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51 is an interesting number, isn’t it? It’s one shy of a deck of cards. It’s the mysterious “Area” where a top-secret U.S. military installation associated with UFOs is located. It’s exactly three times the number of intelligence agencies who confirmed Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 election. It’s a large number — an impressive one, even. And when 51 current and former intelligence officials sign and publicize a letter, it’s designed to get your attention and, undoubtedly, persuade you of the import of what is being said. And so it did — for many Americans, the characterization of...

Brig. Gen. Terryl Schwalier was stunned when he read the account of the June 25, 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that appeared in my recent book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran. I was writing many years after the fact, drawing on sources from inside Iranian intelligence but also on published U.S. government reports. It was those U.S. reports that prompted General Schwalier to contact me a few months ago. “You paint a picture of significant government awareness that “Iran was up to something” in the months prior to the Khobar Towers attack,” he wrote...

Police in Hamburg shut down the notorious al-Quds mosque, renamed the Taiba mosque in 2008, led by German-Syrian national and voluntary imam Mamoun Darkazanli. Darkazanli (a.k.a. Abu Ilyas al-Suri) has been a suspected al-Qaeda operative, primarily as a financier and logistician, in the European Union for close to two decades. Long active in al-Qaeda circles, Darkazanli first surfaced on the radar of Western intelligence agencies when he purportedly helped procure a cargo ship named “Jennifer” for Osama bin Laden as early as 1993 (Hamburger Abendblatt, October 16, 2004). Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt (BKA- Federal Criminal Police Office) admitted that it had been...

Nigergate: the dangerous relations between Democrat Senators and ex spies Here follows an interesting article from the Italian newspaper Il Giornale. I make no comment at all other than ‘read it’. Very soon, under the title “The Rockefeller Connection”, I will post something revealing, something important that until now passed completely under the Radar Screen. Stay tuned .. Nigergate: the dangerous relations between Democrat Senators and ex spies Il GIORNALE 13 November 2005 By Gian Marco Chiocci and Mario Sechi October 9 2002, Rome. Elisabetta Burba, journalist with Panorama magazine, crosses Via Veneto. At the American Embassy someone is waiting...

**SNIP** Valerie Plame, the ex-CIA operative outed by the W. Bush administration, also chimed in. “Astonishing: White House mistakenly identifies CIA chief in Afghanistan,” she tweeted in a sardonic message on Monday. The name of the CIA’s chief of station in Kabul, the agency’s top spy in Afghanistan, was listed among the 15 officials briefing Obama upon his arrival at Bagram Air Base. The White House only caught the error when Washington Post reporter Scott Wilson alerted the press office, after Obama’s schedule was included in an email that was circulated to as many as 6,000 members of the media.

Washington (CNN) -- A clerical misstep? Failure to double-check a routine process? Whatever the cause, the seemingly accidental outing of the CIA's top intelligence official in Afghanistan could put the life of the spy and any family members in danger. It also raised the question of whether the official can continue working in Afghanistan after the revelation in a White House media report sent to about 6,000 journalists.

The White House will investigate how Obama's press team managed to accidentally leak the name of the CIA's Chief of Station in Kabul. Chief of Staff Denis McDonough has deputized White House counsel Neil Eggleston to look into how the name of the top U.S. spy in Afghanistan ended up on Obama's itinerary for his weekend trip to Afghanistan, which was emailed to an estimated 6,000 members of the press. Eggleston will review what led to the disastrous mistake and make recommendations to prevent such a disclosure from happening again.

When George W. Bush was president, a week didn't go by when the press wasn't dismissing his intelligence and proclaiming his administration's incompetence. Over the weekend, President Barack Obama made a surprise visit to the troops in Afghanistan. Someone on his staff demonstrated truly jaw-dropping incompetence by accidentally releasing to 6,000 journalists the name of the CIA station chief in Afghanistan as part of Obama's welcoming delegation. That is a death sentence, not just for the agent but for all those around him. Try to imagine the media firestorm this would have created had the transgression occurred during the W...

There are a few potentially important details surrounding the timeline leading to Bowe Bergdahl’s release that might deserve some discussion. Truth Revolt supplies some details on the timeline: This week’s [the week of Bergdahl’s release] secret diplomacy was not the first time the U.S. government had engaged the Taliban in an effort to negotiate a prisoner swap for the release of Bergdahl. In 2011, State Department officials held a series of meetings with Taliban leaders in Doha. In Congress, there was bipartisan opposition to any release of Guantanamo prisoners. After the negotiations were made public in early 2012 by Sen....

"The analysts said from the get-go that al Qaeda was involved in this attack" -Mike Morell, Deputy CIA Director So today we find out from Mike Morell, the Deputy CIA Director at the time of the Benghazi attacks, that he crafted the talking points which were ultimately used by Susan Rice on talk shows based on what a few CIA analysts believed had happened instead of the on the ground accounts from the CIA Station Chief. The idiocy is mind-boggling. So mind-boggling you have to wonder if he isn't just covering his ass along with the ass of the...

<p>Former CIA head Mike Morrell is scheduled to testify at 10AM in a PUBLIC hearing before the House Intelligence Committee. C-span doesn't have it scheduled live, and FOXnews.com isn't showing that they'll carry it. If anyone finds a link, please post it.</p>

A CIA Libya Station Chief has admitted that the government agency has lied about Libya, as the Benghazi protest never took place. Before the Benghazi news buzzed around the world, the station chief for the CIA reported to his superiors located in Washington that no type of spontaneous protest ever happened. In a deliberate attempt to not just lie to the American people, but others across the globe Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice told the bluff of the century. These political leaders announced to the public that a terrorist attack happening on a Benghazi diplomatic assignment...

The CIA's top officer on the ground in Libya at the time of the Benghazi terror attack will appear before a House panel for the first time Tuesday afternoon -- to deliver what could be critical closed-door testimony, ahead of ex-CIA Director Michael Morell's scheduled appearance on Wednesday. Two congressional sources confirmed to Fox News that the CIA chief of station will appear before a House intelligence subcommittee. His perspective was long-sought by lawmakers, and the timing is critical -- coming before Morell's first-ever public testimony Wednesday about his role, and that of the administration, in the flawed "talking points"...

WASHINGTON - A turf war between the two senior intelligence chiefs over the role of CIA station chiefs in U.S. embassies has forced National Security Adviser James L. Jones to step in to mediate, according to current and former U.S. government officials. The jockeying between CIA director Leon Panetta and National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair centers on Blair's effort to choose his own representatives abroad instead of relying only on CIA station chiefs, the current and former officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the dispute.

...Romney campaign may have misfired with its suggestion that statements by President Obama and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice about the Benghazi attack last month weren’t supported by intelligence,... “Talking points” prepared by the CIA on Sept. 15, the same day that Rice taped three television appearances, support her description of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate as a reaction to Arab anger about an anti-Muslim video prepared in the United States. According to the CIA account, “The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo...

Barack Obama insisted in the presidential debate on Tuesday night that he had called the Benghazi attack an “act of terror” in his Rose Garden address the next day.  Fact-checkers called shenanigans on that claim, but McClatchy notes that Obama did call it an “act of terror” the next day at campaign stops in Colorado and Nevada on September 13th.  On the same day, the State Department refused to link the Benghazi attack to the YouTube video that media outlets like the New York Times and AFP had.  Hillary Clinton called it a terrorist attack that evening. However, the next day,...

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...