The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
March 30, 2010
The use of unmanned aircraft systems, or drones, to fight the Taliban and al-Qaida has increased sharply.
The State Department's top lawyer, Harold Koh, has issued legal justification for targeted killings using drone strikes. But some civil liberties groups are critical of the decision.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the single most relevant comment, by an individual present at Khost, on the reality behind the incompetence of CIA at all levels from D/CIA to the “mob” that got itself killed in Khost. See original post with link, Journal: CIA Leads the “Walking Dead” in USA.
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No one wants to be the person to speak ill of the dead. The truth, however, must trump sensibilities in this matter for a number of reasons, first and foremost being that of using this catastrophic incident as a case study in how not to conduct operations in espionage.
This horrible blunder was at once both easily predictable and preventable. I cannot think of one principle of security that was not violated here. Violations fommented out of the apparent incompetence, obvious arrogance, blind ambition and elitism of “Kathy.” Having been warned repeatedly, constantly, continuously concerning suspicious developments in the days leading up to the “meet”, Kathy was stubbornly and arrogantly dismissive of sound wisdom, counsel and warning. She marginalized and widely disregarded those who were there to conduct and advise her on ground tactical operations. The proof of this is that none were present at the “welcoming party” because they knew that it was not tactically sound, hence no “knuckle draggers” were killed or maimed; they just had to clean up the mess, which they did in the magnificent fashion that is their consistent calling card.
Federal Reserve Transparency Working Group and Supporters:
We have 32 cosponsors for S.604 ” Federal Reserve Sunshine Act of 2009″ and 319 cosponsors for H.R. 1207 ” Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009″
See also:
Total Wall Street Bailout Cost (Thanks Nicole, U.S. PIRG)
The Federal Reserve as a Confidence Game: What They Were Saying in 2007
Salon: The Federal Reserve has come clean about its covert actions
“Thomas Jefferson put a stop to Alexander Hamilton’s idea of a powerful central bank out of fear it would be unaccountable to the public. The Fed has just proven Jefferson’s point.”
A Dagger to the CIA
On December 30, in one of the deadliest attacks in CIA history, an Al Qaeda double agent schemed his way onto a U.S. base in Afghanistan and blew himself into the next life, taking seven Americans with him. How could this have happened? Agency veteran Robert Baer explains, offering chilling new details about the attack and a plea to save the dying art of espionage
If we take Khost as a metaphor for what has happened to the CIA, the deprofessionalization of spying, it's tempting to consider that the agency's time has passed. “Khost was an indictment of an utterly failed system,” a former senior CIA officer told me. “It's time to close Langley.”
I'm not prepared to go quite that far. The United States still needs a civilian intelligence agency. (The military cannot be trusted to oversee all intelligence-gathering on its own.) But the CIA—and especially the directorate of operations—must be stripped down to its studs and rebuilt with a renewed sense of mission and purpose. It should start by getting the amateurs out of the field. And then it should impose professional standards of training and experience—the kind it upheld with great success in the past. If it doesn't, we're going to see a lot more Khosts.
Phi Beta Iota: Robert Bear, a most-respected colleague, only scratches the surface. While we endorse his condemnation of Clinton and Deutch specifically, Robert misses the deeper history and the broader implications. CIA was “Flawed by Design” as Amy Zegart puts it so well, and has always been a loose-cannon shoot from the hip organization with what Tim Weiner now calls the “Legacy of Ashes”.
Continue reading “Journal: CIA Leads the “Walking Dead” in USA”
Admin Threatens Veto Over GAO Role in Intel Oversight
March 17th, 2010 by Steven Aftergood
One of the simplest, most effective ways to strengthen congressional oversight of intelligence would be for Congress to make increased use of specially cleared investigators from the Government Accountability Office. This is such a straightforward step towards improving oversight that it was even championed by CIA Director Leon Panetta when he was a Congressman.
But the Obama Administration told Congress on Monday that new language to reinforce the GAO’s role in intelligence oversight was among several provisions in the pending FY2010 Intelligence Authorization Act that were objectionable to the White House and that might prompt a presidential veto of the bill.
Continue reading “Journal: OUT OF CONTROL–The Demise of Responsible Government “Intelligence” II”
Danger Room Explainer: Outsourced Intel in Afghanistan
When is intelligence really intelligence, and when is it merely “atmospherics”? It may sound abstract, but it goes to the heart of a New York Times scoop about a defense official who apparently set up an off-the-books intelligence operation in Afghanistan.
On Monday, the Times ran a story about Michael Furlong, the Defense Department official being investigated over an ad hoc spy ring. The piece raised more questions than it answered, and Washington Post intelligence columnist David Ignatius is now filling in some of the blanks.
In a column today, Ignatius distills the story. “Under the heading of ‘information operations’ or ‘force protection,’ he writes, “the military has launched intelligence activities that, were they conducted by the CIA, might require a presidential finding and notification of Congress. And by using contractors who operate ‘outside the wire’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the military has gotten information that is sometimes better than what the CIA is offering.”
Ignatius also unpacks some of the curious semantics around this, noting that reports by contractor (and CIA veteran) Duane “Dewey” Clarridge were labeled “force protection atmospherics,” not intelligence, and that sources were called “cooperators.” It’s a key distinction: By avoiding the vocabulary of intelligence collection, Clarridge’s network evidently tried to avoid crossing the line into Title 50 activities (i.e., covert action).
Phi Beta Iota: There are five elements here:
Continue reading “Journal: OUT OF CONTROL–The Demise of Responsible Government “Intelligence” I”
Revealed: Ashcroft, Tenet, Rumsfeld warned 9/11 Commission about ‘line’ it ’should not cross’
by Sahil Kapur, Raw Story
Senior Bush administration officials sternly cautioned the 9/11 Commission against probing too deeply into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, according to a document recently obtained by the ACLU.
The notification came in a letter dated January 6, 2004, addressed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George J. Tenet. The ACLU described it as a fax sent by David Addington, then-counsel to former vice president Dick Cheney.
EXTRACT:
Eventually, the commission’s co-chairs harshly criticized the administration for having purportedly “destroyed” tapes of its interrogations with terror suspects, as Raw Story reported last year.
9/11 Commission members Thomas Kean and Lee H. Hamilton wrote that although US President George W. Bush had ordered all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the probe, “recent revelations that the CIA destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot.”
“Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.”
They continued: “There could have been absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone at the CIA — or the White House — of the commission’s interest in any and all information related to Qaeda detainees involved in the 9/11 plot.
“Yet no one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations,” Kean and Hamilton wrote.
The letter can be found on page 26 of the ACLU’s set of unveiled documents.
