Posts tagged CIA
Obama’s Syria Policy Looks a Lot Like Bush’s Iraq Policy
0Source: http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org
Written by Ron Paul
Obama’s Syria Policy Looks a Lot Like Bush’s Iraq Policy
President Obama announced late last week that the US intelligence community had just determined that the Syrian government had used poison gas on a small scale, killing some 100 people in a civil conflict that has claimed an estimated 100,000 lives. Because of this use of gas, the president claimed, Syria had crossed his “red line” and the US must begin to arm the rebels fighting to overthrow the Syrian government.
Setting aside the question of why 100 killed by gas is somehow more important than 99,900 killed by other means, the fact is his above explanation is full of holes. The Washington Post reported last week that the decision to overtly arm the Syrian rebels was made “weeks ago” – in other words, it was made at a time when the intelligence community did not believe “with high confidence” that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons.
Further, this plan to transfer weapons to the Syrian rebels had become policy much earlier than that, as the Washington Post reported that the CIA had expanded over the past year its secret bases in Jordan to prepare for the transfer of weapons to the rebels in Syria.
The process was identical to the massive deception campaign that led us into the Iraq war. Remember the famous quote from the leaked “Downing Street Memo,” where representatives of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s administration discussed Washington’s push for war on Iraq?
Here the head of British intelligence was reporting back to his government after a trip to Washington in the summer of 2002:
“Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
That is exactly what the Obama Administration is doing with Syria: fixing the intelligence and facts around the already determined policy. And Congress just goes along, just as they did the last time.
We found out shortly after the Iraq war started that the facts and intelligence being fixed around the policy were nothing but lies put forth by the neo-con warmongers and the paid informants, like the infamous and admitted liar known as “Curveball.” But we seem to have learned nothing from being fooled before.
So Obama now plans to send even more weapons to the Syrian rebels even though his administration is aware that the main rebel factions have pledged their loyalty to al-Qaeda. Does anyone else see the irony? After 12 years of the “war on terror” and the struggle against al-Qaeda, the US decided to provide weapons to the allies of al-Qaeda. Does anyone really think this is a good idea?
The Obama administration promises us that this is to be a very limited operation, providing small arms only, with no plans for a no-fly zone or American boots on the ground. That sounds an awful lot like how Vietnam started. Just a few advisors. When these few small arms do not achieve the pre-determined US policy of regime change in Syria what is the administration going to do? Admit failure and pull the troops out, or escalate? History suggests the answer and it now appears to be repeating itself once again.
The president has opened a can of worms that will destroy his presidency and possibly destroy this country. Another multi-billion dollar war has begun.
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Ron Paul photo added to the original post.
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International Law? A Corbett Report Exposé on The Rational Lie of International Criminal Law
0Source: http://xrepublic.tv
Truth. Justice. Accountability. The idea of an international rule of law appeals to our innate sense of justice, but the most horrific plans are often cloaked in the most beautiful lies. Just as the ideals of international law are used to cloak the imperial ambitions of the globalists, so too is the idea of seeking justice in these controlled courtrooms a phoney pipe dream. Join us today on The Corbett Report as we explore the only real solution to this problem: removing the bodyguard of lies from the power elite and to withdrawing ourselves from the systems that seek to legitimize their rule.
Ex-Italian Intel Chief Sentenced for CIA Kidnapping
0Source: https://www.commondreams.org
Italy’s former top intelligence official has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in the CIA’s kidnapping of an Islamic cleric.The official, Nicolo Pollari, was convicted in the fallout over the abduction of Abu Omar from the streets of Milan in 2003. Omar was taken to U.S. bases in Italy and Germany before being sent to Egypt, where he suffered torture during a four-year imprisonment. Pollari will not have to serve jail time until his efforts for appeal are exhausted. His sentencing comes days after an Italian court gave the CIA’s former station chief a seven-year term in absentia. Twenty-five other Americans have also been convicted in the case, though the United States has rejected their extradition.
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Photo credit: www.commondreams.org
Protesters Evicted From Brennan CIA Confirmation Hearings
0Posted by NextNewsNetwork
Headline news covering topics regarding the CIA confirmation hearing of Brennan, drone actions, the lose of Canadian citizenship and much more.
New FAA drone list reveals over 20 more public entities authorized to fly drones over United States
0Source: http://endthelie.com
By Madison Ruppert
Editor of End the Lie
The new Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) drone authorization list obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit reveals more than 20 additional public entities allowed to fly drones over the United States.
This news comes as Charlottesville, Virginia passes a resolution banning drones, the entire state of Virginia might pass a drone moratorium, a Justice Department white paper was leaked outlining the supposed legal justification for the drone assassination program, the Obama administration is reportedly going to release legal memos to intelligence committees and the location of a CIA drone base in Saudi Arabia was revealed after two large media outlets withheld it at the government’s request.
This brings the total to 81 public entities authorized by the FAA to fly drones as of October 2012, according to the list obtained by the EFF. Keep in mind, documents obtained by the EFF reveal that drones are already flying over the United States.
Furthermore, we now know the military is operating drones domestically and sharing data with law enforcement, at least one National Guard unit uses drones, the Department of Homeland Security has embraced small spy drones and colleges and universities are offering more drone piloting programs to keep up with this drone boom.
End the Lie contacted the EFF’s media liaison by phone, confirming that this list is not merely applicants but indeed entities that have been authorized to fly drones over America.
Some of the newly approved agencies include the State Department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and several sheriff’s departments including Canyon County Sheriff’s Office (Idaho), Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office (Northwest Oregon), Grand Forks Sheriff’s Department (North Dakota) and King County Sheriff’s Office (covering Seattle, Washington).
Another interesting new addition highlighted by the EFF is the Barona Band of Mission Indians Risk Management Office (near San Diego, California).
Interestingly, Ohio had several new entities approved, including the Medina County Sheriff’s Office, Ohio Department of Transportation, Sinclair Community College and Lorain County Community College.
This is noteworthy because Ohio is home to a university engaged in cutting edge drone research and has pro-drone legislators.
The concerns raised by this new list are legion. One of the most significant concerns is the privacy and civil liberties implications of domestic drone use, especially given the advances in drone technology.
Among the most worrisome advances are: the capability of potentially constant surveillance thanks to solar power and laser-based charging methods, drone-based facial recognition technology, automated tracking systems, a drone-based camera capable of capturing 36 square miles of imagery at once, ultra-stealthy drones and even fully automated weapons systems.
The EFF also points out, “Even the smallest drones can carry a host of surveillance equipment, from video cameras and thermal imaging to GPS tracking and cellphone eavesdropping tools. They can also be equipped with advanced forms of radar detection, license plate cameras, and facial recognition.”
The EFF hopes that the release of the new list will “spur more people to ask their local law enforcement agencies about their drone programs.”
Thanks to a partnership with MuckRock, it’s even easier to request this information from your local agencies.
The EFF is encouraging people to “ask hard questions of government officials about who is funding drone development in their communities and what policies the government will demand agencies follow if they fly drones.”
“We need greater transparency and citizen push-back to protect Americans from privacy-invasive domestic drone use,” the EFF concludes.
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About Madison Ruppert
Madison Ruppert is a Los Angeles-based independent journalist and researcher as well as the founder, owner, administrator and editor of EndtheLie.com. He has no affiliations with any government agencies, political parties, non-governmental organizations, or economic schools. He is available for freelance writing assignments and appearances or interviews in any format. He can be reached by emailing Admin@EndtheLie.com
Neil Macdonald: U.S. media complicit in Obama’s drone doctrine
0Source: http://www.cbc.ca
By Neil Macdonald, CBC News
Posted: Feb 6, 2013
Some say U.S. president is waging a ‘war on whistleblowers’

Neil Macdonald
Senior Washington Correspondent
In 2001, when Israel started killing militant Palestinian enemies (and, often, innocent bystanders) with missiles fired from helicopters hovering so high you could barely see them, foreign reporters were urged by the Israeli government to call the practice “targeted killing.”
Most of us, including many of my American colleagues, preferred the term “extrajudicial assassination.” We felt we were in the news business, not the euphemism business.
Today, 12 years later, the Washington Post carries a front-page headline about the U.S. drone program titled, “Targeted killings face new scrutiny.”
Yet another government document has been leaked, this time a so-called “white paper” in which the U.S. Department of Justice lays out the administration’s justification for killing American citizens it suspects of belonging to Al-Qaeda.
U.S. media outlets, it seems, are perfectly comfortable with the term “targeted killing,” now that it is a major tool for the Pentagon and CIA.
It’s also clear American media outlets are comfortable suppressing news the government does not want published. Today’s story reveals not just that the Americans have operated a secret drone base for years in Saudi Arabia, but that the Post, along with various other news organizations, have been keeping that fact to themselves at the government’s request.
History of suppressing sensitive information
It isn’t the first time such information has been suppressed. In 2005, bowing to the White House, the New York Times for months kept confidential the fact that the Bush administration had been carrying out warrantless wiretapping. The revelations eventually provoked Congress to pass a new law.
Reports on the U.S. drone program, also based on leaks, have described how Barack Obama’s administration has become ever more dependent on remote-controlled killing. Obama himself reportedly signs off personally on each target.

U.S. President Barack Obama, who once denounced George W. Bush-era security measures, has not just amplified Bush’s programs, but has begun hunting down and prosecuting officials who leak details. (Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)
The American public has been largely unconcerned with the program, except when the person killed has been an American citizen. (The U.S., unlike many other countries, accords its citizens special protections from government intrusions.)
That is the focus of the latest leak. The “white paper” in today’s story appears under the arid title “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qaeda or an Associated Force.”
The term “senior operational leader” appears to be key. An American citizen who is a low-level fighter would appear to enjoy a legal immunity that does not extend to foreign nationals suspected of planning or involvement in attacks on Americans.
As the Post story rather dryly notes, “The number of attacks on Americans is minuscule compared with the broader toll of the drone campaign, which has killed more than 3,000 militants and civilians in hundreds of strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.”
There is an accompanying article today on the astonishing fact that 54 countries, including Canada, have participated in or enabled the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program of sending suspected militants to be interrogated, sometimes under torture, in secret prisons and by totalitarian regimes worldwide.
Twelve years ago, reporters had a different term for that sort of thing, too: kidnapping.
Obama’s ‘war on whistleblowers’
All these hardened security measures were begun under the Bush administration. President Obama, who once denounced them and even, as president, ordered Bush legal memos be made public, has not just amplified Bush’s programs, but has begun vigorously hunting down and prosecuting officials who leak details.
And that is one initiative the American media is not so comfortable with.
Some are calling it Obama’s “war on whistleblowers.” Current Attorney-General Eric Holder has prosecuted more officials for leaking information to reporters than any of his predecessors since the Second World War.
The government has hunted down intelligence officials who leaked details of expensive programs to spy on internet traffic, wiretaps placed in the Israeli embassy in Washington and of Obama’s personal involvement in selecting drone targets.
The lawyer for one of those officials said Holder’s prosecutors “don’t distinguish between bad people – people who spy for other governments, people who sell secrets for money – and people who are accused of having conversations and discussions.”
Several news outlets have noted, rather acidly, that the administration seems fairly expert at leaking classified material that makes the government look good.
None of this makes Obama different from any previous president. It just demonstrates his ability to keep the nation’s media on board, and mete out punishment when they publish the wrong sorts of secrets.
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Republished with permission
Secret CIA drone base in Saudi Arabia revealed
0Source: www.CBC.ca
By The Associated Press
Location of base first disclosed by New York Times Tuesday night

The construction of the drone base was reported in June 2011 but withheld the exact location at the request of senior administration officials (Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press)
The CIA conducts lethal drone strikes against al-Qaeda militants inside Yemen from a remote base in Saudi Arabia, including the strike that killed the U.S.-born al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki.
The location of the base was first disclosed by The New York Times online Tuesday night.
The Associated Press first reported the construction of the base in June 2011 but withheld the exact location at the request of senior administration officials. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because portions of the military and CIA missions in Yemen are classified.
Any operation by U.S. military or intelligence officials inside Saudi Arabia is politically and religiously sensitive. Al-Qaeda and other militant groups have used the Gulf kingdom’s close working relationship with U.S. counterterrorism officials to stir internal dissent against the Saudi regime.
© The Canadian Press, 2013
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Republished with permission
All data stored on cloud computing services can be accessed by US government without a warrant
0Source: http://endthelie.com
By Madison Ruppert
Editor of End the Lie

(Image credit: Sam Johnston/Wikimedia Commons)
According to reports, all personal information stored on major cloud computing services can be spied on by US agencies without users’ knowledge or even a search warrant.
This is all reportedly being done under the recently reauthorized Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and has led British Members of Parliament to call on the British government to not only end the use of cloud computing but also stop sharing intelligence services with the U.S, according to the Independent.
It’s worth pointing out that the US government has admitted breaching the Fourth Amendment under FISA while maintaining an absurd level of secrecy around the Act. Given the massive expansion of the Pentagon’s cyberwarfare forces and the exponential rise in surveillance overall, people around the world have a quite legitimate reason to be concerned.
As New Zealand’s IOL points out, under FISA “all documents uploaded on to cloud systems based in the US or falling under Washington’s jurisdiction can be accessed and analyzed without a warrant by American security agencies.”
Apparently, US agencies have been able to access private data stored on the cloud since 2008 while no one had any clue it was going on.
“What this legislation means is that the US has been able to mine any foreign data in US Clouds since 2008, and nobody noticed,” said Caspar Bowden, chief privacy adviser to Microsoft Europe for nine years until 2011.
According to IOL, US agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA), the FBI and the CIA can all access information that potentially concerns American foreign policy for reasons which are purely political.
There is apparently no need for suspicion that national security issues are at stake which would mean that religious organizations, political campaigns and even journalists could have their data monitored by the US government.
Bowden, now working as an independent advocate for privacy rights, co-authored a report for the European Parliament which warns of the threat posed by FISA.
In the report, Bowden also criticized the UK Information Commissioner’s Office for giving the control over to the US government.
Perhaps even more concerning for the British, four of the suppliers of the UK Government’s G-Cloud system are indeed located in the US and thus under American control thanks to FISA, raising “questions over the security of information is being stored overseas,” as the Independent puts it.
“The Americans have got to remember who their allies are and who their enemies are,” said Tory MP David Davis.
“There are people like us who they rely on to provide them with listening stations, like Menwith Hill for example,” Davis said, referring to a Royal Air Force base which aids the US intelligence community by intercepting communications.
“Do they really want Parliament to start asking Government to limit what Menwith Hill can do? There are all sorts of possibilities if they carry on with this,” Davis said.
Davis further warned that there is “a whole cascade of constitutional and privacy concerns for ordinary British people.”
However, the UK government seems totally onboard as the entity responsible for policing the UK’s data protection laws “effectively ruled that companies were right to pass information over to foreign government requests as the disclosure was made ‘in accordance with a legal requirement,’ such as FISA,” according to IOL.
“Every time we make a bridge of trust, or commit an indiscretion, using a social network or webmail, think how a foreign country could use that information for its own purposes to influence policy and politics,” Bowden said. “Drafts of documents prepared online, who is in contact with each other, all of this can be captured and analyzed using data-mining algorithms much more advanced than those offered by public search engines.”
Bowden said in his report that the threat of “heavy-caliber mass-surveillance fire-power aimed at the cloud” is actually more significant than the threat posed by cybercrime.
“What’s different about this is that it’s a power in the US authorities to insist on real-time collection of information by any data processer within US jurisdiction,” said Gordon Nardell QC, a British barrister specializing in data protection.
“The US authorities basically grab everything that is going in and out,” Nardell said.
Dutch Member of European Parliament Sophie in’t Veld, vice chair of the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee urged the European authorities to act swiftly.
“Let’s turn this around and imagine this is not the United States having unlimited access to our data but the government of Mr. Putin or the Chinese government – would we still wonder if it’s an urgent issue? Nobody would ask that question,” she said.
“I have a particular concern about UK government data,” said Liberal Democrat MP Julian Huppert. “If the Government starts to do more work on a cloud system – which is being looked at for obvious reasons – have we had assurance that the US government would not access such data as foreign intelligence information, and whether there would there have to be unambiguous consent of UK citizens?”
“If the US will not give a clear assurance about government data then we will have to stop using the Cloud, as we cannot allow that to happen,” Huppert said.
“A lot of people wouldn’t realize where data is stored, and hence wouldn’t expect to be subject to US law,” Huppert continued. “The Government has a specific responsibility for personal data, and sensitive data can be stored offshore.”
“There is a very sensible increase in the government use of cloud computing, there are excellent reasons for cloud services, however there are concerns around security and this highlights one of them,” Huppert said, according to the Independent.
“US surveillance ambitions know no bounds,” said Isabella Sankey, director of Policy for Liberty.
Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield
0Dirty Wars: Jeremy Scahill & Rick Rowley’s New Film Exposes Hidden Truths of Covert U.S. Warfare (1/2)
Published on Jan 22, 2013 by democracynow
DemocracyNow.org – Premiering this week at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the new documentary, “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield,” follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill to Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen as he chases down the hidden truths behind America’s expanding covert wars.




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