Tag Archives: CIA

How the CIA Enriches Warlords, Drug Dealers and the Taliban in Afghanistan

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This article from the New York Times further solidifies the notion that we clearly have no idea what we are doing anywhere, whether it relates to the domestic economy or foreign policy. While the American citizenry remains unemployed and increasingly on food stamps, we are paying tens of millions of dollars to Afghan warlords and drug dealers so that they can build their “dream homes.”  My favorite line is: “the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.”   Makes sense.  We are simply exporting our domestic economic model abroad.  From the New York Times:

KABUL, Afghanistan — For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”

Kind of like Corzine at MF Global!

Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.

Payments ordinarily range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, the officials said, though none could provide exact figures. The money is used to cover a slew of off-the-books expenses, like paying off lawmakers or underwriting delicate diplomatic trips or informal negotiations.

It is not clear that the United States is getting what it pays for. Mr. Karzai’s willingness to defy the United States — and the Iranians, for that matter — on an array of issues seems to have only grown as the cash has piled up. Instead of securing his good graces, the payments may well illustrate the opposite: Mr. Karzai is seemingly unable to be bought.

But the C.I.A. has continued to pay, believing it needs Mr. Karzai’s ear to run its clandestine war against Al Qaeda and its allies, according to American and Afghan officials.

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McClatchy Study: Obama Administration Has No Idea Who They are Killing with Drones

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McClatchy has released a very important study that demonstrates that not only is the Obama Administration being intentionally secretive about their entire drone program, but in reality they have no idea who they are killing or how many.  In many cases those killed are just classified as an “unknown extremist,” aka civilian.  We already know how insane the drone program is from many sources, including the confessions of drone operator Brandon Bryant, who quit after realizing his superiors told him the child he had incinerated was just a “dog.”  From McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified “other” militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan’s rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show.

The administration has said that strikes by the CIA’s missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against “specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces” involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting “imminent” violent attacks on Americans.

“It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative,” President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.” 

Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn’t adhere to those standards.

The intelligence reports list killings of alleged Afghan insurgents whose organization wasn’t on the U.S. list of terrorist groups at the time of the 9/11 strikes; of suspected members of a Pakistani extremist group that didn’t exist at the time of 9/11; and of unidentified individuals described as “other militants” and “foreign fighters.”

Micah Zenko, an expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, a bipartisan foreign policy think tank, who closely follows the target killing program, said McClatchy’s findings indicate that the administration is “misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.”

You don’t say.

The documents also show that drone operators weren’t always certain who they were killing despite the administration’s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA’s targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been “exceedingly rare.”

McClatchy’s review is the first independent evaluation of internal U.S. intelligence accounting of drone attacks since the Bush administration launched America’s secret aerial warfare on Oct. 7, 2001, the day a missile-carrying Predator took off for Afghanistan from an airfield in Pakistan on the first operational flight of an armed U.S. drone.

At least 265 of up to 482 people who the U.S. intelligence reports estimated the CIA killed during a 12-month period ending in September 2011 were not senior al Qaida leaders but instead were “assessed” as Afghan, Pakistani and unknown extremists.  Drones killed only six top al Qaida leaders in those months, according to news media accounts.

“Unknown extremists,” just another euphemism for civilian.

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Bruce Schneier: “The Internet is a Surveillance State”

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Last week, I wrote an article on “encryption” that highlighted Kim Dotcom’s effort to create an encrypted email service and Bitcoin’s successful foray into the creation of a decentralized crypto-currency.  Some of the feedback I received from several tech savvy people I know is that the spying is so pervasive there’s really no chance at true anonymity at the moment no matter what we do.  A few days later, this article by legendary American cryptographer and computer security specialist, Bruce Schneier came out.  Here’s what he had to say:

Increasingly, what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data about us. Unmasking Broadwell’s identity involved correlating her Internet activity with her hotel stays. Everything we do now involves computers, and computers produce data as a natural by-product. Everything is now being saved and correlated, and many big-data companies make money by building up intimate profiles of our lives from a variety of sources.

This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it’s efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.

This isn’t something the free market can fix. We consumers have no choice in the matter. All the major companies that provide us with Internet services are interested in tracking us. Visit a website and it will almost certainly know who you are; there are lots of ways to betracked without cookies. Cellphone companies routinely undo the web’s privacy protection. One experiment at Carnegie Mellon took real-time videos of students on campus and was able to identify one-third of them by comparing their photos with publicly available tagged Facebook photos.

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“It’s National Security”…Government Transparency Hits Record Low in 2012 Under Obama

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Surprise, surprise…the “most transparent administration ever” is, well, the least transparent.  Not that any of you are shocked by this revelation, but a new report by the Associated Press demonstrates just how secret our government and intelligence agencies have become.  Not only did they claim “national security” over and over like a bunch of drunk parrots, they also claimed the need to protect “internal deliberations.”  Specifically, the number of times the government withheld or censored reports in 2012 was 479,000 times, up 22% from 2011.  The CIA denied 60% of requests, up from 49% in 2011.  From the Associated Press:

The AP examined more than 5,600 data elements measuring the administration’s performance on government transparency since Obama’s election.

When the government withheld or censored records, it cited exceptions built into the law to avoid turning over materials more than 479,000 times, a roughly 22 percent increase over the previous year.

In a year of intense public interest over deadly U.S. drones, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, terror threats and more, the government cited national security to withhold information at least 5,223 times — a jump over 4,243 such cases in 2011 and 3,805 cases in Obama’s first year in office. The secretive CIA last year became even more secretive: Nearly 60 percent of 3,586 requests for files were withheld or censored for that reason last year, compared with 49 percent a year earlier.

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Rand Paul Filibuster Shockwaves Continue…Now the Democrats are at War

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Dear Mr. President:

In response to partial release of the Department of Justice memos describing the underlying legal justifications for the targeted killings of American citizens and others in the course of counterterrorism operations, we are writing to emphasize Congress’ vital oversight role in these matters.  Every American has the right to know the underlying legal rationale that ensures due process.

Authorizing the killing of American citizens and others has profound implications for our Constitution, the core values of our nation, our national security and future international practice.  The executive branch’s claim of authority to deprive citizens of life, and to do so without explaining the legal basis for doing so, set a dangerous precedent and is a model of behavior the United States would not want other nations to emulate.

Therefore, we ask that you release, in an unclassified form, the full legal basis of executive branch claims in the areas which are the subject of this letter.  The Executive’s claims of authority need to be fully articulated to the whole of Congress and the American people.

- Excerpts from a letter by eight Democrat Representatives to Obama on March 11, 2013

Last Thursday, I took the time to write a lengthy article on the historic Rand Paul talking filibuster because I had a strong sense of its significance.  It was exactly the sort of event we needed as a nation to blow a hole right through the false “left-right” paradigm used by mainstream Democrats and Republicans to trick the public into thinking there is a difference between the two parties on the major issues.  The whole point of the article was that Rand had successfully united libertarian and progressive activists, and also sparked a long overdue civil war within the Republican party.  By forcing John McCain and Lindsey Graham to come out in defense of Obama’s assassinated killing program the day after dining with Obama (while Rand stood on his feet for 13 hours), he brilliantly exposed them for the dinosaur fraud RINOs that they are.

Well now the shockwaves have hit the Democratic Party, as eight members of the House of Representatives have sent Obama a letter demanding he release the details of his assassination program.  The biggest problem for the Obama Administration is that four of them are black, which essentially neutralizes his favorite defense, which is to just say that anyone that disagrees with him must be a racist.  Interesting times have finally come to American politics, and it’s long overdue.

Great job Representatives:  Barbara Lee, John Conyers, Keith Ellison, Raul Grijalva, Donna Edwards, Mike Honda, Rush Holt and James McGovern

In Liberty,
Mike

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Cornel West: Obama is a “War Criminal”

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It’s refreshing to know that at least some public figures still have the critical thinking capabilities and courage to speak the truth.  From Raw Story:

“I think, my dear brother, the chickens are coming home to roost,” West told Smiley. “We’ve been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It’s been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.”

“I think we have to be very honest, let us not be deceived: Nixon, Bush, Obama, they’re war criminals,” West said. “They have killed innocent people in the name of the struggle for freedom, but they’re suspending the law, very much like Wall Street criminals. The law is suspended for them, but the law applies for the rest of us. You and I, brother Tavis, if we kill an innocent person we go to jail, and we’re going to be in there forever.” 

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The United States of Drones

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The following article from the UK’s Telegraph is a perfect follow up to the fantastic piece by Glenn Greenwald about how much pleasure Obama gets from murdering people with a joystick from halfway across the world using drones that I posted on Tuesday.  This expansion of drone usage is extraordinarily disturbing, not only from a moral point of view in that you are desensitizing killing in such a way that it become like a video game, but also from the karmic point of view in that what comes around goes around.  Let’s not forget 30,000 drones are planned to enter U.S. airspace by 2020 (thanks Congress, you can’t pass a budget, but when it comes to spying on and potentially murdering your own people there’s no hold up).  Do you really think these will stay unarmed?

Key quotes:
President Obama has reportedly allowed his CIA chief to deepen the connection between Special Forces and secret intelligence, a potentially unconstitutional move because it can mean that military operations are no longer answerable to Congress. More important still, the CIA also seems to mastermind and direct the drone strikes which have suddenly become the central element of US (and therefore British) military strategy.

Second, US soldiers and airmen are not placed in harm’s way. This is very important in a democracy. In America, the killing of a dozen military personnel is a political event. The death of a dozen Afghan or Pakistani villagers in a remote part of what used to be called the north‑west frontier does not register, unless a US military spokesmen labels them “militants”, in which case it becomes a victory.

We need a serious public debate on drones. They are still in their infancy, but have already changed the nature of warfare. The new technology points the way, within just a few decades, to a battlefield where soldiers never die or even risk their lives, and only alleged enemies of the state, their family members, and civilians die in combat – a world straight out of the mouse’s tale in Alice in Wonderland: “ ’I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury’, said cunning old Fury. ‘I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.’ ” Justice as dealt out by drones cannot be reconciled with the rule of law which we say we wish to defend.

The article also points out that more than two thirds of Pakistanis now consider the United States an enemy.  I suppose they must be getting increasingly jealous of our freedoms.  My message…We the People of the United States don’t like our government much either.

Full article here.

CIA Whistle Blower, Robert D Steele, Reveals The Truth About Government

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This is an extremely powerful 10 minute clip that I suggest everyone take the time to watch.  What I find so remarkable about it is the fact that this speech was given over two years ago and I am just seeing it today for the first time.  It demonstrates that there are many, many brave people speaking out, but the mainstream media just has a total blackout on these sorts of folks in what must be at this point a deliberate strategy to keep most Americans stupid, ignorant debt slaves.  What I really found interesting, particularly given my recent launch of this blog, is the emphasis he put on such activities as being key to turning this whole thing around.  The concept of “citizen journalists” being extremely important, which certainly appears to be taking off.  His description of the Bilderberg group as “nobodies who wanna be somebodies combined with somebodies on their way down” is just classic.  This guy is good…