CIA

Activists Target Obama’s ‘Cheneyesque’ CIA Director

October 24, 2015 Michael Crowley, www.politico.com Resist! Barack Obama, CIA

By Michael Crowley for Politico - John Brennan was at his suburban Virginia home on an early November Sunday in 2012 when he heard a knock on the door. Dressed in jeans and a sweater, Brennan, then White House director of counter terrorism, answered to find a middle-aged couple he did not know. The woman explained she had come to talk to him about a recent trip she’d taken. “A trip to where?” Brennan asked. “Pakistan,” she replied. “Ohhh,” he said, with dawning realization. Brennan’s Sunday visitors were activists from the left wing anti-war group Code Pink.

German Human Rights Group Files Complaint Against CIA

October 22, 2015 Elisabeth Brew, www.america.aljazeera.com Resist! CIA, Germany

By Elisabeth Braw for Aljazeera - BERLIN — A German human rights group has filed a criminal complaint against Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, a CIA official who allegedly authorized torture of suspected al Qaeda militants. The complaint, submitted in federal court on Monday, presents proof of Bikowsky’s involvement in the torture of German citizen Khaled El Masri and asks that she be prosecuted in Germany. It also puts Bikowsky, nicknamed the “Queen of Torture,” in the spotlight of European efforts to hold CIA officials accountable for allegations of abuse. In 2003, Macedonian agents, mistaking El Masri for a suspected member of the 9/11 plot, seized the Kuwaiti-born car salesman as he was on his way to Skopje, the capital, for vacation, holding him for 23 days.

Is The US Protecting Afghanistan Heroin Market?

October 22, 2015 Staff, www.caribflame.com Educate! Afghanistan, CIA, NATO

By Staff of Carib Flame - The United States has called in air strikes to stop the Taliban from taking control of opium fields in the town of Musa Qala in Helmand province. Over the weekend the air strikes were called in after the Taliban seized weapons and vehicles from Afghan soldiers. Helmand province is said to be one of the world’s largest opium-producing regions, larger than the whole of Burma which is the second largest producer of opium. Production of opium reached an all-time high under the military control of the U.S. and NATO. According to a report issued in 2013 by the Afghanistan Opium Survey of the United Nations, cultivation of poppy increased 36 per cent in 2013. Total opium production amounted to 5,500 tons, up nearly half since 2012.

How Teenage Hackers Broke Into CIA Director’s Email Account

October 22, 2015 Kim Zetter, www.wired.com Educate! CIA, Hacking

By Kim Zetter for Wired - A HACKER WHO claims to have broken into the AOL account of CIA Director John Brennan says he obtained access by posing as a Verizon worker to trick another employee into revealing the spy chief’s personal information. Using information like the four digits of Brennan’s bank card, which Verizon easily relinquished, the hacker and his associates were able to reset the password on Brennan’s AOL account repeatedly as the spy chief fought to regain control of it. News of the hack was first reported by the New York Postafter the hacker contacted the newspaper last week. The hackers described how they were able to access sensitive government documents stored as attachments in Brennan’s personal account because the spy chief had forwarded them from his work email.

In Wake Of Drone Leaks ACLU Seeks Secret Program Documents

October 22, 2015 Jameel Jaffer, www.justsecurity.org Resist! CIA, Drones

By Jameel Jaffer for Just Security - As readers of this blog already know, last week The Intercept published a series of fascinating stories about the US drone campaign. The stories, and the official documents that accompany them, supply new details about the way the government chooses its targets, the way drone strikes are authorized, the way the government assesses civilian casualties, and the way the government judges the success or failure of individual strikes. The Intercept’s stories were based largely on government documents furnished by an unidentified source — someone who was willing to risk career and personal liberty in order to inform the rest of us about legally and morally questionable policies that have been shrouded in unwarranted secrecy.

Former CIA Detainees Sue Torture Psychologists

October 14, 2015 Ali Watkins, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! CIA

By Ali Watkins for The Huffington Post - WASHINGTON -- Three former CIA detainees are suing over being tortured at the agency's infamous "black sites," the first suit to seek accountability in a U.S. court for the CIA's tactics since the Senate Intelligence Committee released the executive summary of its groundbreaking torture report. But the ex-detainees aren't suing the CIA. They’re suing the pair that sold the spies the program. James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen are former CIA-contract psychologists who raked in more than $80 million developing and running the torture program on the agency's behalf. The suit accuses the duo of war crimes, including commissioning torture, human experimentation and supporting cruel and inhumane treatment.

Literary Magazines For Socialists Funded By The CIA, Ranked

August 28, 2015 Patrick Iber, www.theawl.com Educate! CIA, Intellectual, Literature

By Patrick Iber in The Awl -In May of 1967, a former CIA officer named Tom Braden published a confession in theSaturday Evening Post under the headline, “I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral.’” Braden confirmed what journalists had begun to uncover over the previous year or so: The CIA had been responsible for secretly financing a large number of “civil society” groups, such as the National Student Association and many socialist European unions, in order to counter the efforts of parallel pro-Soviet organizations. “[I]n much of Europe in the 1950’s,” wrote Braden, “socialists, people who called themselves ‘left’—the very people whom many Americans thought no better than Communists—were about the only people who gave a damn about fighting Communism.” The centerpiece of the CIA’s effort to organize the efforts of anti-Communist artists and intellectuals was the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

An Open Letter To Civil Rights Groups In The U.S.

August 14, 2015 Jeffrey Sterling, www.stltoday.com Resist! #BlackLivesMatter, Black Lives Matter (BLM), CIA, discrimination, Racial Justice

By Jeffrey Sterling in St. Louis Post Dispatch - Dear NAACP, National Action Network, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Congressional Black Caucus and others: Where were you? Where were you when I was faced with blatant discrimination at my job, when my employer told me I was “too big and too black” to do the job? Where were you when I, one of the first black officers to do so, filed a discrimination suit against the Central Intelligence Agency? Where were you when the justice system of the United States dismissed my discrimination suit because the U.S. government maintained that trying my suit would endanger national security? Where were you during the many years I reached out to you, begging, pleading for help from you while the United States government pursued and tormented me for years, bent on retaliation and persecution?

The Sentence They Don’t Tell You About

August 9, 2015 John Kiriakou, www.otherwords.org Educate! CIA, Torture

By John Kiriakou in Other Words. Washington, DC - Eight years ago I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program. I knew there’d be trouble, but I never could’ve predicted the years-long ordeal that followed. My revelations led to a four-year-long FBI investigation and five felony charges — against me, not the torturers. Facing a lifetime in prison, I pled guilty to a lesser charge of confirming the name of a former CIA colleague to a reporter who never published it. That may sound familiar to you. It’s exactly what former CIA director David Petraeus did when he exposed the names of multiple undercover officers to his girlfriend. Petraeus took a plea to a misdemeanor. I didn’t have four stars on my shoulder, and I wasn’t a friend of the president’s, so I’d gotten stuck with a felony.

Anti-Torture Reforms Opposed Within Psych Group

August 5, 2015 Spencer Ackerman, www.theguardian.com Resist! CIA, Psychology, Torture

By Spencer Ackerman in The Guardian - Opposition is building to intended anti-torture reforms within the largest professional organization of psychologists in the US, which faces a crossroads over what a recent report described as its past support for brutal military and CIA interrogations. Before the American Psychological Association (APA) meets in Toronto next Thursday for what all expect will be a fraught convention that reckons with an independent review that last month found the APA complicit in torture, former military voices within the profession are urging the organization not to participate in what they describe as a witch hunt. Reformers consider the pushback to represent entrenched opposition to cleaving the APA from a decade’s worth of professional cooperation with controversial detentions and interrogations. TheAPA listserv has become a key debating forum, with tempers rising on both sides.

Snowden: Apple Should Continue To Fight Gov’t On Encryption

August 3, 2015 Jenna McLaughlin, www.firstlook.org Resist! Apple, CIA, NSA, Snowden

By Jenna McLaughlin in The Intercept - As the Obama administration campaign to stop the commercialization of strong encryption heats up, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden is firing back on behalf of the companies like Apple and Google that are finding themselves under attack. “Technologists and companies working to protect ordinary citizens should be applauded, not sued or prosecuted,” Snowden wrote in an email through his lawyer. Snowden was asked by The Intercept to respond to the contentious suggestion — made Thursday on a blog that frequently promotes the interests of the national security establishment — that companies like Apple and Google might in certain cases be found legally liable for providing material aid to a terrorist organization because they provide encryption services to their users.

The Abuse Of Absolute Power

July 3, 2015 Robert C. Koehler, www.commonwonders.com Educate! CIA, Guantanamo Bay, Human Rights, Torture, Wars and Militarism

By Robert C. Koehler in CommonWonders. Guantanamo Bay - Whatever details about the torture program remain classified and buried, these stories, along with plenty of shocking photographs, are fully public. There’s enough data here to open a deep conversation about what it means to be a nation and what the limits of power ought to be. What I see instead is a sort of official resignation — on the part of media and government — to the inevitability of out-of-control power in the pursuit of self-defense. Philip Zimbardo called this phenomenon the Lucifer Effect: the utterly corrupting nature of total power over others. Reports of CIA torture are rife with observations that the interrogators were out of control. The information they sought from the utterly powerless detainees in their keep was a treasure to be extracted, like oil or diamonds from the bowels of the earth, and no technique was too inhumane, too morally odious, to achieve that end. Call it human fracking. It’s for the good of America.

$1 Billion Covert CIA Syrian Budget Facing Potential 20 Percent Cut

June 29, 2015 Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung, www.washingtonpost.com Educate! CIA, Syria, usa, Wars and Militarism

By Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung in Washington Post - Key lawmakers have moved to slash funding of a secret CIA operation to train and arm rebels in Syria, a move that U.S. officials said reflects rising skepticism of the effectiveness of the agency program and the Obama administration’s strategy in the Middle East. The House Intelligence Committee recently voted unanimously to cut as much as 20 percent of the classified funds flowing into a CIA program that U.S. officials said has become one the agency’s largest covert operations, with a budget approaching $1 billion a year. “There is a great deal of concern on a very bipartisan basis with our strategy in Syria,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the intelligence panel. He declined to comment on specific provisions of the committee’s bill but cited growing pessimism that the United States will be in a position “to help shape the aftermath” of Syria’s civil war.

How Jeffrey Sterling Took On The CIA — And Lost Everything

June 22, 2015 Peter Maass, www.firstlook.org Educate! CIA, FBI, Law, Surveillance

By Peter Maass in The Intercept - Sterling’s battle against the government had begun more than 15 years earlier, when he was still at the CIA. After he lodged a racial discrimination complaint, he was fired by the agency and filed two federal lawsuits against it, one for retaliation and discrimination, another for obstructing the publication of his autobiography. He also spoke as a whistleblower to Congress. Soon, his savings ran out and he became all but homeless, driving around the country, lost in despair. He eventually returned to his hometown near St. Louis and rebuilt his life, finding the woman who became his wife and landing a job he thrived at. His new life was torn apart when FBI agents came to his workplace in 2011, placing him in handcuffs and parading him past his colleagues. A few days later, still in jail, he was fired because he had not shown up for work. The drama ended in a wood-paneled courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia on a warm afternoon in May, after Sterling finished his brief statement to the judge.

CIA Torture Appears To Have Broken Rule On Human Experimentation

June 16, 2015 Spencer Ackerman, www.theguardian.com Educate! CIA, Torture

By Spencer Ackerman in The Guardian - But the revelation of the guidelines has prompted critics of CIA torture to question how the agency could have ever implemented what it calls “enhanced interrogation techniques” – despite apparently having rules against “research on human subjects” without their informed consent. Indeed, despite the lurid name, doctors, human-rights workers and intelligence experts consulted by the Guardian said the agency’s human-experimentation rules were consistent with responsible medical practices. The CIA, however, redacted one of the four subsections on human experimentation. “The more words you have, the more you can twist them, but it’s not a bad definition,” said Scott Allen, an internist and medical adviser to Physicians for Human Rights.

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