A quick update edition of Unfilter this week, we just couldn’t stay away! We cover some of the crazy things happening in the news, our favorite clips of the week & more!

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— Show Notes —

Episode Links

• Old Trafford: Urgent inquiry demanded after bomb ‘fiasco’ – BBC Sport
• Did the Nevada Democratic Party Steal State From Bernie Sanders?
• The Intercept
• This isn’t how a democracy should work: How the media boosted Donald Trump and screwed Bernie Sanders – Salon.com
• State Dept ‘Lyin’ John Kirby’ Fails to Explain why Obama is Supporting Al-Qaeda ally Ahrar al Sham – YouTube
• Behind the scenes at CBS This Morning: A 180-degree live stream – YouTube

The post Torturing the Truth | Unfilter 188 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Seymour M. Hersh is out with his version of how Osama bin Laden was killed, which refutes many aspects of the official story. We’ll poke at the aspects of his reports that might be true & those that might be false.

Plus a look at the NSA’s loudest defenders, a new Cyber threat & the real problem ABC has with covering the Clintons.

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Show Notes:

News:

Many of the NSA’s Loudest Defenders Have Financial Ties to NSA Contractors – The Intercept

The debate over the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records has reached a critical point after a federal appeals court last week ruled the practice illegal, dramatically raising the stakes for pending Congressional legislation that would fully or partially reinstate the program. An army of pundits promptly took to television screens, with many of them brushing off concerns about the surveillance.

The talking heads have been backstopping the NSA’s mass surveillance more or less continuously since it was revealed. They spoke out to support the agency when NSA contractor Edward Snowden released details of its programs in 2013, and they’ve kept up their advocacy ever since — on television news shows, newspaper op-ed pages, online and at Congressional hearings. But it’s often unclear just how financially cozy these pundits are with the surveillance state they defend, since they’re typically identified with titles that give no clues about their conflicts of interest. Such conflicts have become particularly important, and worth pointing out, now that the debate about NSA surveillance has shifted from simple outrage to politically prominent legislative debates.

As one example of the opaque link between NSA money and punditry, take the words of Stewart Baker, who was general counsel to the NSA from 1992 through 1994. During a Senate committee hearing last summer on one of the reform bills now before Congress, the USA FREEDOM Act, which would partially limit mass surveillance of telephone metadata, Baker essentially said the bill would aid terrorists.

Previously, in December 2013, Baker wrote in The New York Times that “Snowden has already lost the broader debate he claims to want, and the leaks are slowly losing their international impact as well.” He made similar comments in multiple news outlets, and testified before Congress to defend virtually every program revealed by the Snowden documents. Baker at one point told intelligence committee lawmakers that The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald was simply on a campaign to “cause the greatest possible diplomatic damage to the United States and its intelligence capabilities.”

Isil leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi issues call to arms in ‘audio message’ – Telegraph

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), appeared to issue a defiant call to arms on Thursday in what would be the jihadist leader’s first audio recording in six months.

Seymour M. Hersh · The Killing of Osama bin Laden

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

• Seymour Hersh – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Seymour Myron “Sy” Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award.[5]

He first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US military‘s mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention.

• Gareth Porter – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gareth Porter (born June 18, 1942) is an American historian, investigative journalist, author and policy analyst specializing in U.S. national security policy. He was active as a Vietnam specialist and anti-war activist during the Vietnam War, serving as Saigon Bureau Chief for Dispatch News Service International from 1970-1971, and later, as co-director of the Indochina Resource Center. He has written several books about the potential for peaceful conflict resolution in Southeast Asia and the Middle East,[1] including his 2005 book Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, an analysis of how and why the United States went to war in Vietnam.[2] Porter’s analysis and reporting has appeared in academic journals, news publications and periodicals for four decades, and in 2012 he was the winner of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, which is awarded annually by the Frontline Club in London to acknowledge reporting that exposes propaganda.

Seymour Hersh Succumbs To Disinformation — Paul Craig Roberts – PaulCraigRoberts.org

I do not believe Hersh’s story for three reasons. One reason is that bin Laden was suffering from disease that no one can survive for a decade. His death was widely reported in 2001. One reason is that even Hersh’s “true” account of “what really happened” is contradicted by eye witnesses and the initial Pakistani TV interviews of eye witnesses. One reason is that Hersh’s story is too convoluted for an assassination raid, a routine event. He exposes lies within lies, indecision within decision, payoffs within payoffs, and reports such a huge number of people with advance knowledge of the raid that it cannot possibly have been kept a secret.

Sy Hersh’s bin Laden Story First Reported in 2011 — With Seemingly Different Sources – The Intercept

R.J. Hillhouse, a former professor, Fulbright fellow and novelist whose writing on intelligence and military outsourcing has appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times, made the same main assertions in 2011 about the death of Osama bin Laden as Seymour Hersh’s new story in the London Review of Books — apparently based on different sources than those used by Hersh.

George Stephanopoulos Apologizes On-Air: I Made a ‘Mistake’

The former Bill Clinton operative spun the donations, saying, “Even though I made them strictly to support work done to stop the spread of AIDS, help children and protect the environment in poor countries, I should have gone the extra mile to avoid even the appearance of a conflict.” He added, “**I apologize to all of you for failing to do that.” **

Politico Gives CIA’s Worst WMD Liar a Platform to Slam Seymour Hersh – The Intercept

What’s neither appropriate nor useful is to give former government officials the chance to attack Hersh’s story without giving readers the context of their track record of veracity. But that’s exactly what Politico did in this piece, “U.S. officials fuming over Hersh account of Osama bin Laden raid”:

“If you were to believe Sy, you would have to believe this massive conspiracy that President Obama, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta and Mike Morell were all lying to you,” said Bill Harlow, the [CIA]’s former top spokesman, referring to two recent secretaries of defense and a former acting CIA director. “It makes absolutely no sense.”

• The next paragraph would have been the right place for Politico to say this:

*In 2003, Harlow himself participated in a massive conspiracy to lie to you about Iraq’s purported WMD. Indeed, he personally engaged in some of most egregious government dishonesty on the issue when he blatantly lied about a _Newsweek_ story published just before the war that strongly suggested Iraq had no remaining banned weapons. Since leaving the CIA, Harlow has co-written three books with former top CIA officials, all of which defend the agency’s use of torture, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein recently accused Harlow of making “false charges” about the Senate’s torture investigation.
*
That would have provided a real service: readers would have heard what Harlow had to say about a specific news article, but also learned that Harlow has a history of dishonesty when he wants to discredit accurate reporting.

The post Propaganda of Patriotism | Unfilter 143 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Apologist for the CIA were out in full force since our last episode. We’ve clipped their labored justifications & break them down point by point. Plus the critical president Obama is silently setting for future administrations.

It’s been a bad week for Russia & our local correspondent discusses the tragic events in Sydney Australia, then we wrap the show with a little good news.

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— Show Notes —

CIA Torture Report

‘Rectal Hydration’: Inside the CIA’s Interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Along with the waterboarding, Mohammed was subjected to days of standing sleep deprivation, slapping and “stress positions,” the report says. And it says that several times he underwent an emergency medical procedure known as “rectal rehydration,” or proctolysis

The report matter-of-factly notes that such** treatment was “medically unnecessary” for Mohammed**, whom it describes as having been doused with, submerged in or force-fed water hundreds of times. After one session, the medical officer present reported that Mohammed’s gastric contents were “so diluted by water” that Mohammed was in danger of water intoxication. The medical officer later wrote that “in the new technique we are basically doing a series of near drownings.”

• Is rectal feeding an actual modern medical practice?

**”It’s almost never done,” **he wrote to the NewsHour in an email. “There are so many easier and more effective ways to hydrate or feed a patient.”

Thomas Burke, an emergency doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital who teaches at Harvard Medical School echoed that in an interview with the Washington Post.

“For all practical purposes, it’s never used,” Burke said. “No one in the United States is hydrating anybody through their rectum. Nobody is feeding anybody through their rectum. … That’s not a normal practice.”

• Fact Check: CIA’s Use of Rectal Rehydration, Feeding Not Medical Procedures – Press Releases – News Room – United States Senator Dianne Feinstein

Contrary to some claims, this is not a medical procedure, nor was it ever approved by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel as an authorized interrogation technique. On December 10, 2014, the New York-based Physicians for Human Rights stated that “Contrary to the CIA’s assertions, there is no clinical indication to use rectal rehydration and feeding over oral or intravenous administration of fluids and nutrients.”

Dick Cheney’s Tortured Appearance On ‘Meet The Press’ Should Be His Public Swan Song

Torture is “an American citizen on his cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York on 9/11.”

Cheney would be right were he to pose this as an example rather than the defining metric when seeking to determine an act of torture. The horrendous, unthinkable experience referred to by Cheney is, unquestionably, one example of inflicting torture—and a pretty good example of horrific torture at that—but hardly the sole method that Cheney insisted on pretending to be the case.

Yet, each time Cheney was asked for a more realistic and more encompassing definition of torture that would rationally go beyond any one particular example, he continuously returned to the experiences of our lost countrymen on 9-11. This seemed, in the mind of Dick Cheney, to be the only standard to be applied when determining if our interrogation methods may have exceeded the legal bounds imposed by the Geneva Convention for the treatment of detainees.

At a point, it became more than clear that Cheney had pre-planned this “non-answer” for his appearance, thinking it to be very clever.

By pretending that only a horrible infliction of agony similar to what was heaped on the victims of 9-11 would rise to a level that could be termed torture, the Vice-President was simply sending a coded message to his supporters to remind them that, given what the bad guys did to us, there was nothing too horrible that we could do to them—Geneva Convention be damned.

• The 11 Most Psychotic Things Dick Cheney Said About Torture on Meet the Press | The Daily Banter

U.S. Sen. Rockefeller helps release CIA report; torture practice

On Dec. 8, the outgoing senator spoke on the floor after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the Executive Summary of its Study on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. The redacted summary was released after the Intelligence Committee voted in April 2014 to declassify the summary and after negotiations among the Committee, the White House, and the CIA.

News

Sony Just Canceled The Pre mire Of ‘The Interview’

Sony Pictures has decided to cancel the Dec. 25 release of “The Interview” after major theaters said they wouldn’t screen the movie.

“We have decided not to move forward with the planned December 25 theatrical release of ‘The Interview,'” the company said in a statement.

Sony dropped its plan to release the film after the four largest theater chains in the United States — Regal Entertainment, AMC Theaters, Cinemark and Carmike Cinemas — and several smaller chains said they would not show the film. The cancellations virtually killed “The Interview” as a theatrical enterprise, at least in the near term, one of the first known instances of a threat from another nation pre-empting the release of a movie.

• Seth Rogen and James Franco Cancel All Media Appearances for ‘The Interview’

The duo has withdrawn from previously scheduled press appearances, including Rogen’s Thursday appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and an interview with both of them on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” on Wednesday, leading up to “The Interview’s” Christmas Day release. They were also booked for an appearance on Buzzfeed Brews in New York on Tuesday.

U.S. Links North Korea to Sony Hacking

American intelligence officials have concluded that the North Korean government was “centrally involved” in the recent attacks on Sony Pictures’s computers, a determination reached just as Sony on Wednesday canceled its release of the comedy, which is based on a plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.

Senior administration officials, who would not speak on the record about the intelligence findings, said the White House was still debating whether to publicly accuse North Korea of what amounts to a cyberterrorism campaign.

Kerry speaks of lifting Russia sanctions if Putin makes the right decisions

Russia has made constructive moves in recent days towards reducing tensions in Ukraine, US Secretary of State John Kerry said yesterday (16 December), and he raised the possibility that Washington could lift sanctions if Moscow keeps taking positive steps.

Speaking in London, Kerry said the United States and Europe could lift sanctions within days or weeks if President Vladimir Putin keeps taking steps to ease tensions and lives up to commitments under ceasefire accords to end the Ukraine conflict.

—

“These sanctions could be lifted in a matter of weeks or days, depending on the choices that President Putin takes,” Kerry told reporters.

“Their sole purpose here is to restore the international norm with respect to behavior between nations,” to ensure respect for borders, sovereignty and rights, he said.

Russia imposes steep interest rate hike as ruble plummets

The fear was sparked by the plummeting ruble, which has dropped 17 percent against the dollar in two days despite a dead-of-night decision Tuesday by the Russian central bank to impose a steep interest-rate hike to stem the currency losses.

GOP rep attempted late bid to kill spy bill | TheHill

One of the biggest thorns in the side of the country’s intelligence agencies attempted to mount an eleventh hour bid to kill the spy agencies’ funding bill on Wednesday.

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) wrote on Facebook that the intelligence authorization bill that easily passed through the House contained “one of the most egregious sections of law I’ve encountered during my time as a representative.”

“It grants the executive branch virtually unlimited access to the communications of every American,” explained Amash, who has a record of skepticism toward the National Security Agency and other agencies. Last year, he nearly succeeded in an attempt to end the NSA’s controversial phone records program.

That type of collection is currently allowed under an executive order that dates back to former President Reagan, but the new stamp of approval from Congress was troubling, Amash said. Limits on the government’s ability to retain information in the provision did not satisfy the Michigan Republican.

Despite Amash’s late attempt,** the bill easily passed, 325-100**.

The bill passed the Senate earlier this week and is now on its way to President Obama.

Bush, Cheney, Hayden, Rodriguez & Yoo on Sunday talk shows. It's not where they should be appearing. #TortureReport pic.twitter.com/mG7Ze4XbwJ

— Col. Morris Davis (@ColMorrisDavis) December 14, 2014

• Russia invites North Korea leader for May visit: paper | Reuters

Russia has invited North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to attend a May ceremony marking the end of World War Two, in what would be Kim’s first foreign visit since taking the helm of the reclusive state in 2011, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun daily said on Wednesday.

• First ground clash between ISIS and US forces in Iraq

An American force has fought its actual first battle against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria “ISIS” organization during a counter-attack that was carried out by tribal forces

and other force of the Iraqi army near Ein al-Asad base, west of Anbar, in an attempt to remove them from the base of which includes about 100 US adviser in it.

A field commander of the Iraqi Army in Anbar province, said that “the US force equipped with light and medium weapons, supported by fighter force model” F-18 “, was able to inflict casualties against fighters of ISIS organization, and forced them to retreat from the al-Dolab area, which lies 10 kilometers from Ain al-Assad base .

US troops have entered with its Iraqi partner, according to Colonel , Salam Nazim in line against ISIS elements and clashed with them for more than two hours, to succeed in removing them from al-Dolab area, and causing losses in their ranks, at a time American fighter jets directed several strikes focused on ISIS gatherings that silenced their heavy sources of fire. “He points out that the clashes took place between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. on Sunday night.

• ISIS using bombs containing live SCORPIONS in effort to spread panic

Canisters packed with poisonous varieties of scorpion are being blasted into towns and villages, which explode on impact – scattering the scorpions and causing panic among the innocent local population.

High Note

Tacoma to close medical marijuana collectives

All medical marijuana collectives in Tacoma could soon have to shut down.

City leaders addressed plans last week to send out letters to cease operations as early as January, as they are not licensed under Initiative 502. Both business owners and patients are now expressing concerns.

Medical marijuana wins but marijuana legalization loses in congressional spending deal

The spending bill passed by Congress on December 14 includes a provision that prevents the Department of Justice, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, from interfering with states’ medical marijuana laws.
The provision applies to 32 states and Washington, DC, which allow the use of marijuana or a marijuana-based compound, such as the non-psychoactive CBD, for medical purposes.

Teen marijuana use falls as more states legalize – The Washington Post

Teen alcohol and drug use — including marijuana use — was down across the board in 2014.

That’s the big take-home from the 2014 Monitoring the Future study by the University of Michigan and the National Institutes on Drug Abuse, which was released Tuesday morning. The MTF is an annual survey of 40,000 8th-graders, 10th-graders and 12th-graders. It’s notable both for its size and for the fact that it was conducted this past spring, in the midst of a nationwide conversation about drug reform in the run-up to the midterm elections

The post Tortured Logic | Unfilter 127 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

After a year long battle the Executive Summary of the CIA Torture report is out. This week we document the reaction & bring you the most relevant information on this story we’ve been following for nearly a year.

Plus why the 2015 NDAA is being totally ignored, protests in London & we respond to some lovingly critical listener feedback.

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— Show Notes —

CIA Torture Report

16 Horrifying Excerpts From the Torture Report That the CIA Doesn’t Want You to See – Mic

One prisoner froze to death after being left to sleep, without pants, on a cold concrete floor. Another was forced to stand in a “stress position” on broken bones. CIA officers threatened to sexually assault the wife of one detainee, and cut the throat of another prisoner’s mother.

And it gets worse.

After months of negotiations with the White House and CIA, the Senate Intelligence Committee has released a redacted summary of its original 6,300-page report on the “enhanced interrogation techniques” carried out by George W. Bush-era intelligence agents on suspected terrorists.

Through a process known as “extraordinary rendition,” detainees were taken to prisons in allied nations — so-called CIA “black sites” — where American officers sought to extract information, often by using brutal and repugnant tactics banned by international law. The secret program began sometime in the weeks after 9/11; President Barack Obama’s executive order formally ended it Jan. 22, 2009.

Tuesday’s “executive summary” is approximately 500 pages, with certain key details — names and locations — blacked out by CIA censors. The report is a dense and at times confounding read. CIA officials did their best to obscure the names of the 54 countries that partnered with U.S. intelligence to host the prisons. In 2005, 92 videotapes showing hundreds of hours of extreme interrogations were destroyed. Names of individual agents have also been wiped from the record, either to protect their safety or preserve their careers.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney must have known about the CIA’s torture of detainees: The Senate Intelligence report suggests they wanted plausible deniability.

The annals of history suggest the latter, and in a few passages, so does the report. A big lesson of the Church Committee—Sen. Frank Church’s mid-1970s probe into black-bag jobs, assassination plots, coup attempts, and other acts of CIA malfeasance since the agency’s origins—is that, in nearly every instance, there was no “rogue elephant” at Langley. Rather, the presidents in office at the time knew what was going on, at least in broad, strategic terms—and their CIA henchmen knew to give the leader of the free world a wide berth of “plausible deniability” in case they got caught.

As the Church reports and books such as Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes clearly show, President Dwight Eisenhower knew about and approved the CIA’s plot to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. President John F. Kennedy knew about, and approved, the plots to murder Cuba’s Fidel Castro; in fact, his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy formed a top secret “Special Group” in the White House to oversee the operation. President Lyndon B. Johnson (who, after he left office, told a reporter that Kennedy had been running “a damn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean”) carried on the enterprise elsewhere in Latin America.

Bush White House Was Worried Colin Powell Would ‘Blow His Stack’ If Briefed on Torture – Bloomberg Politics

The Bush White House didn’t brief then-Secretary of State Colin Powell about the specifics of the CIA’s interrogation program until September 2003 because it was worried Powell would “blow his stack” if he found out what was going on, according to the report released Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

According to a July 2003 email, the official reason the National Security Council didn’t have a full briefing on the program at that time was to “avoid press disclosures.” But unofficially, the email said, “it is clear to us from some of the runup meetings we had with [White House] counsel that the [White House] is extremely concerned [Secretary of State] Powell would blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what’s been going on.”

The Most Gruesome Moments in the CIA ‘Torture Report’ – The Daily Beast

Interrogations that lasted for days on end. Detainees forced to stand on broken legs, or go 180 hours in a row without sleep. A prison so cold, one suspect essentially froze to death. The Senate Intelligence Committee is finally releasing its review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation programs. And it is brutal.

Off the Grid: Nine CIA ‘Black Sites’ Where Detainees Were Tortured – The Intercept

Margot Williams, The Intercept‘s research editor for investigations, compiled the locations and, with research editor Josh Begley, placed them on the map.

The report identifies the locations of the CIA black sites by color codes and redacts the country names, but previous reports by NGOs, European agencies, media reports and detainee statements can identify most of the locations. The sites are located in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Thailand, and a secret site on the Guantanamo Naval Base, known as Strawberry Fields, — “forever.”

WASHINGTON: CIA acknowledges problems but says tactics helped thwart attacks | National News | The State

“While we made mistakes, the record does not support the study’s inference that the agency systematically and intentionally misled each of these audiences on the effectiveness of the program,” the statement said.

CIA lied to the public and John Brennan must quit, says outgoing senator in fiery speech | US news | The Guardian

Mark Udall, who lost his seat in Colorado last month, said the still-classified portions of the Senate report on CIA torture, represented a ‘smoking gun’

Once Senate investigators noticed about 1000 documents mysteriously disappearing from the firewalled network it shared with the CIA, they took portions of a printed copy of the Panetta review back to the Senate, prompting allegations – later scotched by the CIA Inspector General – that the Senate inappropriately accessed classified CIA information.

But the discrepancy between the Panetta Review’s apparent criticism of torture and a response offered by the CIA in 2013, and released Tuesday, prompted the committee to fear the CIA, Udall said, “knowingly provided inaccurate information to the committee in the present day, which is a serious offense and a deeply troubling matter for the committee, the Congress, the White House and our country.”

“The Panetta review corroborates many of the significant findings of the committee’s study. Moreover, the Panetta review frankly acknowledges significant problems and errors made in the CIA’s detention and interrogation program,” Udall continued.

“The CIA continued not only to defend the program and deny any wrongdoing, but also to deny its own conclusions to the contrary in the Panetta review.” Sections of the review, Udall said, remain in the committee’s hands, but not the whole document, which he called on the CIA to turn over.

The CIA declined to respond to Udall directly and referred instead to the 2013-era response to the committee.

Expressing disappointment in Obama and current White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, Udall said that White House complicity in obscuring the CIA’s torture record jeopardized Obama’s anti-torture stance and refuted Obama’s pledge to run a transparent administration.

“Actions speak louder than words,” Udall said.

Ex-CIA Clandestine Service chief Jose Rodriguez defends interrogation techniques – CBS News

As for the interrogation tapes Rodriguez ordered to have destroyed, Rodriguez said he did it to protect the identity of the officers who worked for him and “whose faces were all over those tapes.”

“I knew the tapes would leak someday, and I feared retribution from al Qaeda for my people,” Rodriguez said.

​CIA paid 2 torture experts $81mn for their ‘unique expertise’ — RT USA

In all, the Senate report suggests that the two contractors who
created the torture program were paid more than $80 million in
taxpayer money for their work with the CIA. The government has
agreed to cover upwards of $5 million in additional indemnity
costs for the two men if they incur legal costs for their role as
interrogation program architects through 2021, and the executive
summary released on Tuesday after nearly four years of work
suggests the pair has already received $1.1 million due to legal
fees largely involving the creation of the Senate Committee’s
report.

For CIA, Truth about Torture Was an Existential Threat – The Intercept

The executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s grindingly exhaustive torture report released Tuesday indelibly captures CIA officials turning their back on human decency, and it all starts with a “novel” legal defense floated in November 2001 by CIA lawyers — and arguably prompted by their White House masters, lurking offstage — that the “CIA could argue that the torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the harm.”

Specifically, they pointed out: “states may be very unwilling to call the U.S. to task for torture when it resulted in saving thousands of lives.”

There are no indications the CIA is ready to turn things around, of course. CIA Director John Brennan went to extraordinary lengths to stymie and discredit the investigation. And now, he is rebuffing its conclusions.

Brennan’s statement Tuesday acknowledged “shortcomings” and “mistakes,” but reasserted “that interrogations of detainees on whom [enhanced interrogation techniques] EITs were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.” He angrily rejected the report’s “inference that the Agency systematically and intentionally misled” Congress, the Executive Branch, and the public.”

Other reports and works of journalism have clearly identified Vice President Dick Cheney as the prime mover in creating a torture regime that extended not just to the black sites, but to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and elsewhere. Cheney was no victim of misinformation; he was its architect.

George W. Bush might have remained unfamiliar with the details until as late as 2006 — “According to CIA records, when briefed in April 2006, the president expressed discomfort with the ‘image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper, and forced to go to the bathroom on himself’.” But he must have had some idea what Cheney and others were up to in the basement.

A 2005 proposal from Senator Carl Levin to establish an independent commission to investigate detainee abuse, for instance, “resulted in concern at the CIA that such a commission would lead to the discovery of videotapes documenting CIA interrogations.” As a result, the CIA destroyed them.

The summary devotes a 37-page appendix on “Inaccurate CIA Testimony” by former CIA Director Michael Hayden in one Senate Intelligence Committee hearing alone.

At the April 12, 2007, hearing, Director Hayden verbally provided extensive inaccurate information on, among other topics: (1) the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, (2) the application of Department of Defense survival school practices to the program, (3) detainees’ counter interrogation training, (4) the backgrounds of CIA interrogators, (5) the role of other members of the interrogation teams, (6) the number of CIA detainees and their intelligence production, (7) the role of CIA detainee reporting in the captures of terrorist suspects, (8) the interrogation process, (9) the use of detainee reporting, (10) the purported relationship between Islam and the need to use the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, (11) threats against detainees’ families, (12) the punching and kicking of detainees, (13) detainee hygiene, (14) denial of medical care, (15) dietary manipulation, (16) the use of waterboarding and its effectiveness, and (17) the injury and death of detainees.

Hayden told the Senate Intelligence committee: “Punches and kicks are not authorized and have never been employed.” But interviews conducted for two CIA internal reviews described the treatment of Gul Rahman, the detainee was died at the Salt Pit. One witness stated:

[T]here were approximately five CIA officers from the renditions team… they opened the door of Rahman’s cell and rushed in screaming and yelling for him to “getdown.” They dragged him outside, cut off his clothes and secured him with Mylar tape. They covered his head with a hood and ran him up and down a long corridor adjacent to his cell. They slapped him and punched him several times… a couple of times the punches were forceful. As they ran him along the corridor, a couple of times he fell and they dragged him through the dirt (the floor outside of the cells is dirt). Rahman did acquire a number of abrasions on his face, legs, and hands, but nothing that required medical attention. (This may account for the abrasions found on Rahman’s body after his death. Rahman had a number of surface abrasions on his shoulders, pelvis, arms, legs, and face.)

Hayden also lied to Congress about how many detainees were held. At first, the CIA’s lowball numbers were, amazingly enough, just a mistake

Internal CIA documents indicate that inadequate record keeping made it impossible for the CIA to determine how many individuals it had detained. In December 2003, a CIA Station overseeing CIA detention operations in Country [REDACTED] informed CIA Headquarters that it had made the “unsettling discovery” that the CIA was “holding a number of detainees about whom” it knew “very little.”

But five years later, when a CIA officer informed Hayden that the correct number was 112 or more, the officer sent himself an email to memorialize the conversation: “DCIA instructed me to keep the detainee number at 98 — pick whatever date i [sic] needed to make that happen but the number is 98.”

Dianne Feinstein leaving intelligence job amid clash on tactics report – LA Times

But as she prepares to turn over the committee’s gavel next month to Sen. Richard M. Burr (R-N.C.), Feinstein’s tenure as chairwoman is closing amid an acrimonious fight over a project that pits her against the CIA. Her staff has completed a 6,000-page report evaluating and criticizing the agency’s use during the George W. Bush years of harsh interrogation tactics, which President Obama and others have labeled as torture.

Since April, Feinstein has been fighting with the CIA and the White House to make public as much as possible of the report’s 480-page executive summary.

• McCain makes passionate defense for torture report’s release – CNN.com

Republican Sen. John McCain broke with members of his party Tuesday, lauding the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture and decrying the use of torture as having “stained our national honor” and doing “much harm and little practical good.”

2003 George W. Bush Statement on Torture

In 2003, _George W. Bush’s_included the following language:.

The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy.

News

Protests Continue

• 19 arrested in 4th night of California protests – Yahoo News

• Berkeley protesters march for fourth night, briefly block freeway

• U.S. chokehold protesters ‘die-in’, issue demands in NY | Reuters

• Protesters plan ‘Week of Outrage’ – CNN.com

‘Die-in’ for Eric Garner: Hundreds shut down mall, block streets in London protest

A crowd of people stormed a London mall, blockaded roads, and shouted slogans in an anti-police brutality demonstration against a Staten Island grand jury’s decision not to indict police officer Daniel Pantaleo for Eric Garner’s death on December 4.

Sneak Attack? Congress Slips Controversial Measures into Spending Bil

Congress snuck in two measures to its must-pass spending bill — all without formal debate. The first was a rider that essentially overturns the District of Columbia’s ballot initiative legalizing marijuana, which passed by a more than 2-to-1 margin last month.

The second measure Congress snuck into the spending the bill will be more galling to some, because it amounts to a pay raise for the two unpopular political parties: It raises the $32,400 maximum that donors could give the Democratic National Committee or Republican National Committee to a whopping $324,000 per year, gutting what’s left of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law. The Washington Post says this was inserted on page 1,599 of a 1,603-page bill (!!!). These two measures — and probably more like them — will become law because they were jammed into a must-pass spending bill to keep the government open.

21st Century Cold War Has Began; US House Of Reps Passes Resolution 758 Even As US Tells Russia To Stop Self-isolation – International Business Times

The United States has effectively pushed the button of the 21st century Cold War era. On Thursday, its House of Representatives passed Resolution 758, a decree telling the U.S., Europe and its’ allies to “aggressively keep the pressure” on Russia and its President Vladimir Putin until such measures “change his behaviour.”

• House Chooses New Cold War With Russia
• House Resolution 758: Russia has been warned | Russia Direct
• Russian Media Warns Of World War 3 Over U.S. Resolution 758, Canada Offers Military Aid To Ukraine | The Inquisitr News

Emergency Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2014 (H.R. 3979) – GovTrack.us

On December 4, 2014, the House used the bill again as the vehicle for passage of a third bill, by replacing its text completely and turning it into the bill it is now, the Carl Levin and Howard P. “Buck” McKeon National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015.

Feedback

• You ask for feedback, I’ve got some. : unfilter

A friend of mine and I were discussing Unfilter (both of us are supporters) and here are some thoughts I have after our discussion. To be clear, my thoughts, not necessarily his. He can chime in here if he likes.

• Digitize the red book? : unfilter

Hey, I think it would be really great if you guys could digitize the Red book and make it searchable. You’re always referencing it and I think a lot of people would also enjoy being able to see what is in it so far and what has and hasn’t come true.

The post CIA Torture Exposed | Unfilter 126 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

In the live run up to Obama’s sales pitch to the nation to go back into Iraq, we analysis the recent developments of ISIS, and dispel common memes being pushed out by the media. Then cover Obama’s speech in real time with our commentary.

Plus new leaks from the CIA Torture report suggest the scope of waterboarding and other tactics by the CIA were much more brutal than the public has been lead to believe.

Then we end on a surprising high note, and in-depth discussion.

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— Show Notes —

CIA Torture Report

CIA ‘tortured al-Qaeda suspects close to the point of death by drowning them in water-filled baths’ – Telegraph

As the US Senate prepares to release a report documenting US
torture programme after 9/11, Telegraph reveals new details about the scope
of CIA excesses

“They weren’t just pouring water over their heads or over a cloth,” said the source who has first-hand knowledge of the period. “They were holding them under water until the point of death, with a doctor present to make sure they did not go too far. This was real torture.”

The account of extreme CIA interrogation comes as the US Senate prepares to publish a declassified version of its so-called Torture Report – a 3,600-page report document based on a review of several million classified CIA documents.

Publication of the report is currently being held up by a dispute over how much of the 480-page public summary should remain classified, but it is expected to be published within weeks.

Snowden

• Switzerland will host Edward Snowden, if he testifies against the NSA- The Inquirer

The Swiss attorney general has said that whistleblower Edward Snowden can reside there if he responds to state requests for testimony against the US National Security Agency (NSA).

A document provided to the Swiss Sunday newspaper Sonntagszeitung is titled, “What are the rules would apply to consider when Edward Snowden would [be] brought to Switzerland and then the United States would make a request for extradition“, and it relates that the rules would allow the movement and repel the requests.

Speaking to the newspaper, Snowden’s Swiss lawyer Marcel Bosonnet revealed that he is pleased with the results of the study, commenting that, “The legal requirements for safety are met.”

ISIS

• CNN poll: Majority of Americans alarmed by ISIS – CNN.com

Seven in 10 Americans believe ISIS has the resources to launch an attack against the United States, just days before President Barack Obama plans to address the nation on the subject.

The poll released Monday shows that Americans favor:

— Additional airstrikes against ISIS (76% favor, 23% oppose)

— Military aid to forces fighting ISIS (62% favor, 37% oppose)

— Providing humanitarian aid to people fleeing ISIS (83% favor, 16% oppose)

U.S. targets ISIS fighters near Iraq’s second-largest dam

But a majority of Americans, 61%-38%, oppose placing U.S. soldiers on the ground in Iraq and Syria to combat the terrorist group.

Even as Americans support military action against ISIS, they still want Obama to seek authority from Congress before taking any action. More than 7 in 10 Americans think Obama should ask Congress for the ability to strike ISIS militarily. And 8 in 10 Americans support Congress approving military force against ISIS.

• Straw Poll

High Note:

Washington’s indoor pot grows could be big power suck – Local – MyNorthwest.com

“You’re installing 1,000 watt lights over about every two plants and running those 16 to 18 hours a day to grow the product over a 10, 12, 14 week cycle. It’s a pretty significant consumption of electricity.”

The council studied a number of growers across the state earlier this summer after they were granted licenses by the Washington State Liquor Control Board. It determined demand for electricity could grow between 60 and 160 average megawatts over the next few years.

“That’s significant,” Eckman says. “That’s about half of the size of a new combustion turbine gas generating plant.”

• Pot producers add demand on Northwest power grid | Local & Regional | Seattle News, Weather, Sports, Breaking News | KOMO News

Since Washington voters in 2012 approved an initiative to legalize recreational pot use by adults, the state Liquor Control Board has so far issued more than 200 licenses to marijuana growers out of about 2,500 who have applied.

• Recreational pot eclipses medical pot in Colorado – National – MyNorthwest.com

Colorado is now selling more recreational pot than medical pot, a turning point for the newly legal industry.

Tax records released by the state Department of Revenue on Wednesday showed that the state sold $29.7 million worth of recreational marijuana in July, the most recent data available. That was slightly higher than the $28.9 million worth of medical marijuana sold in the same month.

Colorado has many more medical pot shops than recreational pot shops, which are open to all 21 and over. Colorado has some 500 medical shops, fewer than 200 open to all adults.

Since January, Colorado has reaped more than $37 million in taxes from marijuana. That figure includes taxes, licenses and fees from both medical and recreational pot.

The post Obama Sells ISIS | Unfilter 113 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

The Intercept has published Obama’s secret terrorist tracking system, by the numbers. We dig in. The CIA and the Senate are still fighting over the torture report.

Then we’ll examine the new groundwork for the new Cold War, and the ridiculous reactions Colorado’s neighbor states are having to Cannabis legalization.

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— Show Notes —

— The Slow Death of Privacy —

Barack Obama’s Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers

Of the 680,000 people caught up in the government’s Terrorist Screening Database—a watchlist of “known or suspected terrorists” that is shared with local law enforcement agencies, private contractors, and foreign governments—more than 40 percent are described by the government as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” That category—280,000 people—dwarfs the number of watchlisted people suspected of ties to al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah combined.

The documents, obtained from a source in the intelligence community, also reveal that the Obama Administration has presided over an unprecedented expansion of the terrorist screening system. Since taking office, Obama has boosted the number of people on the no fly list more than ten-fold, to an all-time high of 47,000—surpassing the number of people barred from flying under George W. Bush.

“If everything is terrorism, then nothing is terrorism,” says David Gomez, a former senior FBI special agent. The watchlisting system, he adds, is “revving out of control.”

• The second-highest concentration of people designated as “known or suspected terrorists” by the government is in Dearborn, Mich.—a city of 96,000 that has the largest percentage of Arab-American residents in the country.

• The government adds names to its databases, or adds information on existing subjects, at a rate of 900 records each day.

• The CIA uses a previously unknown program, code-named Hydra, to secretly access databases maintained by foreign countries and extract data to add to the watchlists.

State Dept. ‘Torture Talking Points’ Reveal White House PR Machine Ahead of Senate Report

A State Department document obtained by the Associated Press reveals part of the Obama administration’s attempt to ready its public relations response to an upcoming Senate report on the CIA’s torture program.

The document details some of the administration’s prepared talking points to be used once a White House-approved version of the report is released.

Reportedly sent by accident via email to the AP, the State Department memo describes the report as a demonstration of American democracy, rather than as an indictment of the CIA’s torture practices. The document states that “no American is proud” of the CIA’s tactics, but that “the story” of illegal, indefinite torture and imprisonment is part of a larger message, one in which “America’s democratic system worked just as it was designed to work in bringing an end to actions inconsistent with our democratic values.” That story, the document proclaims, is one in which Americans can take pride.

The document contains a few subtle errors in its dates and phrasing. At one point, it claims that the “interrogation methods were debated in our free media, challenged in our independent courts, and, just two years after their introduction, restricted by an act of our Congress sponsored by Senator John McCain and overwhelmingly backed by members of both of our political parties.”

As investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler notes, that “act of Congress” likely refers to the Detainee Treatment Act — but that legislation was passed in 2005, almost four years after the launch of the CIA’s Retention, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) program, not two. In addition, the RDI program has rarely been “challenged in independent courts,” as both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama regularly prevented the details of the program from coming to light by invoking the “state secrets privilege,” a rule which allows governments to hold back evidence in a legal case by claiming that disclosing the information might endanger national security.

Report: Israel tapped John Kerry’s phone when he was brokering peace talks

Israeli intelligence intercepted phone calls of US Secretary of State John Kerry while he was trying to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority earlier this year, German news magazine _Der Spiegel _reported on Sunday.

The report was confirmed by several sources in the intelligence community, according to Der Spiegel.

Both Israel and Russia Shared Kerry’s Intercepted Phone Calls Tikun-Olam Tikun Olam-תיקון עולם

Yesterday’s report, originating in Der Spiegel that Israel intercepted the telecommunications of Secretary of State John Kerry when he was in flight to the Middle East has just become a much bigger story. The reporter noted that there were two countries who eavesdropped on Kerry. But he didn’t say which country it was.

My highly-placed Israeli source tells me that the identity of that country is Russia.

While Kerry’s position on the Israel-Palestine peace talks was Israel’s number one priority, Russia’s number one priority was to learn the U.S. plans and position regarding the Ukrainian separatist movement and Russia’s involvement with it. My source had this to say:

…It’s a “fruitful ongoing joint venture” initiated by Lieberman thanks to his Moscow connections. Israel provides Russia with recordings of intercepted calls Kerry makes flying over the Middle East, and Russia provides Israel with recordings of calls he makes flying over Central Asia, the Far East & the Pacific Ocean.

The source notes this “joint venture” became extremely important for Moscow since last February — because of the Ukrainian crisis.

In this way, the spying collaboration has been fruitful for both sides.

New leaker disclosing US secrets, government concludes

Proof of the newest leak comes from national security documents that formed the basis of a news story published Tuesday by the Intercept, the news site launched by Glenn Greenwald, who also published Snowden’s leaks.

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— Cold War 2.0 —

Putin Urges Economic Retaliation for Sanctions Over Ukraine Conflict – NYTimes.com

Mr. Putin said that Russia should signal that it finds the economic sanctions offensive, but that it should do so without harming Russian consumers.

“The political tools of economic pressure are unacceptable and run counter to all norms and rules,” he was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.

Unintended consequences: Sanctions on Russia hurt US dollar dominance — RT USA

The US dollar, the dominant global currency since 1944, may lose some of its luster due to the American-led sanctions against Russia over the turmoil in Ukraine. The greenback has been fading in favor since the global financial crisis in 2008.

The US-led sanctions against Russia may have backfired on the US
because it threatens to “hasten a move away from the dollar
that’s been stirring since the global financial crisis [in
2008],” Rachel Evans at Bloomberg wrote. In an unexpected turn of events, Hong Kong’s
central bank has bought more than $9.5 billion since the start of
July “to prevent its currency from rallying as the sanctions
stoked speculation of an influx of Russian cash,” she noted.

Germany Blocks the Delivery of Military Parts to Russia – NYTimes.com

A spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Berlin would be open to expanding the existing European Union sanctions to include already signed deals. “The European Council decided what it decided,” the spokesman, Georg Streiter, told reporters on Monday.

The decision to halt the deal, estimated by the Economics Ministry to be worth 123 million euros, or about $165 million, will also put the German government under increased pressure from the country’s powerful industrial sector, which has warned that economic sanctions against Russia will hamper growth and increase unemployment.

Vladimir Putin signs historic $20bn oil deal with Iran to bypass Western sanctions

Vladimir Putin has agreed a $20bn (£11.8bn) trade deal with Iran that will see
Russia sidestep Western sanctions on its energy sector.

Under the terms of a five-year accord, Russia will help Iran organise oil
sales as well as “cooperate in the oil-gas industry, construction of power
plants, grids, supply of machinery, consumer goods and agriculture
products”, according to a statement by the Energy Ministry in Moscow.

The move is a win-win for both nations after they were hit with Western sanctions aimed at limiting their energy sectors.

Russia, India to ink $40 bn gas deal

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are expected to announce a massive natural gas deal during their summit later this year, Indian media reports said Monday.

Russian and Indian officials are negotiating a $40 billion gas pipeline project from Russia to India, oil ministry officials told Indian daily Hindustan Times.

Russia will also supply 46 million tonnes of oil to China each year in the next 25 years, according to recent deals signed by President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.

Even as the US and EU try to isolate Russia on the Ukraine issue, Beijing and other BRICS capitals have been cementing their business ties with Moscow.

— Weed Wackers —

Since marijuana legalization, highway fatalities in Colorado are at near-historic lows – The Washington Post

Since the new Colorado law took effect in January, the “drugged driver” panic has only intensified.I’ve already written about one dubious example, in which the Colorado Highway Patrol and some local and national media perpetuated a story that a driver was high on pot when he slammed into a couple of police cars parked on an interstate exit ramp. While the driver did have some pot in his system, his blood-alcohol level was off the charts and was far more likely the cause of the accident.

As you can see, roadway fatalities this year are down from last year, and down from the 13-year average. Of the seven months so far this year, five months saw a lower fatality figure this year than last.

What’s notable here is that the totals so far in 2014 are closer to the safest composite year since 2002 than to the average year since 2002. I should also add here that these are total fatalities.

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The post Watchlist of Terror | Unfilter 109 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

We update you on several big stories we’ve been following this week in this causal supporter show style edition of Unfilter. Plus our thoughts on Mozilla’s CEO stepping down, XP coming to an end, and more!

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— Show Notes —

• Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress–and a Plan to Stop It: Lawrence Lessig

NSA is Crazy

Edward Snowden: US government spied on human rights workers

The US has spied on the staff of prominent human rights organisations, Edward Snowden has told the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Europe’s top human rights body.

Giving evidence via a videolink from Moscow, Snowden said the National Security Agency – for which he worked as a contractor – had deliberately snooped on bodies like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Snowden, meanwhile, dismissed NSA claims that he had swiped as many as 1.7m documents from the agency’s servers in an interview with Vanity Fair.

He described the number released by investigators as “simply a scare number based on an intentionally crude metric: everything that I ever digitally interacted with in my career.”
He added: “Look at the language officials use in sworn testimony about these records: ‘could have,’ ‘may have,’ ‘potentially.’ They’re prevaricating. Every single one of those officials knows I don’t have 1.7m files, but what are they going to say? What senior official is going to go in front of Congress and say, ‘We have no idea what he has, because the NSA’s auditing of systems holding hundreds of millions of Americans’ data is so negligent that any high-school dropout can walk out the door with it’?”

In the Vanity Fair interview the whistleblower said he paid the bill in the Mira Hotel using his own credit card because he wanted to demonstrate he was not working for a foreign intelligence agency. “My hope was that avoiding ambiguity would prevent spy accusations and create more room for reasonable debate,” he told the magazine. “Unfortunately, a few of the less responsible members of Congress embraced the spy charges for political reasons, as they still do to this day.”

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CIA Torture Scandal Marches On

Fury at attack on Dianne Feinstein by ex-CIA director Michael Hayden

The latest row broke on Sunday when Hayden, a former NSA and CIA director, said the Senate intelligence committee’s landmark report on torture and coercive interrogations was not objective because Feinstein, a California Democrat, was too “emotional”.

Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said on Monday that Michael Hayden’s attack on Feinstein, the committee chairperson, was “outrageous” and fitted a pattern of “misleading” the American public.

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The post Narrative of Negligence | Unfilter 92 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

After five years the Senate’s investigation into the Central Intelligence Agencies torture programs has bursted into the light when a massive fight between top Senate officials and the CIA went public in a big way.

Taking to the floor, traditionally an intelligence agency apologist, blasted the CIA we’ll break it all down.

Plus Snowden makes his first public appearance, Greenwald reveals how the NSA spreads malware, your feedback, and much much more.

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— Show Notes —

NSA is Crazy

Snowden rocks SXSW: FULL SPEECH

Speaking remotely from Russia on Monday, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden told attendees at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas that encryption is still a powerful deterrent against government surveillance.

• Snowden calls on the geeks to save us from the NSA

The surprising thing was how much time Snowden spent on technical details like the mechanics of end-to-end encryption or the importance of solid encryption standards, rather than the political problems of NSA reform. “They are setting fire to the future of the internet,” he told the crowd, in what seemed designed to be the standout quote of the talk “And the people in the room now, you guys are the firefighters.”

“Giving Hypocrisy a Bad Name”: NSA-Backing Senate Intel Chair Blasts CIA for Spying on Torture Probe

How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware – The Intercept

The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.”

The covert infrastructure that supports the hacking efforts operates from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic.

In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware.

Documents analyzed by The Intercept show how the NSA has aggressively accelerated its hacking initiatives in the past decade by computerizing some processes previously handled by humans. The automated system – codenamed TURBINE – is designed to “allow the current implant network to scale to large size (millions of implants) by creating a system that does automated control implants by groups instead of individually.”

The agency’s solution was TURBINE. Developed as part of TAO unit, it is described in the leaked documents as an “intelligent command and control capability” that enables “industrial-scale exploitation.”

TURBINE was designed to make deploying malware much easier for the NSA’s hackers by reducing their role in overseeing its functions. The system would “relieve the user from needing to know/care about the details,” the NSA’s Technology Directorate notes in one secret document from 2009. “For example, a user should be able to ask for ‘all details about application X’ and not need to know how and where the application keeps files, registry entries, user application data, etc.”

In a top-secret presentation, dated August 2009, the NSA describes a pre-programmed part of the covert infrastructure called the “Expert System,” which is designed to operate “like the brain.” The system manages the applications and functions of the implants and “decides” what tools they need to best extract data from infected machines.

“When they deploy malware on systems,” Hypponen says, “they potentially create new vulnerabilities in these systems, making them more vulnerable for attacks by third parties.”

Mikko Hypponen, an expert in malware who serves as chief research officer at the Finnish security firm F-Secure said

The ramifications are starkly illustrated in one undated top-secret NSA document, which describes how the agency planned for TURBINE to “increase the current capability to deploy and manage hundreds of Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) and Computer Network Attack (CNA) implants to potentially millions of implants.” (CNE mines intelligence from computers and networks; CNA seeks to disrupt, damage or destroy them.)

Eventually, the secret files indicate, the NSA’s plans for TURBINE came to fruition. The system has been operational in some capacity since at least July 2010, and its role has become increasingly central to NSA hacking operations.

The TURBINE implants system does not operate in isolation.

It is linked to, and relies upon, a large network of clandestine surveillance “sensors” that the agency has installed at locations across the world.

The NSA’s headquarters in Maryland are part of this network, as are eavesdropping bases used by the agency in Misawa, Japan and Menwith Hill, England.

The sensors, codenamed TURMOIL, operate as a sort of high-tech surveillance dragnet, monitoring packets of data as they are sent across the Internet.

When TURBINE implants exfiltrate data from infected computer systems, the TURMOIL sensors automatically identify the data and return it to the NSA for analysis.

The NSA began rapidly escalating its hacking efforts a decade ago. In 2004, according to secret internal records, the agency was managing a small network of only 100 to 150 implants. But over the next six to eight years, as an elite unit called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) recruited new hackers and developed new malware tools, the number of implants soared to tens of thousands.

The agency sought $67.6 million in taxpayer funding for its Owning the Net program last year. Some of the money was earmarked for TURBINE, expanding the system to encompass “a wider variety” of networks and “enabling greater automation of computer network exploitation.”

In one secret post on an internal message board, an operative from the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate describes using malware attacks against systems administrators who work at foreign phone and Internet service providers. By hacking an administrator’s computer, the agency can gain covert access to communications that are processed by his company. “Sys admins are a means to an end,” the NSA operative writes.

The internal post – titled “I hunt sys admins” – makes clear that terrorists aren’t the only targets of such NSA attacks. Compromising a systems administrator, the operative notes, makes it easier to get to other targets of interest, including any “government official that happens to be using the network some admin takes care of.”

Two implants the NSA injects into network routers, HAMMERCHANT and HAMMERSTEIN, help the agency to intercept and perform “exploitation attacks” against data that is sent through a Virtual Private Network, a tool that uses encrypted “tunnels” to enhance the security and privacy of an Internet session.

The implants also track phone calls sent across the network via Skype and other Voice Over IP software, revealing the username of the person making the call. If the audio of the VOIP conversation is sent over the Internet using unencrypted “Real-time Transport Protocol” packets, the implants can covertly record the audio data and then return it to the NSA for analysis.

But not all of the NSA’s implants are used to gather intelligence, the secret files show. Sometimes, the agency’s aim is disruption rather than surveillance. QUANTUMSKY, a piece of NSA malware developed in 2004, is used to block targets from accessing certain websites. QUANTUMCOPPER, first tested in 2008, corrupts a target’s file downloads.

Other selectors the NSA uses can be gleaned from unique Google advertising cookies that track browsing habits, unique encryption key fingerprints that can be traced to a specific user, and computer IDs that are sent across the Internet when a Windows computer crashes or updates.

What’s more, the TURBINE system operates with the knowledge and support of other governments, some of which have participated in the malware attacks.

Classification markings on the Snowden documents indicate that NSA has shared many of its files on the use of implants with its counterparts in the so-called Five Eyes surveillance alliance – the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

:– William P
:– Robert T
:– Jonathan H
:– Oscar C
:– Martin S
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CIA vs the Senate

Behind Clash Between C.I.A. and Congress, a Secret Report on Interrogations

What the C.I.A. did next opened a new and even more rancorous chapter in the struggle over how the history of the interrogation program will be written. Agency officials began scouring the digital logs of the computer network used by the Senate staff members to try to learn how and where they got the report. Their search not only raised constitutional questions about the propriety of an intelligence agency investigating its congressional overseers, but has also resulted in two parallel inquiries by the Justice Department — one into the C.I.A. and one into the committee.

A deal was struck between Leon E. Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., and Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the intelligence committee’s Democratic chairwoman, to make millions of documents available to the committee at a C.I.A. facility near the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va. The documents covered roughly five years: from the inception of the program until September 2006, when all of the C.I.A.’s prisoners were transferred to the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

At the same time, Mr. Panetta ordered the C.I.A. to conduct its own review of the documents, a move designed to help the agency better understand the volumes of the material it had agreed to hand over to its congressional overseers.

Some people who have read the review memos said that parts of them were particularly scorching in their analysis of extreme interrogation methods like waterboarding, which the memos described as providing little intelligence of any value.

According to a recent court filing in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the C.I.A. created a “network share drive” segregated from the main agency network, a provision intended to allow the committee to work in private.

It is unclear how or when committee investigators obtained parts of the Panetta review. One official said that they had penetrated a firewall inside the C.I.A. computer system that had been set up to separate the committee’s work area from other agency digital files, but exactly what happened will not be known until the Justice Department completes its inquiry.

Senator Mark Udall of Colorado disclosed the existence of the review during an open hearing on Dec. 17.

C.I.A. officials had come to suspect that committee investigators working at the Virginia facility had seen at least a version of the internal review. Senior officials at the agency ordered a search of several years’ worth of digital audit logs that the C.I.A. uses to monitor its computer systems.

In January, the C.I.A. presented the results of its search to the intelligence committee in a tense meeting that ignited the most recent confrontation. The day after the meeting, Senator Feinstein wrote a letter to Mr. Brennan demanding answers for why the C.I.A. carried out the search, which she suggested had violated the constitutional separation of powers and undermined the committee’s oversight role.

Dianne Feinstein launches scathing attack on CIA over alleged cover-up

• Intelligence committee chair accuses CIA of smear campaign
• Feinstein alleges CIA broke law and violated constitution
• CIA director John Brennan denies thwarting investigation
• Dianne Feinstein statement – full text

Feinstein: CIA searched Intelligence Committee computers

Feinstein described the escalating conflict as a “defining moment” for Congress’s role in overseeing the nation’s intelligence agencies and cited “grave concerns” that the CIA had “violated the separation-of-powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution.”

The CIA: the double life of Dianne Feinstein

The senator’s contradictory nature was on show for all to see on Tuesday, when she delivered an extraordinary speech from the Senate floor. It amounted to the biggest and most public rift between Congress and the spy community since the 9/11 attacks. Ms Feinstein, who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, which has oversight of America’s myriad spy agencies, accused the CIA of breaking into the committee’s computers. It is an extremely serious charge: a breach of the constitution, the executive branch tampering with the elected branch. She described it as “a defining moment for the oversight of our intelligence community”.

The day after Edward Snowden revealed himself as a whistleblower last June, she was among the first to brand him a traitor. In the face of revelation after revelation, she praised the professionalism of the NSA. She defended mass data collection as a necessity, arguing that the NSA had to have access to the whole “haystack” to find the one needle, the terrorist.

Panetta Review

The Panetta Review was a secret internal review conducted by Leon Panetta, then the Director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, of enhanced interrogation techniques previously used by the CIA during the administration of George W. Bush. The review led to a series of memoranda that, as of March 2014, remained classified. According to The New York Times, the memoranda “cast a particularly harsh light” on the Bush-era interrogation program, and people who have read them have said parts of the memos are “particularly scorching” of techniques such as waterboarding, which the memos describe as providing little valuable intelligence

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

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The post CIA vs Senate | Unfilter 89 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

After dodging shoes, and taking a critical look at commercialism, we’ll take a deep dive into Obama’s bad week

From the leaked Justice Department memo establishing the legal framework for killing American citizens without due process, to the new report showing 54 different governments around the world still hosting CIA black sites.

And the story of the congressmen who say they can generate $20 billion a year in new revenue, by Ending The Federal Prohibition of Cannabis, but there’s an expensive catch.

All that and much more, on this week’s Unfilter.

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has arrived in Cairo, marking the first visit to Egypt by an Iranian president since Iran\’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

• Ahmadinejad Visits Egypt, Signaling Realignment
• Iran\’s president begins historic Egypt visit – YouTube

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A new report from the Open Society Foundation details the CIA’s effort to outsource torture since 9/11 in excruciating detail. Known as “extraordinary rendition,” the practice concerns taking detainees to and from U.S. custody without a legal process — think of it like an off-the-books extradition — and often entailed handing detainees over to countries that practiced torture. The Open Society Foundation found that 136 people went through the post-9/11 extraordinary rendition, and 54 countries were complicit in it.

• More Than 50 Countries Helped the CIA Outsource Torture
• Extraordinary Rendition Report Finds More Than 50 Nations Involved In Global Torture Scheme
• 20 Facts About Extraordinary Rendition, Torture, and Secret Detention « Antiwar.com Blog

While Obama issued an executive order in 2009 to get the CIA out of the detentions business, the order “did not apply to facilities used for short term, transitory detention.” The Obama administration says it won’t transfer detainees to countries without a pledge from a host government not to torture them — but Syria’s Assad made exactly that pledge to the U.S. before torturing Maher Arar.

The sixteen page white paper, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News, provides new details about the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama administration’s most secretive and controversial policies: its dramatically increased use of drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects, including those aimed at American citizens, such as the September 2011 strike in Yemen that killed alleged al-Qaida operatives Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Both were U.S. citizens who had never been indicted by the U.S. government nor charged with any crimes.

• Someone Just Leaked Obama\’s Rules for Assassinating American Citizens

• Leaked Obama administration memo sets out case for killing US citizens

• Early Drone Kill List Coverage: Obama\’s Dronegeddon | Unfilter 19

• The PDF White Paper

• \”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain UNALIENABLE RIGHTS, that among these are LIFE, LIBERTY and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, GOVERNMENTS ARE INSTITUTED AMONG MEN, DERIVING THEIR JUST POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED

• Attorney General Holder: Due Process Doesn\’t Necessarily Mean a Courtroom

Congressmen Jared Polis, D-Colorado, and Earl Blumenauer, D-Oregon, introduced a set of bills to end federal marijuana prohibition for states which determine the drug is legal. The bills would also provide a system of regulation and method to levy a federal excise tax on the drug.

On Revenues:

A rough figure based on a tax amount of $50.00 per ounce of marijuana, is said to generate $20 billion a year, according to policy paper Blumenauer and Polis are releasing this week.

• Lawmakers push to end federal marijuana prohibition, levy taxes on drug

• Marijuana program brings $10-million windfall for Michigan government, report says

The \”Washington State Preservation of Liberty Act\” introduced on Wednesday condemns and criminalizes the use of the 2012 NDAA\’s provision purportedly authorizing the indefinite detainment of U.S. citizens.

• Washington state\’s anti-NDAA bill introduced with viral support

After news of H.B. 1581\’s introduction caught wind, an Internet campaign went viral asking activists to contact their Washington state representatives to co-sponsor the legislation.

In less than 24 hours the number of the bill\’s co-sponsors tripled.

• Seattle Mayor McGinn kills drone program

\”We agreed that it was time to end the unmanned aerial vehicle program, so that SPD can focus its resources on public safety and the community building work that is the department\’s priority. The vehicles will be returned to the vendor,\” McGinn said in a written statement.

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The post Ethical Murder | Unfilter 36 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.