Tag: cia

Inside the ‘Gateway Process,’ the CIA’s Quest to Decode Consciousness and Unlock Time Travel

In 1983, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Wayne M. McDonnell was asked to write a report for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about a project called the Gateway Process. His report, declassified in 2003, gives the “scientific” underpinnings—as well as instructions and technical assistance—to help people convert the energy of their minds and bodies into a kind of laser beam that can transcend spacetime. The goal was to “gain access to the … intuitive knowledge which the universe offers,” as well as travel in time and commune with other-dimensional beings.

Even more intriguing, one seemingly crucial part of the document, page 25, went missing for 40 years.

For a lot of people, hearing about this report was right up there with finding out that the CIA had tested clairvoyance as a spying tool, or that U.S. Department of Defense had been secretly collecting data on Unidentified Flying Objects, even as it labeled UFO spotters as crazy. Non-scientists have long been frustrated by scientists claiming the exclusive right to pose implausible theories with impunity. After all, scientists expect to be believed when they say that 95 percent of what’s in the universe is invisible, composed of dark matter and dark energy. They say it’s conceptually possible that, as in The Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, we create new timeline universes through daily decisions. And many lauded scientists embrace string theory, which suggests our universe might be a multi-dimensional hologram.

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Seymour Hersh: the CIA Knows Ukrainian Officials Are Skimming US Aid

On Wednesday, Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a report on Substack that alleged the CIA was aware of widespread corruption in Ukraine and the embezzlement of US aid.

The report said the Ukrainian government has been using US taxpayer money to purchase diesel from Russia to fuel its military. Hersh said Zelensky “has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments.”

Hersh said according to one estimate by CIA analysts, at least $400 million in funds were embezzled last year. Sources told Hersh that Ukrainian officials are also “competing” to set up front companies for export contracts to private arms dealers around the world.

The issue of corruption was raised during a meeting between CIA Director William Burns and Zelensky in January. An intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting told Hersh that Burns delivered a stunning message to Zelensky.

Hersh wrote: “The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president, because ‘he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.’”

During the meeting, Burns presented Zelensky with a list of 35 generals and senior government officials whose corruption was known to the CIA. Zelensky responded by dismissing 10 officials who were engaged in flagrant corruption. “The ten he got rid of were brazenly bragging about the money they had—driving around Kiev in their new Mercedes,” the intelligence official said.

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Annals of the Covert World: the Secret Life of Shampoo

Veterans of the CIA’s Phoenix Program always seem to make soft landings with a golden parachute: a lifetime guarantee of gainful employment. CounterPunch reported on the ascent into the Congress of Robert Simmons, a Phoenix veteran and adept at torture. Then there’s the case of former senator Bob Kerrey, who commanded a Phoenix operation in the Mekong delta that featured throat-slitting and the assassination of elderly men and women and children. Now comes word that Phoenix veterans are also highly sought after by the upper echelons of the corporate world.

In early September, Procter and Gamble, the Cincinnati-based conglomerate, fessed up to hiring Phoenix operatives to infiltrate its chief rival Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch cosmetics giants. It was all about the secrets of shampoo, specifically the top-selling Salon Selectives and Finesse. It seems both of those Unilever brands had taken a big bite out of the market share once dominated by a shelf of P&G products, including Wash & Go, Head & Shoulders, Pantene and Vidal Sassoon. Also at stake was the planned sale of Clairol, which was on the auction block with both companies in an intense bidding struggle. One former P&G executive said that the companies were engaged in a decades-long dirty war, which had become “a death struggle to incrementally gain share”.

The operation was launched in June of 2000, when P&G contracted with the Phoenix Consulting Group of Huntsville, Alabama, a corporate espionage firm set up by Phoenix veteran John Nolan and fellow CIA officers. P&G also set up a secret wing inside its own security department. The operations were run out of a secret office known as The Ranch, and featured safe houses, off-shore bank accounts, dumpster diving and informants.

Nolan and his operatives were apparently able to secure more than 80 internal Unilever documents that detailed the company’s shampoo marketing strategy for the next two years. The documents were returned to the company after word of the operation leaked out to a reporter at Fortune magazine. P&G apologized for the operation, saying it had “violated our strict business guidelines regarding our business policies.” The company also fired two executives in the firm’s security sector.

But few take these actions as anything more than the defensive maneuvers of a company caught doing something shady and in full damage control mode. Indeed, P&G is well-known for its paranoia and obsessive concerns about corporate secrecy. Its security officers are known inside the company as “Proctoids”. In the past, P&G has shadowed employees on their business trips to see if they chatted to fellow travelers (and Unilever agents?) about company business, snooped in on company phone lines and tracked computer traffic. A few years ago P&G executives became enraged by a series of critical articles about the company by Wall Street Journal reporter Alecia Swasy and retaliated by hitting her with grand jury subpoenas and putting her under 24-hour surveillance.

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‘Special’ service: Declassified Guantanamo court filing suggests some 9/11 hijackers were CIA agents

An explosive court filing from the Guantanamo Military Commission – a court considering the cases of defendants accused of carrying out the “9/11” terrorist attacks on New York – has seemingly confirmed the unthinkable.

The document was originally published via a Guantanamo Bay court docket, but while public, it was completely redacted. Independent researchers obtained an unexpurgated copy. It is an account by the Commission’s lead investigator, DEA veteran Don Canestraro, of his personal probe of potential Saudi government involvement in the 9/11 attacks, conducted at the request of the defendants’ lawyers.

Two of the hijackers were being closely monitored by the CIA and may, wittingly or not, have been recruited by Langley long before they flew planes into the World Trade Center buildings. 

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Spanish company provided CIA with information leading to Julian Assange’s arrest

“Be on the lookout tomorrow to see what you can get… and make it work.” Michelle Wallemacq, head of operations of a Spanish company called UC Global, wrote this message on December 20, 2017, to two technicians monitoring security at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was living after being granted asylum. She was alerting them to the arrival of Rommy Vallejo, the head of SENAIN, Ecuador’s secret service, who was scheduled to meet the next day with Assange to receive confidential information that could influence the cyberactivist’s future.

Vallejo had hired the services of this small company from Jerez de la Frontera in southwestern Spain to provide security for Ecuador’s diplomatic corps in London but didn’t know that it was planning to record his meeting with Assange. Vallejo was unaware that UC Global had planted hidden microphones throughout the embassy, even in the women’s bathroom. Nor did he know that UC Global’s owner, David Morales, had been sending information about Assange’s meetings with his lawyers to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) soon after he took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy.

Ecuador’s president at the time, Lenin Moreno, had ordered his staff to work with Assange’s Spanish lawyers to develop a plan to get Assange out of the embassy, grant him Ecuadorian nationality and provide a diplomatic passport. The plan was set weeks before Vallejo’s meeting and was known to only six people. When UC Global’s cameras recorded the meeting attended by Assange, his lawyer Stella Morris, Ecuadorian consul Fidel Narváez and Vallejo, it learned that the getaway would happen in four days: December 25. Assange would leave in one of the ambassador’s diplomatic cars and travel through the Eurotunnel to Switzerland or another destination in continental Europe.

“It’s very late… Because it’s so big, I put the file in a shared Dropbox [cloud data storage service] folder. Someone with experience in audio can make it more intelligible… The ecu [Vallejo] is quite audible, but the others [Assange and Morris] are very muffled,” wrote one of the technicians a few hours later to David Morales.

Morales dispatched the data in the early morning hours to his “American friends,” and the impact was immediate. The United States quickly sent an arrest warrant for Assange to the United Kingdom, so the escape plan had to be aborted. Two years later, Assange was expelled from the Ecuadorian Embassy. In June 2022, the British government ordered his extradition to the United States. Since then, Assange has been held in a London jail pending an appeal. The United States has charged him with 18 alleged crimes that could lead to a maximum of 175 years in prison.

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U.S. argues for immunity in MK-ULTRA mind control case before Quebec Court of Appeal

A proposed class-action lawsuit over infamous brainwashing experiments at a Montreal psychiatric hospital was before Quebec’s highest court Thursday, as victims attempted to remove immunity granted to the United States government.

The U.S. government successfully argued in Quebec Superior Court last August that the country couldn’t be sued for the project known as MK-ULTRA, allegedly funded by the Canadian government and the CIA.

U.S. lawyers argued that foreign states had absolute immunity from lawsuits in Canada between the 1940s and 1960s, when the program took place.

But survivors (and their families) of the experiments at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute — which included experimental drugs, rounds of electroshocks and sleep deprivation — appealed that decision.

On Thursday, a lawyer representing the United States government told the Quebec Court of Appeal that the country should be immune from prosecution and that any lawsuit against the U.S. government should be filed in that country.

The court case stems from a class-action lawsuit filed against McGill University — which was affiliated to the psychiatric hospital — Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital and the Canadian and U.S. governments after Montrealers allegedly had their memories erased and were reduced to childlike states.

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Why Renee DiResta Leads The Censorship Industry

Since the 2016 elections, politicians, journalists, and many others have raised the alarm about “foreign election influence” and “disinformation,” demanding greater “content moderation” by social media platforms. It is too easy, they argued, for foreign and malign actors to quickly “go viral” at low cost, leaving the good guys unable to correct bad information. We must become more “resilient” to disinformation.

It’s now clear that all of that rhetoric was cover for a sweeping censorship effort by the federal government and government contractors.

Since December, a small but growing group of journalists, analysts, and researchers have documented the rise of a “Censorship Industrial Complex”, a network of U.S. government agencies, and government-funded think tanks. Over the last six years, these entities have coordinated their efforts to both spread disinformation and to censor journalists, politicians, and ordinary Americans. They have done so directly and indirectly, including by playing good cop/bad cop with Twitter and Facebook. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of people have been involved in these censorship and disinformation campaigns in the U.S., Canada, and the UK.

We now know, thanks to the Twitter Files, emails released by the Attorney Generals of Missouri and Louisiana, and research by others, that the Censorship Industrial Complex is violating the First Amendment by coordinating with government agencies and receiving government funding to pressure and help social media companies to both censor information, including accurate information, while spreading disinformation, including conspiracy theories.

And such efforts are continuing if not accelerating. At Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” last week, US allies in Europe demanded that Facebook censor “false narratives” and news that would “weaken our support to Ukraine.” Facebook agreed.

One of the most intelligent, influential, and fascinating public-facing leaders of the Censorship Industrial Complex is Renee DiResta, Research Manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Diresta has, more than anyone else, made the public case for greater government-led and government-funded censorship, writing for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and other major publications, and through public speaking, including on podcasts with Joe Rogan and Sam Harris.

To many journalists and policymakers, DiResta is one of the good guys, advocating as a citizen and hobbyist for greater U.S. government action to fight disinformation. DiResta has argued that the U.S. has been unprepared to fight the “information war” with Russia and other nations in her bylined articles for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, and many others. And in her 2018 Senate testimony DiResta advocated “legislation that defines and criminalizes foreign propaganda” and for allowing law enforcement to “prosecute foreign propaganda.”

DiResta, as much as any other public person in the Western world, has sounded the alarm, repeatedly and loudly, for stronger governmental and non-governmental coordination to get social media platforms to censor more information. “The Russian disinformation operations that affected the 2016 United States presidential election are by no means over,” wrote DiResta in the New York Times in December 2018. “Russian interference through social media is a chronic, widespread, and identifiable condition that we must now aggressively manage.”

In 2021, DiResta advocated for creating a government censorship center, which she euphemistically referred to as a “Center of Excellence,” within the federal government. “Creation of a ‘Center of Excellence’ within the federal government,” she said, “could tie in a federal lead with platforms, academics, and nonprofits to stay ahead of these emerging narratives and trends.” DiResta argued that her censorship center could also help spread propaganda. “As narratives emerge,” she explained, “the Center of Excellence could deploy experts to relevant federal agencies to help prepare pre-bunking and messaging, to identify trusted voices in communities, and to build coalitions to respond.”

Did the Department of Homeland Security act on DiResta’s proposal to create a censorship center? It did. But DHS didn’t call it a “Center of Excellence.” Instead, it called it a “Disinformation Governance Board,” which the agency announced publicly in April 2022.

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In Push To Dismiss Lawsuit, CIA Says Americans Who Visited Assange Had No Privacy Rights

The Central Intelligence Agency and former CIA director Mike Pompeo contend that attorneys and journalists, who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, had no “legitimate expectation of privacy” when it came to conversations with a “notorious wanted fugitive in a foreign embassy.”

“There is no plausible argument that it would be unreasonable or indiscriminate for the government to surveil Assange, who oversaw WikiLeaks’ publication of large amounts of U.S. national security information,” the CIA and Pompeo additionally contend. “Thus, any alleged surveillance of Assange that incidentally captured his conversations with U.S. citizens such as plaintiffs would not violate the Fourth Amendment [right to privacy] as a matter of law.”

The statements are part of a motion to dismiss [PDF] a lawsuit that was brought by a group of Americans, who allege that they were spied on by the CIA when they met with Assange while he was living under political asylum in the Ecuador embassy.

When one considers that Assange has been held in detention at Belmarsh prison and faces Espionage Act charges for publishing classified documents, the government is essentially arguing that it may spy on any journalist who publishes such documents and “incidentally capture” the communications of anyone communicating with that particular journalist.

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Academic Journal Supresses Expose of Murderous CIA ‘Maidan’ Coup in Ukraine

A peer-reviewed paper initially approved and praised by a prestigious academic journal was suddenly rescinded without explanation. Its author, one of the world’s top scholars on Ukraine-related issues, had marshaled overwhelming evidence to conclude Maidan protesters were killed by pro-coup snipers.

The massacre by snipers of anti-government activists and police officers in Kiev’s Maidan Square in late February 2014 was a defining moment in the US-orchestrated overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government. The death of 70 protesters triggered an avalanche of international outrage that made President Viktor Yanukovych’s downfall a fait accompli. Yet today these killings remain unsolved.

Enter Ivan Katchanovski, a Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist at the University of Ottawa. For years, he marshaled overwhelming evidence demonstrating that the snipers were not affiliated with Yanukovych’s government, but pro-Maidan operatives firing from protester-occupied buildings.

Though Katchanovski’s groundbreaking work has been studiously ignored by the mainstream media, a scrupulous study he presented on the slaughter in September 2015 and August 2021 and published in 2016 and in 2020 has been cited on over 100 occasions by scholars and experts. As a result of this paper and other pieces of research, he was among the world’s most-referenced political scientists specializing in Ukrainian matters.

In the final months of 2022, Katchanovski submitted a new investigation on the Maidan massacre to a prominent social sciences journal. Initially accepted with minor revisions after extensive peer review, the publication’s editor effusively praised the work in a lengthy private note. They said the paper was “exceptional in many ways,” and offered “solid” evidence in support of its conclusions. The reviewers concurred with this judgment.

However, the paper was not published, a decision Katchanovski firmly believes to have been “political.” He filed an appeal, but to no avail.

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Central Inclusive Agency! Fury as CIA lists ‘equal employment opportunity specialist’ role for up to $184,000 per year (almost TRIPLE the $67,000 per year starting salary for field agents)

The CIA has sparked fury by advertising for an equal opportunities officer at up to triple the pay of a foreign intelligence job.

An Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Specialist position at the agency is being offered at an eye-watering starting salary of between $154,428 and $183,500.

The job description includes pushing outreach and education initiatives to help raise awareness of equity issues within the CIA.

In stark contrast, a Collection Management Officer role – which involves the collection of foreign intelligence – starts at between $67,122 and $102,166.

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