Amusing: The CIA is now on Twitter...

Heh.

We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.
— CIA (@CIA) June 6, 2014

Report: CIA is now delivering weapons to rebels in Syria

Bashar al-Assad is a bad man. Al Qaeda is with the rebels.  Am I the only one hoping the all kill each other?

Via WaPo:

The CIA has begun delivering weapons to rebels in Syria, ending months of delay in lethal aid that had been promised by the Obama administration, according to U.S. officials and Syrian figures. The shipments began streaming into the country over the past two weeks, along with separate deliveries by the State Department of vehicles and other gear — a flow of material that marks a major escalation of the U.S. role in Syria’s civil war.
The arms shipments, which are limited to light weapons and other munitions that can be tracked, began arriving in Syria at a moment of heightened tensions over threats by President Obama to order missile strikes to punish the regime of Bashar al-Assad for his alleged use of chemical weapons in a deadly attack near Damascus last month.
The arms are being delivered as the United States is also shipping new types of nonlethal gear to rebels. That aid includes vehicles, sophisticated communications equipment and advanced combat medical kits.
U.S. officials hope that, taken together, the weapons and gear will boost the profile and prowess of rebel fighters in a conflict that started about 21 / 2 years ago. Keep on reading...

The CIA has closed their Center on Climate Change and National Security

Put Al Gore back on suicide watch...

Via Greenwire:

With the U.S. intelligence budget shrinking, the CIA has quietly shut down its Center on Climate Change and National Security — a project that was launched with the support of Leon Panetta when he led the agency, but that drew sharp criticism from some Republicans in Congress.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the center said it closed its doors earlier this year, with its staff and analysis continuing under other auspices.

CIA spokesman Todd Ebitz confirmed the change.

“The CIA for several years has studied the national security implications of climate change,” Ebitz said in a statement to Greenwire. “This work is now performed by a dedicated team in an office that looks at a variety of economic and energy security issues affecting the United States.”

The CIA launched the climate change center in September 2009 after a spate of reports linking climate change and national security that drew interest from some members of Congress seeking political action on climate change.

After the Benghazi disaster, the CIA is really worried about global warming...

The CIA should focus on terrorism and leave global warming scaremongering to Al Gore...

Via Judicial Watch:

As the CIA basks in the shame of a major sex scandal the spy agency divulges some of its valuable work concerning global warming, that it presents a worldwide security risk caused mainly by “social and political stresses outside the United States.”

This type of sensational information is probably not the sort  expected from the government agency responsible for providing national security intelligence to senior U.S. policymakers. But this is today’s Central Intelligence Agency, with a fallen chief who may have compromised national security during an extramarital affair and a new emphasis on global warming.

In fact, many Americans may not know that the CIA, created in 1947 by President Harry S. Truman, operates a special center dedicated to global warming. Judicial Watch wrote about it last fall because it operates under a cloak of secrecy that rejects all public-records requests. What we do know is was launched under President Obama in 2009, it’s known as the Center on Climate Change and National Security and it is considered an exclusive unit led by “senior specialists.”

Video: FOX News Confirms US Was Holding Prisoners at Benghazi Annex

The CIA has claimed they were not holding prisoners at the Benghazi compound. Who is lying?

Jennifer Griffen at FOX News today confirmed that the US was holding prisoners at the Benghazi annex near the consulate compound. US agents handed three prisoners over to Libyan authorities on their way out of the city on September 12. The prisoners may have been held in the compound for several days.

Bill Clinton's CIA turned down opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden in 1999

 Hmm...

From McClatchy:

 In late 1999, two years before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, a group of Afghan agents loyal to an anti-Taliban guerrilla leader proposed assassinating Osama bin Laden. All they wanted was the $5 million reward the Clinton administration had offered for bin Laden’s capture, says a former Polish spy who was the Afghans’ go-between on the plot.

The CIA rejected the plan, however, saying, “We do not have a license to kill.”

“They gave us the exact location of the houses where bin Laden would be staying in Kandahar, the route he would be taking between his living quarters, his meeting place, and what kind of transportation he would be using,” Makowski told McClatchy in a recent interview, referring to the city in southern Afghanistan that was the Taliban’s seat of power. The Afghans planned to use car bombs to kill the Saudi-born leader of al Qaida.

The CIA Hosted a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Summit

It's nice the CIA has time to focus on these touchy-feely issues. It's not like there is an international terrorist organization determined to kill us. Oh, wait...

Via the CIA:

The CIA and the Office of the Director for National Intelligence (ODNI) recently hosted the first Intelligence Community (IC) Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Summit. Participants included members of LGBT employee groups from nine IC agencies and CIA and ODNI leaders. The Summit was designed to ensure the Agency maintains a high performing, engaged, and diverse workforce.

CIA Associate Deputy Director (ADD) Sue Bromley welcomed participants to the February event, highlighting the importance of inclusion in mission success: “When I look at our mission and our challenges, what I look to is my single greatest resource at the CIA—our people,” she said. “In order to get the most out of our people, we have to make sure there is an environment where everybody can thrive, where everybody feels secure and comfortable, so they can bring their unique contribution to our challenges,” ADD/CIA Bromley continued.

Participants agreed that a fully inclusive IC directly and positively affects the workforce’s contribution to mission. Discussions delved into collective IC experiences and best practices for making agencies welcoming to LGBT employees. Officers considered policy implementation, lessons learned, and ways to increase the understanding and visibility of transgender issues. Participants also shared ideas about leveraging LGBT supporters and assessing the mission impact of LGBT officers.

Former John Kerry Staffer Charged With Leaking Names of CIA Interrogators

John Kerry hardest hit.

(Politico) — A former CIA officer was charged Monday with disclosing the identity of a covert CIA officer and with telling journalists the name an agency officer involved with the interrogation of alleged Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah.

The Justice Department charged that John Kiriakou, 47, who worked as a CIA officer from 1990 to 2004, revealed the information to journalists and that one reporter passed some of the secrets onto attorneys representing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Kiriakou’s case is the sixth leak-related criminal prosecution brought since President Barack Obama took office, a figure that exceeds the number of such cases in all previous administrations combined.

Kiriakou worked for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigator from March 2009 to April 2011, according to Senate records.

Read more here…

Much of the mainstream media failed to mention John Kiriakou was a Kerry staffer from March 2009 to April 2011.

Pakistan gives CIA 15 days to stop its drone operations

Saturday night allied forces bombed 2 miles inside Pakistan's border and hit Pakistani troops. The details are murky ATM. Tensions were already high with Pakistan because they didn't like our Seal Team killing Osama bin Laden inside their borders. Pakistan has also cut off NATO supply routes into Afghanistan. We should cut off all Pakistan's aid money and start building a closer relationship with India.

(Sydney Morning Herald) — THE Pakistani government has responded to NATO air strikes that killed at least 25 soldiers by ordering the CIA to vacate the drone operations it runs from Shamsi Air Base in northern Pakistan and closing the two main NATO supply routes into Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials said that NATO aircraft hit two military posts at the northwestern border with Afghanistan. The country’s supreme army commander called the attacks unprovoked acts of aggression.

The CIA was given just 15 days to stop its drone operations. Among the two NATO supply routes into Afghanistan shut by the government was the one at Torkham. NATO forces receive about 40 per cent of their supplies through that crossing, which runs through the Khyber Pass. Pakistani officials gave no estimate as to how long the routes would be shut down.

Keep on reading…

CIA operating super secret global warming center or something

The CIA secret special center for global warming is supposed to be studying the impact of global warming and rising sea levels on our security. Since global warming stalled out 10 years ago and sea levels actually declined last year, I wonder what they are wasting out tax dollars doing?

(Judicial Watch) — Most Americans may not know that the government agency responsible for providing national security data to the nation’s senior policymakers, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), operates a special center dedicated to global warming.

That’s because the CIA doesn’t want anyone to know what goes on in its two-year-old Center on Climate Change and National Security. So the exclusive unit, led by “senior specialists,” operates under a cloak of secrecy that rejects all public-records requests, despite President Obama’s promise to run a transparent government.

When the center was launched in 2009, the CIA said it would not address the science of climate change but rather the national security impact of phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts and heightened competition for natural resources. The new division was touted as an important tool that would bring together in a single place expertise on an important national security topic; the effect environmental factors can have on political, economic and social stability overseas.

Reasonably, some U.S. taxpayers want to know what exactly the center has been doing with their money...

Pakistan Outs CIA Station Chief in Revenge for OBL Killing

Cut off all aid to Pakistan now.

WASHINGTON: Amid bitter, recriminatory exchanges between the United States and Pakistan over the Osama bin Laden extermination, planned bilateral visits of President Asif Ali Zardari to Washington DC and a return trip of President Barack Obama to Islamabad are both in jeopardy. Ties between the two sides are expected to slide further following Pakistan’s “outing” of the CIA station chief in Islamabad on Saturday.

In a sign of how bad ties are between the two countries, Pakistani media on Saturday once again publicly named the CIA station chief in Islamabad, a breach of both protocol and trust, that is bound to enrage Washington.

A Pakistani TV channel and a newspaper considered mouthpieces of the country’s military said the ISI chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha had met CIA station chief Mark Carlton to protest US incursion into Abbottabad to kill al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden. CIA station chiefs remain anonymous and unnamed in public although the host government is told.

Has the CIA Been Shackled?

It must be hard to fight terrorism with one arm tied behind your back.

(LA Times) — He’s considered one of world’s most dangerous terrorism suspects, and the U.S. offered a $1-million reward for his capture in 2005. Intelligence experts say he’s a master bomb maker and extremist leader who possesses a wealth of information about Al Qaeda-linked groups in Southeast Asia.

Yet the U.S. has made no move to interrogate or seek custody of Indonesian militant Umar Patek since he was apprehended this year by officials in Pakistan with the help of a CIA tip, U.S. and Pakistani officials say.

The little-known case highlights a sharp difference between President Obama’s counter-terrorism policy and that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Under Obama, the CIA has killed more people than it has captured, mainly through drone missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. At the same time, it has stopped trying to detain or interrogate suspects caught abroad, except those captured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Seven Former CIA Chiefs to Obama: Knock It Off

Seven former CIA Directors have written President Obama a letter asking him to end Attorney General Eric Holder's CIA interrogation witch hunt. Two of the Directors served under Democratic Presidents.

From ABC's Political Punch:

Arguing that the actions of the Attorney General are essentially putting this country at greater risk of terrorist attack, a bipartisan team of seven former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency wrote to President Obama today urging him to direct Attorney General Eric Holder to close the criminal investigation looking into whether any CIA officers went beyond what they were told was legal in their interrogations during counterterrorism investigations.

Allowing future investigations and prosecutions “will seriously damage the willingness of many other intelligence officers to take risks to protect the country,” the seven men write. “In our judgment such risk-taking is vital to success in the long and difficult fight against the terrorists who continue to threaten us.”
Moreover, they argue, “public disclosure about past intelligence operations can only help Al Qaeda...

You can read their letter HERE.

CIA Interrogators Accused of Another Illegal Interrogation Technique

We have all heard about how CIA interrogators used water boarding and threats to pry information from known terrorists. Now, a new allegation as been reported. Interrogators blew smoke in a terrorist's face. Yes, that's right. They blew smoke.

CNS News reported:

Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, according to the 9-11 commission report, was the mastermind of the Oct. 12, 2000, attack on the U.S.S. Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors.

Nashiri was also the target of an "unauthorized" CIA interrogation technique (that had not been legally vetted by the Justice Department) that is described in a May 7, 2004, CIA inspector general's report that was partially declassified by the Obama administration this week.

CIA officers blew smoke in Nashiri's face, according to the report, and they used cigars.

The IG's office described this smoke-blowing as one of several "unauthorized or undocumented techniques" it discovered had been used in isolated incidents by CIA employees interrogating high-level al-Qaida terrorists.

"An Agency (redacted phrase) interrogator admitted that, in December 2002, he and another (redacted phrase) smoked cigars and blew cigar smoke in al-Nashiri's face during the interrogation," said the IG report.

The IG, however, was unable to clearly establish that the smoke-blowing was intended to force Nashiri to cough up what he knew about al-Qaida's plans.

Obama flip-flops on prosecution of CIA employees

Back in January, Barack Obama had no intentions of prosecuting Bush administration or CIA employees for water boarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques.

Barack Obama on This Week (Jan 2009)


From the Video:

"I don't believe anybody has broke the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you've got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don't want them to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering."

Now that they need a distraction from the Obamacare disaster, they are ready to name a prosecutor.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has decided to appoint a prosecutor to examine nearly a dozen cases in which CIA interrogators and contractors may have violated anti-torture laws and other statutes when they allegedly threatened terrorism suspects, according to two sources familiar with the move.

Holder is poised to name John Durham, a career Justice Department prosecutor from Connecticut, to lead the inquiry, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process is not complete.

Durham's mandate, the sources added, will be relatively narrow: to look at whether there is enough evidence to launch a full-scale criminal investigation of current and former CIA personnel who may have broken the law in their dealings with detainees. Many of the harshest CIA interrogation techniques have not been employed against terrorism suspects for four years or more.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder should remember water boarding prevented a second 9-11 in Los Angeles. This investigation will be very damaging to the moral at the CIA. Rumor is CIA Director Leon Panetta is ready to throw in the towel.

Hat tip to Gateway Pundit.

How CIA Director Leon Panetta kneecapped the CIA

This story is important because even some on the Center/left are now realizing Leon Panetta’s emergency testimony to Congress about an illegal assassination program was a demonstration of incompetence from an inexperienced Director. No laws were broken. The alleged program was little more than a powerepoint presentation and was public knowledge since 2002. Of course, Nancy Pelosi "went off the deep end" and the rest is history.

From The Daily Beast:

CIA Director Leon Panetta’s emergency testimony to Congress about an illegal assassination program has set off a crisis at the spy agency. The Daily Beast’s Joseph Finder exclusively reports that:

• The secret assassination ‘program’ wasn’t much more than a PowerPoint presentation, a task force and a collection of schemes—it never got off the ground

• Panetta’s three immediate predecessors—George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden—have spoken to him, and that he now sees that no laws were broken.

• Panetta has frantically tried to rectify his gaffe, but now faces increased Congressional oversight.

CIA Director Leon Panetta stunned Washington earlier this summer by disclosing, in an emergency closed-door briefing to Congress, that for the last eight years, the agency he now runs illegally concealed a secret terrorist-assassination program. The reaction was predictably explosive. The House intelligence-oversight committee launched a major investigation. Here was official confirmation, from the very top, that the CIA in the Bush years had been flagrantly and systematically violating the National Security Act of 1947.

“If we briefed Congress on every single foreign intelligence collection activity,” one former CIA director tells me, “we’d be a very small intelligence agency attached to a massive congressional briefing agency.”

But according to a half-dozen sources, including several very senior, recently retired CIA officials, clandestine-service officers, and Cabinet-level officials from the Bush administration, the real story is at once more innocent—Panetta was mistaken; no law was broken—and far more troubling: an inexperienced CIA director, unfamiliar with how his vast, complicated agency works, unable to trust senior officials within his own agency, and desperate to keep his hands clean, screwed up.

Leon Panetta was hoping the whole thing would be forgotten, but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.

So Panetta ordered an internal CIA inquiry into the matter, headed by a widely respected senior official. In his private conversations with his three predecessors, Panetta “as much as admitted” to them (in the words of one CIA insider) that he’d misunderstood. Without explicitly apologizing, he assured the men—whom he’d in effect accused of breaking the law—not to worry: The whole thing would quietly go away. He told them that he’d been pre-briefed by the officer conducting the internal inquiry, and that when the report came out it would indeed back them up. It would come swaddled in vague banalities calling for improving communication between the CIA and Congress. And the whole thing would die a quiet death.

But of course it didn’t. The bell couldn’t be unrung.

GOP Fires a Hilarious Video Shot at Pelosi

The GOP have made a James Bond themed video spoof of liar Nancy Pelosi and her CIA statements. This is hilarious!

Pelosi v. The CIA (video)

Nancy Pelosi is in meltdown over CIA briefings

Nancy Pelosi is in meltdown over what she knew from the CIA briefings she received several years ago. The House Republican Conference has put together some video clips of Pelosi trying to explain.

What did Speaker Pelosi know?

Republicans demand proof or apology from Pelosi(video)

Top Republicans want an apology or proof from Nancy Pelosi for her allegations that the CIA lied to her and Congress. From CNN:

Top Republicans are demanding an apology from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or proof to back her claim that the CIA misled Congress about the use of harsh interrogation tactics.

Pelosi last week said that she was briefed by the CIA on such techniques only once -- in September 2002 -- and that she was told at the time that techniques like waterboarding were not being used.

Pelosi, D-California, said she learned from an aide that waterboarding had been used after other lawmakers were briefed in 2003.

A recently released Justice Department memo says the CIA used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a suspected al Qaeda leader imprisoned at U.S. facilities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said Monday that if Pelosi's accusations are not true, she may need to step down.

"She made some outrageous accusations last week where she said that the CIA lied to her and lied systematically over a period of years. That is a very, very serious charge," Hoekstra said Monday on CNN's "American Morning.

Watch Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, hammer House Speaker Pelosi 4:33

Pelosi lies about calling CIA liars

This story just keeps going and getting worse. Nancy Pelosi must be on about her eight version of events surrounding what she knew about "enhanced interrogation" techniques employed on high level Al Qaeda operatives captured after 9-11. Thursday, she called the CIA liars when they briefed members of Congress about "enhanced interrogation" techniques. Friday, she denied she called the CIA liars and said she was referring to the Bush administration. Nancy Pelosi made this statement after CIA Director Leon Panetta went on offense to protect the morale of his department. The call for Pelosi's removal as Speaker has begun.

Today, she said she was talking about the Bush Administration, but the video does not lie.