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 [...]

DOJ Prosecuted Texas Sheriff in 1983 For Waterboarding Prisoners

In 1983, the Department of Justice prosecuted a Texas sheriff and three of his deputies for waterboarding prisoners to get them to confess to crimes.
The deputies were sentenced to four years in prison and Parker pleaded guilty to extortion and federal civil rights violations and received a 10-year sentence. [...]

Government Document Archives Online

Over at Sources and Methods, Kristan Wheaton has published a list of online archives of declassified or otherwise released government documents. Some of the sites linked to – like the National Security Archive and the CIA’s FOIA Reading Room – are like old and dear friends. Others, like the [...]

Legal U.S. Arms Exports May Be Source of Narco Syndicates Rising Firepower

More Than $1 billion In Private-Sector Weapons Exports Approved For Mexico Since 2004
Mainstream media and Beltway pundits and politicians in recent months have unleashed a wave of panic in the nation linking the escalading violence in Mexico, and its projected spread into the U.S., to illegal weapons smuggling.
The smokescreen being [...]

Glenn Beck and Penn Jillette on MIAC report

See also: The Radical Polarization of Law Enforcement

Meet the CIA’s Shrink

Meet Dr. David Charney, the Brooklyn-born, Virginia-based psychiatrist who’s been treating the CIA’s cloak-and-dagger set for nearly 20 years.
SpyTalk shares a fascinating St. Patrick’s Day lunch with Charney, who breaks down the issues that various spooks face. For analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence, the problem is  “obsessional,” like [...]

Accused CIA Rapist’s Alleged Victims Did Not File Local Charges

Interesting tidbits continue to shake out from the strange case of Andrew Warren, the erstwhile CIA station chief in Algeria accused of date rape.First is the overlooked statement of Algeria’s interior minister that the two “local” Muslim women who complained to U.S. embassy officials that Warren spiked their cocktails for [...]

The Radical Polarization of Law Enforcement

The Radical Polarization
of Law Enforcement

Patriots, Christians and concerned citizens are increasingly in the cross hairs of the U.S. intelligence community, and battle lines are being quietly drawn that could soon pit our own law enforcement and military forces against us.
A February 20 report entitled “The Modern Militia Movement” was issued [...]

CIA Man Accused of Rape Claimed to Be FBI Agent in Parking Row

Andrew Warren,  the former CIA officer accused of date rape in Algiers late last year, caused such a ruckus over parking dispute at a Washington, D.C. hotel three years earlier that the matter was referred to the FBI.
Multiple sources said Warren flashed official credentials and claimed to be [...]

Foggo Addendum: In Their Own Words

Court documents released this week in advance of Thursday’s sentencing of former CIA Executive Director Kyle “Dusty” Dustin Foggo provide a remarkable glimpse into the mindset of the key players in a sordid drama involving corruption that reached the highest levels of the CIA and touched the agency’s most sensitive [...]

Wikileaks cracks NATO’s Master Narrative for Afghanistan

Wikileaks has cracked the encryption to a key document relating to the war in Afghanistan. The document, titled “NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative”, details the “story” NATO representatives are to give to, and to avoid giving to, journalists.
The encrypted document, which is dated October 6, and believed to be current, can [...]

Disgraced Senior CIA Official Heads to Prison Still Claiming He’s a Patriot

A judge wrapped up one of the most sordid and sprawling congressional scandals in American history Thursday when he sentenced Kyle “Dusty” Dustin Foggo, formerly the No. 3 official at the CIA, to just over three years in federal prison for defrauding the government.
Foggo is one of eight people who have [...]

The CIA Family Jewels

Agency Violated Charter for 25 Years, Wiretapped Journalists and Dissidents
Full Report Now Available and Full Text Searchable
CIA Announces Declassification of 1970s “Skeletons” File, Archive Posts Justice Department Summary from 1975, With White House Memcons on Damage Control
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 222, Edited by Thomas Blanton
For more information contact: Thomas Blanton – [...]

Ecuador says expelled diplomat was ‘CIA chief’

The US diplomat Ecuador expelled from the country earlier this week was a CIA station chief, President Rafael Correa said on Saturday.
“Last week we expelled the US embassy’s (Mark) Sullivan from the country. He was, let’s be clear, the director of the CIA in Ecuador,” Correa told his weekly radio [...]

Iranians don’t “hate us because we have freedom”

Iran is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its historic Islamic revolution after three decades of siege warfare by the western powers. To understand why relations between Tehran and the West are so bitter, we must understand their historical context.
Iran’s jagged relations with the West began during World War II. [...]

The Missing Memos

The Bush administration’s controversial policies on detentions, interrogations and warrantless wiretapping were underpinned by legal memoranda. While some of those memos have been released (primarily as a result of ACLU lawsuits), the former administration kept far more memos secret than has been previously understood. At least three dozen by [...]

Retiring CIA Inspector General Faces Suit Over Conduct of Office

John L. Helgerson, the CIA’s controversial inspector general, may be finally leaving the spy agency after three decades, but he will not be fading back into the shadows.Helgerso, who has been at the center of some of the agency’s most difficult moments related to terrorism and pre-war intelligence about Iraq, [...]

Guatemala apologizes to Cuba for Bay of Pigs

HAVANA – Guatemala’s president has apologized to Cuba for his country’s having allowed the CIA to train exiles in the Central American country for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
Alvaro Colom says he wants to “officially ask Cuba for forgiveness as president and head of state, and as commander [...]

Of Children and “Cyber Wars,” Another Witchhunt to Fund

February 17, 2009: The U.S. Department of Defense tries to keep track of countries that have established Cyber War organizations, or just capabilities. Now Germany has joined the ranks of countries with a formal Cyber War organization. Germany is putting together a Cyber War unit. It is small, with [...]

The US military and its cult of cruelty

In the week that George Bush took to fantasizing that his blood-soaked “war on terror” would lead the 21st century into a “shining age of human liberty” I went through my mail bag to find a frightening letter addressed to me by an American veteran whose son is serving as a [...]

CIA Station Chief in Algeria Accused of Rapes

The CIA’s station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.
The suspect in the case is identified [...]

NSA Whistleblower Tells More on Illegal Wiretapping of US Citizens (videos)

On January 21, former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice appeared Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show. Tice, who helped expose the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, told Olbermann government programs designed to spy on the American people are more extensive and far reaching than previously admitted. “The National Security [...]

Guide to Using Declassified Documents and Archival Materials on U.S. Foreign Policy

David N. Gibbs

Associate Professor of
History and Political Science
University of Arizona
PhD, 1989, M.I.T.

General Sources
When searching for primary documents pertaining to U.S. foreign policy, a good place to begin is with the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series. This is a huge collection of declassified documents from [...]

White House Lied About Iraqi Yellowcake Buy According to New Report

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales misled Congress when he claimed the CIA in 2002 approved information that ended up in the 2003 State of the Union speech about Iraq’s alleged effort to buy yellowcake (uranium) for its nuclear weapons program, a House Democrat said Thursday.

Al Qaeda is More of a U.S. Propaganda Campaign than a Real Organization

Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook wrote:
Al-Qaida, literally “the database”, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.
Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told the Senate that the war on terror is [...]

The Pentagon is muscling in everywhere. It’s time to stop the mission creep

We no longer have a civilian-led government. It is hard for a lifelong Republican and son of a retired Air Force colonel to say this, but the most unnerving legacy of the Bush administration is the encroachment of the Department of Defense into a striking number of aspects of civilian [...]

A CIA Contractor’s Christmas

Day One. Partridge in a pear tree:

During the night-shift at the NSA, Booz Allen contractors suddenly have their online Christmas shopping interrupted when Booz Allen proprietary counterterrorist data-mining algorithms note an unusual spike in internet chatter of “persons of interest” using the term “partridge in a pear tree.”  Their NSA [...]

CIA helped shoot down 15 planes

With the help of CIA spotters, the Peruvian air force shot down 15 small civilian aircraft between 1995 and 2001, ostensibly as part of the US-abetted war on drugs, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee revealed Thursday. Many of the shoot-downs were made without warning within two to [...]

Former CIA Employee Zawahri Threatens America

Al-Qaeda’s alleged number two Ayman Al-Zawahiri has called for new attacks to be launched against “criminal America,” which is somewhat odd considering the fact that he once fought on behalf of the CIA and was granted U.S. residence by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Indeed, Al-Zawahiri has reportedly been captured twice before, so the fact that [...]

Interrogation Drugs at Gitmo Alleged

President-elect Obama has re-affirmed his intention to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. This will come as a relief to many who have been concerned about some of the ethical issues involved and exactly what has been going on there. While much has been made of so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques [...]

Family Racked by CIA Cover-Up

Former Poquoson resident Gloria Luttig learned this week that her daughter’s and granddaughter’s deaths were shrouded by a CIA cover-up.
“My daughter was murdered. My granddaughter was murdered,” Luttig said during a phone interview from her home in Pace, Fla., outside Pensacola.
Veronica L. “Roni” Bowers, 35, was aboard a small floatplane April 20, 2001, flying with [...]

CIA 2008 World Factbook

In order to help policymakers understand the nature and global dimensions of the current financial crisis, The World Factbook has added five new fields to the Economy category.

CIA lied about shoot-down of missionary plane, report says

An investigation by the agency’s inspector general finds that officials covered up details of the 2001 incident over Peru that killed two Americans and wounded three other people.

Spy drone ‘Predator,’ reflects what US has become

TUCSON — The bad news is that the US Border Patrol has four drones flying out of Fort Huachuca over the US/Mexico border for surveillance. One drone has already crashed near Nogales and these unmanned aerial planes, provided first by Israel’s Apartheid spy technology maker, Elbit Systems, are a risk to the lives of those [...]

CIA, NI directors expect to lose their jobs: report

WASHINGTON: The current chiefs of National Intelligence (NI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) expect to be replaced when Barack Obama takes over as US president on January 20, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.