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WASHINGTON—Eleven pages of State Department documents released on Jan. 7 in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch show that Jonathan Winer, an assistant to then-Secretary of State John Kerry, used his private email address to convey information he received from former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to top U.S. diplomatic officials. “I will send them to her [his assistant, Nina Miller] from my non-State email account, not copying myself,” Winer said in response to a December 2014 email from Paul Jones, principal deputy assistant secretary for European Affairs. Jones wanted Winer to use the State...

For the past several days we have been discussing the Deep State shadow war within the various intelligence agencies. The larger issues have been building for a long time. CIA Director John Brennan and DNI head James Clapper, both took politicization of intelligence to new levels to accommodate the White House. It is not accidental that both of these names are the primary voices behind the “Russian Hacking Conspiracy“. bob-baer-cnn Those who have followed the intelligence storyline might find the comments last night (video below) by CNN contributor and former CIA official, Bob Baer, very interesting. Ideologically and politically Baer...

He added, “If this was on her server, and it got into her smartphone, there’s a big problem there. Seriously, if I had sent a document like this over the open Internet, I’d get fired the same day, escorted to the door, and gone for good, and probably charged with mishandling classified information.” When asked if people could argue that sometimes things can drop through the cracks, Baer answered, “No. When I was overseas at various stations, I had encrypted communications, and I wasn’t even allowed to receive documents like this over highly encrypted communications. We were worried about leakage,...

Hillary Clinton’s email scandal should disqualify her from the Oval Office.At least so says former CIA operative and CNN national security analyst Bob Baer, who is not known for being a political partisan.“If this was on her server and it got into her smart phone, there’s a big problem there,” Baer said during an appearance on CNN International Saturday, noting that the sensitivity of the information reportedly found on Clinton’s private server was likely more secret than what Edward Snowden pilfered.“Seriously, if I had sent a document like this over the open Internet I’d get fired the same day, escorted...

Far from huddling in a cave in Afghanistan fearing for his life, the al-Qaeda leader has been enjoying the protection of Iran's Revolutionary Guard with his wife and children since 2003, the film Feathered Cocaine asserts. The documentary features Alan Parrot, one of the world's foremost falconers, who claims that bin Laden, an avid falcon hunter, has been taking part in the sport relatively freely in Teheran, Fox News reports. (snip) He said that the terrorist leader was calm, healthy and so comfortable that "he travels with only four bodyguards."

Oh to be a fly on the NBC cafeteria wall next time Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews run into each other. On today’s Morning Joe, Scarborough singled out Hardball as an example of the cable shows he doesn’t watch because their guests “vomit bad information” for which they’re cheered. Scarborough slammed Bob Baer, a former CIA agent, who on yesterday’s Hardball claimed “you cannot rely on torture,” and that the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and Abu Zubaydah produced only “fantasies” that “got us nowhere.” Reacting to the report that KSM had been waterboarded 183 times, Baer declared: “I can...

The American spy who persuaded Libya to renounce its weapons of mass destruction is to return to the Central Intelligence Agency, where he will direct an aggressive drive to recruit informants inside Iran to aid possible negotiations over Teheran's nuclear capability. Stephen Kappes, a former United States Marines officer who resigned from the CIA after a clash with its then director, Porter Goss, has been brought back from self-imposed exile in London by George W Bush. Iran will be top of his agenda. "He's a remarkable guy, a talented leader and among the finest officers of his generation," said Gary...

Speech by John Loftus, former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Holocaust Remembrance Day Yom Ha Shoah - 2004 It always seems a little strange to have an Irish-Catholic talking about Yom Ha Shoah. I had an unusual education in the Holocaust. When I was working for the Attorney General, I was assigned to do the classified research about the Holocaust, so I went underground to a little town called Suitland, Maryland, right outside Washington, D.C. and that's where the US Government buries its secrets - - literally. There are twenty vaults underground and each vault is one acre in size. Anyone...

Early on the morning of March 16th, 1984, William Buckley left for work at the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Officially, Mr. Buckley, a decorated veteran of the Special Forces, served as the political officer at the embassy. In reality, however, Mr. Buckley was the embassy’s CIA station chief. On his way to the compound, Buckley’s car was stopped by a group of masked men, who forced him from his car at gunpoint. His assailants would later be identified as terrorists from the group Islamic Jihad, which served as an alias for the real perpetrators, Hezbollah. The circumstances surrounding the...

Sunday March 3, 2002 'Bombing Saddam is ignorance' Robert Baer, the ex-CIA man in Iraq during the failed uprising in 1995, says the US is not in a position to strike against Iraq because it does not understand anything about the country Robert Baer's objections to an attack on Iraq could hardly be principled. As the CIA's point man in Iraq during the failed uprising in 1995, he encouraged dissident groups to believe that the United States wanted the overthrow and death of Saddam Hussein. Yet Baer, whose memoir of life in the CIA, See No Evil, is published ...

Saddam Hussein's intelligence chief tried to arrange a meeting last week between US representatives and the former Iraqi leader, who an opposition official believes was seen about three days ago, ABC News reported. Leaders of Iraq's prominent Dulaym tribe told the US network that they had made contact with former CIA officer Bob Baer and others to try to arrange some kind of meeting."They told me the chief of Iraqi intelligence was seeking to get in touch with the United States and could I do anything about that," said Baer, who now works for ABC News.Saddam's intelligence chief, General...

<p>Unfortunately George W. Bush didn't make the LBJ speech last night. You know, the one in which he announces he will not seek or accept his party's nomination for president. That's a shame, but there's still hope. The GOP still has three months to switch candidates.</p>

Robert Baer was a CIA case officer in the Directorate of Operations from 1976 to 1997, where he served in Middle Eastern countries, including Iraq and Lebanon. He is the author of See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (Crown Publishers, 2002). Here, Baer says that there is evidence linking Iran to attacks on American interests, including the Khobar Towers bombing in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 U.S. soldiers in 1996. He says that Iran has been mishandled by U.S. diplomats since the 1980s and that American foreign policy regarding...

War talk sweeps city By Richard Sale and Nicholas M. Horrock UPI Correspondents From the Washington Politics & Policy Desk Published 2/12/2003 1:07 PM WASHINGTON, Feb. 11 (UPI) -- In this city obsessed with the Iraq confrontation, you can a hear a plan de jour, from the United States destruction of Syria to the dismemberment of the Saudi Arabia kingdom, to a plan where President George W. Bush will end up taking Jewish votes from the Democrats. At the dinner tables and watering holes of this capital, the idea that Bush wants to invade Iraq solely to disarm Saddam Hussein,...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 (UPI) -- Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was investigating the man who allegedly planned the Sept. 11 airplane hijackings and attacks on New York and Washington when he was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan, according to two former Central Intelligence Agency officials. Bob Baer, a former case officer in the agency's Directorate of Operations, said he provided Pearl with unpublished information about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has since been accused by American officials of being one of the masterminds of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a top aide to Osama bin Laden. Mohammed is...

Megrahi's appeal team ignored 'evidence' from key CIA investigator that claims Iran was behind PanAm 103 bombing INVESTIGATION By Neil Mackay, Home Affairs Editor, John Ashton in Washington and Ian Ferguson in Camp Zeist ONE of the CIA's leading Lockerbie bomb investigators has come forward with compelling evidence that Libya was not behind the downing of PanAm 103 which killed 270 people. Robert Baer, a retired senior CIA agent, offered to meet the defence team leading the appeal of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who was convicted last year of the bombing. However, his offer was not accepted and the ...

It's striking how, since 9/11, the Saudi image has lurched between valued partner and veiled enemy -- especially when you consider Bush's strict moral declaration that nations are "either with us or against us." How do you think the Saudis ultimately fit into the picture in terms of the war on al-Qaida? Saudi Arabia is a sacred cow. It's sort of like Israel in this sense; it's been defined as an ally. But since Saudi Arabia is the source of most of the money and most of the hijackers, they have a long way to go before they're a...