7/2/07
New NSA Whistleblower Speaks
By David Swanson
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Kinne says that post-9/11 she and others routinely collected information on people, even after identifying them as aid workers for non-governmental organizations. A common rationale was that the phones of such organizations could conceivably be seized by terrorists. She recalled one case in which she was listening to an American talk to his British colleague in an international aid organization. The Brit expressed concern about the American military eavesdropping, and the American replied that they couldn’t possibly be doing that because of USSID 18. Kinne recalls that her colleagues got quite excited and behaved as if the American had divulged secrets by mentioning that directive. They continued eavesdropping on the man, although they were unclear at that point whether they were permitted to spy on Americans.
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Glasgow Airport 2007 vs. 9/11 Pentagon: remake upscaled with actor “burning” and being “arrested”
Glasgow Airport 2007, the remake of 9/11 Pentagon: apparently downscaled, but in one chapter in fact upscaled: actor “burning” and being “arrested” by the police.
The Glasgow Airport vs. the Pentagon: the number of actors playing the firemen or the blazing vehicle vs. the “plane” debris at the lawn – it all is downscaling.
But there is a new chapter in this remake that is in fact a real upscaling from the Pentagon:
- the footage of the actor playing the “terrorist” “burning” (1);- the photo of the policemen arresting the actor, with make-up to suggest burnings.
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7/1/07
Ex-CIA Man Exposes Hysteria Of Car “Bomb” Terror
London car bombs would not have
killed anyone, government using terrorist tactics by hyping fear to
morph society
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Update 6/28/07
Pakistan to help as the US’s jailer
ISLAMABAD – With the George W Bush administration under pressure to close the
US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Pakistan is readying to step in
to help its ally in the “war on the terror”.
Both US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates
have suggested that President Bush transfer Guantanamo’s detainees to the
United States, saying the facility is undercutting US foreign-policy efforts.
Should Bush not do so, it is likely that the joint military prison and
interrogation
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Secret trials for terrorists, says US judge
A TOP-RANKING US judge has stunned a conference of Australian judges and barristers in Chicago by advocating secret trials for terrorists, more surveillance of Muslim populations across North America and an end to counter-terrorism efforts being “hog-tied” by the US constitution.
Judge Richard Posner, a supposedly liberal-leaning jurist regarded by many as a future US Supreme Court candidate, said traditional concepts of criminal justice were inadequate to deal with the terrorist threat and the US had “over-invested” in them.
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Update 6/22/07
Army officer says Gitmo panels flawed
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – An Army officer with a key role in the U.S. military hearings at Guantanamo Bay says they relied on vague and incomplete intelligence and were pressured to declare detainees “enemy combatants,” often without any specific evidence.
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Update 6/20/07
Psychologists helped the CIA exploit a secret military program to develop brutal interrogation tactics — likely with the approval of the Bush White House.
There is growing evidence of high-level coordination between the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military in developing abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorist suspects. After the Sept. 11 attacks, both turned to a small cadre of psychologists linked to the military’s secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program to “reverse-engineer” techniques originally designed to train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if captured, by exposing them to brutal treatment. The military’s use of SERE training for interrogations in the war on terror was revealed in detail in a recently declassified report. But the CIA’s use of such tactics — working in close coordination with the military — until now has remained largely unknown.
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Today’s Must Read
According to John A. Rizzo, the longtime CIA attorney nominated to become general counsel, the agency might — just might — have the power to detain a U.S. citizen overseas at the direction of the president.
Rizzo’s statement came at the end of his two-hour Senate confirmation hearing yesterday, in which he equivocated on what he thought of the Justice Department’s shifting definitions of torture and whether any top al-Qaeda detainees in CIA custody were in fact abused. Responding to a question from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) about presidential authority to order CIA to take an American citizen overseas into custody, Rizzo replied, “it would be extremely problematic in terms of the rights of an American citizen for CIA to capture him overseas.”
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Update 6/16/07
Defreitas: Not Simply an Idiot, but a Useful Idiot
“The recently publicized terrorist plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport, like so many of the terrorist plots over the past few years, is a study in alarmism and incompetence: on the part of the terrorists, our government and the press,” writes Bruce Schneier for Wired.
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Update 6/12/07
Nuremberg prosecutor says Guantanamo trials unfair
MIAMI, June 11 (Reuters) – The U.S. war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo have betrayed the principles of fairness that made the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg a judicial landmark, one of the U.S. Nuremberg prosecutors said on Monday.
“I think Robert Jackson, who’s the architect of Nuremberg, would turn over in his grave if he knew what was going on at Guantanamo,” Nuremberg prosecutor Henry King Jr. told Reuters in a telephone interview.
“It violates the Nuremberg principles, what they’re doing, as well as the spirit of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.”
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Update 6/11/07
Judges Rule Against U.S. On Detained ‘Combatant’
A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that President Bush cannot indefinitely imprison a U.S. resident on suspicion alone, ordering the government either to charge Qatari national Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri with his alleged terrorist crimes in a civilian court or release him.
The opinion is a blow to the Bush administration’s assertion that the president has exceptionally broad powers to combat terrorism, including the authority to detain without charges foreign citizens living legally in the United States.
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(June 10, 2007 — 09:19 PM EDT // link)
Over at TPMmuckraker, Spencer Ackerman has gotten a copy of the Council of Europe’s report on the CIA’s secret detention facilities (aka “black sites”, “secret prisons” …) and he’s sharing his findings here.
We’ve posted the actual report here.
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Update 6/10/07
A former American army torturer has laid bare the traumatic effects of American interrogation techniques in Iraq – on their victims and on the perpetrators themselves.
Tony Lagouranis conducted mock executions, forced men and boys into agonising stress positions, kept suspects awake for weeks on end, used dogs to terrify detainees and subjected others to hypothermia.
But he confesses that he was deeply scarred by the realisation that what he did has contributed to the downfall of American forces in Iraq.
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Preacher seized by CIA tells of torture in Egypt
AN EGYPTIAN preacher who was seized by the CIA in daylight on a Milan street has revealed the details of 14 months of torture to which he says he was subjected after his “extraordinary rendition” to Egypt.
Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, described how Egyptian interrogators stripped him, shackled his arms and legs in a crucifixion position and then beat him and gave him electric shocks. He claimed they had twice attempted to rape him.
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6/9/07
CIA rejects secret jails report
The CIA has dismissed a Council of Europe report alleging that it ran secret jails for terror suspects in Europe after the 11 September attacks.
A CIA spokesman said the report was biased and distorted, and that the agency had operated lawfully.
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5/26/07
Update: Video below isn’t working.
BBC News:
Shedding light on CIA mystery flights
“This World: Mystery Flights” pieces together the jigsaw of “extraordinary rendition”, the alleged illegal CIA transfer of terror suspects to secret prisons in Europe.
In far eastern Poland in 2002 and 2003 strange planes landed on an old disused runway in a secluded forest – nine times.
The airport was closed but Mariola Przewlocka, the airport facilities manager, was told to accept the planes or “heads would roll”.
Airport staff were told to stay away while the passengers were unloaded out of sight. Mini-vans with blacked-out windows drove them away to a former Soviet military intelligence base, where it is believed the CIA has its own zone.
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