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Digital Blackwater: How the NSA Gives Private Contractors Control of the Surveillance State

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Jun. 11 (Special Report) - Over the past decade, the U.S. intelligence community has relied increasingly on the technical expertise of private firms such as Booz Allen, SAIC, the Boeing subsidiary Narus and Northrop Grumman. About 70 percent of the national intelligence budget is now spent on the private sector.

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World leaders seek answers on US collection of communication data

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Alan Travis, Louise Osborne, Lizzy Davies, Jon Boone, David Smith, Kim Willsher, Patrick Kingsley, Miriam Elder - Jun. 11 (News Report) - Data protection chiefs and analysts in EU, Pakistan, South Africa and Canada express concerns at revelations in leaks Leading Europeans, from Angela Merkel down to information chiefs across the continent, are lining up to grill American counterparts on the Prism surveillance programmes , amid mounting fury that the private information of EU nationals will have been caught up in the data dragnet.

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EU wants clarity on US data snooping

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0700

BBC News - Jun. 11 (News Report) - EU officials demand assurances over claims the US captures vast amounts of data on foreigners, as an ex-CIA leaker goes to ground in Hong Kong.

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How the CIA's Bags of Cash Undermined the Afghanistan War

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Spencer Ackerman - Apr. 29 (Opinion) - It’s the most understandable, intuitive and tempting mistake in geopolitics: secretly pay a powerful foreigner to do what you want. The CIA, like many spy agencies, has done it throughout its history, and now we know it helped undermine the America’s longest war.

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Millions In 'Ghost Money' Paid To Afghanistan President's Office, New York Times Reports

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Apr. 29 (News) - The so-called "ghost money" was meant to buy influence for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) but instead fuelled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington's exit strategy from Afghanistan, the newspaper quoted U.S. officials as saying. "The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan", one American official said, "was the United States."

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As Obama Shuns Hearing, Yemeni Says U.S. Drone War Terrifying Civilians, Empowering Militants

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Apr. 24 (News Report) - Six days after the U.S. bombed his village, Yemeni activist Farea al-Muslimi testified on Capitol Hill about the terror of the U.S. drone wars. Al-Muslimi spoke during the Senate's first-ever public hearing on the Obama administration's targeted killing program. His family's village was hit by a U.S. drone strike last week. The White House refused to send an official to defend the program's legality. "When they think of America, they think of the terror they feel from the drones that hover over their heads, ready to fire missiles at any time," al-Muslimi says of his fellow Yemenis. "What the violent militants had previously failed to achieve, one drone strike accomplished in an instant." Others to testify at the hearing included law scholars and members of the U.S. military.

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Jeremy Scahill: The Secret Story Behind Obama's Assassination of Two Americans in Yemen

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Jeremy Scahill, Amy Goodman - Apr. 23 (News Analysis) - While the Obama administration has defended the killing of Anwar, it has never publicly explained why Abdulrahman was targeted in a separate drone strike two weeks later. Scahill reveals CIA Director John Brennan, Obama’s former senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, suspected that the teenager had been killed "intentionally." "The idea that you can simply have one branch of government unilaterally and in secret declare that an American citizen should be executed or assassinated without having to present any evidence whatsoever, to me, is a — we should view that with great sobriety about the implications for our country,"

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Hamid Karzai Seeks to Curb CIA Operations in Afghanistan

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Emma Graham-Harrison - Apr. 20 (News Report) - "Some of them are said to be working with the NDS, but they are not armed by the NDS, not paid by the NDS, and not sent to operations by the NDS. Sometimes they only inform the NDS minutes before the operation," Faizi said. "They are conducting operations without informing local authorities and when something goes wrong it is called a joint operation."

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Contrasting Views on North Korea Underscore Sensitivities and Lack of Evidence

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt - Apr. 13 (News Analysis) - A sudden round of finger-pointing highlighted the sensitivity surrounding intelligence estimates in the wake of failures leading up to the Iraq war, and some subsequent missteps involving North Korea.

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The fun-filled ocean resort at Guantánamo Bay |

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Glenn Greenwald - Mar. 28 (Advocacy) - A growing hunger strike among detainees is mocked by gullible journalists spouting familiar Potemkin Village propaganda If you're looking for a fun activity-filled resort to take your family for a summer vacation, you simply cannot do better than Club GTMO, according to a new glossy travel guide just published by Robert Johnson, the Defense Editor of Business Insider, under the guise of a news article. Scrumptious meals. Video games galore for the kids. Outdoor sports. Newspapers from your hometown delivered by smiling bellhops to the front door of your villa. Picturesque Caribbean vistas. All that and more can be yours - provided that you're "compliant". What more could vacationers - or prisoners kept in a cage for more than a decade with no charges thousands of miles away from their family - possibly want? They are, proclaims Johnson, treated "absurdly well". Not just well: absurdly well. They are, he actually writes, lavished with "resort treatment". The context for Johnson's glowing ...

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Bachmann Bungles Benghazi, Food Stamps

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

FactCheck - By Robert Farley - Mar. 23 (Fact Check) - Rep. Michele Bachmann used misleading and at times wildly inaccurate portrayals of two key domestic and foreign policy issues — food stamps and the response to an attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya — to paint President Obama as someone who doesn’t “care.” Her account of the White House … More >>

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Operation Condor Trial Tackles Coordinated Campaign By Latin American Dictatorships To Kill Leftists

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Juan Gonzalez, Amy Goodman - Mar. 07 (News Report) - A historic trial underway in Argentina is set to reveal new details about how Latin American countries coordinated with each other in the 1970s and ‘80s to eliminate political dissidents. The campaign known as "Operation Condor" involved military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. They worked together to track down, kidnap and kill people they labeled as terrorists: leftist activists, labor organizers, students, priests, journalists, guerilla fighters and their families. The campaign was launched by the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and evidence shows the CIA and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were complicit from its outset. We're joined by John Dinges, author of "The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents." The book brings together interviews and declassified intelligence records to reconstruct the once-secret events.

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Rand Paul Shames America

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0800

readersupportednews.org - By Amy Goodman - Mar. 07 (Opinion) - "I can't ultimately stop the nomination, but what I can do is try to draw attention to this and try to get an answer ... that would be something if we could get an answer from the president ... if he would say explicitly that noncombatants in America won't be killed by drones. The reason it has to be answered is because our foreign drone strike program does kill noncombatants. They may argue that they are conspiring or they may someday be combatants, but if that is the same standard that we are going to use in the United States, it is a far different country than I know about."

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Former CIA Agent, Anti-Torture Activist John Kiriakou Toasted By Progressives as He Prepares For Prison

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - Feb. 22 (News Report) - The first person in 27 years to be convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, Kiriakou views himself as a whistleblower who is being punished for shedding light on the government’s policy of torturing terrorism suspects through the use of waterboarding and so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

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The Day That NPR Lost Me

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Firedoglake - By Quasit - Feb. 18 (Opinion) - it slowly occurred to me that everyone on the show approved of the current drone program. Even the representative from a so-called human rights organization praised drones as superior to the alternative. And all of them agreed that the the only alternative to drone assassinations was all-out total warfare with massive artillery fire. But that dichotomy is pure bullshit! Drones are being used to kill some people, including American citizens and minors, who are far from a battlefield and not engaged in action against the United States.

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DOJ kill list memo forces many Dems out of the closet as overtly unprincipled hacks

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Glenn Greenwald - Feb. 11 (News Analysis) - Last week's controversy over Obama's assassination program forced into light many ignored truths that were long obvious This past week has been a strangely clarifying political moment. It was caused by two related events: the leak of the Justice Department's "white paper" justifying Obama's claimed power to execute Americans without charges, followed by John Brennan's alarming confirmation hearing (as Charles Pierce wrote: "the man whom the administration has put up to head the CIA would not say whether or not the president of the United States has the power to order the extrajudicial killing of a United States citizen within the borders of the United States "). I describe last week's process as "strange" because, for some reason, those events caused large numbers of people for the first time to recognize, accept and begin to confront truths that have long been readily apparent. Illustrating this odd phenomenon was a much-discussed New York Times article on Sunday by Peter Baker which ...

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The Moral Torment of Leon Panetta

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Consortium News - By Ray McGovern - Jan. 20 (News Analysis) - Leon Panetta returned to government in 2009 amid hopes he could cleanse the CIA where torture and politicized intelligence had brought the U.S. to new lows in world respect. Yet, after four years at CIA and Defense, it is Panetta who departs morally compromised

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Assassination Of JFK: Robert F. Kennedy's Children Speak About Incident In Dallas

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Jamie Stengle - Jan. 12 (News Report) - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is convinced that a lone gunman wasn't solely responsible for the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and said his father believed the Warren Commission report was a "shoddy piece of craftsmanship."

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Iran Nuke Deal Within Sight

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Consortium News - By Paul R. Pillar - Jan. 05 (News Report) - A resolution to the Iranian nuclear dispute is within reach, with Iran ready to accept limits on its program and many in the West willing to ease sanctions. But the real question remains whether chest-thumping politicians and pundits will let a deal go through

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Julian Assange on WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, Cypherpunks, Surveillance State

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Nov. 29 (Interview) - Assange vowed WikiLeaks would persevere despite attacks against it. On Tuesday, the European Commission announced that the credit card company Visa did not break the European Union’s antitrust rules by blocking donations to WikiLeaks. "Since the blockade was erected in December 2010, WikiLeaks has lost 95 percent of the donations that were attempted to be transferred to us over that period. ... Our rightful and natural growth, our ability to publish as much as we would like, our ability to defend ourselves and our sources, has been diminished by that blockade."

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Media Knives Come Out Over the Downfall of Petraeus: The Facts You Need to Know

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Alex Kane - Nov. 12 (News Report) - Mainstream media spent years shilling for David Petraeus, the CIA head felled by a sex scandal. Now that the need to valorize the general is gone, a torrent of information is emerging.

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America’s Coming Space Wars

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Informed Comment - By Alfred W. McCoy - Nov. 09 (Opinion) - It’s 2025 and an American “triple canopy” of advanced surveillance and armed drones fills the heavens from the lower- to the exo-atmosphere. A wonder of the modern age, it can deliver its weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering speed, knock out an enemy’s satellite communications system, or follow individuals biometrically for great distances. Along with the country’s advanced cyberwar capacity, it’s also the most sophisticated militarized information system ever created and an insurance policy for U.S. global dominion deep into the twenty-first century. It’s the future as the Pentagon imagines it; it’s under development; and Americans know nothing about it.

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U.S .sees Israel, tight Mideast ally, as spy threat

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Salt Lake Tribune - Jul. 29 (News) - By ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZO The Associated Press Published Jul 28, 2012 05:59PM MDT Washington • The CIA station chief opened the locked box containing the sensitive equipment he used from his home in Tel Aviv, Israel, to communicate with CIA headquarters in Virginia, only to find that someone had tampered with it. He sent word to his superiors about the break-in. The incident, described by three former senior U.S. intelligence officials, might have been dismissed as just another cloak-and-dagger incident in the world of international espionage, except that the same thing had h... ...

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More Secrets on Growing State Surveillance: Exclusive Part 2 With NSA Whistleblower, Targeted Hacker

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez - Apr. 23 (Interview) - In part two of our national broadcast exclusive on the growing domestic surveillance state, we speak with National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney, and two targeted Americans: Oscar-nominated filmmaker Laura Poitras, and hacker Jacob Appelbaum, who has volunteered for WikiLeaks and now works with Tor Project, a nonprofit organization that teaches about internet security. Binney left the NSA after the 9/11 attacks over his concerns about the agency’s widespread surveillance of U.S. citizens. He describes how the FBI later raided his home and held him at gunpoint and notes there is still no effective way of monitoring how and what information the NSA is gathering on U.S. citizens, and how that data is being used. "Click here to watch part one of our special report.":democracynow.org/shows/2012/4/20 [Transcript to come. Check back soon.]

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AP Wins Pulitzer for Exposing NYPD's CIA-Linked Intel Program, Leading Widespread Spying on Muslims

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Apr. 17 (Interview) - We speak with Matt Apuzzo, co-author of the Associated Press series that revealed the New York City Police Department has extensively spied on Muslim Americans not only in the tri-city area, but throughout the eastern United States. The series won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Beginning last August, the AP detailed how the NYPD established a vast operation to monitor Muslim neighborhoods after the 9/11 attacks. Hundreds of mosques, businesses and Muslim student groups were investigated, monitored and, in many cases, infiltrated. Police observed and cataloged daily life in Muslim communities, from where people ate and shopped to where they worked and prayed. Police used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even without any evidence of wrongdoing. Also falling under NYPD’s scrutiny were imams, cab drivers and food cart vendors. According to the AP, many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans.

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