The BBC video here was aired two days before Russia intervened to stop Georgia’s ethnic cleansing operation in South Ossetia. It needs to be viewed by Bush, Condi, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, little Billy Kristol and all the neocons and their associated slavering bloggers and newspaper columnists calling for war against Russia, a nation bristling with thermonuclear weapons and an increasing desire to use the tactical variety of nukes against the United States, or rather its servile little clients such as Poland that are installing U.S. missile “defense systems” on Russia’s borders.

Read the rest of this entry »

video from ExpandedBooks.com

David Edwards and Muriel Kane | RawStory.com

Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, is worried about the giant mercenary firm’s latest foray into private intelligence. “They’re marketing their services to not only foreign governments, but to Fortune 500 corporations,” he recently told an interviewer.

The forthcoming paperback edition of Scahill’s book on Blackwater, which appeared in hardcover in February 2007, will include 100 pages of new material, including a discussion of last September’s shooting spree in Baghdad by Blackwater operatives — which killed 17 Iraqi civilians but for which nobody has ever been charged.

“This is a company that has been accused of murdering Iraqi civilians,” Scahill pointed out, “of shooting the bodyguard to the Iraqi vice-president, of causing blowback attacks on United States troops, of hurting the morale of the United States military — that has cost United States taxpayers over a billion dollars for its operations in Iraq.”

However, Scahill’s greatest concern at present appears to be Blackwater’s venture into the private intelligence business.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kurt Nimmo | Infowars.com 

So disconnected from reality is the average Faux News watcher, the government can kill al-Qaeda terrorists over and over and he does not notice.

Abu Khabab al-Masri, aka Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar, described as al-Qaeda’s chemical and biological weapons expert, was reportedly killed on July 29 by a CIA drone on the Afghan border. He was said to have a $5 million bounty on his head. “Western diplomats said it would be a boost to morale in the Bush administration, struggling with mounting troop casualties in Afghanistan and a revival of militant attacks in Iraq,” reports the Financial Times

It’s all about “morale,” or rather propaganda, and has nothing to do with reality. It’s about sending a message to Pakistan’s new government. The supposed elimination of al-Masri was perfectly timed to coincide with a meeting between Bush and Pakistani prime minister Yousaf Raza Gillani.

In fact, al-Masri’s death is a recycled bit of propaganda. On January 18, 2006, ABC News reported “that Pakistani officials now believe that al Qaeda’s master bomb maker and chemical weapons expert was one of the men killed in last week’s U.S. missile attack in eastern Pakistan….

Read the rest of this entry »

MASSIMO CALABRESI | Time.com

Which is closer to dying: Osama bin Laden or the CIA’s effort to catch him? Nothing has characterized the fruitlessness of the hunt for the al-Qaeda leader so much as the recurrent — and mostly inaccurate — reports that he is seriously ailing, or even at death’s door. In 2002, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said bin Laden had kidney disease, and that he had required a dialysis machine when he lived in Afghanistan. That same year, the FBI’s top counterterrorism official, Dale Watson, said, “I personally think he is probably not with us anymore.” Since then, of course, bin Laden has appeared on multiple videos looking healthier than ever.

Now the CIA has produced a report saying that bin Laden has long-term kidney disease and may have only months to live, two U.S. officials familiar with the report told TIME. The agency ostensibly managed to get the names of some of the medications bin Laden is taking. One U.S. official familiar with the report, which came out between six and nine months ago, says it concluded, “Based on his current pharmaceutical intake, [we] would expect that he has no more than six to 18 months to live and impending kidney failure.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran.

Seymour Hersh | NewYorker.com

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Froomkin | WashingtonPost.com

The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability.

In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees.” He called the abuse “systemic and illegal.” And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement.

Now, in a preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of former detainees, Taguba adds an epilogue to his own investigation.

The new report, he writes, “tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individual’s lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.

Read the rest of this entry »

Rob Harris | MANCHESTER, England (AP) — A city police chief who led an investigation into charges that Britain cooperated with secret CIA flights to transport terrorism suspects without formal proceedings has been found dead, his deputy said Tuesday.

Manchester Chief Constable Michael Todd, 50, was found dead in Snowdonia, about 240 miles northwest of London, Deputy Chief Constable Dave Whatton said. He had been missing since going out for a walk Monday during his day off.

Whatton said the body, which was found Tuesday afternoon, had not yet been formally identified but he believed it was Todd.

He said a coroner’s inquest would investigate the cause of death and did not give any further details.

Todd was elected vice president of the Association of Chief Police Officers of England and Wales in 2006, according to a biography on his Web site.

The association gave him the task of looking into accusations that Britain allowed the CIA to use the country’s airports to fly terrorism suspects to other countries without any extradition hearings, a clandestine procedure known as “extraordinary rendition.”

Todd’s investigation concluded last June that there was no evidence to back the claim. Last month, however, Britain admitted one of its remote outposts in the Indian Ocean had twice been used by the United States as a refueling stop for the secret transfer of two terrorism suspects.

Evidence in Damascus car bombing points to Israel, says Bruce Riedel, former advisor to three US presidents on Middle Eastern affairs. ‘This proves Israel has infiltrated Hizbullah,’ he notes, adding that Nasrallah has genuine reason for concernYitzhak Benhorin | YNetNEws.com

WASHINGTON – While Israel has formally refuted allegations it was involved in theassassination of Hizbullah ’operations officer’ Imad Mugniyah in Damascus on Tuesday, former CIA official Bruce Riedel says all signs seem to indicate the Mossad was behind the killing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Why Were the 9/11 Tapes Destroyed?

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS |CounterPunch.org

Many Americans are content with the 9/11 Commission Report, but the two chairmen of the commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton are not. Neither was commission member Max Cleland, a US Senator who resigned from the 9/11 Commission, telling the Boston Globe (November 13, 2003): “This investigation is now compromised.” Even former FBI director Louis Freeh wrote in the Wall Street Journal (Nov. 17, 2005) that there are inaccuracies in the commission’s report and “questions that need answers.”

Both Kean and Hamilton have twice stated publicly, once in their 2006 book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, and again in the January 2, 2008, New York Times, that there are inaccuracies in their report and unanswered–or mis-answered–questions.

On the second day of this new year, Kean and Hamilton accused the CIA of obstructing their investigation: “What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the President, to investigate one of the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.”

In their book, Kean and Hamilton wrote that they were unable to obtain “access to star witnesses in custody who were the only possible source for inside information about the 9/11 plot.”

The only information the commission was permitted to have about what was learned from interrogations of alleged plot ringleaders, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, came from “thirdhand” sources. The commission was not permitted to question the alleged plotters in custody or even to meet with those who interrogated the alleged plotters. Consequently, write Kean and Hamilton, “We had no way of evaluating the credibility of detainee information” that was fed to them by third party hands. “How could we tell if someone such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was telling us the truth?”

The fact that video tapes of the interrogations existed was kept secret from the 9/11 Commission.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Philip Giraldi | The American Conservative

FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her secrets.

Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistleblower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington’s highest levels—sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Edmonds’s account is full of dates, places, and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani, and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators.

But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shrouded Edmonds’s case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances. According to the Department of Justice, such an investigation “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Luke Ryland | DissidentVoice.com 

In the last few weeks, London Times has run a series of articles about the so-called ‘Sibel Edmonds case’: (For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets,’ FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft‘ and ‘Tip-off thwarted nuclear spy ring probe‘)

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds stumbled into a world of espionage, nuclear black market, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and corruption at the highest levels of the US government.

I interviewed Sibel on Sunday regarding the current investigation and reporting by the Times, the failures of the US media, and last week’s decision by the Bush administration to legalize the sale of nuclear technology to Turkey, in an apparent effort to exonerate prior criminal activity by officials in his administration.

Sibel also has some urgent ‘action items’ so that we can stop these dangerous nuclear proliferation activities. I urge you to act on her suggestions.

Read the rest of this entry »

Who is stealing our nuclear secrets – and why are they being shielded by the authorities? 

Justin Raimondo | antiwar.com  

The Valerie Plame case is, by journalistic standards, ancient history, and naturally any follow-up on a once-important story is considered bad form. Yet there is an interesting – and rather scary – new twist to the narrative. It turns out that Scooter Libby and friends weren’t the first to “out” CIA agent Plame, whose alleged employer, a company known as Brewster Jennings, was really a cover for a CIA unit investigating nuclear proliferation issues.

The London Times reveals that a former top U.S. State Department official tipped off Turkish agents about Brewster Jennings’ CIA connection, according to Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator assigned to produce English-language transcripts of intercepted conversations of Turkish targets – in this case recordings of Turkish embassy officials and a top State Department official discussing, among other things, Brewster Jennings’ relationship to the CIA.

As the Times reports, the recordings were made “between the summer and autumn of 2001. At that time, foreign agents were actively attempting to acquire the West’s nuclear secrets and technology. Among the buyers were Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s intelligence agency, which was working with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the ‘father of the Islamic bomb,’ who in turn was selling nuclear technology to rogue states such as Libya.”

Read the rest of this entry »

By Chalmers Johnson I have some personal knowledge of Congressmen like Charlie Wilson (Democrat - 2nd District, Texas, 1973-1996) because, for close to 20 years, my representative in the 50th Congressional District of California was Republican Randy “Duke” Cunningham, now serving an eight-and-a-half year prison sentence for soliciting and receiving bribes from defense contractors. Wilson and Cunningham held exactly the same plummy committee assignments in the House of Representatives - the Defense Appropriations Sub-committee plus the Intelligence Oversight Committee - from which they could dole out large sums of public money with little or no input from their colleagues or constituents. Both men flagrantly abused their positions - but with radically different consequences. Cunningham went to jail because he was too stupid to know how to game the system - retire and become a lobbyist - whereas Wilson received the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Clandestine Service’s first “honored colleague”award ever given to an outsider and went on to become a US$360,000 per annum lobbyist for Pakistan.  Read the rest of this entry »

DePauw University

 January 2, 2008, Greencastle, Ind. - Writing in today’s New York Times, 9/11 Commission co-chairs Lee H. Hamilton and Thomas H. Kean state, “the 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.” Hamilton is a 1952 graduate of DePauw University. (photo, l-r, Kean and Hamilton on NBC’s Meet the Press in December 2005) Read the rest of this entry »

http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/2008/01/justice-department-appoints-insider-to.html
After the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission said that the CIA (and the White House) “obstructed our investigation”, attorney general Mukaseyappointed a prosecutor to conduct a criminal probe.Sounds good, right?Well, the prosecutor: 

• “will not serve as a special prosecutor such as Patrick Fitzgerald, who operated autonomously” (AP)

• There’s nothing really “outside” about [prosecutor] John Dunham. He’s a career DOJ prosecutor, the number two official in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Connecticut. . . .” (former DOJ official Marty Lederman, )

• The prosecutor “will report to the deputy attorney general”, acting Deputy attorney general Craig Morford (Washington Post)

• The prosecutor will lack independence, contrary to the Justice Department’s own regulations:
• 
  

“While I certainly agree that these matters warrant an immediate criminal investigation, it is disappointing that the Attorney General has stepped outside the Justice Department’s own regulations and declined to appoint a more independent special counsel in this matter. . . . 

The Justice Department’s record over the past seven years of sweeping the administration’s misconduct under the rug has left the American public with little confidence in the administration’s ability to investigate itself. Nothing less than a special counsel with a full investigative mandate will meet the tests of independence, transparency and completeness. Appointment of a special counsel will allow our nation to begin to restore our credibility and moral standing on these issues.” (House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers)

Bottom line: Just another whitewash.

Agency Defends Its Role as Information Provider in Commission’s Investigation of Terrorist Plots
By Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Former members and staffers of the 9/11 Commission have concluded that the CIA withheld videotapes of harsh interrogation sessions even after specific and “very detailed” requests about the two prisoners whose tapes were later destroyed, according to a review of classified material by the panel.

A seven-page report for former commission members by the panel’s former executive director, Philip Zelikow, says the group made broad initial requests for intelligence information from interrogations, “including repeated requests for very detailed information” about the interrogations and how they were carried out.

The commission also made specific inquiries about the interrogations of suspected al-Qaeda operatives Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, commonly known as Abu Zubaida, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the report says. The CIA revealed earlier this month that tapes of those prisoners’ interrogations were destroyed in 2005.
Read the rest of this entry »

By MARK MAZZETTI/New York Times
Published: December 22, 2007

WASHINGTON — A review of classified documents by former members of the Sept. 11 commission shows that the panel made repeated and detailed requests to the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 and 2004 for documents and other information about the interrogation of operatives of Al Qaeda, and were told by a top C.I.A. official that the agency had “produced or made available for review” everything that had been requested.

The review was conducted earlier this month after the disclosure that in November 2005, the C.I.A. destroyed videotapes documenting the interrogations of two Qaeda operatives.

A seven-page memorandum prepared by Philip D. Zelikow, the panel’s former executive director, concluded that “further investigation is needed” to determine whether the C.I.A.’s withholding of the tapes from the commission violated federal law.

In interviews this week, the two chairmen of the commission, Lee H. Hamilton and Thomas H. Kean, said their reading of the report had convinced them that the agency had made a conscious decision to impede the Sept. 11 commission’s inquiry.
Read the rest of this entry »

By Steve Benen/TalkingPointsMemo.com
The CIA withheld information about its interrogation videos from quite a few people, but we can include the 9/11 Commission among those who are annoyed about having been misled.

[I]n separate interviews on Friday, the co-chairmen, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, said they had made clear in hours of negotiations and discussions with the C.I.A., as well as in written requests, that they wanted all material connected to the interrogations of Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody in order to get a complete understanding of the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks for their 2004 report. […]

“The C.I.A. certainly knew of our interest in getting all the information we could on the detainees, and they never indicated to us there were any videotapes,” Mr. Hamilton said. “Did they obstruct our inquiry? The answer is clearly yes. Whether that amounts to a crime, others will have to judge.”

Mr. Kean said, “I’m upset that they didn’t tell us the truth.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Good Morning America gets more than it bargained for in a feature on young people in Pakistan
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Tuesday, Dec 4, 2007

An ABC news piece that ran yesterday morning attracted attention after four Pakistanis who were being interviewed about the attitudes and life of young people in Pakistan declared Osama Bin Laden to be a creation of western intelligence and stressed that Islamic extremist attitudes towards the west were virtually non existent in their country before 9/11.
Read the rest of this entry »