excess of evil

From: www.zum.de

“In 1953, the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government and installed the Shah, a brutal dictator who proceeded to establish one of the worst human rights records of the era. Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which deposed the Shah, Washington turned its favor to another brutal dictator in the region: Saddam Hussein, who received U.S. aid throughout the Iran-Iraq War. Ever since the revolution, the U.S. has imposed various sanctions on Iran. And most recently, we launched major military operations in two of Iran’s neighboring states, further destabilizing the region and threatening Iran’s own safety.
     But in the eyes of U.S. commentary, Iran remains the supreme evil. It’s instructive, for instance, that without any irony or self-awareness we charge Iran with interfering in the Iraq War – a war we instigated from the other side of the world, against massive international protest, on Iran’s doorstep. Actually, Iran’s involvement in the Iraq conflict has necessarily increased with the growing threat of ISIS, a group that only exists because of the immense power vacuum and destabilization caused by the U.S. invasion.”
— Kyle Schmidlin, Salon
Read more…

cowboys and cowgirls

Dan Blocker's "Bonanza" Ten Gallon Hat (from: liveauctioneers)

"The expert — one of several female CIA employees on whom 'Maya,' the lead character in the movie Zero Dark Thirty, was based — has previously been identified in the media as a CIA officer involved in the rendition program. But the Senate report offers the first detailed account of the depth of her involvement. […]
     Few CIA employees have been more central to the agency's battle against al Qaeda than the expert, a former Soviet analyst who has worked in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and in the al Qaeda unit since the mid-1990s, according to interviews with several former CIA officers who worked with her.
     The expert already survived one controversy; she came under harsh criticism after a subordinate on the bin Laden unit refused to share the names of two the 9/11 hijackers — Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi — with the FBI prior to the attacks, which was considered by the 9/11 Commission as a key intelligence failure. It is unclear if she was ever reprimanded for her role in the incident.
     But one former intelligence officer who worked directly with her at the time said the expert bears direct responsibility for the intelligence failures prior to 9/11 and should have faced consequences. 'She should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done,' the former officer said.”
— Matthew Cole, NBC News
Read more…

soul-sold eyes

James Mitchell (left), Bruce Jessen (right) independent.ie

“By 2005, the psychologists, James Mitchell and John 'Bruce' Jessen of Spokane, WA, had formed a company specifically to contract with the CIA. The agency, in turn, outsourced virtually all aspects of the program to Mitchell, Jessen & Associates in the form of a contract with options totaling more than $180 million.
     Despite having no experience or training in actual interrogation, Mitchell and Jessen personally interrogated many of the CIA's most significant detainees. To the degree there was any effort to assess the effectiveness of the interrogation program, Mitchell and Jessen graded their own work. By 2009, the psychologists had collected $81 million on the contract when the Obama Administration abruptly terminated it.
     The Senate report also notes that in 2007, Mitchell, Jessen & Associates received a multi-year indemnification agreement from the CIA to shield the company and its employees from legal liability arising out of the program. So far the CIA has paid out more than $1 million pursuant to the agreement.”
— Ryan Casey, Huffington Post
Read more…

“[FBI agent] Ali Soufan, in his early 30s at the time, was an advocate of the traditional FBI strategy known as 'rapport building,' which is based on the notion that an interrogation can only produce the desired results once a rapport has been developed with the prisoner. Soufan dressed the fresh gunshot wounds Zubaydah had received during the arrest. He told Zubaydah that he even knew the nickname he had been given by his mother. […]
     Soufan showed Zubaydah photos of al-Qaida members. When he saw a photo of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the prisoner identified him as the man who had planned and organized the Sept. 11 attacks. Later the Bush administration -- with no justification whatsoever -- would celebrate this piece of information from the FBI interrogation as a significant breakthrough and evidence of the effectiveness of its new interrogation techniques.
     A few days later, CIA agents arrived in Thailand. They had brought along James Mitchell, the architect of the new interrogation methods. Suddenly the tone changed dramatically. Mitchell gave orders to intensify Zubaydah's treatment if he did not respond to questions.
     One day Soufan, seeing that the prisoner was naked, threw him a towel. Later on, he and Mitchell argued heatedly over the prisoner's treatment. 'We're the United States of America, and we don't do that kind of thing,' Soufan recalls shouting at Mitchell. He also asked Mitchell who had authorized him to use the aggressive methods. Mitchell responded that he had received approval from the 'highest levels' in Washington.
     All this happened in April 2002, four months before the Bush administration issued its first torture memorandum to legally justify the interrogation techniques.”
— John Goetz and Britta Sandberg, Spiegel Online
Read more…

gang of five

Source images: quota, Huffington Post

"GENEVA (AP) — All senior U.S. officials and CIA agents who authorized and carried out torture like waterboarding as part of former President George W. Bush's national security policy must be prosecuted, top U.N. human rights officials said Wednesday. The U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, said it is 'crystal clear' under international law that the United States, which ratified the U.N. Convention Against Torture in 1994, now has an obligation to ensure accountability. 'In all countries, if someone commits murder, they are prosecuted and jailed. If they commit rape or armed robbery, they are prosecuted and jailed. If they order, enable or commit torture — recognized as a serious international crime — they cannot simply be granted impunity because of political expediency,' he said.”
— John Helprin, AP via Huffington Post
Read more…

Lee is 75; Jack is 97

From: Constantine Report

“In 1956, at the age of 17, [Lee Harvey] Oswald quit high school to join the U.S. Marine Corps. He was no ordinary Marine: From 1957 through 1958, he was assigned to work as a radar operator at Atsugi Naval Air Base in Japan. Atsugi was not only a major CIA station, but also the home base of the top-secret U-2 spy plane, used to conduct reconnaissance missions inside the Soviet Union. While working at Atsugi, Oswald—as his commanding officer told the Warren Commission—'had access to the location of all bases in the West Coast area, all radio frequencies for all squadrons, all tactical call signs, and the relative strength of all squadrons.'
     In 1959, Oswald abruptly quit the marines and traveled to Russia, where he declared his intention to defect to the Soviet Union. He subsequently turned up at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, where he dramatically announced that he intended to spill all of the secrets he had learned as a marine to his new country’s government. He even bragged that he 'might know something of special interest' to the Soviets.
     This should have set off alarm bells in every corner of the U.S. intelligence community. Defections to the Soviet Union were rare enough; a former marine who had access to top-secret, highly sensitive information was something else again. When the U-2 plane was shot down by Soviet guns in May 1960, Oswald might well have been considered the most likely culprit. The young defector should have been poised to be condemned as the Edward Snowden of his day.
     But he was not. The vast U.S. national-security establishment showed virtually no interest in Oswald. When Oswald decided to return home in 1962—two years after openly declaring his intent to betray his country to its deadliest enemy—he received a warm welcome. […]”
— Justyn Dillingham, Salon
Read more...

“It was 1993, the 30th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, when FRONTLINE first aired its documentary, Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? In that program FRONTLINE concluded, 'What now seems certain is that the CIA is still covering up its contact with Lee Harvey Oswald.'
     Now, 10 years later, much material has been made available to the American public which sheds light on what the CIA had been hiding for 40 years. This new information is the result of the U.S. Congress passing the 1993 'JFK Records Act,' which mandated the full release of all government files relating to the assassination of President Kennedy and created a civilian Assassination Records Review Board to oversee this process. By the time the Board’s work was completed in the late 1990s, 6 million pages of documents had been made available to the public in the National Archives.
     Arguably, the most startling information so far brought to light by the release of these intelligence records is the CIA cover-up relating to Oswald’s visit to Mexico City.”
— John Newman, PBS
Read more…

CAT got your tongue?

Photo from: pixgood

“If the two sides do not reach a consensus soon, the [Senate Intelligence] committee and its members will be left with only extreme options. One would be to release the heavily redacted version [of the torture report] that the CIA has already agreed to, which would be a capitulation on the part of the committee. The alternative would be for Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) or another member of the committee to read the report — or sections that the committee believes should be released — into the Senate record, as then-Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) did with the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
     [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein's optimism about the [CIA torture] report's release has been stifled in the past by the tense negotiations. In September Feinsetin said she expected the 500-page document to be public within two to four weeks. Two months later, negotiations are still ongoing — and based on reports of Tuesday night's meeting, not going well.
     Despite a committee vote in April to release the 500-page executive summary of the five-year, 6,000-plus page study, a public version of the document has been hamstrung for months by disputes over aspects of the report that the White House and CIA wish to suppress.”
— Ali Watkins, Huffington Post
Read more…

“The international community watched closely this week as representatives from the U.S. government defended its compliance with the Convention Against Torture (CAT) in front of the United Nations Committee against Torture. […]
     Since the U.S. last reported to the committee in 2006, more evidence of violations have been reported by the media or alleged by human rights groups. But the U.S. has done little to demonstrate that it is holding the top officials who gave the orders to torture accountable. Groups like the Advocates for U.S. Torture Prosecutions say that the United States is shielding those responsible, which is in direct violation of its CAT obligations.
     'It’s is at the heart of everything,' Deborah Popowski, a clinical instructor at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and a member of Advocates for U.S. Torture Prosecutions said in an interview with Newsweek. Referring to what she called the ‘legal framework the U.S. government built to shield itself from liability’ (a mixture of legal opinions that distort laws governing torture and the use of the Military Commissions Act to retroactively redefine war crimes to impede prosecution), she added that by choosing to immunize those responsible, [the U.S. government] 'legitimizes their actions and the legacy lives on, the precedent is set.’”
— Lauren Walker, Newsweek
Read more…

“truth” is a four letter word… believe me

Photo: Michael Hale

“[…] Jeff Leen, the Washington Post’s assistant managing editor for investigations, begins his renewed attack on the late Gary Webb’s Contra-cocaine reporting with a falsehood.
     Leen insists that there is a journalism dictum that ‘an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.’ But Leen must know that it is not true. Many extraordinary claims, such as assertions in 2002-03 that Iraq was hiding arsenals of WMDs, were published as flat-fact without ‘extraordinary proof’ or any real evidence at all, including by Leen’s colleagues at the Washington Post.
     A different rule actually governs American journalism – that journalists need ‘extraordinary proof’ if a story puts the U.S. government or an ‘ally’ in a negative light but pretty much anything goes when criticizing an ‘enemy.’
     […] Leen is trying to fool you when he presents himself as a ‘responsible journalist’ weighing the difficult evidentiary choices. He’s just the latest hack to go after Gary Webb, which has become urgent again for the mainstream media in the face of ‘Kill the Messenger,’ a new movie about Webb’s ordeal.
     What Leen won’t face up to is that the tag-team destruction of Gary Webb in 1996-97 – by the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times – represented one of the most shameful episodes in the history of American journalism.
     The Big Papers tore down an honest journalist to cover up their own cowardly failure to investigate and expose a grave national security crime, the Reagan administration’s tolerance for and protection of drug trafficking into the United States by the CIA’s client Contra army.”
— Robert Parry, Consortiumnews.com
Read more…

“James Risen is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He's also currently under subpoena, possibly facing jail time, because of his reporting.
     Specifically, he's being investigated because of an article on a CIA ploy to hinder Iran's quest for a nuclear bomb that went epically sideways and may have actually helped Iran along. 60 Minutes ran a great story on him this weekend, during which they cited a well-known statistic: the Obama administration has prosecuted more national security ‘leakers’ than all other presidencies combined, eight to three.
     But the story also prompted me to look into another figure, which is less well known and potentially more dramatic. Partially because of press freedom concerns, sentencing in media leak cases has historically been relatively light. Not so under President Obama. When it comes to sending these folks to jail, the Obama administration blows every other presidency combined out of the water – by a lot. By my count, the Obama administration has secured 526 months of prison time for national security leakers, versus only 24 months total jail time for everyone else since the American Revolution. It's important – and telling – to note that the bulk of that time is the 35 years in Fort Leavenworth handed down to Chelsea Manning.
     It takes a bit of digging to find all this information. As my public service for the day, here's a rundown of every leak case, the sentence (if there was one), and its current disposition.”
— Gabe Rottman, ACLU
Read more…