CIA rendition: US court throws out torture case, citing state secrets
Appeals court judges sound apologetic tone in ruling; plaintiffs say they were tortured overseas in ‘extraordinary rendition' program.
Under the state secrets doctrine, courts have generally granted deference to executive branch claims that certain litigation may involve highly sensitive US government information which, if disclosed, would cause significant damage to national security.
. . . . . .
In a dissent joined by four other judges, Judge Michael Hawkins said the court was wrong to dismiss the entire lawsuit at such an early stage. He said the case should be remanded to a federal judge to determine to what extent actual evidence in the case might raise a threat of disclosing state secrets.
Hawkins acknowledged that the state secrets doctrine is an established precedent. But he said the privilege need not be so broadly enforced.
“The doctrine is so dangerous as a means of hiding governmental misbehavior under the guise of national security, and so violative of common rights of due process, that courts should confine its application to the narrowest circumstances that still protect the government’s essential secrets,” he wrote.
The majority concluded its opinion with a quasi apology to the plaintiffs. “Our holding today is not intended to foreclose – or to prejudge – possible nonjudicial relief, should it be warranted for any of the plaintiffs,” Judge Fisher said.
Renewed instability in global food markets requires urgent response, UN expert said
An independent United Nations human rights expert today called on governments and the international community to promptly tackle the renewed instability of global food markets, noting the related social unrest that has hit some countries in recent weeks.
Dedicated to educating a network of intelligence professionals who Think and Live Leadership.
“Leadership and learning are indispensible to each other. ”
John F. Kennedy to the Dallas Citizen's Council, 22 Nov. 1963
This website is a labor of professional love for retired Senior Executive Service (SES) Bill Manthorpe, also Captain, USN (Ret). Once serving as Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence he followed this with over a decade of teaching at Johns Hopkins University and as an Adjunct Professor at the Joint Military Intelligence College.
This site is being added to the roster of Righteous Sites.
This detailed geo-statistical analysis entitled “The Fog of War: The Geography of the WikiLeaks Afghanistan War Logs 2004-2009″ has been published, not much more than a month after Wikileaks made available to the world six years of Afghanistan records and reports. The study was honestly, scientifically, and nimbly completed and published at no direct cost to the intelligence community. It was made possible by the decentralization, fluidity, and constant sharing and shifting of roles and responsibilities that comprise the Internet. As I read through this lucid analysis, I recalled the recently published Washington Post project, Top Secret America. Both the Post and the researchers in “Fog of War” tried to be careful not to step on government toes, but the very process and existence of these kinds of analyses are cause for great optimism, and provide a strong justification to radically slash government spending on intelligence that the state has proven to be unable to use effectively.
Phi Beta Iota: Michael Ostrolenk, our newest contributing editor, is a Libertarian with a very broad range of policy interests and an innate desire to use the taxpayer dollar wisely. The cited item leads to two different pdf files, each with multiple color-coded maps.
Phi Beta Iota: Click on the title to read their description of the SECRET/NOFORN document entitled Wikileaks.org – An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, Or Terrorist Groups? dated 18 March 2008, evidently out of the U.S. Army. The document is no longer available at the stated link. Our esteemed colleague Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) has been down on WikiLeaks for its irresponsibility, as found in this posting at Secrecy News, Wikileaks: Giving Leaks a Bad Name. What is clear from the description is that these folks have no clue how the US Intelligence Community actually works (or not). They seriously exaggerate and even misrepresent the document's thrust, and draw strategic action conclusions about “planned” action from minor-league tactical-technical level “exploratory” analysis. We continue to believe that whistle-blowing is good for society, but we also meet FAS half-way in observing that WikiLeaks is half-baked. Public intelligence in the public interest is NOT about violating secrecy oaths, exposing secrets, or in any way breaking the law–instead, public intelligence is about driving holistic analytics using open sources and methods so as to produce decision-support that can be shared, and in being shared, can help harmonize spending and behavior by multiple multinational stake-holders. WikiLeaks is the opposite of Phi Beta Iota.
What has become abundantly clear is that the Obama administration has taken the Bush-era doctrine of the world as a battlefield and run with it. US special forces are now operating in seventy-five countries across the globe—up from sixty under Bush—and special operations sources say Obama is a major fan of the work of JSOC and other special operations forces.
Despite its portrayal in the movies, working at the Central Intelligence Agency isn’t glamour and danger all the time. In fact, for most officers, it’s more like a normal 9-to-5 job. This story is the first in a series that will debunk certain myths and misperceptions about working at the CIA.
Meet Brad, Chris, Larry, and Eleanor — all experienced CIA officers with time spent overseas. In this article, they’ll share their insights and do their best to debunk myths about being an Agency employee.
Phi Beta Iota: Just shaking our head. CIA, 9 to 5. The other observation is that unilateral anything is bad, bad, bad. We should be creating multinational regional stations and using host country case officers on the street, not muscle-bound guys whose idea of cover clothing is shorts and corafam shoes.
U.S. Strategy: Control The World By Controlling The Internet
A Chinese Perspective, by Chen Baoguo, August 24, 2010
In May 2009, Microsoft announced on its website that they would turn off the Windows Live Messenger service for Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan and North Korea, in accordance with US legislation. In January 2010, Google, the company which owns the largest Internet information resources, declared that in order to establish a more open Internet environment, they had to abandon the Chinese market.What is even more worrying is that Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of US Homeland Security Committee, recently presented to the US Senate a bill titled “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset. “To control the world by controlling the Internet has been a dominant strategy of the US.From the network infrastructure protection of the Clinton era to the network anti-terrorism of the Bush era and to the “network deterrence” of the Obama era, the national information security strategy of the US has evolved from a preventative strategy to a preemptive one.Meanwhile, the methodology has moved from trying to control Internet hardware to control of Internet content.
China Cyber-army Talk Pulled from Black Hat
By: Brian Prince 2010-07-15
A presentation on Chinese state-sponsored hacking has been pulled from the Black Hat security conference due to pressure from the Taiwanese government. The talk, titled “The Chinese Cyber Army: An Archaeological Study from 2001 to 2010,” was to be held by Wayne Huang, CTO of Web application security firm Armorize Technologies.
