Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic EvolutionSM
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Spooks, Spies, Thugs and Bureaucrats |
After stewing over our nation's intelligence failures, for a pretty long time (Bay of Pigs, JFK's assassination, J. Edgar Hoover running roughshod over our Constitution, the Iranian hostage crisis, 911, etc.), I decided to create this page in February, 2005. Then, on March 31, 2005, the president's Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction was released substantiating my claims (and that of everyone else) that America's "intelligence" agencies were colossal failures. Unfortunately this same report was used by President George W. Bush to hide the fact that he had decided to invade Iraq long before his intelligence services even began to come to any conclusions - a sad, pathetic, and immoral chapter in our country's history...
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Click Here for the bad guys... |
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Click Here for my page on Military Madness... |
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Click Here for my page on War and Terrorism... |
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Click Here for more info about my favorite country... |
"But one thing is certain: spy work depends, as much as anything, on a large flow of funds for keeping foreign palms greased. It is an enormously expensive business, and it requires layers and layers of ostensibly unconnected cutouts for the millions to flow properly and without detection."- Russ Baker in his book, Family of Secrets p. 42
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In November 2009 this happy couple made their way into an official White House state dinner without an invitation! The same Secret Service that requires tourists to wait in miserable lines for a White House tour allowed these two to skip on through for an evening of high statesmanship with the President of the United States and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. |
BBC Tuesday, December 29, 2009:
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"The president criticised 'systems failure' over bomb plot President Barack Obama has said a systemic failure allowed a known extremist with explosives to get onto a US-bound plane last week. Mr Obama said he considered the intelligence and security failures to be 'totally unacceptable'. The US needed to learn from the incident and act quickly to fix flaws in the system, he said." |
"A Nigerian man accused of attempting to blow up the plane as it came in to land was restrained by passengers. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, allegedly tried to detonate explosives in his underwear. There were nearly 300 people aboard the plane. A Yemen-based offshoot of al-Qaeda has claimed it planned the failed attack, and Yemeni officials say the group could be planning more attacks.""When our government has information on a known extremist and that information is not shared and acted upon as it should have been, a systemic failure has occurred, and I consider that totally unacceptable."
"In a blunt statement, Mr Obama said he wanted to talk to the American people because some preliminary information about the attack had raised serious concerns. 'It has been widely reported that the father of the suspect in the Christmas Day incident warned US officials in Africa about his son's extremist views,' he said. 'It now appeared that weeks ago, that info was passed to a component of our intelligence community but was not effectively distributed so as to get the subject on the no-fly list,' he said. 'We need to learn from this episode and act quickly to fix flaws in the system," Mr Obama said, adding that there was no excuse for such a failure.'"
Some good news!
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I'm happy to report that our intelligence agencies were doing a pretty good job as of September, 2009! During that month the FBI thwarted three potential terrorist attacks. One was a Denver airport shuttle driver who was attempting to put together high explosives from materials purchased at local beauty shops in my old hometown of Aurora, Colorado - apparently to bomb a New York City building on the 8th anniversary of 911.
The other two incidents were interesting in that the FBI let two different guys, in unrelated plots, go through all of the motions except when it actually came to blowing-up their target buildings. One was a 19-year-old guy who thought his explosive cache would destroy a Dallas Skyscraper when he dialed a certain number on a programmed cell phone. Thankfully that number turned out to be programmed to do nothing and the guy was arrested by the FBI (after declining to wear earplugs because he wanted to hear the explosion!). The other incident, unrelated, involved a 29-year-old American who planned to use a cell phone call to detonate what he believed were explosives in a van outside a federal courthouse in Springfield, Illinois. In both cases the FBI let the sting run its course to show, in court, that these guys were acting on their own and willing to go forward without guidance or prompting. The CIA, and other clandestine services, provided President Obama with solid evidence of a secret nuclear facility in Iran. The president presented the information to the G-20 economic summit in Pittsburgh. Of course the entire world is now in an uproar over the problem and rightly so. But, of course, everyone continues to ignore Israel's huge nuclear arsenal but that's a subject for another rant. For now I'm just happy to report that America's spook agencies are earning their keep for a change! |
CIA erased waterboarding videos
Friday, December 07, 2007
by Lewis Page, The Register
 CIA Director Hayden and President Bush |
The director of the CIA has admitted that videotapes of American intelligence operatives using harsh interrogation methods on terrorist suspects have been destroyed.
The interrogations in question are said to have taken place in 2002, when the US intelligence community had been unleashed by a vengeful president in response to 9/11. At that point, the CIA was specifically authorised by George Bush to use a range of interrogation measures not permitted to other US agencies. The most famous of these means is so-called "waterboarding", where a prisoner is made to feel that he is drowning by having water poured onto a gag. Many commentators consider this to be torture, and in fact the method has now become so controversial that - reportedly - it is no longer allowed to the CIA, which has eased off substantially from its aggressive posture in the year or so immediately after 9/11. It is thought that the 2002 tapes may have shown the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the first terror suspect seized by the CIA in the post-9/11 era. Zubaydah, under severe questioning, was said to have led the US to his comrade Ramzi Binalshibh. Binalshibh, harshly-questioned/tortured in his turn - and possibly also in the now-destoyed tapes - supposedly gave information which led to the capture in 2003 of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to have masterminded the 9/11 attacks. Mohammed is also said to have provided a great deal of key information after his capture. |
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On June 22, 2007 the CIA made public documents that detailed illegal and scandalous activities it had engaged in over 30 years ago. These "revelations" were in preparation for even more documents to be released that detailed admissions about wiretapping of journalists, kidnappings, warrantless searches, surveillance, assassination plots and other illegal (and immoral) activities.
CIA Director Michael Hayden said that these documents were "unflattering" (to say the least!) but part of CIA history. I guess the big surprise is that any spy agency would even consider engaging in such disclosure. However, it was to nobody's surprise that these "unflattering" activities took place - despite the propaganda we've received, for decades, telling us how moral and lawful our spook agencies were compared to the rest of the world. The big question, of course, is what are our spy agencies up to these days anyway? At the time of this CIA "disclosure" there were still questions about its involvement with extraordinary rendition (extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another), the torture of prisoners, and the possibility of domestic spying (although that's probably more of the NSA's illegal domain than the CIA's...). Maybe we'll have the answers in another three decades from now? |
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AP NATIONAL NEWS WASHINGTON, Mar. 8, 2007: |
"An internal Justice Department report accuses the FBI of underreporting its use of the Patriot Act to force telecommunications and financial firms to turn over customer information in suspected terrorism cases, according to officials familiar with its findings."Shoddy bookkeeping and records management led to the problems, said one government official familiar with the report. The official said FBI agents appeared to be overwhelmed by the volume of demands for information over a two-year period.
"'They lost track,' said the official who like others interviewed late Thursday spoke on condition of anonymity because the report had not been released.
"The errors are outlined by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in an audit to be released on Friday. The audit requirement was added to the Patriot Act by Congress over the objections of the Bush administration.
"The FBI reported to Congress in 2005 that its agents had delivered a total of 9,254 national security letters seeking e-mail, telephone or financial information on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents over the previous two years. That was the first year the Bush administration publicly disclosed how often it uses national security letters to obtain records. The numbers from previous years have been classified.
"Fine's report, according to officials, says the numbers of national security letters, or NSLs, between 2003 and 2005 were underreported by 20 percent. "
September 06, 2006:
President Bush gave a speech that covered a lot of ground concerning Guantanamo Bay, the CIA, and the "war" on terrorism in general. Some of his speech acknowledged our use of "alternative" interrogation methods and the CIA's secret detention system. Although I was suspicious of his motives, a lot of the detail he provided was a welcome change to the secrecy and illegal practices of his administration's previous five years. Of course there was no mention of American military bases in Arab countries, Israel's theft and occupation of Palestinian lands, or the other reasons terrorism remains such a threat to our country...
CNN
August 17, 2006:
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A federal judge ruled that the U.S. government's domestic eavesdropping program is unconstitutional and ordered it ended immediately! Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the Bush Administration disagrees with the ruling and has appealed - much to everyone's "surprise..."
"Government spying on innocent Americans without any kind of warrant and without congressional approval runs counter to the very foundations of our democracy. We hope that Congress follows the lead of the court and demands that the president adhere to the rule of law." - Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director |
Once Again, FBI Caught Breaking The Law In Gathering Phone Call Info;
But Real Issue Is Why Telcos Let Them
from the surprise-surprise dept
by Mike Masnick at techdirt.com January 19, 2010
 (Telephone wiretapping bug) |
"A few years back, we found out that the FBI regularly violated the Patriot Act, issuing "National Security Letters" to access information that they had no right to access. So it should come as no surprise that during that same period, the FBI was also regularly violating the law to get phone call records without following the proper procedures, even beyond the problem with the NSLs. In fact, it appears the FBI may have violated the law in about half of all of these cases. Basically, it sounds like the FBI just went to phone companies, said the magic word ("terrorism!!") and the phone companies just handed over records -- even without using NSLs, but instead using an "exigent circumstances letter," which could be used even more easily than an NSL, but which required an NSL to follow it up eventually. The FBI is now basically admitting to screwing up and that using these "ECLs" without followup NSLs almost certainly violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The FBI's excuse? They're claiming that the process was "good-hearted but not well-thought-out." Doesn't that make you feel better?" |
Rocky Mountain News
May 20, 2006:
By Katherine Shrader, AP
"CIA putting spooks on fast track"
Business Week
August 21/28, 2006 p. 13:
"In the Dark about Outside Snoops"
"Five Years After the September 11 attacks, the U.S. Intelligence community has so many outside contractors working for it that the government doesn't know the exact number. Nor does the top brass know exactly what all these companies are doing. (Such work can include everything from threat analysis to translation services.) This summer, staffers at the Office of the Director of National Inteligence, which briefs the President daily, began taking an inventory. 'We're trying to identify those contractors who are doing core intelligence work,' says a senior intelligence official. Up to now, he says, there wasn't 'a good way of counting them or identifying what kind of work they're doing.'"
 J. Edgar Hoover building |
CNN
March 9, 2007 |
The FBI is guilty of "serious misuse" of the power to secretly obtain private information under the Patriot Act, a government audit said Friday.The Justice Department's inspector general looked at the FBI's use of national security letters, in which agents demand personal and business information about individuals -- such as financial, phone, and Internet records -- without court orders.
The audit found the letters were issued without proper authority, cited incorrect statutes or obtained information they weren't supposed to.
As many as 22 percent of national security letters were not recorded, the audit said.
"We concluded that many of the problems we identified constituted serious misuse of the FBI's national security letter authorities," Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said in the report.
CNN
March 13, 2008
Report: FBI abuse of investigative tool continued in 2006
From Terry Frieden
"The FBI continued in 2006 to badly mishandle letters that it uses to obtain personal records without a court order, according to a Justice Department report released Thursday.""The new report cites 'issuance of NSLs [national security letters] without proper authorization, improper requests and unauthorized collection of telephone or Internet e-mail records due to FBI errors or mistakes made by NSL recipients.'"
"But a top department official said significant progress has been made in the past year toward correcting those errors."
"Inspector General Glenn Fine said it's too soon to tell if the problems will be eliminated."
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I wasn't using my civil liberties anyway:
Just before Christmas, 2005 American media revealed that George W. Bush authorized the NSA, and other spook houses, authority to tap phone calls without a court order. In a December 16, 2005 New York Times piece (page A22) it was suggested that President Bush's actions were illegal and that intelligence officials were still required to seek an F.I.S.A. (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - a secret court system with strict limits for intelligence gathering on American soil) warrant every time they want to eavesdrop within the United States. According to the New York Times, "Some officials familiar with it [wire taps] say they consider warrantless eavesdroping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstituional, amounting to an improper search." "Several senior government officials say that when the special operation began, there were few controls on it and little formal oversight outside the N.S.A. The agency can choose its eavesdropping targets and does not have to seek approval from Justice Department or Bush administration officials. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, a former senior Bush administration official said. Before the 2004 election, the official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators..." |
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CIA Director Porter Goss resigned without notice on May 5, 2006. At that time, the Bush Administration scrambled to fill the post with either a military official or similarly minded ideologue while America's intelligence community remained at odds with itself (it was revealed that longstanding feuds and turf wars between military intelligence, the CIA, and even the FBI were still occurring at times). One interesting idea surfaced, during all of this turmoil, that the CIA was being forced back to its "roots" as a coordinator of human intelligence. Additionally, it was also suggested that the CIA will maintain its informal role as the eyes and ears for the White House when it comes to monitoring military adventures. Strange days, indeed, when our own elected government needs a multi-billion dollar intelligence network to keep tabs on our own military. Of course history repeats itself here... |
The two and a half years leading up to November 22, 1963 [the assassination of President Kennedy], had been tumultuous ones. The Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, designed to dislodge Fidel Castro and his Cuban revolution from its headquarters ninety miles off the Florida Keys, was an embarrassing foreign policy failure. Certainly in terms of lives lost and men captured, it was also a human disaster. But within the ruling American elite it was seen primarily as a jolt to the old boy's network - a humiliating debacle, and a rebuke of the supposedly infallible CIA."- Russ Baker
from his book, Family of Secrets, p. 44
 An ax to grind... |
The Complaint: |
What American doesn't want their country to be safe, secure and strong? I'm no exception - other than I'd add that I think our country should also be frugal, fair, decent and Democratic. Unfortunately our nation's "intelligence" services have taken us in the opposite direction - The CIA, FBI, NSA, Secret Service, military intelligence agencies, and a dozen other "security" organizations have long histories of falsifying information, lying to the American people, harassing innocents, promoting drug trade, torture and other illegal activities.What really hurt is the failure of these organizations to protect us from 9-11 and dozens of other attacks both on and off our shores in the late 90s and early 2000s. Despite the government's propaganda (remember President Bush telling us that CIA employees, right after 911, were working late nights and having to eat pizza at the office?) most of the folks who "work" for these agencies have much better pay, benefits and working conditions than the average American - evidence the huge number of applicants lined up for these jobs each year. The point is, despite very nice jobs and careers, these secret agencies insist on more and more funding while protecting us even less and less.
Yep, I'll admit I have an "ax to grind" when it comes to overpaid, under worked bureaucrats - especially when they continue to not only sully the good name of the American people, but promote hostility and insecurity both at home and abroad. Admittedly, the vast number of folks who apply for any job, inside or outside of government, have good intentions but it's clear that freedom from oversight and accountability can turn any group of employees, or an entire organization, into something to be ashamed of.
And, I'm not the last to have recognized these problems either. Things got so bad (and embarrassing) for President George W. Bush, in early 2005, that he nominated John Negroponte as our nation's first director of National Intelligence! This added layer of bureaucracy, it was hoped, would reduce the waste, redundancy and lethargy in our country's dozen or so intelligence agencies. Problem is, this is the same John Negroponte who did nothing to stop Honduran death squads while he was our Ambassador down there. This is also the same Negroponte who was our ambassador to Iraq after we illegally invaded and trashed their country!
Certainly there must be some honest, hardworking people capable of taking these kinds of jobs without us reducing ourselves to the hiring of questionable characters like Negroponte? There are scores of honest, capable technicians, managers and leaders deserving of these jobs - let's target them for service to our country and let the Negropontes of the world find employment elsewhere...
Maybe with some luck a spook or two, in one of our nation's spy agencies, will stumble onto this page and mention to his or her coworkers that their customers (the American people!) aren't too pleased with their performance lately [Note: there was a time in our country's history that the military and spy agencies weren't allowed to turn on our own people...]. Or, even better, maybe one of our nation's elected officials will catch wind of this page, or others like it, and start demanding some truth and accuracy out of these spy groups?Of course I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for any meaningful changes in how these agencies operate. Nevertheless, every journey begins with the fist step - in time the American people may be able to turn these dozen or so bureaucratic coffee clutches into honest, hardworking organizations that provide good service to not only the American people, but humankind in general. We can only hope...
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Spy agencies are fond of reminding us is that their "successes" are secrets that can never be revealed and that we should be thankful for what they've done so far. Nevertheless, the horror of their huge failures (the ones that have surfaced, despite their best efforts to keep them secret), continue to astound and amaze us. So, we can only imagine how many tragedies and atrocities they've covered up at great expense to America. We shovel billions and billions of dollars their way, each and every year, yet have little clue as to what they're up to or what's been accomplished. Most neighborhood garage sales are run with more efficiency and honesty than these guys. |
As for my own disclaimer, I'll admit that I don't know it all, either. I have no inside information, no access to "deep throat," and certainly no special abilities or insights that would make me an expert on the subject. Nevertheless, I really do love my country and have been deeply saddened by all the damage we've done, and the losses we've endured, while defense contractors, bureaucrats and spies line their pockets at our expense.
- Roger J. Wendell
Golden, Colorado
Expert: CIA missed glaring red flags on double-agent bomber.
From Nic Robertson, CNN Senior International Correspondent - January 12, 2010
"Amman, Jordan (CNN) -- In the murky world of spying, where choices are generally among shades of gray, success, by definition, goes unnoticed.""Failure, however, is catastrophic."
"So how did a Jordanian doctor play double agent, outsmart his CIA handlers, and end up killing seven Americans and a Jordanian military officer at a remote base in Afghanistan?"
"'This is the biggest deception ever of intelligence agencies, whether CIA or Jordanian intelligence,' said Hassan Hanieh, a former Islamic extremist who now studies jihadist movements. 'From the beginning, he was deceiving them.'"
"In a videotape released after the December 30 attack, the double agent, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, said his suicide bombing was retaliation for the death of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. Mehsud was killed in a missile strike in August, an attack thought to have been carried out by an American drone aircraft."
"Al-Balawi had been recruited as a counterterrorism intelligence source, with U.S. and Jordanian intelligence agencies apparently believing he had given up his Islamic extremist views. They were using him to hunt Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy to al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, a former U.S. intelligence official told CNN last week."
"Hanieh told CNN he has read the bomber's radical blogs and says intelligence agencies made an obvious mistake in believing al-Balawi had changed."
"'We have never seen in the history of al Qaeda a person who changed his ideas completely in this sudden way -- a person who writes jihadi stuff, then suddenly switches sides,' Hanieh said."
More examples:
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Click Here for Matt Damon's NSA speech in the movie Good Will Hunting... |
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