Posts tagged “CIA”
You Know You Live In A Police State When…
…the planning involved by the police in dismantling a nonviolent demonstration is almost identical to the Navy SEALs preparation for catching and killing a terrorist mastermind. I really want to disclaim that I’m not talking about some conspiratorial Black Helicopter shit, except for the fact that in its most basic essence this was literally Black Helicopter [...]
Presidential Helplessness
How bizarre is this? The president of Lithuania, Dalia Grybauskaite, suspects that Lithuania hosted a secret CIA prison for terror suspects in 2004 and 2005, as alleged by an ABC News report last August. She suspects it, but isn’t sure. And apparently she can’t just summon a few officials, or make a few phone calls, [...]
Secrecy Is The Best Policy, Isn’t It?
Once again, the Obama administration has chosen to hew closely to the Bush administration’s line on a controversial aspect of The War Against Terror. This time it’s about supporting the CIA as it invokes national security as a reason for drawing an invisibility cloak around the CIA’s “defunct detention and interrogation program”. The Central Intelligence [...]
The Disinfectant Properties Of Sunlight
Here’s a little word collage, made largely by re-arranging chunks of a BBC article: A heavily censored version of (a) 2004 internal Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report was released last year but in an almost meaningless form because so much remained classified. A federal judge ordered more details to be released on Monday, after a [...]
GOP Attack On CIA
Nine top Senate Republicans are calling the CIA a thoroughly unprofessional and dysfunctional organization, which cannot be trusted to protect the country against future terrorist attacks. Specifically, they think the CIA is likely to deliberately pass up “opportunities to prevent attacks” and “policies to protect the nation”. The Republicans with this dim view of the [...]
The Dance Of The Seven Veils
Although the story broke on July 8, even now we have only the most shadowy notion of what the top secret program that Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to keep secret even from the Gang of Eight might actually involve. Investigative reporters have been forced to fall back on lots of heavy breathing; there haven’t [...]
CIA: Liars, Clowns or Both?
(1) Bob Graham was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2002. Today he weighed in on last week’s controversy over whether Nancy Pelosi was or wasn’t briefed in September 2002 about the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques on Abu Zubaydah. To recap, the CIA made some absurdly half-hearted assertions which essentially [...]