”. The action was discovered in time, and the assassins who should have arrived from Croatia never reached Sarajevo.

Busted
Security services from Serbia and Republic of Srpska have captured the conversation at the meeting of the two main foreign operatives in Serbia at the time, Anthony Monckton [MI6] and David Black [CIA], as they discussed the Operation Bandit. Published by Kurir, the following is an exclusive transcript of their conversation taking place on August 7, 2002, in a restaurant of one of Belgrade hotels.

Monckton: I don’t understand how was the operation busted. The most trustworthy men were selected.

Black: It seems that the logistics have failed. The Muslims simply can’t be trusted.

Monckton: Who was involved among the Sarajevo operatives?

Black: Our men. Reliable.

Monckton: Was the planned trigger a solo-act, or were there few more teams for cover?

Black: One man, but our team from Zagreb should have covered him, just in case. I don’t know what went wrong.

Monckton: Who was securing the target?

Black: BIA [Serbian security service] was securing President Kostunica up until now, but as a part of a deeper protection it is possible that some intelligence centers of Republika Srpska security services have gotten involved too.

Monckton: Krga and Tomic were constantly under surveillance before the [Paddy] Ashdown’s meeting with President Mesic, Kostunica and the members of the BiH presidency. The authorities from BIA were also observed. Our operatives on the ground in Bosnia were reporting that their intelligence services are under control.

Black: Yes, but the army intelligence service of Republic of Srpska is still strong and it is obviously not under control.

Monckton: A mistake was made with Biljana Plavsic. Things were quickly put in order while she was there!

Black: Was Ashdown aware of the operation Bandit?

Monckton: The operation was a top secret and only three men knew about it.

Source

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

rest of article at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Zoltar, and his ambushing crew,  were set upon in a frenzied, violent, vicious and cowardly attack which has left his cameraman and sound operator fighting for their lives. Zoltar has fared much worse and endured a marathon 28-hour operation to repair a grocery-list of sickening injuries, which doctors say, include: "a collapsed lung, ruptured spleen, a punctured left ear-drum, two broken arms, a broken knee-cap, three cracked vertebrae, eight broken ribs, a fractured collar-bone, a shattered hip, a crushed ankle, deep lacerations to his hands, neck, calve and thigh muscles; a hair-line fracture to the skull, dozens of hen-pecked wounds to the ears, forehead, chin, cheeks, eyes and throat - and his nose, that had to be completely sewn back on."

Zoltar Zays struck fame when he exposed to the world the secret to Donald Trumps 'fold-over' hairline. He was given his own show on the KKL Network and made a fortune out of his harmless "surprise makeover raids". The show was planning to air the "El Pollo Locco make-over episode" in two weeks, but now local police, FBI and the CIA are gearing-up for a nation-wide manhunt for the desperate gang of thieves that have inflicted this cowardly unprovoked attack.

A spokesman for the  KKL Network issued this statement: "Zoltar is a one-of-a-kind talent, he will be back better than ever. I hope the cowards that did this are brought to justice, they have no sense of fun; we are all praying that Zoltar makes a speedy recovery."

THE DARK NIGHT,  JULY 14TH

http://thedarkknight.warnerbros.com/

    PEEP'S GUARANTEE

Turn on any cop show, and the surveillance always seems pretty straightforward. There are always a couple of guys in a van and maybe another two in a car outside some apartment building. But the truth is, real surveillance is much more subtle.

The Special Agent-in-Charge of the Special Operations Division of the FBI in New York is Todd Letcher. He says if his team is doing the job right, you won't even know they are there. "When a target comes out of the bodega with a cup of coffee, they don't see where we are, or they don't see our people," he said. "Our people look so ordinary, they just look over them." ...read rest of story..

It's hardly an anniversary many will register, but last week marked 30 years since President Jimmy Carter authorised the first covert CIA operations against the government of Afghanistan.

By backing the anti-Communist mujahideen and creating civil unrest, the plan was to provoke a Soviet invasion and thus, in the words of Carter's adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, "[give] the Soviet Union its Vietnam War".

History records this Cold War gamble paid off. But the laws of unintended consequences have also meant that 30 years on we're still living with its legacy.

The "warlords" who inherited the ruins of Afghanistan after the Soviet army began pulling out 10 years later in turn provoked the reactionary extremism of the Taliban. The ensuing fundamentalist Islamic state became a refuge for bin Laden and al Qaeda . September 11 provoked another invasion, this time by the US and its western allies. Seven years on we are hearing the familiar comparisons with Vietnam all over again.

Overall, civilian deaths are at their highest since the start of the war and military casualties, while not as bad as in Iraq in terms of sheer numbers, are rising. Pakistan now harbours something like 1.5 million Afghan refugees. The opium trade is back in business. The Afghan army remains inept and untrained. Iraq has drained American and Nato military resources.

Coalition troop deaths in Afghanistan surpass Iraq

• May and June death tolls for foreign troops were higher in Afghanistan than Iraq
• 46 U.S. and allied troops died in Afghanistan in June; 31 in Iraq
• Afghan deaths included troops from U.S., U.K., Canada, Poland, Romania, Hungary
• Same trend seen with civilian deaths, analysts say

(CNN) -- For the second month in a row, U.S. and allied troop deaths in the Afghan war have surpassed those in Iraq, according to official figures tallied by CNN.

In June, 46 foreign troops died in Afghanistan and 31 troops died in Iraq. In May, 23 foreign troops died in Afghanistan and 21 died in Iraq.

A Pentagon report issued last week about Afghanistan said that security in many areas of the country is regarded as "fragile" and that Taliban militants have regrouped into a "resilient insurgency" after the Taliban was toppled from power in 2001.

June was the deadliest month for foreign troops in Afghanistan since the conflict there began in 2001. Twenty-eight Americans, 13 Britons, two Canadians, one Pole, one Romanian and one Hungarian died in Afghanistan. The latest deaths were three American troops who died in a vehicle rollover while on patrol in Kandahar province.

Afghanistan: Airstrikes kill civilians

• U.S. airstrikes hit Nuristan province in Afghanistan on Friday
• Provincial governor says strikes killed 22 civilians, including 1 woman, 1 child
• U.S. says strikes hit two vehicles carrying insurgents

US, NATO deaths in Afghanistan pass Iraq toll

Afghan Civilian Casualty Rates

A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States' Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan:

Karzai orders probe into deadly U.S. strike

• Afghan president orders inquiry into allegations 15 civilians killed in U.S. strike
• In second strike local officials said coalition bombing killed 23 in wedding party
• Karzai has stepped up pressure on his U.S. allies to take more precautions

KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai has ordered an inquiry into allegations that 15 civilians were killed in a U.S. military strike targeting militants.

UN figures reveal 62% rise in Afghan civilian deaths

The number of civilians killed in Afghanistan has risen by almost two-thirds in the first half of the year compared with 2007, UN figures showed today.

The figures, which reveal that almost 700 civilians have died, show that the instability and violence afflicting the country are taking an increasing toll on ordinary Afghans.

John Holmes, the UN's humanitarian affairs chief, said a recent increase in militant attacks was making it increasingly difficult to deliver emergency aid.

"The humanitarian situation is clearly affected and made worse by the ongoing conflict in different parts of the country," he said in Kabul.

"Most of these casualties are caused by the insurgents, who seem to have no regard for civilian life, but there are also still significant numbers caused by the international military forces."

The hearts and minds of those we are trying to save, die from the good intentions the Bush Message sends every day.

Send More Troops To Afghanistan

WASHINGTON (CBS News) ― Grappling with a record death toll in an overshadowed war, President Bush promised Wednesday to send more U.S. troops into Afghanistan by year's end. He conceded that June was a "tough month" in the nearly 7-year-old war.

In fact, it was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Afghanistan since the conflict began.

"One reason why there have been more deaths is because our troops are taking the fight to a tough enemy, an enemy who doesn't like our presence there because they don't like the idea of America denying safe haven (to terrorists)," Mr. Bush told reporters Wednesday. "Of course there's going to be resistance."

Mr. Bush said it was a tough month too for the Taliban fighters. The former ruling Islamic militants have rebounded with deadly force since their overthrow 6½ years ago by U.S.-led troops.    "We're going to increase troops by 2009," Mr. Bush said, without offering details of exactly when or how many.

It amounted to a reiteration by Mr. Bush of a promised buildup of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. He said coalition forces have doubled in size over two years and pledged that the twin strategy of fighting extremists and supporting Afghanistan's civil development "is going to work."

The more Bush pledges, the more Bush promises, the more Messages Bush sends dig us deeper into the body count ...  The message the world has heard since 9/11 is that the USA has devolved into the evil empire.  The seeds of resentment, hate and conflict have been sewed by the USA since WWI.  That was when the US started picking up where British Imperialism left off.  Using better euphamisms, the US has embedded its influence across the world with the similar manipulation techniques used by Britain.  It is all about creating a monopoly for resources and commerce.  Body count becomes incidental.

Any promises Bush makes at this point is so moot it would be comical had Bozo the Clown not passed away recently.   Bozo actually reincarnated before his passing.

The only problem is Bush has the personality of

by Peter Dale Scott

Global Research, July 5, 2008

Global Research recently published my essay entitled 9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics In this article, I argue that 9/11 should be analyzed as a deep event (an event not fully aired or understood because of its intelligence connections) and above all as one of a series of deep events which from time to time have frustrated peace initiatives or become pretexts for war.

In support of this overall thesis I pointed to features of 9/11 which recalled similar deep events: the still not fully understood outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the JFK assassination, and the so-called Second Tonkin Gulf Incident of 1964 (an alleged attack on U.S. destroyers which we now know never happened).

The similarities between these deep events which have disturbed American history since World War Two suggest that they are not just a sequence of unrelated external accidents, but at least in part the product of some on-going deep indigenous force not yet adequately understood.

In this series of deep events, perhaps the most striking similarities are between the JFK assassination (henceforward referred to as "JFK") and 9/11. Earlier talks and articles I have delivered on this topic are developed even further in my forthcoming much expanded reissue of my early book, The War Conspiracy. As The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, it is due to be published by the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press in August 2008.

The following essay is the concluding section of the new book, and has never hitherto been published.]

I wish to summarize again the first striking similarity between 11/22/63 and of 9/11/01: the dubious detective work on those two days. Less than fifteen minutes after the President’s assassination, the height and weight of Kennedy’s alleged killer was posted.1 Before the last of the hijacked planes crashed on 9/11, the FBI told Richard Clarke that they had a list of alleged hijackers.2

In the case of Oswald, within fifteen minutes of the assassination and long before Oswald was picked up in the Texas Theater, Inspector Sawyer of the Dallas police put out on the police radio network, and possibly other networks, a description of the killer – "About 30, 5’10", 165 pounds."3 As noted, this height and weight exactly matched the measurements attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald in Oswald’s FBI file, and also in CIA documents about him.4

The announced height and weight were however different from Oswald’s actual measurements, as recorded by the Dallas police after his arrest: 5’9 1/2", 131 pounds.5 More importantly, there is no credible source for the posted measurements from any witness in Dallas. (The witness said to have spotted him, Howard Brennan, failed to identify Oswald in a line-up.)6 This leaves the possibility that the measurements were taken from existing files on Oswald, rather than from any observations in Dallas on November 22. If so, someone with access to those files may have already designated Oswald as the culprit, before there was any evidence to connect him to the crime.

A similar situation pertains to the alleged hijackers on 9/11. For example, shortly afterwards men in Saudi Arabia complained that "the hijackers' `personal details’" released by the FBI -- "including name, place, date of birth and occupation -- matched their own."7 One of them, Saeed al-Ghamdi, claimed further that an alleged photograph shown on CNN (of an alleged Flight 93 hijacker with the same name) was in fact a photograph of himself. He speculated "that CNN had probably got the picture from the Flight Safety flying school he attended in Florida."8

If the above information is accurate, then the details posted by the FBI and CNN about the alleged hijackers cannot have derived from the events of 9/11, with which the survivors in Saudi Arabia would appear to have been uninvolved. Once again this leaves the strong possibility that the details were taken from existing files, rather than from empirical observations on September 11.9

And some of the hijackers, like Lee Harvey Oswald, may have been in CIA files for a special reason: because the CIA had an operational interest in them.

Internal CIA Evidence of Operational Interest in Oswald and the Hijackers

I have speculated that Oswald, like the al-Qaeda trainer Ali Mohamed, might have been a double agent reporting to the FBI about the terrorist group (Alpha 66) with which some law enforcement officers associated him.

I would like now to discuss more unequivocal evidence, from internal CIA records, about an operational CIA interest in first Oswald and later two of the alleged al-Qaeda hijackers, Nawaz al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdar. In 2001 as in 1963 the CIA inexplicably withheld information about the subjects from the FBI, which ought categorically to have received it. The anomalies are extreme.

This is now easy to show in the case of Oswald. On October 10, 1963, six weeks before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, CIA Headquarters sent out two messages about Oswald, a teletype to the FBI, State, and Navy, and a cable to the chief of the CIA’s Mexico City station. Both messages contained false and mutually contradictory statements, and also withheld known facts of great potential importance.10 The teletype to the FBI withheld the obviously significant information that Oswald had reportedly met in Mexico City with a Soviet Vice-Consul, Valeriy Kostikov, who was believed by CIA officers to be an officer of the KGB.11

One CIA officer, Jane Roman, helped draft both messages. In 1995 she was confronted by two interviewers with irrefutable evidence that she had signed off on erroneous information about Oswald in the CIA cable to Mexico City. After much questioning, she finally admitted, "I’m signing off on something I know isn’t true." One of the interviewers, John Newman, then asked her, "‘Is this indicative of some sort of operational interest in Oswald’s file?’ ‘Yes,’ Roman replied. ‘To me it’s indicative of a keen interest in Oswald held very closely on the need-to-know basis.’" She later repeated, "I would think there was definitely some operational reason to withhold it [the information at CIA headquarters on Oswald], if it was not sheer administrative error, when you see all the people who signed off on it."12

Other CIA officers withheld important information from the FBI in January 2000, with respect to Khalid al-Mihdar, who would later be identified as one of the al-Qaeda hijackers on September 11, 2001. The NSA overheard on a Yemeni telephone about a meeting in Malaysia which al-Mihdar would attend, along with Tewfiq bin Attash, the mastermind of the fatal attack on the USS Cole.13 It notified the CIA but not the FBI. In consequence

[Khalid al-Mihdar’s] Saudi passport – which contained a visa for travel to the United States – was photocopied [in Qatar] and forwarded to CIA headquarters. The information was not shared with FBI headquarters until August 2001. An FBI agent detailed to the Bin Ladin unit at the CIA attempted to share this information with colleagues at FBI Headquarters. A CIA desk officer instructed him not to send the cable with this information. Several hours later, this same desk officer drafted a cable distributed solely within CIA alleging that the visa documents had been shared with the FBI.14

Lawrence Wright, reviewing this and other significant anomalies, reported in The Looming Tower the belief among FBI agents following bin Laden "that the agency was protecting Mihdar and [his companion, the alleged 9/11 hijacker Nawaz al-] Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them," or alternatively that "the CIA was running a joint venture with Saudi intelligence" using al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi.15 Wright himself speculated in a companion essay he wrote for The New Yorker that "The CIA may also have been protecting an overseas operation and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it."16

The Consequences of the CIA’s Withholding of Evidence

As just noted, the CIA, in its teletype to the FBI of October 10, 1963, withheld the information that Oswald had reportedly met with a KGB officer, Valeriy Kostikov. Former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that this failure to inform the FBI was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963.17 In other words, the withholding enabled Oswald to play whatever role he played on that fateful day, even if it was only to become a designated patsy.

FBI officials are even more bitter about the consequences of the withholding of information about al-Mihdar:

They didn’t want the bureau meddling in their business – that’s why they didn’t tell the FBI….They purposely hid from the FBI, purposely refused to tell the bureau that they were following a man in Malaysia who had a visa to come to America….And that’s why September 11 happened. That is why it happened….They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands.18

But the CIA withheld information from the FBI about bin Attash (already the subject of a criminal investigation) as well, even when asked by an FBI agent, Ali Soufan, about bin Attash and the Malaysia meeting. According to Wright,

The agency did not respond to his clearly stated request. The fact that the CIA withheld information about the mastermind of the Cole bombing and the meeting in Malaysia, when directly asked by the FBI, amounted to obstruction of justice in the death of the seventeen American sailors."19

In late August 2001, only days before 9/11, FBI agent Steve Bongardt, complaining about the CIA’s withholding of information about al-Mihdar, correctly predicted in an angry email to the CIA’s bin Laden unit that "someday someone will die."20

The CIA’s Dishonest Efforts to Cover-Up

From the moment Congress, in the 1970s, began to evince an interest in the Kennedy assassination, former CIA officer David Phillips became a vigorous defender of the CIA’s performance. With respect to false information about Oswald in CIA cables both to and from Mexico City (where Phillips was in charge of Cuban affairs for the CIA station), Phillips’s first response was to dismiss Oswald as "a blip" of no interest.21

A similar defense of the CIA’s failure to act on al-Mihdar was offered to the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 by the Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Cofer Black: "I think that month we watchlisted about 150 people."22 The same defense was offered by Dale Watson, the FBI’s former counterterrorism chief:

There were a lot of red flags prior to 9/11….So it’s a mass of information and it’s a sea of threats, and it’s like working against a maze. If you know where the end point of a maze is, it’s certainly easier to work your way back to the starting point than trying to go through the maze and sort out all the red flags.23

The problem with this excuse is that both Oswald and al-Mihdar were singled out for special CIA attention, not left floating in a sea of red flags. The cable to Mexico City which Jane Roman signed off on was not handled routinely, it was sent for signature to the CIA’s Assistant Deputy Director for Plans, Thomas Karamessines. And in the case of al-Mihdar in Malaysia, back in 2000

CIA leaders were so convinced about the potential significance of the al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia, they not only set up surveillance of it, but provided regular updates to the FBI director [Louis Freeh], the head of the CIA [George Tenet], and the national security advisor [Samuel Berger].24

That Freeh and Berger were being notified at the top about the Malaysia meeting (at the same time that the regular FBI bureaucracy was being cut out) is confirmed in accounts by Terry McDermott and Philip Shenon.25

CIA officials testified falsely to congressional committees with respect to both Oswald and al-Mihdar. James Angleton was asked by the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations about a memoir written by the CIA’s station chief in Mexico City, Win Scott, and later personally retrieved for the Agency after Scott’s death by Angleton himself. Angleton testified that Scott’s "manuscript was fictional and did not include a chapter on Oswald." In fact, according to Jefferson Morley, "The only surviving manuscript is clearly nonfictional and does have a chapter on Oswald."26

Both George Tenet and Cofer Black testified before the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 that the FBI had been granted access to the information linking al-Mihdar and Tewfiq bin Attash (alias Khallad), the mastermind of the Cole bombing. The 9/11 Commission, after a lengthy review of the matter, concluded "this was not the case."27

The CIA, Oswald, and Al-Mihdar: Suppression of Vital Records

That the CIA regards its relationship to the suspects Oswald and al-Mihdar as sensitive is further illustrated by its suppression of vital evidence with respect to both. Although in the 1990s all government agencies were required by law to submit their Oswald-related documents to the Assassination Records Review Board, the CIA has been vigorously resisting pressure to do this in the case of former CIA officer George Joannides. In 1963 Joannides was the case officer for AMSPELL, the CIA’s operation in support of the Cuban exile group DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil). In August 1963 the DRE was in contact with Oswald and participated with him in a radio broadcast which was later distributed with CIA help throughout Latin America.28

According to Jefferson Morley, "four decades after the fact, the most important AMSPELL records are missing from CIA archives – perhaps intentionally." Monthly reports on DRE activities were filed by CIA case officers Ross Crozier and William Kent, and these records were declassified by the ARRB for the periods September 1960-November 1962 and after May 1964.

But the board was unable to locate any monthly AMSPELL reports from December 1962 to April 1964. There was a seventeen-month gap in the AMSPELL records, which coincided exactly with the period in which George Joannides handled the group.29

With respect to 9/11, all that is known about suppression so far has to do with the public record. Here it is striking that the Report of the Joint Inquiry by Congress into 9/11 has one glaring redaction of twenty-eight pages, dealing with "sources of foreign support for some of the September 11th hijackers while they were in the United States." Press reports have specified that this refers to Saudi money which reached al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi in 2000 while they were in San Diego. According to committee cochair Senator Bob Graham,

The draft contained a twenty-eight page passage that detailed evidence that Saudis in the United States – Saudi government "spies," Graham called them – had provided financial and logistical support to [al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi] while they lived in Southern California.30

Similarly the 9/11 Commission failed to deal with the information on an FBI "hijacker timeline" that al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi were met at the airport on their first arrival in the United States by Omar al-Bayoumi, the transmitter of the Saudi funds, whom Graham claimed was obviously "a low-ranking Saudi intelligence agent."31 The FBI findings were leaked in an early story in Newsweek:

At the airport, they were swept up by a gregarious fellow Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, who had been living in the United States for several years. Al-Bayoumi drove the two men to San Diego, threw a welcoming party and arranged for the visitors to get an apartment next to his. He guaranteed the lease, and plunked down $1,550 in cash to cover the first two months' rent.32

One month later, "In January 2003, Graham and the other members of the committee were …the focus of a criminal investigation by the FBI into whether someone on the panel had leaked classified information."33

The 9/11 Commission avoided this sensitive area. It cited the FBI Chronology a total of 52 times in its footnotes, for example at 493n55, concerning al-Mihdar’s travel from Yemen to the Malaysian meeting. But it suppressed the FBI’s report that al-Bayoumi met al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi on their arrival; and it substituted what Shenon calls an "improbable tale" supplied by al-Bayoumi himself: namely, that he had run into the two men two weeks later by accident "at a halal food restaurant" near Los Angeles.34

It is clear that two members of the 9/11 Commission staff who redacted this part of the report – Dietrich Snell and Philip Zelikow – were concerned to tone down what junior staffers considered to be "explosive material" on the Saudis.35 Shenon tells how this section of the 9/11 report was rewritten by Snell and Zelikow, until the text "removed all of the most serious allegations against the Saudis."36

But Snell and Zelikow may have been protecting the CIA as well as the Saudis. We have already noted how Lawrence Wright, looking at the extraordinary CIA record on withholding information about al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi, concluded, "It is also possible, as some FBI investigators suspect, the CIA was running a joint venture with Saudi intelligence."37

Conclusion

It is clear, as everyone who has studied these matters closely and impartially concurs, that there have been cover-ups of the CIA’s relationships to first Oswald and later al-Mihdar – cover-ups which in both cases have not yet been adequately resolved.

A reasonable conclusion from the available evidence is that the cover-ups were in order to conceal prior CIA operational interest in the designated subjects, just as in the case of Ali Mohamed in the early 1990s. It could of course be a coincidence that people of operational interest to the CIA became designated subjects in the deep events of JFK and 9/11. Another, more disturbing possibility is that those responsible for these events knew of the CIA’s operational interest, and exploited it in such a way as to ensure that the government would be embarrassed into covering up what really happened on those days.

A lot of books about 9/11, including my own, have focused on the roles played by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld on that day. But it is clear that 9/11 involved a USG connection to at least one figure (Ali Mohamed) so sensitive that it had been covered up from the time of the Nosair murder in 1990 and the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. It is probable that Oswald’s covert USG connections also dated back to the time of his strange release from the U.S. Marine Corps in 1959, enabling him to travel to the Soviet Union.38

In short there is a substratum of covert operations underlying both events that antedates the presidencies in which they occurred. Thus one should not expect the cover-up of 9/11 in the G.W. Bush administration to dissipate simply because the Democrats take over the White House, just as the Johnson administration’s cover-up of the Kennedy assassination did not dissipate with the election of Richard Nixon.39

This is said not out of despair, but out of belief in the ultimate resilience and good sense of the American people. The analysis in this book is that America’s involvement in two disastrous wars – first Vietnam and later Iraq – was not an outcome of the people’s will, but rather in large part because of deep events that were used to manipulate that will. Thus this analysis is not an attack on America, but on that manipulative mindset that has twice succeeded in maneuvering America into war.

This dominant mindset is not restricted to intelligence agencies, though it is largely rooted there. Over time it has spread into other parts of government, and has also corrupted large sections of the media and even universities. That the mindset is widespread does not however make it either omnipotent or invincible.

It is important to identify the dominant mindset clearly, if we are ever going to displace it. It is important also to recognize that the dark topics discussed in this book are not representative of America as a whole. In the half century since the CIA’s first adventures in Burma and Laos, America has continued to be, as in the two centuries before it, a source of life-enhancing innovations, such as the computer and the internet.

As Amy Chua has written in her book Day of Empire,

If America can rediscover the path that has been the secret to its success since its founding and avoid the temptations of empire building, it could remain the world’s hyperpower in the decades to come – not a hyperpower of coercion and military force, but a hyperpower of opportunity, dynamism, and moral force.40

I have tried to suggest in this book that the key to this rediscovery is the

identification and displacement of the manipulative forces that have maneuvered America, almost unsuspectingly, into two unnecessary and disastrous wars.

If there is any merit to my analysis, then, to isolate those forces, we must press for the truth about both the Kennedy assassination and 9/11.

NOTES

1 Transcript of Dallas Police Channel Two, 12:44 PM; cf. Channel One 12:45 PM,

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/dpdtapes/; Warren Report 5, 17 Warren Commission Hearings 397, 23 Warren Commission Hearings 916.

2 Clarke, Against All Enemies, 13-14. The list of 19 names, accepted without question by the 9/11 Commission Report, was given by the FBI to the press on September 14, 2001 (Daily Telegraph, September 15, 2001,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/15/whunt15.xml).

3 Transcript of Dallas Police Channel Two, 12:44 PM; cf. Channel One 12:45 PM,

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/dpdtapes/; Warren Report 5, 17 Warren Commission Hearings 397.

4 E.g. Dallas FBI Report from John Fain, May 12, 1960, 17 Warren Commission Hearings 704, NARA #157-10006-10213 ("Height: 5’10" Weight: 165 lbs." [inaccurate description supplied by Marguerite Oswald]); CIA HQ Cable DIR 74830 to Mexico City, 10 Oct 1963, NARA #104-10015-10048, reproduced in John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995), 512 ("five feet ten inches, one hundred sixty five pounds").

5 Fingerprint card dated "11-25-63," 17 Warren Commission Hearings 308.

6 Warren Report 5, 144; Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact (Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2006), 10-13, 78n. After seeing Oswald twice on television, Brennan picked out Oswald in a second lineup (Warren Report, 143).

7 Daily Telegraph, September 23, 2001,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/23/widen23.xml.

Cf. Guardian, September 21 2001,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/21/afghanistan.september112 :" Abdulaziz

Al-Omari has also come forward to say he was not on the flight from Boston that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Centre. An electrical engineer who works in Saudi Arabia, Mr Al-Omari said he was a student in Denver during the mid-1990s, and that his passport and other papers were stolen in a burglary in the US five years ago. … `The name is my name and the birth date is the same as mine,’ he told Asharq al-Aswat, a London-based Arabic newspaper. `But I am not the one who bombed the World Trade Centre in New York.’"

8 Daily Telegraph, September 23, 2001,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/23/widen23.xml.

9 On October 4, 2001, the FBI issued a press release showing what appeared to be photos from surveillance videotape of two hijackers, Mohammed Atta and Abdulaziz Al-Omari, entering Portland Jetport on the morning of September 11, 2001 (FBI Press Release, October 4, 2001,

http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/100401picts.htm ). If valid, these would constitute evidence from the event itself. However the photos are anomalous, in that they show two time superimposed stamps, one showing 5:45, the other showing 5:53. The photos are not cited as evidence in the 9/11 Commission Report. On July 22, 2004, the date of the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, CNN aired what they said was surveillance videotape of two hijackers, Majed Moqed and Khalid al-Mihdar. entering "at one of the security screening points at Dulles International" (CNN, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0407/22/lad.04.html ). The authenticity of the videotape has been challenged, however, because it lacks the time and date and location identification normally burned into a surveillance video image (Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall, 9/11 Revealed: The Unanswered Questions [New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005], 117-19).

10 I have argued that the conflicting messages were part of a so-called "marked card" or "barium meal" test to determine if and where leaks of sensitive information were occurring. This was a familiar technique, and was the responsibility of the CI/SIG or Counterintelligence Special Intelligence Group which drafted the two cables. See Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II: The New Revelations in U.S. Government Files,1994-1999 (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2007), 17-18, 92; also Peter Dale Scott, "Oswald and the Hunt for Popov's Mole," The Fourth Decade, III, 3 (March 1996), 3;

www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=519798.

11 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33.

12 Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 196-98. See Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33.

13 Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 310.

14 9/11 Commission Report, 502n44.

15 Wright, The Looming Tower, 312, 313.

16 Lawrence Wright, "The Agent," New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68.

17 Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City: Andrews, McMeel, & Parker, 1987), 268.

18 James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 224.

19 Wright, The Looming Tower, 329. In his New Yorker story (p. 70), Wright wrote that "By withholding the picture of Khallad [bin Attash]…the C.I.A. may in effect have allowed the September 11th plot to proceed."

20 9/11 Commission Report, 271; Wright, The Looming Tower, 353-54.

21 David Atlee Phillips, Nightwatch, 139; quoted in Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 184. Morley observes that in the 1970s Phillips offered a total of "four not entirely consistent versions of the story of Oswald’s visit to Mexico City."

22 J. Cofer Black testimony before 9/11 Congressional Joint Inquiry, 107th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 24, 2003.

23 Dale Watson testimony before Joint Inquiry, 107th Cong., 2nd Sess., September 26, 2002.

24 Amy B. Zegart, Flying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007), 117.

25 Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why TheyDid It (New York: HarperCollins, 20050, 294n45; Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (New York: Twelve/Hachette, 2008), 141.

26 Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 7, 294.

27 9/11 Commission Report, 267.

28 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 81-86; Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 170-77.

29 Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 177.

30 Shenon, The Commission, 50-51.

31 Larisa Alexandrovna, "FBI documents contradict 9/11 Commission report," RawStory, February 28, 2008, http://rawstory.com/news/2008/FBI_documents_contradict_Sept._11_Commission_0228.html (met at the airport); Shenon, The Commission, 52 (al-Bayoumi). Al-Bayoumi "apparently did work for Dallah Avco, an aviation-services company with extensive contracts with the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation, headed by Prince Sultan, the father of the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar" ("The Saudi Money Trail," Newsweek, December 2, 2002, http://www.newsweek.com/id/66665).

32 "The Saudi Money Trail," Newsweek, December 2, 2002. The FBI "hijacker timeline" was released by the FBI on February 4, 2008. See Larisa Alexandrovna, "FBI documents contradict 9/11 Commission report, Rawstory.com, February 28, 2008,

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/FBI_documents_contradict_Sept._11_Commission_0228.html.

33 Shenon, The Commission, 54.

34 9/11 Commission Report, 217; Shenon, The Commission, 52-53.

35 Shenon, The Commission, 398.

36 Shenon, The Commission, 398.

37 Wright, The Looming Tower, 313. Looking at the same evidence, Christopher Ketcham has raised an alternative possibility, that "the CIA may have subcontracted to Mossad, given that the agency was both prohibited by law from conducting intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and lacked a pool of competent Arabic-fluent field officers. In such a scenario, the CIA would either have worked actively with the Israelis or quietly abetted an independent operation on U.S. soil…. When in the spring of 2002 the scenario of CIA's domestic subcontracting to foreign intelligence

was posed to the veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative, with whom I spoke extensively, the operative didn't reject it out of hand" (Christopher Ketcham, "Cheering Movers and Art Student Spies: What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?" CounterPunch, February 7, 2007,

http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=73&contentid=4253&page=2 ).

38 Oswald requested a dependency discharge from the Marines in August 1959, "on the ground that his mother needed his support" (Warren Report, 688). Accordingly Marine Lt. A.G. Ayers, Jr. signed a document for Oswald’s release to inactive duty on September 11, 1959 (19 WH 679, cf. 17 WH 762) "by reason of hardship (19 WH 678). However Lt. Ayers should have known that Oswald had no intention of staying in Texas to support his mother; he had already, on September 4, 1959, signed an affidavit in support of Oswald’s passport application "to attend the College of A. Schweitzer, Chur, Switzerland and the Univ of Turku, Turku, Finland" (22 WH 77-79). (It is a sign of some covert intrigue that the language of instruction at the University of Turku was Finnish, a language Oswald did not know.)

39 A significant symptom of this enduring substratum has been the Bush Administration’s protection of Samuel Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor. Berger pleaded guilty in April 2005 to having stolen 9/11 documents from the National Archives (Shenon, The Commission, 414). A condition of his plea bargain was to submit to a Justice Department polygraph test, to determine what documents had been stolen. Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a long-time critic of CIA operations in Afghanistan, revealed to the House in February 2008 that he had written to the Bush Justice Department, demanding that it administer the polygraph test, and that the Justice Department had rejected his demand (Congressional Record, February 26, 2008, House, pp. H1065-H1072). We have already seen that Berger when in office was receiving regular reports from the CIA about the presence of al-Mihdar and al-Hamzi at the Kuala Lumpur meeting (Zegart, Flying Blind, 117). It is possible that these were the reports he was stealing from the Archives, and that the Justice Department refusal to administer the polygraph test is part of a cover-up to protect the CIA’s relationship to the two Saudis.

40 Amy Chua, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance – and Why They Fall (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 342.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of the forthcoming The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, due in August 2008. This previously unpublished essay is the concluding section of the new book, which can be ordered from the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press by clicking here at http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/MFF_Store. His website is http://www.peterdalescott.net.

Peter Dale Scott is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Peter Dale Scott

source

Kpete's Journal Documenting the Atrocities
Posted by kpete in General Discussion
Fri Jul 04th 2008, 01:07 PM
Ray McGovern's Response to Obama's FISA Explanation
Submitted by davidswanson on Fri, 2008-07-04 09:29. Elections Spying
It's a Deal Breaker for This Intelligence Officer
Submitted by Ray McGovern on July 3, 2008 - 11:11pm.

Dear Senator Obama,

I speak from 30 years of experience in intelligence work. I don't know who actually briefed you on the eavesdropping legislation, but the bill is unnecessary for intelligence collection and POISON for our civil liberties not even to mention the unconscionable retroactive immunity provision.

You have made a big mistake, Senator, in indicating you intend to vote for it. There is still time to change your mind. That's what big people do.

Your penultimate paragraph seals it for me. What you are saying relies not on principleóand still less on respect for the law, or respect for our Constitutional rights.

What I hear you saying is an all too familiar refrain: "Tough s___, progressive voter. You know you've got nowhere else to go. You want McCain in there?"

A painful reminder that the Republicans have no corner on arrogance. You think you have us over a barrel. Well let me tell you something those suits from K Street haven't told you; you need our active support, and you are about to blow it.

Your "explanation" was unworthy of one who has sworn to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States (including the Fourth Amendment).

And your attitude is not that of a person I THOUGHT was differentóand would be genuinely for change I could believe in.

We live just a couple of miles from where George Mason is buried. (As you may remember, professor of the Constitution that you have been, Mason actually refused to approve the Constitutionóalthough he and fellow Virginian James Madison had pretty much drafted it BECAUSE IT LACKED THE BILL OF RIGHTS).

Well, the air is still this evening. Our windows are open and George Mason can be heard tossing and turning in his grave, loudly moaning. Yes, moaning.

I went over to his grave; between the moans he explained that he had just heard of your plan to play fast and loose with his beloved Bill of Rights. "Hard to enjoy the Fourth tomorrow with the Constitution being shredded Right and Left," he whispered.

Remember, Senator, what Emerson said about those unable to change their "little" minds. Beware the K Street hobgoblins!

Again: Dissing us by the "So-you-want-McCain?" riposte is unworthy. Not only is it clear that you are "mis-underestimating" us but, frankly, I find it insulting.

Please get back on track.

Respectfully,

Ray McGovern
US Army Infantry/Intelligence Officer: 1962-64
CIA Analyst, 1964-1990
Co-Founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/345...

source

De säger att Alzery och hans kamrat Ahmed Aghiza har blivit brutalt behandlade av de CIA-agenter som hämtade dem på Bromma flygplats, därför att de kroppsvisiterades, sattes i bojor och förseddes med huvor utan hål för ögonen i ett privat CIA-plan? JO kallar detta för ”inhuman och oacceptabel behandling”. Inhuman – Nej (SÄPO får betala 250 000 kr för CIA:s behandling av fångarna, och även om behandlingen hade varit inhuman så har han vänt sig till fel personer efter pengar, men han vet att den amerikanska staten aldrig skulle betala ut några pengar till honom eftersom ”rendition” är lagligt i USA)! Dumma svenskar! Oacceptabel – Kanske. Men det som borde ifrågasättas är inte hur avvisningen gick till, utan varför den blev till! Kanske skulle vi inte ha lämnat ut dem till CIA?! Fast de hade inte svenskt medborgarskap, så frågan om utlämningens berättigande är nog inte relevant.

Att egyptierna sedan blev torterade i Egypten skall inte svenska staten, eller ytterst de svenska skattebetalarna, ställas till svars för, det var ju inte Sverige som torterade dem eller ens överlämnade dem till egyptierna! Vi fick ju garantier att de inte skulle torteras av Egypten när CIA var klara med dem, lögnaktiga garantier skulle det visa sig, men ändå inte vårt fel!

Det är dags att vi knyter upp de band som vi förbundit oss med, att inte skicka brottslingar tillbaka till sina hemländer om de riskerar tortyr!

Med detta sagt så ska man komma ihåg att det kan ha varit fel att avvisa Alzery vid tidpunkten, då det sannolikt var oklart om han verkligen var en brottsling, åtminstone för Sveriges del. Men han borde inte kompenseras - för den behandling han har blivit utsatt för av CIA och den Egyptiska staten - av SÄPO och den svenska staten! Kanske kan det tänkas att han borde ha kompenserats för att det inte var fastställt om han var en brottsling innan han avvisades, men först måste efterföljandet av konventionen om avvisningsförbud för tortyrhotade ses över - om den aktuella personen är kriminell! Konventionen kan annars missbrukas, och har gjorts så i detta skolexempel i ren dumhet från svenska myndigheter. Båda männen har nu ansökt om uppehållstillstånd i Sverige, den ene trots att han är en dömd brottsling i Egypten. Det finns människor som arbetar för att han ska få komma till Sverige. Han befinner sig inte under hot utan lever fri, men under övervakning i sitt hemland, så skyddsbehovet kanske inte är aktuellt längre.

Roger Klang, Lund den 06/07/2008

Video 1

No sabemos si la entrevista es grabada con anterioridad o se forja días o meses antes previos a su difusión.

Personalmente creo que es una entrevista ya grabada pero en cuanquier caso este Blog, precisamente busca esa interactuación con sus lectores. Si hay alguien que disponga de información para poder esclarecer el tema que no dude en Postear o enviarnos un mail a de2008a2012@gmail.com. Mientras tanto os dejo con la entrevista que por otro lado no nos decubre nada nevo. Básicamente la promoción de sus obras literarias

Video 2

This is a follow up to yesterday’s article Stolen Nuclear Bomb Plans Sold On Black Market. Today, scientist, A.Q. Khan, denied reports coming out of Washington that stated he sold stolen nuclear warhead blueprints to factions in the Middle East.

A.Q. Khan

While I think he knows more than he is saying, one would be able to rule out all other culprits, save for the fact that high ranking U.S. government officials in Washington, also illegally sold nuclear bomb plans to parties in the Middle East, such as Turkey.

There were closed hearings in Congress regarding it with many credible newspapers lambasting FBI headquarters for trying to cover it up and not prosecuting the offenders. Not to mention, Robert Mueller's predecessor at the FBI, the now incarcerated, Robert Hansen, was spying for Russia for 20 years.

Sidebar: FBI headquarters is not good at covering things up. FBI headquarters is like the CIA’s idiot cousin that keeps dropping the ball when you throw it to him (hence 9/11 and 7/7 happening). That’s why the public always finds out the FBI’s business, sometimes, without even trying (*looking at the EFF and the ACLU*).

You know, like trying to look all official in putting out redacted documents when there is software on the market than can un-redact it. Stuff like that (LOL). Or the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, going into Congress asking for tools they already gave him.

Robert Mueller

It’s all quite sad, as the FBI has the potential to do a great amount of good in America, especially with some of the dedicated agents it has, but the corrupt agenda that trickles down from headquarters is constantly disgracing and humiliating the FBI as a whole...and the press is always there to capture it for posterity.

With proper leadership the agency could really kick butt, but with headquarters in chaos under Mueller’s poor stewardship, bad things are going to keep happening, for which excuses will continue to be made to Congress. The American people deserve more than that for the billions a year in their tax dollars given to the agency.

Pakistan's Khan denies selling advanced nuke blueprint

Jun 17 03:52 AM US/Eastern - Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan on Tuesday denied selling blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon to Iran or North Korea, telling AFP that Western countries were to blame…

"This is all a lie, there is no truth in this. It is total bulls**t," Khan told AFP by telephone from his Islamabad villa, where he has been kept under house arrest since confessing to proliferation activities in 2004.

"The Western countries are suppliers of the technology, they sold it, they are the proliferators.... Why don't they publish juicy stories about Israel. There is not a single word about Israel on the nuclear issue," he added.

http://www.breitbart.com

Boeing Scientist Charged with Mishandling Govt. Info

June 16, 2008 - A former Boeing scientist who specialized in anti-missile systems for aircrafts was charged in federal court today with the unlawful retention of national defense information. Abraham Lesnik will plead guilty to the charge, his lawyer Marc Harris told ABCNews.com.

Agents in the FBI's foreign intelligence unit opened a criminal investigation into Lesnik in 2006 after questions were raised as to whether or not classified information ended up in the hands of unauthorized individuals, including foreigners.

http://www.abcnews.go.com

http://www.judiciaryreport.com/scientist_aq_khan_denies_selling.htm

]]> http://invizweb.wordpress.com/?p=114 Sun, 06 Jul 2008 02:49:13 +0000 invizweb http://invizweb.wordpress.com/?p=114 Joby Warrick, staff writer for the Washington Post wrote:

A former CIA operative who says he tried to warn the agency about faulty intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs now contends that CIA officials also ignored evidence that Iran had suspended work on a nuclear bomb.

The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by the CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time.

The consensus view on Iran's nuclear program shifted dramatically last December with the release of a landmark intelligence report that concluded that Iran halted work on nuclear weapons design in 2003. The publication of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran undermined the CIA's rationale for censoring the former officer's lawsuit, said his attorney, Roy Krieger.

"On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all," Krieger said in an interview.

In court documents and in statements by his attorney, the former officer contends that his 22-year CIA career collapsed after he questioned CIA doctrine about the nuclear programs of Iraq and Iran. As a native of the Middle East and a fluent speaker of both Farsi and Arabic, he had been assigned undercover work in the Persian Gulf region, where he successfully recruited an informant with access to sensitive information about Iran's nuclear program, Krieger said.

Read more.

That was a video of Christopher Hitchens being tortured. Last year in an article in Slate magazine where he said in effect that waterboarding was not torture. Following on from this he was asked to undergo waterboarding to experience it and to then make a judgement about whether or not it is torture.

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning

-Hitchens
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808

Hitchens quickly changed his mind about waterboarding, no longer would it be a tool for extracting information from enemies in his arsenal he now rightly regards waterboarding as a torture contrary to the Geneva Conventions.

Torture is defined by the 1949 UN Convention against Torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person..." in order to get information.

The United States uses this method of torture or, what it calls in Orwellian doublespeak terms, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques against terror suspects. The US military is forbidden from using this method following from the scandal at Abu Ghraib however, President Bush exempted the CIA from the provisions of this ban because he felt it would take away "one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror".

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Fusion Centers: Implementing the Control Grid

Kurt Nimmo | July 5, 2008

In order to sell us on surrendering our rights, the government told us they would establish “fusion centers” around the country to collect intelligence on al-Qaeda and assorted other amorphous bad guys, an explanation that made sense to a lot of people after September 11, 2001. For some reason, though, the government did not get around to telling us that these so-called “fusion centers” are a creature of the Department of Defense and DARPA, an outgrowth of the supposedly discredited and “defunded” Total Information Awareness program, the brainchild of convicted Iran-Contra felon John Poindexter.

Back in 2002, writing for the New York Times, William Safire said Poindexter was “determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic ’stovepiping.’ And he has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans.” In other words, the TIA program would create computer dossiers on virtually every American — not just blue eyed, blond haired al-Qaeda Americans, mind you, but everybody without exception.

Due to a spate of bad publicity, the House and Senate moved to cut funding for the program by adding provisions to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2004. Two years later, in early 2006, Shane Harris, writing for the National Journal, revealed that TIA “was stopped in name only.” It lives on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget and “names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.”

Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA.

In other words, after a meddling and mostly clueless Congress stuck its nose in TIA, the program went undercover and now poses even more of a threat to the liberty of average Americans, not just al-Qaeda dimwits and patsies. TIA and the fusion center concept was just too good for the spooks to let go. An idea “that grabs so much government power at the expense of its citizens’ privacy always has a phoenix-like ability to resurrect itself, and so the fusion center initiative has been reborn under the Department of Homeland Security’s ‘Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative’ and been provided with $380 million in funding for 40 installations throughout the country,” writes the Ohm Project. “These fusion centers are usually located deep in the bowels of some state law enforcement agency… All forty coordinate and share data with each other, but no single agency, Congressional or otherwise, has oversight authority over them.”

However, the sales pitch is ongoing, never mind the lack of “oversight authority” or the Orwellian aspects of the government shuffling through credit, medical, and sundry other records of over 300 million Americans. As KLAS in Las Vegas reported earlier this week, while supposedly preventing terrorism “is the main mission of Metro’s Fusion Center,” it is also “proving successful in solving local crimes,” much to the approval of Nevada Congress critter Harry Reid. Las Vegas is not alone in this move away from investigating terrorism and concentrating of crime — Boston, Chicago, and other large cities are selling their fusion centers in the same way. In fact, Chicago’s fusion center dispenses entirely with the idea of terrorism — its fusion center is called the Crime Prevention Information Center. The Kentucky Intelligence Fusion Center promotes its operations as follows:

The principle role of the Intelligence Fusion Center is to compile, blend, analyze and disseminate criminal intelligence and other information (including, but not limited to, threat assessment, public safety, law enforcement, public health, social service and public works) and to support efforts to anticipate, identify, prevent and monitor criminal activity. The ultimate goal is to provide a mechanism where law enforcement, public safety and the private sector can come together with a common purpose to improve the ability to safeguard our homeland and prevent criminal activity.

Not specifically prevent al-Qaeda terrorism, mind you, but “prevent criminal activity.” In order to do this, you have to surrender any last shred of privacy, any quaint idea that you are protected by an increasingly moribund Constitution and Bill of Rights. “Fusion center technologies of all kinds vacuum up information from the real and digital worlds day and night,” explains the Government Security website. “In addition to microphones placed in crime-ridden hot spots, real world citizens send information to fusion centers by calling telephone tip lines or sending e-mail. Video cameras installed by local law enforcement, state departments of transportation and corporate security departments often provide visual data to fusion centers through memoranda of understanding (MOUs) and sometimes by request during emergencies.” In order to fight crime, fusion centers bring together the FBI, DHS, FEMA, CIA, and state and local law enforcement, all of them using a networked system developed by DARPA and the Pentagon.

“Intelligence centers run by states across the country have access to personal information about millions of Americans, including unlisted cellphone numbers, insurance claims, driver’s license photographs and credit reports,” the Washington Post reported in April. “The centers use law enforcement analysts and sophisticated computer systems to compile, or fuse, disparate tips and clues and pass along the refined information to other agencies. They are expected to play important roles in national information-sharing networks that link local, state and federal authorities and enable them to automatically sift their storehouses of records for patterns and clues…. The list of information resources was part of a survey conducted last year, officials familiar with the effort said. It shows that, like most police agencies, the fusion centers have subscriptions to private information-broker services that keep records about Americans’ locations, financial holdings, associates, relatives, firearms licenses and the like.” Additional records at the disposal of widely dispersed fusion centers include “wage and property records, corporate charters, utility records and a host of government files, including criminal justice information and traffic tickets.”

According to the government, all of this data is required to protect you from al-Qaeda… er, excuse me, protect you from pot dealers, shoplifters, prostitutes, drunk drivers and the like. More than half of all federal and state inmates were convicted on drug and “public-order” offenses in 2006. Naturally, they are a national security risk.

“The still rising prison population comes after a decade of declines in violent and property crime. According to the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Reports, violent crime declined 2.2% last year and has dropped a whopping 32% since 1995. Property crime rates have also declined, although not so dramatically, dropping 23% since 1985,” reports the Drug Reform Coordination Network. “Violent and property crime is down, but discretionary drug arrests continue to go through the roof.”

The bastard son of TIA, growing like a cancer in the bowels of the NSA, and the proliferation of fusion centers employing this technology have nothing to do with crime, even nonviolent and victimless crime — it has to do with implementing a total surveillance panopticon, a high-tech control grid.

The FBI is not particularly interested in drug crimes, or violent crime for that matter, but as numerous news stories reveal they are interested in infiltrating and disrupting political activist groups. Under the guise of fighting crime — and more and more, domestic crime is considered terrorism — the government has provided an excuse to roll out its intrusive technologies, cooked up by DARPA and the Pentagon, not so much to surveil Joe and Jane Taxpayer, but rather the troublemakers among us. And the troublemakers, of course, are those opposed to endless war and the imposition of a fascist corporate state. Joe and Jane are not a problem — that is so long as they pay their taxes, follow myriad state and federal laws, get their vaccinations, drink their fluoride, eat their GMO, and donate their kids to various perpetual war for perpetual military-industrial complex profit scams.

Cuban spies' ranks on rise in state

An American SPY-CATCHER says Cuba has rebuilt its network of spies in Florida to pre-Wasp Network levels -- or about 210 agents.

BY ALFONSO CHARDY
The Miami Herald

Cuba's communist government has rebuilt its network of spies in Florida to the levels that existed before the FBI rounded up more than a dozen members of the Cuban spy Wasp Network, according to a U.S. Army expert on Cuban intelligence.

Read Full Story on The Investigative Anti-Terrorism Unit of The Miami Herald.

Aldrig att konspirations-anhängarna ger sig, de har rent bibliska uppfattningar om sina teorier.
Månlandningen, prinsessan Diana och inte minst Olof Palme vimlade det av konspirationsteorier om, den ena mer paranoid än den andra.

En grupp konspirationsteoretiker hävdar att explosiva laddningar hade placerats ut för att avsiktligt rasera huset. Bland annat säkerhetstjänsten CIA hade kontor där, och kollapsen ska ha varit ett sätt att dölja deras inblandning i attackerna på tvillingtornen.
Vore det inte lättare att plocka bort bevisen på kontoret än att spränga det också? Tror man utredare är så korkade att de inte kan hitta spår efter bomber.

WTC

Skulle CIA med Bush administrationens goda minne kunna utföra detta och sedan inte bli avslöjade?
ALDRIG.... Bomber i de två tornen och även bomber i det tredje, ingen som märker hur korkat det är?
Bildspel

Trevor Paglen

Es un geógrafo que ha dedicado parte de su vida a espiar los satélites artificiales, sobre todo los que ha lanzado EE.UU para vigilar la Tierra. Ya ha descubierto 189 artefactos de vigilancia orbitando nuestro planeta y sus fotos se hayan expuestas en El otro cielo nocturno, una recopilación de imágenes recogidas durante dos años de trabajo.

Paglen tiene una obsesión recurrente: el lado oscuro del Gobierno de EEUU. Las actividades secretas de sus 16 agencias de seguridad, sus bases militares especiales o las prisiones fantasma de la CIA han llamado la atención de este geógrafo, artista social, escritor y fotógrafo. Todo lo que su Gobierno quiere hacer invisible, él intenta hacerlo visible a los ojos de los ciudadanos. La misión de Paglen es espiar a los espías.

La exposición actual (abierta al público hasta septiembre en el Museo de Arte de Berkeley) comienza con una instalación multimedia de una visión nocturna de la Tierra envuelta por pequeños puntos luminosos. Cada uno de esos luceros es un satélite espía. Los hay de reconocimiento, de la CIA, fotográficos de alta resolución, de la Marina de EEUU, de interceptación de comunicaciones, de la fuerza aérea estadounidense, para la guerra electrónica... Un total de 189 han sido detectados, aunque podrían ser más. La información sobre estos ingenios es material clasificado y, además de su nombre en código, poco más se sabe de ellos.

El trabajo de este geógrafo y fotógrafo juega con la lejanía de lo que fotografía. Ya sean imágenes de satélites, de bases secretas o aviones prisión de la CIA, el resultado son instantáneas borrosas, difuminadas, que buscan resaltar el oscurantismo de las actividades del Gobierno de EEUU.

Trevor Taglen realizó en el pasado exposiciones sobre códigos secretos o bases militares. También ha escrito dos libros que denuncian la deriva del gobierno de su país. Uno es Los taxis de la tortura, sobre los aviones de la CIA, que cuenta con imágenes tomadas por aficionados que vigilan a estos aparatos allá donde vayan. La otra obra, que se traduciría como Podría contártelo pero tendría que destruirte, se centra en los emblemas de algunas operaciones secretas del Pentágono.

Siga leyendo...

]]> http://infolution.wordpress.com/?p=2163 Sat, 05 Jul 2008 14:05:26 +0000 infolution http://infolution.wordpress.com/?p=2163 Kucinich presents Bush impeachment petition
Sign it! here

Chief Tries to Repair CIA as Scrutiny Grows

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 5, 2008; A01

Soon after accepting the post of CIA director two years ago, Michael V. Hayden set an unusual goal for his scandal-beset agency: virtual invisibility.

"CIA needs to get out of the news as source or subject," he said in an internal memo to his staff in 2006.

Two years later, that goal is far from met, as Hayden has tacitly acknowledged. In a retirement ceremony last month marking the end of his military career, the Air Force general stressed the need for the agency to "stay in the shadows" while ignoring what he called the "sometimes shrill and uninformed voices of criticism."

The comment reflected the difficulties that Hayden's CIA faces in trying to turn the corner on six years of controversy at the same time that it attempts sweeping internal changes. While the agency's leadership has sought a return to normal and has launched initiatives intended to improve ties with lawmakers and foreign allies, it finds itself in the cross hairs of a Congress determined to force a reckoning over the agency's past intelligence failures and its conduct in the fight against terrorism.

In recent weeks, both the House and the Senate have intensified their scrutiny of the CIA's treatment of detainees, with Senate investigators launching new inquiries into whether agency lawyers influenced the Defense Department's decision to use harsh interrogation techniques in the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Both Congress and the Justice Department are examining whether top CIA officers broke the law in ordering the destruction of videotapes that recorded the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects.

At the same time, lawmakers are attempting to set new limits on how the CIA deals with suspected terrorists in the future, and even who at the agency may interrogate them. One measure would ban the CIA from using contractors to question detainees, while another would require prompt notification of the International Committee of the Red Cross when a new prisoner enters CIA custody. A third would again seek to limit CIA interrogators to a shortlist of Army-approved tactics, a restriction approved last year by Congress but vetoed by President Bush.

The prospect for passage of the measures is unclear, but the attempts have set back relations between Democratic congressional leaders and Hayden, who has been battling proposals that he says would undermine the agency's ability to protect the country.

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Hayden acknowledged "changed circumstances" since the weeks immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and he noted that the intelligence agencies must operate within the limits set by a democratic society. "We exist in a political context," Hayden said. But he warned that the threat of continual change is making it harder for counterterrorism officers to do their jobs.

Continue Reading

See enough July 4th fireworks last night?

Good. Today it's back to the old waterworks:

L.A. Times: Key player in waterboarding policy 'smug' under questioning

Washington Post/Chicago Tribune: CIA advised Pentagon on interrogation; Waterboarding defended in 2002

AFP: Harsh interrogation methods stain US image, endanger soldiers: experts

CNN:  Military lawyers objected to harsh interrogation techniques

Wall Street Journal: Ex-Pentagon Lawyers Challenged on Torture

Top image: Mike Licht. Download it here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

The documentary "Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion" is the story of the history, the  culture and the religion of the  Tibetan people. It is the story of an oppressed nation fighting for its freedom, fighting for its existence.

A more concise and affecting summation of the Tibetan crisis would be hard to imagine.

The New York Times Review

Each revelation seems more disturbing than the next. But Chinese treatment of Tibetans is only half the heartbreak. The other is the amazing resilience of the Tibetans, who are overwhelmingly Buddhist.

Washington Post

There are several copies of this documentary online, as well as to be downloaded. Choose from the links below the version that suits you best.

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.623527&w=425&h=350&fv=docId%3D7340075074864535106%26playerMode26hl]

Another Google Video here. A YouTube version is also available: parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10.

Download the documentary here [1.45Gb] (best torrent). Other versions can be found for instance here. The full DVD version here [4.37Gb].

"Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion" @ IMDb

About Tibet @ Wikipedia

The official movie homepage

For more information about TIBET SUPPORT ORGANIZATIONS, TIBETAN CULTURE, CHINESE INFORMATION ABOUT TIBET, NEWS ABOUT TIBET, and others, click here.

Discussion forum about this movie here (@ Critical Docs Dialog Blog)

Para este fin de semana, me gustaría proponeros la visita al siguiente Blog, donde encontrareis varios documentales clasificados, comentados ... es un buen lugar para echar un hojo al tema que nos interese de una forma más amplia y amena desde diferentes puntos de vista:

http://documentalesalternativos.blogspot.com

He ido ojeando varios y me quedo con este breve corto. De forma visual y divulgativa toca uno de los temas más calientes y sensibles del momento, además me parece un buen complemento del anterior post. Gracias a internet y muchas de las libertades existentes en varios países, la información de este tipo puede circular. Esperemos que dure mucho, ya que creo que es nuestra única forma de sembrar un cambio, ya no digo revolución (deben ser los años que me hacen menos optimista). 

Küresel Emperyalizmin yeni düşmanları

Türkiye´yi bugünlerde çalkalayan, toplumu yine ikiye ayıran Ergenekon Soruşturmasını iyi analiz etmek gerekiyor. Yani devlet iktidarını kontrol altına almayı hedefleyen bu çete neyin nesidir?

Ergenekon yeni bir mesele değildir. Yıllardır Türkiye´de var olan, az sayıda insanın haberdar olduğu bir meseledir. Hatta önceleri Alparslan Türkeş ve Abdullah Çatlı´nın bile ismi geçtiği yapılanmayı anlamak için Soğuk Savaş zamanlarına geri dönmek gerekiyor.

1950li yıllarda NATO, CİA ve Mİ6 “Gladyo“ isminde bir gizli örgüt kurarlar ve yaklaşık 40 sene Yunanistan, Türkiye ve Batıavrupa ülkerinde faaliyetler gösterirler. Bu örgütün elemanları genellikle toplumu kışkırtmak için çeşitli faaliyetler düzenlerler ve etkili oldukları ülkede gerekirse rejimi çökertirler.

Soğuk Savaş zamanında Amerika Birleşik Devletleri (ABD) özellikle Avrupa Ülkelerinde ajanlar yerleştirme çabasına girer. Asker içinde gizli örgütler kurulur. ABD`nin amaçları doğrultusunda sivil toplum kuruluşları, thing-thang´ler kurulur. Bu şekilde Amerika, CİA ayağı ile tüm dünyada solculara karşı bir akım eğitmiştir. Kontrol ettikleri devletlerin Rusya ile bağlantılarını kesebilmek için gizli çeteler harıl harıl çalıştırılmıştır. Bu yapılanmalar Gladyo yapılanmalarıdır.

Soğuk Savaş sona erdikten sonra, Avrupa ülkerinin birçoğunda Gladyo yapılanmaları çökertilmiştir. ABD ise kendi gücünü muhafaza edebilmek için yeni düşmanlar „yaratmak“ zorunda kaldı. Nitekim hiç bir devlet düşmansız ayakta duramaz. Düşmansız bir devlet gücünü kaybetmeye mahkumdur. Yok olmamak için, halkı rejime bağlamak, daha doğrusu rejimden bağımlı hale getirebilmek için, onu korkutmak gerekir. Korkutmak için düşman birebirdir. ABD´de Rusya´nın ekonomik, siyasi ve askeri gücünün yıkılmasıyla beraber, en büyük düşmanını kaybetmiş bulunuyordu. Yeni bir düşman arayışına girmek zorundaydı. Bu arayış çabuk sonuçlandı: İslam.

İslamı tüm dünyaya öcü olarak göstermek için 90lı yıllarda düğmeye basıldı. CİA maaşlı Samuel Huntington zaten başlangıcı yapmıştı. Ardından bir çok karanlık „aydın“ işini başarıyla yerine getirdi. Bazı devletlerde özel olarak müslüman görünümlü „radikal dinci grupları“ kuruldu ve eğitildi. Bin Ladin ve ekibi dahi Soğuk Savaş´ta ABD´nin can yoldaşı değil miydi?

Türkiye hariç tüm müslüman ülker bu şekilde hem öcü haline getirildi, hemde sonunda ABD´nin kukla devletleri haline geldiler… yine Türkiye hariç…

Peki neden Türkiye hariç?

Memleketimizi çok sevdiklerinden mi?

Yoksa çayına, suyuna, simitine, çayırına bayıldıklarından mı?

Elbetteki değil. Gerçek neden, Türkiye´nin sosyo-kültürel şartları yukarıda belirtilen „oynamalara“ müsait olmadığı için. Bu nedenle Türkiye için özel bir proje hazırlandı: Gladyo Projesi. Eski bir CİA yetkilisinin CNN´de yaptığı bir açıklamaya göre, Soğuk Savaş döneminde Rusya´da Amerika´nın üç bin tane ajanı varmış. Sovyetler dağılınca bunların hepsi Türkiye´ye gönderilmiş.

İşte „Kenan Evren Darbesi“nden sonra tohumları atılan Ergenekon çetesi, Gladyo´dan başka birşey değildir. Ergenekon, Gladyo´nun Türkiye ayağıdır.

Başörtü, Türban, Şeriat, Kemalizm, İrtica, Laiklik, Kürtçülük ve Ilımlı İslam terimleriyle Türkiye´yi 20 senedir yıpratan Küresel Emperyalistler, önce Gladyo´yu Türkiye´ye yerleştirdirler ve eğittiler. Şimdide son darbeyi vurabilmek için, birileri kendi örgütlerini deşifre etmeye başladılar.

İki senedir Türkiye´nın altını üstüne getiren Gladyo yapılanmasının hasarına bir bakalım: Şemdili olayları, bayrak yakmalar, papaz cinayeti, danıştay cinayeti, misyonerlerin yayın evi baskını, imam cinayeti, Hrant Dink cinayeti, Cumhurbaşkanlığı seçimleri nedeniyle yaratılan kaos vs. vs.

Peki Ergenekon´un tam bu zamanda deşifre edilmesin gerekçeleri nedir? Bunu açıklamak şuan zor… çünkü ortada henüz yanıtlanmamış önemli sorular var:

1. Bu iş kimin işine yarıyor? Yani Mahir Kaynak vari sormak gerekir. Sebep-Sonuç ilişkisine bakmak gerekiyor. Kimin işine yaradığı henüz pek berrak görünmüyor, fakat kimlerin işine yaramadığı açık ve net ortada:

Öncelikle Tayyip Erdoğan´a hiç yaramıyor. Çünkü bu soruşturma üzerinden ilk başta Başbakan Erdoğan yıpratılıyor. Buda açıkca, bazı medya örgütlerinin belirttiği gibi, „AKP´nin hesaplaşması“ olmadığını ispatlıyor.

İkinci olarak Türk halkı yıpratılıyor. Yukarıda saydığım olaylardan dolayı zaten yıpranmış olan halk, Cumhurbaşkanlığı seçimi ve AKP davasıyla adeta ortadan yarıldı ve 80li yılların sağ-sol çatışmasında olduğu gibi, dindar-laik bölünmesi gerçekleştirilmek istenildi. Ergeneko