Tag Archives: Central Intelligence Agency

Google: Don’t be evil unless it’s profitable

Google has officially sold out to the forces of government censorship. They have decided that they will tailor the output of their Chinese-language search interface to suit the whims of the Chinese government

Care to see the result? Search for Tiananmen Square on google.com. Then compare the results with the same search on google.cn.

It seems to me that the most effective way to protest this shameless caving in would be to spread the forbidden information far and wide. Let Google spend as much time as possible cleaning it out, and make sure the censored Google search results are as useless as possible. Ideally, even innocent searches like “pictures of kittens” should result in a notice saying that results were censored.

With that in mind:

In 1989, the government of the People’s Republic of China violently suppressed a peaceful protest by students in Tiananmen Square. At least 400 protesters were massacred according to the CIA; other estimates are higher.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a peaceful non-violent religious movement. Its teachings include meditation, breathing exercises, and other elements borrowed from Buddhism and Taoism.

With a little editing, they’ll even fit in .signatures.

Google starts being publically traded in August 2004, completely abandons its supposed corporate ethics in January 2005. That’s the fastest and most complete sellout the USA has seen since Bill Clinton was first elected.

Google’s Sergei Brin rationalized:

We ultimately made a difficult decision, but we felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese Web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it.

I’m old enough to remember the exact same arguments being made against boycotting South Africa over apartheid. They were wrong then and they’re wrong now.

[Added 2006-02-16] In a telling piece of testimony, Google’s VP of communications says:

The requirements of doing business in China include self-censorship – something that runs counter to Google’s most basic values and commitments as a company.

There you have it. They admit they’re selling out their basic values.

News you can use

To celebrate its redesign, The Guardian is offering free access to its online edition for the next two weeks. If you live in America and have always wondered what a real newspaper would be like, now’s your chance to find out.

(If you think the New York Times is a real newspaper…well, they ditched their entire technology section to make way for more articles on shopping, fitness and fashion. Says it all really.)

To my mind, there are three reasons why The Guardian is a great newspaper.

The first is accuracy—the paper has a policy of correcting every factual error, and the Corrections and Clarifications column can make for very entertaining reading. The paper even does a pretty good job of covering technology and science.

The second is that the paper does real investigative reporting into things that actually matter. For example, today:

MPs from all parties are planning to campaign against the CIA’s use of British airports and RAF bases when abducting terrorism suspects who are then flown to countries where they are allegedly tortured. An all-party group is to be established this autumn to coordinate the campaign and to inquire into the extent of Britain’s support for the operations, which are said to violate international law.

The development was announced as the UN began inquiring into the operations, known in US intelligence circles as “extraordinary renditions”, and as an investigation by the Guardian uncovered the extent of British logistical support. [...]

And elsewhere there’s the first full account of the May 13th massacre in Uzbekistan. If you have no idea what that’s about, it may be because the violence was carried out by paramilitaries sent in by one of the USA’s crucial allies in the war against (some) terrorists.

The third reason I like The Guardian is diversity of opinion. Although it’s popularly believed to be ‘left wing’ or ‘socialist’, The Guardian in fact gives space to all kinds of (often contradictory) viewpoints. Today, for example, the opinion section has an article arguing that the UK road haulers’ threatened strike and fuel blockade should be smashed the way Thatcher smashed the miner’s strike. That’s like FOX News suggesting that Michael Moore should be elected President.

I should mention that the digital edition is having a few teething troubles right now; normally all the stories are available indexed, but at the moment some pages are only readable as PDF. Still, stick with it, I think you’ll find it worthwhile.

Support our Barbarians

The Guardian yesterday had interesting news from Iraq:

Babylon, a city renowned for its beauty and its splendour 1,000 years before Europe built anything comparable, was chosen as the site for a US military base in April 2003, just after the invasion of Iraq.

Military commanders set up their camp in the heart of one of the world’s most important archaeological sites and surrounded the enclosed part of the ancient city. At least 2,000 troops were installed, daily passing relics such as the enormous basalt Lion of Babylon sculpture.

In September 2003 the base was passed to a Polish-led force, which held it until today’s formal handover of the site to the Iraqi culture ministry.

Can you guess how it turned out? I think you can.

John Curtis, keeper of [The British Museum’s] Ancient Near East department and an authority on Iraq’s many archaeological sites, found “substantial damage” on an investigative visit to Babylon last month.

[…]

Among the damage found by Mr Curtis, who was invited to Babylon by Iraqi antiquities experts, were cracks and gaps where somebody had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate.

He saw a 2,600-year-old brick pavement crushed by military vehicles, archaeological fragments scattered across the site, and including broken bricks stamped with the vainglorious boasts of king Nebuchadnezzar.

Vast amounts of sand and earth, visibly mixed with archaeological fragments, were gouged from the site to fill thousands of sandbags and metal mesh baskets. When this practice was stopped, large quantities of sand and earth were brought in from elsewhere, contaminating the site for future generations of archaeologists.

The paper has photos of some of the damage, including “UT TEXAS” graffiti.

Still, at least we’ve achieved the goal of preventing Afghanistan from being the center of terrorism:

Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of “professionalized” terrorists, according to a report released Thursday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director’s think tank.

Iraq provides terrorists “a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills,” said David Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats. “There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries.”

—Chicago Tribune

Was that a buck I saw whizz past?

Seymour Hersh is the journalist who broke the story of the My Lai massacre, a Pulitzer prize winner. He’s got a new book out. Expect to see it rubbished extensively on TV.

Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guantánamo Bay reached the highest levels of the Bush administration as early as autumn 2002, but Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, chose to do nothing about it, according to a new investigation published exclusively in the Guardian today.

The investigation, by the veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, quotes one former marine at the camp recalling sessions in which guards would “fuck with [detainees] as much as we could” by inflicting pain on them.

[...]

Hersh provides details of how President George Bush signed off on the establishment of a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate “high-value” suspects—considered by many to be in defiance of international law—an officially “unacknowledged” programme that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guantánamo to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

[...]

A CIA analyst visited Guantánamo in summer 2002 and returned “convinced that we were committing war crimes” and that “more than half the people there didn’t belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces,” a CIA source told Hersh.

[...]

A senior intelligence official told Hersh: “I was told [by FBI agents] that the military guards were slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring cold water over them and making them stand until they got hypothermia.”

The secret “special access programme” facilitating much of the mistreatment of prisoners—widely held to have contravened the Geneva convention—was established after a direct order from the president.

Hersh reports that a secret document signed by Mr Bush in February 2002 stated: “I determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world.”

—Guardian

But in case there’s anyone out there thinking “Well, Americans raping Iraqi children is OK if it makes America safer”, consider the following insightful comments from a CIA analyst about Guantánamo Bay:

Two former administration officials who read the analyst’s highly classified report told me that its message was grim. According to a former White House official, the analyst’s disturbing conclusion was that “if we captured some people who weren’t terrorists when we got them, they are now”.

—Guardian

So, who’s going to vote for torture this November?

Foxes guarding the henhouse?

The 9/11 Commission recommended setting up an organization to help safeguard civil liberties. Sure enough the Bush administration has gone ahead and created a President’s Board on Safeguarding Americans’ Civil Liberties.

Ignoring for the moment the issue that civil liberties should, constitutionally, be protected for everyone and not just US citizens, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the people who are being put in charge of safeguarding your freedoms.

  • The Deputy Attorney General, James B. Comey.

    Quote from Comey: A court of the United States has no jurisdiction…to enjoin the president in the performance of his official duties.

    He also explained at length why he thought it was right that Jose Padilla was thrown in a military jail indefinitely and not allowed to talk to a lawyer, even though he is a US citizen and was not officially charged with any crime. Comey’s position was overruled by the Supreme Court, thank goodness.

  • The Assistant Attorney General (Civil Rights Division), R. Alexander Acosta.

    Acosta seems to be one of the Good Guys, having (amongst other things) defended a Muslim student’s right to wear her head scarf at school.

  • The Assistant Attorney General (Office of Legal Policy), Daniel J. Bryant.

    Bryant is a strong supporter of a Constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning. Need I say more?

  • The Under Secretary for Border and Transportation Security at the Department of Homeland Security, Asa Hutchinson.

    Hutchinson was formerly head of the DEA, that bastion of concern for the civil liberties of the individual. He pushed the “drugs support terrorism” angle, and favored intensifying the War On (Selected) Drugs. He also supports Constitutional Amendments to ban flag burning and allow official school prayer, and supports banning abortion and gay adoption.

  • The Assistant Secretary for Information Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security, General Patrick Hughes. He was a member of the 9/11 Commission, and wrote a series of articles on the theme of global threats to the USA and its interests abroad, for various audiences. His major focus in recent years has been building a massive information sharing network to ensure that law enforcement, homeland security and private contractors at federal, state and local level share information freely, so I’m sure he’ll have something to say about preserving your privacy.

  • The Assistant Secretary (Policy), Directorate of Border and Transportation Security, part of the Department of Homeland Security; that would be a Mr C. Stewart Verdery, I believe.

    Quote from his nomination speech: We all remember well the bipartisan effort which spawned a host of responses to the terrorist attacks, including the PATRIOT Act and the creation of the Transportation Security Administration. Those days exemplified the kind of public service which is truly gratifying.

    His department is responsible for visa policy, and is pushing biometric passports—including forcing foreign countries to use biometric passports if they wish to take part in US visa waiver programs.

  • The Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security, Daniel W. Sutherland. He’s another of the good guys, having written in favor of immigration reform and against mandatory biometric national IDs.

  • The Privacy Officer at the Department of Homeland Security, Nuala O’Connor Kelly. She was the Chief Privacy Officer for…wait for it…DoubleClick. Joking aside, though, she seems to be on the side of light.

  • The Counsel for Intelligence Policy, Department of Justice, James A. Baker III. You might recognize that name if you’ve seen Farenheit 9/11. He’s the Senior Counsel for the Carlyle Group, the 10th largest defense contractor in the US, heavily tied to ENRON and the Bin Laden family. He even has a bio page on the George Bush Foundation web site.

  • The Under Secretary for Enforcement, Department of the Treasury, Stuart Levey. Coincidentally, he’s was a partner in James Baker’s law firm.

  • The Assistant Secretary (Terrorist Financing), Department of the Treasury, Juan Zarate. His job focus has been on stopping the flow of cash to terrorists—while assuring Muslim charities that Bush administration policies were not intended to hurt them.

  • The General Counsel, Office of Management and Budget. I think that’s Raymond J. McKenna. His office is part of the General Services Administration, responsible for helping to improve government efficiency by providing office space, office supplies, technology, and services.

    I must confess to being unclear why he’s on this particular committee.

  • The Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Community Management, Larry C. Kindsvater. He’s strongly in favor of reorganizing the US intelligence system, which is probably why he was picked.

  • The Chair of the Privacy Council at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I can’t find any record of a Privacy Council at the FBI; a search of their web site produces 0 hits.

  • The General Counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency. These are the people who advise the CIA on the legality of their assassinations, foreign government coup attempts, and drug running.

    The CIA OGC web site doesn’t provide any information naming anyone who works there. They do mention that you can’t work for the CIA OGC in any capacity without a Top Secret clearance, polygraph test, and 6 month background screening. I believe the current General Counsel is still Scott W. Muller. Interestingly, Muller had no intelligence background before getting the job; his background was investigating white collar crime.

    Muller apparently thinks the PATRIOT Act didn’t go far enough. As he said at his nomination hearing:

    Well, let me start, Senator, by saying that I think the changes that were made in the U.S.A. Patriot Act were clearly necessary in light of the events of September 11 and I think have gone a long way toward creating at the operational level the kind of sharing and collaboration that this Committee and the Intelligence Community and the Bureau and law enforcement think need to occur. There’s a lot of work left to be done.

  • The General Counsel for the National Security Agency. I believe this is still Vito T. Potenza, though obviously it’s very hard to find any information on who the NSA’s General Counsel is, or even who Mr Potenza is.

  • The Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone. The Center for American Progress describe his qualifications as a fierce loyalty to Donald Rumsfeld and an unshakeable right wing ideology and note that he was responsible for sending Major General Geoffrey Miller to Iraq with orders to find more effective ways to interrogate prisoners.

  • The General Counsel of the Department of Defense, William J. Haynes II

    Mr Haynes is the man who wrote the infamous memo listing “interrogation techniques” (i.e. torture) authorized for use at Guantanamo Bay, and was also involved in numerous other dubious legal arguments.

  • The Legal Adviser at the Department of State, James H. Thessin. I can’t find much of anything about him.

  • The Director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, John O. Brennan, a 23 year CIA veteran. His is the department which is supposed to glue together all the other departments and make sure that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. It’s also the department that was blamed for embarrassing inaccuracies in the 2003 “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report. It was initially released to a fanfare of congratulation, as it showed that deaths from terrorist activity had fallen thanks to the Bush “War on Terror”. Then, the spurious figures were quietly revised to show that things had actually gotten worse. Brennan explained the errors by saying that their computers were too old and they were understaffed.

So, there we have it. Not a totally one sided panel, but definitely stacked carefully in a particular direction.

Politics

Wednesday’s Guardian had a story with the headline Bush names rightwing Republican as CIA chief. I half expected to see a story elsewhere on the page saying Study confirms bears defecate in woods or Pope announces he isn’t Jewish. Yes, I’m talking about the guy who says he’s not qualified for a job at the CIA.

Also yesterday, Wikipedia’s featured article was MKULTRA. I must admit, I was amazed by some of the details. It makes me realize that the Church of Scientology’s rabid hatred of psychiatry makes some kind of sense, in the 50s and 60s context of the cult’s growth. Did L. Ron Hubbard know that the leader of the World Psychiatric Association was carrying out experiments that involved deliberately putting people into comas and giving them electroshock at 30x normal voltage? Or did he merely suspect?

Thirdly, a quick pointer to Jeff The Pacifist Bomb, written back before the Iraq war but not posted until now.

In case you missed it:

The retrial of a Moroccan man convicted of involvement in the September 11 attacks appeared to be in doubt last night after the Bush administration refused to allow two key al-Qaida suspects to give evidence.

On the first day of the new trial of Mounir el Motassadeq, a court in Hamburg was told that the US had refused to allow its al-Qaida suspects to be questioned in Germany.

Mr Motassadeq, 30, is accused of plotting the attacks in 2001 together with Mohamed Atta and other members of Hamburg’s al-Qaida cell.

Washington’s announcement came as Mr Motassadeq’s defence lawyer tried to have the case thrown out. Josef Graessle-Muenscher told the court it would be impossible to find out what had really happened on September 11 because al-Qaida suspects in US custody had probably been tortured.

“In this swamp of torture and prison camps, no court can ascertain the truth any more,” he said in an intervention detailing US abuses of prisoners, especially at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba

—Guardian 2004-08-11

Yup, you read it right—one of the guys who the German government believe helped plan the 9/11 attacks may walk free because the Bush administration won’t let suspects held in Guatánamo Bay give evidence.

Remind me, why are they there again?

Ask not for whom the bone bones, it bones for thee

Well, the disaster is playing out as my black, pessimistic heart knew it would. Kerry the two-faced weasel has won a bunch more primaries, and Dean has yet to win any.

Why is this bad? Because I’m convinced Kerry is less electable than Al Gore. The problem is, Kerry picks up the votes of the DLC faithful, the ones who believe that the path to success is massive quantities of special interest money, preaching liberal values, and voting for whatever the opinion polls tell you to vote for. According to the exit polls, most of the people voting for Dean are first-time voters, or people previously so disgusted by the Democrats that they didn’t bother to vote.

So if Dean were picked, the DLC faithful would vote for him (because they’ll vote for anyone who has the word “Democrat” written next to his name), and he’d also get a chunk of votes from the disgusted majority of the population. If Kerry is picked, yeah, he’ll get the DLC faithful’s vote… but what chance do you think he has of getting any votes from the disgusted majority?

Kerry has had years in the Senate in a totally safe Massachusetts seat (75% majority). What better opportunity to vote with his conscience and try to make a difference? So we look at his actual voting record, and it shows a Clinton/Gore-like disconnect between what he says and what he does:

  • He criticized Ashcroft and the “PATRIOT” act—which he voted for.

  • He spoke out against the Iraq war—but voted for it. He now claims he wasn’t voting for what the act says.

  • He spoke out in favor of making it easier for immigrants to become citizens—but voted for the infamous 1996 Immigration Act.

  • He says he’s against the death penalty—but twice voted to expand it (1994 and 1995).

  • He says that NAFTA is a problem that needs fixing it—but he voted for NAFTA, he voted for GATT, and he voted to permanently give China “Most Favored Nation” status.

  • After 9/11 he complained about the CIA being underfunded—but he campaigned to cut its funding in 1997.

  • He criticizes the Bush education bill—which he voted for.

  • He votes for and against increasing spending on Medicare.

Don’t think I’m the only person to have noticed this either. The right-wing bloggers are already all over Kerry’s lying past, and you can be sure FOX News and the other media mouthpieces of the Republican Party will pick it up if he’s chosen.

Of course, Clinton too would shamelessly U-turn whenever the opinion polls told him the other position might be more popular. But Clinton had charisma, something Kerry definitely lacks.

To get back to actual policy, though, Kerry is “liberal” in all the wrong places. He votes in a liberal way on economic issues including the environment, and is conservative on issues like war and surveillance. In contrast, Dean is an economic conservative and liberal on social issues. The problem is, America doesn’t give a shit about the environment, and hates liberal welfare programs; and everyone left of Bush was against the war.

Kerry voted for the “Communications Decency Act” and Internet censorship. He voted for pumping tax money into churches. He voted for mandatory national ID cards. He voted for wiretapping with no court order required. He voted for the DMCA. He’s an unpalatable choice for everyone except the DLC sheep. If he’s picked, I predict we’ll get four more years of Bush.

That said, I’ve decided that if Kerry is the next Democratic candidate, I’m just going to do my best to observe a self-imposed silence on the whole election. Because after all, no matter how much he sucks, he can’t be any worse than Bush. But it’s gonna be really hard not to scream liar, liar, pants on fire…

I have some more general theory which explains why Kerry is popular, but it’ll have to wait, I really have to work now…

Another egg hits the face

So David Kay has resigned. He was the top official in charge of the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, a CIA adviser who was confident WMDs would be found quickly.

Now he has resigned, because the entire search project is being quietly shut down. And Mr Kay himself now thinks that no stocks of WMDs are likely to be found.

Well, fancy that.

I, for one, am surprised. I was sure they’d at least bother to plant some WMDs and fool the sheep who watch Fox News, but apparently even that would be too much effort.

OJ’s hunt for the real killers

US News:

On the evening of February 1, two dozen American officials gathered in a spacious conference room at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va. The time had come to make the public case for war against Iraq. For six hours that Saturday, the men and women of the Bush administration argued about what Secretary of State Colin Powell should—and should not—say at the United Nations Security Council four days later. Not all the secret intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s misdeeds, they found, stood up to close scrutiny. At one point during the rehearsal, Powell tossed several pages in the air. “I’m not reading this,” he declared. “This is bullshit.”

[…]

Today, the mystery is what happened to Iraq’s terror weapons. “Everyone believed they would find it,” says a senior official. “I have never seen intelligence agencies in this government and other governments so united on one subject.”

Were they right? Powell and Tenet were convinced that chemical agents had been deployed to field units. None have been found. War planners used the intelligence when targeting suspected weapons of mass destruction sites. Yet bomb-damage assessments found that none of the targets contained chemical or biological weapons. “What we don’t know at this point,” says an Air Force war planner, “is what was bad intelligence, what was bad timing, what was bad luck.”

[…]

Senior administration officials say they remain convinced that weapons of mass destruction will turn up. The CIA and the Pentagon reported last week that two trucks seized in Iraq were apparently used as mobile biological weapons labs, though no biological agents were found.

Sydney Morning Herald:

Condoleezza Rice was smart enough to attempt her U-turn weeks ago. According to the US National Security Adviser, WMD bombs, missiles and drones are out. Dual-use technology and just-in-time manufacturing are in. Find a pesticide factory, for instance, and you find a chemical warfare facility. And don’t be concerned about looters. The more the place is trashed, the more difficult will be any dispute about the evidence. More recently, the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, has said publicly that Iraq may have destroyed its WMDs prior to the war.

[…]

This is not to say that Iraq was of no concern or that some WMD-related materials will never be found in Iraq. Iraq had what’s known in the business as a breakout WMD capability in its many dual-use facilities. The Fallujah III castor oil production plant near Baghdad, for example, was, like similar plants elsewhere in the world, suitable for conversion to a ricin toxin factory.

And Iraq, again like many countries including Australia, probably still has stockpiles of potential WMD ingredients – the chlorine needed for clean water, for example, can also be used to make deadly chemical agents.

Moreover, Iraq almost certainly had other WMD-related materials. US claims about mobile biological warfare facilities could yet prove true, though the implication that Iraq’s biological weapons program relied on a handful of trailers tends to confirm the program was limited.

The trailers, and any other finds, will remain irrelevant until scrutinised by independent officials. The same goes for the interrogation reports of former Iraqi scientists, including those now detained in Morocco. With so much at stake, the possibility can’t be ruled out that a zealous coalition official might attempt to tamper with the evidence.

Claims by Iraqis in custody that the WMD program was dismantled before the war could be true, especially if Saddam thought he could survive the war and achieve some sort of moral victory. But that would mean the program must have been much smaller than US assessments. Just as elusive is hard evidence of active co-operation with al-Qaeda. This was always an extraordinary proposition, not least because Saddam was a secular dictator intent on eradicating Islamic fundamentalism.

[…]

One of the major concerns about the war now is the way it will encourage the proliferation of WMDs. America’s adversaries are being encouraged to acquire WMDs to deter US aggression.

Yes, I know Saddam is a bad man, but…

To paraphrase Mr Francesco Zappa, these days they have lies so big you can’t see ’em. I feel like it would be worth doing a “lie a day” feature… there’s so much material.

Let’s look at a selection of lies: That Iraq did not cooperate with UN weapons inspections, that Iraq kicked UN inspectors out of the country, that inspections did not achieve anything, and that Iraq was not cooperating at the time when war began.

Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was shut down by inspections, according to the people who were actually there. That is, until the inspectors were withdrawn for safety reasons, because America wanted to carry out some airstrikes. The inspectors were subsequently not allowed back because Iraq discovered that several of them were CIA spies. So far from refusing to comply with UN resolutions, Iraq reluctantly disarmed under UN supervision until America broke the terms of the disarmament agreement by planting spies in UNSCOM. In spite of that, inspections resumed in November after Iraq said that it would comply with the most recent US-drafted UN resolution. Did they? Well, Hans Blix said just before the war that Iraq was providing more cooperation than it had in over a decade. (Note that the Iraqis also let the UN inspectors leave freely before the start of the bombing, rather than trying to use them as “human shields”.)