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
- Publicly Posting in Social Control Media About Oneself Makes It Public Information
- sheer hypocrisy on privacy is evident in the Debian mailing lists
- Frans Pop suicide and Ubuntu grievances
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Workers' Right to Disconnect Won't Matter If Such a Right Isn't Properly Enforced
- I was always "on-call" and my main role or function was being "on-call" in case of incidents
- A Discussion About Suicides in Science and Technology (Including Debian and the European Patent Office)
- In Debian, there is a long history of deaths, suicides, and mysterious disappearances
- Federal News Network is Corrupt, It Runs Propaganda Pieces for Microsoft
- Federal News Network used to be OK some years ago
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- Enrico Zini & Debian: falsified harassment claims
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- European Parliament Elections 2024: Daniel Pocock Running as an Independent Candidate
- I became aware that Daniel Pocock had decided to enter politics
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, April 30, 2024
- IRC logs for Tuesday, April 30, 2024
- [Meme] Sometimes Torvalds and RMS Agree on Things
- hype around chatbots
- [Video] Linus Torvalds on 'Hilarious' AI Hype: "I Hate the Hype" and "I Don't Want to be Part of the Hype", "You Need to Be a Bit Cynical About This Whole Hype Cycle"
- Linus Torvalds on LLMs
- Colin Watson, Steve McIntyre & Debian, Ubuntu cover-up mission after Frans Pop suicide
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Links 30/04/2024: Wireless Carriers Selling Customer Location Data, Facebook Posts Causing Trouble
- Links for the day
- Links 30/04/2024: More Google Layoffs (Wide-Ranging)
- Links for the day
- Fresh Rumours of Impending Mass Layoffs at IBM Red Hat
- "IBM filed a W.A.R.N with the state of North Carolina. That only means one thing."
- Mark Shuttleworth's (MS's) Canonical is Promoting Microsoft This Week (Surveillance Slanted as 'Confidential')
- Who runs Canonical these days? Why does Canonical help sell Windows?
- What Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical Can to Remedy the Damage Done to Frans Pop's Family
- Mr. Shuttleworth and Canonical as a company can at the very least apologise for putting undue pressure
- Amnesty International & Debian Day suicides comparison
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- [Meme] A Way to Get No Real Work Done
- Walter White looking at phone: Your changes could not be saved to device
- Modern Measures of 'Productivity' Boil Down to Time Wasting and Misguided Measurements/Yardsticks
- People are forgetting the value of nature and other human beings
- Countries That Beat the United States at RSF's World Press Freedom Index (After US Plunged Some More)
- The United States (US) was 17 when these rankings started in 2002
- Record Productivity and Preserving People's Past on the Net
- We're very productive these days, partly owing to online news slowing down (less time spent on curating Daily Links)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, April 29, 2024
- IRC logs for Monday, April 29, 2024
- Links 30/04/2024: Malaysian and Russian Governments Crack Down on Journalists
- Links for the day
- Frans Pop Debian Day suicide, Ubuntu, Google and the DEP-5 machine-readable copyright file
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Axel Beckert (ETH Zurich), the mentality of sexual violence on campus
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- [Meme] Russian Reversal
- Mark Shuttleworth: In Soviet Russia's spacecraft... Man exploits peasants
- Frans Pop & Debian suicide denial
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Hard Evidence Reinforces Suspicion That Mark Shuttleworth May Have Worked Volunteers to Death
- Today we start re-publishing articles that contain unaltered E-mails
- The Real Threats to Society Include Software Patents and the Corporations That Promote Them
- The OIN issue isn't a new one and many recognise this by now
- Links 30/04/2024: OpenBSD and Enterprise Cloaking Device
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Still Owes Over 100 Billion Dollars and It Cannot be Paid Back Using 'Goodwill'
- Meanwhile, Microsoft's cash at hand (in the bank) nearly halved in the past year.
- [Teaser] Ubuntu Cover-up After Death
- Attack the messenger
- The Cyber Show Explains What CCTV is About
- CCTV does not typically resolve crime
- [Video] Ignore Buzzwords and Pay Attention to Attacks on Software Developers
- AI in the Machine Learning sense is nothing new
- Outline of Themes to Cover in the Coming Weeks
- We're accelerating coverage and increasing focus on suppressed topics
- [Video] Not Everyone Claiming to Protect the Vulnerable is Being Honest
- "Diversity" bursaries aren't always what they seem to be
- [Video] Enshittification of the Media, of the Web, and of Computing in General
- It manifests itself in altered conditions and expectations
- [Meme] Write Code 100% of the Time
- IBM: Produce code for us till we buy the community... And never use "bad words" like "master" and "slave" (pioneered by IBM itself in the computing context)
- [Video] How Much Will It Take for Most People to Realise "Open Source" Became Just Openwashing (Proprietary Giants Exploiting Cost-Free or Unpaid 'Human Resources')?
- turning "Open Source" into proprietary software
- Freedom of Speech... Let's Ban All Software Freedom Speeches?
- There's a moral panic over people trying to actually control their computing
- Richard Stallman's Talk in Spain Canceled (at Short Notice)
- So it seems to have been canceled very fast
- Links 29/04/2024: "AI" Hype Deflated, Economies Slow Down Further
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 29/04/2024: Gopher Experiment and Profectus Alpha 0.9
- Links for the day
- [Video] Why Microsoft is by Far the Biggest Foe of Computer Security (Clue: It Profits From Security Failings)
- Microsoft is infiltrating policy-making bodies, ensuring real security is never pursued
- Debian 'Cabal' (via SPI) Tried to Silence or 'Cancel' Daniel Pocock at DNS Level. It Didn't Work. It Backfired as the Material Received Even More Visibility.
- know the truth about modern slavery
- Lucas Nussbaum & Debian attempted exploit of OVH Hosting insider
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Software in the Public Interest (SPI) is Not a Friend of Freedom
- We'll shortly reproduce two older articles from disguised.work
- Harassment Against My Wife Continues
- Drug addict versus family of Techrights authors
- Syria, John Lennon & Debian WIPO panel appointed
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, April 28, 2024
- IRC logs for Sunday, April 28, 2024
- [Video] GNU and Linux Everywhere (Except by Name)
- In a sense, Linux already has over 50% of the world's "OS" market