Transparency reporting, or reports that advocate public knowledge/awareness and call for transparency where secrecy prevails, is abundantly important. Some of the most secretive operations in the world are carried out by the CIA, which reportedly tries to end transparency [1-4], citing budget constraints (the CIA has black -- i.e. hidden -- budget). How convenient an excuse. No transparency, no accountability. Recently, the world received confirmation from the CIA about the CIA's coup in Iran and in coming years or decades we'll receive confirmation of CIA coups in Latin America and Asia. Good time for the CIA to kill transparency, no? Assuming a 60-year classification period...
"Recently, the world received confirmation from the CIA about the CIA's coup in Iran and in coming years or decades we'll receive confirmation of CIA coups in Latin America and Asia."Domestic violations of human rights are being noticed in the United States [5] and racism is seemingly on the rise [6], not on the decline (the economic issues must have contributed to xenophobia). This racism is motivated in part by the narration of "terrorism", which CIA intervention abroad plays a role in (it created "blowback", to use the CIA's own term). No wonder terrorists recruitment is seemingly rising [7], given the CIA's abuses abroad [8-9], arming of so-called 'rebels' who kill a lot of people (the Arab Spring is seemingly over [10], now it's just a CIA-run coup, by proxy as in Syria), and of course torture and assassinations (typically by imprecise, wide-ranging Hellfire missiles shot from UAVs).
It seems like those who speak out against these abuses are being portrayed as America's worst enemies (see Manning's prosecution [11] and response [12]) while those who commit serious crimes are hardly being portrayed as anything as they go into the darkness and disappear. The new head of the Clandestine Service at the Central Intelligence Agency is not even being named because of corporate press complicity in hiding her identity, which is Francis "Frank" Archibald. Some call her "Covert Head" of the CIA and she has waterboarding (torture) past, so the CIA knows very well what it's hiding and why (there is no photo of hers on the Web). ⬆
Related/contextual items from the news:
The forced cuts of the sequester are hitting everywhere, apparently even at agencies with black budgets. With the budgets not open for public inspection, whatever's cut by those agencies will take on the appearance of being "discretionary." The latest cut by the CIA certainly looks to be a cut of convenience, rather than one of necessity.
“I was in the belly of the beast. I began to see the lengths to which the CIA will go to conceal unconstitutional operations, hide information from Congress and silence anyone inside who challenges it.” Those are the words of Kevin M. Shipp, a former category 1, highly decorated CIA agent who held positions as an agent on the protective detail of the director and deputy director of the CIA, a manager of ongoing operations, an internal Security Officer, a counterintelligence investigator tasked to ferret moles out of the CIA, a Counter Terrorism Center (CTC) officer, a protective operations team leader and a polygraph examiner.
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As any loving husband and father would do, Kevin Shipp took his family to several doctors and immunologists for their diagnosis and treatment at his own expense to avoid discovery by the CIA. Once, he flew his son to a specialist, and was shaken by what he was told. He learned that his son and his entire family was exposed to some significant toxin that was damaging their immune systems. Continued exposure would certainly be fatal.
As a result of the sequester-induced budget cuts, the CIA is closing the Historical Collections Division office, which declassifies historical documents, and transferring the division's responsibilities to the office that handles FOIA requests.
The CIA office that declassifies agency documents on top Soviet spies and the Cuban missile crisis is closing due to federal sequester budget cuts.
As Peter Hart has pointed out (FAIR Blog, 2/25/13, 8/20/13), there's a lot of misinformation coming from the media on the unconstitutional police strategy known as stop-and-frisk. There's a powerful urge to believe, it seems, that abusing the Fourth Amendment rights of young men of color somehow makes the rest of us safer.
The Americans have sought Pakistan’s help to track down Sheikh Aminullah, the founder of the Peshawar-based Ganj Madrassa which has been slapped with economic sanctions by the US Treasury Department for being a ‘terrorist training centre’.
An opinion piece in Scientific American from May 2 outlined, in more detail and stronger language, why the CIA shouldn’t have used a sham-vaccination ruse. “Few mourn [bin Laden] the man responsible for the slaughter of many thousands of innocent people worldwide over the years,” the article said. “But the operation that led to his death may yet kill hundreds of thousands more.”
Previous human rights lawyer Laverty spoke about the hurt and deaths the CIA have caused in a number of countries.
Over the weekend of August 16-18, 30,0000 Syrians crossed into Iraq over the Peshkhabour Bridge that spans River Tigris. They left the towns of Aleppo, Efrin, Hassake and Qamishly for the Kurdish region, where UNHCR field officers were stunned to see them. “The factors allowing this sudden movement are not fully clear to us,” said spokesperson Adrian Edwards. Thousands continue to make the transit, leaving a Syria paralysed by what U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi calls “a civil war, a sectarian war, and a proxy war,” and entering Iraq, where a string of car bombs over the past month has brought the highest death toll since 2008. A major bomb blast in Beirut’s southern district of Dahieh (which means suburb) rattled Lebanon, where one million Syrians have sought refuge — now one in four of the people who live in this small Levantine country. Sounds of gunfire and bombs have become routine from the Mediterranean coast to the Iranian border, from the souqs of Egypt to the small coastal towns of Libya.
...we now give longer sentences to those who expose war crimes than those who commit them.
Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission.
Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy — the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps — to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.
As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
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If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.