NightBlogger

Raw Story
Author Ron Suskind, whose new book charges that the Bush administration ordered the CIA to forge a letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence linking Iraq to al Qaeda, will now be releasing a transcript of the interview with one of his primary sources to defend himself against charges of inaccuracy. Suskind told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Friday, “I’ve never done this in 25 years as a journalist, but I’m posting transcripts of my conversations with Rob Richer.” More

Glenn L. Carle
I spent 23 years in the CIA. I drafted or was involved in many of the government’s most senior assessments of the threats facing our country. I have devoted years to understanding and combating the jihadist threat. We do not face a global jihadist “movement” but a series of disparate ethnic and religious conflicts involving Muslim populations, each of which remains fundamentally regional in nature and almost all of which long predate the existence of al-Qaeda.

Osama bin Laden and his disciples are small men and secondary threats whose shadows are made large by our fears. Al-Qaeda is the only global jihadist organization and is the only Islamic terrorist organization that targets the U.S. homeland. Al-Qaeda remains capable of striking here and is plotting from its redoubt in Waziristan, Pakistan. The organization, however, has only a handful of individuals capable of planning, organizing and leading a terrorist operation. Al-Qaeda threatens to use chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, but its capabilities are far inferior to its desires. Even the “loose nuke” threat, whose consequences would be horrific, has a very low probability. For the medium term, any attack is overwhelmingly likely to consist of creative uses of conventional explosives.

No other Islamic-based terrorist organization, from Mindanao to the Bekaa Valley to the Sahel, targets the U.S. homeland, is part of a “global jihadist movement” or has more than passing contact with al-Qaeda. These groups do and will, however, identify themselves with global jihadist rhetoric and may bandy the bogey-phrase of “al-Qaeda.” They are motivated by hostility toward the West and fear of the irresistible changes that education, trade, and economic and social development are causing in their cultures. These regional terrorist organizations may target U.S. interests or persons in the groups’ historic areas of interest and operations. None of these groups is likely to succeed in seizing power or in destabilizing the societies they attack, though they may succeed in killing numerous people through sporadic attacks such as the Madrid train bombings. More

George Washington’s Blog
Even experts at the U.S. bioweapons facility at Fort Detrick think that the anthrax which was used in the 2001 attacks came from their facility: “In an e-mail obtained by FOX News, scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues. “Then he said he had to look at a lot of samples that the FBI had prepared … to duplicate the letter material,” the e-mail reads. “Then the bombshell. He said that the best duplication of the material was the stuff made by [name redacted]. He said that it was almost exactly the same his knees got shaky and he sputtered, ‘But I told the General we didn’t make spore powder!’” Indeed, 3 of the 4 suspects the FBI is investigating are employees of Fort Detrick, which is run by the Army. More

US intervention in Latin America is rarely discussed among American intellectuals. Latin America is where—thanks to misguided men like Reagan—the so-called “War On Terror” began in the 1980’s. Latin Americans will tell you who the real terrorists are.

Compiled by Steve Kangas

1954

Guatemala - The CIA overthrows the democratically elected Jacob Arbenz in a military coup. Arbenz has threatened to nationalize the Rockefeller-owned United Fruit Company, in which CIA Director Allen Dulles also owns stock. Arbenz is replaced with a series of right-wing dictators whose bloodthirsty policies will kill over 100,000 Guatemalans in the next 40 years.

1959

Haiti - The U.S. military helps “Papa Doc” Duvalier become dictator of Haiti. He creates his own private police force, the “Tonton Macoutes,” who terrorize the population with machetes. They will kill over 100,000 during the Duvalier family reign. The U.S. does not protest their dismal human rights record.

1961

The Bay of Pigs - The CIA sends 1,500 Cuban exiles to invade Castro’s Cuba. But “Operation Mongoose” fails, due to poor planning, security and backing. The planners had imagined that the invasion will spark a popular uprising against Castro — which never happens. A promised American air strike also never occurs. This is the CIA’s first public setback, causing President Kennedy to fire CIA Director Allen Dulles.

1963

Dominican Republic - The CIA overthrows the democratically elected Juan Bosch in a military coup. The CIA installs a repressive, right-wing junta.

Ecuador - A CIA-backed military coup overthrows President Arosemana, whose independent (not socialist) policies have become unacceptable to Washington. A military junta assumes command, cancels the 1964 elections, and begins abusing human rights.

1964

Brazil - A CIA-backed military coup overthrows the democratically elected government of Joao Goulart. The junta that replaces it will, in the next two decades, become one of the most bloodthirsty in history. General Castelo Branco will create Latin America’s first death squads, or bands of secret police who hunt down “communists” for torture, interrogation and murder. Often these “communists” are no more than Branco’s political opponents. Later it is revealed that the CIA trains the death squads. More

Rebecca Sommer

This is a clip of my awareness-raising documentary “Hunted Like Animals” © 2007. Hunted Like Animals is an eye-opening documentary about an ongoing, but unknown, genocide — against the Hmong people in the jungles of Laos.

Coerced into joining the CIA’s anti-communist efforts during the Vietnam war, the Hmong people became a Secret Army. When the U.S. pulled out of Southeast Asia in 1975 and the Lao kingdom was overthrown by the communists, the Hmong became targets of retaliation and persecution.

Hundreds of thousands fled the country; others ran to remote mountainous regions of Laos. Over 30 years and two generations later, the Hmong in hiding are still mercilessly hunted, attacked, raped, tortured and killed by the military.

Since 2004, the crackdown has intensified and those who can escape seek refuge in Thailand. The traumatized refugees have not been promised protection or help. Instead, they are threatened with deportation back to Laos, the very place from which they barely escaped.

In this documentary, the refugees speak for thousands of voiceless people still trapped in the jungle, surrounded by Lao and Vietnamese soldiers — and hunted like animals. See Clip

SueAnn Arrigo is the source. She was a high-level CIA insider. Her title was Special Operations Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). She also established the Remote Viewing Defense protocols for the Pentagon in her capacity as Remote Viewing Advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). It earned her a two-star general rank in the military. She called it a “ploy” so the Pentagon could get more of her time and have her attend monthly Joint Chiefs of Staff meetings. Only high-level types are invited, and she was there from October 2003 to July 2004.

Part of her job involved intelligence gathering on Iraq and Afghanistan - until August 2004 when she refused to spread propaganda about a non-existant Iranian nuclear weapons program and left. She followed in the footsteps of others at CIA who resigned for reasons of conscience and became critics - most notably Ray McGovern, Ralph McGehee, and Phil Agee.

On May 16, 2008, Arrigo sent extensive government corruption and cover-up information to Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee - in 12 separate cases. This article covers four of them or about one-third of what Congress got. The 12 are explosive and revealing but just the tip of the iceberg: More

Rep. John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who heads the Judiciary Committee, says he has “invited” former presidential spokesman Scott McClellan to testify about “attempts to cover up the involvement of White House officials in the leak of the covert identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame.”

Here’s the letter Conyers sent to the author of What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. More

A German citizen has gone to court in an attempt to force his government to seek the extradition of 13 suspected CIA agents who allegedly kidnapped him. Khaled al-Masri says he was abducted in December 2003, flown to a US detention centre in Afghanistan and tortured. Mr Masri was released in May 2004 after his captors allegedly told him he had been mistaken for someone else.

He says he was kidnapped in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, in 2003, flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan, nicknamed the “salt pit” and tortured there. On his flight to Afghanistan, he says, he was stripped, beaten, shackled, made to wear nappies and drugged. Mr Masri says he was finally released in Albania five months later after the CIA realised they had got the wrong man. More

The Guardian
She had probably done this a dozen times before. Modern digital technology had made clandestine communications with overseas agents seem routine. Back in the cold war, contacting a secret agent in Moscow or Beijing was a dangerous, labour-intensive process that could take days or even weeks. But by 2004, it was possible to send high-speed, encrypted messages directly and instantaneously from CIA headquarters to agents in the field who were equipped with small, covert personal communications devices. So the officer at CIA headquarters assigned to handle communications with the agency’s spies in Iran probably didn’t think twice when she began her latest download. With a few simple commands, she sent a secret data flow to one of the Iranian agents in the CIA’s spy network. Just as she had done so many times before.

But this time, the ease and speed of the technology betrayed her. The CIA officer had made a disastrous mistake. She had sent information to one Iranian agent that exposed an entire spy network; the data could be used to identify virtually every spy the CIA had inside Iran. More

WASHINGTON - Pentagon officials in late 2001 and 2002 concealed from the CIA and other intelligence agencies potentially useful information gleaned from Iranian agents, said a Senate report released Thursday. The Iranians told Pentagon employees about a tunnel complex in Iran used to store weapons and move its personnel covertly out of the country, likely into Afghanistan in the post 9/11 war period, according to the report by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The Iranians also told of a long-standing relationship with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and the growth of anti-regime sentiment inside Iran, it said. The new report adds more details to the storied mistrust and lack of cooperation by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with the CIA in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States. More

BEN FELLER
Associated Press
President Bush broke his promise to the country by refusing to fire aide Karl Rove for leaking a CIA agent’s identity, said Scott McClellan, the president’s chief spokesman for almost three years.

“I think the president should have stood by his word and that meant Karl should have left,” McClellan said Sunday in a broadcast interview about his new tell-all book, a scathing rebuke of the White House under Bush’s leadership. McClellan now acknowledges he felt burned by Rove, Bush’s top political adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff. He said Rove and Libby assured him they were not involved in leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity, and he repeated those assurances to reporters.

In fact, Rove and Libby did help leak Plame’s identity, as confirmed in a later criminal investigation. Libby had resigned by then, but Rove remained in office and eventually stepped down on his terms in August 2007. More

The American Civil Liberties Union today obtained several heavily redacted documents concerning the CIA’s use of waterboarding as well as a CIA Office of Inspector General report on the CIA’s interrogation and detention program. The CIA turned over the documents in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the ACLU and other organizations seeking documents related to the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody overseas. Government lawyers informed the ACLU today that a federal judge has also “preliminarily overruled” claims by the CIA that other documents it continues to withhold are exempt from the FOIA.

“Even a cursory glance at these heavily-redacted documents shows that the CIA is still withholding a great deal of information that should be released,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. “This information is being withheld not for legitimate security reasons but rather to shield government officials who ought to be held accountable for their decisions to break the law.” More

rinf.com
A Milan judge ruled Wednesday that Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi and his predecessor Romano Prodi, can be called as witnesses in a trial on the alleged abduction of a terrorism suspect by agents of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Berlusconi who returned to office as premier last week was in power in 2003 when an Egyptian imam, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr - better known in Italy as Abu Omar - was allegedly snatched from a Milan street.

A total of 33 defendants - including 26 CIA agents as well as several top Italian intelligence officials - are accused of Omar’s kidnapping, with the complicity of Italy’s military intelligence agency SISMI. Read more

Photo Mike Licht

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. judge ordered the Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday to submit to the court a 2002 memo said to specify harsh interrogation methods used on suspected terrorists held abroad.

The American Civil Liberties Union said the memo was written by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and sent to the CIA in August 2002. The ACLU described the memo as “one of the most important torture documents still being withheld by the Bush administration.”

In a copy of the order posted on the ACLU’s Web site, Judge Alvin Hellerstein told the government to produce the memo so he can determine whether it should be made public as part of a lawsuit the ACLU and other organizations filed in June 2004 requesting records concerning the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody abroad. Read more

Photo Ford

“You may have heard about the Central Intelligence Agency. But, do you know what we really do and how we do it? The people of the CIA do very important work. They help keep our country safe. They give our leaders information so they can make good decisions. And they take pride in their important jobs. We have a lot of different jobs here. We have analysts, doctors, lawyers, scientists, geographers, and librarians, to name just a few. Look through our pages and you will learn all about us. If you read carefully, you can become a CIA expert. We also have some fun stories and games for you.” Read more