CIA – praag.org

America’s infrastructure crisis: Israel, Iran and the growing pressure on Washington

America’s nationwide aviation shutdown has exposed serious weaknesses in its ageing infrastructure. Meanwhile, Israel’s Mossad chief has travelled to Washington as Benjamin Netanyahu presses Donald Trump to resume military action against Iran.

The nationwide grounding of US flights has exposed serious weaknesses in America’s ageing infrastructure, while a high-level visit by Israel’s Mossad chief to Washington has highlighted the growing pressure on Donald Trump to resume military action against Iran.

The United States experienced one of its most significant aviation disruptions in decades on Friday, November 13, when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered a nationwide ground stop following a breakdown in its air traffic communications network.

The shutdown lasted almost five hours and affected more than 20,000 flights. Seventeen of the FAA’s 22 en-route air traffic control centres experienced communications problems, disrupting the systems used to coordinate aircraft movements and radar information.

Although flights subsequently resumed, the incident exposed the vulnerability of critical American infrastructure and raised fresh questions about the country’s ability to maintain and modernise essential technological systems.

An ageing system brought to a standstill

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy attributed the disruption to a technical failure during routine maintenance work carried out by L3Harris, a longstanding contractor responsible for operating the FAA’s telecommunications network.

The work involved replacing ageing copper telecommunications lines with fibre-optic connections. According to Duffy, a router associated with the upgrade began generating an extraordinary number of connection attempts, overwhelming other routers in the network.

Officials reported more than 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds.

The resulting instability affected communications between air traffic controllers and aircraft, as well as radar feeds. The FAA consequently decided to ground departing flights nationwide as a precautionary measure.

Duffy said investigators were examining whether the incident resulted from human error, faulty installation or defective equipment. No definitive technical cause had yet been established.

The administration also stated that there was no indication of a cyberattack or deliberate hostile action.

The incident nevertheless highlighted a wider problem: parts of America’s air traffic control infrastructure remain dependent on equipment and telecommunications systems that are decades old.

Congress has already approved substantial funding for modernisation, but the transition has been slow and technically complicated.

The episode raises questions about the resilience of infrastructure that is essential not only to commercial aviation but also to the functioning of the world’s largest economy.

Netanyahu presses Trump over Iran

While Washington was dealing with the aviation crisis, another development was unfolding in the relationship between the United States and Israel.

President Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu

According to a report by Axios on November 13, Mossad director Roman Gofman was in Washington for discussions with senior Trump administration officials concerning the war with Iran.

Gofman was reportedly scheduled to meet CIA director John Ratcliffe and was also expected to travel to Miami for discussions with White House envoy Steve Witkoff.

The visit coincided with renewed pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the United States to resume military operations against Iran.

Trump has so far resisted this pressure, although his position on the conflict has fluctuated. Reports have described disagreements over whether to continue diplomatic efforts or return to a more extensive military campaign.

The Israeli government considers Iran’s military and nuclear capabilities an existential security concern. Washington, meanwhile, must weigh the consequences of renewed hostilities, including the possibility of a wider regional conflict, disruption to energy markets and further American military commitments.

The presence of the Mossad director in Washington therefore illustrates the extent to which intelligence and military cooperation form part of the relationship between the two countries.

It also raises an important question about the degree of influence Israel exercises over American strategic decision-making.

Intelligence cooperation and political pressure

The relationship between American and Israeli intelligence agencies has traditionally been close. Cooperation between the CIA and Mossad covers a range of regional security issues, including Iran, counterterrorism and intelligence gathering.

However, cooperation does not necessarily imply agreement over every strategic decision.

The reported Washington visit comes at a particularly sensitive moment. Israel wants to prevent Iran from consolidating its regional military position, while the Trump administration faces the economic and political consequences of prolonging a costly conflict.

The question is whether American foreign policy is being determined primarily by Washington’s assessment of its own national interests or increasingly by the strategic priorities of a close regional ally.

This is a legitimate subject for public debate, particularly when decisions about war and peace are involved.

There have also been allegations and speculation in political circles about possible intelligence leverage, blackmail and pressure exerted on American political leaders. However, no independently verified evidence has established that Mossad is blackmailing Trump or that Israeli intelligence has been responsible for the recent American infrastructure disruptions.

Such allegations should not be confused with the documented diplomatic and political pressure surrounding the Iran conflict.

Is America becoming more vulnerable?

The FAA incident and the renewed diplomatic activity surrounding Iran are separate developments. There is currently no evidence connecting the aviation shutdown to Israel, Mossad or the conflict in the Middle East.

Nevertheless, both events illustrate different aspects of the challenges confronting the United States.

On the domestic front, an advanced industrial economy remains dependent on ageing infrastructure that can be disrupted by relatively isolated technical failures.

On the international front, Washington faces competing strategic priorities and pressure from allies whose regional objectives do not necessarily coincide with American interests.

The United States possesses enormous military, technological and economic resources. Yet the ability to project power abroad ultimately depends on the reliability of institutions and infrastructure at home.

The question facing Washington is therefore not simply whether it should resume military action against Iran. It is whether American foreign policy can remain independent, coherent and sustainable while the country struggles to modernise the systems upon which its own security and prosperity depend.

For a country that has long presented itself as the guarantor of international stability, these are questions that cannot easily be ignored.

PRAAG — November 15, 2026

Destroying Libya for profit

While advising Mrs. Clinton on Libya, Mr. Sydney Blumenthal, who had been barred from a State Department job by aides to President Obama, was employed by her family’s philanthropy, the Clinton Foundation, to help with research, “message guidance” and the planning of commemorative events, according to foundation officials.

During the same period, he also worked on and off as a paid consultant to Media Matters and American Bridge, organizations that helped lay the groundwork for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

Much of the Libya “intelligence” that Mr. Blumenthal passed on to Mrs. Clinton appears to have come from a group of business associates he was advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government.

The venture, which was ultimately unsuccessful, involved other Clinton friends, a private military contractor and one former C.I.A. spy seeking to get in on the “ground floor” of the new Libyan economy.

The projects — creating floating hospitals to treat Libya’s war wounded and temporary housing for displaced people, and building schools — would have required State Department permits, but foundered before the business partners could seek official approval.

It is not clear whether Mrs. Clinton or the State Department knew of Mr. Blumenthal’s interest in pursuing business in Libya; a State Department spokesman declined to say. Many aspects of Mr. Blumenthal’s involvement in the planned Libyan venture remain unclear. He declined repeated requests to discuss it.

But interviews with his associates and a review of previously unreported correspondence suggest that — once again — it may be difficult to determine where one of Mr. Blumenthal’s jobs ended and another began.

A series of memos from Mr. Blumenthal — who was not an employee of the State Department — to Mrs. Clinton about events unfolding in Libya before and after the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, have been obtained by The New York Times.

Mrs. Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic officials in Libya and Washington and at times asking them to respond. Mrs. Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.

Source: NYT

Snowden wants asylum in Switzerland

US National Security Agency (NSA) leaker Edward Snowden, who has been living in Russia since mid-2013, on Friday made a public appeal for asylum in Switzerland, where he said he once worked under diplomatic cover for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

“I would love to return to Switzerland, some of my favourite memories are from Geneva. It’s a wonderful place,” he told a Moscow-Geneva videoconference. “I do think Switzerland would be a sort of great political option because it has a history of neutrality.”

US prosecutors accuse Snowden of leaking information on US National Security Agency (NSA) secret surveillance programs to mainstream media.

In 2013, he was granted a temporary asylum in Russia after spending more than a month in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.

In August 2014, as the asylum expired, Snowden received a three-year residency permit.

CIA sting spurs reassesment of Iran’s nuclear

Details of a CIA sting emerging from a court case in the U.S. may prompt United Nations monitors to reassess some evidence related to Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons work, two western diplomats said.

International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in Vienna will soon have to review intelligence they received about Iran as a result of the revelations, said the two diplomats who are familiar with the IAEA’s Iran file and asked not to be named because the details are confidential. The CIA passed doctored blueprints for nuclear-weapon components to Iran in February 2000, trial documents have shown.

“This story suggests a possibility that hostile intelligence agencies could decide to plant a ‘smoking gun’ in Iran for the IAEA to find,” said Peter Jenkins, the U.K.’s former envoy to the Vienna-based agency. “That looks like a big problem.”

The UN agency is charged with deciding whether the Iranian government has been trying to develop nuclear weapons and its ruling may determine whether international sanctions against the country are lifted. While Iranian officials have consistently accused the IAEA of basing its case on forged documents, the agency has never acknowledged receiving tampered evidence.

The CIA documents were filed as evidence to an Alexandria, Virginia court on Jan. 14 for the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, who was convicted of leaking classified information about operations against Iran. Sterling worked on a CIA project aimed at misleading Iranian scientists by feeding modified designs for nuclear-weapons components to the country’s IAEA mission in Austria.

“The goal is to plant this substantial piece of deception information on the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, sending them down blind alleys, wasting their time and money,” according to a May 1997 cable submitted to the court.

The CIA sting shows the kind of tactics that the U.S. and its allies have used against Iran, according to Dan Joyner, a law professor at the University of Alabama.

“The falsification of nuclear-related documents is a very real part of such states’ efforts to frustrate Iran’s nuclear program,” said Joyner, who has written extensively on nuclear proliferation risks. “This revelation highlights the dangers of reliance by the IAEA upon evidence concerning Iran provided to it by third party states whose political agendas are antithetical to Iran.”

Source: Bloomberg

Who controls the weather?

The CIA, ever the innovators, have decided it would be quite useful to know how to control the weather.

A prominent climate scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey has reported receiving a strange phone call from CIA consultants who wanted to know if hostile countries could be triggering floods or drought in the United States.

Professor Alan Robock said: “Consultants working for the CIA rang and said we’d like to know, if someone is controlling the world’s climate would we know about it?”

Robock said he told the mysterious callers that any attempts to control another country’s weather on a large scale would be detectable, which probably led to some disappointed sighs over in Langley—because of course, the real query wasn’t that difficult to decipher:

“Of course they were also asking—if we control someone else’s climate would they then know about it?” Robock said.

Now, while this all does sound a bit like a science fiction movie, the Daily Mail reports that Robock has in fact warned about the weaponization of weather in the past.

He told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference in San Jose, that during the Vietnam War, American scientists made attempts to increase rainfall by spraying particles into the clouds which would hamper the progress of the enemy.

In Cuba, he said, the CIA seeded clouds to “make it rain and ruin the sugar harvest”.

“I’d learned of lots of other things the CIA had done that haven’t followed the rules and that wasn’t how I wanted my tax money spent,” he said.

Robock said any research into geoengineering should be “open and international” to remove any ability to use it for “hostile purposes”.

Interestingly, the CIA is reported to have partly-funded a recent National Academy of Sciences report on the different approaches to tackling climate change. The report looked at ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and examined ways to reflect sunlight in order to manually cool the earth.

It concluded that the risks of such methods are “not well understood” and that extensive research would be needed to determine if they could become viable strategies in the future.

Professor Robock was speaking at the launch of a new report looking into the possibilities of addressing climate change by increasing the Earth’s reflectivity, a process known as albedo modification, which was largely funded by the CIA.

However the experts agreed that most plans were ‘irrational and irresponsible’ and could trigger war. They said cutting greenhouse gases was a far safer way of tackling climate change.

“Albedo modification approaches show some evidence of being effective at temporarily cooling the planet, but at a currently unknown environmental price.

“That scientists are even considering technological interventions should be a wake-up call that we need to do more now to reduce emissions, which is the most effective, least risky way to combat climate change,” said Maria McNutt, head of the National Research Council committee which compiled the report.

The committee has also called for a rapid response team to study the effects of volcano eruptions on global weather

Source: Russia Insider

FAZ editor regrets planted stories to foment war

Becoming the first credentialed, well-known media insider to step forward and state publicly that he was secretly a “propagandist,” an editor of a major German daily has said that he personally planted stories for the CIA.

Saying he believes a medical condition gives him only a few years to live, and that he is filled with remorse, Dr. Udo Ulfkotte, the editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest newspapers, said in an interview that he accepted news stories written and given to him by the CIA and published them under his own name. Ulfkotte said the aim of much of the deception was to drive nations toward war.

Dr. Ulfkotte says the corruption of journalists and major news outlets by the CIA is routine, accepted, and widespread in the western media, and that journalists who do not comply either cannot get jobs at any news organization, or find their careers cut short.

Dr. Ulfkotte is the author of a book currently available only in German, “Bought Journalists” (Kopp 2014.) Aged 55, he was also once an advisor to the government of German Chancellor Helmet Kohl.

The book has become a bestseller in Germany but, in a bizarre twist which Ulfkotte says characterizes the disconnect caused by CIA control of the western media, the book cannot be reported on.

Ulfkotte says:

“No German mainstream journalist is allowed to report about [my] book. Otherwise he or she will be sacked. So we have a bestseller now that no German journalist is allowed to write or talk about.”

Among the stories Ulfkotte says he was ordered to plant in his newspaper over the years was a story that Libyan President Moammar Gaddafi was building poison gas factories in 2011.

Ulfkotte says he is better positioned to come forward than many journalists because he does not have children who could be threatened. Ulfkotte told the Russian newspaper Russian Insider (RI):

“When I told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Ulfkotte’s employer) that I would publish the book, their lawyers sent me a letter threatening with all legal consequences if I would publish any names or secrets – but I don’t mind. You see, I don’t have children to take care of. And you must know I was severely injured during the gas attack I witnessed in Iran in 1988. I’m the sole German survivor from a German poison gas attack. I’m still suffering from this. I’ve had three heart attacks. I don’t expect to live for more than a few years.”

Ulfkotte says that remorse of having “lied” to mass audiences over the years drove him to come forward. He told RI that he was: “taught to lie, to betray and not to tell the truth to the public.”

Ulfkotte says:

“I’m ashamed I was part of it. Unfortunately I cannot reverse this.”

Among the admissions that Ulfkotte makes in the interview are putting his own name to articles completely written by intelligence agencies. He said:

“I ended up publishing articles under my own name written by agents of the CIA and other intelligence services, especially the German secret service.”

Ulfkotte detailed the pattern of cajolery and outright bribery used by the CIA and other US-allied intelligence agencies, for the purpose of advancing political agendas.

“Once you’re connected, you make friends with selected Americans. You think they are your friends and you start cooperating. They work on your ego, make you feel like you’re important. And one day one of them will ask you ‘Will you do me this favor’…”

Ulfkotte noted that a journalists on international press trips paid for by organizations close to the government are unlikely to submit a storyline not favorable to the sponsor. He fears that politicians are actively driving the world towards war.

“It is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do, and have done in the past, because they are bribed to betray the people not only in Germany, all over Europe. … I am very fearful of a new war in Europe, and I don’t like to have this situation again, because war is never coming from itself, there is always people who push for war, and this is not only politicians, it is journalists too. … We have betrayed our readers, just to push for war. … I don’t want this anymore, I’m fed up with this propaganda. We live in a banana republic, and not in a democratic country where we have press freedom…”

In his book “The CIA and the Media,” Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein quotes William B. Bader, former CIA intelligence officer, in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Baeder said:

“There is quite an incredible spread of relationships. You don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are [Central Intelligence] Agency people at the management level.”

Bernstein writes:

“The Agency’s relationship with the Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about ten CIA employees were provided Times cover under arrangements approved by the newspaper’s late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements were part of a general Times policy—set by Sulzberger—to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible.”

Ulfkotte was on the staff of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation from 1999 to 2003, according to his Wikipedia entry. He won the civic prize from the Annette Barthelt Foundation in 2003.

Thousand of German spies at risk after leak

Thousands of German spies at risk after double-agent stole list of identities

Thousands of German spies posted around the world could be at risk after it emerged that a double agent unmasked last summer stole a list of their real identities and may have sold it.

The double agent, who has been identified only as Markus R under strict German privacy laws, obtained a top secret list of the real names, aliases and locations of 3,500 German intelligence officers posted abroad, according to a report in Bild newspaper.

But German intelligence sources sought to downplay the incident, briefing that the list in question was out of date and contained far fewer than 3,500 names, the DPA news agency reported.

The arrest of Markus R last summer caused a major diplomatic rift between Germany and the US, after it emerged he had acted as a double agent for the CIA.

He had also approached Russian intelligence and offered to sell them secret information, and there are fears he may have passed the list of German spies’ names to a hostile foreign agency.

It was reported earlier this week that prosecutors now believe the case of Markus R is more serious than previously thought.

He was discovered after an email he sent the Russian Embassy in Berlin offering to sell secrets in exchange for cash was intercepted, and German investigators were stunned when he confessed he had been spying for the Americans.

Prosecutors now believe he was recruited by the CIA a year and a half earlier than he has admitted, in 2010, and was paid €75,000 for passing secrets over a period of four years, according to Spiegel magazine.

Source: The Telegraph

CIA instructs operatives to circumvent EU security

Wikileaks has released two classified documents instructing CIA operatives how best to circumvent global security systems in international airports, including those of the EU, while on undercover missions.

The first of the documents, dated September 2011, advises undercover operatives how to act during a secondary airport screening. Secondary screenings pose a risk to an agent’s cover by focusing “significant scrutiny” on an operative via thorough searches and detailed questioning.

The manual stresses the importance of having a “consistent, well-rehearsed, and plausible cover,” in addition to cultivating a fake online presence to throw interrogators off track.

Meanwhile, the second document, dated January 2012, presents a detailed overview of EU Schengen Border Control procedures.

The overview outlines the various electronic security measures, including the Schengen Information System (SIS) and the European fingerprint database EURODAC, used by border control and the dangers these measures may pose to agents on clandestine missions.

WikiLeaks’ сhief editor Julian Assange explains that these documents show that “under the Obama administration the CIA is still intent on infiltrating European Union borders and conducting clandestine operations in EU member states.”

The document also demonstrates the CIA’s increasing concern over the risks to operatives’ assumed identities posed by biometric databases—the very same systems the US pushed for after 9/11.

On Friday, WikiLeaks released a CIA report suggesting that though targeted killing programs, including drone strikes, may be effective in some cases, there is also a risk that the programs may backfire. For example, targeted strikes may prompt local populations to sympathize with insurgents or further radicalize remaining militants.

Will John Brennan sink the Obama?

Just hours before he publicly responded last week to the Senate Intelligence Committee report accusing the Central Intelligence Agency of torture and deceit, John O. Brennan, the CIA’s director, stopped by the White House to meet with President Obama.

Ostensibly, he was there for an intelligence briefing. But the messages delivered later that day by the White House and Brennan were synchronized, even down to similar wording, and the larger import of the well-timed visit was hardly a classified secret: After six years of partnership, the president was standing by the embattled spy chief even as fellow Democrats called for his resignation.

Brennan, 59, who spent much of his career as an Arabic-speaking CIA officer, has been a central figure in Mr. Obama’s world since the beginning of his presidency.

Irritated advisers to Obama believe Brennan made a bad situation worse by battling Democrats on the committee over the torture report during the past year. Some who considered Brennan the president’s heat shield against the agency when he worked in the White House now worry that since being appointed director, he has “gone native,” as they put it.

Several Obama advisers said privately that Brennan made a mistake by letting the situation grow so toxic.

But in the 67 years since the CIA was founded, few presidents have had as close a bond with their intelligence chiefs as Obama has forged with Brennan. It is a relationship that has shaped the policy and politics of the debate over the nation’s war with terrorist organizations, as well as the agency’s own struggle to balance security and liberty.

And the result is a president who denounces torture but not the people accused of inflicting it.

“He was a pretty good analyst. He was a bright guy,” said a former CIA officer of Brennan. “But he always had a reputation of sucking up to power and moving in the direction of power and not being able to exercise any independence.”

Brennan managed “kill lists” for drone strikes and could order air attacks in Yemen without getting further approval from the president. “Brennan’s control over his area was as complete as anyone’s control over anything in the White House,” another former senior official said.

He came to be identified with the escalation of America’s secret war in Yemen and the successful raid that killed Osama bin Laden, but he was also an ally of those resisting more hawkish policies in Afghanistan and Libya, and advocated freeing wrongly held detainees at Guantánamo.

Last week Brennan became the agency’s prime defender, much to the chagrin of some of the president’s allies.

Source: NYT

Put Blair and Straw on trial for torture

By Craig Murray

Former British Ambassador To Uzbekistan

In the summer of 2004, I warned Tony Blair’s Foreign Office that Britain was using intelligence material which had been obtained by the CIA under torture. Two months later I was sacked as the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan on the orders of Downing Street, bringing to an end my 20-year diplomatic career.

When I then went public with the news that Uzbek territory was part of a global CIA torture programme, I was dismissed as a fantasist by Mr Blair’s henchmen. Now finally, a decade later, I have been vindicated by last week’s shocking Senate Intelligence Committee report.

Over 500 pages it details the CIA’s brutal abuse of Al Qaeda suspects, who were flown around the world to be tortured in a network of secret prisons. One of these was in Uzbekistan, where the US had an air base.

The CIA programme included both torture they conducted themselves and torture conducted for them by allies. Shamefully, the torture-by-proxy details remain classified to protect America’s gruesome ‘allies’.

The CIA were flying people to Uzbekistan to be tortured, usually via their secret prison at Szymany in Poland. The Uzbeks were doing the actual torture, sometimes with CIA members in the room.

Aside from the moral dimension, the Senate report confirmed my repeated view that intelligence gleaned from torture is useless. When I was Ambassador, one secret file I was sent contained CIA information which named a member of Al Qaeda. The man turned out to be a Jehovah’s Witness.

In 2003, I attended a meeting at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), where I was told by officials that it was not illegal for us to use intelligence from torture as long as we did not carry out the torture ourselves. I was also told at the meeting that this intelligence was ‘useful’ – and that policy came directly from the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

I have a copy of a note signed by the Foreign Secretary’s private secretary which says that Mr Straw had seen the minutes of the meeting and thought it had been ‘handled well’.

I was specifically told by a very senior FCO manager that there was a deliberate policy of not writing down anything about this because there should not be evidence of the policy.

Meanwhile, the FCO was churning out speeches which claimed we opposed it. On July 22, 2004, I sent that telegram to Mr Straw complaining about the fact we were using intelligence material obtained under torture and passed to us via the CIA.

His silence in response didn’t surprise me. I was gone soon afterwards. Strange then that when he sacked me – on the express orders of Mr Blair’s Downing Street, I was later informed – Mr Straw claimed to Parliament that the existence of a CIA torture programme was only ‘Mr Murray’s opinion’.

He claimed the Government knew nothing of any torture by the CIA, and still today denies knowing anything about it.

My career had been destroyed by leftist politicians who wanted to hide their complicity in human rights abuses.

To complete the process, they then trashed my reputation with smears: the stressful end to my first marriage, and the start of my relationship with my current wife, Nadira, found its way into the press in the most lurid terms. False stories about my drinking and fabrications about sleeping with prostitutes also appeared. All of this was to distract from the truth: that hundreds of British members of the security services, diplomats and civil servants co-operated with the CIA torture programme.

It is a terrible indictment of our society that I was the only person in a position of authority who was trying to stop it.

Now that I have been vindicated, it is time for a formal Government apology for the way I was treated. But it is not just past UK governments which were complicit in both the torture and the cover-up. For the past year, the British Ambassador in Washington and his staff have regularly been lobbying the US authorities not to reveal facts about the UK’s involvement in the CIA torture programme.

That lobbying has been successful, and is one of the reasons that most of the Senate report has not been published.

The British Government continues to cover up the truth even today. We should not forget that the climate of public and media opinion which made it possible for this US Senate report to be published at all was generated entirely by the work of whistleblowers. I was the first of these, but at least I remain at liberty: two subsequent whistleblowers – soldier Chelsea Manning and CIA agent John Kiriakou – are serving long stretches in prison.

Although it is in no way comparable to the horrifying abuses suffered by the torture victims, we truth-tellers have also been through hell.

It is very strange to now hear Westminster politicians calling for a judicial inquiry into our involvement in rendition.

There has already been one, headed by retired judge Sir Peter Gibson. He started to gather evidence, and ordered the Foreign Office to give me full access to all the classified documentation on the subject from my time as Ambassador. Indeed, Gibson gave every appearance of being a man of integrity, appointed to lead an investigation into governmental wrongdoing.

It was therefore no surprise when the Gibson inquiry was cancelled and his duties handed to politicians on the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee. Incredibly, its members include Hazel Blears, one of Tony Blair’s Ministers at a time when the Government had a policy of using intelligence from torture. She is therefore investigating herself.

No wonder a source on the Intelligence and Security Committee told journalists last week that they would only scrutinise members of the security services, not the politicians who instructed them.

There is, at least, an ongoing Metropolitan Police inquiry, called Operation Lydd, into whether the criminal law was broken by Britons implicated in the rendition programme.

Complicity in torture is a crime in the UK. I have given sworn evidence to the detectives involved, who recently passed a file to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Astonishingly, at the CPS the dossier has been given not to the branch that deals with misconduct in public office, but to the counter-terrorism division. This focuses attention away from the crime of torture and on to the alleged criminal intentions of the actual victims of the crime they are supposed to be considering.

The police think it will all be quietly swept under the carpet by the CPS.

Recent scandals, such as the alleged cover-up of an Establishment paedophile ring, highlight the apparent impunity of our political class in the face of the honest forces of law and order.

We don’t need an inquiry into British complicity in torture. We need a trial. And it should be Tony Blair and Jack Straw in the dock.

Source: AP

Torture: CIA officials will walk free

From Russian roulette to power drills, shackling and other painful and humiliating “enhanced interrogation techniques”, the CIA crossed all lines. Yet despite evidence incriminating the officials, it is highly likely that the perpetrators will walk free.

Although a scandalizing U.S. Senate report over CIA practices has sparked calls for prosecution from human rights groups, chances of affiliated officials being brought to justice seem little as President Barack Obama stated that it is ‘time to move on’.

After the U.S. Senate released a detailed intelligence report criminalizing the Central Intelligence Agency, the UN and several human rights groups called for the prosecution of U.S. officials involved in torture practices.

However, with a black president and the justice department saying it will not press charges, the agents responsible for the violence are likely to go unpunished.

Obama’s top officials, as WikiLeaks cables revealed, secretly worked with GOP operatives to coerce other countries, such as Spain and Germany, to quash their investigations into the US torture of their citizens, and issued extraordinary threats to prevent British courts from disclosing any of what was done.

The Obama administration aggressively shielded Bush officials even from being held accountable in civil cases brought by torture victims, by invoking radical secrecy powers and immunity doctrines to prevent courts even from hearing those claims.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced the closing without charges of the only two cases under investigation relating to the US torture program in 2012.

This decision, the New York Times noted “eliminat[es] the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the CIA”.

White House spokesperson Josh Earnest announced on Wednesday that US President Barack Obama shares the US Department of Justice decision that no prosecutable crime had been committed by the CIA officers.

“The president [Obama] has confidence both in this [US] justice system and in the way it was deployed in this particular situation [CIA officers investigation],” Earnest said when asked if Obama accepts DOJ conclusion that there are no prosecutable crimes committed by the CIA.

Heroin trafficking handed to Islamic State

According to the UN, world heroin production stands at 430-450 tons, of which only 340 tons actually reach the market, the rest being seized or destroyed.

Top heroin producing countries are: Afghanistan (at least 380 tonnes), Myanmar and Laos (at least 50 tonnes).

According to John F. Sopko, the US government’s special inspector general for Afghanistan, the reconstruction efforts undertaken by Afghanistan have collapsed in the face of the continued expansion of drug cultivation drugs and criminal organizations. Afghan farmers reportedly earned some $ 3 billion in 2013.

Since 2010, the Russian authorities have consistently accused NATO of exporting Afghan heroin to Europe.

The switch from using drugs planes run by NATO to those controlled by the Islamic Emirate confirms the links between the two organizations. This came just after President Hamid Karzai left office, September 29, 2014.

The Islamic Emirate uses a cocktails of drugs to condition its fighters according to protocols that appear to have been prescribed by the CIA.

According to the Russian Federal Drug Control Service (FSKN), more than half of the heroin consumed in Europe currently comes from Afghanistan via the Islamic State.

Source: Reseau Voltaire

China says US behind Hong Kong protests

A commentary in the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party on Saturday accused the U.S. of trying to foment a “color revolution” in Hong Kong.

The commentary, which was entitled “Why is the U.S. so keen on ‘Color Revolutions’?”, appeared on the front page of the The People’s Daily overseas editions on Saturday. The People’s Daily is the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party.

The commentary deems it “inevitable” that the U.S. actions towards Hong Kong “will be associated with the US involvement in the ‘Color Revolutions’ in the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere.” The People’s Daily then slams the U.S. for pretending to be interested in democracy when it is really only trying to advance its “strategic interests.” For the United States, the commentary claims, a “‘democratic’ country is one that conducts its affairs in line with American interests.”

The commentary ends by stating that “U.S. may enjoy the sweet taste of interfering in other countries’ internal affairs, but on the issue of Hong Kong it stands little chance of overcoming the determination of the Chinese government to maintain stability and prosperity.”

Although China has strongly implied that foreigners were secretly controlling the Hong Kong protests in recent weeks, the commentary was the first time it so explicitly accused the U.S. of being behind the movement. Its support for this accusation is not very compelling, however, as it mostly focuses on the coverage of independent different media outlets, one of which appears to be a Hong Kong-based online publication.

The commentary begins by noting that, “according to media reports,” Louisa Greve, National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) the Vice President for Asia, Middle East & North Africa, and Global Programs, met with “key people” in Occupy Central “several months ago” to “talk about the movement.” The unidentified media reports the article references likely refers to an earlier report published in a “Hong Kong-based pro-Beijing newspaper,” according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The allegations themselves are most likely based on a NED-hosted public discussion on democracy in Hong Kong between Occupy Central leaders Martin Lee and Anson Chan that was held in Washington, DC in April of this year. Louisa Greve mediated the hour long talk, a video of which is available on YouTube.

The National Endowment for Democracy is a democracy promotion organization that, while administered as a private non-profit organization, receives the bulk of its funding from the U.S. government. In 2013 it gave two grants that together totaled less than $300,000 to two organizations for work on Hong Kong. Only one of those organizations is based in Hong Kong.

However, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a subsidiary of the NED, does maintain a tiny office in Hong Kong. The Diplomat has learned that NDI’s Hong Kong office typically employs one international staff member and occasionally hires one or two locals to help out when needed. Most of NDI’s work in Hong Kong focuses on holding workshops attended by young leaders from all interested political parties that focus on building skills in areas like public speaking, campaign strategy, message development and message delivery. The Diplomat has learned that NDI has regularly worked with pro-Beijing political parties in Hong Kong who, like all political parties, hope to prevail in local elections. Local Hong Kong press have occasionally accused NDI of being a front for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the past.

Beyond NED, the People’s Daily article notes that three former U.S. Consuls General to Hong Kong had “recently united” to write an open letter to Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung.

Most of the People’s Daily’s claim that the U.S. is trying to foment a color revolution in Hong Kong, however, is based on mainstream newspapers using the term “Umbrella Revolution” in their coverage of the Hong Kong protests. For example, it notes that the Associated Press and Wall Street Journal had used the term “Umbrella Revolution” in their Hong Kong coverage. Neither organization is affiliated with the U.S. government.

The People’s Daily commentary also claimed the “The Times Asia” had used the Umbrella Revolution phrase. It wasn’t entirely clear which publication the commentary was referring to, but it most likely it meant Asia Times Online. Asia Times Online is a Hong Kong-based online publication that grew out of a former Hong Kong and Bangkok-based daily print newspaper. Asia Times Online claims to cover issues “from an Asian perspective; this distinguishes us from the mainstream English-language media, whose reporting on Asian matters is generally by Westerners, for Westerners.”

Source: The Diplomat

US Senate torture report vanishes

By Philip Giraldi

The crisis involving the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a Godsend to politicians, which is probably why the threat actually posed by the group is being hyped as it is while the White House and Pentagon continue to change the meaning of commonly used English expressions to enable the attacking of just about anyone anywhere. We are told that the United States will have a free hand in bombing Syria, an independent nation with which Washington is not at war. The Administration has warned that if Damascus attempts to defend itself from the air armada there will be consequences in the form of “retaliation,” suggesting that the US would be striking back after being attacked. Oddly enough, my dictionary suggests that it would be the Syrians who would be retaliating, but one supposes that in the Emerald City everything is not as it seems and certain words have little or no meaning.

The welcome distraction afforded by ISIS means that the issue of Gaza, which was recently devastated by the Israelis, has largely disappeared from the mainstream media, enabling Benjamin Netanyahu to steal still more land on the West Bank for new settlements. And remember MH-17? Still a whodunit and nobody cares anymore.

Back here at home, the dispute over the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture, a hot button issue earlier this year, has also benefited, largely disappearing from sight. The meticulously researched Senate report, covering 6000 pages and including 35,000 footnotes, apparently concluded that torturing terrorist suspects was not only illegal under the United Nations Convention on Torture, to which Washington is a signatory, it was also ineffective, producing no intelligence that was otherwise unobtainable.

Since a “forgive and forget” forward-looking White House has already indicated that no one will ever be punished for illegal actions undertaken in the wake of 9/11, why is the torture issue important beyond the prima facie case that a war crime that was authorized by the highest levels of the federal government? It is important because of its constitutional implications and its impact on rule of law in the United States, which is again being flouted by the Administration in its rush to “destroy” ISIS, which is little more than a terrorist group du jour being exploited to terrify the American public. The constitutional issue, in its simplest terms, is that the CIA works for the president and when it operates without legally mandated oversight by the legislative branch and judiciary it does so in defiance of separation of powers, making the Agency little better than a secret army run by POTUS.

The inability of the Senate Committee to compel the Agency and White House to come up with an acceptable draft of its report and agreement over what parts of it can be made public is also important because it reveals that the best the US Congress can do to oversee the country’s intelligence agencies is not very good at all. The past 22 months of delay in the report’s release have demonstrated that the intel community, with the support of the White House, can stonewall any issue until the cows come home.

The latest account of the head butting between the Agency and Congress reveals a bad working relationship between the Senate and CIA while also suggesting that Langley is again closing ranks against its critics. At a top secret behind closed doors meeting on September 9 th Agency Director John Brennan refused to divulge who at CIA authorized the actual intrusion into the computers being used by Senate staffers to compile their report. Brennan would also not address what the presumed legal authority to do so was. A shouting match with several Senators, all Democrats, ensued with several Senators demanding to know how Brennan could refuse to answer their questions.

The Agency had initially contended in its defense that the computer search was motivated by the alleged accessing and removal of restricted CIA reports by the Senate staffers, but it is no longer making that claim. Brennan reportedly refused to answer the two questions posed by the Senators because he did not want to “compromise” the ongoing investigations by the Justice Department and the CIA Inspector General into the computer hacking, but the committee felt he was stonewalling over questions that invited a relatively simple response. If he did not know the answers he could have said so. It might also be noted in passing that the two investigations are hardly independent, one being conducted in house by CIA and the other by a highly politicized Attorney General who will be inclined to protect the president.

CIA has also been working on its own rebuttal of the Senate report which is intended to demonstrate that torture actually worked and that no one at the Agency broke any laws. It is also reportedly seeking to redact major sections of the sixty page summary, which is the part most likely to see the light of day, an effort, which, if successful, will likely make the end product largely unreadable. It would probably also avoid including any blame or suggestion of “mission failure” which would be damaging to broader Agency political interests.

There also has been some speculation that the CIA would like to drag out the process in hopes that the Republicans will take control of the Senate in November, making any release of any part of the report unlikely. The White House has been brokering the review process between the intelligence community and Senate but has been largely mum about its preferences. It would likely want the report to remain classified or in limbo as its release might increase pressure on President Barack Obama to do something about criminal activity that might be revealed, which would be politically dangerous ground.

CIA has also welcomed back former Director George Tenet to help in crafting its own rebuttal report that it hopes will exonerate it from any blame, or at least point the finger elsewhere. Tenet was in charge of the Agency when the torture took place, so on one hand he would be a logical choice to craft a defense though on the other hand he would be keen to conceal any direct role on the part of himself and his accomplices, if only to preserve what remains of their reputations since there is no chance that any of them will be going to jail.

Let’s review who George Tenet is. He is a Greek American from Queens who never was an actual spy or analyst but made his way upwards in the intelligence community through a series of staff positions in Congress. As senior staffer for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence he got to know many important politicians. George could talk the talk in an affable way with Bill Clinton, who eventually named him Director of Central Intelligence in 1997, and then went on to discuss baseball minutiae with George W Bush, cementing his tenure with the new Republican administration. Tenet also presided over 9/11, which was a bit of an embarrassment for the Agency. He later utterly destroyed his own credibility when he declared that making a case for war with Iraq was a “slam dunk” before misleading both the United Nations and Secretary of State Colin Powell about the threat posed by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Tenet later retired into some well remunerated directorships before writing a book called At the Center of the Storm which reportedly earned him an advance of $4 million while demonstrating clearly that he is a great American hero.

So George will be reviewing what George did when he was good ol’ George DCI. When I was with the government I once served in a foreign city where a new United States Consul General’s residence was being built. It was so poorly constructed that there were holes in the ceilings and water running down inside the walls but the State Department Admin officer who was responsible left post before the project was completed. He came back a year later, after complaints, as the inspector to review the project. He determined that everything was just fine. That is sort of like putting George in charge of investigating George, but if the ISIS thing continues to pick up steam everyone in the media and among the public will in any event forget that there was ever a Senate torture report. In intelligence slang, it will “be disappeared.”