Tag: cia

Would Liberals Have Cheered Nixon’s Resignation Fifty Years Ago If They Knew The CIA Was Behind It?

Fifty years ago, on August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace on the threshold of impeachment as a result of the Watergate scandal.

Two years earlier, five men, including a salaried security coordinator for President Nixon’s re-election committee, were arrested for breaking into and illegally wiretapping the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate Hotel.

Later that year, reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post discovered a higher-echelon conspiracy surrounding the incident and then published a book, All the President’s Men, that established them as heroes for having uncovered the corruption in the Nixon administration, which supposedly helped to restore the rule of law to government.

Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting prompted establishment of a Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (the “Watergate Committee”), headed by Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC), which garnered testimony from, among others, former White House Legal Counsel John Dean.

He testified that the Watergate break-in had been approved by former Attorney General John Mitchell with the knowledge of White House advisers John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, and that President Nixon had been aware of the cover-up and tried to order the FBI to halt the investigation.

To this day, most history textbooks repeat the official story about Watergate in which Nixon and his staffers are the villains, and Woodward and Bernstein and the Senate Committee, are the heroes.

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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the Problem of Torture

In the months following the attacks of 9/11, the government laid the blame for orchestrating them on Osama bin Laden. Then, after it murdered bin Laden, the government decided that the true mastermind was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

By the time of bin Laden’s death, Mohammed had already been tortured by CIA agents for three years at various black sites and charged with conspiracy to commit mass murder, to be tried before an American military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Mohammed and four other alleged conspirators have been awaiting trial since their arrivals at Gitmo in 2006. Since then, numerous government military and civilian prosecutors, as well as numerous military judges, have rotated into and out of the case. Two weeks ago, the government and the defendants agreed to a guilty plea in return for life in prison at Gitmo. Then, last week, the Department of Defense abruptly changed its mind and rescinded its approval of the guilty pleas.

Here is the backstory.

The concept of military tribunals for the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks was born in the administration of President George W. Bush, who argued that the attacks, though conducted by civilians on civilians, were of military magnitude and thus warranted a military response. Throughout the entire 22-year existence of the U.S. military prison at Gitmo, no one has been tried for causing or carrying out the crimes of 9/11. The government tried only one person for crimes related to 9/11. That was Zacarias Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty in federal court in Virginia to conspiracy for being the 20th hijacker and then was tried in a penalty phase trial where the jury chose life in prison.

Bush’s rationale not only brought us the fruitless and destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; it also brought a host of legal problems unforeseen by Bush and his revenge-over-justice colleagues. The first legal issue was conspiracy. Since Mohammed did not carry out the attacks, he could only be charged with planning them. But conspiracy is not a war crime, and thus no military tribunal could hear the case. So Congress came up with a historic first — a military tribunal that would try civilian crimes.

The next issue was where to try Mohammed and his colleagues. President Barack Obama wanted to close Gitmo, which costs $540 million annually, and try Mohammed and the others in federal courts. This would have been consistent with federal law and the U.S. Constitution. But Republicans in Congress viewed Mohammed as too dangerous to bring onto U.S. soil, and so Congress enacted legislation that prohibits the removal of Mohammed and the others to the U.S. for any purpose.

The prohibition on removal means that any life terms would need to be spent at Gitmo. It also means that there would be a legal obstacle to the execution of a death sentence, as Gitmo is not equipped to execute anyone.

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Unrest In Venezuela: It Was A US-Led Coup All Along

“No Venezuelan party that alleges to have 40 percent more votes than President Maduro (as the opposition claims) would hesitate to present the evidence to the National Electoral Council (CNE)…Whoever cries election fraud, must irrefutably prove it, the onus is on them not on the CNE to prove there wasn’t.” – Dr Olga Alvarez, Venezuelan constitutionalist expert.

Despite a monstrous internationally-coordinated, and grotesquely false media campaign of fake news that repeatedly quoted CIA-linked “pollsters” giving extreme right-wing candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, percentages of up to 80 percent of the vote and all supplemented by a propaganda campaign threatening violence, voiced principally by media-lionised, far-right politician, Maria Corina Machado, on July 28, 2024, the people of Venezuela calmly but solidly voted to continue the Bolivarian process by re-electing Nicolas Maduro for the 2025-2031 period.

President Maduro’s victory as in the first CNE bulletin with 80% of the ‘voting records’ (tally sheets) in was 51.2 percent, against Gonzalez 44.2 percent, then confirmed by the CNE second Bulletin with 97 percent of the voting records, Maduro with 52 percent (6,408,844 votes) and Gonzalez with 43 percent (5,326,104 votes.).

The unprecedented level of fake messaging coordination by the world corporate media, even when the target is Venezuela, was surprising. It was exceedingly well-coordinated with an astounding degree of content homogeneity that for months bombarded Venezuelans 24/7 with disinformation. Bombardment which grew in intensity in the few days before the election.

There is only one centre of power in the world with the muscle to command the world corporate media to carry out such an insidious campaign. This involved thousands of newspapers and TV channels going from the most reputable to the most loathsome. The media lies were incessantly repeated with a twist of hatred by tens of thousands of web networks spewing millions of messages daily by bot farms. Opposition leaders, as they have done many times in the past, unashamedly legitimised the campaign of hatred.

Firstly, there was the false media charge that elections in Venezuela are neither free nor fair, allegations with no evidence to back it up. The media just echo the opposition’s claims of ‘fraud’ when they lose, but accept the results when they win. Venezuela’s electoral system has been electronic since 2004, and has been substantially improved over the years with biometric authentication since 2012, yet the opposition has cried fraud in 2004, 2017, 2018, 2023 and now in 2024, but not in 2015 when the opposition got nearly two thirds majority in the National Assembly (which President Maduro recognised immediately).

To top it all up, every election has at least 16 audits at which all political contenders participate and, unless one audit is approved, the next one cannot be undertaken. Venezuela’s election system is fully auditable, verifiable, reliable and fraud-proof, the vote is secret. To this day, the opposition has totally failed to produce irrefutable evidence of their patently false allegations. The only time they promised evidence of ‘fraud’ was for the August 2004 recall referendum (at which Maria Corina Machado-led, US-funded ‘NGO’, Súmate, played a central role) was when opposition politician, Henry Ramos Allup, immediately after the referendum result was announced (won by President Chávez by 59 percent), promised to produce the evidence ‘within 24 hours.’ We are still waiting.

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Court Rules That the Government Can Hide Its Own Report on CIA Torture

The government investigated itself—and you’re not allowed to see the results. On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) doesn’t apply to the Senate’s 2012 report on CIA torture programs. The decision blocks off an avenue to find out what’s in the 6,700-page paper, which the CIA has fought to keep under wraps for more than a decade.

The ruling comes after a small victory for transparency. On Friday, defense lawyers at the Guantanamo Bay military tribunal were allowed to release a photo of their defendant handcuffed and nude at a CIA black site in 2004. Defense lawyers have mentioned the existence of disturbing photos from black sites, but because almost all evidence at the Guantanamo trials is classified, they have never been able to release these photos to the public.

Over the weekend, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin canceled military prosecutors’ controversial plea deal for three accused Al Qaeda members. Their cases may go to trial—which would allow lawyers to uncover more evidence related to the CIA torture program.

The Senate investigation had been prompted by past CIA attempts to cover its tracks. After learning that the CIA had destroyed tapes of prisoners being tortured, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence began an investigation into the CIA’s entire interrogation program. (CIA officer Gina Haspel, who helped destroy the tapes and had personally watched torture sessions, later became CIA director during the Trump administration.)

By 2012, staffers had dug up reams of evidence on CIA malfeasance. They reported not only the specific torture methods, but also that the CIA had tortured innocent people (including a mentally challenged man and two of the agency’s own informants), that CIA leaders had lied to the public and Congress about the program, and that much of the intelligence gained under torture was useless or worse.

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Historic US-Russia prisoner swap exposes CIA support for Chechen jihad

Western media focused intently on a Russian “murderer” released in the exchange with Washington, but whitewashed the record of his target – a Chechen militant now confirmed as a CIA asset.

August 1 saw the largest prisoner exchange between Moscow and Washington since the end of the Cold War. Among those freed were Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US marine Paul Whelan, who were each serving 16 year sentences for espionage.

In the other direction, Russian opposition activists jailed for criticism of the so-called “special military operation” have now resettled in Western countries. This includes politician Ilya Yashin, sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in December 2022. At a press conference in Bonn, Germany on August 2, he described the feeling of being beside “the wonderful Rhine river”, when just a week earlier he was imprisoned in Siberia, as “really surreal.” But Yashin claimed that his release was difficult to personally accept, “because a murderer was free.”

He referred here to Vadim Krasikov, a Russian convicted of killing the Georgian-born Chechen militant Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin in August 2019, who was also released as part of the deal. He was reportedly of extremely high value to the Kremlin. In a February 2024 interview with US journalist Tucker Carlson, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed trading Gershkovich for an unnamed Russian “patriot” imprisoned in a “US-allied country” for “liquidating a bandit.” 

Krasikov was that “patriot”, and Khangoshvili that “bandit.” In 2004, Khangoshvili led a lethal guerilla operation that killed four Russian soldiers. Krasikov was tasked by the Russian state with serving the Chechen justice, cutting him down in broad daylight in Berlin in 2019. 

While the Russian operative has been subject of intense mainstream interest since the swap, the media has largely whitewashed Khangoshvili’s background. To the extent he was mentioned at all, he was laconically characterized as a “Chechen militant,” or more favorably, as a “dissident.” For some anti-Russian ideologues, the Western media’s failure to completely lionize Khangoshvili demanded a rebuke. Giorgi Kandelaki, formerly a Georgian lawmaker with the United National Movement of the now-imprisoned former President and US posterboy Mikheil Saakashvili, was so repulsed he took to ‘X’ to correct the record.

Kandelaki seethed that Khangoshvili was, in fact, a patriotic Georgian citizen and state “security agent.” What’s more, he was “part of US-Georgian security cooperation,” and “highly respected by the CIA.” The furious former MP suggested Khangoshvili “was assassinated in part because he loyally served” Tbilisi at a time when it was an effective US colony under the puppet Saakashvili’s rule. 

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Some Swapped Prisoners Were Likely ‘On CIA Payroll’

The operation to swap 26 prisoners from seven countries took place in Ankara (Turkiye) on Thursday. As a result, eight Russian citizens, detained and imprisoned in several NATO countries, along with their minor children, were returned to their homeland.

All implications are that some of the people involved in the recent prisoner swap between Moscow and several Western countries were CIA espionage assets, Scott Ritter has told Sputnik.

The exchange that occurred on August 1 appears to have been “a deal hashed out between the Russian secret services and the American CIA,” noted the former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and ex-UN weapons inspector.

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Kremlin Reveals Details of Prisoner Swap With Western Countries

Negotiations for the Russian-US prisoner exchange were primarily conducted between Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and the CIA, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.

The FSB confirmed on Thursday that eight Russians detained and held in custody in a number of NATO countries had been returned home.

A plane carrying the freed prisoners arrived at Moscow’s Vnukovo-2 airport from Ankara late on Thursday, where they were greeted by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russia, in turn, has released 16 people, including seven Russians and five German citizens.

“Negotiations for this complex exchange were conducted through the FSB and CIA. This was the main channel through which the agreement was reached,” Peskov told journalists.

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When Presidents Kill

Sometime before he withdrew from the presidential race, President Joe Biden secretly reaffirmed his own self-willed and self-created authority to kill persons in other countries, so long as the CIA and its military counterparts have “near certainty” that the target of the homicide is a member of a terrorist organization. That standard was concocted by the George W. Bush administration in 2002.

There is no “near certainty” standard in the law, as the phrase is oxymoronic and defies a rational definition – like “nearly pregnant.”

Just as one is either pregnant or not, one is either certain or not. There is no “near” there.

Yet, the creation of this standard underscores the lamentable absence of the rule of law in government today. The Biden administration and its three immediate predecessors have all deployed drones to kill persons who were not engaged in acts of violence at the time of their killing, irrespective of the near certainty of their membership in any organizations.

“Terrorist” cannot be a standard for extrajudicial murder because it is subjective. To King George III, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were terrorists. To the poor folks in Libya and Syria, to the popularly elected governments toppled by CIA-inspired violence in Iran in 1953 and in Ukraine in 2014, to the innocents tortured by the CIA at black sites around the world, the CIA is a terrorist organization.

The presidential use of drones to kill persons overseas began in 2002 with Bush-ordered targeted killings. It continued under President Barack Obama – who even killed Americans overseas. The rules for killing were made up by each president. They were relaxed under President Donald Trump, who gave CIA senior personnel and military commanders the authority to kill without his express approval for each killing. Trump’s folks infamously murdered an Iranian general and his companions on their way to lunch with Iraqi generals to negotiate peace between the two countries.

The Biden administration quietly took back the Trump grants of authority so that today only the president can authorize targeted killing. Yet, there is no moral, constitutional or legal authority for these killings. But presidents of both political parties do it anyway.

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CIA Denies Conspiracy Theory That It Used MKUltra on Trump Shooter

Was the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump earlier this month part of a secret CIA program involving brainwashed killers? That’s the claim being made by some far-right accounts on X, but the U.S. intelligence agency is taking the unusual step of directly and forcefully denying the claims.

When it was revealed in the 1970s that the CIA had tried to develop a mind-manipulation program called MKUltra, it sounded like the most absurd conspiracy theory around. Unfortunately, it turned out to be true, even if the suggestive results of the program–and potential for creating Manchurian Candidate-like killers–have been exaggerated in the subsequent decades.

But MKUltra has become quite a meme in the 2020s, with many conspiracy theorists jumping into the fray after Trump was shot at by a 20-year-old during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. The shooter was identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks who acted alone. But some people on social media are trying to claim Crooks was somehow trained by the CIA under an MKUltra program to go after Trump.

“What if US President Joe Biden’s ‘mean tweets’ triggered Thomas Matthew Crooks?” one X account that goes by the name Real Global News tweeted a couple days after the shooting. “Yes like an #MKUltra test subject. I dont want to go into conspiracy theories here but the CIA did mind control experiments like the #ManchurianCandidate. Wait for the trigger before acting.”

Another account with the handle @MJTruthUltra tweeted “MKUltra anyone?” with a list of supposedly suspicious claims about Crooks and the way local police handled the investigation into the assassination attempt against Trump.

The CIA, for its part, decided to push back very publicly against these claims, something the agency doesn’t often do when weird conspiracy theories are floating around on the internet.

“These claims are utterly false, absurd, and damaging,” a CIA spokesperson told Gizmodo on Thursday. “The CIA had no relationship whatsoever with Thomas Crooks. Regarding MKULTRA, the CIA’s program was shut down more than 40 years ago, and declassified information about the program is publicly available on CIA.gov.”

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Uncovering the CIA & Rockefeller Foundation’s Role in the Depopulation Forecast released by Deagel

In a world where reality often seems stranger than fiction, the machinations behind global events can be an enigma wrapped in mystery.

One such intrigue revolves around Deagel.com, an obscure online entity known for its exhaustive data on military capabilities and eyebrow-raising depopulation forecasts for 2025.

We can reveal that recent findings appear to link Deagel directly to significant players on the world stage: The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)/ The Pentagon, and The Rockefeller Foundation.

And current real-world data on excess deaths in the West strongly suggest Deagel’s depopulation forecast is not just an estimation but in fact, a target that is on track to be hit thanks to the deadly effects of Covid-19 vaccination.

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