Obama threatens to veto greater intelligence oversight: Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.

(updated below)

One of the principal weapons used by the Bush administration to engage in illegal surveillance activities -- from torture to warrantless eavesdropping -- was its refusal to brief the full Congressional Intelligence Committees about its activities.  Instead, at best, it would confine its briefings to the so-called "Gang of Eight" -- comprised of 8 top-ranking members of the House and Senate -- who were impeded by law and other constraints from taking any action even if they learned of blatantly criminal acts. 

This was a sham process:  it allowed the administration to claim that it "briefed" select Congressional leaders on illegal conduct, but did so in a way that ensured there could be no meaningful action or oversight, because those individuals were barred from taking notes or even consulting their staff and, worse, because the full Intelligence Committees were kept in the dark and thus could do nothing even in the face of clear abuses.  The process even allowed the members who were briefed to claim they were powerless to stop illegal programs.  That extremely restrictive process also ensures irresolvable disputes over what was actually said during those briefings, as illustrated by recent controversies over what Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats were told about Bush's torture and eavesdropping programs.  Here's how Richard Clarke explained it in July, 2009, on The Rachel Maddow Show: [ Read more ... ]

CIA’s Lost Magic Manual Resurfaces: Via Danger Room | Wired.com .

At the height of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency paid $3,000 to renowned magician John Mulholland to write a manual on misdirection, concealment, and stagecraft. All known copies of the document — and a related paper, on conveying hidden signals — were believed to be destroyed in 1973. But recently, the manuals resurfaced, and have now been published as “The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.” Topics include working a clandestine partner, slipping a pill into the drink of the unsuspecting, and “surreptitious removal of objects by women.”

This wasn’t the first time a magician worked for a western government. Harry Houdini snooped on the German and the Russian militiaries for Scotland Yard. English illusionist Jasper Maskelyne is reported to created dummy submarines and fake tanks to distract Rommel’s army during World War II. Some reports even credit him with employing flashing lights to “hide” the Suez Canal.

But Mulholland’s contributions were far different, because they were part of a larger CIA effort, called MK-ULTRA, to control people’s minds. Which lead to the Agency’s infatuation with LSD, as David Hambling recounted here a few weeks ago: [ Read more ... ]

Court Silences CIA Operative Despite Yellowcake Scandal: Via Threat Level.

Valerie Plame Wilson cannot publicize details of her work as a CIA operative, even though a government official already outed her as an agent in an attempt to discredit her husband, Joseph C. Wilson, a federal appeals court says.

Plame Wilson, who served as chief of the unit responsible for weapons proliferation issues related to Iraq, argued that confidentiality agreements she signed to win her employment more than two decades ago should be nullified. The CIA has prohibited her from discussing her pre-2002 employment in her 2007 memoir, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.

She maintained the confidentiality agreement should be set aside because government officials leaked to the press that she was an agent. Also, as part of a battle to obtain retirement benefits, her 20-year-employment status became part of the congressional record.

Given that she has been revealed as a operative, the First Amendment allows her to sidestep her confidentiality agreement, she argued.

But the appeals court, in siding with a lower court and a CIA review board prohibiting her from describing her work prior to 2002, said the nation’s national security could be compromised (.pdf) by the disclosures she’d planned in her book. In addition, the court said, it was irrelevant whether it was widely known that she was working under cover. [ Read more ... ]

CIA Invests in Social-Network Datamining: Via Schneier on Security.

From Wired:

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It's part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using "open source intelligence" -- information that's publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Here's the Visible Technologies press release on the funding.

Read Original Article:(Via Schneier on Security.)

The Torture Report: Via Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union.

(Originally posted on Huffington Post.)

Since 2004, the ACLU and its partners — the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace — have been litigating under the Freedom of Information Act for documents concerning the abuse of prisoners held by the Department of Defense and CIA. The litigation has produced thousands of pages of government documents, including the Justice Department torture memos that were released in April, the FBI emails that discussed the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo, and dozens of autopsy reports relating to the deaths of prisoners in the custody of the Defense Department.

To those of us who have been working on the lawsuit, though, the remarkable thing is not how much information has been released but how much is still being withheld. [ Read more ... ]

CIA Directors conclude CIA shouldn't be investigated for murder: Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.

(updated below)

In a truly shocking development being treated as major news, seven former CIA Directors -- including all three who served under George W. Bush -- jointly concluded that the CIA should not be criminally investigated for torture deaths, and they have written a letter to President Obama (.pdf) expressing that view.  Do leaders of organizations in general ever believe that their organizations and its members should be criminally investigated and possibly prosecuted for acts carried out on behalf of that organization, and do CIA Directors specifically ever believe that about the CIA?  Has a CIA Director ever advocated that CIA agents be criminally investigated for illegal intelligence activities?

But what's most notable about this letter is that it is not addressed to the individual charged with making decisions about whether an individual should be prosecuted:  namely, the Attorney General of the U.S.  Instead, it is addressed to the President himself, and they "urge [him] to exercise [his] authority to reverse Attorney General's August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations."  What so-called "authority" are they talking about? [ Read more ... ]

Whose Lawyer? The People’s Lawyer.: Via Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Today a group of former CIA directors sent a letter to President Obama asking him to kill Attorney General Eric Holder’s investigation into the torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody. Clearly these CIA directors have forgotten one key thing: this isn’t the president’s decision to make.

Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Program, said in a statement today: [ Read more ... ]

Attorneys Can See Classified Info in Coffee Table Spy Suit: Via Threat Level.

A federal judge in Washington has ordered the government to grant security clearances to lawyers on both sides of a lawsuit claiming illegal spying against a DEA agent, in a ruling that challenges the government’s long-held claim that the executive branch alone has the authority to determine who can access classified material.

The attorneys in the case, which was noted by Secrecy News, need the security clearances to obtain classified knowledge held by their clients so they can adequately argue the lawsuit, the judge said, in an August 26 ruling supported by attorneys on both sides of the lawsuit, but bitterly opposed by the government.

On Thursday, a federal appeals court ordered an emergency stay of the order pending an appeal by the Justice Department. [ Read more ... ]

Black Sites? What’s That? Torture? Us?: Via Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Last week, the Department of State (DOS) released a huge tranche of documents on its website in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights and NYU Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. There’s a lot of stuff to wade through, but we found some gems.

In this email from Laura M. Stone of the DOS to Anne S. Casper at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, Stone writes (PDF):

If iTV ask anything about the Black Sites here, I think we should stick to what we have done before: deny flat out that they exist.

[ Read more ... ]

Group Plans Lawsuit To Unveil the CIA’s ‘Pentagon Papers’: Via Wired: Threat Level.

The CIA and other agencies are sitting on a trove of documentary evidence of actual and suspected wrongdoing under the Bush administration, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation plans to file a lawsuit Wednesday to force the intelligence community to come clean, the group says.

At issue are the misconduct reports the spy agencies are required to file with the Intelligence Oversight Board, a board of private citizens with security clearances who oversee the spy agencies and report to the president. The board is tasked with evaluating the self-reported malfeasances of intelligence agencies, looking at the agencies’ responses, and forwarding on the worst to the attorney general when it believes criminal prosecution is called for. [ Read more ... ]

House Intelligence Committee To Probe CIA Disclosure Policy: Via ACLU online newsroom.

WASHINGTON – The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Congressman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), today announced that his committee would be launching an investigation into allegations that the CIA intentionally lied to Congress about “significant actions.” The investigation will focus on how Congress and its committees are kept informed by the executive branch and whether the recent revelations of information being withheld violated federal laws including the National Security Act of 1947.

The following can be attributed Michael Macleod-Ball, Interim Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office: [ Read more ... ]

Expanding Failure - Via ACLU Blog - Government Spying:

On Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA director Michael Hayden and told the Senate Intelligence Committee they believe the United States is still at great risk — even as they claimed their policies of torture and warrantless wiretapping are making us safer.

Hayden finally admitted the CIA has used waterboarding as one of its “enhanced” interrogation techniques, but he claimed it has only been used on three people. What Hayden failed to mention (but is well documented) is that the CIA has used other illegal torture techniques against countless detainees, including several who died while in U.S. custody. [ Read more ... ]

CIA Admits Cyberattacks Blacked Out Cities - Via Security -- InformationWeek :

The disclosure was made at a New Orleans security conference Friday attended by international government officials, engineers, and security managers.

[...]

The CIA on Friday admitted that cyberattacks have caused at least one power outage affecting multiple cities outside the United States.

Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, said that CIA senior analyst Tom Donahue confirmed that online attackers had caused at least one blackout. The disclosure was made at a New Orleans security conference Friday attended by international government officials, engineers, and security managers from North American energy companies and utilities. [ Read more ... ]

CIA Claims Cyber Attackers Blacked Out Cities - Via Slashdot:

Dotnaught writes to tell us InformationWeek is reporting that the CIA admitted today that recent power outages in multiple cities outside the United States are the result of cyberattacks. "We have information, from multiple regions outside the United States, of cyber intrusions into utilities, followed by extortion demands. We suspect, but cannot confirm, that some of these attackers had the benefit of inside knowledge. [ Read more ... ]

Utter Contempt - Via ACLU Blog:

Today's a big day in Tape Destruction World.

We’re headed to court at 3:00 p.m. to argue that the CIA acted in contempt of court when it destroyed hundreds of hours of videotape depicting the harsh treatment of two detainees in its custody. The CIA neglected to mention the existence of the tapes, and ultimately decided to destroy them in 2005, despite an order from a federal judge to produce or identify all records pertaining to — that’s right — the treatment of detainees in its custody. [ Read more ... ]

Bush's torture ban is full of loopholes: "The president has issued an executive order to stop the CIA from using torture, but the ban is unenforceable.

[...]

July 23, 2007 | Once upon a time, a U.S. official's condemnation of torture was a statement of moral principle. Today, it is an opportunity for obfuscation. We have learned that when President Bush says, "We don't torture," it's important to read the fine print. So it was once again on July 20, when Bush issued a long-awaited executive order purporting to regulate interrogation tactics used by the CIA in the "war on terror." According to a White House press release, the order provides "clear rules" to implement the Geneva Conventions governing treatment of detainees in wartime -- rules the administration insisted did not even apply to the "war on terror" until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise last summer. But while the new rules reflect a significant retreat by the administration from its initial torture policies, they are anything but "clear," come far too late in the day, and in any event are unenforceable. [ Read more ... ]

The CIA's torture teachers: "Psychologists helped the CIA exploit a secret military program to develop brutal interrogation tactics -- likely with the approval of the Bush White House.

There is growing evidence of high-level coordination between the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military in developing abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorist suspects. After the Sept. 11 attacks, both turned to a small cadre of psychologists linked to the military's secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program to "reverse-engineer" techniques originally designed to train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if captured, by exposing them to brutal treatment. [ Read more ... ]

Detailed Report of CIA's Wiretapping of Americans and Dirty Tricks To Be Unclassified -- Updated: "

In its first 25 years, the Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter by plotting assassinations, funding behavioral and drug studies that included 'unwitting participants,' opening U.S. mail, creating dossiers on nearly 10,000 American dissidents, wiretapping journalists to root out their sources, and interrogating a Soviet defector against his will for two years, according to a summary of a decades-old CIA report on the agency's activities released Thursday by the National Security Archive, an open government group.

Simultaneously, the head of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, made an unexpected announcement Thursday at the annual convention of the Society for
Historians of American Foreign Relations that the agency would declassify the full 693-page report on CIA wrongdoings and release it Monday.'

That report was compiled in 1973 at the order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger, following revelations that the Watergate burglars had CIA help. The existence of report, referred to as the 'Family Jewels' has long been known, but only a few bits have been revealed through open government requests. [ Read more ... ]

The CIA's latest "ghost detainee": "New details confirm a CIA prisoner disappeared in U.S. custody for months, renewing suspicions the agency could be violating the law and using torture. [ Read more ... ]

Former CIA Director Tenet's Memoir Sparks Controversy: "Former CIA Director George Tenet's new memoir has drawn criticism from administration officials over his account of events leading up to the Iraq war. [ Read more ... ]