Category: Espionage

Now This is Reassuring

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Seymour Hersh is now saying that Bush and His Evil Minions™ turned the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) into a personal assassination squad reporting directly to Dick Cheney. (see also here and here):

Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

Seeing as how it was Dick Cheney calling the shots, let’s be glad that it wasn’t unleashed against inconvenient people in the USA.

Or, at least, I don’t think so. I’ve always wondered about J. Clifford Baxter.

Jeebus: Over a Month Out of Office, and Bush and His Evil Minions&trade Still Shock Me

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So, we know that Dusty Foggo, who was installed by then CIA head Porter Goss, was corrupt, but the court files from his trial are stunning.

He went to jail for taking bribes from Brent Wilkes, who was also bribing Randall “Duke” Cunningham, but we now know that he was alwo sleeping around with his wife with a woman who was also sleeping with a Russian spy, and Porter Goss knew this, and hired him anyway.

Un-dirtyword-believable.

Cheney Admits to Engineering Outing of CIA Operative to FBI

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Ummmm…wow????

Legally, it may be a gray zone, because there is no evidence that he actually explicitly gave the order to out Valerie Plame, but Murray Waas, one of the better investigative journalist of my generation has gotten his hands on the notes from FBI interview with dick Cheney, and it’s very clear that he rewrote the talking points on the push-back on Joe Wilson’s OP/ED debunking the Niger-Iraq-Uranium claim in such a way as to make it nearly inevitable that Plame would be outed:

Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.

Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer.

(emphasis mine)

Of course, I expect Cheney to be among those pardoned between January 15 and January 20, so it will amount to nothing.

NSA Ignores Congress, Classifies Wiretap Report

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This is such a surprise:

When Congress passed a landmark electronic-spying bill last summer, the measure included a key provision that ordered the inspectors general of U.S. intelligence agencies to produce the first-ever public report on President Bush’s warrantless-surveillance program.

The report isn’t due until next July—long after Bush leaves office. But when the inspectors general recently submitted their first “interim” report to Congress under the measure, it wasn’t made public. Instead, the brief document, written by CIA inspector general John Helgerson, was marked classified—a move that has drawn a stiff protest from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes.

…..

Since when do Bush and His Evil Minions™ ever feel the need to obey the law?

Bush Claims Executive Privilege on Documents from a Criminal Investigation

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It’s the interviews by the FBI with him and Cheney in the Plame Affair, and Bush is insisting that it’s covered by executive privilige, and Mukasey going along with it.

Simply put, enough is enough. Find Mukasey in contempt, and have the sergeant at arms of the Congress throw his ass in th t cell in the basement of Congress.

While you are at it, get Miers and Bolton in a cell.

Kafka Lives

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U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker dismissed the lawsuit by the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation claiming that the US government has wiretapped conversations with their lawyers, because the document that confirms this is classified:

A federal judge in San Francisco has dismissed a lawsuit that claimed the government illegally wiretapped conversations between lawyers and a client, a now-defunct charity suspected of terrorism.

The lawsuit relied on a classified call log the government turned over by mistake to the client, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation. U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker barred the foundation from using the document and dismissed the suit, according to the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He gave the foundation 30 days to file a new lawsuit using publicly available information.

Catch 22.

Hmmmmm….An Interesting Factoid about the Iran – US Conflict

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According to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius :

He said the Iranians had recently captured several dissident Iranian operatives who had been recruited by U.S. military officers inside Iraq and then sent into Iran. The Iranians, whose intelligence network inside Iraq is pervasive, surveilled the meeting, then followed the agents across the border and seized them.

So, the Iranians know that we are attempting to insert spies, saboteurs, and garden variety terrorists from Iraq, but they have the Iraqis so penetrated that they when we plan something before we do it.

Sounds an awful lot like Vietnam, where about 35% of the intelligence officers there were working for the North.

At some point, they will catch an American, and put him on TV.

McClellan Says White House Plame Coverup is Ongoing

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I am not surprised, except for the fact that Congress has been so complicit in this coverup:

“The continuing cloud of suspicion is not something I can remove because I only one part of the story,” McClellan said in his opening statement before the House Judiciary Committtee this morning. “Only those who know the underlying truth can bring this to an end. Sadly, they remain silent.”

Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?

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It appears that there is evidence that Iranian intelligence operatives infiltrated the various Iraqi and Iranian exile groups that called for war against Iraq in 2002-2003.

The aborted counterintelligence investigation probed some Pentagon officials’ contacts with Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar, whom the CIA had labeled a “fabricator” in 1984. Those contacts were brokered by an American civilian, Michael Ledeen, a former Pentagon and National Security Council consultant and a leading advocate of invading Iraq and overthrowing Iran’s Islamic regime.

According to the Senate report, the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity unit concluded in 2003 that Ledeen “was likely unwitting of any counterintelligence issues related to his relationship with Mr. Ghorbanifar.”

There is also Achmed Chalabi and the INC, though they are not mentioned in this article.

The Pentagon started an investigation of it, but Rumsfeld shut it down when he heard of it.

Read the complete article, including the hair brained scheme to overthrow the mullahs with ….. traffic jams.

4 Years ago, Matthew Yglesias suggested, tongue in cheek, that GW Bush was an Iranian mole…I now wonder how funny it really was….I’m just saying.

McClellan’s New Tell-All Actually Tells All

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Or at least a lot more than you would expect from the guy who job was to Bush’s liar in chief*.

To be fair, at least from the excerpts on Politico, he does a lot more blaming of Bush’s staff than Bush himself, but still, the allegations are explosive:

  • He accuses Bush of relying on propaganda to sell the war.
  • Basically calls the press a bunch of lap dogs.
  • Admits that the administration was clueless on Katrina
  • That Rove, Libby, and possibly Cheney lied to him about l’affaire Plame.

I’m not going to buy the book, paying Republicans only creates more Republicans, but I’m definitely going to borrow it at some point.

*To be fair, this is the job description of every press secretary.

National Reconnaissance Office Gets Slapped Down

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The NRO has, for the 2nd time in a year, “been stripped of Milestone Decision Authority on a program, which means that it no longer has the authority to sign off on a project as complying with the contract requirements.

It appears that it has been decided that the NRO, which is responsible for procurement and operation of the US spy satellite fleet, has been determined to need adult supervision.

A Good Article on Modern Strategic Camoflage

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In the Washington Post, of all sources. Basically, they describe the techniques used by Syria to conceal their nuclear site*, and make it clear that various nations are becoming increasingly savvy about satellite reconnaissance, and how to conceal large items from this.

They used techniques such as burying power lines in trenches, embedding cooling towers in walls, etc.

It’s a good read.

*Yep, it appears that I was wrong when I ruled this out.

They Are Spying on US, but They Aren’t Prosecuting Terrorists

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The LA Times is reporting that despite an enormous expansion in surveillance of Americans, there has been no increase in terror prosecutions.

Kevin Drum has a useful pictorial perspective:

He also has a perspective that is even more alarming:

If anything, the real situation is almost certainly even worse than this: ‘Warrants’ understates the vast increase in surveillance, which also includes things like national security letters and the warrantless programs run by the NSA, while ‘prosecutions’ overstates the number of genuine terrorists who have been taken to court. It would be nice if Congress actually took a serious look at this.

Needless to say, I’m not sanguine about the likelihood of a Congressional investigation, but I do have a theory as to why you would have an explosion in surveillance without any increase in anti-terror actions: surveillance of political enemies.

By expanding surveillance to unprecedented levels, it allows a few dozens of actions to be taken against political opponents. For people who are actually conducting the surveillance, typically non-poltical civil service appointees, it would be easy to miss the political surveillance among the hundreds discreet actions, but someone *cough* Karl Rove *cough* would have the clearance to get the data that they wanted.

Condi’s State Department: Making Our Best and Brightest Targets

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The US Embassy in Bolivia has been asking members of the Peace Corps and Fulbright Scholars to Spy on Cubans and Venezuelans.

Van Schaick’s account matches that of Peace Corps members and staff who claim that last July their entire group of new volunteers was instructed by the same U.S. Embassy official in Bolivia to report on Cuban and Venezuelan nationals.

The State Department says any such request was “in error” and a violation of long-standing U.S. policy which prohibits the use of Peace Corps personnel or Fulbright scholars for intelligence purposes.

This paints big fat targets on the backs on a group of people who are sent out into the world to understand, and develop friendships with, foreigners all over the world.

Bush League Diplomacy in action.

Something Weird is Going On With the Cut Internet Cables

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We have had three major fiber optic cables cut, and they , carrying the bulk of internet traffic for the Middle East and India, and it’s been confirmed that ships did not cut internet cables with their anchors.

Three widely spaced cables have been severed, and the chance that this would occur as random chance is vanishingly small.

I don’t know what it is.

It’s unlikely to be terrorist, because media like the internet help them both in their internal communication and their propaganda.

It could be some sort of attempt by some of the more despotic regimes in the area to get control of the internet, but the economic consequences of this does not make sense.

If I put on my tinfoil hat, I think that it’s the NSA using creative destruction in order to get taps on the lines, kind of how they used submarines to put taps on lines running from the Kamchatka peninsula to the Soviet mainland during the Cold War.