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By Beverly Gage
$18.45
By Morris Berman
$10.80
$17
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U.S. Government
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President Obama is expected to announce Thursday that CIA Director Leon Panetta will be the new defense secretary, replacing Robert Gates, and that the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, will head the CIA.
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Flickr / welovepands
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This weekend marked the 50th anniversary of Cuba’s defeat of a CIA-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs, and the communist nation remembered the occasion with a parade Saturday celebrating the bloody nose it delivered to its powerful neighbor.
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AP / K.M. Chaudary
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It’s not like we couldn’t have seen this coming: Due in part to a special request made by the head of the Pakistani army, the U.S. has been asked to scale back significantly on the number of CIA operatives in Pakistan and to stop drone attacks on northern militants.
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By Karen Lee Wald — I thought it would be helpful if people who are always hearing and reading about the “repression of dissidents” in Cuba and jump to their defense could also hear the other side: What happened to the thousands of people whose lives were affected by the actions of terrorists from inside and outside the country.
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Wikimedia Commons / U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Lorie L. Jewell
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After many long months of leading U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus is said to be considered for, and considering, the easy and relaxing job of CIA director. Meanwhile, current CIA chief Leon Panetta reportedly has his sights set on the Pentagon.
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U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Marc I. Lane
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Since President Obama’s “no U.S. boots on the ground” declaration—a statement that has been repeated by every U.S. spokesman since, we have learned that, in fact, CIA operatives have been active in Libya.
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Anonymous officials tell the Los Angeles Times that “The CIA has been on the ground in rebel-held areas of Libya since shortly after the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli was evacuated.” Those agents are reportedly offering “nonlethal assistance” to the rebels and getting to know them.
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AP / Hamza Ahmed, File
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Lucky for him. Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor who was nabbed in January after shooting and killing two men in Pakistan (the news of which wasn’t released until February), has been freed from detainment after the payment of “blood money” to the victims’ families.
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By Carlos Latuff (http://twitpic.com/3tiwqf) [see page for license], via Wikimedia Commons
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Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak once again defied calls to step down. During a 10-minute speech Thursday, Mubarak repeated that he will stay on until September elections, contradicting widespread reports that he would capitulate. Anderson Cooper just called Mubarak’s “lies” a “slap in the face.”
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AP / Tara Todras-Whitehill
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By Robert Scheer — After a good start, the Obama administration’s response to the democratic revolution in Egypt has begun to exude the odor of betrayal, falling back on the sordid option of backing a new and improved dictatorship. But this time the Egyptian street will not meekly go along.
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cia.gov
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What will those clever minds at the CIA think of next? The agency has assembled a task force to gauge the effects of WikiLeaks’ recent intelligence exposés on its operations, dubbed the WikiLeaks Task Force—or W.T.F. for short.
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AP / Fradioon Pooya
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By Robert Scheer — One of “the best and the brightest” died last week, and in Richard Holbrooke we had a perfect example of the dark mischief to which David Halberstam referred when he authored that ironic label.
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YouTube
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Although the timing of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s arrest and proposed extradition to Sweden seemed a tad conspicuous, what with the site’s recent big release that angered and embarrassed several powers that be around the globe, Sweden is denying ... (continued)
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Congress via Wikimedia Commons
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According to diplomatic cables obtained and leaked by the whistle-blowers extraordinaire, the king of Saudi Arabia asked the U.S. to attack Iran, Hillary Clinton instructed her diplomats to spy on U.N. leaders and others, Vladimir Putin is ...
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Flickr / zimpenfish (CC-BY-SA)
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After a three-year investigation, the government has decided not to charge the CIA officers who destroyed 92 videotapes of waterboarding after the White House and the agency had ordered that the recordings be preserved.
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AP / Rodrigo Abd
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By Robert Scheer — It’s over for the U.S. in Afghanistan, but that doesn’t mean the death and destruction are about to stop. Quagmires don’t just go away. However, the signs are everywhere that the American course in that nation is doomed.
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AP / Franklin Reyes
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By Moshe Adler — Fidel Castro recently told The Atlantic that the Cuban model does not work anymore, not even for Cuba. But according to statistics collected by none other than the CIA, the Cuban model has actually worked very well.
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By Fred Branfman, AlterNet —
Future historians will marvel at how U.S. leaders failed to learn from their horrific crimes in Indochina, and are instead repeating many of them today.
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Mike Keefe, Cagle Cartoons, The Denver Post —
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AP / Mary Schwalm
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By Chris Hedges — Like the Ancients, we arrogant humans who turn ourselves into objects of worship and build ruthless systems of power to control the world around us will get what we are due.
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Anthony A. Shaffer, a former spy for the military who went by the preposterous pseudonym “Christopher Stryker,” was clever enough to publish a memoir with information the Pentagon would prefer to keep secret. As a result, the military is in negotiations to buy every single copy.
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Boeing
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Five men who say they were kidnapped and tortured would like to sue a Boeing subsidiary for flying them to their agony, but the Obama administration successfully convinced an appeals court Wednesday to throw out the case. One judge said the court “reluctantly” bought the national security argument.
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By Amy Goodman — The ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States should serve as a moment to reflect on tolerance. It should be a day of peace.
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U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Bradley Lail
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By Fred Branfman, AlterNet —
Greatly expanded U.S. military Special Ops teams, U.S. drone strikes and private espionage networks run by former CIA assassins create a threat to our security.
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Flickr / courtesy anarchosyn.
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By G.W. Schulz, CIR —
At midnight on July 15, Arizona’s Department of Public Safety pulled the plug on dozens of speed cameras that criss-crossed state highways, part of a widely loathed program to catch traffic violators and control erratic driving. This at a time when every other government agency around the nation is steadily adopting as many enhanced security technologies as possible.
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AP / Vahid Salemi
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When it comes to registering disapproval for Iran’s nuclear program, certain key members of the international community keep pushing the same button—that would be the one marked sanctions. But is this becoming more of a rote reflex than an effective strategy?
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Patrick Chappatte, The International Herald Tribune —
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By Joe Conason — Back in the bad old days of the Cold War—when mutual nuclear annihilation was a policy option—a culture of secrecy arose in Washington. What wise observers understood even then was that while governments tried to keep secrets from each other, their chief concern was to keep secrets from their own people.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Ruth Marcus — After James Clapper’s response to the devastating Washington Post series on the intelligence complex, President Obama should seriously reconsider his nomination to be director of national intelligence.
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cia.gov
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It’s no secret that the intelligence community in the United States has undergone significant changes since Sept. 11, 2001, but the extent to which the spying business has expanded in nine years is nearly impossible to gauge ... (continued)
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AP / Maya Hitij
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By Chris Hedges — We sit passive and dumb as corporations and the leaders of industrialized nations ensure that climate change will accelerate to levels that could mean the extinction of our species. Homo sapiens, as the biologist Tim Flannery points out, are the “future-eaters.”
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Flickr / Boris SV (CC-BY-ND)
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The family of a Russian scientist convicted in 2004 of spying for the CIA says he and nine other prisoners were being prepared for an exchange brokered by U.S. and Russian authorities. The deal would reportedly see the return of the alleged Russian spies who were recently arrested on American soil.
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U.S. Army / Sgt. Joseph Rivera Rebolledo
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CIA Director Leon Panetta estimates that there are currently fewer than 100 al-Qaida fighters—that’s one for every thousand or so U.S. soldiers—left in Afghanistan. Outgoing intelligence director James Jones has used the same figure. (Rant continues after the jump.)
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By Joe Conason — The years of detainee abuse and constitutional violations cannot be dismissed so easily, because the past is still with us—and so are the dangers that drew America’s leaders toward the dark side.
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By William Pfaff — Even though Barack Obama writes that America cannot allow the burdens of the 21st century to “fall on American shoulders alone,” he similarly cannot accept that the United States deviate from the globalist ambitions emphasized in the published strategies of both the Bush and Obama administrations.
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DoD photo / SSG Lorie Jewell, U.S. Army
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The New York Times is calling it a “secret directive,” but it’s not so secret anymore, it would appear: Back in September, Gen. David Petraeus signed an order to expand “clandestine military activity” around the Middle East.
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Office of the Director of National Intelligence
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Retired Adm. Dennis Blair is expected to announce his resignation after less than a year and a half on the job. The national intelligence director, who oversees 16 intelligence agencies, had his share of run-ins with the administration in that time.
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U.S. Air Force
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The U.S. military, despite reports to the contrary, has continued to rely on a secret private spy network, akin to a Blackwater with brains, that has provided a stream of intelligence to military forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than a year.
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By Chris Hedges — Ernest Logan Bell, a 25-year-old Marine Corps veteran walking 90 miles to make a point, is the new face of the resistance. He is young, at home in the culture of the military, deeply suspicious of the federal government, disgusted by the liberal elite, unable to find work and angry.
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youtube.com
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Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki is a U.S. citizen, but he’s also wanted—dead or alive—by the U.S. government. The CIA has been given the go-ahead to target al-Awlaki, who’s now in Yemen, and to capture or kill him for allegedly threatening his home country.
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U.S. Army
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A Defense Department official may have diverted millions from a Pentagon-funded research website to hire a rogue band of spies he reportedly called “my Jason Bournes” (as in the Matt Damon super assassin). These Jason Bournes, The New York Times reports, allegedly spent time running around both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border looking for militants to have killed.
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AP / Chris Carlson
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By Chris Hedges — The illegal wars and occupations, the largest transference of wealth upward in American history and the egregious assault on civil liberties, all begun under George W. Bush, raise only a flicker of tepid protest from liberals when propagated by the Democrats.
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cia.gov
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In case you didn’t know, there’s a “secret war,” as The New York Times puts it, going on in Pakistan, and the drone attacks that occasionally make headlines represent just one tactic that the U.S. is employing to target militants. Another involves CIA operatives joining forces with their Pakistani counterparts at the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI.
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By Joe Conason — Preparing for what they hope will be their return to power in Washington, Republican congressional leaders have revived the fear-mongering and flag-flapping used by Karl Rove to win the 2002 midterm elections.
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U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Angelita Lawrence
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By William Pfaff — U.N. officials and American military commanders suggest that diplomacy might be coming alive on the Afghan front, but neither the Pentagon nor the White House seems to have clearly identified what the United States wants in Afghanistan.
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While the real-life Mrs. Robinson, an ultraconservative, “sanctity of marriage” homophobe from Northern Ireland, was shtupping a teenager, our feet were all getting bigger. Confused? Head on past the jump for clarification—and maybe even a little enlightenment.
Posted on Jan 12, 2010
READ MORE 
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U.S. Air Force / Master Sgt. Jerry Morrison
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By William Pfaff — It is not widely understood that the policy objective of al-Qaida is not to attack Western countries, but to bring about an upheaval in the Islamic world in which Islam can be rescued from corrupted governments and degenerate practices.
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washingtonpost.com
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Barack Obama gave U.S. intelligence agencies the presidential equivalent of a knuckle-rapping Tuesday for their failure to connect the dots and nab Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before a fellow passenger on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 was forced to foil his underwear bomb plot the old-fashioned way.
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CIA
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The Washington Post is reporting that the suicide bomber who carried out the deadliest attack against the agency in a quarter-century was a trusted double agent who “lured intelligence officers into a trap by promising new information about al-Qaeda’s top leadership. ...”
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CIA
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According to a BBC report, intelligence sources say that the suicide bomber who managed to enter a military base and kill seven CIA agents in the Khost province of Afghanistan was courted by the U.S. as a possible informant.
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Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery
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