Rep. Lewis passed over for powerful chairmanship

Republicans passed over  Rep. Jerry Lewis in favor of a veteran Kentucky lawmaker Wednesday to chair the powerful House Appropriations Committee. The party’s steering committee rejected Lewis’s request to waive term limits that bar him from reclaiming the post he held when Republicans last held the majority. The decision deprives Lewis of a position that [...]

Startups Backed By The CIA

The spy agency has a venture capital arm that is funding an array of companies developing bleeding-edge technologies. Tiny cameras. Hearing devices for the teeth. Wi-fi for refrigerators. These are some of the products made by companies that have caught the eye of In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Forty years since the Kent State massacre

May 4 marks the 40th anniversary of the shootings of unarmed student protesters at Kent State University in northeast Ohio. The Ohio National Guard killed four students and wounded nine others at a rally against the Nixon administration’s decision to escalate the Vietnam War by invading neighboring Cambodia. The four students who died were Allison [...]

Former CIA Official Arrested in Virginia for Rape

A former Central Intelligence Agency official, who is accused of raping two women, was arrested Monday at a motel in Virginia. A warrant was issued for 42-year-old Andrew M. Warren after he failed to show up for a hearing last week. Warren was the CIA’s Station Chief in Algeria. According to court papers, two Algerian [...]

Memo to America: Stop murdering my people

Almost every day, the NATO occupation of our country continues to kill innocent people. Each time, it seems, military officials try to claim that only insurgents are killed, or they completely deny and cover up their crimes. The work of a few courageous journalists is the only thing that brings some of these atrocities to [...]

Britain: Details of hundreds of students handed to CIA

The details of up to one thousand Muslim students at University College London (UCL) have been made available to the Central Intelligence Agency jointly by the university and the Students Union. The move represents a grave attack on democratic rights and another step towards tighter controls over academic institutions in the UK. An article appeared [...]

Report: US ordered assassination of Yemeni cleric

The United States has ordered the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni cleric, over alleged links to a failed Christmas airline bombing in Detroit, a report says. Citing unnamed US officials, The Washington Post reported Wednesday that US President Barack Obama’s administration has authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to capture and kill Awlaki. Al-Awlaki, 38, [...]

The Chemist’s War

The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences. It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept [...]

United Nations report blasts US over human rights abuses

A United Nations report says the US has been violating basic human rights by kidnapping and holding terrorism suspects in secret detention centers during the past nine years. The US is among dozens of countries that have kidnapped suspects, four independent UN rights investigators said in a year-long study based on flight data and interviews [...]

Mystery surrounds arrest of renegade CIA agent in Indonesia

In January of 2008, a man with an American accent appeared at a passport office in the popular West Java tourist resort of Bogor, Indonesia, and applied for an Indonesian passport. But his inability to speak Bahasa Indonesia triggered the suspicion of passport officials, who subsequently discovered that his Indonesian birth certificate was faked. He [...]

White House memo sides with CIA in inter-agency turf war

For several months now, I have been keeping tabs on a bitter inter-agency turf war between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Now a Los Angeles Times article by Greg Miller confirms what intelNews reported on November 18, namely that the White House has come down [...]

The Nevada gambler, al-Qaida, the CIA and the mother of all cons

The intelligence reports fitted the suspicions of the time: al-Qaida sleeper agents were scattered across the US awaiting orders that were broadcast in secret codes over the al-Jazeera television network. Flights from Britain and France were cancelled. Officials warned of a looming “spectacular attack” to rival 9/11. In 2003 President George W. Bush‘s homeland security [...]

John Brennan Controversy

A veteran Central Intelligence Agency official appointed to review the US government’s defective terrorism watch-list system, was actually involved in designing it, and later helped sustain it through a lucrative private-sector contract. John O. Brennan was appointed by President Barack Obama on Sunday to head a “comprehensive interagency review” of travel security measures, after it [...]

Langley-Eustis merger on track for Jan. 31

+ HAMPTON, Va. — Two Virginia military bases will merge next month, but officials say little will change in the short term. Langley Air Force Base and Fort Eustis will become Joint Base Langley-Eustis starting Jan. 31. Military officials say the process of combining operations is expected to last through October. Col. Kevin Altman, commander [...]

Are America’s Mercenary Armies Really Drug Cartels?

News out of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India reports massive corruption at the highest levels of government, corruption that could only be financed with drug money. In Afghanistan, the president’s brother is known to be one of the biggest drug runners in the world. In Pakistan, President Asif Ali Zardari is found with 60 million in [...]

Dutch MP: Curaçao is US spy base

Mr. Harry an Bommel has asked Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen whether he is aware that a Boeing RC-135 aircraft has been making regular reconnaissance flights from the Caribbean island’s Hato International Airport airport over the past few weeks. War on drugs The flights were the cause of angry reactions by Venezuelan president Hugo Rafael Chávez, [...]

US to stop funding scandal-prone Colombian spy agency

The US Congress has voted to stop subsidizing Colombia’s soon-to-be dismantled Administrative Department of Security (DAS – Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad) intelligence agency. The Colombian government recently decided to disband DAS, after it was found to have illegally wiretapped the phones of several public figures, including the chief of the Colombian National Police (Policía Nacional [...]

Lista de agencias en el mundo que trabajan con la CIA

Caracas, dic. 2009, Tribuna Popular TP.- A continuación publicamos el listado de más de 500 agencias, fundaciones y empresas que son parte de la Central Intelligence Agency  (CIA) y trabajan con ella en el área de la información y acción contra los pueblos y sus organizaciones políticas y sociales. LISTADO DE AGENCIAS DE LA CIA:

UK army ‘waterboarded’ prisoners in 1970s

Evidence has emerged that the British Army used waterboarding to interrogate Northern Ireland prisoners during troubled times back in the 1970s. The torture technique was allegedly used in at least one interrogation of a prisoner who was accused of killing a British soldier in 1973, a Tuesday report published in the Guardian said. The prisoner [...]

Mumbai terror suspect David Headley was ‘rogue US secret agent’

A key terror suspect who allegedly helped to plan last year’s attacks in Mumbai and plotted to strike Europe was an American secret agent who went rogue, Indian officials believe. David Coleman Headley (aka Daood Sayed Gilani), 49, who was born in Washington to a Pakistan diplomat father and an American mother, was arrested in [...]

Lithuania ‘hosted at least two secret CIA prisons’

A Lithuanian inquiry has found that the US Central Intelligence Agency set up and used secret prisons on its soil following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the US. Lithuania‘s intelligence agency assisted the CIA-run secret prisons, which were used to hold at least eight al-Qaeda suspects, the parliamentary panel in charge of the [...]

Spy agencies closely monitoring climate change talks

I have written before about the increasing involvement of intelligence agencies in ongoing climate change negotiations between the world’s governments. In October, the Central Intelligence Agency announced the establishment of its Center on Climate Change and National Security, despite fierce opposition by Republican lawmakers. Earlier this month, it was alleged that the hackers who stole [...]

Intelligence Improperly Collected on U.S. Citizens

WASHINGTON — In February, a Department of Homeland Security intelligence official wrote a “threat assessment” for the police in Wisconsin about a demonstration involving local pro- and anti-abortion rights groups. That report soon drew internal criticism because the groups “posed no threat to homeland security,” according to a department memorandum released on Wednesday in connection [...]

Lithuanian leader ‘impeached’ for refusing CIA

Lithuania‘s former president says he was impeached because of his refusal to let the Central Intelligence Agency set up secret prisons in the country. Rolandas Paksas made the remark during a parliamentary hearing into claims that at least eight al-Qaeda terror suspects were held by the US Central Intelligence Agency at a facility just outside [...]

Republic of Lithuania’s spy chief quits after leak of CIA prison in Lithuania

The Republic of Lithuania‘s intelligence chief has resigned after news leaked out that the Central Intelligence Agency operated a secret prison in the country between 2004 and 2005. Povilas Malakauskas, director of the Lithuanian State Security Department (Valstybės saugumo departamento), quit his job after two years in the position “partly” because of government efforts to [...]

Cold War Museum to Open in Virginia

The Cold War Museum, founded by Francis Gary Powers, Jr. and John C. Welch, has found a physical home and will open to the public in 2010. The museum will lease a modest two-story building and storage facility at Vint Hill, located in Fauquier County, Va., less than 30 miles from Washington Dulles International Airport. [...]

Brussels gives CIA the power to search UK bank records

THE Central Intelligence Agency is to be given broad access to the bank records of millions of Britons under a European Union plan to fight terrorism. The Brussels agreement, which will come into force in two months’ time, requires the 27 EU member states to grant requests for banking information made by the United States [...]

Lawsuit demands info on government’s use of social media sites

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing five different government agencies for refusing to disclose their policies on investigations using social networking websites. The lawsuit was filed Monday after the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of the Treasury, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [...]

Analysis: Is an obscure US military unit replacing the CIA?

An obscure US military unit established in 1980 is gaining prominence in America’s “war on terrorism” and may be slowly replacing the Central Intelligence Agency’s functions, according to a well-researched piece in The Atlantic magazine.  The US Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was created soon after the fiasco of the attempted rescue of the [...]

Soviet and Warsaw Pact Military Journals

A collection of sensitive Soviet and Warsaw Pact military journals from 1961 to 1984 providing a view into Warsaw Pact military strategy. Click here.

No laughing matter for CIA

The top lawyer at the Central Intelligence Agency, General Counsel Stephen Preston, recently introduced himself during an American Bar Association conference on national security as “the chief legal officer of a well-understood and enormously popular agency, the object of universal praise and appreciation.” He was greeted with laughter, reports The Washington Post. We imagine that [...]

CIA’s Lost Magic Manual Resurfaces

At the height of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency paid $3,000 to renowned magician John Mulholland to write a manual on misdirection, concealment, and stagecraft. All known copies of the document — and a related paper, on conveying hidden signals — were believed to be destroyed in 1973. But recently, the manuals resurfaced, [...]

CIA Lithuanian torture site located

The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA

Through interviews with former narcotics agents, politicians, and bureaucrats, this exposé documents previously unknown aspects of the history of federal drug law enforcement from the formation of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) up until the present day. Written in an easily accessible style, the [...]

Occupiers involved in drug trade: Afghan minister

The Afghan minister of counter narcotics says foreign troops are earning money from drug production in Afghanistan. General Khodaidad Khodaidad said the majority of drugs are stockpiled in two provinces controlled by troops from the US, the UK, and Canada, Islamic Republic News Agency reported on Saturday. He went on to say that North Atlantic [...]

UN says US drone strikes may violate international law

US unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) strikes against suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan could be breaking international laws against summary executions, the United Nations top investigator of such crimes said. “The problem with the United States is that it is making an increased use of drones/Predators (which are) particularly prominently used now in relation to [...]

Karzai’s brother ‘on CIA payroll’

US involvement in Afghanistan has come into new question with the claim that President Hamid Karzai‘s brother has for years been on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency – even though he is suspected of being a major figure in the illicit opium trade that Washington and its allies are pledged to do everything [...]

How Washington Learned to Love Nonviolence

Nonviolence can be a major force for democratic social change, but not when it becomes a tool for covert intervention. A close-cropped, no-nonsense infantry officer, Col. Robert Helvey was studying at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs on an Army fellowship. One day in 1987, he happened upon a seminar led by Gene Sharp, a draft [...]

CIA documents on Agent Posada Carriles released

The Washington, DC-based investigative nonprofit National Security Archive released several documents on Oct. 6 written by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1965 and 1966 about its Cuban-born longtime “asset” Luis Posada Carriles, who currently lives in Miami under indictment after entering the US illegally in 2005. The Archive’s Peter Kornbluh obtained the documents [...]

CIA Opens Climate Change and National Security Center

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recently announced the creation of The Center on Climate Change and National Security. This new unit, comprised of specialists from the CIA Directorates of Intelligence and Science and Technology, is aimed at supporting American policymakers on issues related to the national security implications of climate change as they “negotiate, implement, [...]

Attorney: Oklahoma City bomb tapes appear edited

OKLAHOMA CITY  — Long-secret security tapes showing the chaos immediately after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building are blank in the minutes before the blast and appear to have been edited, an attorney who obtained the recordings said Sunday. “The real story is what’s missing,” said Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney [...]

Scientists: Obama’s election may reduce terrorism

Will Barack Obama’s election make terrorists less eager to strike? A data analysis released Thursday suggests it could make a difference. In the Science magazine study, researchers Alan Bennett Krueger of Princeton University and Jitka Maleèková of the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Science in Prague looked at terrorist attacks in nine countries, [...]

CIA OIG Report on Detention and Interrogation Activities Available

CIA OIG Report on Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001-October 2003) As widely reported in the press yesterday, the CIA Office of Inspector General has just released material on past detention practices in the ‘War on Terrorism’. The release of this material came about following a FOIA request by the American Civil Liberties Union, [...]

CIA Furious Over New Secret Site Expose

Already wrestling with a renewed controversy over contract killers, the CIA reacted angrily Thursday to a news organization’s revelation of yet another secret interrogation center.ABC News reported that the CIA had a secret site in Lithuania where interrogators grilled terrorist suspects,  “one of eight facilities the CIA set-up after 9/11 to detain and interrogate top [...]

C.I.A. Sought Blackwater’s Help to Kill Jihadists

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials. Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped [...]

Senate Bill Would Disclose Intel Budget Request

The Senate version of the FY2010 intelligence authorization bill (pdf) would require the President to disclose the aggregate amount requested for intelligence each year when the coming year’s budget request is submitted to Congress.  Currently, only the total appropriation for the National Intelligence Program is disclosed — not the request — and not before the [...]

Threat Level Privacy, Crime and Security Online Hacker ‘Dark Tangent’ Joins DHS Advisory Council

Forget the new cyber security czar position that President Barack Obama announced last week. The real sign that the White House might be finally taking cyber security seriously came in an announcement on Friday that Jeff Moss, aka “Dark Tangent” and the former hacker behind the annual DefCon hacker confab in Las Vegas, has been [...]

Michael V. Hayden today

Less than three months after stepping down as CIA director, retired general Michael V. Hayden has taken several jobs in the private sector. He has just joined the board of the National Interest Security Company (NISC), a holding company that manages all the assets of the DC Capital Partners equity fund in the intelligence field. [...]

Journo Deemed A U.S Terror Threat

Apparently, the pen is so mighty, that we can’t even risk certain foreign journalists flying in our airspace. According to reports over the weekend, an Air France flight to Mexico was diverted because of one passenger, Franco-Colombian writer Hernando Calvo Ospina, who works for the Le Monde Diplomatique, a left-wing French-based newspaper. Apparently, Ospina has [...]

EU nations eye prosecution of Bush officials

European officials and lawyers seek to criminalize former US officials over torture charges amid the reluctance of President Barack Obama. A number of European authorities and human rights groups have expressed dissatisfaction with Obama’s failure to press charges against ex-CIA authorities who sanctioned or administered the so-called ‘enhanced interrogation methods’ to terror suspects, saying that [...]