CIA

In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.

In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.

The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.

Source/Full Story: POLITICO.com

An American intelligence official vowed Thursday that the United States would avenge a suspected terrorist attack on a U.S. base in Afghanistan that resulted in the deaths of seven CIA officers.

Two of those killed were contractors with private security firm Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, a former intelligence official told CNN. The CIA considers contractors to be officers.

A current intelligence official confirmed that the casualties included a mix of people — CIA staff and contractors. Six others were wounded.

The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack, which occurred on Wednesday.

A senior U.S. official said information suggested a bomber walked into a gym facility at Forward Operating Base Chapman — located in the Khost Province near the border of Pakistan — and detonated bombs in a suicide vest.

It was not known how the bomber got past security. In a posting on its Web site Thursday, the Taliban claimed the bomber was an Afghan National Army soldier.

“This attack will be avenged through successful, aggressive counterterrorism operations,” the intelligence official vowed.

Source/Full Story: CNN.com

The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.

Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time. A full report on the can be seen on ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson tonight.

“The activities in that prison were illegal,” said human rights researcher John Sifton. “They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions.”

Lithuanian officials provided ABC News with the documents of what they called a CIA front company, Elite, LLC, which purchased the property and built the “black site” in 2004.

Source/Full Story:  ABC News

The CIA has decisively won a long-running turf fight with the director of national intelligence, the CIA’s ostensible boss, over who will be the top U.S. intelligence representatives in foreign countries, NEWSWEEK has learned. According to a White House ruling, in every country where U.S. intelligence agencies operate, the CIA’s station chief will continue to be the most senior U.S. intelligence officer, intelligence officials told NEWSWEEK.

The ruling represents a big victory for CIA Director Leon Panetta and a setback for the national-intelligence czar, retired Navy Adm. Dennis Blair. Blair had argued in high-level meetings for months that as the nation’s intelligence overlord, he should have the power, in special circumstances, to name an officer from an agency other than the CIA as his “DNI representative” in countries where U.S. intelligence officers are stationed. That would theoretically make such a person superior to the local CIA chief. The issue was presented for resolution several weeks ago to Vice President Joe Biden.

Source/Full Story: Declassified Blog

The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”

Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is “endemic” to the country’s justice system.

Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a “totalitarian” state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.

Source/Full Story: Raw Story

The former head of the CIA in Milan has been given an eight-year jail sentence for kidnapping at the end of the first trial anywhere in the world involving the agency’s “extraordinary rendition” programme.

Robert Lady was tried in his absence and convicted of helping to organise the seizure of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, from a Milan street in February 2003. His superior, Jeff Castelli, the head of the CIA in Italy at the time, was acquitted on the grounds that he was covered by diplomatic immunity. Most of the other 23 alleged CIA operatives on trial were given five-year jail sentences in their absence.

Extraordinary rendition involved the abduction of suspects and their forcible transfer for interrogation to third countries, often states in which torture was routinely employed.

The judge ruled that neither the former head of Italian military intelligence, Nicolo Pollari, nor his deputy could be convicted because the evidence against them was subject to official secrecy restrictions. Two other Italian intelligence officials were given three years’ jail.

Successive Italian administrations avoided applying to the US for the extradition of the 26 American defendants, who included a senior US air force officer. Their lawyers, appointed by the court, had no contact with their clients, who were regarded in Italian law as being on the run.

Source/Full Story: guardian.co.uk
Technorati Tags: Robert Lady

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.

The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America’s increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.

Source/Full Story: NYTimes.com
Technorati Tags: Ahmed Wali Karzai

The CIA in 2004 hired contractors from the private security firm Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to track and assassinate senior al Qaeda figures, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Blackwater helped with planning, training and surveillance in a program on which the Central Intelligence Agency spent several million dollars without capturing or killing any militants, the newspaper reported, quoting former and current U.S. officials.

The Times said it was not clear whether the CIA had planned to use Blackwater executives to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives or limit the contractors to help with training and surveillance.

The North Carolina-based contractor, which recently changed its name to Xe Services, was enmeshed in controversy in Iraq in 2007 when Blackwater employees hired to guard U.S. diplomats were accused of using excessive force in a Baghdad shooting in which 17 Iraqi civilians were killed.

The CIA’s use of an outside company for a covert program prompted CIA Director Leon Panetta to inform Congress in June that the agency had withheld details of the program for seven years, the Times said.

The House of Representatives Intelligence Committee is investigating why lawmakers were never informed about the program, the report said.

Source/Full Story: Reuters

The National Security Agency is taking a cloud computing approach in developing a new collaborative intelligence gathering system that will link disparate intelligence databases.

The system, currently in testing, will be geographically distributed in data centers around the country, and it will hold “essentially every kind of data there is,” said Randy Garrett, director of technology for NSA’s integrated intelligence program, at a cloud computing symposium last week at the National Defense University’s Information Resources Management College.

The system will house streaming data, unstructured text, large files, and other forms of intelligence data. Analysts will be able to add metadata and tags that, among other things, designate how securely information is to be handled and how widely it gets disseminated. For end users, the system will come with search, discovery, collaboration, correlation, and analysis tools.

The intelligence agency is using the Hadoop file system, an implementation of Google’s MapReduce parallel processing system, to make it easier to “rapidly reconfigure data” and for Hadoop’s ability to scale.

The NSA’s decision to use cloud computing technologies wasn’t about cutting costs or seeking innovation for innovation’s sake; rather, cloud computing was seen as a way to enable new scenarios and unprecedented scalability, Garrett said. “The object is to do things that were essentially impossible before,” he said.

NSA’s challenge has been to provide vast amounts of real-time data gathered from intelligence agencies, military branches, and other sources of intelligence to authorized users based on different access privileges. Federal agencies have their own systems for sharing information, but many remain disconnected, while community-wide systems like Intellipedia require significant user input to be helpful.

The NSA effort is part of Intelligence Community Directive 501, an effort to overhaul intelligence sharing proposed under the Bush administration. Current director of national intelligence Dennis Blair has promised that intelligence sharing will remain a priority.

“The legacy systems must be modernized and consolidated to allow for data to actually be shared across an enterprise, and the organizations that collect intelligence must be trained and incentivized to distribute it widely,” he said in response to questions from the Senate prior to his confirmation.

The new system will run on commodity hardware and “largely” on commercial software, Garrett said. The NSA will manage the arrayed servers as a pool of resources rather than as individual machines.

Source/Full Story:: InformationWeek
Technorati Tags: National Security Agency, cloud computing

Since 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed plans to dispatch small teams overseas to kill senior Qaeda terrorists, according to current and former government officials.

The plans remained vague and were never carried out, the officials said, and Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, canceled the program last month.

Officials at the spy agency over the years ran into myriad logistical, legal and diplomatic obstacles. How could the role of the United States be masked? Should allies be informed and might they block the access of the C.I.A. teams to their targets? What if American officers or their foreign surrogates were caught in the midst of an operation? Would such activities violate international law or American restrictions on assassinations overseas?

Yet year after year, according to officials briefed on the program, the plans were never completely shelved because the Bush administration sought an alternative to killing terror suspects with missiles fired from drone aircraft or seizing them overseas and imprisoning them in secret C.I.A. jails.

Mr. Panetta scuttled the program, which would have relied on paramilitary teams, shortly after the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center recently informed him of its existence. The next day, June 24, he told the two Congressional Intelligence Committees that the plan had been hidden from lawmakers, initially at the instruction of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The program was designed in the frantic weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks when President George W. Bush signed a secret order authorizing the C.I.A. to capture or kill operatives of Al Qaeda around the world. To be able to kill Osama bin Laden or his top deputies wherever they might be — even in cities or countries far from a war zone — struck top agency officials as an urgent goal, according to people involved in the discussions.

Source/Full Story: NYTimes.com

Wipe that smirk off your face, bub…

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

Efforts to reach Mr. Cheney through relatives and associates were unsuccessful.

Source/Full Story: NYTimes.com

Source:  Global Research, June 19, 2009
Press TV

Two militants’ leaders who defected from notorious Taliban chief in Pakistan have revealed that their comrade was pursuing a US-Israeli agenda across the country.

A prominent militant leader, Turkistan Bittani, who broke away from Baitullah Mehsud, called him "an American agent".

Mehsud, a warlord in his late 30s, has claimed responsibility for dozens of devastating string attacks on both civilians and security forces throughout the feared region.

Moreover, Baetani emphasized that Mehsud was being funded by US and Israeli intelligence services for brainwashing innocent youths.

The insurgents’ chief has recruited several teenagers who have carried out dozens of suicide attacks on Pakistani mosques and educational institutes over some past months.

Baetani also noted that al-Qaeda and Taliban’s leadership was never targeted in the dozens of US drone strikes in the country’s troubled north-west region.
Another defector, Qari Zainuddin, said that Mehsud had established strong links with Israeli intelligence services which were destabilizing the nuclear armed country. "These people (Mehsud and his men) are working against Islam."

Insurgents have stepped up their attacks on civilian and religious centers in major cities across Pakistan which has fueled anti-Taliban sentiments among the Pakistani people.

The US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 has prompted militants to focus their attention across the border in Pakistan, turning the restive tribal belt between the two neighbors into a scene of daily violence.

The US invaded Afghanistan more than seven years ago to allegedly eradicate insurgency and arrest Taliban and al Qaeda leaders.

The Obama administration objected yesterday to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security and benefit al-Qaeda’s recruitment efforts.

In an affidavit, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta defended the classification of records describing the contents of the 92 videotapes, their destruction by the CIA in 2005 and what he called "sensitive operational information" about the interrogations.

The forced disclosure of such material to the American Civil Liberties Union "could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security by informing our enemies of what we knew about them, and when, and in some instances, how we obtained the intelligence we possessed," Panetta argued.

Although Panetta’s statement is in keeping with his previous opposition to the disclosure of other information about the CIA’s interrogation policies and practices during George W. Bush’s presidency, it represents a new assertion by the Obama administration that the CIA should be allowed to keep such information secret. Bush’s critics have long hoped that disclosure would pinpoint responsibility for actions they contend were abusive or illegal.

Last month, President Obama said he would seek to bar the release of photographs being sought by other nonprofit groups that depict abusive interrogations at military prisons during the Bush administration.

Source/Full Story: washingtonpost.com

When Gregg Wenzel died six years ago in Ethiopia, the obituaries said he was a U.S. Foreign Service officer killed by a drunken driver on the streets of Addis Ababa.

CIA Director Leon Panetta spoke Monday at a ceremony commemorating fallen CIA officers.

Monday the public learned the State Department job was a cover for his real occupation: CIA spy.

At a ceremony commemorating those who died in the line of duty, CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed Wenzel’s affiliation with the agency and noted Wenzel was a member of the first clandestine service class to graduate after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"He helped unite the class and kept its spirits high in the toughest moments," Panetta said.

Source/Full Story:   CNN.com

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has launched a new program to recruit staff fluent in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu, as part of its fight against ‘America’s enemies.’

The program dubbed as "ambitious" by the American daily, the Washington Post, seeks "to double the number of analysts proficient in languages deemed critical in the fight against America’s enemies."

"To gather intelligence and understand a complex world, CIA must have more officers who read, speak, and understand foreign languages," CIA Director Leon Panetta, told employees in a letter.

The agency will offer night classes and online training, and will enable new recruits to study languages while awaiting security clearance, he said.

According to official statistics, only 13 percent of overall CIA employees are fluent in a second language. The figure rises to about 30 percent for foreign-deployed officers working in the National Clandestine Service responsible for covert and clandestine operations abroad.

The three languages, widely spoken in the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan, will enable the agency to continue gathering intelligence against its adversaries in the area.

Source/Full Story:   presstv.ir