Tag: cia

Epstein’s private calendar reveals planned meetings with Obama admin official, CIA chief

Jeffrey Epstein’s newly-revealed private calendar showed scheduled meetings with the current CIA director, a college president and attorney who served in the Obama administration, according to a report published Sunday.

New documents, which belonged to the rich convicted pedophile and were obtained by The Wall Street Journal, showed planned meetings with a slew of prominent individuals, including now-CIA Director William Burns, Bard College president Leon Botstein, Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler and professor Noam Chomsky.

All the scheduled meetings were slated to take place after Epstein was jailed in 2008 on charges of solicitation, including soliciting a minor. WSJ could not prove each scheduled meeting actually took place, and the documents did not reveal the purpose for the meetings. 

A spokesperson for Burns, who has taken the CIA’s helm since 2021 under the Biden administration, said the nation’s spy chief met with Epstein a decade ago when he was trying to leave the government.

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Meet a Forgotten CIA Critic Who Presciently Characterized the Agency as a Cancer in 1970 Book

In 1970, David W. Conde, an American journalist working in Japan, who had served with the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare Branch in World War II, published a now-forgotten book in New Delhi, CIA—Core of the Cancer.

Five years before publication of CIA whistleblower Philip Agee’s Inside the Company: A CIA Diary, the book provided a damning indictment of the CIA’s involvement in criminal operations—particularly in Southeast Asia—and manipulation of public opinion through tax-exempt foundations financed by large corporations that corrupted a generation of intellectuals.

Conde wrote that, “while there seems no question that historians will record that the CIA’s greatest defeat was its failure to overcome [Fidel] Castro’s forces at the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the CIA’s greatest victory may well turn out to be not its food poisoning, its ballot-stuffing, its coup d’états, or its mobilization of labor unions or students to serve U.S. interests overseas, but its research grants to U.S. and foreign scholars.”[1]

These scholars played an influential role in helping condition the public in the U.S. and in countries around the world to support U.S. foreign policy interests and Cold War mobilization against the Soviet Union.

Conde noted that, “in Hitler’s Germany and Prince Konoe’s Japan, thought police used torture, and ordered death or [used] the threat of death to convert communists into anti-communists, but America being a rich country, relied upon the power of its money.”

This money had a deeply corrupting effect, tarnishing intellectual and scientific integrity, debasing political life and causing almost all societal institutions to be up for sale.

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Ex-FBI agents accuse top CIA, FBI officials of 9/11 coverup; CIA said to use Saudis, others for illegal domestic spy operations

Weeks before 9/11, an angry New York FBI agent nearly “came over the table” at CIA officials who were blocking him from obtaining intelligence about two al Qaeda terrorists who would soon take part in hijacking an American Airlines passenger jet and crashing it into the Pentagon.

“Someone is going to die,” the counterterrorism agent wrote in a bitter email shortly after the 2001 encounter.

That astonishing account, and many others, are contained in a sworn declaration by Donald Canestraro, an investigator for the Office of Military Commissions, part of the Department of Defense’s Military Commissions Defense Organization. It is dated July 20, 2021.

Canestraro said in a brief interview with Florida Bulldog that he is part of the defense team for Guantanamo detainee Ammar al-Baluchi, a Pakistani citizen who is awaiting trial with four other men accused of planning the 9/11 attacks. His declaration includes the results of his interviews with 11 ex-FBI agents, 2 ex-CIA agents, a CNN investigative journalist, former deputy National Security Advisor Richard Clarke and former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), co-chair of Congress’s Joint Inquiry into 9/11.

The 22-page declaration, first obtained by the national security website Spytalk, is not confidential, but rather it’s marked CUI – Controlled Unclassified Information. The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency defines CUI as “government created or owned information that requires safeguarding or dissemination controls consistent with applicable laws, regulations and government wide policies.”

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No, Saudi Arabia did NOT do 9/11

The bombshell 911 news this past week, is that a freshly-published court filing from Jul 2021, has revealed at least two of the 19 alleged “hijackers” may have been recruited by the CIA.

Now this isn’t exactly “news”, after all it has long since been established that the CIA, FBI and/or any other US alphabet agencies simply must have been involved. It couldn’t have happened without their involvement.

Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the new release doesn’t go that far. Instead, the testimony from Donald C Canestraro Declaration – former lead investigator for the Office of Military Commissions – discusses the “intelligence failures that led to 9/11”, while focusing mainly on the “hijackers” and their backgrounds.

According to a report in Grayzone, the court filing relies on anonymous testimony from “high-ranking CIA and FBIA officials”:

…the filing is a 21-page declaration by Don Canestraro, a lead investigator for the Office of Military Commissions, the legal body overseeing the cases of 9/11 defendants. It summarizes classified government discovery disclosures, and private interviews he conducted with anonymous high-ranking CIA and FBI officials.

That should be a red flag, right there. Rather like Sy Hersh’s recent “revelations” on Nord Stream 2, any use of “anonymous insider sources” should always set off your internal bullshit alarm. It’s more likely to be a limited hangout than anything else.

In fact, any discussion of the “hijackers” at all should engage your inner sceptic.

Reality check: The hijackers’ names were supplied by the FBI. Virtually everything we know about those men came from US intelligence sources or the 9/11 Commission Report.

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How the CIA created Osama bin Laden

“Throughout the world … its agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive — on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive. Freedom movements arise and assert themselves. They’re doing so on almost every continent populated by man — in the hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America … [They are] freedom fighters.”

Is this a call to jihad (holy war) taken from one of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden’s notorious fatwas? Or perhaps a communique issued by the repressive Taliban regime in Kabul?

In fact, this glowing praise of the murderous exploits of today’s supporters of arch-terrorist bin Laden and his Taliban collaborators, and their holy war against the “evil empire”, was issued by US President Ronald Reagan on March 8, 1985. The “evil empire” was the Soviet Union, as well as Third World movements fighting US-backed colonialism, apartheid and dictatorship.

How things change. In the aftermath of a series of terrorist atrocities — the most despicable being the mass murder of more than 6000 working people in New York and Washington on September 11 — bin Laden the “freedom fighter” is now lambasted by US leaders and the Western mass media as a “terrorist mastermind” and an “evil-doer”.

Yet the US government refuses to admit its central role in creating the vicious movement that spawned bin Laden, the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists that plague Algeria and Egypt — and perhaps the disaster that befell New York.

The mass media has also downplayed the origins of bin Laden and his toxic brand of Islamic fundamentalism.

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CIA in Congress’ crosshairs over alleged mishandling of sex assault cases

The House intelligence committee is investigating whether the Central Intelligence Agency is mishandling how it responds to sexual assault and harassment in its workforce, according to four people familiar with the matter.

At least three female CIA employees have approached the committee since January to tell them that the agency is discouraging women from making sexual misconduct complaints, according to one of the people, attorney Kevin Carroll, who represents the first employee who talked to the committee. He also said the CIA is making it difficult for alleged victims to speak to law enforcement.

The allegations led committee chair Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) and ranking member Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) to send a letter last week to CIA director Bill Burns to ask for the agency’s help looking into the issues, according to another of the four people, who was granted anonymity to discuss the private letter. Burns responded within 24 hours and pledged full cooperation, according to a senior CIA official.

Carroll said his client has told him that as many as 54 women at the CIA over the past decade have said they were been victims of sexual assault or misconduct by colleagues, and that their cases were improperly handled. POLITICO could not independently verify that assertion.

“This is the CIA’s Me Too moment,” said Carroll, who is a partner at the firm Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP and is representing the victim pro bono.

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Biden Campaign, Blinken Orchestrated Intel Letter To Discredit Hunter Biden Laptop Story, Ex-CIA Official Says

An adviser to Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, now Secretary of State, prompted former intelligence community officials to jointly suggest Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken contacted intelligence officials weeks before the 2020 general election about New York Post reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell testified before the House Judiciary Committee that Blinken called him to discuss the Post report. Later the same day, he emailed Morell a USA Today report alleging the FBI was investigating whether the Post report was a Russian disinformation campaign.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) wrote to Blinken April 20 in a joint request with Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael Turner (R-OH). The congressmen asked the Secretary of State to reveal the identities of everyone he communicated with about the laptop letter along with all documents and communications regarding it between October 18-November 24, 2020.

Fox News further reported:

A former CIA official testified that then-Biden campaign senior adviser, now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken “played a role in the inception” of the public statement signed by current and past intelligence officials that claimed the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

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Former Mexican president worked for CIA

Former Mexican president Jose Lopez Portillo, who led the country from 1976 to 1982, was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) asset, according to a new batch of declassified documents published by the US National Archives.

Among the papers, relating to a CIA probe into the murder of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, was a memo from a meeting of CIA agents on November 29, 1976.

In the discussions, US intelligence official Bill Sturbitts informed his colleagues that “Mexico will soon have a new president, a man who has had control of Liaison for a number of years.”

Lopez Portillo was not mentioned by name in the memo, but the meeting took place just a few days before he officially assumed the presidency.

He had run for office earlier that year as the sole candidate from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled the country from 1929 to 2000. Lopez Portillo died in 2004 at the age of 83.

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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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