Obama administration's absurd priorities

U.S. leaders have developed a disgraceful habit of casting aside those who serve their country with honor and dignity – as well as those from other countries who worked as foreign assets – when they no longer find them useful. Portugal will soon extradite former CIA officer Sabrina de Sousa to Italy for incarceration. Her crime? She executed the orders of her CIA superiors, who were acting under the direction of the administration with oversight from Congress.
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Chinese Hackers Prepare Battlespace for War with America

News broke last week that Chinese hackers had compromised computer databases belonging to the Office of Personnel Management. On the surface, reports of the Obama administration scrambling to contain the damage done by having this information exposed may not make sense. Is it really that big a deal if the Chinese stole lists of government employees? It is when the list is of Americans with top-secret security clearances. According to SOFREP sources, it isn’t just benign human-resources-type information that was stolen, but also lists of active CIA personnel and information pertaining to front companies used as commercial cover by the same agency.

Read more at SOFREP (News & Analysis from military and Spec Ops veterans) Read More......

More troubling revelations about Benghazi: CIA never conducted investigation

ALLEN WEST - Just when you thought questions and controversy surrounding the Benghazi terror attack couldn’t get any worse, something else pops up. ✧ American personnel on the ground in Benghazi the night of the 2012 terror attack are outraged after learning that the CIA’s inspector general never conducted an investigation into what happened — despite two CIA workers being killed in the attack and despite at least two complaints being filed by CIA employees, reports Adam Housley of Fox News.

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Climate change expert's fraud was 'crime of massive proportion,' say feds

The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change deserves to go to prison for at least 30 months for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job, say federal prosecutors.

 

John C. Beale, who pled guilty in September to bilking the government out of nearly $1 million in salary and other benefits  over a decade, will be sentenced in a Washington, D.C., federal court on Wednesday. In a newly filed sentencing memo, prosecutors said that his “historic” lies are “offensive” to those who actually do dangerous work for the CIA.

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CIA finds 1 in 5 flagged job applicants come from Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda

An estimated one-fifth of a subset of all applicants for Central Intelligence Agency positions had significant ties to the terror groups Hamas, Hezbollah and al Qaeda, a newly released document from NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s collection revealed Monday. The document — released by Mr. Snowden as part of his National Security Agency intelligence dump — said the terrorist groups worked hard to infiltrate America’s top security agencies. CIA officials uncovered thousands of applicants, roughly one in five of a subset, with “significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections,” the document states, as Ynet News reported. The specifics of those ties were not revealed, but the groups most often cited as attempting to infiltrate the U.S. intelligence network were al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah.

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The Attack in Benghazi: Worth Investigating After All

CNN reports that dozens of CIA agents were on the ground there -- and that they're being pressured to keep quiet. Why?

Suddenly it is imperative that Congress investigate details surrounding the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens. I've never felt that way before. But Drew Griffin's scoop* changed my mind.

A bit of background: On September 11, 2012, Stevens and three other Americans were killed at a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, touching off perhaps the strangest political controversy in recent years.

Read more at the Atlantic Read More......

The Chosen One

In our time, asking how a young man of scarce achievement got into position to win the Democratic Party's nomination for president courts the contemporary synonyms for "impious": "birther," "conspiracy theorist," and, of course, "racist." Granted, to inquire into what formed a president is not as important as to understand what he does. Nevertheless, because fully to know where anyone is going requires grasping whence he comes, let us open ourselves to wonder how, minus miracles, a 10-year-old boy without obvious talent who had lived in Indonesia since age six ends up with an eight-year scholarship to Hawaii's most exclusive school; a scholarship to Occidental College; a transfer into Columbia University; acceptance into Harvard Law School, and editorship of its law review; and how he goes from job to prestigious job without apparently mastering any of the previous ones. No wonder some of Barack Obama's supporters treat him as if he were anointed by an extraterrestrial power.

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CIA Book

VIA EMAIL, 11/3/2010 (Hat tip: John H. Detweiler) - As President George W. Bush's top speech writer, Marc Thiessen was provided unique access to the CIA program used in interrogating top Al Qaeda terrorists, including the mastermind of the 9/11 attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM). ∴ Now, his riveting new book, "Courting Disaster", How the CIA Kept America Safe (Regnery), has  been published. ∴ Here is an excerpt from "Courting Disaster":

Just before dawn on March 1, 2003, two dozen heavily armed Pakistani tactical assault forces move in  and surround a safe house in Rawalpindi .  A few hours earlier they had received a text message from an informant inside the house. It read:  "I am with KSM."

Bursting in, they find the disheveled mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in his bedroom. He is taken into custody.  In the safe house, they find a treasure trove of computers, documents, cell phones and other valuable "pocket litter."

Once in custody, KSM is defiant.  He refuses to answer questions, informing his captors that he will tell them everything when he gets to America and sees his lawyer. But KSM is not taken to America to see a lawyer.  Instead he is taken to a secret CIA "black site" in an undisclosed location.

Upon arrival, KSM finds himself in the complete control of Americans.  He does not know where he is, how long he will be there, or what his fate will be.

Despite his circumstances, KSM still refuses to talk.  He spews contempt at his interrogators, telling them that Americans are weak, lack resilience, and are unable to do what is necessary to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals.  He has trained to resist interrogation.   When he is asked for information about future attacks, he tells his questioners scornfully: "Soon, you will know." 

It becomes clear he will not reveal the information using traditional interrogation techniques. So he undergoes a series of "enhanced interrogation techniques" approved for use only on  the most high-value detainees. The techniques include waterboarding.

His resistance is described by one senior American official as "superhuman." Eventually, however,  the techniques work, and KSM becomes cooperative-for reasons  that will be described later in this book.

He begins telling his CIA debriefers about active al Qaeda plots to launch attacks against the United States and other Western targets.  He holds classes for CIA officials, using a  chalkboard to draw a picture of al Qaeda's operating structure,  financing, communications, and logistics.  He identifies al Qaeda travel routes and safe havens, and helps intelligence officers make sense of documents and computer records seized in terrorist raids.   He identifies voices in intercepted telephone calls, and helps officials understand the meaning of coded terrorist communications.  He provides information that helps our intelligence community capture other high-ranking terrorists,

KSM's questioning, and that of other captured terrorists, produces more than 6,000 intelligence reports, which are shared across the intelligence community, as well as with our allies across the world.

In one of these reports, KSM describes in detail the revisions he made to his failed 1994-1995 plan known as the "Bojinka plot" to blow up a dozen airplanes carrying some 4,000 passengers over the Pacific Ocean .

Years later, an observant CIA  officer notices that the activities of a cell being followed by  British authorities appear to match KSM's description of his  plans for a Bojinka-style attack.

In an operation that involves unprecedented intelligence cooperation between our countries, British officials proceed to unravel the plot.   On the night of Aug.9, 2006 they launch a series of raids in a northeast London suburb that lead to the arrest of two dozen al Qaeda terrorist suspects.  They find A USB thumb-drive in the pocket of one of the men with security details for Heathrow airport, and information on seven trans-Atlantic flights that were scheduled to take off within hours of each other:

*    United Airlines Flight 931 to San Francisco departing at  2:15 p.m.;
*    Air Canada Flight 849 to Toronto departing at 3:00  p.m.;
*     Air Canada Flight 865 to Montreal departing at 3:15  p.m.;
*     United Airlines Flight  959 to Chicago departing  at  3:40 p.m.;
*     United Airlines Flight  925 to Washington departing at 4:20 p.m.;
*     American Airlines  Flight 131 to New York departing at 4:35 p.m; and
*     American  Airlines Flight 91 to Chicago departing at 4:50 p.m.

They seize bomb-making equipment and hydrogen peroxide to make liquid explosives.  And they find the chilling martyrdom videos the suicide bombers had prepared.

Today, if you asked an average person on the street what they know about the 2006 airlines plot, most would not be able to tell you much. Few Americans are aware of the fact that al Qaeda had planned to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11 with an attack of similar scope and magnitude.

And still fewer realize that the terrorists' true intentions in this plot were uncovered thanks to critical information obtained through the interrogation of the man who conceived it: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

This is only one of the many attacks stopped with the help of the CIA interrogation program established by the Bush Administration in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Editor's Note: For other foiled terrorist plots, see page 9 of Courting Disaster.

In addition to helping break up these specific terrorist cells and plots, CIA questioning provided our intelligence community with an unparalleled body of information about al Qaeda

Until  the program was temporarily suspended in 2006, intelligence officials say, well over half of the information our government  had about al Qaeda-how it operates, how it moves money, how  it communicates, how it recruits operatives, how it picks  targets, how it plans and carries out attacks-came from the  interrogation of terrorists in CIA custody.

Former CIA Director George Tenet has declared: "I know that this program has saved lives.  I know we've disrupted plots.  I know this program alone is worth more than what the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us."

Former CIA Director Mike Hayden has said:  "The facts of the case are that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer.  It really did work."

Even Barack Obama's Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, has acknowledged:  "High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country."

Leon Panetta, Obama's CIA Director, has said:  "Important information was gathered from these detainees.  It provided information that was acted upon."

And John Brennan, Obama's Homeland Security Advisor, when asked in an interview if enhanced-interrogation  techniques were necessary to keep  America safe, replied : "Would  the U.S. be handicapped if the CIA was not, in fact, able to  carry out these types of detention and debriefing activities?  I would say yes."

On Jan. 22, 2009, President Obama issued Executive Order 13491, closing the CIA program and directing that, henceforth, all interrogations by U.S. personnel must follow the techniques contained in the Army Field Manual.

The morning of  the announcement, Mike Hayden was still in his post as CIA Director, He called White House Counsel Greg Craig and told him  bluntly:

"You didn't ask, but this is the CIA officially nonconcurring".  The president went ahead anyway, overruling the objections of the agency.

A few months later, on April 16, 2009, President Obama ordered the release of four Justice Department memos that described in detail the techniques used to interrogate KSM and other high-value terrorists.  This time, not just Hayden (who was now retired) but five CIA  directors –including Obama's own director, Leon Panetta --  objected.  George Tenet called to urge against the memos' release.  So did Porter Goss.  So did John Deutch. Hayden says:  "You had CIA directors in a continuous unbroken stream to 1995 calling saying, 'Don't do this.'"

In addition to objections from the men who led the agency for a collective 14 years, the President also heard objections from the agency's covert field operatives.  A few weeks earlier, Panetta had arranged for the eight top officials of the Clandestine Service to meet with the President. It was highly unusual for these clandestine officers to visit the Oval Office, and they used the opportunity to warn the President that releasing the memos would put agency operatives at risk.  The President reportedly listened respectfully-and then ignored their advice.

With these actions, Barack Obama arguably did more damage to America's national security in his first 100 days of office than any President in American history.

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‘Duh!’ The nation’s top intelligence official speaks

WEEKLY STANDARD, Feb. 1, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 19 by Stephen F. Hayes - In congressional testimony on January 20, the nation’s top intelligence official, Dennis Blair, acknowledged that the U.S. government mishandled the interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian terrorist who tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day. Specifically, Blair was not happy that Abdulmutallab was charged as a common criminal and read his rights, rather than being questioned by the elite interrogation unit announced by President Obama as a replacement for the CIA teams used by the Bush administration. Read more at the Weekly Standard... Read More......

Cantor: No investigation on Pelosi's CIA claim

Statement on Democrats Refusal to Investigate CIA Allegations by Speaker, 6/16/2009 - WASHINGTON, D.C. – House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) issued the following statement after Democrats blocked a resolution offered by Congressman Rob Bishop (R-UT) to create a four member bi-partisan panel to examine allegations made by the Speaker of the House accusing intelligence professionals of deliberately lying to Congress. ∴ Allegations that intelligence professionals consistently lied to members of Congress is extremely serious, especially when they are made by the Speaker of the House. ∴ “Perhaps it is telling that Democrats do not wish to determine whether Speaker Pelosi’s troubling allegation that the CIA lied to Congress is accurate. Speaker Pelosi has failed to make any effort to offer evidence that substantiates her accusations, and a complete and thorough investigation would not only offer that opportunity, but finally provide the American people with the truth.” Read More......

House Democrats vote to block probe of Pelosi claims

NEWSMAX - Republicans to Call for Formal Probe of Pelosi but House Rejects Probe Into Pelosi CIA Claims Read More......

Democrats' Assault On the CIA

WASHINGTON POST, 5/20/2009 by Michael Gerson - In a little over 100 days, the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have delivered a series of blows to the pride and morale of the Central Intelligence Agency. ∴ It began with the release of the Justice Department memos -- a move opposed by CIA Director Leon Panetta along with four previous directors. Then, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. did not rule out Justice Department cooperation with foreign lawsuits against American intelligence operatives. Then, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the CIA of lying to her in 2002 about waterboarding, which she admitted learning about five months later anyway but did nothing to oppose because her real job was to "change the leadership in Congress and in the White House." Read more at the Washington Post...

Hat tip: John H. Detweiler
John said, "Stealing from the political cartoon in the GT today, what planet
do the Democrats live on? Read More......

Republicans to Pelosi: Prove Your Case or Apologize to CIA

FOXNews, 5/18/2009 - House Minority Leader John Boehner told FOX News that lying to Congress is a crime, so if Speaker Nancy Pelosi thinks agency officials did so, she needs to present evidence and have the Justice Department prosecute it or apologize for casting aspersions. Read more at FOXNews.com... Read More......

Pelosi Knew about Waterboarding from the Start

HUMAN EVENTS, 5/7/2009 by Jed Babbin (Editor) - She knew from the beginning. According to a CIA document compiled by the Director of National Intelligence summarizing briefings to Congress on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorist detainees, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca) knew from the very beginning that those techniques -- including waterboarding -- were being used on September 4, 2002. Read more at Human Events... Read More......