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Tag Archives: Intelligence

The Information War

The time has long since passed when governments can commit crimes in the dark, run secret wars, and have their passive and narcotized citizens go along with it, fund it, and salute when they’re told. The advance of technology has challenged the State’s information monopoly, and broken the power of the gatekeepers in the “mainstream” media: [...]

Flashback : Our Terrorists

From : New Internationalist, October 2009 • Issue 426 Islamic fundamentalist militants are the enemies of Israel and Western governments, right? Think again. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed reports. Once upon a time, the CIA trained, financed and supported Osama bin Laden and his mujahidin networks in Afghanistan to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After the end of [...]

Karl Rove Invites Obama Administration to Re-litigate the Past

Remember these facts: Bush was briefed on September 18, 2002 by the CIA and was told at that time Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. That briefing directly contradicted the National Intelligence Estimate Congress relied upon during the debate about the Iraq War. Colin Powell also relied upon the National Intelligence Estimate to [...]

Ex-Navy agent: Israel ambassador clueless on Jonathan Pollard

Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard was wholly controlled by top intelligence officials in Tel Aviv, not part of a “rogue” operation, says the U.S. Navy counterintelligence agent who took his confession. Israeli ambassador Michael Oren caused a bit of a stir Monday when he told a Washington radio station that Pollard, a naval intelligence analyst who [...]

Kucinich: White House Assassination Policy Is Extrajudicial

There has been almost universal silence among Congressional Democrats on the Obama administration’s recently revealed decision to authorize the assassination of a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki, who now lives in Yemen, has been accused of providing inspiration for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the alleged “underwear bomber,” and Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged Fort Hood [...]

NSA on the Flash-Media Hunt

Shh, the National Security Agency has developed a software tool that detects thumb drives or other flash media connected to a network, and any federal agency can get a copy free — no box tops or coupons required. The NSA provided a brief tantalizing description of its USBDetect 3.0 Computer Network Defense Tool in the [...]

Ex Bush Official Willing to Testify Bush, Cheney Knew Gitmo Prisoners Innocent

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once declared that individuals captured by the US military in the aftermath of 9/11 and shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay prison facility represented the “worst of the worst.” “If you think of the people down there, these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield,” Rumsfeld [...]

What wasn’t discussed at last week’s Intel seminar in Washington

By Daniel Saracen, Deputy chief, Best Defense intelligence bureau When intelligence bigwigs get together to publicly discuss the espionage racket, it often is what is not said that is significant. Some of the intel community’s leading lights graced a conference hosted Tuesday by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. Throughout many hours of discussion of intelligence [...]

CIA’s top spy: No losses from waterboarding ban

Michael Sulick, head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, told a student audience last week that the spy agency has seen no fall-off in intelligence since waterboarding was banned by the Obama administration. “I don’t think we’ve suffered at all from an intelligence standpoint,” Sulick told students and some faculty members at Fordham University, his [...]

Inside WikiLeaks’ Leak Factory

WikiLeaks’ commitment to what might be called extreme transparency also means that it won’t turn away documents that have questionable news value or are just plain dishy. It’s posted Sarah Palin’s hacked emails and Wesley Snipes’ tax returns, as well as fraternity initiation manuals and a trove of secret Scientology manuals. According to WikiLeaks’ credo, [...]

Israeli journalist under house arrest

Sources have confirmed that an Israeli journalist has been under secret house arrest for months, Ma’an News Agency reports. Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet has banned media from mentioning the case.  The reporter, Anat Kam 23, worked for Israeli news site Walla! until being arrested in December on espionage and treason charges, her colleagues say. [...]

Justice IG hits FBI’s Sentinel

The Justice Department’s inspector general is worried about the rising costs and delays of the FBI’s projected nearly half billion dollar project to modernize its case management system. The IG’s concerns about the progress of the Sentinel project – now estimated to cost more than $450 million and to be completed in 2011 – follow a recent [...]

Mike McConnell, the WashPost and the dangers of sleazy corporatism

It’s vital to understand how this really works:  it isn’t that people like Mike McConnell move from public office to the private sector and back again.  That implies more separation than really exists.  At this point, it’s more accurate to view the U.S. Government and these huge industry interests as one gigantic, amalgamated, inseparable entity — [...]

Greenwald: The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters

Over the past several years, WikiLeaks — which aptly calls itself “the intelligence agency of the people” — has obtained and then published a wide array of secret, incriminating documents (similar to this CIA Report) that expose the activities of numerous governments and corporations.  Among many others, they posted the Standard Operating Manual for Guantanamo, documents showing how corrupt [...]

Federal judge again denies ACLU request for torture documents

A federal judge in New York City on Wednesday denied for the second time the American Civil Liberties Union’s request for access to CIA documents about interrogation techniques, the Associated Press reported. The ACLU has waged a three-year battle for the release of nearly 600 different documents from the CIA that describe the use of enhanced interrogation [...]

Law Enforcement Appliance Subverts SSL

That little lock on your browser window indicating you are communicating securely with your bank or e-mail account may not always mean what you think its means. Normally when a user visits a secure website, such as Bank of America, Gmail, PayPal or eBay, the browser examines the website’s certificate to verify its authenticity. At [...]

New FBI Files Alleging AIPAC Theft of Government Property and Israeli Espionage Released

Declassified files detailing an FBI investigation targeting the American Israel Public Affairs Committee are now available on the Internet. AIPAC was investigated after it acquired and circulated classified government information provided in strict confidence by US industry and worker groups opposed to AIPAC sponsored economic legislation. The 50 pages now available as portable document files [...]

WikiLeaks Promises to Reveal Pentagon Murder-Cover-up: US Government Feels Threatened

Controversy is not something new for WikiLeaks – a website notorious for leaking sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents. In the past, they have leaked Guantánamo Bay procedures, documents belonging to the Church of Scientology, contents of Sarah Palin’s e-mail account and internet censorship lists. Obviously, over the years WikiLeaks has managed to anger [...]

Top Secret Warfare and the Law

There are now three armies in America: the regular volunteer force, the secret volunteer force — the folks at the Joint Special Operations Command — and the paramilitaries and contractors used by the CIA.  Three armies, a welter of conflicting laws, domains and territories. The scariest part of the Ellen Nakashima’s story on Friday on how [...]

Dismantling of Saudi-CIA Web site illustrates need for clearer cyberwar policies

“We knew we were going to be forced to shut this thing down,” recalled one former civilian official, describing tense internal discussions in which military commanders argued that the site was putting Americans at risk. “CIA resented that,” the former official said. Elite U.S. military computer specialists, over the objections of the CIA, mounted a [...]

Newly Released FBI Documents Support Explosive Claims by Former FBI Translator Sibel Edmonds

Recently released FBI documents prove the existence of highly sensitive National Security and criminal investigations of “Turkish Activities” in Chicago prior to September 11, 2001. These documents add further support to many of the allegations that former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has claimed, in public and in Congress, since 2002. The documents were released under [...]

US military created private spy and murder squad in Afghanistan

The Times report, written by Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti, has the character of a controlled release of information for the purpose of containing the damage to US covert operations in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater. It is not only the US military and intelligence agencies that are being protected, but the Times itself. According to the [...]

FBI Goes Undercover On Social Networks

The Federal Bureau of Investigations may use fake identities on social networks to investigate criminal activities, according to a redacted FBI document (.pdf) acquired by digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation. Specifically, the 33-page confidential presentation says undercover operations are helpful for communicating with suspects and targets of crime, gaining access to private information, and [...]

In Heated Testimony, Holder Says Bin Laden Won’t Be “Captured Alive”

The Obama administration does not expect to capture Osama Bin Laden alive. Attorney General Eric Holder told a House appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday that the possibility of catching the Al Qaeda leader alive is “infinitesimal.” “Based on the intelligence I’ve reviewed, the possibility simply does not exist,” Mr. Holder said in response to heated questioning [...]

U.S. Army worried about Wikileaks in secret report

A leaked U.S. Army intelligence report, classified as secret, says the Wikileaks Web site poses a significant “operational security and information security” threat to military operations. Classified U.S. military information appearing on Wikileaks could “influence operations against the U.S. Army by a variety of domestic and foreign actors,” says the report (.pdf), prepared in 2008 [...]