All intelligence services rely on convincing the public there is a monster at large waiting to grab them
The British undercover agent in the underpants bomb plot that has emerged so sensationally in recent days, was recruited using a technique pioneered by the founder of the KGB, Felix Dzerzhinsky. And Dzerzhinsky would be looking down from wherever he is now and smiling with satisfaction at the latest twists of an episode in which Western intelligence agencies have apparently foiled a plan to attack a US-bound plane.
Dzerzhinsky took over anti-terrorism duties in the newly-emerged Russia at the end of the First World War when the country was riven with revolt and violence. He realised that he had no chance of identifying all the terrorist threats and those planning to perpetrate them. Instead he developed a questionable technique that has become part of espionage theory throughout the international intelligence community: you lure the terrorist to you.
When the story of the foiled bomb plot first broke it seemed too good to be true. The security authorities had intercepted a man carrying a supposedly undetectable bomb which was being examined at the FBI laboratories in Quantico, Virginia. This suggested an amazing piece of intelligence work. What had led the authorities to the man? Why were they suspicious of him? Had they been tipped off? As details emerged it became apparent that the action was rather more straightforward.
“I get mad when bloggers accuse me of lying — of knowing the information was false. I didn’t.” — Colin Powell.
Can you imagine having an opportunity to address the United Nations Security Council about a matter of great global importance, with all the world's media watching, and using it to… well, to make shit up – to lie with a straight face, and with a CIA director propped up behind you, I mean to spew one world-class, for-the-record-books stream of bull, to utter nary a breath without a couple of whoppers in it, and to look like you really mean it all? What gall. What an insult to the entire world that would be.
Colin Powell doesn't have to imagine such a thing. He has to live with it. He did it on February 5, 2003. It's on videotape.
I tried to ask him about it in the summer of 2004. He was speaking to the Unity Journalists of Color convention in Washington, D.C. The event had been advertised as including questions from the floor, but for some reason that plan was revised. Speakers from the floor were permitted to ask questions of four safe and vetted journalists of color before Powell showed up, and then those four individuals could choose to ask him something related – which of course they did not, in any instance, do.
Bush and Kerry spoke as well. The panel of journalists who asked Bush questions when he showed up had not been properly vetted. Roland Martin of the Chicago Defender had slipped onto it somehow (which won't happen again!). Martin asked Bush whether he was opposed to preferential college admissions for the kids of alumni and whether he cared more about voting rights in Afghanistan than in Florida. Bush looked like a deer in the headlights, only without the intelligence. He stumbled so badly that the room openly laughed at him.
While news around the world was told that sheriff candidate J.T. Ready, leader of the controversial US Border Guard, had killed his family and himself, they had always been holding an eyewitness, the 17 year old daughter of Ready’s girl friend, who, from moment one, had given them descriptions of those who killed Ready and the rest of her family.
Yet, the Gilbert police, the Pinal County Sheriff, both suspected of being on “cartel” payrolls, nor even the FBI, conflicted by jurisdictional disputes, has yet to release the truth, begin an investigation or start looking for suspects.
. . . . . . . .
Only one small problem, the Gilbert Police spokesman made the statement knowing it was false, and incomplete. The Gilbert Police Department had witness 17 year old Brittany Modero in protective custody. The Gilbert PD also had statements from neighbors who saw 2 other cars at the house, which fled the scene before the police arrived at the shooting.
This is more than simple obstruction of justice, the Gilbert PD and every corporate owned and controlled News outlet in Arizona especially the local outlet for Village Voice Media, the “New Times” reporter Stephen Lemons. Since it has now been disclosed that there were other people in the house at the time of the shooting, why didn’t Gilbert PD or Media outlet issue an apology or a retraction. Nothing but silence from corporate media, I guess the truth does not fit their pre-planned agenda to destroy the character of Mr. Ready and cast him as a crazed white supremacist, Neo-Nazi.
Phi Beta Iota: There is evidently strong evidence that Mr. Ready was an FBI informant, which means that local law enforcement personnel, corrupted by the cartels, may have murdered not just a citizen, but a federal informant as well. The FBI does not appear too eager to get to the bottom of this….just as they were not at all interested in leads to the 9/11 atrocity received before the event.
Investigators at the FBI supposedly aren't happy that social networks like Facebook or Google+ don't have the same kind of facility for wiretaps that phones have had for decades. If claimed industry contacts for CNET are right, senior staff at the bureau have floated a proposed amendment to the 1994-era Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) that would require that communication-based websites with large user bases include a backdoor for federal agents to snoop on suspects. It would still include the same requirement for a court order as for phone calls, even if US carriers currently enjoy immunity for cooperating with any warrantless wiretapping. As might be expected, technology firms and civil liberties advocates like the Electronic Frontier Foundation object to deepening CALEA's reach any further, and Apple is thought to be preemptively lobbying against another definition of the law that might require a government back channel for audiovisual chat services like FaceTime or Skype. The FBI didn't explicitly confirm the proposal when asked, but it did say it was worried it might be “going dark” and couldn't enforce wiretaps.
I confess: I have an interest in an unseemly topic. Last year I coauthored a report on the subject and testified before Congress about it. The subject is labor trafficking.
This is not, of course, a problem exclusive to the PMSCO sector but neither is it something that has happened only now and then either. Suffice it to say that it enough of a problem that this is the second conference ISOA organized on the issue, the first being seven years ago. The conference program guide minced no words in stating why a conference is necessary:
Labor trafficking is a disgraceful practice that plagues many country as well as international peacekeeping and stability operations. Poverty creates pools of desperate labor at high risk of human trafficking of all kinds, including forced labor. The problem is morally reprehensible but of such enormous complexity it cannot be solved by a single sector and must be addressed by stakeholders working in partnership from all sides — private, governmental, nongovernmental and humanitarians sectors; clients and employers
As a sign that of its recognition of the seriousness of the problem ISOA's Code of Conduct has long had a provision stating that “Signatories shall not engage or allow their personnel to engage in the act of trafficking in persons.”
Trafficking in persons takes different forms. It might be forced labor, sex trafficking or bonded labor, to name a few examples. The first two types have happened in the PMSC industry.
As an article in JIPO notes:
Human trafficking on U.S. government contracts in the Central Command (“CENTCOM”) sector is chronic, overt and unabated. The appalling fact that hundreds of thousands of men have been used as slave laborers to support “freedom” operations is not lost upon the victims.
Investigative journalists reporting of widespread human trafficking of laborers on U.S. government contracts in CENTCOM date back to 2004. The New York Times reported the too common fraudulent recruiting scheme that began in 2003 when contractors first started trafficking men to perform services on government contracts. The Chicago Tribune also covered human trafficking in 2005, calling out the use of US tax dollars to provide slave labor during wartime. Articles in USA Today have reported labor trafficking abuses of Asian workers in Saudi Arabia as well as forced labor of Thai workers in the United States, considered “the nations biggest human trafficking operations.”
Personal investigations both on the ground in Iraq, and in conducted interviews of victims who have returned to the Indian subcontinent, have produced conclusions consistent with other investigative journalists. Other investigative journalists such as David Phinney and reporters who have been on the ground, observed the practice and interviewed thousands of victims have also highlighted this blight on our national image. In fact, the only thing parties agree upon is that the practice is prolific, unabated and contrary to the very foundation and core of American values.
A more blunt way of putting is, as one conference speaker noted, is that we now have people enslaved than at any time in human history, with estimates ranging from 12 to 27 million people.
Interestingly, this is not an issue where people think this is something best left to industry to self-regulate. As the morning keynote speaker Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, senior adviser to the secretary of state, Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, said:
Government is the answer, government is the solution, but it is not the only player. We have to dismiss the notion that this is someone else's problem. This is our problem and we have to be part of the solution. Our starting point has to be that we're not making the problem worse.
Those wanting more detail should see the current (May/June) issue of ISOA's JIPO magazine, which is devoted to the subject. According to ISOA it will be online later this week.
WARSAW — The former head of Poland’s intelligence service has been charged with aiding the Central Intelligence Agency in setting up a secret prison to detain suspected members of Al Qaeda, a leading newspaper here reported on Tuesday, the first high-profile case in which a former senior official of any government has been prosecuted in connection with the agency’s program.
The daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reported that the former intelligence chief, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, told the paper that he faced charges of violating international law by “unlawfully depriving prisoners of their liberty,” in connection with the secret C.I.A. prison where Qaeda suspects were subjected to brutal interrogation methods.
When President Obama took office in 2009, he said he wanted to “look forward, as opposed to looking backward” and rejected calls for a broad investigation of C.I.A. interrogations and other Bush administration counterterrorism programs. In sharp contrast, the Poles see the case as a crucial test for rule of law and the investigation by prosecutors here has reached the highest levels of Polish politics.
One of Poland’s prime ministers during the period when terrorism suspects were alleged to have been subjected to torture in Poland, Leszek Miller, could be charged before Poland’s State Tribunal, the newspaper said.
“We try to treat our Constitution seriously and try not to forget the fact that there was a manifest violation of the Polish Constitution within the country’s borders,” said Adam Bodnar, vice president of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, based in Warsaw.
Phi Beta Iota: There is nothing honorable, patriotic, or even intelligent about rendition and torture (or the drone program managed by CIA) All those US citizens who can be identified by foreign governments as participants in the rendition and torture programs or the drone programs would be well advised to avoid any foreign travel lest they be arrested and charged for crimes against humanity. Poland–like Iceland against financial terrorism–is on the right path.
The question is an absurd one except to those of us who have spent part of our lives exploring contradictions and mysteries posed by official narratives regarding events of that world-changing day. Increasingly, the question is becoming, “How many real persons died as a result of alleged events that occurred in connection with the destruction of buildings in New York City’s World Trade Center Complex on September 11, 2001?”
A logical tentative answer is provided by Mr. Simon Shack, the brilliant creator of SeptemberClues.info web site and supported by members of his CluesForum.info, two online resources that call into serious question reports of that day’s victims.
Shack’s sites initially postulated all alleged victims to be computer created fakes who never existed, based on absurdities of photoshopped and digitally morphed memorial images. Proofs presented on their Vicsim Report are overwhelmingly convincing when one takes sufficient time to carefully review its eighty pages.
Phi Beta Iota: There are three lines of thinking emergent on 9/11 that are gathering some momentum. The first is that the mainstream media were fully engaged in showing manipulated video enhanced with some computer simulation — this has not been investigated to our knowledge. The second is that the body count for 9/11 was fabricated. We would add the likelihood that the same force that pulverized all the concrete was also responsible for pulverizing most of the bodies within the buildings. The third, the most interesting, has actually begun to connect the dots among all the Zionists in NYC and neo-cons in Washington, D.C. We have no direct knowledge. We only know that the truth of the matter remains to be found.
