U.S. Delivers 3,000 Tons Of Weapons And Ammo To Al-Qaeda and Co. in Syria

By Moon of Alabama

Global Research, April 08, 2016

 http://www.moonofalabama.org/2016/04/us-delivers-3000-tons-of-weapons-and-ammo-to-al-qaeda-co-in-syria.html

The United States via its Central Intelligence Service is still delivering thousands of tons of additional weapons to al-Qaeda and others in Syria.
The British military information service Jane’s found the transport solicitation for the shipment on the U.S. government website FedBizOps.gov. Janes writes:

The FBO has released two solicitations in recent months looking for shipping companies to transport explosive material from Eastern Europe to the Jordanian port of Aqaba on behalf of the US Navy’s Military Sealift Command. Released on 3 November 2015, the first solicitation sought a contractor to ship 81 containers of cargo that included explosive material from Constanta in Bulgaria to Aqaba.
…
The cargo listed in the document included AK-47 rifles, PKM general-purpose machine guns, DShK heavy machine guns, RPG-7 rocket launchers, and 9K111M Faktoria anti-tank guided weapon (ATGW) systems. The Faktoria is an improved version of the 9K111 Fagot ATGW, the primary difference being that its missile has a tandem warhead for defeating explosive reactive armour (ERA) fitted to some tanks.

Screenshot of Jane’s Report
The Jane’s author tweeted the full article (copy here).
One ship with nearly one thousand tons of weapons and ammo left Constanta in Romania on December 5. The weapons are from Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania. It sailed to Agalar in Turkey which has a military pier and then to Aqaba in Jordan. Another ship with more than two-thousand tons of weapons and ammo left in late March, followed the same route and was last recorded on its way to Aqaba on April 4.
We already knew that the “rebels” in Syria received plenty of weapons during the official ceasefire. We also know that these “rebels” regularly deliver half of their weapon hauls from Turkey and Jordan to al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al-Nusra):

Hard-core Islamists in the Nusra Front have long outgunned the more secular, nationalist, Western-supported rebels. According to FSA officers, Nusra routinely harvests up to half the weapons supplied by the Friends of Syria, a collection of countries opposed to Assad, ..

U.S. and Turkey supported “rebels” took part in the recent attack on Tal al-Eis against Syrian government forces which was launched with three suicide bombs by al-Qaeda in Syria. This was an indisputable breaking of the ceasefire agreement between Russia and the U.S. It is very likely that some of the weapons and ammunition the U.S. delivered in December were used in this attack.
Millions of rifle, machine-gun and mortar shots, thousands of new light and heavy weapons and hundreds of new anti-tank missiles were delivered by the U.S.. Neither Turkey nor Jordan use such weapons of Soviet providence. These weapons are going to Syria where, as has been reported for years by several independent sources, half of them go directly to al-Qaeda.
From historic experience we can be sure that the consequence of this weaponizing of takfiris will be not only be the death of “brown people” in the Middle East, but also attacks on “western” people and interests.
Skyscrapers falling in New York and hundreds of random people getting killed in Paris, Brussels, London and (likely soon) Berlin seem not be enough to deter the politicians and “experts” that actively support this criminal war on Syria and its people.

The original source of this article is Moon of Alabama

 

The War In Afghanistan Is A Good Thing (If You're A Drug-Dealer)

by Tyler Durden

Jul 23, 2016 4:40 PM

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-23/war-afghanistan-good-thing-if-youre-drug-dealer 

Submitted by Mnar Muhawesh via MintPressNews.com,
The “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” are more intertwined than that media and our elected officials would like us to think.
And this became full front and center when the U.S.-led global crusades overlapped in Afghanistan, leaving in their wake a legacy of death, addiction and government corruption tainting Afghan and American soil.
In the U.S., the War in Afghanistan is among the major contributing factors to the country’s devastating heroin epidemic.

Over 10,000 people in America died of heroin-related overdoses in 2014 alone– an epidemic fuelled partly by the low cost and availability of one of the world’s most addictive, and most deadly, drugs.

Despite our promises to eradicate the black market, the U.S. actually enables the illegal drug trade. As journalist Abby Martin writes, the U.S. government has had a long history of facilitating the global drug trade: In the 1950s, it allowed opium to be moved, processed and trafficked throughout the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia while it trained Taiwanese troops to fight Communist China. In the 80s, the CIA provided logistical and financial support to anti-Communist Contras in Nicaragua who were also known international drug traffickers.
Since the DEA got the boot from the Bolivian government in 2008, cocaine production in that country has steadily fallen year after year.
And in 2012, a Mexican government official claimed that rather than fighting drug traffickers, the CIA and other international security forces are actually trying to “manage the drug trade.”
“It’s like pest control companies, they only control,” Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, the Chihuahua spokesman, told Al Jazeera. “If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job. If they finish the drug business, they finish their jobs.”
While there is no conclusive proof that the CIA is physically running opium out of Afghanistan,  Martin notes:

“[I]t’s hard to believe that a region under full US military occupation – with guard posts and surveillance drones monitoring the mountains of Tora Bora – aren’t able to track supply routes of opium exported from the country’s various poppy farms (you know, the ones the US military are guarding).”

Ironically, it was the U.S. mission to obliterate the Taliban in the “War on Terror” that turned Afghanistan into a “narco state.”
Prior to the War in Afghanistan, the Taliban actually offered subsidies to farmers to grow food crops not drugs.
In the summer of 2000, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar announced a total ban on the cultivation of opium poppy, the plant from which heroin is made. Those caught planting poppies in Taliban-controlled parts of the country were beaten and marched through villages with motor oil on their faces.

The only opium harvest the following spring was in the northeast, in an area controlled by the Taliban’s rivals, the Northern Alliance. That year, as Matthieu Aikins reported for Rolling Stone in 2012, “Opium production fell from an estimated 3,276 tons in 2000 to 185 tons in 2001.”
But then 9/11 hit and the Bush administration pushed into Afghanistan once again, carrying the banner of the “War on Terror.”
“When the Taliban fled or went into hiding, the farmers lost their financial support to grow food, and returned to growing heroin, a crop that thrives in regions of Afghanistan,” as Dr. Steven Kassels noted in a 2015 piece for Social Justice Solutions.
Seeking a “light footprint” in Afghanistan, the U.S. and our allies teamed up with what Aikins describes as “anti-Taliban warlords.” Aikins reported: “Within six months of the U.S. invasion, the warlords we backed were running the opium trade, and the spring of 2002 saw a bumper harvest of 3,400 tons.”
That’s right: The War in Afghanistan saw the country’s practically dead opium industry expanded dramatically. By 2014, Afghanistan was producing twice as much opium as it did in 2000. By 2015, Afghanistan was the source of 90 percent of the world’s opium poppy.
Since 2001, the U.S. has poured billions into counternarcotics programs in Afghanistan. How could this industry flourish right under the nose of the U.S. and our allies? Well, quite simply, because we let it: Aikins alleges that the DEA, FBI, the Justice Department and the Treasury ALL knew about their corrupt allies in the country, but did nothing to pursue them because it would have derailed the troop surge.
“The drug is entwined with the highest levels of the Afghan government and the economy in a way that makes the cocaine business in Escobar-era Colombia look like a sideshow,” Aikins writes, later noting: “On the ground, American commanders’ short-term imperatives of combat operations and logistics trumped other advisers’ long-term concerns over corruption, narcotics and human rights abuses, every time.”
But where did it all go? Well, as Aikins reported, Afghanistan’s “borders leak opium like sieves into five neighboring countries.”
The increased supply flooded European, Asian and Middle Eastern markets. And with Europe no longer reaching out to opium producers in South America and Mexico, that excess flooded the American market. Prices fell everywhere, making heroin dangerously cheap and dangerously accessible.
And this is where we find ourselves today: Heroin, one of the most addictive and deadly substances on Earth, can be found for as little a $4 a bag in some American cities.
Between 2002 and 2013, heroin-related overdose deaths quadrupled. In 2014, more than 10,000 people died of heroin overdoses in America. Should we add these casualties to the 3,504 U.S. and coalition soldiers who died in the war, or the 26,000 dead Afghan civilians?
And heroin use is up across the entire population. Age, sex, race, income, location — it doesn’t matter. And, as the CDC notes, “Some of the greatest increases occurred in demographic groups with historically low rates of heroin use: women, the privately insured, and people with higher incomes.”
Unfortunately, it’s not just the U.S. suffering under the weight of a heroin addiction that’s hit epidemic proportions: Afghanistan, which has a long cultural tradition of smoking opium, is dealing not just with its status as a “narco state,” as Aikins described it, but also with the health and social ills stemming from increased heroin use.
In the process of waging a “War on Terror,” we lost the “War on Drugs.” Both wars deal in corruption and violence, and they put real human lives on the line — not just on the battlefield, but in the fields where farmers cultivate crops and in the neighborhoods where people live.

CIA ‘Plan B’ for Syria would give rebels MANPADs to 'counter Russia' - report

Published time: 13 Apr, 2016 11:16

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© Reuters

A covert ‘Plan B’ for Syria reserved for a “violation of ceasefire” is being pushed to the US president, anonymous officials told media. Arming “moderate” Syrian rebels with anti-aircraft weapons to fight the “Russia-backed regime” is again on the table.

Back in February, the Wall Street Journal first reported that President Barack Obama’s senior military and intelligence advisers were insisting that a back-up plan is necessary to “counter Russia” in Syria.
The fresh details obtained by the WSJ suggest the CIA has given “provisional assurances” to coalition members to expand support to Syrian armed opposition groups fighting troops of President Bashar Assad. Still, the White House reserved the right to define which weapons systems are to be introduced to the battlefield – if the truce fails and full-scale fighting resumes.
On the eve of the ceasefire agreement coming into effect in Syria at midnight on February 27, the heads of Middle East intelligence agencies met to lay out a plan for waging war after the truce. And consultations on the matter never stopped ever since.
Today Washington and its allies, such as Ankara and Riyadh, are discussing which weapon systems are to be delivered to “vetted” Syrian rebels under this secret program, the WSJ reports.
Experts agree that what the anti-government forces in Syria need the most are electronic means to ensure effective suppression of President Bashar Assad’s artillery batteries and take down fighter jets. For the latter purpose, man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADs) are on the table, with Turkey and Saudi Arabia eager to supply them to the Syrian rebels.
The WSJ claims that US officials have conveyed a “private message” to their Russian counterparts that a return to full-scale fighting could “end up putting more Russian pilots in danger.”
The rebels have already obtained a “small number” of MANPADs “through illicit channels,” the CIA hints, thus posing danger to civil aircrafts. The CIA is now busy preventing more MANPADs from “slipping uncontrollably” into the war zone.
"If the ceasefire collapses, if the negotiations don’t go anywhere, and we’re back to full throttle civil war, all bets will be off,” the WSJ cited a senior Obama administration official as saying in a message to Moscow. “The outside patrons will double and triple down, throwing everything they can into Syria, including much more lethal weaponry.”
Actually, the “full-scale fighting” the US warns of never ended in Syria, at least against some parties in the conflict: no armistice was signed with terrorist groups like Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) and Al-Nusra Front.
Since the beginning of the ceasefire six weeks ago, dozens of local rebel groups throughout Syria joined the truce or even teamed up with the government forces against the terrorists. The armed formations that opted to side with terrorists are being bombed by Russian and Syrian air forces.
In the given conditions, the question about who would announce that the ceasefire has been violated remains open. Just as soon it could be voiced at the upcoming peace talks between Damascus and opposition groups that are set to resume this week in Geneva.
In the meantime, Washington’s Arab allies suggested high tech means to limit MANPADs’ operability by fitting them with “geographical sensors” to prevent them from being used outside designated areas, but the US remained silent to the proposal. Instead, Washington has been reportedly pressing main sponsors of the Syrian armed rebels, namely Qatar and Saudi Arabia, to use their influence to order the Syrian rebels to abide by the ceasefire.
The CIA’s covert program to provide the Syrian anti-government forces with “limited supplies” of small arms and ammunition was launched in 2013 and has been growing steadily. A year later, the CIA was already providing rebels with antitank TOW missiles today actively used on the battlefield against Assad troops and eventually rescue groups of the Russian task force deployed to Syria.

How America’s Modern Shadow Government Can Be Traced Back to One Very Evil Man – Allen Dulles

Posted on October 14, 2015 by WashingtonsBlog

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Dulles—who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats—falls firmly in the latter camp. 
But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s. That was the key period when the national security state was constructed in this country, and where it begins to overshadow American democracy. It’s almost like Game of Thrones to me, where you have the dynastic struggles between these power groups within the American system for control of the country and the world…
Absolutely. The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went. He had to build a team of cutthroats and assassins on the ground to go around eliminating the people he wanted to eliminate, who he felt were in the way of American interests. He called them communists. We call them terrorists today. And of course the most controversial part of my book, I’m sure, will be the end, where I say there was blowback from that. Because that killing machine in some way was brought back home.
– From the Mother Jones article: You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles
Many of you will be intimately familiar with the name Allen Dulles. Younger readers, of my generation or below, will be far less so. It is precisely because the youth of this nation remain so ignorant of the nefarious characters in America’s past, that David Talbot’s recently published book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, is so incredibly important.
Mr. Talbot has been recently conducting invaluable interviews about the book with various media organizations. One of the best I’ve seen is with Mother Jones. Here’s some of what he had to say about America’s longest serving CIA director:

But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s. That was the key period when the national security state was constructed in this country, and where it begins to overshadow American democracy. It’s almost like Game of Thrones to me, where you have the dynastic struggles between these power groups within the American system for control of the country and the world.
I focused on those elements that I thought were important to understanding him. I thought other books covered that ground fairly well before me. But what they left out was the interesting nuances and shadow aspects of Dulles’s biography. I think that you can make a case, although I didn’t explicitly say this in the book, for Allen Dulles being a psychopath.
They’ve done studies of people in power, and they all have to be, to some extent, on the spectrum. You have to be unfeeling to a certain extent to send people to their death in war and take the kind of actions that men and women in power routinely have to take. But with Dulles, I think he went to the next step. His own wife and mistress called him “the Shark.” His favorite word was whether you were “useful” to him or not. And this went for people he was sleeping with or people he was manipulating in espionage or so on. He was the kind of man that could cold-bloodedly, again and again, send people to their death, including people he was familiar with and supposedly fond of.
There’s a thread there between people like Dulles up through Dick Cheney and [Donald] Rumsfeld—who was sitting at Dulles’s knee at one point. I was fascinated to find that correspondence between a young Congressman Rumsfeld and Allen Dulles, who he was looking to for wisdom and guidance as a young politician.
Absolutely. The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went. He had to build a team of cutthroats and assassins on the ground to go around eliminating the people he wanted to eliminate, who he felt were in the way of American interests. He called them communists. We call them terrorists today. And of course the most controversial part of my book, I’m sure, will be the end, where I say there was blowback from that. Because that killing machine in some way was brought back home.

How about Dulles’ role in the assassination of JFK? Talbot pulls no punches here either…

To me it’s one of the greatest examples of media incompetence and negligence in American history. I even confronted Ben Bradlee about this, who was probably JFK’s closest friend in the Washington press corps and wrote a book all about JFK and their close friendship. “Why didn’t you, with your investigative resources, try to get [to] the bottom of it?” You should read what he says in Brothers, but basically it came down to, “Well, I thought it would ruin my career.”
I think I have studied this about as much as anyone in my generation at this point, and my final conclusion after 50 years was we have to go there, we have to look at the fact that there’s a wealth of circumstantial evidence that says not only was there, at the highest level, CIA involvement. Probably in the assassination cover-up. But beyond the CIA, because the CIA wouldn’t have acted on its own.

Videos here: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/10/how-americas-modern-shadow-government-can-be-traced-back-to-one-very-evil-man-allen-dulles.html
But the CIA are good guys now. Or so the propagandized American public believes…

Now check out David’s interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now:

Finally, The CIA Admits Covering Up JFK Assassination

Sophie McAdam

http://www.activistpost.com/2015/10/finally-the-cia-admits-covering-up-jfk-assassination.html

OCTOBER 9, 2015

By Sophie McAdam

Suspicions that the CIA covered up JFK’s murder have finally been confirmed, according to an explosive Politico report out this week.  Fifty-two years after the President’s death, declassified documents show that the CIA were in communication with alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald beforeJFK’s murder in 1963, and they were monitoring his mail since 1959.

Not only that but John McCone, who was Chief of the CIA at the time, allegedly hid evidence from the Warren Commission, set up by Lyndon Johnson to investigate JFK’s assassination. The spymaster and other senior CIA officials are accused of withholding ‘incendiary’ information from the commission and therefore perverting the course of justice. The CIA has admitted this.

The Politico report is based on evidence given by CIA historian David Robarge. He has claimed the cover-up was intended to keep the Commission focused on “what the agency believed at the time was the best truth – that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.” McCone directed the CIA to provide only “passive, reactive and selective” assistance to the Warren Commission, meaning the investigation was severely compromised and did not follow up any other leads which may have been crucial in the search for truth.

Robarge also believes that John McCone, who died in 1991, withheld vital information relating to various CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. The historian points out that these plots may well be linked to JFK’s assassination – there’s a strong chance his murder was a revenge attack for CIA operations in Cuba –  but McCone’s unwillingness to explore other potentialities outside of prime suspect Lee Harvey Oswald could have resulted in a grave miscarriage of justice.

JFK was America’s youngest ever and most charismatic President, and his death shocked the nation. Alternative murder theories are popular across the States: A 2013 poll found that only 30% of Americans believe Oswald shot JFK, and that he acted alone. 61% believed that others were involved in a conspiracy (see the embedded video to find out why).

David Robarge first published these exclusive claims in a secret internal CIA magazine in 2013. His claims have now been declassified and can be publicly accessed here on the George Washington University’s National Security Archive. Robarge has also written a biography of John McCone, but his book continues to be classified. What else might the historian have uncovered? Here’s hoping that the full truth of what happened in Dealey Plaza on that fateful day will very soon be common knowledge.

This article (Finally, The CIA Admits Covering Up JFK Assassination) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com

The Tragic Ending To Obama's Bay Of Pigs: CIA Hands Over Syria To Russia

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/10/2015 13:06 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-10/damascus-debacle-how-cia-handed-over-syria-putin-silver-platter 

One week ago, when summarizing the current state of play in Syria, we said that for Obama, "this is shaping up to be the most spectacular US foreign policy debacle since Vietnam." Yesterday, in tacit confirmation of this assessment, the Obama administration threw in the towel on one of the most contentious programs it has implemented in "fighting ISIS", when the Defense Department announced it was abandoning the goal of a U.S.-trained Syrian force.

But this, so far, partial admission of failure only takes care of one part of Obama's problem: there is the question of the "other" rebels supported by the US, those who are not part of the officially-disclosed public program with the fake goal of fighting ISIS; we are talking, of course, about the nearly 10,000 CIA-supported "other rebels", or technically mercenaries, whose only task is to take down Assad.

The same "rebels" whose fate the AP profiles today when it writes that the CIA began a covert operation in 2013 to arm, fund and train a moderate opposition to Assad. Over that time, the CIA has trained an estimated 10,000 fighters, although the number still fighting with so-called moderate forces is unclear.

The effort was separate from the one run by the military, which trained militants willing to promise to take on IS exclusively. That program was widely considered a failure, and on Friday, the Defense Department announced it was abandoning the goal of a U.S.-trained Syrian force, instead opting to equip established groups to fight IS.

It is this effort, too, that in the span of just one month Vladimir Putin has managed to render utterly useless, as it is officially "off the books" and thus the US can't formally support these thousands of "rebel-fighters" whose only real task was to repeat the "success" of Ukraine and overthrow Syria's legitimate president: something which runs counter to the US image of a dignified democracy not still resorting to 1960s tactics of government overthrow. That, and coupled with Russia and Iran set to take strategic control of Syria in the coming months, the US simply has no toehold any more in the critical mid-eastern nation.

Ex-CIA Pilot Gives Sworn Testimony That No Planes Hit The Twin Towers

John Lear, the son of Learjet inventor, shocking claims

By: Ron Baitley-Simens

 on 20th May 2014 @ 3.13pm

http://neonnettle.com/news/211-ex-cia-pilot-gives-sworn-testimony-that-no-planes-hit-the-twin-towers 

A former CIA and civilian pilot has sworn an affidavit, stating that no planes flew into the Twin Towers as it would have been physically impossible.

John Lear, the son of Learjet inventor, Bill Lear, has given his expert evidence that it would have been physically impossible for Boeing 767s, like Flights AA11 and UA175 to have hit the Twin Towers on 9/11, particularly when flown by inexperienced pilots:

‘No Boeing 767 airliners hit the Twin Towers as fraudulently alleged by the government, media, NIST and its contractors’, he stated in the affidavit.

‘Such crashes did not occur because they are physically impossible as depicted, for the following reasons: in the case of UAL 175 going into the south tower, a real Boeing 767 would have begun 'telescoping' when the nose hit the 14 inch steel columns which are 39 inches on center.

‘The vertical and horizontal tail would have instantaneously separated from the aircraft, hit the steel box columns and fallen to the ground.

‘The engines when impacting the steel columns would havemaintained their general shape and either fallen to the ground or been recovered in the debris of the collapsed building.

‘No Boeing 767 could attain a speed of 540 mph at 1000 feet above sea level ‘parasite drag doubles with velocity’ and ‘parasite power’ cubes with velocity.

• The fan portion of the engine is not designed to accept the volume of dense air at that altitude and speed.
• The piece of alleged external fuselage containing 3 or 4 window cutouts is inconsistent with an airplane that hit 14 inch steel box columns, placed at over 500 mph.  It would have crumpled.
• No significant part of the Boeing 767 or engine could have penetrated the 14 inch steel columns and 37 feet beyond the massive core of the tower without part of it falling to the ground.

‘The debris of the collapse should have contained massive sections of the Boeing 767, including 3 engine cores weighing approximately 9000 pounds apiece which could not have been hidden. Yet there is no evidence of any of these massive structural components from either 767 at the WTC. Such complete disappearance of 767s is impossible.'

The affidavit, dated 28^th January 2014 is part of a law suit being pursued by Morgan Reynolds in the United States District Court, Southern District, New York.

In March 2007, Reynolds, a former chief economist under the George W Bush administration filed a Request For Correction with the US National Institute of Science and Technology citing his belief that real commercial jets (Boeings) did not hit the WTC towers.

Although many, including the 9/11 Truth movement initially rejected the ‘no-planes’ theory as too outlandish, with proponents such as John Lear it is gathering traction.

Unlike any other form of statement, an affidavit becomes truth in law, if it is not rebutted.  It will now be up to critics of the theory to present their evidence and analysis to rebut the statement point by point.  If they do not – or cannot – then the US government will by ommisssion be allowing that the account given by the 9/11 Commission is wrong.

The 65 year old retired airline captain and former CIA pilot – who has over 19,000 hours of flight time -- also drew attention to the inexperience of the pilots who allegedly flew the planes:

‘The alleged 'controlled' descent into New York on a relatively straight course by a novice pilot in unlikely in the extreme because of the difficulty of controlling heading, descent rate and descent speed within the parameters of 'controlled' flight.

‘It takes a highly skilled pilot to interpret the "EFIS" (Electronic Flight Instrument Display) display, with which none of the hijacker pilots would have been familiar or received training on, and use his controls, including the ailerons, rudder, elevators, spoilers and throttles to effect, control and maintain a descent.

Lear has, according to his sworn statement, flown over 100 different types of planes during his 40 years of flying and holds more FAA airman certificates than any other FAA certificated airman. He flew secret missions for the CIA in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa between 1967 and 1983 then spent 17 years working for several passenger and cargo airlines as Captain, Check Airman and Instructor.

He is a member of Pilotsfor911truth.org, which has consistently argued that it was impossible for jet airliners to have hit the Twin Towers in the way the 9/11 Commission has suggested.

The Commission did not take evidence from experts or pilots when it conducted its enquiry into the attacks from 2002 to 2004.

After bin Laden backlash, CIA promises: No more vaccination campaigns for spying (and will not seek to exploit DNA or other genetic material - WTH!!)

Amid a deadly backlash again vaccinations and a resurgence of polio in Pakistan, the White House has promised that the CIA will never again use an immunization campaign as a tool of spycraft.

Related Stories

• CIA will no longer use vaccine campaigns for spying The Verge
• CIA: Will not use vaccination programs for spying Associated Press
• CIA: Vaccination programs won't be used as cover Associated Press
• White House Pledges to Stop Using Vaccines as Cover for Spying The Atlantic Wire
• Lawyer for Pakistan doctor jailed over bin Laden hunt quits amid threats Reuters

“I wanted to inform you that the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) directed in August 2013 that the agency make no operational use of vaccination programs, which includes vaccination workers,” President Obama’s top counterterrorism and homeland security advisor, Lisa Monaco, wrote to the deans of 12 public health schools. Yahoo News obtained a copy of the May 16 letter (below).

“Similarly, the Agency will not seek to obtain or exploit DNA or other genetic material acquired through such programs,” Monaco wrote. “This CIA policy applies worldwide and to U.S. and non-U.S. persons alike.”

The Central Intelligence Agency had enlisted a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, to collect intelligence under the guise of an immunization effort in the city of Abbottabad as part of planning for the high-risk May 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound there.
The agency aimed to confirm intelligence that bin Laden was at the compound by comparing DNA obtained from children living there to a sample from the fugitive al-Qaida chief’s late sister, the Guardian newspaper reported in July 2011.
Even before those revelations, the Taliban in Pakistan had already opposed Western-backed vaccination campaigns, claiming that they were secret efforts to sterilize Muslim children. But the CIA’s actions helped fuel an armed backlash against immunization workers, reportedly killing 56 people between December 2012 and May 2014. The victims include not just medical workers but police officers assigned to guard them.
Another result of the CIA’s actions was to lead many Pakistani parents to forgo vaccinations for ailments like polio. The crippling and sometimes fatal illness has no known cure – but there are several safe and effective vaccines, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Of the 77 documented new cases of polio worldwide in calendar year 2014, 61 were in Pakistan, mostly from the remote and restive Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) region, which serves as a Taliban stronghold.
Earlier this month, the World Health Organization imposed travel restrictions on anyone coming from Pakistan, one of just three countries in the world where polio is still endemic. The rules, to be implemented June 1, will require travelers leaving the country to have polio vaccination certificates.
Monaco’s letter came nearly a year and a half after the deans of 12 schools of public health wrote a letter to Obama saying that “as a general principle, public health programs should not be used as cover for covert operations.”
“While political and security agendas may by necessity induce collateral damage, we as an open society set boundaries on these damages, and we believe this sham vaccination campaign exceeded those boundaries,” they wrote, referring to the CIA’s hoax campaign.
CIA Director John Brennan made the decision himself because he “took seriously the concerns raised by the public health community," CIA spokesman Todd Ebitz said.

“By publicizing this policy, our objective is to dispel one canard that militant groups have used as justification for cowardly attacks against vaccination providers,” Ebitz said by email.

Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer on emerging pandemics, was the first to reveal the existence of the letter on Twitter and her Facebook page.

 Lisa Monaco's letter:

View photo

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Revealed: Inside the Senate report on CIA interrogations

by Jason Leopold @JasonLeopold March 18, 2014 8:45AM ET

Exclusive: Intelligence Committee probe concluded some techniques used in CIA interrogations were not legally authorized

A dispute between the CIA and Sen. Dianne Feinstein flared into public view when, in an extraordinary floor speech, she accused the CIA of improperly searching a computer network the agency had set up for lawmakers to investigate the George W. Bush–era interrogation program for suspected terrorists.

A still-classified report on the CIA's interrogation program established in the wake of 9/11 sparked a furious row last week between the agency and Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein. Al Jazeera has learned from sources familiar with its contents that the committee's report alleges that at least one high-value detainee was subjected to torture techniques that went beyond those authorized by George W. Bush's Justice Department.

Two Senate staffers and a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information they disclosed remains classified, told Al Jazeera that the committee's analysis of 6 million pages of classified records also found that some of the harsh measures authorized by the Department of Justice had been applied to at least one detainee before such legal authorization was received. They said the report suggests that the CIA knowingly misled the White House, Congress and the Justice Department about the intelligence value of detainee Zain Abidin Mohammed Husain Abu Zubaydah when using his case to argue in favor of harsher interrogation techniques.

The committee's report, completed in 2012, must go through a declassification review before any part of it may be released, but conflicts between the CIA — the original classification authority for the documents on which the report is based — and the Senate Intelligence Committee have complicated the process. Even if the report was declassified, releasing it would require Senate approval, and it's not clear that Feinstein, a California Democrat, could muster enough votes to do so. President Barack Obama last week expressed support for releasing the report "so that the American people can understand what happened in the past … That can help guide us as we move forward." 

CIA Director John Brennan delivered a rebuttal to the report last June, more than four months after a deadline imposed by the Intelligence Committee. The 120-page CIA response, which addresses what the agency says are flaws in the Senate report, also remains classified. 

The Intelligence Committee probe began in 2009 after allegations that detainees had been tortured in CIA captivity after the 9/11 attacks. Feinstein has said that a CIA internal review contradicts statements previously made by the agency, but Brennan insists that the committee never should have seen documents assembled by former CIA Director Leon Panetta — which Panetta claims was not a review — because they contain sensitive material protected by executive privilege.

The CIA alleges that Senate staffers walked out of a secure facility in Northern Virginia in possession of documents they were not authorized to access. Feinstein and Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., have accused the CIA of monitoring the computers the agency had set up for Senate investigators to review the classified documents related to the agency’s rendition, detention and interrogation program. The Justice Department and FBI are now reviewing the matter.

Agent’s notes missing

Even before accessing the documents, committee staffers received crucial information in a briefing from former FBI agent Ali Soufan in early 2008, according to Al Jazeera’s sources. Soufan — who now runs a private security and intelligence consultancy — told the staffers that he had kept meticulous notes about the methods used by a psychologist under CIA contract to interrogate Abu Zubaydah at a CIA black site in Thailand after his capture in Pakistan in March of 2002. Soufan's account, the staffers say, shows that torture techniques were used on Abu Zubaydah even before some had been sanctioned as permissible by the Bush administration.

Soufan described his briefing of Intelligence Committee researchers in his memoir, “The Black Banners.”

“In early 2008, in a conference room that is referred to as a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF), I gave a classified briefing on Abu Zubaydah to staffers of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,” Soufan wrote. “The staffers present were shocked. What I told them contradicted everything they had been told by Bush administration and CIA officials. When the discussion turned to whether I could prove everything I was saying, I told them, ‘Remember, an FBI agent always keep his notes.’ ” 

The committee tried to gain access to Soufan’s notes — then in possession of the CIA and FBI — after it launched a review of the agency’s detention and interrogation program in 2009. But Senate investigators were told, according to Al Jazeera’s sources, that Soufan’s notes were missing and could not be found in either the FBI’s or CIA’s computer system, where other classified records about the interrogation program were stored.

More than a year later, the notes ended up with the Senate Intelligence Committee, although it's not clear whether they were turned over to committee investigators by the CIA or FBI or if they were in the cache of documents taken by investigators from the secure facility in Northern Virginia in 2010, which Senate staffers refer to as the Panetta review.

Two Senate staffers told Al Jazeera that the Panetta documents question the Bush administration claims about the efficacy of Abu Zubaydah’s torture, and the staffers noted that some of the techniques to which he was subjected early in his captivity had not yet been authorized.

Christopher White, a CIA spokesman, declined to answer questions about the Senate report’s conclusions on Abu Zubaydah, Soufan’s notes or Panetta’s documents. 

Abu Zubaydah torture sketches

A large section of the Intelligence Committee report is devoted to the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, according to Al Jazeera’s sources. Abu Zubaydah was the first high-value detainee captured after 9/11 and the first subjected to the agency’s enhanced interrogation program, and claims about his case were later used by the Bush administration to justify new guidelines for those interrogation techniques.

A few weeks before the 2009 announcement of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation, Abu Zubaydah’s attorney Brent Mickum was invited to meet with committee staffers in a secure conference room in the Senate Hart Office Building in Washington.

Mickum recalled in an interview with Al Jazeera that committee staffers were interested in Abu Zubaydah’s recollections. “The committee was talking about torture and whether it was effective,” Mickum said. “I was able to relate to them what Abu Zubaydah told me. We talked about where he was tortured. I told them where we thought he was. I told them that the government confirmed he was never a member of Al-Qaeda. The drawings were then passed around the room.”

Mickum and his co-counsel, Amy Jacobsen, presented to the committee staffers a set of ink drawings on yellow legal paper marked top secret by the CIA. Abu Zubaydah, they said, made the sketches to depict his torture and the torture of two other high-value detainees.

One of the highly detailed drawings, according to knowledgeable intelligence officials, depict Abu Zubaydah being waterboarded. 

Mickum, who holds a top-secret security clearance, said he could not discuss the contents of the drawings because they are classified. But he said the details were “very impressive … right down to the eyeholes on the leg and hand restraints.”

Senate staffers told Al Jazeera that Abu Zubaydah’s drawings were used in the report’s narrative but that the CIA objected to including copies of the images as exhibits. After the Senate Intelligence Committee voted 9 to 6 in December 2012 to approve the report, copies of the 6,300-page document were sent to the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Justice Department and the CIA.

The Congressional Record says the report is divided into three volumes: a comprehensive history of the interrogation program, the value of the intelligence it revealed and the claims about its nature and effectiveness made by the CIA to Congress, the Justice Department and the media.

When Panetta briefed CIA employees on March 16, 2009, about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s review, he said Feinstein and her Republican counterpart, Kit Bond of Missouri, had “assured” him “that their goal is to draw lessons for future policy decisions, not to punish those who followed guidance from the Department of Justice.”

But now that some of the report’s conclusions suggest that some of the techniques used on Abu Zubaydah and other captives either went beyond what was authorized by the Justice Department or were applied before they had been authorized, the congressional staffers and U.S. officials who spoke to Al Jazeera said CIA officials are seeking further assurances against any criminal investigation.

Thus far, no such assurances have been given, according to Al Jazeera’s sources, nor is there any indication that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report would prompt a criminal investigation.

Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, told Al Jazeera he's not surprised by the CIA's response, because many of those involved in the creation of the interrogation program still work at the agency and may fear being placed in legal jeopardy. 

“Whatever is in the report is big enough and significant enough that the CIA has fought tooth and nail to keep it buried,” Anders said. “If what comes out in this report is as bad as some senators have said, it’s going to require a broader and deeper discussion about what took place, and it will be up to the president and Congress to lead the country through it, figure out what it means and how we need to respond to clean it up.”

Panetta, who also did not return calls or emails seeking comment, announced in 2009 that he, too, planned to review the agency’s detention and interrogation program. He announced the formation of a Director’s Review Group for Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation, whose investigation would run parallel to the one being conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“Peter Clement, a senior leader from our Directorate of Intelligence, will head this new unit, which will have a small number of officers from across the agency, including the National Clandestine Service,” Panetta’s memo said.

That review group was disbanded and never completed its work, according to the U.S. official and the Senate staffers who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., attempted to get Brennan to go on the record during a congressional hearing in January to explain why the Panetta review group did not finish its work. 

“I’ll be happy to address that question at the time when the committee leadership requests that information from me,” Brennan said.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/18/revealed-inside-thesenatereportonciainterrogations.html

CIA Spies On Senate Intelligence Committee In Effort to Block Senate Report On Disastrous CIA Torture Program

Classified Senate Report Documents that Torture Program Was Illegal, Ineffective and Harmful to National Security

Posted on March 5, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/ 

A devastating and secret report by the Senate Intelligence Committee documents in detail how the C.I.A.’s brutalization of terror suspects during the Bush years was unnecessary, ineffective, and deceptively sold to Congress, the White House, Justice Department, and the public.
The CIA has long fought to keep the report secret.
That’s not surprising, given that torture is wholly illegal (and see this).
And that the CIA’s torture program ended up deceiving the 9/11 Commission. Specifically, the 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on third-hand accounts of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees.  The 9/11 Commissioners were not allowed to speak with the detainees, or even their interrogators. Instead, they got their information third-hand.  The Commission itself didn’t really trust the interrogation testimony … yet published it as if it were Gospel.
New York Times investigative reporter Philip Shenon Newsweek noted in a 2009 essay in Newsweek that the 9/11 Commission Report was unreliable because most of the information was based on the statements of tortured detainees.
As NBC News reported:

• Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured

• At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being “tortured.”

• One of the Commission’s main sources of information was tortured until he agreed to sign a confession that he was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ

• The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves

Indeed, the type of torture used by the U.S. on the Guantanamo suspects was of a “special” type. Senator Levin revealed that the the U.S. used Communist torture techniques specifically aimed at creating false confessions. And see these important reports from McClatchy, New York Times, CNN and Huffington Post.

CIA Goes to Great Lengths to Cover Up Torture

The CIA has already gone to great lengths to cover up the torture … and the unreliability of the testimony published by the 9/11 Commission.
The CIA has blocked release of the Senate’s torture report for years. In addition, it has taken many other actions to try to keep the lid on the torture program.
For example, the CIA videotaped the interrogation of 9/11 suspects, but  falsely told the 9/11 Commission that there were no videotapes or other records of the interrogations, and then illegally destroyed all of the tapes and transcripts of the interrogations.
9/11 Commission co-chairs Thomas Keane and Lee Hamilton wrote:

Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.
***
Government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.

(And the chairs of both the 9/11 Commission and the Official Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 said that Soviet-style government “minders” obstructed the investigation into 9/11 by intimidating witnesses.  We believe that some of the minders were from the CIA.)

Spying On Its Overseers In Washington

In the last 24 hours, the New York Times and McClatchy have published stories revealing that the CIA is spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee, as part of its efforts to block release of its torture report.
McClatchy reports:

The CIA Inspector General’s Office has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations of malfeasance at the spy agency in connection with a yet-to-be released Senate Intelligence Committee report into the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program, McClatchy has learned.
The criminal referral may be related to what several knowledgeable people said was CIA monitoring of computers used by Senate aides to prepare the study. The monitoring may have violated an agreement between the committee and the agency.
The development marks an unprecedented breakdown in relations between the CIA and its congressional overseers amid an extraordinary closed-door battle over the 6,300-page report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons. The report is said to be a searing indictment of the program. The CIA has disputed some of the reports findings.

Tech Dirt argues:

In many ways, the idea that the CIA is directly spying on the Senate Committee charged with its own oversight is a bigger potential scandal than many of the Snowden NSA revelations so far.

We partially agree … although we believe that the NSA has also been spying on – and blackmailing – its “overseers” in Washington.