Paul Craig Roberts | InformationClearingHouse.com

What are we to make of the failed Underwear Bomber plot, the Toothpaste, Shampoo, and Bottled Water Bomber plot, and the Shoe Bomber plot? These blundering and implausible plots to bring down an airliner seem far removed from al-Qaida’s expertise in pulling off 9/11.

If we are to believe the U.S. government, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged al-Qaida “mastermind” behind 9/11, outwitted the CIA, the NSA, indeed all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies as well as those of all U.S. allies including Mossad, the National Security Council, NORAD, Air Traffic Control, Airport Security four times on one morning, and Dick Cheney, and with untrained and inexperienced pilots pulled off skilled piloting feats of crashing hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center towers, and the Pentagon, where a battery of state of the art air defenses somehow failed to function.

After such amazing success, al-Qaida would have attracted the best minds in the business, but, instead, it has been reduced to amateur stunts.

The Underwear Bomb plot is being played to the hilt on the TV media and especially on Fox “news.” After reading recently that The Washington Post allowed a lobbyist to write a news story that preached the lobbyist’s interest, I wondered if the manufacturers of full body scanners were behind the heavy coverage of the Underwear Bomber, if not behind the plot itself. In America, everything is for sale. Integrity is gone with the wind.
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RawStory.com

Power struggle’ inside Blackwater over Prince’s successor

Blackwater’s Erik Prince was recruited as a CIA agent in the years after the 9/11 attacks, says an exclusive report at Vanity Fair that also reveals the billionaire ex-Navy SEAL plans to step down from Blackwater to teach high school.

For the past six years, Prince “appears to have led an astonishing double life,” writes Adam Ciralsky. “Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s CEO and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the CIA’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into ‘denied areas’—places US intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies.”

Ciralsky reports that Prince became a CIA “asset,” or spy, who became a “Mr. Fix-It” in the war on terror.

“Prince wasn’t merely a contractor; he was, insiders say, a full-blown asset,” Ciralsky reports. “Three sources with direct knowledge of the relationship say that the CIA’s National Resources Division recruited Prince in 2004 to join a secret network of American citizens with special skills or unusual access to targets of interest. As assets go, Prince would have been quite a catch. He had more cash, transport, matériel, and personnel at his disposal than almost anyone Langley would have run in its 62-year history.”

Prince also told Vanity Fair he believes that people inside the US government sold him out when news of Blackwater’s involvement in the CIA’s secret assassination program went public. Last summer, CIA director Leon Panetta informed congressional intelligence committees that the CIA had kept secret an on-and-off assassination program that many people believe was run during the Bush administration by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Later, news reports emerged alleging that Blackwater, which recently renamed itself Xe Services, was involved in the program which sought to assassinate high-value terrorist targets.

Prince “confesses to feeling betrayed,” Vanity Fair reports.

“I don’t understand how a program this sensitive leaks,” he says. “And to ‘out’ me on top of it?”

Ciralsky reports:

Prince blames Democrats in Congress for the leaks and maintains that there is a double standard at play. “The left complained about how [CIA operative] Valerie Plame’s identity was compromised for political reasons. A special prosecutor [was even] appointed. Well, what happened to me was worse. People acting for political reasons disclosed not only the existence of a very sensitive program but my name along with it.” As in the Plame case, though, the leaks prompted CIA attorneys to send a referral to the Justice Department, requesting that a criminal investigation be undertaken to identify those responsible for providing highly classified information to the media.

Prince told Ciralsky that he was engaged in work for the CIA “up until two months ago—when Prince says the Obama administration pulled the plug.” That would seem to confirm recent news reports that the Obama administration was using Blackwater for assassinations in Pakistan.

Prince also told Ciralsky he plans to step down as chairman and CEO of Blackwater — a move Ciralsky reports has started a “power struggle” within the company over who will succeed its founder.

“I’m through,” Prince told Vanity Fair. “I’m going to teach high school. … History and economics. I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too.”

Prince also told Vanity Fair he believes that people inside the US government sold him out when news of Blackwater’s involvement in the CIA’s secret assassination program went public. Last summer, CIA director Leon Panetta informed congressional intelligence committees that the CIA had kept secret an on-and-off assassination program that many people believe was run during the Bush administration by Vice President Dick Cheney.

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Matthew Cole and Brian Ross | ABCNews.com

The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.

Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time.

“The activities in that prison were illegal,” said human rights researcher John Sifton. “They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions.”

Lithuanian officials provided ABC News with the documents of what they called a CIA front company, Elite, LLC, which purchased the property and built the “black site” in 2004.

John Prados | GWU.edu

The Central Intelligence Agency participated in every aspect of the wars in Indochina, political and military, according to newly declassified CIA histories. The six volumes of formerly secret histories (the Agency’s belated response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by National Security Archive senior fellow John Prados) document CIA activities in South and North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in unprecedented detail. The histories contain a great deal of new material and shed light on aspects of the CIA’s work that were not well known or were poorly understood. The new revelations include:

• The CIA and U.S. Embassy engaged in secret diplomatic exchanges with enemy insurgents of the National Liberation Front, at first with the approval of the South Vietnamese government, a channel which collapsed in the face of deliberate obstruction by South Vietnamese officials [Document 2 pp. 58-63].

•  As early as 1954 that Saigon leader Ngo Dinh Diem would ultimately fail to gain the support of the South Vietnamese people. Meanwhile the CIA crafted a case officer-source relationship with Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu as early as 1952, a time when the French were still fighting for Indochina [Document 1, pp. 21-2, 31].

• CIA raids into North Vietnam took place as late as 1970, and the program authorizing them was not terminated until April 1972, despite obtaining no measurable results [Document 5, pp. 349-372].

• In 1965, a time when the South Vietnamese regime was again in conflict with the Buddhist majority, the CIA secretly funded Buddhist training programs [Document 2, p. 38].

• CIA involvement in South Vietnamese elections goes beyond what has been previously disclosed, and matches the scope of the agency’s controversial 1960s political action program in Chile [Document 2, pp. 51-58].

• In the later period of the war, according to the CIA’s own historian, Saigon leader Nguyen Van Thieu’s mistrust of the United States increasingly focused on the CIA [Document 2, p. 87].

• The CIA historian, contrary to neo-orthodox arguments regarding progress in the Vietnam war, concedes that U.S. pacification efforts failed in Vietnam—including the so-called “Phoenix” program—and traces this failure to several causes, including South Vietnamese lack of interest and investment in this key facet of the conflict [Document 3, p. xv-xvi].

• The CIA was aware from the very early 1960s of the problems posed by Laotian drug trafficking to its Laos campaign, but not only took no action, it did not even make drug trafficking a reporting requirement until the Nixon administration declared war on drugs [Document 5, p. 535].

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Then Maj. Gen. Hamid Gul, Director General of the ISI (far left), with William Webster, Director of Central Intelligence, Clair George, Deputy Director for Operations, and Milt Bearden, CIA station chief, at a training camp for the mujahedeen in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province in 1987 (RAWA.org) 

Jeremy R Hammond | ForeignPolicyJournal.com

In an exclusive interview with Foreign Policy Journal, retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul responds to charges that he supports terrorism, discusses 9/11 and ulterior motives for the war on Afghanistan, claims that the U.S., Israel, and India are behind efforts to destabilize Pakistan, and charges the U.S. and its allies with responsibility for the lucrative Afghan drug trade.

Retired Lieutenant General Hamid Gul was the Director General of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) from 1987 to 1989, during which time he worked closely with the CIA to provide support for the mujahedeen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Though once deemed a close ally of the United States, in more recent years his name has been the subject of considerable controversy. He has been outspoken with the claim that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were an “inside job”. He has been called “the most dangerous man in Pakistan”, and the U.S. government has accused him of supporting the Taliban, even recommending him to the United Nations Security Council for inclusion on the list of international terrorists.

In an exclusive interview with Foreign Policy Journal, I asked the former ISI chief what his response was to these allegations. He replied, “Well, it’s laughable I would say, because I’ve worked with the CIA and I know they were never so bad as they are now.” He said this was “a pity for the American people” since the CIA is supposed to act “as the eyes and ears” of the country. As for the charge of him supporting the Taliban, “it is utterly baseless. I have no contact with the Taliban, nor with Osama bin Laden and his colleagues.” He added, “I have no means, I have no way that I could support them, that I could help them.”

After the Clinton administration’s failed attempt to assassinate Osama bin Laden in 1998, some U.S. officials alleged that bin Laden had been tipped off by someone in Pakistan to the fact that the U.S. was able to track his movements through his satellite phone. Counter-terrorism advisor to the National Security Council Richard Clarke said, “I have reason to believe that a retired head of the ISI was able to pass information along to Al Qaeda that the attack was coming.” And some have speculated that this “retired head of the ISI” was none other than Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul.

When I put this charge to him, General Gul pointed out to me that he had retired from the ISI on June 1, 1989, and from the army in January, 1992. “Did you share this information with the ISI?” he asked. “And why haven’t you taken the ISI to task for parting this information to its ex-head?” The U.S. had not informed the Pakistan army chief, Jehangir Karamat, of its intentions, he said. So how could he have learned of the plan to be able to warn bin Laden? “Do I have a mole in the CIA? If that is the case, then they should look into the CIA to carry out a probe, find out the mole, rather than trying to charge me. I think these are all baseless charges, and there’s no truth in it…. And if they feel that their failures are to be rubbed off on somebody else, then I think they’re the ones who are guilty, not me.”

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AP | YahooNews.com

CIA Director Leon Panetta has terminated a “very serious” covert program the spy agency kept secret from Congress for eight years, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a House Intelligence subcommittee chairwoman, said Friday.

Schakowsky said she is pressing for an immediate committee investigation of the classified program, which has not been described publicly. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has said he is considering an investigation.

“The program is a very, very serious program and certainly deserved a serious debate at the time and through the years,” she told The Associated Press in an interview. “But now it’s over.”

Democrats revealed late Tuesday that the CIA Director Leon Panetta had informed Congress in late June that the spy agency had been withholding important information about a secret program begun after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Panetta has launched an internal probe at the CIA to determine why Congress was not told about the program. Exactly what the classified program entailed is still unclear.

Schakowsky, D-Ill., said Friday that the failure to inform Congress about the program was intentional. The CIA and Bush administration consciously decided not to tell Congress, she said.

“It’s not as if this was an oversight and over the years it just got buried. There was a decision under several directors of the CIA and administration not to tell the Congress,” she said.
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DemocracyNow.org

Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta has admitted the CIA has misled Congress on intelligence matters since at least 2001. On Wednesday, a group of seven Democratic lawmakers released a letter describing Panetta’s comments. House intelligence committee chair Silvestre Reyes said CIA officials “affirmatively lied” in a recent briefing on an unspecified matter.

Jeff Stein | CQPolitics.com 

He may yet turn out to be the avatar of Iranian democracy, but three decades ago Mir-Hossein Mousavi was waging a terrorist war on the United States that included bloody attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.
 
Mousavi, prime minister for most of the 1980s, personally selected his point man for the Beirut terror campaign, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-pur, and dispatched him to Damascus as Iran’s ambassador, according to former CIA and military officials.

The ambassador in turn hosted several meetings of the cell that would carry out the Beirut attacks, which were overheard by the National Security Agency.

“We had a tap on the Iranian ambassador to Syria,” retired Navy Admiral James “Ace” Lyons related by telephone Monday. In 1983 Lyons was deputy chief of Naval Operations, and deeply involved in the events in Lebanon.

“The Iranian ambassador received instructions from the foreign minister to have various groups target U.S. personnel in Lebanon, but in particular to carry out a ’spectacular action’ against the Marines,” said Lyons.

“He was prime minister,” Lyons said of Mousavi, “so he didn’t get down to the details at the lowest levels. “But he was in a principal position and had to be aware of what was going on.”

Lyons, sometimes called “the father” of the Navy SEALs’ Red Cell counter-terror unit, also fingered Mousavi for the 1988 truck bombing of the U.S. Navy’s Fleet Center in Naples, Italy, that killed five persons, including the first Navy woman to die in a terrorist attack.   

Bob Baer agrees that Mousawi, who has been celebrated in the West for sparking street demonstrations against the Teheran regime since he lost the elections, was directing the overall 1980s terror campaign.

But Baer, a former CIA Middle East field officer whose exploits were dramatized in the George Clooney movie “Syriana,”  places Mousavi even closer to the Beirut bombings.

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01/19/09

Mehr News Agency | Payvand.com 

Iran has broken up a CIA-backed network that sought to carry out a “soft revolution” in Iran through people-to-people contacts. The “soft revolution” plan is based in Dubai and is similar to a U.S. plan that targeted the Soviet Union in 1959, the director of the counterespionage department of the Intelligence Ministry told reporters at a press conference here on Monday.

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Frederick H. Katayama | Reueters.com 

Laid off from Wall Street? The CIA wants you — as long as you can pass a lie detector test and show that you are motivated by service to your country rather than your wallet.

The Central Intelligence Agency has been advertising for recruits and will be holding interviews on June 22 at a secret location in New York.

“Economics, finance and business professionals, if the quest for the bottom line is just not enough for you, the Central Intelligence Agency has a mission like no other,” one radio advertisement for the agency says.

“Join CIA’s directorate of intelligence and be a part of our global mission as an economic or financial analyst. Make a difference in your career and for your nation,” it says.

Ron Patrick, a spokesman for recruitment and retention at the CIA, told Reuters Television the agency had received several hundred resumes so far from applicants ranging from people just out of graduate school to laid-off bankers.

“It’s going to be a very different use of their skill set than perhaps they’ve used on Wall Street,” Patrick said.

Recruits will have to pass rigorous background and medical checks, as well as a polygraph, or lie-detector test.

Starting salaries range from around $60,000 for a new graduate to $100,000 for somebody with more experience, and top out at $160,000. Generous benefits are included.

Patrick said the agency would welcome worthy applicants from Wall Street, whose reputation has been tarnished by the financial crisis and revelations of lavish lifestyles and multi-million dollar bonuses at banks blamed for the meltdown.

“Typically the people that come to the CIA want to serve the government, they want to serve their countries. It’s a different mindset perhaps than serving a company or serving profit as a bottom line,” he said.

“As long as they can make that attitude switch from profit being the motivator to serving their country, I think they’ll fit in very well with us.”

Paul Craig Roberts | InfoWars.com

A number of commentators have expressed their idealistic belief in the purity of Mousavi, Montazeri, and the westernized youth of Terhan. The CIA destabilization plan, announced two years ago (see below) has somehow not contaminated unfolding events.

The claim is made that Ahmadinejad stole the election, because the outcome was declared too soon after the polls closed for all the votes to have been counted. However, Mousavi declared his victory several hours before the polls closed. This is classic CIA destabilization designed to discredit a contrary outcome. It forces an early declaration of the vote. The longer the time interval between the preemptive declaration of victory and the release of the vote tally, the longer Mousavi has to create the impression that the authorities are using the time to fix the vote. It is amazing that people don’t see through this trick.

As for the grand ayatollah Montazeri’s charge that the election was stolen, he was the initial choice to succeed Khomeini, but lost out to the current Supreme Leader. He sees in the protests an opportunity to settle the score with Khamenei. Montazeri has the incentive to challenge the election whether or not he is being manipulated by the CIA, which has a successful history of manipulating disgruntled politicians.

There is a power struggle among the ayatollahs. Many are aligned against Ahmadinejad because he accuses them of corruption, thus playing to the Iranian countryside where Iranians believe the ayatollahs’ lifestyles indicate an excess of power and money. In my opinion, Ahmadinejad’s attack on the ayatollahs is opportunistic. However, it does make it odd for his American detractors to say he is a conservative reactionary lined up with the ayatollahs.
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With almost 700 civilians killed by their drone program in Pakistan, the CIA’s method for identifying their targets comes to light.

Gareth Porter | AsiaTimes 

The United States Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) refusal to share with other agencies even the most basic data on the bombing attacks by remote-controlled unmanned Predator drones in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal region, combined with recent revelations that CIA operatives have been paying Pakistanis to identify the targets, suggests that managers of the drone attack programs have been using the total secrecy surrounding the program to hide abuses and high civilian casualties. 

Intelligence analysts have been unable to obtain either the list of military targets of the drone strikes or the actual results in terms of al-Qaeda or civilians killed, according to a Washington source familiar with internal discussion of the drone strike program.

The source insisted on not being identified because of the extreme sensitivity of the issue. 

“They can’t find out anything about the program,” the source told Inter Press Service (IPS). That has made it impossible for other government agencies to judge its real consequences, according to the source.

Since early 2009, Barack Obama administration officials have claimed that the predator attacks in Pakistan have killed nine of the 20 top al-Qaeda officials, but they have refused to disclose how many civilians have been killed in the strikes.

In April, Lahore newspaper The News published figures provided by Pakistani officials indicating that 687 civilians have been killed along with 14 al-Qaeda leaders in some 60 drone strikes since January 2008 - just over 50 civilians killed for every al-Qaeda leader.

A paper published last week by the influential pro-military Center for a New American Security (CNAS) criticizing the Obama administration’s use of drone attacks in Pakistan said US officials “vehemently dispute” the Pakistani figures but offers no further data on the program.

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AP | YahooNews.com

WASHINGTON – CIA Director Leon Panetta says former Vice President Dick Cheney’s criticism of the Obama administration’s approach to terrorism almost suggests “he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point.”

Panetta told The New Yorker for an article in its June 22 issue that Cheney “smells some blood in the water” on the issue of national security.

Cheney has said in several interviews that he thinks Obama is making the U.S. less safe. He has been critical of Obama for ordering the closure of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, halting enhanced interrogations of suspected terrorists and reversing other Bush administration initiatives he says helped to prevent attacks on the U.S.
Last month the former vice president offered a withering critique of Obama’s policies and a defense of the Bush administration on the same day that Obama made a major speech about national security.

Panetta said of Cheney’s remarks: “It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.”

Asked if he agreed with Panetta, Vice President Joe Biden told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he wouldn’t question the motive behind Cheney’s criticism.
“I think Dick Cheney’s judgment about how to secure America is faulty,” Biden said. “I think our judgment is correct.”

Sherwood Ross | GlobalResearch.ca

American liberals stand betrayed. Their new president, the one they sweated to elect—-a brilliant, charismatic leader with a professional background in constitutional law—has transmogrified himself from the champion who denounced in his campaign the illegalities of the Bush White House into a president bent on their perpetuation.

Liberals are stunned by Obama’s plan to “restart Bush-era military tribunals” for some Guantanamo detainees, reviving what the Associated Press pointed out, is “a fiercely disputed trial system he once denounced.”(May 15). Liberals are appalled by Obama’s May 21^st proposal to hold terrorism suspects in “prolonged detention” inside the U.S. without a trial. “Such detention,” Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) wrote him, “is a hallmark of abusive systems that we have historically criticized around the world.”

If liberals chaffed over Obama’s centrist cabinet choices, they were dismayed by his decision not to release photographs depicting the sadistic tortures the Bush Gang inflicted on prisoners during a so-called “War on Terror” that was nothing but terror itself. A typical reaction comes from Joe Kishore, writing on the World Socialist Website (May 22): “Whatever verbal warnings Obama may make about the erosion of democracy in the United States, the actions of his administration facilitate and escalate its breakdown.”

Obama’s latest policy reversals come as liberals are still reeling from his April 16^th speech to the CIA, ignoring its documented history of 60 years of overthrows and assassinations, and reassuring the Agency of its “right” to continue “covert activities,” as if such conduct was not prima facie illegality in the eyes of law-abiding nations.  Earlier, Obama’s pledge not to prosecute CIA torturers that followed orders likely brought relief to the throne room in Langley that is a throbbing heart of the Dark Side. Obama calls upon the nation to “look forward” as he ignores his presidential obligation to prosecute those who, like Bush and Cheney, trampled the Constitution when they ordered torture in violation of international laws that by treaty are America’s laws as well.

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NAFTALI BENDAVID and SIOBHAN GORMAN | WSJ.com

Speaker Claims Intelligence Officials Failed to Reveal Waterboarding Was Used; Spy Agency Denies Misleading Congress

The top congressional Democrat on Thursday accused the Central Intelligence Agency of deceiving her about the use of harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists.

The accusation pits House Speaker Nancy Pelosi against the CIA in a war of words over whether she was specifically told in September 2002 that waterboarding was being used on detainees. Republicans accuse her of being hypocritical for criticizing Bush-era interrogation techniques, and say she should have spoken out against them when she was first briefed if she opposed their use.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is making an explosive charge against the Central Intelligence Agency. She’s responding to accusations that she was fully briefed on harsh interrogation technniques like waterboarding.

Pelosi Says She Was Misled about Waterboarding At a contentious news conference Thursday, Mrs. Pelosi said that during the 2002 briefing, “we were told that waterboarding was not being used.” Mrs. Pelosi acknowledged that as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, she was briefed on Sept. 4, 2002, about waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that critics, including President Barack Obama, call torture. But she said CIA officials told her and other lawmakers only that the Justice Department had concluded the procedure was legal.

A CIA report released last week said that at the briefing, officials described the use of interrogation techniques on terrorism suspect Abu Zubaydah, who had been waterboarded 83 times the month before.
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Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, whose false tortured confession was used as basis for Bush’s war, has reportedly committed suicide…

Brad Friedman | BradBlog.com

British journalist and historian Andy Worthington, an expert and author on Guantanamo, reports that the man who had supplied a key false tie between Iraq and al-Qaeda — after being tortured in Egypt, where he had been rendered by the U.S. — has died in a Libyan prison. “Dead of suicide in his cell,” according to a Libyan newspaper.

Worthington has excellent coverage of the story tonight, which, he says, is “ablaze” in the Arabic media, but so far unreported in all but one English language outlet.

“This news resolves, in the grimmest way possible,” Worthington writes, “questions that have long been asked about the whereabouts of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, perhaps the most famous of ‘America’s Disappeared’ - prisoners seized in the ‘War on Terror,’ who were rendered not to Guantánamo but to secret prisons run by the CIA or to the custody of governments in third countries - often their own - where, it was presumed, they would never be seen or heard from again.”

The “emir” of a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, al-Libi “was one of hundreds of prisoners seized by Pakistani forces in December 2001, crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan. Most of these men ended up in Guantánamo after being handed over (or sold) to US forces by their Pakistani allies, but al-Libi was, notoriously, rendered to Egypt by the CIA to be tortured on behalf of the US government.”
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Mohamed Farag Bashmilah  | Alternet.org

From October 2003 until May 2005, I was illegally detained by the U.S. government and held in CIA-run “black sites” with no contact with the outside world. On May 5, 2005, without explanation, my American captors removed me from my cell and cuffed, hooded, and bundled me onto a plane that delivered me to Sana’a, Yemen. I was transferred into the custody of my own government, which held me — apparently at the behest of the United States — until March 27, 2006, when I was finally released, never once having faced any terrorism-related charges. Since my release, the U.S. government has never explained why I was detained and has blocked all attempts to find out more about my detention.

What I do know is that the Jordanian government — after torturing me for several days — handed me over to a U.S. “rendition team” in Amman, which then abducted me, forced me onto a plane, and flew me to Afghanistan. During this, and several other transfers between CIA prisons, I was subjected to a brutal and deeply humiliating “preparation” ritual. I was stripped naked, dressed in a diaper, shackled, blindfolded and hooded, and then boarded onto a waiting plane. I was forced into painful positions, often reeling from the blows and kicks of the men who had “prepared” me for flight.

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Bob Egelko | SFGate.com 

President Obama’s Justice Department signaled in a San Francisco courtroom Monday that the change in administrations has not changed the government’s position on secrecy and the rights of foreign prisoners - and that lawsuits by alleged victims of CIA kidnappings and torture must be dismissed on national security grounds.

“Judges shouldn’t play with fire,” Justice Department lawyer Douglas Letter told the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which is considering a suit accusing a San Jose company, Jeppesen Dataplan, of arranging so-called extraordinary rendition flights for the CIA.

Once the judges privately examine the government’s classified evidence, Letter said, “you will see that this case cannot be litigated.”

Letter said the Justice Department’s position, previously argued by the administration of former President George W. Bush, has been “thoroughly vetted with appropriate officials of the new administration.”

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Jeremy Gantz | RawStory.com

Two days after taking the helm of a country ready for change after eight years of George W. Bush, President Obama has allowed one controversial “War on Terror” tactic to remain in place: rendition.

Despite frequent condemnation of the practice around the world, rendition — the secret capture, transportation and detention of suspected terrorists to foreign prisons in countries that cooperate with the U.S. — remains in the CIA’s playbook, thanks to a Jan. 22 executive order issued by President Obama.

Other executive orders shuttered the CIA’s secret prisons and banned the harsh interrogation techniques that have been termed torture. And in his most widely noticed break with his predecessor, Obama signed an order to close Guantanamo Bay’s prison within one year.

But rendition will remain. Obama and his administration appear to believe that the rendition program was one piece of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard, the Los Angeles Times reported.

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Pete Winn | CNSNews.com

Defense Secretary Robert Gates predicts the U.S. will be in Afghanistan for years to come.

In an article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Gates laid out the state of the U.S. military — and how well it is poised to face the future.

Gates, who came to his post under Bush and was asked to stay by Obama, said the ability of the United States to deal with future threats will depend on how it performs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“To be blunt, to fail — or to be seen to fail — in either Iraq or Afghanistan would be a disastrous blow to U.S. credibility, both among friends and allies and among potential adversaries,” Gates wrote.

Gates said the number of U.S. combat units in Iraq will decline over time – “as it was going to do no matter who was elected president in November,” he added.

“Still, there will continue to be some kind of U.S. advisory and counterterrorism effort in Iraq for years to come,” he said.
In Afghanistan, however, troop levels will likely continue to increase in the year ahead.

“Afghanistan in many ways poses an even more complex and difficult long-term challenge than Iraq — one that, despite a large international effort, will require a significant U.S. military and economic commitment for some time,” the defense secretary and former CIA head wrote.
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