Covert Action Watch: January 2014
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-16 11:36:54 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-16 12:04:57 UTC
Summary: News, opinions and analysis from the past couple of weeks, concentrating on the imperial systems of the West
UK, Ireland, and Falklands
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Sometimes what is revealed by the State papers is of undoubted importance. The papers from 1982 released this New Year fleshed out, for instance, the tensions between Ireland and Britain over Northern Ireland and the Falklands conflict; as well as the contrasting closeness between the then government and the Catholic bishops in advance of the abortion referendum.
Other items are intriguing because they show how little has changed in the interim. Thirty years ago, Charles Haughey was apparently as eager as Health Minister James Reilly nowadays to clamp down on Irish smokers; and women's groups were complaining about the "degrading treatment of women as sex objects in all forms of the media". Plus ca change, indeed.
Mexico
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Between 2000 and 2012, the US government had a deal with Mexican drug cartel Sinaloa that allowed the group to smuggle billion of dollars of drugs in return for information on its rival cartels, according to court documents published by El Universal.
Written statements made by a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent and a US Department of Justice official in US District Court of Chicago following the 2009 arrest of Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla - son of a Sinaloa leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and the organization’s alleged “logistics coordinator" - indicate that DEA agents met with top Sinaloa officials over 50 times beginning in 2000.
Asia
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The arrest and imprisonment in North Korea of US citizen Kenneth Bae raises once again the issue of the use of religion and humanitarianism as covert vehicles for furthering US hegemony.
[...]
It still remains a mystery just exactly what Kenneth Bae was doing in North Korea.
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Terrorism came into being as soon as humanity appeared, but the US special services turned it into a threat of global scale. The end of the 1970s can be considered as the starting point. Back then the Central Intelligence Agency launched a training program for €«Islamic brigades€» to entangle the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic into the war in Afghanistan. In 1998 Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote, €«According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahedeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention€». That was the time Osama bin Laden was recruited.
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This was the life of a few elite American Middle East specialists and spies in the early days of the Cold War: intrigue and a self-possessed sense of adventure in a region emerging from European colonialism and into, they insisted, a more magnanimous American orbit of what historian Hugh Wilford has called “disinterested benevolence.” If only it had happened that way.
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We've written a few times about the troubling case of Rahinah Ibrahim, a PhD. student at Stanford who was wrongfully placed on the "no fly" list because (it appears) some clueless law enforcement officials mixed up the names of a networking group of professional Muslims in Malaysia who had returned from work or study in the US and Europe (which she was a part of) and a very, very different terrorist organization. While she had received something of an apology for initially not being allowed to fly to Malaysia (and then allowed to fly), it appeared that her name was then placed on the no fly list, preventing her from ever returning. She was later blocked from even flying back to the US for her lawsuit against the government.
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United States military spending has ballooned since World War II, although Americans have historically been reluctant to go to war. The Times’s Sam Tanenhaus explains why.
Silencing the Press
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The Justice Department under President Barack Obama insists a journalist must testify against his source so they can prosecute and convict a former CIA officer for a leak. It has spent about six years trying to force him to testify, and now, having lost in an appeals court, he is taking his case to the Supreme Court.
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A New York Times reporter has asked the US Supreme Court to block an order that would require him to reveal the confidential source for his book exposing CIA secrets.
Conquering the Press
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A tip-off is that the Washington Post refuses to face up to a conflict of interest involving Jeff Bezos -- who's now the sole owner of the powerful newspaper at the same time he remains Amazon's CEO and main stakeholder.
The Post is supposed to expose CIA secrets. But Amazon is under contract to keep them. Amazon has a new $600 million "cloud" computing deal with the CIA.
The situation is unprecedented. But in an email exchange early this month, Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron told me that the newspaper doesn't need to routinely inform readers of the CIA-Amazon-Bezos ties when reporting on the CIA. He wrote that such in-story acknowledgment would be "far outside the norm of disclosures about potential conflicts of interest at media organizations."
But there isn't anything normal about the new situation. As I wrote to Baron, "few journalists could have anticipated ownership of the paper by a multibillionaire whose outside company would be so closely tied to the CIA."
Domestic Backlash
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One month to the day after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, former President Harry Truman recommended that the U.S. abolish the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
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expansion of presidential powers in the United States.
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Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF - September 2001) approved open-ended permanent wars. They rage out-of-control. They do so at home and abroad.
The FY 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) targets freedom. It prioritizes militarism and permanent wars. It authorizes over $600 billion for global belligerence, mass killing and destruction.
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Blum is the author of the famous book Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventionssince World War II (Common Courage Press). The book enjoyed remarkable success, becoming required reading for students and professions in numerous fields. Professor Noam Chomsky said of the book, “It is far and away the best book on the topic.” The book is astounding, as Blum breaks down the post-war CIA in more than 50 fascinating chapters. Actions everywhere from Albania to Zaire are discussed in the book. I met with William Blum in early December in Washington, DC.
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Washington has had the US at war for 12 years: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, and almost Syria, which could still happen, with Iran waiting in the wings. These wars have been expensive in terms of money, prestige, and deaths and injuries of both US soldiers and the attacked civilian populations. None of these wars appears to have any compelling reason or justifiable explanation. The wars have been important to the profits of the military/security complex. The wars have provided cover for the construction of a Stasi police state in America, and the wars have served Israel’s interest by removing obstacles to Israel’s annexation of the entire West Bank and southern Lebanon.
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A workable solution to the perpetual foreign policy crisis requires a new economy and civil society institutions that provide a political fund to promote demilitarized politicians, supported by an alternative ethos of diplomacy, foreign aid, and non-militarized soft power. Social movements might explore how universities contribute to the cycle of violence by marginalizing discourses related to disarmament, alternative security and an ecologically-rooted conversion of big oil, auto and defense firms. Otherwise, expect another several years of dismal headlines in newspapers chronicling blow back, terror states, and meaningless violence.
Slow Justice
Mandela
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A Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student sued the Central Intelligence Agency on Wednesday to compel release of its records on Nelson Mandela, the former South African president and anti-apartheid activist who died last month at age 95.
Border Tyranny
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Security staff allegedly plumb new depths when they subjected D. to a humiliating body search, referencing the Holocaust during their invasive actions.
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A former college student detained at Philadelphia International Airport after Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials discovered he was carrying Arabic language flashcards lost his bid to sue the federal agents who detained him.
Nicholas George alleged that the TSA agents violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights when they arrested him as he tried to board a flight from his Philadelphia home to Pomona College in 2009.
According to Chief Judge Theodore McKee’s ruling, despite the fact that George clearly had the right to carry the flashcards, the TSA agents were “at the outer boundary” of justifiability in detaining him. In addition to everyday words and phrases like “day before yesterday,” “fat,” “cheap,” and “pink,” the deck of flashcards also contained and phrases like “bomb,” “terrorist,” “explosion,” and “to target.”
Misc.
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Stewart was convicted of helping a blind Egyptian sheik communicate with his followers from prison. She had been imprisoned since 2009 and had said she didn't want to die in "a strange and loveless place."
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Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks who has been holed up in an embassy in London for more than a year, is to be a guest on BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
Assange, who has been granted asylum by Ecuador but faces arrest if he leaves the country's London embassy, will be giving his thoughts on the history of the control of information on Thursday.
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Americans who volunteered to distribute books in Russia didn’t know the CIA paid for the printing.
Recent Techrights' Posts
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- Slop isn't about efficiency and saving money
- Reboots Should Never be Necessary
- "BUT WHAT ABOUT SECURITY!!"
- Microsoft's Halloween Documents and systemd, Wayland, Etc.
- Maybe one day Wayland will be widespread. Or maybe not.
- Changing One's Name Won't Change One's Past
- People who have earned a bad reputation are not magically "entitled" to reset
- People Who Assault Women Are Not Victims of "Distress"
- It seems like an American tradition. In a country with almost 50 presidents, not even one was a female.
- Adoption of Gemini Protocol Still Growing
- Gemini Protocol is being obscured by the media - it doesn't help that Google 'hijacked' the word "Gemini" - but people still manage to find out about it, download a client, and use it
- Brett Wilson LLP "Takes it Personal" (Character Assassination, Not Professionalism). Everybody Can See That.
- On behalf of violent men
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- Coming Soon: Another OSI Scandal, This One Implicating Molly de Blanc
- OSI has been fairly quiet lately
- Outreachy & Debian pregnancy cluster, Meike Reichle evidence
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Again, "Lunduke is Actually Sending His Audience to Attack People"
- Microsoft Lunduke is not trying to "protect" Linux
- One of the Most Hilarious Things About the Microsoft SLAPPs
- It's so ridiculous
- Financial Support for the Free Software Foundation or the GNU Project
- The FSF has extended until Friday its fund-raising campaign
- Illegally Hiding (or Demanding Secrecy Around) Illegal Requests or Attempts at Extortion
- unlawful communications like threats
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- Links for the day
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- What does that say about Canonical and Ubuntu?
- Slopfarms Which Take Real Articles About GNU/Linux and Turn Them Into Copycats Which Are False
- Even before the LLM hype those were quite common
- The Firm That Picks on Techrights is Accustomed to Working With Criminals
- Techrights never did anything illegal. So why is it being picked on by people who work with criminals?
- Microsoft Said the Mass Layoffs Were for "Investment" in "AI", But It's Also Laying Off the "AI" and "Copilot" Staff
- Months ago we showed many so-called "AI" people were getting the boot and this time it's the same
- DryDeadFish is Dead, Long Live DryDeadFish
- We kept checking, hoping it can recover from some temporary technical issue
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- Links for the day
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- Links for the day
- More EPO Leaks on the Way
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- Decommodification is a Corporate Strategy Against Communities
- systemd is led by Microsoft and hosted by Microsoft
- copyleft.org 'Hijacked' by the People Who Attack the Person Who Created Copyleft
- So far there's nothing "tasteless" in copyleft.org, but that can change at any time in the future
- Asking People to Take Down Articles and Videos Only Makes These More Popular and "Viral"
- If you do something bad, one of the worst things you can possibly do it try to silence those who speak about it
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
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- Links for the day
- Pissing Contests and Pissing Off Everyone
- people who came from Microsoft are trying to vex and divide the community
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- That scandal was all over the media, not just in English
- The Demise of LLMs
- We've just checked BetaNews again. They've dropped all the slop and went back to human authors.
- Gemini Links 13/07/2025: Sonpo Museum of Art and FCEUX
- Links for the day
- Links 13/07/2025: UnitedHealth's Censorship Campaign, Australia Wary of China
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- Firing Away With Nonsense
- Or fighting fire with fire
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- Turns Out LLMs for Code Don't Save Time and Don't Improve Quality
- Neither legal nor useful
- The Microsofters Will Have an Obligation to Compensate Us
- This story isn't just about Microsoft. It's also about corruption, there are many women victims, there is abject "abuse of process", and many more scandals to be illuminated in years to come.
- Reproducing at the EPO Instead of Producing Monopolies for Foreign Monopolies With Their Price-Fixing Cartels
- Does the EPO recognise the need of well-educated Europeans to bear kids?
- Valnet Inc. Dominates Real (Not LLM Slop) GNU/Linux Coverage in 2025
- And likely in prior years, too
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Fund Raiser Goes on
- Later this month we'll expose another OSI scandal
- EPO Staff Representatives Issue a Warning About Staff's Health and Inadequate Care
- Even the EPO's own stakeholders (money sources) are openly protesting against what the EPO became
- Links 13/07/2025: Partly Assorted News From Deutsche Welle and CBC
- Links for the day
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- Over at Tux Machines...
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- Plunder at the Second-Largest Institution in Europe
- cuts, neglect, health problems, even early deaths
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- Links for the day
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- Nope.
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- EPO Staff Committee on Harassment in the Workplace
- slides
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