Douglas Lucas - Mar 17, 2013

In 1980, a 25-year old graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin wrote a master’s thesis called “Human rights, a case study of Egypt.” In it, he argued that the aim of achieving and maintaining political stability justifies human rights violations by apprehensive governments— including crackdowns on unbridled journalists:

Since the press can play such an influential role in determining the perceptions of the masses, I am in favor of some degree of government censorship. Inflamatory [sic] articles can provoke mass opposition and possible violence.

Why should we care what a 25-year old grad student wrote over 30 years ago? Because that student grew up to be John Brennan—recently appointed director of the CIA. And because the theory he outlined in his master’s thesis seems to have shaped his attitude toward the exercise of power since then.

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The War On Democracy’ (2007) was John Pilger’s first for cinema. It explores the current and past relationship of Washington with Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile.

Using archive footage sourced by Michael Moore’s archivist Carl Deal, the film shows how serial US intervention, overt and covert, has toppled a series of legitimate governments in the Latin American region since the 1950s. The democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, for example, was ousted by a US backed coup in 1973 and replaced by the military dictatorship of General Pinochet. Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador have all been invaded by the United States.

John Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who took part in secret campaigns against democratic countries in the region. He investigates the School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia, where Pinochet’s torture squads were trained along with tyrants and death squad leaders in Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil and Argentina.

March 6, 2013 - Daniel Hopsicker

The upcoming trial in Houston of Rudi Dekkers for drug trafficking has been pushed back and may now never happen, according to a lawyer close to the case.

“The case has been continued, and a plea agreement is in the works,” said the attorney, who asked for anonymity. “The case will never go to trial. That’s all I can say.”

The Asst U.S. Attorney declined comment, as did a representative from Floyd Carlson Choate, the prominent Houston law firm recently retained by Dekkers. In a brief phone conversation in which he declined comment, partner Chistopher Choate confirmed he is from the old New England family whose name adorns prestigious Connecticut boarding school Choate.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, it was Rudi Dekkers’ running account of the character and personality of Mohamed Atta and the other terrorists which transfixed a nation and the world. He was everywhere on television.

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Julie Lévesque - February 28, 2013

“One of the most pervasive trends in 21st century western culture has become somewhat of an obsession in America. It’s called “Hollywood history”, where the corporate studio machines in Los Angeles spend hundreds of millions of dollars in order to craft and precisely tailor historical events to suit the prevailing political paradigm.” (Patrick Henningsen, Hollywood History: CIA Sponsored “Zero Dark Thirty”, Oscar for “Best Propaganda Picture”)

Black Hawk Dawn, Zero Dark Thirty and Argo, those are only a few major recent productions showing how today’s movie industry promotes US foreign policy. But the motion picture has been used for propaganda since the beginning of the 20th century and Hollywood’s cooperation with the Department of Defense, the CIA and other government agencies is no modern trend.

With Michelle Obama awarding Ben Affleck’s Argo the Oscar for best movie, the industry showed how close it is to Washington. According to Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, Argo is a propaganda film concealing the ugly truth about the Iranian hostage crisis and designed to prepare the American public for an upcoming confrontation with Iran.

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sosadmin - 02/22/2013

So-called "human terrain systems" have an interesting history. Reportedly developed by the FBI to study the Black Panthers during the notorious COINTELPRO era, the military institutionalized the practice of deploying ethnography in the service of projecting power in its overseas war operations. The strategy has come home to roost once more, in a sort of boomerang illustrative of the ebbs and flows of US history. These FBI tactics of social coercion and control in the radical 1960s were allegedly purged during the reformist 1970s. Then the 9/11 attacks "changed everything," and once again not only the US military but also domestic law enforcement were implementing cultural anthropology towards the end of deciphering and controlling Muslim (and other) populations from New York to Kabul. The military and CIA appear to be determined to perfect the art.

While it might seem like a stretch at first glance, programs that integrate the CIA and the military into the academy have quite a bit to do with domestic surveillance. After all, apart from the direct descendants of human terrain mapping in the domestic space (e.g. entities like the NYPD and FBI’s racial mapping projects), a decade of war has made clear that war powers, tools, strategies and tactics have a way of coming home to roost. We know, also, that the boundaries between foreign and domestic are blurring in a wide variety of other spheres, including in the realm of information gathering and sharing programs. As I've written about extensively on this website, information sharing programs are increasingly connecting DHS, the Department of State, the FBI and the Department of Defense — and probably also "other government agencies.

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Kennedy heir’s questions draw attention to TrineDay Publications and books by those who have long questioned the lone gunman theory in the JFK assassination

(PRWEB) February 06, 2013

When the son of the late Robert F. Kennedy announced before a live audience recently that his father did not believe in the lone gunman theory regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, nor respect the Warren Commission report on the subsequent investigation, renewed consumer interest was directed to a small publishing company based in Oregon called Trineday.

Founded by Kris Millegan, the 50-plus book house specializes in well-researched publications that challenge the mainstream press. Chief among Trineday’s best sellers are books by former FBI agents and other witnesses to the JFK events, who insist that the true story about the assassination has yet to be told.

All of the titles conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone, or in some cases, challenge whether he was the shooter at all.

The latest of these publications is Trineday’s Bond of Secrecy, wherein the son of CIA Spy and Watergate Conspirator E. Howard Hunt details his father’s deathbed confession about the plot to kill JFK.

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February 2013 - Open Society Justice Initiative

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency embarked on a highly classified program of secret detention and extraordinary rendition of terrorist suspects. The program was designed to place detainee interrogations beyond the reach of law. Suspected terrorists were seized and secretly flown across national borders to be interrogated by foreign governments that used torture, or by the CIA itself in clandestine “black sites” using torture techniques.

Globalizing Torture is the most comprehensive account yet assembled of the human rights abuses associated with CIA secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations. It details for the first time what was done to the 136 known victims, and lists the 54 foreign governments that participated in these operations. It shows that responsibility for the abuses lies not only with the United States but with dozens of foreign governments that were complicit.

More than 10 years after the 2001 attacks, Globalizing Torture makes it unequivocally clear that the time has come for the United States and its partners to definitively repudiate these illegal practices and secure accountability for the associated human rights abuses.

PDF REPORT

Via optics.org:

SiOnyx is far from the only photonics company to have received strategic backing from the CIA, which also invests in communications technologies. Other photonics companies in its portfolio include:

• Advanced Photonix: developing terahertz imaging technologies

• Alfalight: a specialist in manufacturing high-power laser diode and systems

• Genia Photonics: ultrafast fiber lasers suitable for chemical detection

• InView Technology Corp: infrared and hyperspectral imaging

• LensVector: “solid-state optics” to replace moving parts in autofocus cameras

• OpGen: optical mapping for whole genome analysis

• Semprius: concentrated photovoltaics via micro-transfer printing

• SpectraFluidics: surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) to trace airborne chemicals

• Walleye Technologies: microwave imaging to “see through walls”

A chilling documentary on U.S. policy in Central America, this three volume series, which took six years to make, was researched and filmed by Allan Francovich, best known for his award winning film about the CIA, On Company Business.

An astonishing range of characters tell their stories, from soon-to-be-assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero to Salvadoran right wing leader Robert D’Aubuisson; from three then-Presidents of the three republics to Guatemala’s impoverished indigenous peoples; from ousted American Ambassador Robert White, CIA operatives, and National Security officials to the founder of El Salvador’s secret police, who speaks directly of the rape and murder of four American missionary women there, from the top death squad officials to remorseful triggermen whose gruesome accounts of kidnapping, torture and killing lend compelling moral urgency to the case against right-wing dogma.

“The issue is really whether the U.S. government instigated, trained and has direct knowledge regarding a whole series of murders - including American citizens plus hundreds of thousands of local people - and has covered it up. What people know about the world is controlled. These issues are crucial to democracy: without information you can’t expect the population to make decisions knowingly.” - Allan Francovich

“An eye-opening documentary about the Central American wars … the film’s most frightening sequences are bloodless interviews with right-wing vigilantes - self-possessed men of power who suavely deny their responsibility for crimes attributed to them by human rights organizations … a formidable work of investigative cinema.” - San Francisco Examiner

“Not to be destined a favorite in the White House screening room.” - The Washington Post

Guatemala

El Salvador

Nicaragua

Walter Hickey - Aug. 11, 2012

It’s no secret the Central Intelligence Agency has an investment firm that funds startups that could have a big impact for the Agency.

If there is a company out there doing intelligence research, it’s likely that In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s personal investor, either looked them up or made a check out to them.

It’s all to ensure that the Agency remains on the forefront of tech. Not long ago, In-Q-Tel invested heavily in a company called Keyhole. Never heard of them? Maybe you know their work, a little project eventually known as Google Earth.

So, want to know what’s next for technology? Keep an eye on these 25 companies.

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Antifascist Calling - Sept. 3, 2012

In a story which should have made front page headlines, Narco News investigative journalist Bill Conroy revealed that “A high-ranking Sinaloa narco-trafficking organization member’s claim that US officials have struck a deal with the leadership of the Mexican ‘cartel’ appears to be corroborated in large part by the statements of a Mexican diplomat in email correspondence made public recently by the nonprofit media group WikiLeaks.”

A series of some five million emails, The Global Intelligence Files, were obtained by the secret-spilling organization as a result of last year’s hack by Anonymous of the Texas-based “global intelligence” firm Stratfor.

Bad tradecraft aside, the Stratfor dump offer readers insight into a shadowy world where information is sold to the highest bidder through a “a global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards. Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world.”

One of those informants was a Mexican intelligence officer with the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional, or CISEN, Mexico’s equivalent to the CIA. Dubbed “MX1″ by Stratfor, he operates under diplomatic cover at the Mexican consulate in Phoenix, Arizona after a similar posting at the consulate in El Paso, Texas.

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DAVID SIROTA - MONDAY, JUN 4, 2012

By definition, firsthand accounts of the inner workings of the Central Intelligence Agency are uncommon — and such accounts of the agency’s clandestine service are even more rare. That’s why Ambassador Henry Crumpton’s new book, “The Art of Intelligence,” is so important: It gives the public a rare glimpse of the myriad gray areas that now exist at the friction points of statecraft — in particular the gray areas between war and peace, vigilance and aggression, general awareness and outright spying.

Crumpton joined the CIA’s clandestine service in 1981, spending much of the next quarter-century abroad. During the lead-up to and aftermath of 9/11, Crumpton was the deputy chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, participating in the rise of drone warfare and leading the agency’s Afghanistan campaign right after the attacks. He later headed the agency’s domestic clandestine service, ultimately serving as an ambassador-at-large as the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism.

With the publication of his book, Crumpton has made headlines with his assertion that there are now more spies operating on American soil than ever operated during the Cold War. He recently joined me in studio in Denver on my radio show to discuss President Obama’s “kill list”; what went wrong before and after 9/11 in Afghanistan; how America’s national security apparatus targets suspects; and whether it’s fair to worry that the changing definition of warfare is undermining age-old democratic ideals.

The following is an edited transcript of our discussion. You can listen to the whole conversation by clicking here.

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Robert Parry - October 30, 2011

In another blow to the crumbling cover-up surrounding Ronald Reagan’s secret dealings with Iran during the 1980 presidential campaign, a key “journalist” who “debunked” the October Surprise allegations in the early 1990s has now been identified by a recent study as a member of a right-wing “misinformation” network.

Entitled “Fear, Inc.,” the 129-page report by the Center for American Progress lists Steven Emerson as one of five “scholars” who act as “misinformation experts” to “generate the false facts and materials” that are then exploited by politicians and pundits to frighten Americans about the supposed threat posed by Muslims.

The report offers a rare glimpse into the right-wing propaganda network that has exploited America’s post-9/11 hysteria and transformed those fears into a powerful political movement to get millions of Christians and Jews to support legislation and policies that target Muslims and their communities.

But the historical significance of noting Emerson’s role in this “Islamophobia network” is that he is revealed to be a propagandist willing to distort information for ideological ends, not the serious journalist that he successfully posed as during the 1980s and 1990s.

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Nick Turse - October 16, 2011

They increasingly dot the planet. There’s a facility outside Las Vegas where “pilots” work in climate-controlled trailers, another at a dusty camp in Africa formerly used by the French Foreign Legion, a third at a big air base in Afghanistan where Air Force personnel sit in front of multiple computer screens, and a fourth that almost no one talks about at an air base in the United Arab Emirates.

And that leaves at least 56 more such facilities to mention in an expanding American empire of unmanned drone bases being set up worldwide. Despite frequent news reports on the drone assassination campaign launched in support of America’s ever-widening undeclared wars and a spate of stories on drone bases in Africa and the Middle East, most of these facilities have remained unnoted, uncounted, and remarkably anonymous — until now.

Run by the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and their proxies, these bases — some little more than desolate airstrips, others sophisticated command and control centers filled with computer screens and high-tech electronic equipment — are the backbone of a new American robotic way of war. They are also the latest development in a long-evolving saga of American power projection abroad — in this case, remote-controlled strikes anywhere on the planet with a minimal foreign “footprint” and little accountability.

Using military documents, press accounts and other open source information, an in-depth analysis by AlterNet has identified at least 60 bases integral to U.S. military and CIA drone operations. There may, however, be more, since a cloak of secrecy about drone warfare leaves the full size and scope of these bases distinctly in the shadows.

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Skilluminati - Sep 25, 2011

“Deception is a state of mind–and the mind of the state.” - James Jesus Angleton

As the CIA’s own website has the cunning arrogance to tell me: “…observers of the intelligence scene find James Angleton endlessly fascinating.” Too true. Personally, though, what interests me the most is that with a small mountain of information available, none of it is believable. The man himself simply isn’t there.

Vanished in a turn of phrase. Angleton is all fiction, these days. From Hollywood bastardization to the weird channeled communications with Michael Ledeen, ARTIFICE remains an inscrutable wall of impeccable forgeries. Largely, this is thanks to the CIA’s enviable position as the primary author of it’s own history.

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