Just when you thought shit couldn’t get any worse:
The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.
Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.
“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”
The Raw Story: Former UK ambassador: CIA sent people to be ‘raped with broken bottles’
(via Cryptogon)
America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.
In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.
Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.
Danger Room: Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets
“Fears of an alien invasion created greater alarm in the US than the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack, writes Philippe Mora.
In January 1979, The New York Times reported that despite repeated, feverish denials, the CIA had indeed investigated the UFO phenomenon: “CIA Papers Detail UFO Surveillance” screamed the headline. The report is said to have so upset the then CIA director, Stansfield Turner, that he reportedly asked his staff: “Are we in UFOs?” The answer was yes – since the late 1940s, apparently. But exactly how, what, when, why and who remained layered in mystery, leaving grist for the conspiracy mill.
But this year a raft of newly unclassified CIA documents revealed that the remote possibility of alien invasion elicited greater fear than the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack.”
via The Sydney Morning Herald
Now that University of Miami neurologist Deborah Mash has the cash needed to resume clinical studies of ibogaine?the drug that could be the best anti-drug the CIA never told you about?there’s new hope for hard-core drug addicts and alcoholics. She got the go-ahead from the Food and Drug Administration 10 years ago, but after negative reviews by other scientists, the National Institute on Drug Abuse refused to fund her.
Village Voice (via LVX23).
Robert Novak? CIA operative?
It is the opinion of this writer, that Robert Novak has been part of Operation MOCKINGBIRD for a very long time. (As has the Post’s Bob Woodward, and through which he gained the acumen for to reach and sustain a relationship with “Deepthroat”–now known to be the FBI’s then-second-in-command, Mark Felt.) Someone (and it appears certain now, that it is either Novak or Rove) knew definitively of Valerie Plame’s employment history. If the source was Novak, that he is also a CIA agent, working within a long-standing media-infiltration project, would be a winning bet.
If Robert Novak is employed by the Central Intelligence Agency via Operation MOCKINGBIRD, and if for whatever reason he confirmed Valerie Plame-Wilson’s identity to Karl Rove, it appears now that Mr. Rove is turning on his ultimate Source: a man who is very likely to be CIA himself. Spooks will be spooks, and spooks–as with any two humans–often don’t like each other. But Federal statutes are also Federal statutes, and the citizenry can’t be expected to abide by that which our Masters do not. What’s good for the goose, etc.
Complete article here
Kerry soft on terrorism? Not likely.
A decade after Kerry helped shut the bank down, the CIA discovered Osama bin Laden was among those with accounts at the bank. A French intelligence report obtained by The Washington Post in 2002 identified dozens of companies and individuals who were involved with BCCI and were found to be dealing with bin Laden after the bank collapsed, and that the financial network operated by bin Laden today ?is similar to the network put in place in the 1980s by BCCI.? As one senior U.S. investigator said in 2002, ?BCCI was the mother and father of terrorist financing operations.?
Link
“However, Nixon?s weary world ignored the eschatological opportunity I thought my brother?s inspired fiddling with hyperspace had afforded. The world continued grinding forward in its usual less than merry way. There was only one small incident that might subsequently be construed, even within the framework of the schizoid logic that was my bread and butter then, to support my position. Unknown to me, a struggling, overweight SF writer, an idol of mine since my teens, discovered the next day that his house have been broken into, his privacy violated by the Other. How peculiar that on the first day of the new dispensation in my private reformist calendar, he had been burglarized by extraterterrestials the CIA or his own deranged self in an altered state. The torch had been passed, in a weird way the most intense phase of my episode of illumination/delusion ended right where Phil?s began.”
Link (via New World Disorder).
Looks like Clockwork Orange author Anothony Burgess was involved with the CIA’s MK-ULTRA project:
According to the anonymous source, Burgess became involved with the CIA while working as a Colonial Service education officer in Malaya in the 1950s.
There he became a party to trials for a mind-control process designed to trigger emotional responses in the brain using pain and pleasure ? the inspiration, it is claimed, for the chilling Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange.
Link (via Post Atomic).
Disinfo is running a piece compiling evidence from mainstream news sources indicating that the govenment knew in advance “…that a devastating attack was in the works, that it would involve hijacked airplanes, and that it would occur inside the United States.”
1. Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial aircraft in July 2001 2. The FAA refused to let author Salman Rushdie fly in North America starting the week before 9/11 3. Four days before the attacks, Florida Governor Jeb Bush activated the National Guard, citing ?acts of terrorism? 4. On September 10, 2001, high-ranking Pentagon officials cancelled travel plans for the morning of September 11. 5. On September 10, 2001, San Francisco?s mayor was warned against flying to New York the next morning. 6. CIA Director George Tenet warned Congressmen of ?an imminent attack on the United States of this nature.?
Link.
To me this stuff only indicates that multiple agencies knew something involving commercial planes was going to happen sometime. And let’s not forget this one: one U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings.
Recent Comments