Tag Archives: CIA

Regime Change In Riyadh? The CIA Has Just Publicly Dumped MbS, by Tyler Durden

Posted on October 28, 2018 | Leave a comment

If you want to know the official intelligence community (both American and British) line, the Financial Times ranks right up there with the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

A fascinating FT article suggests Western intelligence agencies have now dumped Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman after he’s been personally accused by world leaders — foremost among them Turkey’s President Erdogan and US President Trump — for ordering the brutal murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Implicit in the article, rich with quotes from current and former US and Western intelligence officials, is the further suggestion that these very intel operatives appear to now be actively seeking MbS’ ouster.

But the other fascinating aspect to FT’s commentary is what it reveals about both the mainstream media and intelligence ‘deep state’ perspective on the kingdom and Middle East politics in general: a head of state is deemed good or bad insofar they are amenable to the goals of Western intelligence agencies. While this might be obvious to any student of the history of covert action in the 20th century, it is rare to see it acknowledged so out in the open in a mainstream publication. The FT article reads like a “bragging rights” competition over which crown prince could be better formed by US intelligence: MbS or his recently ousted cousin Mohammed bin Nayef (MbN)?

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Seven Days in September, by Joe Lauria

Posted on October 3, 2018 | Leave a comment

The Deep State has tried to depose a duly elected president on totally specious grounds. None dare call it treason. From Joe Lauria at consortiumnews.com:

A new book, an anonymous Op-Ed and an Obama speech in the first seven days of September appeared to reveal dangerous insider moves against a dangerous, but constitutionally elected president, writes Joe Lauria.

In the first seven days of September efforts to manage and perhaps oust a constitutionally elected president were stunningly made public,  raising complex questions about America’s vaunted democratic system.

What unfolded appears reminiscent of the novel and film Seven Days in May: the story of an attempted military coup against a U.S. president who sought better relations with Russia. The fictional president was based on the real one, John F. Kennedy, who opened the White House in 1963 to director John Frankenheimer to film the only scenes of a Hollywood movie ever made there.

Kennedy was well aware of the Pentagon brass’ political fury after his refusal to proceed with a full-scale assault against Cuba in the Bay of Pigs operation. It was compounded by his desire for detente with Moscow after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Kennedy expressed forcefully in his seminal American University address, five months before his death.

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Posted in Crime, Cronyism, Geopolitics, Government, History, Intelligence, Investigations, Media, Morality, Politics

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The untold truth about Obama’s former CIA director, John Brennan, by Richard Galustian

Posted on September 9, 2018 | Leave a comment

When John Brennan departs this vale of tears, as a loyal lackey of the Deep State but an incompetent intelligence agent, will he get as big a send-off as John McCain? Probably not, but will still be undoubtedly impressive. From Richard Galustian at theduran.com:

Let’s get something clear from the start. In 1976, in his 20s, John Brennan was a card carrying communist who supported the then Soviet Union, at the height some might say of the Cold War, so much so he voted and assisted Gus Hall, the communist candidate for President against a devout Christian, Jimmy Carter who ultimately won the Presidency.

Yet under four years later, just after the then Soviet Union invaded, just weeks before, Afghanistan and months after the tumultuous Iranian revolution of 1979, which at the time many thought the Soviet Union had a hand in, Brennan was accepted into the CIA as a junior analyst.

At that time, John Brennan should have never got into the CIA, or any Western Intelligence agency given his communist background.

Think on that carefully as you continue to read this.

Also reflect on the fact that Brennan, later in his CIA career, was surprisingly elevated from junior analyst to the prestigious position of Station Chief in Saudi Arabia where he spent a few years.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Intelligence, Media, Politics

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I Know Who the “Senior Official” Is Who Wrote the NY Times Op-Ed, by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on September 8, 2018 | Leave a comment

And the answer is…. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

I know who wrote the anonymous “senior Trump official” op-ed in the New York Times. The New York Times wrote it.

The op-ed (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50194.htm) is an obvious forgery. As a former senior official in a presidential administration, I can state with certainty that no senior official would express disagreement anonymously. Anonymous dissent has no credibility. Moreover, the dishonor of it undermines the character of the writer. A real dissenter would use his reputation and the status of his high position to lend weight to his dissent.

The New York Times’ claim to have vetted the writer also lacks credibility, as the New York Times has consistently printed extreme accusations against Trump and against Vladimir Putin without supplying a bit of evidence. The New York Times has consistently misrepresented unsubstantiated allegations as proven fact. There is no reason whatsoever to believe the New York Times about anything.

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Posted in Government, Horseshit, Intelligence, Media, Politics

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CIA and Saudi Arabia Conspired to Keep 9/11 Details Secret, by Jeff Stein

Posted on September 4, 2018 | Leave a comment

We wouldn’t want to do anything to embarrass our Saudi Arabian “friends.” From Jeff Stein at newsweek.com:

It’s easier to bury uncomfortable facts than to confront them. So this September 11, the ceremonies marking the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., will simply honor the dead. In Manhattan, tourists and mourners will gather where the World Trade Center Towers once stood, lowering their heads in memory of the 2,606 who perished there. The services won’t reflect the view that the attacks might well have been prevented.

But for hundreds of families and a growing number of former FBI agents, the grief of another 9/11 ceremony will be laced with barely muted rage: There remains a conspiracy of silence among high former U.S. and Saudi officials about the attacks.

“It’s horrible. We still don’t know what happened,” said Ali Soufan, one of the lead FBI counterterrorism agents whom the CIA kept in the dark about the movements of the future Al-Qaeda hijackers. To Soufan and many other former national security officials, the unanswered questions about the events leading up to the September 11, 2001, attacks dwarf those about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, because “9/11 changed the whole world.” It not only led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the fracturing of the Middle East and the global growth of Islamic militantism but also pushed the U.S. closer to being a virtual homeland-security police state.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Cronyism, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Intelligence, Investigations

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Why US Imperialism Loves Afghan Quagmire, by Finian Cunningham

Posted on August 28, 2018 | Leave a comment

The real reasons the US stays in Afghanistan, from Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

t may seem paradoxical that any American interest would seek to deliberately prolong the Afghan quagmire. Costing trillions of dollars to the national debt, one would think that US planners are anxious to wind down the war and cut their immense losses. Not so, it seems.

Like the classic 1960s satire film, Dr Strangelove, and how he came to “love the A-bomb”, there are present-day elements in the US military-security apparatus that seem to be just fine about being wedded to the mayhem in Afghanistan.

That war is officially the longest-ever war fought by US forces overseas, outlasting the Vietnam war (1964-75) by six years – and still counting.

After GW Bush launched the operation in October 2001, the war is now under the purview of its third consecutive president. What’s more, the 17-year campaign to date is unlikely to end for several more years to come, after President Donald Trump last year gave the Pentagon control over its conduct.

This week saw two developments which show that powerful elements within the US state have very different calculations concerning the Afghan war compared with most ordinary citizens.

First there was the rejection by Washington of an offer extended by Russia to join a peace summit scheduled for next month. The purpose of the Moscow conference is to bring together participants in the war, including the US-backed Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani, as well as the Taliban militants who have been fighting against American military occupation.

Washington and its Afghan surrogate administration in Kabul said they would not be participating because, in their view, such a dialogue would be futile.

The US refusal to attend the Moscow event, after previously showing an apparent interest, drew an angry response from Russia. Russia’s foreign ministry said the “refusal to attend the Moscow meeting on Afghanistan shows Washington has no interest in launching a peace process.”

One suspects that US reluctance is partly due to not wanting to give Moscow any additional international standing since Russia’s successful military intervention in Syria and its leading role in mediating for peace there.

To continue reading: Why US Imperialism Loves Afghan Quagmire

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Shocking Report Details How CIA Hubris Exposed Agents In China, Resulting In 30 Executions, by Tyler Burden

Posted on August 17, 2018 | Leave a comment

The CIA apparently put too much faith in its computer system for its Chinese agents. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

A bombshell new report in Foreign Policy reveals that up to 30 CIA agents and assets working in China were identified and executed by Chinese counterintelligence over a two year period after the CIA’s encrypted communications system was infiltrated.

The report is based on former and current unnamed CIA officials who were part of the program, which established a network of spies across China. The in-country spies communicated with their CIA handlers via an online system capable of being logged into from any laptop or computer.

But when starting in late 2010 Chinese authorities began to sweep up the network of spies for interrogation and eventual execution, the CIA was “shellshocked” in the words of one former official, and for eight years a joint FBI-NSA-CIA investigation has sought answers as to what went wrong in what is widely considered “one of the CIA’s worst failures in decades”.

For the first time, it appears answers have been made public. Foreign Policy asks, “How were the Chinese able to roll up the network?” and begins by answering:

Now, nearly eight years later, it appears that the agency botched the communication system it used to interact with its sources, according to five current and former intelligence officials. The CIA had imported the system from its Middle East operations, where the online environment was considerably less hazardous, and apparently underestimated China’s ability to penetrate it.

The CIA officials paint a picture of both hubris on the part of American operatives and shockingly sophisticated abilities of the Chinese to gain access to the CIA communications system, which the Americans wrongly thought impenetrable.

One officials is cited as saying, “The attitude was that we’ve got this, we’re untouchable.”

“You could tell the Chinese weren’t guessing. The Ministry of State Security [which handles both foreign intelligence and domestic security] were always pulling in the right people,” one of the officials told Foreign Policy. “When things started going bad, they went bad fast.”

News of the roundup and detention of a dozen or more spies in China was first revealed in a May 2017 story in the New York Times, but Foreign Policy’s sources say it was actually around 30, with some offering a high figure. The FP report contains this stunning line: “All the CIA assets detained by Chinese intelligence around this time were eventually killed, the former officials said.”

To continue reading: Shocking Report Details How CIA Hubris Exposed Agents In China, Resulting In 30 Executions

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Senator Richard Burr: a Longtime Fan of Torture, by Ray McGovern

Posted on August 12, 2018 | Leave a comment

Why should Gina Haspel’s record running a torture site disqualify her from running the CIA? Torture is, after all, a CIA speciality. From Ray McGovern at consortiumnews.com:

Newly released declassified documents prove once and for all that CIA Director Gina Haspel oversaw torture in Thailand, which the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee knew all along, as Ray McGovern explains.

Newly released official documents obtained by the National Security Archive showing that CIA Director Gina Haspel directly supervised waterboarding at the first CIA “Black Site” simply confirm what Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr (R-NC) already knew as he orchestrated the charade that was Haspel’s confirmation hearing.  Burr allowed her to “classify” her own direct role in waterboarding and other torture techniques so that it could be kept from the public and secure her confirmation—-further proof that this Senate oversight committee has instead become an overlook committee.

That Haspel supervised the torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri at the first CIA “black site” for interrogation was already clear to those who had followed Haspel’s career, but she was able to do a song and dance when Sen. Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) asked her about it.  Haspel declined to reply on grounds that the information was classified. It was of course because Haspel herself had classified it. All the senators knew that only too well. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) had strongly objected to this bizarre practice only minutes before.

Witnessing this charade from the audience prompted me to stand up, excuse myself for interrupting, and suggest that the committee members were entitled to an honest answer since this was a public hearing with thousands watching on TV.  The American people were also entitled to know whether or not Haspel was directly involved in torture. As I was calmly pointing out that any Senate Intelligence Committee member who prepared for the hearing already knew the answer, I was “escorted out,” manhandled and charged with disrupting Congress and resisting arrest.

McGovern after he made a comment at Haspel’s confirmation hearing.

Jeremy Scahill later did a good job on Democracy Now! in putting needed context around the free pass and encouragement CIA torturers continue to enjoy at the hands of co-conspirators like Sen. Burr.

I have now had time to read through the documents obtained by the National Security Archive via Freedom of Information Act requests.  Suffice it to say they are so sad and sickening that I had to stop reading.

To continue reading: Senator Richard Burr: a Longtime Fan of Torture

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“Truth Was Irrelevant” WSJ Asks: Was Brennan’s Action The Real “Treason”? by Kimberley Strassel

Posted on July 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

John Brennan’s actions as the ringleader of the intelligence agency jihad against President Trump deserves much investigation than its received…and potentially prosecution. From Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal via zerohedge.com:

The Wall Street Journal continues to counter  the  liberal mainstream media’s Trump Derangement Syndrome, dropping uncomfortable truth-bombs and refusing to back off its intense pressure to get to the truth and hold those responsible, accountable (in a forum that is hard for the establishment to shrug off as ‘Alt-Right’ or ‘Nazi’ or be ‘punished’ by search- and social-media-giants).

And once again Kimberley Strassel – who by now has become the focus of social media attacks for her truth-seeking reporting – does it again this morning, as she points out – after his ‘treasonous’ outbursts, that Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan acknowledges that it was him egging on the FBI’s probe of Trump and Russia.

Via The Wall Street Journal,

The Trump-Russia sleuthers have been back in the news, again giving Americans cause to doubt their claims of nonpartisanship. Last week it was Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Peter Strzok testifying to Congress that he harbored no bias against a president he still describes as “horrible” and “disgusting.” This week it was former FBI Director Jim Comey tweet-lecturing Americans on their duty to vote Democratic in November.

But the man who deserves a belated bit of scrutiny is former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan. He’s accused President Trump of “venality, moral turpitude and political corruption,” and berated GOP investigations of the FBI. This week he claimed on Twitter that Mr. Trump’s press conference in Helsinki was “nothing short of treasonous.” This is rough stuff, even for an Obama partisan.

That’s what Mr. Brennan is—a partisan—and it is why his role in the 2016 scandal is in some ways more concerning than the FBI’s. Mr. Comey stands accused of flouting the rules, breaking the chain of command, abusing investigatory powers. Yet it seems far likelier that the FBI’s Trump investigation was a function of arrogance and overconfidence than some partisan plot. No such case can be made for Mr. Brennan. Before his nomination as CIA director, he served as a close Obama adviser. And the record shows he went on to use his position—as head of the most powerful spy agency in the world—to assist Hillary Clinton’s campaign (and keep his job).

To continue reading: “Truth Was Irrelevant” WSJ Asks: Was Brennan’s Action The Real “Treason”?

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“Democratic Institutions?” – 10 Lessons From History That Will Destroy Your Trust In The CIA, by Tyler Durden

Posted on July 21, 2018 | Leave a comment

If you still have any trust in the CIA, read this article so that it can be destroyed. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

A somewhat recently declassified CIA memo unearthed by the FOIA collective MuckRock shows that in the midst of the historic Church Committee hearings which attempted to bring various shocking and illegal US intelligence practices and operations to public light, the National Security Council considered the move for strong Congressional oversight a “personal holocaust” that could result in Americans losing faith in the CIA and intelligence officials. 

MuckRock, drawing lessons from this historical CIA archived memo, rightly observes that it “reveals how hostile the Intelligence Community could be to the concept of oversight.”

In a ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ moment, the “eyes only” classified memo demonstrates in stunning clarity that a top concern for the agency has always fundamentally been fear of exposure over its “illegal and improper activities”.

As the MuckRock report explains: “Decades before Donald Trump infamously compared the CIA to Nazi Germany, the National Security Council made its own allusion to the Holocaust – the difference was that in the NSC’s version, it was CIA that was cast as the potential victim of a ‘Final Solution’ that might be imposed by Congress in response to the exposure of the Agency’s illegal and improper activities.”

And this is true and essential to remember now more than ever given intelligence officials’ increased role in setting the agenda of national debate through their close and longtime acknowledged ties to the mainstream media.

With a continuing avalanche of unverified and unproven assertions inundating the American and Western public from every corner of Washington’s deeply rooted intelligence establishment, we think it necessary to pause and reflect on the many reasons to remain skeptical of the claims and allegations coming from US officials.

To continue reading: “Democratic Institutions?” – 10 Lessons From History That Will Destroy Your Trust In The CIA

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