While the reality of Gladio’s existence in Europe is a matter of historical record, the same strategy was adopted by the Pentagon in the 1990s in a new theatre of operations, namely, Asia. “Instead of using neo-Nazis, they used mujahideen working under various bin Ladens, as well as al-Zawahiri”
The last publicly known Gladio meeting occurred in NATO’s Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) in Brussels in 1990. While Italy was a focal point for the older European operations, Turkey and Azerbaijan served as the main conduits for a completely new, different set of operations in Asia using veterans of the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, the so-called “Afghan Arabs” that had been trained as al-Qaeda.

In a recent  book Classified Woman, Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI, describes how the Pentagon, CIA and State Department maintained intimate ties to al-Qaeda militants as late as 2001. Her memoir, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, published last year, charged senior government officials with negligence, corruption and collaboration with al Qaeda in illegal arms smuggling and drugs trafficking in Central Asia.

In interviews with this author in early March, Edmonds claimed that Ayman al-Zawahiri, current head of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s deputy at the time, had innumerable, regular meetings at the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, with U.S. military and intelligence officials between 1997 and 2001, as part of an operation known as ‘Gladio B’. Al-Zawahiri, she charged, as well as various members of the bin Laden family and other mujahideen, were transported on NATO planes to various parts of Central Asia and the Balkans to participate in Pentagon-backed destabilisation operations.

According to two Sunday Times journalists speaking on condition of anonymity, this and related revelations had been confirmed by senior Pentagon and MI6 officials as part of a four-part investigative series that were supposed to run in 2008. The Sunday Times journalists described how the story was inexplicably dropped under the pressure of undisclosed “interest groups”, which, they suggest, were associated with the U.S. State Department.

If you still have room for some painful truth in your heart… here you go. I think you’ll recognize it when you hear it.

Brian Kelly shared this powerful chunk of it. It’s lengthy and significant.

I received this essay a few days ago. I have edited the text for readability, and corrected the English idioms and expression, English is not the author’s first language, but it remains essentially as given in the narrative.  I think you can feel the love of the writer for his flawed and well meaning father who thought he was doing his patriotic duty for his country but awakened too late to realize he was working for corrupt bankers and business interests.  Particularly interesting is how his father’s love for his son caused him to confess the true nature of his work and that kept his son from following in the same awful footsteps.  I apologize for the quality of the black and white photos, if I get better versions I will update them.  Perhaps its just as well we can’t see all the carnage that is in the photos. The photos below have never been published before, the photo above is a stock photo of the invasion of Iwo Jima.  -AK

How did we become the Evil Empire?
by “A light warrior”

editing and photo enhancement by AK

How did we become the Evil Empire? How did it come to this? The following story it is based in true facts, which I have decided to share with all of you because it is time to spread the truth to the four winds.

Human liberation is at stake.  Every single human being who has information needs expose the iron hands behind the curtains.  This will help end the tyranny we all have been subject to for so long.

You should feel obligated to do so NOW!  The “real truth” if you do not know it by now, is that we have been lied to, duped, used, abused, mind controlled, poisoned and mass murdered for millenniums. Most of us now know our lives are illusion!  It’s an illusion of the most nightmarish kind. So lets all start speaking hard and loud until the veil of ignorance completely falls.

This story is based on my fathers life experiences, his entire life history, the challenges, accomplishments and discoveries throughout his entire life … an entire lifetime window of wisdom is now opening with the writing of this letter.

I choose to keep his name a mystery because I know he would have liked it that way. I will refer to him as “FATHER”.  I know he would have approve of me sharing of this information with you today because he could have not done it itself while alive.  He had “fear” due to his secrecy vows and especially after all he had witnessed through out his military career years. He was constantly tortured by daunting weekly sweating nightmares, which I had to shake him real hard to wake him from.  It seem he was having convulsions while he slept.  He would just say “bad dreams”!

Father never had the opportunity to see how far down the rabbit hole goes. My commitment to my father in his last days was to always tell the truth and be an honorable man! I think father would be proud of me today.  I have seen how deep the rabbit hole goes thanks to him, so here is the “TRUTH” being presented to you today .

Father was a WWII veteran, fought all the way island hoping from the Philippines to Okinawa Japan, he also participated in the Korean war as part of the psychological warfare unit, a unit that secretly experimented on prisoners of war.

Among the experiments he was involved in was finding ways of keeping them complaint and docile while the prisoners were being kept in concentration camps under horribly inhumane conditions.
Our government during this heinous period perpetrated many war crimes, but that is another story in itself.

After my father’s last infamous war tour in the Korean peninsula ended and having returned to our motherland, he worked in the proud automobile industry in the infamous “Irritation engineering” (planned obsolescence) unit of our then thriving & proud automobile industry. They designed all the parts of our automobiles to fail at a certain mileage or time. Especially right after the warranty expires which caused the demise of our automobile industry.  All because of profit, they chose to rip us all off with additional replacement parts and repairs through the automobile lifetime, and gave us “lemons”.

Shortly thereafter he worked for the Defense Department building ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) and at the end of his military carrier he worked building rockets to outer space. He was an extremely smart individual. He was a Physicist, an engineer, a mathematician and a psychologist. He could hypnotize anyone with in 5 minutes of a regular conversation. It’s scary but true. He worked for the CIA or as insiders call it “The Company”, when talking in public. For over 30 years in the CIA and the NSA for the last 20 years of his life.It is through hypnotism that Intelligence agents extract information from prisoners. It is also through hypnotism that men like Lee Harvey Oswald, for no reason he could remember, shot JFK.

Its the reason why people like James Holmes went through a shooting rampage in Colorado killing innocent people in a movie theater, all done to promote gun control and disarm our population. James Holmes swears up and down he does not remember why and what he did, BECAUSE HE DOESN’T.  He is now being declared mentally insane.   Or as we commonly know it, he was brain washed.

The scariest thing is that same process can be done through the phone, to anyone who dares to engage in a conversation with a “random overly friendly stranger”. That story Daddy and mommy always said about not talking to strangers is absolutely true! Phone conversations are included!

He was a good man. Everything he did, he did it for his country. He was a true patriot. Proud of his military service, which he always spoke highly. He was a true American, a man of principals.

When he finally found out of the aberrations committed in the name of ” democracy”, ” liberty” and “capitalism” were just excuses to slowly close the circle on human enslavement he became depressed, antisocial & slowly slipped out of the game and became a hermit. His heart knew the answers that the contradictions in his battled mind could not make sense of.

Unlucky dad could never figure out the depth of the root of the monstrous conspiracy he was indirectly involved in.  He could smell it. He could feel it.  But could not really see it, nor could he ever entirely figure it out!

Poor dad, it must have been hard for him to go down, in such spiritual pain and despair.  But nothing happens without purpose. His life experiences taught me and set the foundation to the amazing path I now travel. It’s a life that has become the only way of life that is worth living. Without his life experiences, I would have never been able to understand and believe what the hands behind the curtains were truly doing to humanity. He taught me all I know of this 3D world.  He showed me the LIE, the monstrous conspiracy that lies before our very own eyes, so aberrant most of us choose to not ever hear or see it.

I met father when I was 20 yrs. Old.  It was just he and I both alone in this world. There were no other family members. He had no friends, at least not one that visited or ever had a lunch with him.  There were rare random nights he spent on the phone, conversations he never spoke of.

After I asked him numerous times why no one he ever spoke or visited us, why they were never invited to our “two man weekend barbecues”, he said they were “Company men” (CIA agents) dangerous and murderous individuals better always to keep them at an “arms length”.

Dad had cut off all his family relations for over the last 50 yrs. He missed his own mother, father and brothers funerals. Not because he did not love them, but because of the international bounty hunters. He had contracts on his head his entire life, the kind that never go away. The job had required many sacrifices and that one must have been the most burdensome.

Father was a proud individual, seasoned and experienced in battle, highly educated and as sharp as anyone could possibly aspire to be. A genuine 007 and he certainly had the good looks as he always dressed just like one of the  ”men in black” in the MIB movie (a popular clothing style in the 1960s).

Read the rest…

Do you understand what the AP scandal is all about?  I have to admit that until I read this piece by Jack Shafer of Reuters, I really didn’t.  I don’t think the press did a good job of trying to explain their own story.  Did you know that the leak had to do with the underwear bomber?  I didn’t.  Never heard or saw that and I follow the news pretty closely.

Shafer writes

Journalists gasp and growl whenever prosecutors issue lawful subpoenas ordering them to divulge their confidential sources or to turn over potential evidence, such as notes, video outtakes or other records. It’s an attack on the First Amendment, It’s an attack on the First Amendment, It’s an attack on the First Amendment, journalists and their lawyers chant. Those chants were heard this week, as it was revealed that Department of Justice prosecutors had seized two months’ worth of records from 20 office, home and cell phone lines used by Associated Press journalists in their investigation into the Yemen underwear-bomber leaks.

First Amendment radicals — I count myself among them — resist any and all such intrusions: You can’t very well have a free press if every unpublished act of journalism can be co-opted by cops, prosecutors and defense attorneys. First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams speaks for most journalists when he denounces the “breathtaking scope” of the AP subpoenas. But the press’s reflexive protests can prevent it from seeing the story in full, which I think is the case in the current leaks investigation.

,,,

The Obama administration has already used the Espionage Act to prosecute more government officials for leaking than all of his predecessors put together, but we shouldn’t automatically lump its pursuit of the underwear-bomb leaker in with those cases. Perhaps this investigation is chasing an extra-extraordinary leak, and the underwear-bomber leak is but one of the drops.

I have to point out here that the Republicans in Congress have pushed the administration to find leakers and, I fear, have caused the Democrats and President Obama to catch their paranoia.

Attorney General Eric Holder has overseen more leak investigations under Obama than were pursued under Bush

Shafer continues

The AP story that has so infuriated the government described the breakup of an al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula plot to place an underwear bomber on board a U.S.-bound airliner. Published on the afternoon of May 7, 2012, the story patted itself on the back for having heeded the White House and CIA requests to not publish the previous week, when the AP first learned of the operation. The AP states in the article that it published only after being told by “officials” that the original “concerns were allayed.” In a chronology published in today’s Washington Post, we’re told that the CIA was no longer resisting publication of the AP story on the day it hit the wire (Monday) and that the White House was planning to “announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday.”

That may be the case, but the government was still incensed by the leak. In fact, it appears that officials were livid. As my Reuters colleagues Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria reported last night, the government found the leak so threatening that it opened a leak investigation before the AP ran its story.

Now, what would make the Obama administration so furious? My guess is it wasn’t the substance of the AP story that has exasperated the government but that the AP found a source or sources that spilled information about an ongoing intelligence operation and that even grander leaks might surge into the press corps’ rain barrels.

At the risk of making the Department of Justice’s argument for it, a leak once sprung can turn into a gusher as the original leakers keep talking and new ones join them, or as the government attempts to explain itself, or as others in the government begin to speak out of turn. From what I can tell, all of the above happened after the AP story appeared.

So there you have it.  It was not the particular leak, but the fact that there was a leaker that could potentially leak again.  As Shafer points out when there is a leak there is also the problem of government officials saying too much and, in effect becoming leakers.  What happened here was the existence of a double agent got out, mostly because of what government officials said in trying to explain the original AP story.   Shafer summarizes the trail and concludes

To begin with, the perpetrators of a successful double-agent operation against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula would not want to brag about their coup for years. Presumably, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula will now use the press reports to walk the dog back to determine whose misplaced trust allowed the agent to penetrate it. That will make the next operation more difficult. Other intelligence operations — and we can assume they are up and running — may also become compromised as the press reports give al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula new clues.

Likewise, the next time the CIA or foreign intelligence agency tries to recruit a double agent, the candidate will judge his handlers wretched secret keepers, regard the assignment a death mission and seek employment elsewhere.

Last, the leaks of information — including those from the lips of Brennan, Clarke and King — signal to potential allies that America can’t be trusted with secrets. “Leaks related to national security can put people at risk,” as Obama put it today in a news conference.

The ultimate audience for the leaks investigation may not be domestic but foreign. Obviously, the government wants to root out the secretspillers. But a country can’t expect foreign intelligence agencies to cooperate if it blows cover of such an operation. I’d wager that the investigations have only begun.

None of this means we should go rooting around people’s cell phone and email records without some protection.  In his reaction to the scandal, President Obama called for Congress to enact an updated media shield law which would replace the Justice Department’s internal regulations (which I think they actually didn’t follow).  Wouldn’t it be interesting for Congress to take some proactive steps instead of just investigating?

Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Related articles

• Here’s Why the Government Went Ballistic Over the AP Leak (motherjones.com)
• Secret AP sweep by Justice Department may have been too broad, but stopping leaks is about saving lives (thesunnews.typepad.com)
• Why The Underwear-Bomber Leak Infuriated The Obama Administration (huffingtonpost.com)
• AP Leak Ended Informant’s Rare Opportunity To Help U.S. (fortunascorner.wordpress.com)
• AP records seizure just latest step in sweeping U.S. leak probe (reuters.com)
• Intel leak in AP probe “embarassing, bad” for CIA (cbsnews.com)
• Leaks, Bombs And Double Agents: More On That AP Story : The Two-Way : NPR (slcabbie.newsvine.com)

When congressional Republicans complete manipulating the Benghazi tragedy, it will be time for the virtually silent Senate intelligence committee to take up three major issues that have been largely ignored.  The committee must investigate the fact that the U.S. presence in Benghazi was an intelligence platform and only nominally a consulate; the politicization by the White House and State Department of CIA analysis of the events in Benghazi; and the Obama administration’s politicization of the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which has virtually destroyed the office and deprived congressional intelligence committees of their most important oversight tool.

When U.S. personnel were airlifted from Benghazi the night of the attack, there were seven Foreign Service and State Department officers and 23 CIA officers onboard.  This fact alone indicates that the consulate was primarily diplomatic cover for an intelligence operation that was known to Libyan militia groups.  The CIA failed to provide adequate security for Benghazi, and its clumsy tradecraft contributed to the tragic failure.  On the night of the attack, the small CIA security team in Benghazi was slow to respond, relying on an untested Libyan intelligence organization to maintain security for U.S. personnel.  After the attack, the long delay in debriefing evacuated personnel contributed to the confusing assessments.

The Senate intelligence committee should investigate why the State Department changed the CIA analysis of Benghazi before it went to the Hill.  The Congress is entitled to the same intelligence analysis that is provided to the White House–with few exceptions.  In the wake of the intelligence hearings in the mid-1970s in response to intelligence abuses during the Vietnam War, the CIA lost its exclusive relationship with the president and had to accept a rough equilibrium between the White House and the Congress.  It serves both branches of government, and is  accountable to both.  It cannot act on presidential requests without clearance from the Congress.

Read more

Senior Obama officials tell the US Senate: the ‘war’, in limitless form, will continue for ‘at least’ another decade – or two

Last October, senior Obama officials anonymously unveiled to the Washington Post their newly minted “disposition matrix”, a complex computer system that will be used to determine how a terrorist suspect will be “disposed of”: indefinite detention, prosecution in a real court, assassination-by-CIA-drones, etc. Their rationale for why this was needed now, a full 12 years after the 9/11 attack:

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism.”

On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether the statutory basis for this “war” – the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) – should be revised (meaning: expanded). This is how Wired’s Spencer Ackerman (soon to be the Guardian US’s national security editor) described the most significant exchange:

“Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, ‘At least 10 to 20 years.’ . . . A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today – atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America’s Thirty Years War.”

That the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the “war on terror” will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of this week’s big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS, and AP/DOJ) combined. The military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of “endless war”. Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this to be so.

Read more

how us the emails! Here, take another look!

The strangest thing about the public release on May 15 of 100 or so emails relating to Benghazi talking points was that the White House had already made these same emails available to Congress roughly two months earlier.

But they weren’t the same emails, were they?

Well, yes, apparently they were exactly the same emails.   But the White House didn’t release them, it just gave a few congresspeople a chance to look at them. But the emails weren’t classified, congresspeople were free to talk about them if they had any problems with then.

But didn’t the emails tell pretty much the same story last winter as they do this spring?

Yes, they tell exactly the same story – the same sloppy, confusing, bureaucratic mishmash of a story featuring a mud-wrestling match between the CIA and the State Department over who would be set up to be the fall guy for four dead Americans. Of course that wasn’t the story Republicans were looking for.

But if that’s the true story, isn’t that the story news media were looking for? Apparently not, since it’s not a very exciting story, especially during an election season that needed all the excitement it could get, no matter how artificial.

Read more

The Events of the Week in Cartoons… 13 to 17 May 2013

Sergei Yolkin

2013

******

The original in Russian had the CIA guy saying “No-o-o-o” in English, with the other two saying “Het” (Nyet) in Russian… just thought that you’d like to know that…

______________________________

Sergei Yolkin summed up events that have been cooking for some time… the USA eliminated the Russian ice hockey team in the quarter-finals of World Cup, the FSB nicked a CIA agent in Moscow for espionage, and the maintenance man will turn off the hot water.

17 May 2013

Sergei Yolkin

RIA-Novosti

http://ria.ru/caricature/20130517/937915697.html

Bill Lair is a WW II Veteran and a very famous CIA Agent that worked in Thailand and Laos. In fact the CIA allowed him to be in the Thai Police as a Colonel.

PARU Patch

I met this great man at his home today and we talked for about 2 hours. He told me that he started PARU, which is s a paramilitary police force. This unit is still in existence  and operational today.

Each member of PARU is trained in airborne operations. PARU trains Royal Thai Police in unconventional warfare and international counter terrorism prevention.  PARU also trains Police in parachuting.

PARU was responsible for training the Hmong people in Laos into SGU’s (Special Guerrilla Units). The Hmong SGU’s were brave men who fought against communism.

Bill Lair today at 89

Bill Lair is an awesome person and so easy to get along with. He said he would never change anything he did, he loved his job at the CIA and loves the organization. He spent several decades in Asia and has many friends from that region of the world. He told me most of those have past on now.

_____________________________

On Friday, the FSB publicly identified an individual it claims was the Moscow station chief of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as of late 2011… a move widely-seen as a breach of protocol in the intelligence community. A man identified as an FSB official named the alleged CIA station chief in an interview with state-run television, in which he gave new details about the agency’s highly-publicised detention of alleged American spy Ryan Fogle earlier this week. In the interview, the FSB official reiterated earlier claims that his agency explicitly asked the CIA to stop trying to recruit Russian security and intelligence officers. In late 2011, he added, the FSB formally warned the CIA station chief in Moscow, whom he identified by name, “In the event that provocative efforts to recruit employees of the Russian special services continue, the FSB … would take reciprocal measures against American intelligence officers”. The officer, his face blacked out, and voice altered, said that Fogle’s brief detention this week… reportedly preceded in January by the unpublicised ouster of another American diplomat suspected of spying… was made public because the CIA continued to disregard the warning.

The Daily Telegraph reported, “A diplomat of the same name [given by the FSB official] is listed as a Counsellor in the US Embassy in Moscow in the Autumn-Winter 2012-13 edition of a directory of foreign diplomatic, media, and business offices in the city”. It wasn’t clear whether the man identified as the station chief is still in Moscow. US Embassy officials weren’t immediately available for comment. On Friday, US State Department spokesman Jen Psaki told a news conference in Washington DC that she hadn’t seen the report and referred further questions to the CIA. On Friday afternoon, the CIA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

17 May 2013

******

On Friday, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers and security experts told RIA-Novosti that Russia’s decision to identify a purported top American spy in the country is an “unprecedented” move in relations between Moscow and Washington with no clear indication of how the USA will react. Peter Earnest, who operated intelligence collection and covert operations in Europe and the Middle East during a 35-year career with the CIA, said, “Certainly, throughout the Cold War, and even after that, there was a practise of not naming the head of the [spy agencies] in the respective countries”. Earnest and other security experts said that the television interview in which a man identified as an FSB officer named an alleged CIA station chief in Moscow puzzled them.

In the interview with state-run television, the FSB officer explained that his agency detained purported US spy Ryan Fogle in Moscow earlier this week because a request in late 2011 to the purported station chief, whom he identified by name, to halt “provocative” CIA efforts to recruit Russian intelligence agents went unheeded. The Daily Telegraph reported, “A diplomat of the same name [given by the FSB official] is listed as a Counsellor in the US Embassy in Moscow in the Autumn-Winter 2012-13 edition of a directory of foreign diplomatic, media, and business offices in the city”. On Friday, neither the US State Department nor the CIA responded to requests for comment.

Melvin Goodman, who served as division chief and senior analyst at the CIA’s Office of Soviet Affairs in the 1970s and 1980s, said, “The leak of the purported spy’s name represents a serious breach in protocol. These things are usually done quietly”. He added that the release of the name was “unprecedented” in the history of American relations with Russia and the USSR. Goodman pointed up that the disclosure of a CIA operative’s name in such a fashion is typically a death knell for the agent’s career, saying, “He could stay operational clandestinely, but I don’t see how they could send him out under any cover”.

Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security services at New York University, called the naming of the alleged station chief a “definite escalation” in the wake of Fogle’s brief detention and subsequent eviction from Russia, where he served as a third secretary in the political section at the US embassy. Galeotti told RIA-Novosti, “It’s almost as if the Russians are inviting the Americans to respond, but as it is, they seem to have Washington off balance”.

Earnest and Goodman both said that without the full picture of the circumstances surrounding Fogle’s detention and the public naming of the purported station chief, it’s difficult to predict how Washington might respond. Goodman said that if Russia’s reaction was indeed precipitated by CIA operatives’ aggressive attempts to recruit Russian intelligence officers, Washington “may just decide to let it go, but without knowing what some of the operational details are, I’d hesitate to speculate on this”.

It wasn’t the first time that the name of an alleged CIA station chief was publicly disclosed in recent years. In 2010 and early 2011, American officials accused Pakistani authorities of leaking the name of two CIA station chiefs in Islamabad to the country’s news media within five months. However, Earnest, the founding executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington DC, noted that Washington’s relationship with Pakistan is considerably different than its relationship with Russia is, adding that there’s no formal protocol dictating how countries should respond in these cases. “It’s very situational, and the fact that you and I and the public don’t know what occasioned the takedown of Fogle means we don’t know what the signal [from Russia] was. That makes it doubly-hard to know the signal of this latest development is. It sort of deepens the mystery”.

Goodman, who spent 24 years as a CIA analyst specialising in Soviet affairs, said the spy spat surprised him given public overtures from both countries in recent weeks indicating they were interested in cooperating on the investigation of last month’s Boston Marathon bombings and ending the civil war in Syria, saying, “This past week suggests that something else is going on”.

18 May 2013 (MSK)

Carl Schreck

RIA-Novosti

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20130517/181209758/Russia-Outs-Alleged-Moscow-CIA-Station-Chief.html

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20130518/181212155/Unprecedented-CIA-Moscow-Chief-Leak-Puzzles-Ex-Spies.html

Professor Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon, who researches how technology impacts privacy, stunned Stahl with an experiment. He photographed random students on the campus and in short order, not only identified several of them, but in a number of cases found their personal information, including social security numbers, just using a facial recognition program he downloaded for free. Acquisti says smart-phones will make “facial searches” as common as Google searches in the future. And nearly everybody can be subject to such prying, even those who are careful about their Internet use.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50146970n

“One of the participants, before doing the experiment, told us, ‘You’re not going to find me because I’m very careful about my photos online.’ And we found him,” says Acquisti, “Because someone else had uploaded a photo of him.”

“We’ve consistently said that we won’t add new face recognition features to our services unless we have strong privacy protections in place,”
Google has faced punishments over privacy violations with past products, including a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over a social networking tool and another one with 38 states over data collection during its Street View mapping project.

Microsoft, which owns Skype, reported receiving 4,713 requests in 2012 from law enforcement, which covered just over 15,000 Skype accounts; the company said it released only “noncontent data, such as a Skype ID, name, e-mail account, billing information and call detail records” if an account is connected to a telephone number.

Old-School Spy Mania

Sergei Yolkin

2013

******

Yolkin captures the utter ridiculousness of this whole affair by showing the “spy” wearing an obvious blonde wig. Nonetheless, Ryan Fogle was an overly-ambitious over-educated little swine caught in his own machinations. This was so derisively-amateurish that it’s apparent that Fogle never had formal training in spycraft. He played right into the hands of the anti-American faction amongst the siloviki. Well, look at the bright side of it all… it would’ve been WORSE if Wet Willy had been elected… Romney’s ignorant bluster would’ve done nothing but deepen the conundrum. America dares to lecture the world…

______________________________

Sergei Yolkin takes a sardonic look at the arrest in Moscow of an American spy, nicked during “a clumsy recruitment” of a Russian special services operative. The cops seized wigs, money, and instructions for recruitment from the alleged CIA agent.

17 May 2013

Sergei Yolkin

RIA-Novosti

http://ria.ru/caricature/20130517/937820535.html

During a month of testimony before the three-judge panel that found General Ríos Montt guilty last Friday, the prosecution never raised the issue of American military backing in the army’s war against leftist guerrillas. The 86-year-old former dictator barely mentioned the United States when he argued in his own defense that he had no operational command over the troops that massacred and terrorized the Maya-Ixil population during his rule in 1982 and 1983.

The current American ambassador, Arnold A. Chacon, sat as a spectator in a show of support for the trial.

After the 1954 coup deposed the reformist President Jacobo Arbenz, the United States supported a series of military dictators, particularly after the victory of the Cuban revolution in 1959.

In the 1990s, the American government revealed that the C.I.A. had been paying top military officers throughout the period (of massacres).

For some in Guatemala, the virtual invisibility of the American role in the trial was disturbing.

“Who trained them?” asked Raquel Zelaya, a former peace negotiator for the government who now runs a research institute, referring to American support for the military. The trial seemed to be removed from all historical context, she said.

Lawmakers are considering enacting a new authorization, because the original Qaeda network has been largely decimated, while the current threat is increasingly seen as arising from terrorist groups in places like Yemen that share Al Qaeda’s ideology but have no connection to the 2001 attacks.  Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, noted that the 2001 statute said nothing about “associated forces” of Al Qaeda. He said the administration’s theory had “essentially rewritten the Constitution here today” because it was up to Congress to declare war.

“Every major military agency receives an enormous amount of requests about UFOs.”

There is a group of people in America that may be more committed to prying documents from the government than just about anyone else: People who believe that Unidentified Flying Objects are real.

UFO believers have been dutifully trying to prove the existence of alien lifeforms for decades, largely by submitting countless Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. These requests are so exhaustive, they’ve actually spawned new laws for how government decides to give up its other (more mundane) secrets.

SEE MORE: What would you do?

“There are individuals who file FOIA requests every single time a new report of a UFO comes in, asking all the relevant agencies to look for mentions of a triangular object” says Kel McClanahan, an attorney specializing in national security and privacy law. “Every major military agency receives an enormous amount of requests about UFOs.”

One of those FOIA requesters is 32-year-old John Greenewald Jr., a television producer and writer in North Hollywood, Calif. He says he’s filed hundreds of FOIA requests about UFOs. He filed his first request when he was 15, and received a four-page document detailing the 1976 Tehran UFO encounter that read “like an X-Files episode.” After that, he says he “was hooked,” and has since amassed more than 700,000 pages of government documents, most of which he’s posted online.

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He’s not the only one. Larry Bryant, who spent decades writing for U.S. Army publications, claims that he has “filed more UFO-related lawsuits in federal court than has anyone else in the entire universe.”

It’s not unusual for a UFO FOIA case to make it to court. In a 1981 case, Ground Saucer Watch v. CIA, William Spaulding, head of a small UFO group, alleged that the CIA was hiding information about the “Robertson panel,” a government intelligence advisory committee that met in 1953 to investigate a spate of UFO sightings. The group filed a FOIA lawsuit, which forced the CIA to conduct a search of all UFO-related documents — even if it was a piece of paper stuck under a secretary’s desk.

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According to the CIA’s website, “It was much like the John F. Kennedy assassination issue. No matter how much material the Agency released and no matter how dull and prosaic the information, people continued to believe in a Agency coverup and conspiracy.”

McClanahan says the real implication of this case came in determining how far down the rabbit hole an agency has to go to find a document. “While the court ended up ruling against Ground Saucer Watch, it took for granted that the agency had to do a full, comprehensive search for requested documents. And it also set a line where if you’re looking for say, every document about Martin Luther King Jr, and one of those document mentions a church burning, the government is not expected to reasonably find the document related to the church.” Today, the original 1981 case has been cited in hundreds of other decisions, and the CIA proactively puts UFO documents dating all the way back to the 1940s on its website.

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Like the CIA, other government agencies are expected to search in every nook and cranny for a FOIA request, even one about aliens. In a 2007 case, Kean v. NASA, a plaintiff requested historical documents concerning an object that allegedly fell from the sky and crashed in Kecksburg, Pa., in the 1960s. The court ultimately determined that NASA didn’t adequately search for the documents, and directed NASA to come up with a plan to look for them again.

Even when a UFO group doesn’t win a case, like what happened in 2001 in Citizens Against UFO Secrecy v. DOD, it still provides useful information for Americans wishing to file future FOIA requests. In UFO Secrecy, the plaintiff produced dozens of eyewitness accounts of the alleged UFO, but the court determined that “speculation that documents exist is insufficient to create a genuine issue of material fact.” So even if Benghazi conspiracy theorists produced dozens of eyewitnesses to support a certain allegation, it makes no difference if the government doesn’t have any documentation of it. “Because of this case, you’ll see plaintiffs fighting about whether or not something happened — but a judge working by the book will rule against them, because they didn’t fight the right fight,” says McClanahan.

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Finally, say that a concerned American is looking for all information related to harmful contaminated water at the Marine Corps Camp Lejeune military base. Would the more effective search be “water tanks and toxins,” or “water tanks or toxins?” Thanks to Citizens Against UFO Secrecy, the government ultimately has to choose the conjunction that is not unusual and unreasonable, so the hypothetical requester doesn’t end up with a lot of information about random water tanks.

Whether or not you fall into the camp of the 36 percent of Americans who believe that UFOs are zooming around Earth, you’ve got to hand it to the persistence of the believers — the CIA and the National Security Agency are actually dumping UFO-related cables on their public websites. “What other advocacy group can say that they’re getting the government to proactively disclose everything there is to know about a subject?” says McClanahan.

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As John Greenewald Jr. puts it: “I would say all of my requests have been successful, in a way. Even a negative response tells a story and offers evidence… In regards to UFOs, there is always something to look for.”

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Other stories from this section:

• The myths of leak investigations
• Why is the FBI pursuing this leak so aggressively?
• My advice for the class of 2013

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It is very unfortunate that often we take freedom for granted and forget the pain that the generations before us had endured under the yoke of a foreign rule. Such was the pain and stigma of slavery that the great Muslim leader and freedom fighter Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar declared at the first Round Table Conference held in London in 1930, that he would not return to India alive unless the country was set free. “I would prefer to die in a foreign country so long as it is a free country,” he addressed to the British, and went on, “and if you do not give us freedom in India you will have to give me a grave here.” He died in London and was buried in Jerusalem. He had asked in his will that he be buried there because he did not want to return to a “slave country.” It would take seventeen more tumultuous years before his namesake Muhammad Ali Jinnah would prise away freedom from the jaws of death. Jinnah would accept a moth eaten Pakistan at great personal cost (the premature death of his young wife and loss of his personal property in Bombay) and national loss (death and destruction in Punjab and Bengal) because time was running out for him. Jinnah, the Great Leader had defied all odds to win liberty for his countrymen. The great struggle had left him too weak and enfeebled to defy the grim reaper. His mission accomplished, Jinnah died almost a year later. A disconsolate but grateful nation buried him atop a hillock overlooking Karachi, his birthplace and the capital of his newly founded country.

I was born ten years after Pakistan became a free country. My children were born nearly forty years later. We all belong to the post-independence era. We are Pakistanis by birth. We have known no other nationality. We have not known slavery. We have savoured the fruits of freedom without having experienced the pangs of slavery. My late father, a student in Lahore’s famous Government College, had campaigned for the Muslim League candidate before partition. He often explained that it was important for the sake of freedom that their election campaign was a success. My mother a young teenager, travelled on a military special train to Pakistan, huddled and petrified by the horrors of communal violence that ravaged the countryside. Pakistan meant safety and freedom from fear. It was the promised homeland for Muslims of India and all those who opted to stay here. A new nation state, where they were free to practice their faith and traditions irrespective of caste or creed, and fear or favour. The prominent white margin in the national flag symbolised their rights as minorities in a free state.

The question often asked is whether the dream has gone sour and if indeed it has. where have we erred? Admittedly our record as a free and independent nation has not been unblemished. As we have struggled to find an honourable place for ourselves among the comity of nations, we have committed grave sins. Some of our mistakes may have not been entirely of our own making but other more grievous and fatal wounds have been self-inflicted. In most cases we have suffered by sacrificing national interests at the altar of self-interest.

What we need to understand is that our struggle for freedom had cost our earlier generations dearly. Some had died yearning for a free homeland. Those, who could make a choice didn’t even want an interment in a colonised country. Others, more fortunate ones left behind their native land to begin anew in a strange and alien surrounding. The choice of freedom was too great to forego and ignore. Most of them took the plunge without a second thought. Some succeeded in making a successful life for themselves, others could not prosper but none thought of going back. They had turned the leaf and they simply had to move on in life. Mercifully we are not presented with any stark choices that those before us had to contend with. True, some of us go through great deal of trouble to immigrate to more prosperous countries. There is no harm in seizing better opportunities and improving the quality of life. The only thing to remember is that we are blessed with a free country, where we can do our best to thrive and flourish and in the bargain add to our nation’s wealth.

In these times of doom and gloom, we need to reflect on how bad it was before we became a free nation or how worse it could have been if we had continued to languish under colonial rule. See for example the misery of the Kashmiris, protesting against the cold blooded murder of their youth in the streets of Srinagar and chanting the slogans of AZADI (liberty) and ‘Go India Go;’ and the plight of the Palestinians, who are hostages in their own country, where no freedom flotilla can reach them. Freedom is a cherished commodity for all who possess it and for those who strive for it.