The unclassified Zelikow torture memo as evidence of crimes

By Michael Collins

“My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views,” he [Zelikow] continued. “They did more than that: The [2006] White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department’s archives.” Phillip D. Zelikow, State Department Counselor, 2005-2007, to Congress, May 13, 2009

Former legal counsel to the Department of State, Phillip Zelikow, produced a convincing and elegant argument for the immediate cessation of anything that looked like torture in February 2006. The government declassified the memo last week and National Security Archive released it on April 3.

The failure to follow Zelikow’s clear statement of the law, withholding the memo without justification, and the failure to prosecute those responsible for the previous acts represent evidence of crimes.

Zelikow’s memo

Evidence that the CIA lied to the 9/11 Commission

Tom Kean, George Tenet, Richard Clarke. Inset: The Pentagon on fire after an aircraft crashes into it, Sept. 11, 2001.

By Rory O’Connor and Ray Nowosielski
Salon

A growing number of former government insiders — all responsible officials who served in a number of federal posts — are now on record as doubting ex-CIA director George Tenet’s account of events leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Among them are several special agents of the FBI, the former counterterrorism head in the Clinton and Bush administrations, and the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, who told us the CIA chief had been “obviously not forthcoming” in his testimony and had misled the commissioners.

Beyond the Nation-State

By Robert C. Koehler

Is there such a thing as a relaxed nation — one that isn’t, you know, obsessed with its borders and sense of identity?

We can easily see how absurd it all is when we read about the hikers recently released from prison in Iran, where they were held in cruelly restricted confinement for more than two years because they had inadvertently strayed across the border, out of U.S.-occupied Iraq. The inhuman nature of Iran’s response — the trumped up charges of espionage against the two young men, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, and their companion, Sarah Shourd, who was imprisoned for over a year — were gleefully obvious to the American media . . . because they were Americans, and Iran is part of the Axis of Evil.

However, the hikers, upon their release last week, strayed across another border as well, and in so doing belied the concept of good nations and bad ones.

NYPD targets American Muslims: More details

Mosques, students and NGOs: Journalist blows the lid off police spying on NYC Muslims

By Alex Kane
Aletho News

Sept. 8 — Two weeks after an Associated Press investigation exposed the New York Police Department (NYPD)’s  “demographic units” used to spy on a wide array of Muslim New Yorkers, a journalist has published startling new details that reveal the breadth of that operation.  The details are sure to raise new alarms in the Muslim-American community in New York City (NYC) as the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks approach.

Explosive New 9/11 Charge by White House Insider

In a new radio documentary, ex-national security aide Richard Clarke suggests the CIA tried to recruit 9/11 hijackers—then covered it up. Former CIA director George Tenet denies it.

By Philip Shenon
Daily Beast

August 11, 2011 “Daily Beast” – -With the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks only a month away, former CIA Director George Tenet and two former top aides are fighting back hard against allegations that they engaged in a massive cover-up in 2000 and 2001 to hide intelligence from the White House and the FBI that might have prevented the attacks.

Ex-CIA Robert Steele on Spying, Blogging and the Restoration of Open Society (64 min video)

Keynote address at the 2007 Gnomedex conference by former intelligence officer Robert D. Steele who holds multiple advanced degrees. Though extracted portions of this speech show him encouraging bloggers to step up their work, his main concern is that the intelligence community needs to rely more on open sources of information rather than clandestine sources.

9/11: Starting Over with the Truth

Part One

By Susan Lindauer

When I recall the summer of 2001 and our last days of innocence before the 9/11 attack, I often think of Guy Clark’s old song, “Like Desperadoes Waiting for a Train.”

I remember the heartbreak of it vividly. That’s because our team gave advance warnings about the 9/11 attack in precision detail. On command of my CIA handler, I also delivered threats to Iraqi diplomats at the United Nations of the consequence of war should Baghdad withhold actionable intelligence about the 9/11 conspiracy.

Throughout that hot summer, we understood exactly how 9/11 would play out— with airplane hijackings and a strike on the World Trade Center. We had a good idea of the timing. And we projected the use of a miniature thermo-nuclear device. Yet for all that we tried, we could not stop it. Forces had been set in motion. Responsive actions to our urgent appeals for help— which should have been automatic—got ignored.

Not So Fast, Mr. President: How Obama Got It (All) Wrong in Libya and How to Fix It

By Susan Lindauer
Former U.S. Asset covering Libya at the United Nations during the Lockerbie negotiations

See New Videos of War Crimes and Victims Families on www.obamaslibya.com 

In the U.S. battle with Libya, Americans are witnessing the consequence of gutting U.S. Intelligence during the Iraqi War, when President Bush drove out CIA officers and Assets who criticized his War policy.  In my case, I got slapped with the Patriot Act and thrown in prison on a Texas Military Base, while Republican leaders reinvented the entire story of my work on 9/11 and Iraqi Pre-War Intelligence. It was not pretty.

The consequences for intelligence gathering and policymaking are not pretty, either.  Last week President Obama demonstrated the most stunning ignorance by declaring that Libya—of all countries— has some link to terrorism. Obama was trying to justify NATO’s War against Gadhaffi’s government. However his argument exposed whopping gaps in the intelligence base from which his Administration has been drawing.

This time it’s not Obama’s fault. When Assets got forced out by Bush and Cheney, a lot of deep knowledge got shoved out the door with us.

Pakistani Intelligence on the Defensive

By Brian Dowing

That Osama bin Laden has been living comfortably in Abbottabad and evidently directing al Qaeda from there – all within earshot of a Pakistani military facility – has been a tremendous embarrassment to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), but it comes as no surprise to Indian or many other intelligence services, though realization in Washington has been too long in coming. Paradoxically, US intelligence’s recent success in Abbottabad has underscored a long-running failure.

‘Our Man in Tripoli’ – Islamic Terrorists Join Libya’s Pro-Democracy Opposition

By Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research

Concepts are Turned Upside Down: The US-NATO military alliance is supporting a rebellion integrated by Islamic terrorists, in the name of the “War on Terrorism”…

There are various factions within the Libyan opposition: Royalists, defectors from the Qadhafi regime including the Minister of Justice and more recently the Foreign Minister, Moussa Koussa, members of the Libyan Armed Forces, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) and the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition (NCLO) which acts as an umbrella organization.

Rarely acknowledged by the Western media, Al-Jamaa al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah bi Libya, the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), is an integral part of the Libyan Opposition.

Libya’s Blood for Oil: The Vampire War

By Susan Lindauer
Former U.S. Asset who covered Libya at the United Nations from 1995 to 2003

Who are we kidding? The United States, Britain and NATO don’t care about bombing civilians to contain rebellion. Their militaries bomb civilians every day without mercy. They have destroyed most of the community infrastructure of Iraq and Afghanistan before turning their sights on Libya. So what’s really going on here?

According to the CIA, the following never happened…

Last October, US oil giants— Chevron and Occidental Petroleum— made a surprising decision to pull out of Libya, while China, Germany and Italy stayed on, signing major contracts with Gadhaffi’s government.  As the U.S. Asset who started negotiations for the Lockerbie Trial with Libyan diplomats, I had close ties to Libya’s U.N. Mission from 1995 to 2003. Given my long involvement in the Lockerbie saga, I have continued to enjoy special access to high level intelligence gossip on Libya.

Last summer that gossip got juicy.

Black ops on GM critics, other social justice advocates reveal corporate-government collusion

Energy companies, biotech firms, business associations and globalists hire spies, police and mercenaries to scrutinize activists and thwart their activities. Methods include infiltration, criminal trespass, theft, computer hacking, and creating false identities and fraudulent documents to smear labor unions, environmentalists, and other progressive groups. Greenpeace, Common Cause and Protect Our Elections are fighting back with lawsuits. (Embedded links added.) ~Ed.

Greenpeace finds itself in cross hairs

By Peter Huck
New Zealand Herald

The first time Greenpeace USA realised they had a security problem was in April 2008 when Mark Floegel, senior investigator with the environmental organisation, took a call from a colleague.

“He told me Jim Ridgeway, a reporter with Mother Jones, was writing a piece and would call me for comment. I didn’t know what he was talking about,” Floegel said.

Ridgeway revealed Greenpeace had been “targeted” by a private security company and that a trove of sensitive documents was stashed in a Maryland storage locker.

Gadhaffi, Fall Guy for CIA Drug Running

By Susan Lindauer
(Former U.S. Asset covering Iraq and Libya)

Lockerbie Diary: For years I was told the terrorist who placed the bomb on board Pan Am 103, known as the Lockerbie bombing, lives about 8 miles from my house, in Fairfax County, Virginia.

His life-time of privilege and protection, gratis of high flyers in U.S. Intelligence, has been a reward for silence on the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking in Lebanon during the 1980s.

As sources go, I was more than a casual observer. From May 1995 until March 2003, I performed as a back channel to Tripoli and Baghdad, supervised by my CIA handler, Dr. Richard Fuisz, who claimed from day one to know the origins of the Lockerbie conspiracy and the identity of the terrorists. http://issuepedia.org/1998-12-04_Susan_Lindauer_Deposition He swore that no Libyan participated in the attack.

A cold season for Assange

By Bob Row

The extradition of Julian Assange to be judged in Sweden sets the path to the end of what we can call the “romantic period” of cyber-activism. The dream of a perfectly transparent society, free from secretive diplomatic deals, where the people have ALL the data that can affect their lives is not a reachable one.

Why Mubarak Is Out

This piece provides deep background on the interplay of forces — progressive, repressive, labor, business, military, police, and criminal factions in Egypt — leading to the ongoing collapse of Mubarak’s regime. ~ Ed.   (H/T to Claudia)

[Image from Lefteris Pitarakis/AP]

By Paul Amar
Jadaliyya.com

The “March of Millions” in Cairo marks the spectacular emergence of a new political society in Egypt. This uprising brings together a new coalition of forces, uniting reconfigured elements of the security state with prominent business people, internationalist leaders, and relatively new (or newly reconfigured ) mass movements of youth, labor, women’s and religious groups. President Hosni Mubarak lost his political power on Friday, 28 January [though he officially resigned on Feb. 11]. On that night the Egyptian military let Mubarak’s ruling party headquarters burn down and ordered the police brigades attacking protesters to return to their barracks. When the evening call to prayer rang out and no one heeded Mubarak’s curfew order, it was clear that the old president had been reduced to a phantom authority. In order to understand where Egypt is going, and what shape democracy might take there, we need to set the extraordinarily successful popular mobilizations into their military, economic and social context. What other forces were behind this sudden fall of Mubarak from power? And how will this transitional military-centered government get along with this millions-strong protest movement?

Obama refuses cooperation with Poland’s CIA ‘black site’ probe

News from Poland

The U.S. Department of Justice has rejected a request from prosecutors in Warsaw for assistance in the investigation into the alleged CIA prisons in Poland, where captives claim they were tortured. [Image: A giant billboard has appeared on Ulica Żydowska in Poznan, designed by the Abnormals.org artistic group.]

Wikileaks: Documents Confirm US Plans to Destabilize Venezuela

By Eva Golinger
Global Research

State Department documents published by Wikileaks evidence Washington’s plans to “contain” Venezuela’s influence in the region and increase efforts to provoke regime change

A substantial portion of the more than 1600 State Department documents Wikileaks has published during the past two weeks refer to the ongoing efforts of US diplomacy to isolate and counter the Venezuelan government.

Former CIA op Philip Giraldi on Mossad foreknowledge of 9/11

By Scott Horton
AntiWar.com

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi discusses recent Mossad intelligence operations in America based out of the Israel mission to the U.N. in New York , the one-way street intelligence sharing between the CIA and Israel, why FBI and DOJ espionage investigations never go anywhere and the evidence that Israeli agents in America had foreknowledge of 9/11.

Wikileaks CIA Release – Say What?

By Michael Collins

Wikileaks offered its first release since the controversial distribution of documents related to the United States effort in Afghanistan.

The current leak was posted to their web site on August 25. It is titled CIA Red Cell Memorandum on United States “exporting terrorism”, 2 Feb 2010.

The leak describes Red Cell as a CIA unit created by the Director to develop “out-of-the-box” analysis offering “alternative viewpoints” on key intelligence issues.

This document doesn’t disappoint in being out-of-the-box.

CIA Perception Management – How the World Sees the United States

CIA Red Cell starts out by stating, “This report examines the implications of what it would mean for the US to be seen increasingly as an incubator and exporter of terrorism.” Don’t hold your breath. There’s nothing there about the School of the Americas, the shock and awe invasion of Iraq and the carnage that entailed, or 300 dead Panamanians and United States soldiers as a result of the 1981 manhunt for General Manuel Noriega, a former US asset.

Response to Israel Shamir’s ‘Wikileaks the Real Stuff’

By Joe Quinn
Sign of the Times

Israel Shamir recently published his opinion on the Wikileaks exposé and in the process took issue with those who had dismissed the leaks as a distraction. While I wasn’t named by Shamir as one of the dissenters, I had waxed skeptical in a recent Sott.net editorial on the topic.

I sent the following letter to Shamir: