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The United States has started engaging the Taliban in negotiations through Saudi and Pakistani intelligence agencies, highly-placed sources told Dawn on Monday. He said that four “major neutral players” were engaged with the Afghan Taliban on behalf of the Saudi leadership and the General Intelligence Directorate (GID) of Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani leadership and Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).The GID and ISI have been doing the job on behalf of the US government and CIA. The source said that one of the main objectives of the recent visit to Pakistan by CIA chief Leon Panetta was to assess progress in...

Fearing that Taliban supremo Mullah Omar might be targetted by US drones, Pakistan's ISI has helped him to flee from the border town of Quetta to the mega port city of Karachi, where he has established a new Shura council. One-eyed leader of the Afghan Taliban recently found refuge from potential US attacks in Karachi with Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) assistance, the Washington Times reported quoting US intelligence officials. "Mullah Omar travelled to Karachi last month after the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. He inaugurated a new senior leadership council in Karachi, a city that so...

The CIA has produced a new batch of TV ads for recruiting Arab and Iranian-Americans. Especially those with a good knowledge of the languages and cultures of the old country. Such recruiting has been a tricky business, because we are war with an entity that identifies itself via culture and religion; not nationality. A polyglot nation like the United States has citizens, and non-citizens, from all parts of the world. This creates opportunities (for recruiting intelligence operatives) and dangers (spies in our midst) in wartime. And we are at war, with over a dozen Islamic terrorist attacks within the U.S....

FEDS: “WE NEED MORE MAJOR NIDAL HASANS” thelastcrusade.org With new evidence linking Major Nidal Hasan (Ft. Hood Massacre) to U.S. Based Muslim radicals, Al Qaeda and Pakistani terror networks, American Intelligence agencies are reacting with mind-boggling foolishness. While military families are grieving the murder of their loved ones, the CIA is recruiting radical Muslims from Dearborn Michigan, ground zero for America's Islamic jihad movement. America has squandered billions of taxpayer's dollars kissing up to the Islamic world, only to be rewarded by terrorism and bloodshed against U.S. Citizens. And now this: Your nation, your world," a male voice says...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 20 (UPI) -- CIA Director Leon Panetta arrived in Pakistan Friday to discuss the issue of the location of the leadership of the Taliban with security officials. Panetta was to meet with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and top military and intelligence officials, Pakistan's The National newspaper reported. He is expected to discuss issues related to the leadership of the Taliban believed to be hiding in the tribal border regions along the Afghan border. Pakistani officials denied claims the leadership is in the area, the report said.

TV Ad Seeks To Recruit Arab-Americans To CIA By JEFF KAROUB, Associated Press Writer DEARBORN, Mich. – There's a swirl of activity in a spacious, modern kitchen as final meal preparations are made. An older man tries to swipe a felafel off an appetizer plate but instead gets a loving hand slap from a woman. The happy, well-dressed guests move to a table full of food in a dining room adorned with Middle Eastern wall-hangings. It's an inviting, if idealized, dinner party scene from any Arab-American home — at least that's what the CIA seeks to convey in the first...

A former horse riding school in the tiny Baltic state of Lithuania was used as a secret CIA prison to hold and interrogate top al-Qaeda terrorists, it has been claimed. The prison was reportedly built from scratch on the territory of a former horse riding school about 15 miles from Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, and included an underground annex. Pictures of the building said to be the former CIA jail show a bland-looking two-storey house surrounded by a fence and CCTV cameras. Locals say the building, which is now used as a training facility by Lithuania's state security service, originally...

Lets be honest here, this is not about bringing more Arabs into the CIA, this is about bringing more Muslims into the fold. This is about our government agencies bowing down to Muslims and Islam, just like the Labour Party does in the UK. I am sure that Muslims who want to destroy life as we know it, would never think of taking this invitation and infiltrate the CIA. Nah, that could never happen.

In the event of his arrest or God forbid- his death, Pastor James David Manning has given his will and testament in a video message released yesterday on the ATLAH Media Network. Pastor Manning requests that as many people as possible have access to this video for safekeeping. Manning says if enough people have the same information, it could not be contradicted in a court of law. I've provided a link on the YouTube video in case anyone wants to download it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR8hl8JV0hA

Pastor James David Manning, one of President Obama’s most vocal and outspoken critics, has just released a video in which he claims that on the afternoon of November 16th, 2009, while at his ATLAH World Missionary Church, he was visited by two CIA agents. Manning says the agents claimed that they were from Homeland Security and were accompanied by two NYPD Detectives. Pastor Manning also said he expects to be arrested within the next few days and charged with “the threat against the life of a U.S. President”, and that he believes that his arrest is “imminent”. Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6OEDFCvNns Church...

EXCLUSIVE: CIA Secret 'Torture' Prison Found at Fancy Horseback Riding Academy ABC News Finds the Location of a "Black Site" for Alleged Terrorists in Lithuania By BRIAN ROSS and MATTHEW COLE Nov. 18, 2009 — The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week. Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda...

I get it! "Elections have their consequences." In countries without the democratic tradition of America, those consequences may include putting the former leaders in jail, or worse. But that has never been the tradition in the US. The history of America has been that those consequences have been political, a change in policy, appointment of advisers who were hated by the old regime, etc. But has not been the Obama way. Since his election, Obama and his team have attempted to appease their political left by publicly denouncing the Bush Administration's national security policies which kept us safe, even as...

The CIA has paid millions of dollars to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) since 9/11, "accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy agency's annual budget", says a media report. The ISI also collected "tens of millions of dollars through a classified CIA programme", which pays for the capture or killing of wanted militants, a newspaper reported on Monday citing current and former US officials. An intense debate has been triggered within the US government due to "long-standing suspicions that the ISI continues to help Taliban extremists who undermine US efforts in Afghanistan and provide sanctuary to Al Qaeda...

RUSH: Folks, I'm sorry. I can't get off this decision to bring these terrorists to New York and conduct a trial. This is such an insidious plot. It is such a disaster. Do you realize Barack Obama is tougher on insurance companies than he is on the 9/11 mastermind? I want to know -- Eric Holder -- I'm still struck by things he said in his press conference. "We gotta find a jury of their peers." These guys are not citizens! Who the hell are we going to find that is a jury of their peers? Do you realize we're...

Source: 9/11 Terror Detainees Face Trial in N.Y. Friday, November 13, 2009 WASHINGTON — Self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be sent to New York to face trial in a civilian federal court, an Obama administration official said Friday. The official said Attorney General Eric Holder plans to announce the decision later in the morning. The official is not authorized to discuss the decision before the announcement, so spoke on condition of anonymity.

CIA Director Leon Panetta and National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair squared off in May over Blair's effort to designate his own representative at U.S. embassies to be his personal eyes and ears abroad, instead of relying on CIA station chiefs. Two intelligence officials said Thursday that the CIA won a monthslong turf battle with the Office of National Intelligence, assuring the primacy of CIA station chiefs over other U.S. intelligence operations and personnel around the world. The territorial dispute was resolved only after it got all the way to the office of national security adviser Gen. James Jones. The CIA...

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News. It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that one of its officers was seeking to connect with suspected al Qaeda figures, the officials said. One senior lawmaker said the CIA had, so far, refused to brief the intelligence committees on what, if any, knowledge they had about Hasan's efforts. CIA director Leon Panetta and the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis...

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News. It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that one of its officers was seeking to connect with suspected al Qaeda figures, the officials said.

These new reports, dated June 1, 2005 and July 12, 2005, contain some different information than the previously released report, dated June 3, 2005. Notably, the June 1, 2005 report concludes that "Detainee reporting accounts for more than half of all HUMINT reporting on al-Qa'ida since the program began..." This fact is missing from the other two later reports..... .....n March 31, 2009, Vice President Cheney personally issued a request to the National Archives Presidential Libraries section for declassification review of the June 1, 2005 and another detainee program report. The Archives then passed on the request to the CIA...

Several high-priority and high-priced satellites crucial to U.S. national security are slated to launch over the next 15 to 18 months, according to Bruce Carlson, director of the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). During a keynote address here at the Strategic Space Symposium, Carlson did not provide details of the upcoming missions. Most of the NRO’s satellite programs are classified. Carlson noted the launches to make the point that the NRO continues to perform its mission despite having had its struggles in recent years. But Carlson also said the NRO has suffered a steep decline in its research and development...

Fort Hood shooting: Texas army killer linked to September 11 terrorists Major Nidal Malik Hasan worshipped at a mosque led by a radical imam said to be a "spiritual adviser" to three of the hijackers who attacked America on Sept 11, 2001. By Philip Sherwell and Alex Spillius Published: 8:17PM GMT 07 Nov 2009 Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the sole suspect in the massacre of 13 fellow US soldiers in Texas Photo: GETTY Imam Anwar al-Awlaki The radical Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, accused of supporting attacks on British troops Hasan, the sole suspect in the massacre of 13 fellow US soldiers...

ABC News' Rachel Martin reports: The US intelligence gathering program known as “extraordinary rendition” was essentially put on trial for the first time - in Italy - and this week the court rendered a guilty verdict. Italian Judge Oscar Magi convicted 23 Americans of the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric on a street in Milan, Italy. The cleric, known as Abu Omar, alleged that he was abducted by CIA operatives who then shuttled him between US bases in Europe and then moved him to Egypt where Omar says he was tortured. The Italian judge tried the Americans, all but...

A judge in Milan convicted 23 Americans today of the kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in 2003, culminating a landmark trial that gave a look into the secret world of CIA renditions of terror suspects. Judge Oscar Magi acquitted three Americans, including the former CIA station chief in Italy, because they had diplomatic immunity when a secret team abducted militant cleric Abu Omar in Milan and flew him to Egypt, where he underwent months of torture and abuse. The Americans were tried in absentia, and given that the U.S. government has long declined to cooperate with the prosecution, it seemed...

MILAN -- An Italian court on Wednesday convicted 22 CIA operatives and a U.S. Air Force colonel of orchestrating the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric in Milan in 2003 and flying him to Egypt, where he said he was later tortured.

An Italian judge on Wednesday began deliberating the fate of 26 Americans and seven Italians accused of kidnapping an Egyptian terror suspect in 2003, the first trial in the world involving the CIA's extraordinary rendition program. After a nearly three years of hearings, Judge Oscar Magi heard final arguments before beginning deliberations. A verdict was expected Wednesday. The American suspects -- all but one identified by prosecutors as CIA agents -- are being tried in absentia and are considered fugitives. Their lawyers, who have had no contact with their clients, have entered innocent pleas on their behalf. The Americans are...

Saturday, October 31, 2009 Obama DOJ shovels out more grist for foreign prosecutions of Bush officials   [Andy McCarthy] Well, the hyper-"transparent" Obama administration won't share any of its internal deliberations on matters about which there is no good reason to keep the public in the dark — e.g., its strong-arming in Honduras, its dismissal of a slam-dunk civil rights case against the New Black Panther Party, and the legal analysis by DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel that explains why the DC Voting Rights Bill is unconstitutional — but it continues to shovel out previously classified information about interrogation techniques...

Samuel Johnson once remarked that seeing a dog walking badly using only its hind legs would not be surprising. What would be surprising, he said, was seeing a dog walking on its hind legs in the first place. Similarly, coming upon a poorly developed story on the Marxist network Democracy Now! having anything to say which would reflect unfavorably on a fellow Marxist would not be a surprise. The surprise would come with the realization that the story was run at all.

WASHINGTON – Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the president of Afghanistan, gets regular payments from the CIA and has for much of the past eight years, the New York Times reported Tuesday. The newspaper said that according to current and former American officials, the CIA pays Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the CIA’s direction in and around Kandahar. The CIA’s ties to Karzai, who is a suspected player in the country’s illegal opium trade, have created deep divisions within the Obama administration, the Times said. Allegations that...

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the embattled Afghan president and a suspected drug trafficker, has been on the CIA payroll for most of the past eight years, The New York Times says. The US spy agency pays Karzai for a variety of services, the newspaper said on Tuesday, such as fielding recruits for an Afghan paramilitary force operating at the CIA's direction in and around his home city of Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold. He also helps the CIA contact and sometimes meet Taliban followers. Karzai, who is said to have ties to Afghanistan's lucrative illegal opium trade, has a...

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials. The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home. The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about...

Maintaining his stature as one of the most forceful defenders of the Bush Administration's defense policies former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Obama of committing "libel" against CIA interrorgators on Wednesday. Mr. Cheney’s criticized the Obama White House in a wide-ranging address on foreign policy matters for abandoning commitments to allies in Poland and the Czech Republic in favor of the Russians, sacrificing American intelligence officials to satisfy the political left and "dithering" on taking action in Afghanistan, among other things. The speech, delivered to the Center for Security Policy, comes as the White House considers U.S. Commander of...

American spies are investing in technology designed to monitor websites including blogs, Twitter, YouTube and even reading habits on Amazon. They say social media websites offer a powerful opportunity for "open source" intelligence – publicly available data that can be mined for information. In an attempt to sift through the blizzard of information, the investment arm of the CIA, In-Q-Tel, has invested in a software firm that monitors social media. According to Wired magazine, In-Q-Tel has put money into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specialises in monitoring the internet. Visible Technologies examines more than half a million websites a...

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It's part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using 'open source intelligence' — information that's publicly available... Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn't touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the...

Click through on the link below, no posting allowed.

For three long years, the United States, Britain, and France kept the secret while their intelligence services shared information they had been gathering on what appeared to be a top secret underground nuclear weapons plant near Qom. At the very last minute, just four days before the allies planned to shock the world by revealing detailed information on the secret nuclear plant, the Iranian government sent a tersely worded letter acknowledging the existence of the site to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and pledged to open it for future inspections. “Someone leaked,” says Danielle Pletka, vice president of the...

A U.S. federal judge has ruled that hundreds of documents detailing the Central Intelligence Agency's now-shuttered overseas secret detention program of suspected terrorists, including extreme interrogation methods, may be kept secret. U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein on Wednesday refused to release documents describing Central Intelligence Agency terror interrogations, and the names of detainees or CIA contractors involved in the secret rendition program. He said he would defer to the CIA's judgment on the need to keep the papers secret in order to protect intelligence methods and sources. The American Civil Liberties Union had asked for the release of 580...

Is the Central Intelligence Agency covering up some dark secret about the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Probably not. But you would not know it from the C.I.A.’s behavior. For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundreds of documents from 1963, when an anti-Castro Cuban group it paid clashed publicly with the soon-to-be assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The C.I.A. says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But because of the agency’s history of stonewalling assassination inquiries, even researchers with no use for conspiracy thinking question its stance. The files in question, some released under...

Among the 250+ people rallying against socialism and anti-American values at the intersection of Highways K and N in O’Fallon, Mo., early Saturday afternoon, one man carried a sign unlike all the others. It’s message: “CIA AGENTS DESERVE GRATITUDE, NOT PROSECUTION.”

Iran most likely will develop a nuclear capability far sooner than the NIE timeline of around 2015... Much of the analysis both classified and from think tanks, mistakenly presupposes Iran will only pursue an implosion device... In the mid 1970’s feeling threatened by Soviet expansion by its Cuban surrogates in Angola, the South African government started down the road to becoming a nuclear power. Similar to Iran today, they settled on the production of uranium as the fuel and developed a gun type of weapon. Between 1982 and 1989 they completed 6 lightweight (750 kg/1,650 lb) weapons with an estimated...

In his widely reported London speech earlier this month, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, described how people constantly offer him ideas for fixing that country's problems. One of the more unusual recommendations, he suggested, came from a paper that advocated using a "plan called 'Chaosistan.' " McChrystal said it advised letting Afghanistan become a "Somalia-like haven of chaos that we simply manage from outside," but there was no further explanation of its origins. When journalists from NEWSWEEK and other media outlets asked McChrystal's entourage about where the paper came from, they were directed to an obscure Web...

In the Pentagon's newly expanded Special Operations office, a suite of sterile gray cubicles on the "C" ring of the third floor, Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael G. Vickers is working to implement the U.S. military's highest-priority plan: a global campaign against terrorism that reaches far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. The wide-ranging plan details the targeting of al-Qaeda-affiliated networks around the world and explores how the United States should retaliate in case of another major terrorist attack. The most critical aspect of the plan, Vickers said in a recent interview, involves U.S. Special Operations forces working through foreign partners to...

In a remarkable interview with Time, CIA Director Leon Panetta reveals that the U.S. has known about the secret Qom site, built into the side of a mountain, since 2006. This raises a number of questions. First, that 2007 National Intelligence Estimate looks absurd — and entirely disingenuous — in retrospect. The 2007 report led us to believe that the military program had been discontinued. The report was issued a year after we first knew of the facility. Sure there remained some questions (it could have been a dummy site to conceal another secret site someplace else), but we at...

There comes a time when big things should be considered rather than tinkering at the edges. It is certainly what the Left – as embodied in the Obama administration – thinks. It is certainly worth considering by those of us on the Right. So let’s look at the CIA; an agency that has – at the highest levels – individuals who pursue their own foreign policy. That may be forgivable if the result is improved intelligence and improved safety for the US. Unfortunately, the list of intelligence and judgment failures is piling up to such an extent that it now...

At the end of when North Korea tested a nuclear bomb it was a total surprise to administration officials: North Korea's decision to detonate a nuclear device underground Monday caught the United States by surprise, officials said. "They didn't give us any warning whatsoever," one senior U.S. intelligence official who works on North Korean issues told FOX News. Another official told Reuters that North Korea gave less than an hour's notice to the United States that it would carry out the test. The official said the communist country made "no demands," and passed on the message that it would carry...

WASHINGTON--A federal judge said the Federal Bureau of Investigation must publicly reveal much of its interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney during the investigation into who leaked the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative. The FBI interviewed Mr. Cheney in June 2004 as it was investigating the leak of Valerie Plame's identity after her husband criticized the Bush administration. Both the Bush and Obama administrations said they wanted to keep the interview confidential because future vice presidents may not cooperate with criminal investigations if it became public.

A federal judge has ordered the Justice Department to release notes and summaries of former Vice President Dick Cheney's 2004 interview with Special Prosecutor Pat Fitzgerald in the CIA leak case, but is allowing the deletion of what may be some of the most interesting details in the documents. In a ruling issued Thursday morning, Judge Emmet Sullivan flatly rejected claims by both Bush and Obama appointees at DOJ that the entirety of the records should be withheld because their disclosure could discourage White House officials from cooperating in future investigations. The judge said the prospect of such inquiries was...

NEW YORK — A judge cited national security concerns in ruling Wednesday that the CIA does not have to release hundreds of documents related to the destruction of videotapes of Sept. 11 detainee interrogations that used harsh methods. U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said he believed he had an obligation to let the CIA director decide what should be released when it pertains to methods used to make uncooperative detainees divulge information. "The need to keep confidential just how the CIA and other government agencies obtained their information is manifest, and that has to do with the identities of...

Note: The following text is a quote: CIA Opens Center on Climate Change and National Security September 25, 2009 The Central Intelligence Agency is launching The Center on Climate Change and National Security as the focal point for its work on the subject. The Center is a small unit led by senior specialists from the Directorate of Intelligence and the Directorate of Science and Technology. Its charter is not the science of climate change, but the national security impact of phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts, and heightened competition for natural resources. The Center will provide support...

It wasn't their intention, but seven former CIA directors who asked President Obama to abort a Justice Department inquiry into "enhanced interrogation techniques" have moved Obama to renew his promise that he will do no such thing. Last month, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. asked a career federal prosecutor, John H. Durham, to conduct a "preliminary review" into whether laws were violated in overseas interrogations of suspected terrorists. Holder made it clear that interrogators who complied with Justice Department guidelines, inadequate as they were, had nothing to fear. That didn't prevent the former directors from sending Obama a letter...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US Senate Republicans on Friday pulled out of a bipartisan investigation into controversial "war on terror" detentions and interrogations, including tactics widely condemned as torture. The move by the opposition party dealt a sharp blow to the Senate Intelligence Committee's efforts to find out exactly what methods were used when and whether they paid off -- without prosecuting witnesses or agents thought to have committed abuses. Senator Kit Bond, the panel's top Republican, blamed Attorney General Eric Holder's investigation into alleged CIA abuse of detainees, which he said made it impossible for current or former CIA officials...