Full Briefing: 2013-03-11 HIST 2012-06-10 Don Fox Vancouver Mini-Nukes and WTC
Reference: Mini-Nukes on 9/11 — Evidence in Detail
07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoDBerto Jongman: The Terror Courts – An Inside Look at Rough Justice, Torture — and the Military Prosecutor Who Refused Illegal Orders — at Guantanamo, Cuba
07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military
“The Terror Courts”: An Inside Look at Rough Justice, Torture at Guantánamo Bay
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]
Headline Links to Video. Book Links to Amazon.
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.
Mongoose: Is General Patraeus Slated for “Suiciding?” + Meta-RECAP on No Rule of Law in USA
07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Law Enforcement, Military
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.
Owl: Naomi Wolf — JSOC Obama’s Secret Assasins
07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Ethics, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military
JSoc: Obama's secret assassins
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.
Continue reading “Owl: Naomi Wolf — JSOC Obama's Secret Assasins”
Marcus Aurelius: CIA’s Double Standard Exploitation of Secrecy — Use It to Hide Official Attrocities, While Screwing Iconoclasts + RECAP
07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), Government
By Ted Gup
New York Times, January 9, 2013
Cambridge, Mass. — IN the last week, the American public has been reminded of the Central Intelligence Agency’s contradictory attitude toward secrecy. In a critique of “Zero Dark Thirty,” published last Thursday in The Washington Post, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., defended the use of waterboarding and said that operatives used small plastic bottles, not buckets as depicted in the film, to carry out this interrogation method on three notable terrorists. On Sunday, The New York Times reported on the Justice Department’s case against a former C.I.A. officer, John C. Kiriakou, a critic of waterboarding who faces 30 months in prison for sharing the name of a covert operative with a reporter, who never used the name in print.
The contrast points to the real threat to secrecy, which comes not from the likes of Mr. Kiriakou but from the agency itself. The C.I.A. invokes secrecy to serve its interests but abandons it to burnish its image and discredit critics.
Over the years, I have interviewed many active and retired C.I.A. personnel who were not authorized to speak with me; they included heads of the agency’s clandestine service, analysts and well over 100 case officers, including station chiefs. Five former directors of central intelligence have spoken to me, mostly “on background.” Not one of these interviewees, to my knowledge, was taken to the woodshed, though our discussions invariably touched on classified territory.
Somewhere along the way, the agency that clung to “neither confirm nor deny” had morphed into one that selectively enforces its edicts on secrecy, using different standards depending on rank, message, internal politics and whim.
I am no fan of excessive secrecy, or of prosecuting whistle-blowers or leakers whose actions cannot be shown to have damaged American security. The C.I.A. needs secrecy, as do those who place their lives in the agency’s hands, but the agency cannot have it both ways.
Steve Aftergood: Intelligence System Acquisition
Director of National Intelligence et al (IC)
New Procedures for Intelligence System Acquisition
January 8th, 2013 by Steven Aftergood
The Director of National Intelligence issued a directive last month prescribing procedures for major system acquisitions by elements of the intelligence community.
The directive defines a multi-phase process for identifying critical needs, evaluating alternative paths to meet those needs, and so forth.
See Intelligence Community Directive 115, “Intelligence Community Capability Requirements Process,” December 21, 2012.
Phi Beta Iota: A sad little document of no value what-so-ever. This is a process for stove-piping that sets no standards for a) assuring that all collection can be processed; b) assuring that all processing collection can be shared; or c) assuring that the IC is moving as quickly as possible toward Open Source Everything (OSE) as well as M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Shariing and Sense-Making). The DNI and ODNI appear to be distracted, incoherent, largely ineffective, and long over-due for elimination.
See Also:
Marcus Aurelius: Fact-Checking CIA Fact-Checking 0 Dark 30 [with Robert Steele Fact-Checking Both] 1.2
07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 09 Terrorism, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), Government, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO ImpotencyFact-Checking the CIA's Fact-Check on ‘Zero Dark Thirty
By J.K. Trotter | The Atlantic Wire – Fri, Dec 28, 2012
“The CIA is a lot different than Hollywood portrays it to be,” reads an official explainer issued today by the Central Intelligence Agency — a thinly veiled attempt to continue debunking Zero Dark Thirty, the controversial Oscar favorite that its director admittedly hates. Referring to James Bond, the fictional MI6 agent, depictions of “shootouts and high speed chases,” and scenes of “CIA officers chasing terrorists through the American heartland,” the memo goes on to try and dispel an array of “myths” pertaining to the agency's operations, from its impact on foreign policy to its ability to spy on Americans. The effort follows a December 21 letter addressed to CIA employees from the agency's acting director, Michael Morrell, concerning the “artistic license” of Zero Dark Thirty. Today's release touches on the same themes: whether the CIA of our popular imagination corresponds to the CIA of reality, and how movies like Zero Dark Thirty (which isn't name-checked directly) blur the distinction between fact and fantasy. Should you believe the CIA's interpretation of Hollywood? We break down each agency claim with actual details from the movies — and Homeland, obviously.
RELATED: CIA Emails Reveal Winners and Losers of National Security Access
Below the line: each of the five “myths” and Robert Steele's “best truth” answer, Steve Coll's negative review of film.
