Why should George W. Bush have been “angry” to learn in late 2007 of the “high-confidence” unanimous judgment of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon four years earlier? Seems to me he might have said “Hot Dog!” rather than curse under his breath. Nowhere in his memoir, …
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Intelligence is like statistics. Both can be manipulated to tell you anything you want to hear, and you seldom get the real story from either one. But there is one major difference between intelligence and statistics: we didn’t spend $80 billion on statistics last year. Our government announced on Thursday that it has spent $80.1 …
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Amiri is a pawn in a meaningless game, says Philip Giraldi
Contrary to a news media narrative that Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri has provided intelligence on covert Iranian nuclear weapons work, CIA sources familiar with the Amiri case say he told his CIA handlers that there is no such Iranian nuclear weapons program, according to a former CIA officer. Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism official, …
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Breaking from President Barack Obama’s insistence on "moving forward, not backward" in investigating U.S. detainee torture, the British government appears poised to investigate its own complicity with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in "rendering" British citizens and residents and subjecting them to "enhanced interrogation" techniques. The British newspaper, The Guardian, is reporting that Prime …
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Human rights groups are turning to an obscure government agency to investigate allegations that medical professionals on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped the agency to perform experiments on detainees in U.S. custody following the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, in an effort to make "enhanced interrogation techniques" more efficient and …
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A major human rights organization claims it has uncovered evidence indicating that the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush conducted “illegal and unethical human experimentation” and research on detainees in CIA custody. The group, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), claims “the apparent experimentation and research appear to have been performed to provide legal …
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Targeted killings, including those using drones, are increasingly being applied in ways that violate international law, according to a report issued Wednesday by a United Nations expert on extrajudicial killings. The report by special rapporteur Philip Alston will be presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday. It says that while targeted …
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The sacking of Dennis Blair, the third director of national intelligence in the position’s short five-year history, is one important indicator that the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act of 2004 has failed. That act was effective neither in achieving real reform of the sprawling intelligence bureaucracies nor in preventing terrorist attacks. In fact, Blair’s …
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Citizens on both sides of the political divide are outraged at the recently released Department of Justice report on the Bush administration’s torture memos and what it shows about the lawyers who compiled those legal weapons and subverted the law. But while debate rages over whether or not legal pugilists John C. Yoo and Jay …
Continue reading “The CIA’s Lawyer Problem” 
