Thursday 28th of November 2024
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dusty foggo & co .....

dusty foggo & co .....

It is hard to summarize Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes because there really isn't anything that can be cut from it. Every page is packed with stories of incredible sacrifice at low levels and incredible malfeasance at the highest level (low-level people thinking of sacrificing yourselves, take note).

There's the story of how the CIA stole 5% of the Marshall Plan relief money, stories of how it funded "moderate" socialist political parties and media all over the "free" world, stories of vast expenditure on covert programs with little result. And of course the story of Dusty Foggo, executive director of the CIA under Bush. His story is unusual in that he was actually convicted for corruption, unlike most of the questionable characters that have hidden behind CIA secrecy.

The first lesson is that the CIA has never been able to spy on America's potential enemies. The CIA was caught completely by surprise by every major development: the Soviet A-bomb, the Soviet H-bomb, the Korean War, the arrival of missiles in Cuba... right up to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, which the CIA absolutely denied would happen even as it was underway. A few years later the CIA turned around and stated that absolutely for sure, Saddam had WMDs. Dick Cheney was presumably lying about the WMDs... Weiner is pretty sure the CIA just didn't know.

The second lesson is that the CIA does no better when it comes to covert operations. The CIA has served as a great shield to the dictatorships of the world, by recruiting people who wanted to oppose tyranny and turning them over to the respective secret police agencies. Thousands of anti-communist Chinese, Koreans, Russians, Tibetans, Germans, Hungarians, Cubans etc. etc. were parachuted to certain death by the CIA, year after year and decade after decade. And decade after decade the CIA covered up its failures from the American people, and kept the money flowing.

The third lesson is that secrecy is counterproductive to real security. Of course the world is a dangerous place, and we need defenses. But the CIA has never been an effective part of America's defenses. The military detests the CIA for its refusal to turn over what little intelligence it has during wartime. CIA ineptitude and coverups have left US Presidents unknowingly blind during crises, thinking that they knew what was going on when they didn't.

The CIA creates enemies in places where we had none, while it gives our real enemies more ability to spy on us (and on their own dissidents) than they would have without it. It has always been a black hole for money... secret budgets breed Dusty Foggos like spilling cornflakes behind the kitchen counter breeds roaches. And worst of all, the CIA is the most directly evil part of Aid To Dependent Dictators; directly helping torture and kill people who oppose their own tyrannical governments.

The bottom line is that government secrecy is the enemy of freedom, not its protector. The opposite of foreign totalitarianism is not domestic totalitarianism, it is transparency. The US is still by far the most powerful nation on Earth; we need fear no open enemy. And all we have to do to get rid of most of the secret enemies is to quit paying for them ourselves.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/walker/walker38.1.html

elsewhere .....

On April 5, online truth and transparency advocate WikiLeaks.org plans to release at the National Press Club what it alleges is a video confirming a Pentagon cover-up of a wartime massacre of civilians and journalists committed under the leadership of General David Petraeus.

In a recent editorial that was later scrubbed, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed WikiLeaks is under fire from American and international intelligence agencies angered by his site's oversharing of the global village's dark political and financial secrets, and that they are responding with harassment, surveillance, unnecessary detention and worse.

"But the CIA and Pentagon are vastly powerful entities that operate almost entirely in the dark. They have a long, sordid and well-documented history of targeting anyone who they perceive to be undermining their interests, and -- as they themselves acknowledge -- WikiLeaks qualifies. I think it would be foolish in the extreme not to take those threats seriously."

Indeed, downplaying the severity of real threats while inflating the importance of imagined or, worse yet, created ones has been an escalating obsession of ours in this new, turbulent century. And our chief coping mechanism has worked to the government's advantage, according to Greenwald's column. The official outcry over WikiLeaks is "based in the same rationale...used by all governments to conceal evidence of their wrongdoing: we need to suppress our activities for your own good. WikiLeaks is devoted to subverting that mentality and, relatively speaking, has been quite successful in doing so. For that reason, numerous governments and private groups would like to see them destroyed."

http://www.alternet.org/story/146275/intelligence_agencies_allegedly_going_to_extremes_to_suppress_video_confirming_pentagon_massacre_cover-up_

good on wikileaks, we salute you...

From the New York Times

Wikileaks is a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret. The Web site allows people to post documents anonymously, the nonprofit organization says, "to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations."

The Pentagon has added Wikileaks.org to its list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States. It assessed the danger the organization posed to the Army in a report marked "unauthorized disclosure subject to criminal sanctions." It concluded that "WikiLeaks.org represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC threat to the U.S. Army" — or, in plain English, a threat to Army operations and information.

WikiLeaks, true to its mission to publish materials that expose secrets of all kinds, published the 2008 Pentagon report about itself on March 15, 2010.

The Army's report says that in 2008 access to the Web site in the United States was cut off by court order after Bank Julius Baer, a Swiss financial institution, sued it for publishing documents implicating Baer in money laundering, grand larceny and tax evasion. Access was restored after two weeks, when the bank dropped its case.

On April 5, 2010, Wikileaks released a video that it said it had received from a military whistle-blower and used donated computing power to decrypt it. The video shows what appears to be crews of two American Apache attack helicopters killing a Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, and 11 other people.  Mr. Noor-Eldeen was 22 when he was killed in July 2007. Also among the dead was a Reuters driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40.

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Gus: I have the feeling that many BIG news organisations would like to have the clout of Wikileaks. But they are hemmed in by too many regulations, by having to sleep with governments, and brown-nosing with advertisers. But they are also curtailed by the colour of their owners who, it goes without fear, need to make a buck out of the news — thus the news becomes a regular entertainment feature designed and packaged like a laxative. We watch the "news", we know everything there is to know, we can go back to sleep as long as we buy our mattress at the advertised factory.

There was a segment on John Stewart's show showing the once mighty CNN dwelling in vacuous segments that would not even made the grade on amateur community TV...

Wikileaks we salute you.

But beware of double-cross too. Some leaks may appear to be genuine but they could be part of greater set-ups to discredit your valiant efforts.

caught by surprise?...

"The first lesson is that the CIA has never been able to spy on America's potential enemies. The CIA was caught completely by surprise by every major development: the Soviet A-bomb, the Soviet H-bomb, the Korean War, the arrival of missiles in Cuba... right up to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, which the CIA absolutely denied would happen even as it was underway. A few years later the CIA turned around and stated that absolutely for sure, Saddam had WMDs. Dick Cheney was presumably lying about the WMDs... Weiner is pretty sure the CIA just didn't know"

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Gus: I have not read the book but I will take the plunge here and comment to my detriment. The major purpose of the CIA is as much "to know" as to "misinform"... The CIA is only one many "spy" agencies in the US. On this site I have already exposed that the US has at least 14 major spy agencies, including the CIA.

The CIA has many levels of "actions", including the dissemination of false information from one level to the next in its own organisation, in order to satisfy government's purpose. Weiner is wrong when he states " [he] is pretty sure the CIA just didn't know"... The CIA was groomed to "manufacture" palatable reasons to help the public swallow Gearge W Bush desire to attack Iraq. I am prepared to believe that some secret lower levels at the CIA manufactured "proofs" for other levels in the CIA to build up a case, "even if there were some doubt in some of the reports"... The war in Iraq was built on a giant hoax, or in spy parlance was a "double-cross", a clever and deep manipulation of information. I am prepared to believe as well that the CIA knew about the Russian A and H bombs but chose to "feign" ignorance to let build anger and fuel the arms race...

meanwhile at murder-a-cleric inc...

The US government has authorised the capture or killing of radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, currently based in Yemen, officials have confirmed.

The cleric, who is a US citizen, is being targeted for his involvement in planning attacks on the US.

Mr Awlaki was linked to the attempted bombing of an airliner bound for the US and a shooting on a US Army base.

US officials have warned that Yemen is becoming a safe haven for al-Qaeda militants.

The BBC's Steve Kingstone, in Washington, says it is highly unusual for the CIA to be given approval by the president's National Security Council to target a US citizen.

The order was made by the Obama administration earlier this year, but it has just been revealed after a review of national security policy.

rhubarb from psycho... logists...

The sight of human beings, most of them unarmed, being gunned down from above is jarring enough.

But for many people who watched the video of a 2007 assault by an Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad, released Monday by WikiLeaks.org, the most disturbing detail was the cockpit chatter. The soldiers joked, chuckled and jeered as they shot people in the street, including a Reuters photographer and a driver, believing them to be insurgents.

“Look at those dead bastards,” one said. “Nice,” another responded.

In recent days, many veterans have made the point that fighters cannot do their jobs without creating psychological distance from the enemy. One reason that the soldiers seemed as if they were playing a video game is that, in a morbid but necessary sense, they were.

“You don’t want combat soldiers to be foolish or to jump the gun, but their job is to destroy the enemy, and one way they’re able to do that is to see it as a game, so that the people don’t seem real,” said Bret A. Moore, a former Army psychologist and co-author of the forthcoming book “Wheels Down: Adjusting to Life After Deployment.”

Military training is fundamentally an exercise in overcoming a fear of killing another human, said Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of the book “On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society,” who is a former Army Ranger.

Combat training “is the only technique that will reliably influence the primitive, midbrain processing of a frightened human being” to take another life, the colonel writes. “Conditioning in flight simulators enables pilots to respond reflexively to emergency situations even when frightened.”

The men in the Apache helicopter in the video flew into an area that was being contested, during a broader conflict in which a number of helicopters had been shot down.

Several other factors are on display during the 38-minute video, said psychologists in and out of the military. (A shortened 17-minute version of the video has been viewed about three million times on YouTube.)

Soldiers and Marines are taught to observe rules of engagement, and throughout the video those in the helicopter call base for permission to shoot. But at a more primal level, fighters in a war zone must think of themselves as predators first — not bait. That frame of mind affects not only how a person thinks, but what he sees and hears, especially in the presence of imminent danger, or the perception of a threat.

The fighters in the helicopter say over the radio that they are sure they see a “weapon,” even though the Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, is carrying a camera.

“It’s tragic that this all begins with the apparent mistaking of a camera” for a weapon, said David A. Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University. “But it’s perfectly understandable with what we know now about context and vision. Take the same image and put it in a bathroom, and you swear it’s a hair dryer; put it in a workshop, and you swear it’s a power drill.”

To a soldier or a pilot, it can look like life or death. “I worked with medevac pilots, and vulnerability is a huge issue for them,” Dr. Moore said.

The video does show that the second object that the soldiers identified as a weapon was a rocket-propelled grenade, or R.P.G. “An R.P.G. can take them down in a second,” Dr. Moore said.

After the helicopter guns down a group of men, the video shows a van stopping to pick up one of the wounded. The soldiers in the helicopter suspect it to be hostile and, after getting clearance from base, fire again. Two children in the van are wounded, and one of the soldiers remarks, “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”

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Rhubarb, rhubarb... It is highly possible that the soldiers in the chopper will develop tramatic experiences after this 2007 episode... it may not happen tomorrow but by the time they reach retirement age, there is a good chance the memory will balk...

For the people who've been killed, there is no more "emotions"... just for their family members. And one has to remember that every "enemy" has a family...