I will not replicate all that is at www.oss.net and to a much lesser extent, www.earth-intelligence.net, but do want to recognize a handful of extraordinary individuals by isolating their especially meritorious contributiions to the long-running debate about national intelligence reform and re-invention.
Wall Street Journal journalist Jess Bravin reports on the controversial military commissions at Guantánamo. Describing it as “the most important legal story in decades,” Bravin uncovers how the Bush administration quickly drew up an alternative legal system to try men captured abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks. Soon evidence obtained by torture was being used to prosecute prisoners, but some military officers refused to take part. We speak to Jess Bravin, author of The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay, and to Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, a former Guantánamo prosecutor featured in the book. [includes rush transcript]
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Soon after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the United States captured hundreds of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and around the world. By the following January the first of these prisoners arrived at the U.S. military’s prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were subject to President George W. Bush’s executive order authorizing their trial by military commissions. Jess Bravin, the Wall Street Journal’s Supreme Court correspondent, was there within days of the prison’s opening, and has continued ever since to cover the U.S. effort to create a parallel justice system for enemy aliens. A maze of legal, political, and moral issues has stood in the way of justice—issues often raised by military prosecutors who found themselves torn between duty to the chain of command and their commitment to fundamental American values.
While much has been written about Guantanamo and brutal detention practices following 9/11, Bravin is the first to go inside the Pentagon’s prosecution team to expose the real-world legal consequences of those policies. Bravin describes cases undermined by inadmissible evidence obtained through torture, clashes between military lawyers and administration appointees, and political interference in criminal prosecutions that would be shocking within the traditional civilian and military justice systems. With the Obama administration planning to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators at Guantanamo—and vindicate the legal experiment the Bush administration could barely get off the ground—The Terror Courts could not be more timely.
If General Patraeus appears to commit suicide anytime soon, it will not have been suicide and the White House and the Department of Justice and the FBI will cover up the murder. Since the dual chain of command got away with the murder of JFK, the impunity with which they are willing to murder American citizens has steadily expanded. We are at a cross-roads. The final Obama term will either begin the restoration of the rule of law (very unlikely) or deliver the multiple precipitants for sparking a revolution in the USA,
Phi Beta Iota: The back chatter on the above post has been extraordinary. There appears to be a growing anger within the Special Operations community with respect to their being lied to, abused, and put in danger for political advantage — one is reminded of both Jim Webb's book, Friendly Fire, and the murder of Col James Sabow, USMC in the early 1990's. The trail of murders and uninvestigated suicides associated with the military-industrial-intelligence-terror complex is now easily over 200 in number just in the past 12 years, but evidently no one in the Inspector General, Law Enforcement, of Judiciary oversight world cares to take on the challenge.
If Patraeus is “suicided,” the irony and justice in relation to Petraeus' covering up the murder of Col Ted Westhusing, USA (RIP), is noted.
An honest President would demand that a task force itemize and investigate as a whole all of the “suicides” among all military officers in the past twelve years. The results are certain to be frightening. We do not expect such an investigation to occur, because the lack of integrity in the US Government has peaked at what we hope is a final high before public intelligence in the public interest begins to push back to good effect toward 2014 and 2016. We pray that a non-violent public majority can restore the rule of law in the USA. The elite and their security state servants are out of control, but from the bottom up, JSOG appears to be reconnecting with its integrity and that should scare the shit of Brennan and a handful of others.
The president has a clandestine network targeting a ‘kill list' justified by secret laws. How is that different than a death squad?
The film Dirty Wars, which premiered at Sundance, can be viewed, as Amy Goodman sees it, as an important narrative of excesses in the global “war on terror”. It is also a record of something scary for those of us at home – and uncovers the biggest story, I would say, in our nation's contemporary history.
Though they wisely refrain from drawing inferences, Scahill and Rowley have uncovered the facts of a new unaccountable power in America and the world that has the potential to shape domestic and international events in an unprecedented way. The film tracks the Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc), a network of highly-trained, completely unaccountable US assassins, armed with ever-expanding “kill lists”. It was JSoc that ran the operation behind the Navy Seal team six that killed bin Laden.
Scahill and Rowley track this new model of US warfare that strikes at civilians and insurgents alike – in 70 countries. They interview former JSoc assassins, who are shell-shocked at how the “kill lists” they are given keep expanding, even as they eliminate more and more people.
ROBERT STEELE: CIA was clearly a full participant in the drafting of these answers, many of which are utter nonsense (being effective at clandestine intelligence, all-source analysis, and open source intelligence, to take three fairly pertinent examples). The questions are the best I have ever seen over 30 years of watching this theater of the absurd. Brennan's answers are a mix of world-class dissembling, avoidance of substance, and specious assurances. Harry Truman would be aghast at what the CIA has become. Below I offer honest answers to 6 of the 40 questions. I am always available for staff or Member testimony.
1A. How well do you think the CIA has performed recently in each of its primary missions:
CIA is broken beyond repair, and pathologically harmful in its present state. Drones and extrajudicial killings dominate its clerk-leaders' time, its budget, and its culture. 90% of what CIA claims as clandestinely acquired information is actually a mix of hand-outs from foreign liaison services and domestically-acquired information. CIA does not do all-source analysis, its inexperienced analysts do cosmetics on very thin streams of technical collection on a handful of hard-targets, and know nothing at all about Global Coverage (e.g. Mali at the tribal level). CIA counterterrorism is non-existent, outside of prisoner interrogation in partnership with JSOG at secret prisons that still do exist (e.g. Somalia), and direct support to Mossad false flag operations intended to keep the public distracted from domestic issues. There is no CIA counterintelligence function to speak of, that remains the final career stop for those who cannot be found work anywhere else. Covert action continues to consist of contractors running drugs into the US via US military bases and rural strips in Texas and elsewhere, and a tiny handful of truly extraordinary very small operations that defy imagination and merit fulsome praise–those who do the latter are the real heroes at CIA. CIA is not central — it does NOT have access to most of the information that the National Security Agency and National Geospatial Agency collect, nor does it do more than 10% of what is possible in either clandestine collection or multilingual analog and human open source acquisition. CIA is not intelligent, its back office and desktop processing are still closer to the Soviet gulag (John Perry Barlow said this first) than Silicon Valley, and CIA is not an “agency,” there are at least seven different CIAs, only three of them legitimate.
2. What do you consider to be the appropriate role for the CIA in the collection of human intelligence, given that human intelligence also is collected by the Department of Defense and others parts of the Intelligence Community?
Abstract: This article reflects the importance of the consolidation of structures of Intelligence, able of canalizing the flows in the support and exchange of information that provide the preventive measures to the decision making that serves like fortification of the UE. The Intelligence considered like the sap, the food of the Union, must be had present like part fundamental in the vanguard of any policy to develop.
Abstract: This article reflects the importance of the consolidation of structures of Intelligence, able of canalizing the flows in the support and exchange of information that provide the preventive measures to the decision making that serves like fortification of the UE. The Intelligence considered like the sap, the food of the Union, must be had present like part fundamental in the vanguard of any policy to develop.
