Greg Jaffe at the Washington Post reports that Trump has reversed an Obama-era push to get the Central Intelligence Agency out of the business of assassinating people with drone strikes (Obama had tried to shift most such operations to the Department of Defense).
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: Request to Withdraw Nomination of Gina Haspel
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
With respect, we veteran intelligence officers from CIA and other agencies urge you to withdraw the nomination of Gina Haspel for CIA director. From what is already known of her leading role in CIA torture 16 years ago, she has disqualified herself.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Gina Haspel’s colleagues describe her as a seasoned veteran who would lead the CIA with integrity. Human rights advocates see her as someone who supervised torture at a secret prison.
President Donald Trump’s pick to be the next — and first female — director of the clandestine agency has conflicting public reputations. If confirmed, the 61-year-old career spymaster will succeed Mike Pompeo, who is replacing ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
“If Obama had allowed prosecutions over CIA torture, ‘people like Haspel, quite plausibly, could have gone to prison.’ Instead, she’s going to run the CIA.” (COMMONDREAMS) Human rights advocates are expressing outrage on Tuesday after President Donald Trump nominated deputy director Gina Haspel—”an actual torturer“—to be the next CIA director despite her leading role in running an agency black […]
Jeffrey Sterling, the case officer for the CIA’s covert “Operation Merlin,” who was convicted in May 2015 for allegedly revealing details of that operation to James Risen of the New York Times, was released from prison in January after serving more than two years of a 42-month sentence. He had been tried and convicted on the premise that the revelation of the operation had harmed U.S. security.
The entire case against him assumed a solid intelligence case that Iran had indeed been working on a nuclear weapon that justified that covert operation.
Exclusive: The CIA’s “Operation Merlin,” which involved providing Iran with a flawed design for a nuclear weapon and resulted in an alleged whistleblower going to prison, was the perfect example of creating intelligence in order to justify operations, reports Gareth Porter.…Read more →
There is something very fishy about the Anti Doping Rule Violations (ADRVs) pinned on the Russian curler and Russian bobsledder during the final week of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.
It makes no logical sense that an athlete would do a one-time consumption of a chemical that is of no value in circumstances where it is almost certain to be detected with huge negative consequences.
Opinion — Now that I have been nominated again – this time by author Paul Craig Roberts – to be CIA director, I am preparing to hit the ground running.
A former Central Bureau of Investigation (CIA) operative has confirmed the U.S agency has been meddling in the elections and internal political affairs of other countries since its inception in 1947.
“The United States absolutely has carried out such election influence operations historically,” said Steven L. Hall, a CIA operative who retired from the U.S. agency in 2015 after 30 years of service, the New York Times reported. “I hope we keep doing it:”
Decades ago, philosopher Marshall McLuhan predicted a future world war fought using information. While World War I and World War II were waged using armies and mobilized economies, “World War III [will be] a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation,” McLuhan said, a prophecy included in his 1970 book of reflections, Culture Is Our Business.
