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By Peter Brooks $19.95
By Elliot D. Cohen $12.38
$17
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 Lance Page/Truthout.org
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The recently uncovered al-Qaida plot to take down a U.S.-bound airliner took a dramatic turn Tuesday: It turns out that the would-be bomber who was chosen to carry out the mission was actually an informant for the CIA.
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 Jennuine Captures (CC-BY)
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By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch —
I was out of the country only nine days, hardly a blink in time, but time enough, as it happened, for another small, airless room to be added to the American national security labyrinth.
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 mobyhill (CC-BY)
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By Ann Jones, TomDispatch —
Since May 2007, 76 NATO soldiers have been killed and an undisclosed number wounded in 46 recorded “deliberate attacks” by members of the Afghan National Security Force. These figures suggest more than a recent “trend of Afghan treachery.”
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 AP / Paul Sakuma
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Since his death last year, we’ve heard plenty of lionizing and denigrating takes on Steve Jobs and his challenging leadership style, but we can now add the FBI’s character sketch of the late Apple founder, circa the George H.W. Bush era, to that mix.
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 CIA
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Here’s a spooky story: The Central Intelligence Agency has once again called unwanted attention to its clandestine collaboration with the New York Police Department, a relationship that was fortified after 9/11 and led to special NYPD surveillance of the city’s Muslim communities, as it has come to the notice of select lawmakers and media outlets that an experienced CIA operative ... (more)
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 Flickr / Ben Piven (CC-BY)
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An Associated Press investigative team revealed in an article Thursday ways that, sometime around 2003 or 2004, part of the New York Police Department transformed from being a public security service that solved murders and muggings to a mini domestic intelligence agency that targeted the Moroccan Muslim community.
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Little is publicly known about the security investigations that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but a recent “60 Minutes” interview with a former FBI agent shed some light on what had been going on behind the scenes.
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 AP / Jin Lee
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New York and Washington, D.C., police officers are ramping up security measures Friday in response to what intelligence officials are calling a specific, credible terrorist threat planned for the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
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 CIA
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The CIA had a close relationship with Libyan intelligence under the regime of Moammar Gadhafi, according to documents seized from Libyan intelligence headquarters.
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 Flickr / Steve Rhodes
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More than a year after Pfc. Bradley Manning was arrested on suspicion of passing tens of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, Wired magazine has released the full record of the conversations between Manning and former hacker Adrian Lamo that led to Manning’s imprisonment. Previously, the logs had appeared only in redacted form, a situation that generated criticism in some quarters. (more)
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 AP / Aqeel Ahmed
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This bit of news probably will not help the already dicey relationship between Pakistan and the U.S.: Pakistani officials have arrested five people believed to have assisted the CIA in the operation that felled Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad last month.
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 fbi.gov
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He’s been in charge since just before the 9/11 attacks, and if President Obama gets his way, FBI Director Robert Mueller will stay at his post for another two years—an unusual move aimed at keeping some aspects of Obama’s intelligence and security strategy consistent.
Posted on May 12, 2011
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.jpg) Flickr / DVIDSHUB
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Pakistani security officials said Saturday that Osama bin Laden may have resided in the country’s northern urban areas for almost eight years before U.S. forces killed him. That information creates new pressure for President Asif Ali Zardari to explain what Pakistan’s leaders knew and when they knew it. (more)
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By Eugene Robinson — It wasn’t torture that revealed Osama bin Laden’s hiding place. Finding and killing the world’s most-wanted terrorist took years of patient intelligence gathering and dogged detective work, plus a little luck.
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.jpg) Flickr / Josh Pesavento
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The U.S. special ops team that took out Osama bin Laden at his compound in Pakistan scooped up an assortment of computer equipment, which the intelligence community is now analyzing. (more)
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.jpg) 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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 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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 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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 Flickr / Carolyn Coles (CC-BY)
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Scientists gave some hamsters the frequent flier treatment and found that their brains birthed fewer neurons. The sleep-confused rodents also had learning and memory issues almost a month after their simulated travel ordeal.
Posted on Nov 17, 2010
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 fbi.gov
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One would think that if a bunch of FBI operatives were to devise a plan to cheat on a key intelligence exam, they might be a little more creative and a lot less obvious about it than the group of agents who recently drew attention to themselves ... (continued)
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 Flickr / Sonja Pieper (CC-BY-SA)
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There are three kinds of studies we hear about. (1) Something incredibly obvious turns out to be true. (2) Something you like is good for you. (3) Something you like is bad for you. Obviously we prefer No. 2s, like this study out of Norway that says drinking wine—especially if you’re a woman—might make you smarter.
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 AP / Dima Gavrysh
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By Chris Hedges — By the end of Howard Zinn’s 423-page FBI file one walks away with a profound respect for the historian and a deep distaste for the buffoonish goons in the FBI who followed and monitored him.
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 wikileaks.org
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It’s not surprising that the Pentagon is conducting “a very robust investigation” to find the source of the latest Wikileaks heard ’round the world. And it’s also to be expected that the military and intelligence communities are shoring up ... (continued)
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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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 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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A group of heavily armed militants in military uniforms stormed a Yemeni intelligence headquarters Saturday, killing 11 and reportedly freeing several prisoners. The gunmen were suspected to be local al-Qaida members.
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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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 AP / Mohammed Javed
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A new report by the United Nations blames Pakistan’s intelligence services for not taking the proper security measures to protect Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister assassinated three years ago in an ongoing whodunit.
Posted on Apr 16, 2010
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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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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
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By Eugene Robinson — The clues that would have alerted authorities to the Christmas Day underwear bomber were buried under mountains of intelligence data.
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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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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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Eight CIA officers died after a suicide bomber set off an explosive vest at the Forward Operating Base Chapman in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, marking the deadliest attack on U.S. intelligence officials since the early ’80s, according to the Los Angeles Times.
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By William Pfaff — Iran appears to be in the throes of popular uprising, yet the U.S. and Israel continue to flirt with military intervention for dubious reasons.
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 AP / Evert Elzinga
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By Eugene Robinson — The United States will soon have about 100,000 troops chasing shadows in Afghanistan, not long after an airliner was nearly blown up by a terrorism suspect who had no connection to that country. What’s wrong with this picture?
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 Flickr / REL Waldman
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With all the bad press that pigs have been getting of late, owing to the swine flu scourge, it’s good to see that an academic journal, Animal Behaviour, has given our porcine friends a PR boost in the form of a study that shows pigs know how to identify themselves, and explore their surroundings, using mirrors.
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 Flickr / lightmatter
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Twenty-three CIA agents are going to have to think twice about leaving the U.S. now that an Italian court has convicted them in absentia for snatching an imam in Milan and sending him to Egypt, where the cleric says he was tortured. (continued)
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 AP / David Guttenfelder
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By Scott Ritter — President Obama may have won the Nobel Peace Prize, but if he allows himself to be bullied into supporting Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s foray into Afghanistan, he will reveal himself as the worst kind of warmonger.
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 White House / Pete Souza
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The gossipy schoolchildren who make up Washington’s power elite have sunk their claws into White House counsel Greg Craig. The president’s top lawyer has had one of the toughest jobs in the building—reversing George W. Bush’s torture policies, finding a Supreme Court justice and vetting some of the nation’s most complex legislation—and he has the scars to prove it.
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By William Pfaff — Given the Western world’s obsession with al-Qaida, it’s remarkable that public discourse makes little mention of the fact that the terror group is going out of business.
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 Flickr / Jaako
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The current national threat level is yellow, which, according to the Department of Homeland Security, means a “significant risk of terrorist attacks.” But it turns out the national threat level is almost always at yellow, defeating the whole purpose of a warning system that operates on a scale.
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 rebelreports.com
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Many intelligence professionals have categorically disapproved of torture, claiming it both ineffective and counterproductive. Former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan writes of the mountains of good information uncovered with traditional interrogation procedures in contrast to the erroneous and unproductive intelligence gleaned from torture.
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 AP / Rahmat Gul
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The violence just hasn’t let up in Afghanistan in the nearly two weeks that have passed since the nation’s presidential election. The latest deadly episode came in the form of a Taliban suicide attack east of Kabul on Wednesday that killed 23 people, including Afghanistan’s deputy head of intelligence, Abdullah Langhmani.
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By Joe Conason — Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his supporters love America so much they would transform it into Stalinist Russia.
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