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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...

The top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee has pulled out of the panel's bipartisan review of Bush-era terrorist interrogation techniques, saying Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.'s criminal investigation into the CIA undermines the committee's ability to interview witnesses. "Had Mr. Holder honored the pledge made by the president to look forward, not backwards, we would still be active participants in the committee's review," said Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the panel's vice chairman. "Instead, DOJ sent a loud and clear message that previous decisions to decline prosecution mean nothing and old criminal charges can be brought anytime...

During my interview last night with 27-year CIA analyst Ray McGovern on the Mike Malloy Show (which I've been guest hosting all this week), the man who used to personally deliver the CIA's Presidential Daily Briefings to George Bush Sr., among other Presidents, offered an extraordinarily chilling thought --- particularly coming from someone with his background.

LANGLEY, Va. - Part of the new Dan Brown novel is based on a local mystery. In the introduction to his new best-selling novel, "The Lost Symbol," author Dan Brown lists the following: "In 1991, a document was locked in the safe of the director of the CIA. The document is still there today, its cryptic text includes references to an unknown location underground. The document ... includes the phrase, 'It's buried out there somewhere.'" Brown says the 20-year-old document contains the answers to a 20-year-old mystery. WTOP's National Security Correspondent J.J. Green investigated the claim, and found out it's...

Starting at about 0:38, "We want to have four people who donate money this week to sit down and have dinner with me, on me. We'll fly you in, I'll pay for dinner..." I recommend downloading this before it goes under the bus.

A New York City Muslim imam, who acted as a police informant, betrayed his handlers by tipping off a terrorism suspect... Ahmad Wais Afzali, of the New York borough of Queens, was among three men arrested during the weekend in connection with an alleged bombing plot... The documents show that Zazi, 24, of Denver, abruptly left New York and returned to Colorado after having wiretapped phone conversations with the imam, which the FBI alleges contained talk of how police were interested in Zazi... Zazi attended an al-Qaida terrorism training camp in Pakistan and was arrested in possession of notes detailing...

Here is video of President Obama yesterday on CNN with John King saying he has not intention of heeding the plea of seven former CIA Directors - from both parties - to stop the move to investigate CIA officials who interrogated terror suspects during the Bush Administration to keep the United States safe. Obama said he "respected the seven former directors," but also said "no one is above the law." Obama continues to say he is not interested in "looking back," or a "witch hunt," but it is clear he is determined to throw this bone to the Far-Left and...

WASHINGTON -- President Obama says he has no plans to ask the Justice Department to end its criminal investigation into the harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists during the Bush administration. Seven former CIA directors have asked the president to do just that. In a letter to Obama on Friday, they warned that the probe could discourage CIA officers from doing the kind of aggressive intelligence work needed to fight terrorism. Obama tells CBS' "Face the Nation" that he appreciates that the former CIA chiefs are wanting "to look after an institution that they helped to build." Obama says he wants...

WASHINGTON -- President Obama says he has no plans to ask the Justice Department to end its criminal investigation into the harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists during the Bush administration. Seven former CIA directors have asked the president to do just that. In a letter to Obama on Friday, they warned that the probe could discourage CIA officers from doing the kind of aggressive intelligence work needed to fight terrorism. Obama tells CBS' "Face the Nation" that he appreciates that the former CIA chiefs are wanting "to look after an institution that they helped to build."

Tom Maguire, citing the Washington Post, reports that AG Eric Holder seems to be winding down the much ballyhooed and widely criticized decision to investigate the CIA interrogators: The WaPo reports that, having finished with the grandstanding and puffery, Attorney General Eric Holder's investigation into the already-investigated detainee abuse cases is narrowing and winding down. Beyond the obvious problems - in addition to demoralizing the CIA they are investigating the foot soldiers, not the generals who ordered the policy - it turns out that technicalities of law, jurisdiction and evidence make prosecutions and convictions difficult.  That is hardly a surprise to...

Seven former heads of the CIA wrote President Obama on Friday to ask him to end an investigation launched by former Attorney General Eric Holder into the actions of CIA interrogators who used "enhanced" techniques to question terror detainees.

"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 they claimed Obama...

Seven former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency on Friday urged President Obama to reverse Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to hold a criminal investigation of CIA interrogators who used enhanced techniques on detainees. The directors, whose tenures span back as far as 35 years, wrote a letter to the president saying the cases have already been investigated by the CIA and career prosecutors, and to reconsider those decisions makes it difficult for agents to believe they can safely follow legal guidance.

The Justice Department investigation into CIA torture allegations may have already jeopardized American intelligence capabilities, seven former CIA directors told President Obama have claimed. In a letter, the spy chiefs urge him to reverse Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to re-review case files of a dozen interrogations for possible criminal prosecution. Letter to President Obama from Former DCIs and DCIAs.

WASHINGTON — Seven former CIA directors are asking President Barack Obama to quash Attorney GeneralEric Holder's investigation into harsh CIA interrogations of terror suspects during the Bush administration. The request came in a letter Friday from CIA directors who served both Democratic and Republican presidents, including three who served former President George W. Bush. Holder announced in August that he was appointing an independent counsel to investigate incidents of potential abuse that were reported by the CIA inspector general to the Justice Department.

Turn Oil into Salt by: Sarah Carlsruh, September 18, 2009 James Woolsey, Former Director of the CIA, presented insight into the two subjects that invariably define Saudi Arabia, religion and oil. “The United States has [had] its own periods of intolerance,” Woolsey stated, pointing to the KKK and the fact that the state of Rhode Island exists because the Puritans of Massachusetts banished one man for his religious beliefs. Those regrettable snippets of history are true for this country but, he said, “its general thrust is of religious liberty.” Woolsey then spoke about the 1950’s Soviet Union, where he...

Obama's crew just continues to bow down to the Islamic community, practically begging them to respect us. They are also masters of ignoring facts. The first being that Peter King has stated that Muslims do not cooperate. The second being that US Muslims have said that their Mosques and Koran are off limits. That certainly is not cooperating, but apparently we are going to have to learn the hard way. Just like Europe is.

The US government is just doing a wonderful job at bowing down to the Islamic community. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder went to a LA Mosque pledging to advance religious freedoms for Muslims. While some US military "leaders" are practically crawling on their knees begging Muslims to respect us. Now the CIA has joined in on the Islamic love fest.

Former CIA counterterrorism expert Kent Clizbe tells Newsmax it's "indisputable" that the Obama administration's actions regarding intelligence agents have undermined the global war on terror. Clizbe was a member of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, and returned to the CIA after 9/11 to serve in multiple counterterrorism deployments. He recently wrote an opinion piece for Newsmax headlined "Obama and Holder 'At War' With Agency." Newsmax.TV's Ashley Martella noted that President Barack Obama has allowed Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate CIA personnel involved in the interrogation of terrorist detainees, and has taken future interrogations away...

In blind retaliation, we wreaked havoc on Iraq and continue to slaughter peasants in Afghanistan. What if eight years ago the World Trade Center had been leveled by a small nuclear bomb that took out most of lower Manhattan, as well? How many millions of innocent civilians would we have killed in retaliation? Would we still be a free society, or would then-Vice President Dick Cheney have attained the power of a demented king, having moved on from snooping on our phone calls and outing honest CIA agents to destroying the last vestiges of the rule of law? As assaults...

Lithuania Parliament Rejects CIA Prison Probe By REUTERS Published: September 10, 2009 VILNIUS (Reuters) - Lithuania's parliament on Thursday rejected holding an inquiry into a U.S. report that the country hosted a secret CIA prison for al Qaeda suspects. ABC News reported in August that Lithuania was the third European country after Poland and Romania to have provided the Central Intelligence Agency with facilities for detaining and, possibly, interrogating suspects. "The committees have concluded that there is no factual information, confirming at least in part the media allegations, and also, that there is no ground to conduct any new investigation,"...