The Garlic: CIA Secret Prisons

Showing posts with label CIA Secret Prisons. Show all posts

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Paging Andy Card ...Or: From The "What If Paranoids Are Right" Department

Funny, in doing a Google search this morning, on the Obama Campaign for President, I couldn't find "A covert CIA Manipulation Program you can believe in", anywhere

Earlier this week, Adrian Chen, over on Gawker, brought to our attention the organization Wikileaks, and how the U.S. Government wants to put a serious ass-whipping on them.

Is the U.S. Government Spying on a Tiny Secret-Sharing Website?

Wikileaks.org is a website legendary in certain circles for posting documents people want hidden from the world. The Pentagon is not a fan. Now, Wikileaks is accusing the U.S. of spying on its editors.

[snip]

Wikileaks, which is run by a 9-person advisory board, has built a reputation based on its impressive record of posting secret documents like the ones that threaten the U.S. Army. These include emails hacked from Sarah Palin's private account, 570,000 pager messages from 9/11 and the infamous climate change scientist emails. They have also posted sensitive U.S. military documents—most prominently the standard operating procedures for Guantanamo Bay.

Holy Spooky Shadows Batman!

But wait, there's more!

Glenn Greenwald, today, has some startling info, in his "The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters";

A newly leaked CIA report prepared earlier this month (.pdf) analyzes how the U.S. Government can best manipulate public opinion in Germany and France -- in order to ensure that those countries continue to fight in Afghanistan. The Report celebrates the fact that the governments of those two nations continue to fight the war in defiance of overwhelming public opinion which opposes it -- so much for all the recent veneration of "consent of the governed" -- and it notes that this is possible due to lack of interest among their citizenry: "Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters," proclaims the title of one section.

[snip]

It's both interesting and revealing that the CIA sees Obama as a valuable asset in putting a pretty face on our wars in the eyes of foreign populations. It is odious -- though, of course, completely unsurprising -- that the CIA plots ways to manipulate public opinion in foreign countries in order to sustain support for our wars. Now that this is a Democratic administration doing this and a Democratic war at issue, I doubt many people will object to any of this. But what is worth noting is how and why this classified Report was made publicly available: because it was leaked to and then posted by WikiLeaks.org, the site run by the non-profit group Sunshine Press, that is devoted to exposing suppressed government and corporate corruption by publicizing many of their most closely guarded secrets.

[snip]

If that doesn't sound familiar to Americans, it should. At exactly the time when U.S. government secrecy is at an all-time high, the institutions ostensibly responsible for investigation, oversight and exposure have failed. The American media are largely co-opted, and their few remaining vestiges of real investigative journalism are crippled by financial constraints. The U.S. Congress is almost entirely impotent at providing meaningful oversight and is, in any event, controlled by the factions that maintain virtually complete secrecy. As I've documented before, some alternative means of investigative journalism have arisen -- such as the ACLU's tenacious FOIA litigations to pry documents showing "War on Terror" abuses and the reams of bloggers who sort through, analyze and publicize them -- but that's no match for the vast secrecy powers of the government and private corporations.

Holy Foreign-Policy-Mess-Waiting-To-Happen Batman!

It's almost as if The Bush Grindhouse still has an office putting alongside the new Obama Administration.

Or has the Obama team launched, based on their predecessors model, a new "White House Afghanistan Group"?

Maybe they'll have to dust off Rummy's Propaganda Agency plans to sail past this one

Paging Andy Card!

Bonus CIA Riffs

We Looked In the DIY Section, But Bob Vila Didn't Have A Handbook On It ...

Top Ten Cloves: Things About The New CIA Personality Test

Paid News Scandal Widens; CIA Said To Run Network Of "Blue Hole" Newspapers ...Detainees Forced To Work As Copy Editors Or Write Stories In Isolation; Old Typewriters With No Wite-Out Used

Breaking News! ...Leak of CIA Covert Prison System May Affect IPO, Franchising Rights ...Early Heavy Investment Cools In Wake of Story; North Korea May Trade Nuke Program For Multiple Prisons

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Yoo's Crossing

I hope, that journalists around the world, are on their toes, tonight, and over the next few days.

Especially those stationed, and working, in Iraq, Guantanamo, Poland, Thailand, and wherever the Bush Grindhouse is keeping detainees, and/or has secret prisons.

More specifically, in the desolate areas, out-of-way locations, forests, etc.

And that they have cameras.

It would be poetically (and, sadly) ironic, if they caught sight of details in U.S. Soldiers, maybe MP's or CIA-types, arriving, with picks, shovels and body bags, and they began unearthing, well ... something ...

Courtesy of TPMMuckraker;

"But then it was Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) turn to ask questions. And he went toe to toe with Yoo, the former DOJ attorney and torture-memo author extraordinaire:

Conyers: Could the President order a suspect buried alive?

Yoo: Uh, Mr. Chairman, I don't think I've ever given advice that the President could order someone buried alive. . .

Conyers: I didn't ask you if you ever gave him advice. I asked you thought the President could order a suspect buried alive.

Yoo: Well Chairman, my view right now is that I don't think a President . . . no American President would ever have to order that or feel it necessary to order that.

Conyers: I think we understand the games that are being played."

Here's the video on it;

Conyers and Yoo: "The Games That Are Being Played"

Considering the track record of these NeoNitwits, why shouldn't we think that they haven't already done this? ... That it was "authorized" and "legal" ... Just another tool in the bag of "Enhanced Interrogation".

Bonus Yoo Yammering

Marty Lederman: John Yoo Testimony

Steve Benen: It depends on what you mean by, ‘Unitary Theory of the Executive’

Dan Froomkin: 20 Questions for David Addington - A proposed script for the vice president's chief of staff

Glenn Greenwald: John Yoo's ongoing falsehoods in service of limitless government power

Yoo Hooey

We Looked In the DIY Section, But Bob Vila Didn't Have A Handbook On It ...

Saturday, February 09, 2008

An Enigma, Wrapped Inside of A Riddle ... The Tesseract Archipelago...

"A concentration camp within a concentration camp that we pay a Communist nation to host."

I have to wonder, with all that we know so far, do they have a secret handshake as well? Have they issued super secret decoder rings? Lapel buttons, so they can know who is one of them, nod silently and knowingly, as they pass each other?

Well, after the Crony General the other day, the "Hear-No-Evil, See-No-Evil, Speak-No-Justice" Crony General, it really shouldn't come as a surprise that it has been uncovered that we have secret prisons inside secret prisons.

Only in the Bush Grindhouse...

We really should have titled this post "An Evil Enigma, Wrapped Inside A Riddle of Lies"

Larisa Alexandrovna, on her At-Largely, doesn't pull any punches, in a great post this past Thursday, "The Tesseract Archipelago..."

Here's a few nuggets;

"For the commie fearing right-wingers, their collective silence about US funding of communist Cuba through a business arrangement in which they give us land to house our concentration camps on is astounding. It is, however, no surprise that nationalists see human rights abuses as a necessary fall-out of war. After all, Christian extremists, like their Muslim counterparts see war as a tool of God, and they see God in a single man giving them orders, not in anything divine:

Aside from the security propaganda and its flag-waving boot-marchers, however, I want a legitimate explanation as to why we need this many camps, this many secret camps within camps, and just who the hell is being held there in secret and why in secret. I demand this as a US citizen. Because if we have people secretly boxed within secret boxes, which house even more secret boxes filled with even more secret people, then we cannot continue calling ourselves a democracy."

Maybe this is the reason that The Commander Guy thinks Vice President Darth Vader is "The Best Vice President In History".

How nicely it fits ... The secret, Shadow Government running secret prisons inside secret prisons.

Read Larisa's "The Tesseract Archipelago..."

Add it to the ever-growing Clean-Up/To-Do List, once we get these criminals out of office.

Bonus Secret Prisons Riffs

We Looked In the DIY Section, But Bob Vila Didn't Have A Handbook On It ...

Top Ten Cloves: Problems Created With President Bush Admitting To CIA Black Site Prisons

Paid News Scandal Widens; CIA Said To Run Network Of "Blue Hole" Newspapers; Detainees Forced To Work As Copy Editors Or Write Stories In Isolation; Old Typewriters With No Wite-Out Used

Breaking News! Leak of CIA Covert Prison System May Affect IPO, Franchising Rights; Early Heavy Investment Cools In Wake of Story; North Korea May Trade Nuke Program For Multiple Prisons

Monday, January 28, 2008

We Looked In the DIY Section, But Bob Vila Didn't Have A Handbook On It ...

Somewhat ironic, or, apropos, that this article hits today, on the eve of the SOTU.

For, it highlights one of the Bush Grindhouse's legacy accomplishments - turning the United States of America into a nation that tortures prisoners.

Spencer Ackerman, former stalwart of TPMmuckracker, writing now for The Washington Independent, has penned a beauty, detailing the sorry, sad road the Central Intelligence Agency (oxymoron?) - at the direction and order of The Commander Guy - has taken us down;

CIA Largely in the Dark on Interrogation Tactics; Bush Tasked Agency To Build a Robust System, Despite Its Limited History;

But 9/11 changed all that. Despite having nearly no off-the-shelf experience, the CIA was tasked by President Bush to come up with a robust interrogation program for the most important al-Qaeda captives. So the agency turned to its partners for assistance in designing its interrogation regimen: Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia—all countries cited by the State Department for using torture—among others. Additionally, as Mark Benjamin has reported for Salon, two psychologists named Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, who worked as contractors for CIA, helped the agency "reverse-engineer" the military and CIA training on resisting torture for use on detainees. Suddenly, waterboarding, an illegal practice of simulating or in some cases inducing drowning, became an American-administered practice.

So much for the "CEO" presidency... Be it launching unneeded wars, to reacting to natural disasters (versus the ones they created), to running the Injustice Department, to protecting its' own intelligence agents, It's been DIY all the way, and bad DIY at that ...

Read Spencer Ackerman's "CIA Largely in the Dark on Interrogation Tactics; Bush Tasked Agency To Build a Robust System, Despite Its Limited History" ... It's a good one!

Bonus CIA Riffs

Bob Vila Home Improvement

Top Ten Cloves: Problems Created With President Bush Admitting To CIA Black Site Prisons

Leak of CIA Covert Prison System May Affect IPO, Franchising Rights; Early Heavy Investment Cools In Wake of Story; North Korea May Trade Nuke Program For Multiple Prisons

Top Ten Cloves: Ways White House Aides Got President Bush To Claim "We Do Not Torture"

Top Ten Cloves: Ways CIA Will Cut Back On Using Contractors

Top Ten Cloves: Things About The New CIA Personality Test