The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Et tu, Brute?
EXTRACT
Ex-IAEA Chief Warns on Using Unverified Intel to Pressure Iran
EXTRACT
Blix, who clashed with US officials when he was head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq from 2000 to 2003, said he has long been skeptical of intelligence that has been used to accuse Iraq and Iran of having active nuclear-weapons programs. “I’ve often said you have as much disinformation as information” on alleged weaponization efforts in those countries, Blix said.
A Form of Moral Paralysis
Torture and the Violence of Organized Forgetting
Henry Giroux
CounterPunch, Weekend Edition December 12-14, 2014
EXTRACT
20 key findings about CIA interrogations
Almost 13 years after the CIA established secret prisons to hold and interrogate detainees, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the CIA’s programs listing 20 key findings. Click a statement below for a summary of the findings:
1 “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence” 2 “rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness” 3 “brutal and far worse than the CIA represented” 4 “conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher” 5 “repeatedly provided inaccurate information” 6 “actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight” 7 “impeded effective White House oversight” 8 “complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions” 9 “impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General” 10 “coordinated the release of classified information to the media” 11 “unprepared as it began operating” 12 “deeply flawed throughout the program's duration” 13 “overwhelmingly outsourced operations” 14 “coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved” 15 “did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained” 16 “failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness” 17 “rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable” 18 “ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms, and objections” 19 “inherently unsustainable” 20 “damaged the United States' standing in the world”
A Spurious Challenge to the Senate Torture Report
CounterPunch, 10 December 2014
CIA director John Brennan, having failed to block the release of the Senate intelligence committee’s report on torture and abuse, is now abetting the efforts of former CIA directors and deputy directors to rebut the report’s conclusions that the interrogation techniques amounted to sadism and that senior CIA officials lied to the White House, the Congress, and the Department of Justice about the effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation program. Former CIA directors George Tenet and Michael Hayden and deputy directors John McLaughlin and Steve Kappes, who were guilty of past deceit on sensitive issues, have threatened to make documents available to undermine the findings of the Senate committee. The senior operations officer who ran the CIA’s torture and abuse program, Jose Rodriquez, has been permitted to write a book and a long essay in the Washington Post that argue the interrogation techniques were legal and effective. Their charges are completely spurious and their credibility is non-existent. Read more.
CIA Torture Report: Oversight, But No Remedies Yet
The release of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program is, among other things, an epic act of record preservation. Numerous CIA records that might not have been disclosed for decades, or ever, were rescued from oblivion by the Senate report and are now indelibly cited and quoted, even if many of them are not yet released in full. That’s not a small thing, since the history of the CIA interrogation program was not a story that the Agency was motivated or equipped to tell. Read more.
Treason. From Tenet onwards. Any questions?
The 10 most disturbing revelations in the CIA torture report
10. The use of torture to extract information was ineffective.
