David Dastych – “Dear David, I badly need your help. Some time ago a Russian newspaper “Vremya Novostei” published a story written by Arkady Dubnov, one of the best informed Russian journalists on Central Asia, about the alleged role of the US Air Force in heroin traffic from Afghanistan to Europe.

He wrote that the US Air Force transported 85% of heroin produced in Afghanistan. Dubnov quotes anonymous Afghani sources (there are also some accusations of Karzai’s brothers who take part in this scheme).

The article also claims Afghan warlords have some deals with local US and British commanders not to liquidate the poppy plantations etc. What do you think about that? Have you ever heard about such possibilities? Best regards, Andrei.”

This is a letter I received from my Russian friend, Andrei Soldatov, a respected investigative journalist and the Managing Editor of an Internet Magazine “Agentura.ru”. Soldatov is young (in his 30’s), not a Putin crony and a very brave reporter (Dubrovka, Beslan, Chechnya, Lebanon war), who had many times clashes with the Russian special services over his objective reporting and publishing. That’s why I trust him. The only national economy of Afghanistan is virtually the narco-business–worth some $ 10 billion or more per year. I have been receiving hints since a year or so that the ISAF forces in Afghanistan, the American and the British forces there in particular (at least some units) are deep-rooted in the Afghani narco-business.

Are some units deep-rooted in the Afghani narco-business?

It seems that the U.S. Government is tolerating it, and the British Government, too. The worse part of the whole dirty scandal is that allegedly some heroin is purchased from Taliban guerillas, in exchange for weapons. Thus, the ISAF (NATO) is selling weapons to the enemy, who later uses them against soldiers of the Alliance in battle. It is exactly the same corrupt practice that had been so popular (and still is) in Chechnya, where the Russian forces were selling Russian weapons to their enemy–the Chechen Jihadists they fought against. The main motive is, of course, money. But the Russian soldiers are poor devils, while the U.S. Air Force troops by comparison are elite, well paid and equipped.

Arkady Dubnov wrote: “Paradoxically as it is, British servicemen and their American colleagues have found themselves now dragged into the international mafia that buys drugs made in Afghanistan and smuggles them abroad.”

I wouldn’t exclude such a possibility. There could be even more opportunities for the Turkish, Albanian, Russian and other wholesale drug dealers to infiltrate Western services. Some time ago, a trusted information source told me that some CIA so called “rendition flights”, secretly executed over several years and passing through Western and Eastern Europe could be used for drug trafficking.

CIA planes, beyond any control, landed in Bosnia, Kosovo, also in Poland, Romania, Germany, Spain, Italy, Britain and in other European countries. Some of these countries and territories were either mafia strongholds (for example Bosnia and Kosovo). Others were main drug markets (Germany, Britain), still others (like Poland, Romania) could be transit route countries, controlled by Russian mafia organizations. And that’s not to mention Turkey, where the ‘bubbas’ operate, distributing heroin all over Europe and beyond.

While the international human rights organizations focused on the investigation of alleged CIA kidnapping and torture of al-Qaeda suspects and prisoners, they never paid any attention to a fair possibility that the infamous, secret and uncontrolled CIA “rendition flights” could be used to smuggle heroin from Afghanistan to Europe.

This is only an allegation, but perhaps some institutions of the European Union (EU) should pay serious attention to this other possible dark side of the CIA “renditions”.

On the Afghani side, it seems that the whole pro-Western administration of President Hamid Karzai, and also his two brothers, Kajum Karzai and Akhmed Vali Karzai, are head-to-heels involved in the narcotics trade.

Quoting an American expert, Arkady Dubnov wrote that: “The US expert who attended the Kabul conference last month [October, 2007] said that drug dealers had infiltrated Afghani state structures to the extent where they could easily paralyze the work of the government if the decision to arrest one of them was ever made.”

The ISAF military forces – American, British, German, Polish and of other European nations – are trying hard to pacify the situation in Afghanistan, fighting against the Taliban resurge offensive, while at the same time a part of them is ‘stabbing them in the back.’ One wonders why this situation is tolerated by the U.S. government and some European governments?

The answer could be easier to guess than expected:

“Some Afghani businessmen believe” – wrote Arkady Dubnov – “that the United States and the government in Kabul need trafficking to keep the Afghani financial market in shape. In other words, these revenues enable the Afghani Central Bank to maintain the local monetary unit at the proper level. Without them, it would have taken substantial financial injections from Washington.”

The same seems true for a lack of effective control over the destruction of poppy fields in Afghanistan. As the (poor) income from the poppy cultivation is the only means of subsistence of Afghani villagers, they are not interested to lose it. So far, drug dealers pay them. But if the poppy fields could be effectively destroyed (defoliated) by ISAF forces or the Karzai administration officials, the only choice left would be to charge the U.S. and European taxpayers with an additional burden to support the Afghani population.

But by allowing illegal exports of opium (and heroin) from Afghanistan (“Afghani opium reaching the international market accounts 93% of global production”) the West is funding the radical Jihad world-wide. Any other solutions in sight? It’s high time to find some.

This article was first published at Canada Free Press

David Dastych is a former Polish intelligence operative, who served in the 1960s-1980s and was a double agent for the CIA from 1973 until his arrest in 1987 by then-communist Poland on charges of espionage. Now he is an international journalist, who writes for Poland’s acclaimed weekly, WPROST, Canada Free Press, and The Polish Panorama (Canada), Ocnus Net (Britain), FrontPageMagazine and The New Media Journal (USA), Axis Information and Analysis (international), Nachrichten Heute (Switzerland), Agentura.ru (Russia), and runs his own David’s Media Agency.

The Crimes of Mena
Ollie North and the C-123 Story

The Susurluk Legacy
The highjacking of a Nation Part 1
The Highjacking of a Nation Part 2: The Auctioning of Former Statesmen & Dime a Dozen Generals
Pizza aus dem Hindukusch
Krausköpfe mit Stinger-Raketen
Fallout an Heroin
A Reinvigorated Bush Narco-regime?
Part I: History and the Political Requirements of the Global Drug Traffic
Part II: The Meta-Group, West, and East
Part III: The Meta-Group, BCCI, and Adnan Khashoggi
Part IV: Dunlop’s Account of the Beaulieu Meeting’s Purpose: The “Russian 9/11” in 1999
Part V: Dunlop’s Redactions of His Source Yasenev
Part VI: The Khashoggi Villa Meeting, Kosovo, and the “Pristina Dash”
Part VII: The Role of Anton Surikov: The Dunlop and Yasenev Versions
Part VIII: Saidov, Surikov, Muslim Insurrectionism, and Drug Trafficking
Part IX: Allegations of Drug-Trafficking and Far West Ltd.
Part X: Far West Ltd, Halliburton, Diligence LLC, New Bridge, and Neil Bush
Part XI: The U.S. Contribution to the Afghan-Kosovo Drug Traffic.
Last Part XII: Concluding Remarks: Meta-Groups and Transpolitics.
Mysteriös & unheimlich: Wo ist unser Opium geblieben?
Opium-Anbau in Afghanistan: kein Einsatz von Herbiziden
Koks in Mexiko – Heisse Kartoffeln in Clearwater
Bermudadreieck: Koks, Gambling & Politik
Mit Nebelgespenstern, Koks & Poker rund um die Welt
Skyway und die Räuberpistolen
Der seltsame Weg einer DC-9
Hasenfus Kokain? Oder kein Hasenfus Kokain?
Swissair DC-9 „Graubünden“ steckt mit in der Kokain Affäre
Special Operation Samurais & die 5.5 Tonnen Koks
Kokain nicht nur Straffrei sondern bald Pflicht?
Wer war denn Mr. Bramble?
In Coca Mekka Schnee bis in die Niederungen
Die Old Boys Dirigenten von Genf
Das Old Boys Netzwerk
CIA-Flieger in Mexiko mit 128 Koffern voll Kokain erwischt
Verbindung von US-Politiker zu 5,5 Tonnen Kokain

Cooperativeresearch – In Athens, a number of Iraqi security officials get snagged in an arms bust arranged by the CIA. The CIA made it appear as though the Iraqis were buying guns for terrorists. The operation was part of an effort by the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group to exacerbate the tension between the US and Saddam Hussein in the lead-up to war with Iraq.

CIA Officials Discuss Plans for Sabotage in Iraq at Secret Meeting in London
CIA station chiefs from all over the Middle East meet at the United States Embassy in London for a secret conference. Deputy Director for Operations James Pavitt has called the meeting because certain people in the CIA are disappointed with a lack of action in the field on Iraq-related tasks. John Maquire of the Iraqi Operations Group has repeatedly criticized field operatives for being too timid. [Isikoff and Corn, 2006, pp. 161] “After several worldwide cables from IOG [Iraqi Operations Group], the Near East front office, and the DDO’s office, we found little movement in the field on the Iraq issue.…

This lack of movement on the Iraq target triggered the call by the ADDO [the assistant deputy director of operations] for the London meeting,” an official from the CIA’s Iraqi Operations Group (IOG) later tells author James Risen. The problem is that many CIA officers, especially those in the Near East division, simply do not support the administration’s plan to invade Iraq. So one of the meeting’s objectives is to get everyone on board. The IOG official explains: “We kept saying that the president has decided we are going to war, and if you don’t like it, quit.”

During the meeting, the officials say that the agency is interested in developing a plan for sabotage that will undermine the Iraqi regime. The chief of the IOG describes a plan to prevent the shipment of goods to Saddam Hussein and his family with the hope that it might cause Hussein to become paranoid and distrustful of those around him. One young station chief suggests sinking a ferry that imports these goods into Iraq from neighboring Arab countries.

An IOG official present at the meeting will later tell Risen that this plan is dismissed because the vessel also transports passengers. But two station chiefs tell Risen that they left the meeting with the impression that IOG officials were open to the plan. Risen also reports in his book that another plan for sabotage was to equip “low-level Iraqi agents with special spring-loaded darts that they could use to destroy the windshields of cars owned by members of the Iraqi regime. Large supplies of the darts were later delivered to forward CIA stations, but nothing was ever done with them.”

Larisa Alexandrovna– Italy is demanding the arrest of 140 members of Operation Condor, which was a secret assassination team created by six governments in South America during the 1970s. These neo-fascists, right wing terrorists targeted left leaning opponents of the military dictatorships in South America as well as peace activists and even religious leaders who dare question the torture tactics of the various governments. Condor was put together in order to make sure that no one got out alive. If a target escaped one country, they would be hunted down in any of the remaining five should they go there. Here is the basic summary of the news out of Italy:

„Under Operation Condor, six governments worked together from the 1970s to hunt down and kill left-wing opponents. Italian authorities have been looking into the plot since the late 1990s. The investigation followed complaints by relatives of South American citizens of Italian origin who had disappeared. A judge issued the arrest warrants on Monday, following a request from state prosecutor Giancarlo Capaldo.

Citizens of Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru are on the list.

Mr Troccoli, who was arrested at the home in Salerno in which he has lived for several years, will be transferred to a jail in Rome to face questioning on 26 or 27 December, Efe reported.

Exiles hunted
Among the other names on the list are the former Argentine military leader Jorge Rafael Videla, Argentine former naval chief admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera, and ex-Uruguayan junta leader Jorge Maria Bordaberry.

Those named face charges ranging from lesser crimes to kidnappings and multiple murders.

Under Operation Condor – thought to have been launched in 1975 and running into the 1980s – the six military governments agreed to co-operate in sending teams into other countries to track, monitor and kill their political opponents.

As a result, many left-wing opponents of military regimes in the region who had fled to neighbouring countries found themselves hunted down in exile.“

Anyone notice what is missing from this article and in general, all articles about this story? Let me help you.

„Henry Kissinger continues to cast a deep, lingering shadow over the violent middle decades of the Cold War years. From 1969 to 1977, his smug baritone dominated U.S. foreign policy, guiding many of the more dubious alliances formed with less-than-democratically minded governments. It should come as no surprise, then, as John Dinges makes clear in his book „The Condor Years,“ that Kissinger played a role in the unflinching brutality that was known as Operation Condor.

Led by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Condor was a highly organized anti-terrorist, anti-communist military intelligence operation carried out by six „Southern Cone“ countries (Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil), roughly between 1973 and 1980. During that time, anywhere from 15, 000 to 30,000 people were tortured or murdered by the group, all in the name of keeping communist forces from gaining a foothold in South America — and keeping corrupt military dictatorships in power.

There are more than 200 international warrants for the arrest of military officials who took part in Condor, but the U.S. government has remained mum on the issue. Kissinger has refused to testify in criminal proceedings related to Condor, and Dinges says that there is ample evidence of „cooperation, liaison, acquiescence, and even complicity“ between the United States and Condor.“

Read it all at At Largely

Forschungen zeigen: Geheimarmeen in Europa wurden von der CIA bezahlt, von der Nato koordiniert
Schweizer „SAS“ Geheimtruppe AAD 10 ist Einsatzbereit
Ali Agca aus Haft entlassen

Larisa Alexandrovna, Muriel Kane and Lindsay Beyerstein – „Part I of this series explored the long-term involvement of two men — GOP consultant Bill Canary and Alabama Attorney General William Pryor — in the events leading to the imprisonment last summer of former Alabama Democratic governor Don Siegelman.

That train of events began in 1998, when Canary managed Pryor’s campaign for re-election as Alabama attorney general. Immediately afterwards, Pryor began the investigation of Siegelman that eventually led to the newly-elected governor’s conviction on corruption charges in 2006.

In the 2002 race for Alabama governor, Bill Canary advised the campaign of Siegelman’s Republican opponent, Rep. Bob Riley. Pryor ensured Riley’s victory in that extremely close race when he declared that unsealing the ballots for a recount would be a crime.

The following April, Pryor was nominated by George W. Bush to serve as a federal judge on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. He was eventually installed by a recess appointment, against the objections of Senate Democrats.

Bill Canary, Karl Rove, and the 2002 Elections
Karl Rove is known to have worked with Bill Canary on numerous political races in Alabama, beginning in 1994 and including William Pryor’s campaign in 1998. Canary and Pryor both enjoyed a close political and social relationship with Rove — who went on to become a senior adviser to the president, before Bush’s „brain“ resigned earlier this year.

Two Republican lawyers who have asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation allege that Canary and Rove also worked together on the 2002 Alabama governor’s race. One of the lawyers is close to the Republican National Committee in Alabama.

By 2002, George W. Bush was president and Karl Rove was working in the White House as his special assistant with the highest level of security clearances. Rove, however, did not lose his security clearances, even after he was identified as one of the sources in the CIA leak case, in which the cover of covert CIA officer, Valerie Plame Wilson was exposed to journalists in 2003 as an apparent act of reprisal against her husband Joseph Wilson.

Rove could not be reached for comment for this article. A call placed to the White House for forwarding information was answered but not returned.

Windom, after being told about the article and the name of this publication, said, „I’m not interested, thanks.”

According to the Alabama RNC source, Rove met regularly with operatives for the Riley campaign. The source’s allegations are confirmed in part by campaign disclosure forms, which show that Windom paid Canary as a consultant between 1999 and early 2001 and later received large contributions from Canary’s business partner, a pattern that is duplicated with Riley and Canary.

According to public records, Windom paid Canary’s firm $38,022 for consulting and polling between 1999 and 2001. At the same time, PACs associated with Canary’s business partner, Patrick McWhorter, donated heavily to Windom’s campaign, contributing $149,000 in 2001 and another $75,000 in 2002.

After Windom lost the primary, PACs associated with McWhorter and Canary switched their donations to Bob Riley, giving him $85,000 in the days immediately preceding the November election. After the election victory, Windom emerged immediately as a close confidant of Riley’s, advising him on the appointment of a new Insurance Commissioner, Walter A. Bell, and other matters. Canary also emerged as a key Riley advisor.

Public records also show that at the same time Canary was consulting for Bob Riley’s campaign, his lobbying group, the Business Council for Alabama, donated $678,000 to the campaign of his client. This was the third largest donation the campaign received, exceeded only by those from the Republican National State Elections Committee, for $2,475,000, and from Bob Riley himself, who contributed $1,070,000 to his own campaign.

Rove on the Corner
Rove’s meetings with Riley campaign operatives are said to have taken place on street corners in Washington at prearranged times. „Riley’s people went up to DC and had a couple of meetings with [Rove],“ one of the Republican attorneys stated. In addition, Rove and his wife purchased a property in Rosemary Beach, Florida in November of 2002, about 2-1/2 hour drive from Alabama’s capital – Montgomery, a little over an hour’s drive from Mobile, and less than an hour by jet.
„He would never discuss anything on the phone. He would tell you to meet him at some corner and then you get there and sure enough he is standing in the middle of the intersection waving at you.“

Riley did not return calls seeking comment.
These allegations are similar to those made by consultant Marc Schwartz in The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power by James Moore and Wayne Slater, describing a meeting that took place in March of 2002:

„I gotta meet Rove,“ Jack Abramoff told Schwartz one afternoon as they talked in the backseat of the lobbyist’s car. Abramoff’s driver, Joseph, was working his way through the crowded streets of Washington. The lobbyist gave Joseph a location for a rendezvous, and he set a course in the direction of the White House.

„Really?“ Schwartz asked. „We’re going to the White House?“

„No. No. We don’t do that,“ Abramoff answered.

„Why not?“ Schwartz joked. „I’m sure George would want to see me.“

…He explained to Schwartz why they were not going to see Karl Rove at the White House.

„They’ve got movement logs over there and everything, and we like to keep things kind of quiet. So just watch. You’ll really get a kick out of it.“

A few minutes later, Abramoff pointed through the front windshield at an approaching street corner and turned to smile at Schwartz.

„You recognize him?“ the lobbyist asked his client.

„Son of a bitch,“ Schwartz muttered. „He’s just out in the middle of the street.“

„Uh-huh.“

Read all at RawStory

Larisa Alexandrovna is managing editor of investigative news for Raw Story and regularly reports on intelligence and national security stories.
Muriel Kane is Raw Story’s research director and part of the RSI team.
Lindsay Beyerstein is a national correspondent for Raw Story and part of the RSI team.

Larisa Alexandrovna – Okay, here is the problem with flatland journalism in yet another example of Michael Isikoff playing with facts as though they were opinion:

The CIA repeatedly asked White House lawyer Harriet Miers over a two-year period for instructions regarding what to do with „very clinical“ videotapes depicting the use of „enhanced“ interrogation techniques on two top Al Qaeda captives, according to former and current intelligence officials familiar with the communications (who requested anonymity when discussing the controversial issue). The tapes are believed to have included evidence of waterboarding and other interrogation methods that Bush administration critics have described as torture.

Sorry, Bush critics? Which critics would that be? The Geneva conventions? Seriously, welcome to flatland where the world is no longer round, but may be flat depending whose opinion you present. In flatland journalism, both fact and opinion are presented on equal footing and offered up by the so-called impartial journalist in order to be fair and balanced. Waterboarding is torture. This is not an opinion of Bush critics, but of the world courts and treaties to which the US is a signatory.

Now for the news in the article, which is buried, so I will cut to the chase (emph mine):

Senior officials of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service finally decided on their own authority in late 2005 to destroy the tapes—which were kept at a secret location overseas—after failing to elicit clear instructions from the White House or other senior officials on what to do with them, according to one of the former intelligence officials with direct knowledge of the events in question. An extensive paper—or e-mail—trail exists documenting the contacts between Clandestine Service officials and top agency managers and between the CIA and the White House regarding what to do about the tapes, according to two former intelligence officials.

A detailed written transcript of the tapes‘ contents—apparently including references to interrogation techniques—was subsequently made by the CIA. But the tapes themselves were never brought onto U.S. territory; they were kept, and later destroyed, at a secret location overseas. At one point portions of the tapes were electronically transmitted to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., so a small number of officials there could review them. A counterterrorism source, who also asked for anonymity when discussing this subject, said that there was no reason to believe that any recordings of such an electronic feed still exist.

The reason CIA officials involved the White House and Justice Department in discussions about the disposition of the tapes was that CIA officials viewed the CIA’s terrorist interrogation and detention program—including the use of „enhanced“ interrogation techniques—as having been imposed on the agency by the White House. „It was a political issue,“ said the former official, and therefore CIA officials believed that the decision as to what to do with the tapes should be made at a political level, by Miers—a former personal lawyer to President Bush and later White House staff secretary and counsel—or someone else directly representing the president.

„CIA officials viewed the CIA terrorist interrogation and detention program… as having been imposed by the White House?“ Are you kidding me? Flatland journalism is now the norm at Newsweek.

Seriously, why would CIA officials view the torture program (use the damn word Isikoff) as having been „imposed by the White House?“ Did they just all get up one morning and suddenly have this view? Were there no memos written, orders given, legal gymnastics done in order to make the WH dreams of torture a reality?

First of all, after having been told to conduct more aggressive interrogations (torture), the CIA wanted a legal „safety net“ in advance, and approached the White House for legal permission.

„The Office of Legal Counsel is the federal government’s ultimate legal adviser. The most significant and sensitive topics that the federal government considers are often given to the OLC for review. In this case, the memorandum was signed by Jay S. Bybee, the head of the office at the time. Bybee’s signature gives the document additional authority, making it akin to a binding legal opinion on government policy on interrogations. Bybee has since become a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.“

Bush did not hold Bybee accountable and neither did the Senate. Instead, Bybee is now a judge, clearly illustrating that he did what he was told, interpret the law in such a way as to allow torture.

Read all at AtLargley

World Content News – Ausgewählte Mitglieder des US-Kongresses wussten bereits seit 2002 über die Geheimgefängnisse der CIA und ihrer angewendeten Foltermethoden wie Waterboarding Bescheid, meldet die „Washington Post“ heute. Mindestens zwei von ihnen sollen sogar auf den US-Geheimdienst eingewirkt haben, härter gegen die Gefangenen vorzugehen: „They asked the CIA to push harder“. (ABC-News)

Waterboarding-Demonstration: „Darf’s ein bisschen mehr sein???“

Im September 2002 stellte die CIA erstmals in einer Computer-Präsentation ihr Rendition-Programm einer vierköpfigen Abgeordneten-Delegation vor, bestehend aus Republikanern und Demokraten. Mit dabei war auch die gegenwärtige Sprecherin des Weißen Hauses, Nancy Pelosi. In den folgenden Jahren soll es mindestens 30 weitere Briefings gegeben haben, die „Washington Post“ dagegen erfuhr erstmals 2005 von existierenden Blacksites in Europa.

Zeugen wie der Ex-CIA-Direktor Porter Goss beschrieben die Reaktion der Anwesenden während der Unterrichtungen als stille Einwilligung, wenn nicht gar als offene Unterstützung. Hier wurde auch die brutale Verhörmethode des Waterboarding erklärt. Dabei wird der Verhörte unter Wasser gehalten, bis er zu ertrinken glaubt. Im ersten Briefing schienen die Methoden der CIA den Befürwortern noch zu lax zu sein:

„The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough“, schreibt das Blatt unter Berufung auf einen US-Offiziellen.

Wegen der vernichteten CIA-Videos wurde inzwischen eine Voruntersuchung eingeleitet. Führende Demokraten nannten die Vernichtung „zutiefst beunruhigend“.

Beruhigend: Es ist alles ok in Guantanamo Bay (Reinhard Mey)

Beunruhigend: Diese Klassifizierung trifft wohl in höchstem Maße auch auf diese Veröffentlichung zu.

Quellen:
CIA-Affäre: Spekulationen über Mitwisser im Kongress (ZDF, 09.12.2007)
Die CIA steht vor einer Katastrophe (Kleine Zeitung, 09.12.2007)
Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002 (Washington Post, 09.12.2007)
Top US lawmakers knew about CIA’s interrogation (ABC, 09.12.2007)
CIA-Videos: „So etwas tut ihr?“ (Spiegel Online, 09.12.2007)
Ermittlungen wegen Verhör-Videos auch im Kongress
(epochtimes.de, 09.12.2007)
Terror suspect Majid Khan says CIA tortured him
(Dallas News, 09.12.2007)

Dieser Artikel erschien bei World Content News

Larisa Alexandrovna – What is incredibly fascinating about the destroyed tapes discussion being had is the the number of angles people are approaching it from. I was almost entirely focused on the question of orders, who gave them, and who delegated them. (See here). But there is plenty more about this topic that should be considered. Here are a few highlights:

Cover Up:
There appear to be two different perspectives on the question of cover-up. One perspective is that the cover-up was to conceal the violations of Geneva conventions and protect those conducting the interrogation. The other perspective is that what someone wanted concealed had more to do with what was revealed during interrogation than the concern about violations of Geneva conventions.

Time reporter Massimo Calabresi, for example, examines the cover-up from the angle that Rodriguez was trying to merely protect his own officers:

Now, Rodriguez’s eagerness to protect his case officers has landed him, and others at the CIA, in serious trouble. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin called Friday for Attorney General Michael Mukasey to initiate an investigation into whether actions by Rodriguez or others criminally obstructed justice. Durbin argues, in his letter to Mukasey, that by refusing to turn the interrogation tapes over to the 9/11 Commission, CIA officials may have violated the law against criminal obstruction. Durbin has given Mukasey until Dec. 12 to respond.

The CIA, meanwhile, is scrambling to defend itself against the accusation of obstruction. „The agency went to great lengths to meet the requests of the 9/11 Commission,“ says CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano. „The Commission had access to material from detainees… [and] even though the Commission obviously had a good sense of what was learned from detainees, the tapes were not destroyed while the Commission was active because it was thought the staff could ask about tapes at some point. As Director Hayden noted in his message to the CIA workforce, the tapes were destroyed only when it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquiries.“

Gerald Posner writes at Huffington Post that the destruction of the tapes destroyed the content of the interrogations. Indeed, anyone who has read Craig Unger’s excellent book House of Bush, House of Saud will likely already know where Posner is going with this:
„Instead, when confronted by his „Saudi“ interrogators, Zubaydah showed no fear. Instead, according to the two U.S. intelligence sources that provided me the details, he seemed relieved. The man who had been reluctant to even confirm his identity to his U.S. captors, suddenly talked animatedly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the Americans would kill him. He then asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family. And Zubaydah provided a private home number and a cell phone number from memory. „He will tell you what to do,“ Zubaydah assured them

That man was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, one of King Fahd’s nephews, and the chairman of the largest Saudi publishing empire. Later, American investigators would determine that Prince Ahmed had been in the U.S. on 9/11.

American interrogators used painkillers to induce Zubaydah to talk — they gave him the meds when he cooperated, and withdrew them when he was quiet. They also utilized a thiopental sodium drip (a so-called truth serum). Several hours after he first fingered Prince Ahmed, his captors challenged the information, and said that since he had disparaged the Saudi royal family, he would be executed. It was at that point that some of the secrets of 9/11 came pouring out. In a short monologue, that one investigator told me was the „Rosetta Stone“ of 9/11, Zubaydah laid out details of how he and the al Qaeda hierarchy had been supported at high levels inside the Saudi and Pakistan governments.

He named two other Saudi princes, and also the chief of Pakistan’s air force, as his major contacts. Moreover, he stunned his interrogators, by charging that two of the men, the King’s nephew, and the Pakistani Air Force chief, knew a major terror operation was planned for America on 9/11.“

Anyone who has read me long enough also is not going to be surprised when I say that Pakistani ISI and Saudi royals were directly involved in financing the 9/11 attack. This is a fact that has been made clear over and over by any number of investigators, reporters, testimony, etc.

Read all at Atlargely

Tim Shorrock – As the Bush administration winds up nearly seven years of intelligence fiascos, a quiet revolution has been going on at the Pentagon, which controls more than 80% of America’s $60 billion intelligence budget. Since taking over from Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense in winter 2006, Robert Gates has greatly scaled down the Pentagon’s footprint on national security policy and intelligence.

Working closely with Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Michael McConnell, he has slowly begun to assert civilian control over the key spy agencies funded by the defense budget and halted the Pentagon’s efforts to create its own intelligence apparatus independent of the CIA. The recent intelligence assessment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, in contradicting early administration assertions, is perhaps the most significant sign of this newly won independence.

Those are significant actions. Under Rumsfeld, the Pentagon had become the dominant force in U.S. intelligence, with vast new powers in human intelligence and counterterrorism, both at home and abroad. By 2005, it was deploying secret commando units on clandestine missions in countries as far afield as the Philippines and Ecuador, sometimes without consulting with the local U.S. ambassadors and CIA station chiefs. At some point, President George W. Bush and his national security team apparently decided that the genie had to be put in the bottle, and sent Gates – a former CIA director who had worked closely with Vice President Dick Cheney during the first Bush administration – to put the kibosh on Rumsfeld’s private intelligence army.

But these efforts by Gates and McConnell to demilitarize U.S. Intelligence will never succeed until Congress, with the support of the next administration, removes the three national collection agencies – the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) – from the Pentagon’s command-and-control system and places them directly, like the CIA, under the control of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

That consolidation was one of the key recommendations made by the 9/11 commission that investigated the role of U.S. spying agencies prior to the terrorist attacks of 2001. This consolidation was supposed to happen under the 2004 intelligence reform bill that grew out of the commission’s deliberations. At the last minute, however, pro-military lawmakers supported by Rumsfeld stripped the language that would have done the trick out of the bill. Until Congress restores that provision, the bulk of intelligence spending – and therefore the critical decisions about how to deploy spying assets – will remain under military control.
Three National Collection Agencies

The NSA, the NGA, and the NRO are the crown jewels of America’s vast intelligence system and make up the most powerful surveillance and eavesdropping system on the planet. Together, the three agencies are responsible for about half of the $42 billion the government spends every year on its National Intelligence Program, which also includes the CIA and the much smaller intelligence units within the FBI and the Departments of State, Treasury, Homeland Security, and Energy. The rest of the intelligence budget goes to tactical intelligence units within the Pentagon and the Armed Services.

The NSA, as most American readers are increasingly aware, monitors billions of phone calls, e-mails, and Internet messages flowing through the global telecommunications system from listening posts throughout the world, and then analyzes them for possible clues to threats to the nation. It is led by Army Lt. General Keith Alexander, who has at his command a hugely expensive army of contractors providing cutting-edge technology in cryptology, data-mining, social network analysis, and super-computing, all of which are used to search telephone and Internet traffic for information about foreign leaders, military commanders, and trade negotiators, in addition to picking up chatter about terrorist organization and potential plots. Anyone who watched Colin Powell’s disastrous 2003 appearance before the UN Security Council should remember his display of three NSA intercepts of cell phone calls made by Iraqi military commanders – examples of the agency’s incredible ability to listen in on communications thousands of miles away.

The NGA was formally inaugurated as a combat support agency of the Pentagon in 2003, and is therefore less known to the American public. It supplies imagery and mapping products to the military and national leaders that are beamed to earth from photoreconnaissance planes, commercial and military satellites, and unmanned aerial vehicles. Geospatial intelligence is used in everything from climate studies and human rights reporting to the tracking of enemy soldiers and insurgents in Iraq. The NRO, meanwhile, builds and maintains the spy satellites that feed the NSA and NGA and operates ground stations, both at home and abroad, where imagery and signals data is translated, analyzed, and sometimes combined.

These three agencies probably supply about 75% of the information that appears every morning in the presidential daily brief, which intelligence officials say has evolved into a multi-media presentation in which NSA phone intercepts compete with NGA imagery and live video streams for the president’s attention. As I’ve reported elsewhere, since 2004 the NSA and the NGA have also been collaborating closely – using the NGA’s “eyes” and the NSA’s “ears” – to create hybrid intelligence tools that are used primarily by the military. By combining intercepts of cell phone calls with overhead imagery gathered by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), intelligence analysts can track suspected terrorists or insurgents in Iraq in real time. As these tools become available for use by domestic policing agencies, a possibility created by a new intelligence institution known as the National Applications Office[link to my recent article on the NAO – the power of the military to conduct both foreign and domestic intelligence will increase.

No Debate
For most of their existence, the Pentagon has controlled the NSA, NGA, and NRO, appointed their directors, and maintained ultimate authority over the information they collect and how it is used. These agencies, then, are essentially military assets, to be used as directed by the secretary of defense.

But there has been no public debate about this issue. Within the intelligence community, officials and contractors at the CIA and the NSA generally support the idea of a strong ODNI with authority over their budgets. But officials and contractors directly involved in defense intelligence – including the expensive communications and networking apparatus that supports the computerized, network-centric warfare of precision bombing practiced in Iraq – prefer working for the Pentagon. Any debate these two groups have, however, is held in secret and behind the closed doors of the intelligence-industrial complex.

One of the only voices to press the case for civilianized intelligence is Melvin Goodman, a former CIA officer at the Center for International Policy. Goodman resigned from the CIA over what he perceived as the politicization of Soviet analysis during the 1980s. In op-eds going back over a decade he has argued consistently for placing the three national agencies under control of a director of national intelligence. “The collection of strategic intelligence is being given short shrift because of the military’s emphasis on tactical intelligence and support for the warfighter,” Goodman told me in an interview for my forthcoming book on intelligence outsourcing. While the nation can’t deny intelligence support to warfighters in places like Iraq, “if you don’t get the job of strategic intelligence done correctly, you will blunder in your larger national security policies,” he says.

The penultimate example of such a blunder occurred in 1998, when U.S. intelligence failed to detect the Indian government’s planning for its first test of a nuclear weapon – a failure that led in part to the collapse of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. “I blame that in part on the collection requirements of the military dominating” the intelligence bureaucracy “and not being interested in arms control or the Indian subcontinent,” Goodman told me. Essentially, he said, the weapons test wasn’t picked up because U.S. spy satellites had not been programmed to tip toward India in the crucial weeks leading up to the test. Intelligence leaders “have a list of priorities, and the satellite collection corresponds to one, two, and three priorities, and arms control wasn’t one of them,” he said. And because the Pentagon wasn’t particularly interested in arms control, what was happening on the Indian subcontinent merited little attention.

That incident underscores that decisions about how and what intelligence is collected at any given time are deeply political, and should be carried out by elected national officials whose interests go beyond immediate military goals. Consider the NGA and its considerable abilities to provide overhead imagery and mapping tools. During the 1990s, when the NGA was known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), an analyst assigned to monitor satellite imagery from the Balkans began to compare what he was seeing on the ground in Bosnia to past photographs of the area. Working on his own time late at night, he noticed that certain towns in Bosnia showed unmistakable signs of ethnic cleansing, including destroyed mosques and what looked very much like mass graves. The analyst brought his findings to the CIA’s National Intelligence Council, which realized their importance and showed them to senior officials from the State Department and the National Security Council. Using that evidence, the Clinton administration charged the government of Serbia with crimes against humanity – an event that led directly to the NATO bombing campaign. Whether one agrees or not with the NATO response, the imagery became a powerful tool for the Clinton administration.

This link between intelligence-gathering and administration action happened because Clinton’s government – and that individual analyst – was deeply concerned about the Balkans. The same tools in the hands of officials concerned about the plight of indigenous people in, say, Guatemala, could have turned up similar evidence of crimes by the Guatemalan military against its people, in numbers far greater than those in the Balkans. Similarly, human rights groups are today using unclassified commercial imagery to track ethnic cleansing in Darfur and Burma (or Myanmar, as that country’s military government calls itself). Because the NGA is a combat agency of the Pentagon, however, its tools – which include both unclassified imagery purchased from commercial satellite vendors and classified imagery supplied by U.S. spy satellites – are at the command of military leaders, who make the ultimate decisions about where to aim their cameras. That is the legacy of military control over the national agencies, a process that deepened during the first six years of the Bush administration.

Read all @ Foreign Policy In Focus
Tim Shorrock

Tim ­Shorrock has been writing about U.S. foreign policy and national security for nearly 30 years. His book, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence, will be published in May 2008 by Simon & Schuster.

JULIAN ASSANGE and DANIEL MATHEWS with EMI MACLEAN, MARC FALKOFF, REBECCA DICK and BETH GILSON – Wikileaks has released the 2004 Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) manual for Camp Delta, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The transparency group’s disclosure follows its widely reported release of the 2003 SOP manual only a few weeks ago. A comparison between the two leaks reveals changes to official US detainee policy in exquisite detail. Wikileaks has also released another related sensitive US military manual entitled „Detainee Operations in a Joint Environment“, which is a defense-wide instruction manual for detainee operations including rendition flights, which has yet to be analyzed — Wikileaks invites journalists and the public to persue it.

Wikileaks journalists and leading Habeas Corpus lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights examined the 2004 SOP manual.

Read all at Wikileaks

Tim Shorrock – A new intelligence institution to be inaugurated soon by the Bush administration will allow government spying agencies to conduct broad surveillance and reconnaissance inside the United States for the first time. Under a proposal being reviewed by Congress, a National Applications Office (NAO) will be established to coordinate how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and domestic law enforcement and rescue agencies use imagery and communications intelligence picked up by U.S. spy satellites. If the plan goes forward, the NAO will create the legal mechanism for an unprecedented degree of domestic intelligence gathering that would make the U.S. one of the world’s most closely monitored nations. Until now, domestic use of electronic intelligence from spy satellites was limited to scientific agencies with no responsibility for national security or law enforcement.

The intelligence-sharing system to be managed by the NAO will rely heavily on private contractors including Boeing, BAE Systems, L-3 Communications and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). These companies already provide technology and personnel to U.S. agencies involved in foreign intelligence, and the NAO greatly expands their markets. Indeed, at an intelligence conference in San Antonio, Texas, last month, the titans of the industry were actively lobbying intelligence officials to buy products specifically designed for domestic surveillance.

The NAO was created under a plan tentatively approved in May 2007 by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell. Specifically, the NAO will oversee how classified information collected by the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and other key agencies is used within the U.S. during natural disasters, terrorist attacks and other events affecting national security. The most critical intelligence will be supplied by the NSA and the NGA, which are often referred to by U.S. officials as the “eyes” and “ears” of the intelligence community.

The NSA, through a global network of listening posts, surveillance planes, and satellites, captures signals from phone calls, e-mail and Internet traffic, and translates and analyzes them for U.S. military and national intelligence officials.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which was formally inaugurated in 2003, provides overhead imagery and mapping tools that allow intelligence and military analysts to monitor events from the skies and space. The NSA and the NGA have a close relationship with the super-secret National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which builds and maintains the U.S. fleet of spy satellites and operates the ground stations where the NSA’s signals and the NGA’s imagery are processed and analyzed. By law, their collection efforts are supposed to be confined to foreign countries and battlefields.

The National Applications Office was conceived in 2005 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which Congress created in 2004 to oversee the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. The ODNI, concerned that the legal framework for U.S. intelligence operations had not been updated for the global “war on terror,” turned to Booz Allen Hamilton of McLean, Virginia — one of the largest contractors in the spy business. The company was tasked with studying how intelligence from spy satellites and photoreconnaissance planes could be better used domestically to track potential threats to security within the U.S.. The Booz Allen study was completed in May of that year, and has since become the basis for the NAO oversight plan. In May 2007, McConnell, the former executive vice president of Booz Allen, signed off on the creation of the NAO as the principal body to oversee the merging of foreign and domestic intelligence collection operations.

The NAO is „an idea whose time has arrived,“ Charles Allen, a top U.S. intelligence official, told the Wall Street Journal in August 2007 after it broke the news of the creation of the NAO. Allen, the DHS’s chief intelligence officer, will head the new program. The announcement came just days after President George W. Bush signed a new law approved by Congress to expand the ability of the NSA to eavesdrop, without warrants, on telephone calls, e-mail and faxes passing through telecommunications hubs in the U.S. when the government suspects agents of a foreign power may be involved. „These [intelligence] systems are already used to help us respond to crises,“ Allen later told the Washington Post. „We anticipate that we can also use them to protect Americans by preventing the entry of dangerous people and goods into the country, and by helping us examine critical infrastructure for vulnerabilities.“

Donald Kerr, a former NRO director who is now the number two at ODNI, recently explained to reporters that the intelligence community was no longer discussing whether or not to spy on U.S. citizens: “Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,“ Kerr said. “I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but [also] what safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn’t empty our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere.“

Read all at CorpWatch
Tim Shorrock

Tim ­Shorrock has been writing about U.S. foreign policy and national security for nearly 30 years. His book, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence, will be published in May 2008 by Simon & Schuster.