Tag: cia

Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet

As the digital revolution was underway in the mid-nineties, research departments at the CIA and NSA were developing programs to predict the usefulness of the world wide web as a tool for capturing what they dubbed “birds of a feather” formations. That’s when flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in rhythmical patterns.

They were particularly interested in how these principles would influence the way that people would eventually move together on the burgeoning internet: Would groups and communities move together in the same way as ‘birds of a feather, so that they could be tracked in an organised way? And if their movements could be indexed and recorded, could they be identified later by their digital fingerprints?

To answer these questions, the CIA and NSA established a series of initiatives called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) to directly fund tech entrepreneurs through an inter-university disbursement program. Naming their first unclassified briefing for computer scientists ‘birds of a feather,’ which took place in San Jose in the spring of 1995.

Amongst the first grants provided by the MDDS program to capture the ‘birds of a feather’ theory towards building a massive digital library and indexing system – using the internet as its backbone – were dispersed to two Stanford University PHD’s, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who were making significant headways in the development of web-page ranking technology that would track user movements online.

Those disbursements, together with $4.5 million in grants from a multi-agency consortium including NASA and DARPA, became the seed funding that was used to establish Google.

Eventually MDDS was integrated into DARPA’s global eavesdropping and data-mining activities that would attempt total information awareness over US citizens. Few understand the extent to which Silicon Valley is the alter-ego of Pentagon-land, even fewer realise the impact this has had on the social sphere.   But the story does not begin with Google, nor the military origins of the internet, it goes back much further in time, to the dawn of counterinsurgency and PSYOPs during the second world war.

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The Supreme Court Uses Twisted Logic to Protect US Agents Committing Torture

The Supreme Court declared last week that Americans have no right to learn the grisly details of CIA torture because the CIA has never formally confessed its crimes. The verdict symbolizes how the rule of law has become little more than a form of legal mumbo-jumbo to shroud official crimes. Why should anyone expect justice from a Supreme Court that covers up torture?

In 2002, the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian radical, in Pakistan, mistakenly believing he was a kingpin with al-Qaeda. The CIA tortured him for years in Thailand and Poland. As dissenting Justice Neil Gorsuch noted, the CIA “waterboarded Zubaydah at least 80 times, simulated live burials in coffins for hundreds of hours,” and brutalized him to keep him awake for six days in a row. The CIA has admitted some of the details and Zubaydah’s name was mentioned more than a thousand times in a 683-page Senate report on the CIA torture regime released in 2014.

This case turned on the invocation of a holy bureaucratic relic of dubious origin—state secrets. As the court’s 6–3 ruling, written by Justice Stephen Breyer, noted, “To assert the [state secrets] privilege, the Government must submit to the court a ‘formal claim of privilege, lodged by the head of the department which has control over the matter.’” After a government agency claims the privilege, the court “should exercise its traditional “reluctance to intrude upon the authority of the Executive in military and national security affairs,” Breyer wrote. And the most important role for the Supreme Court nowadays is apparently to sanctify the privileges it has awarded federal agencies that committed crime sprees.

The court upheld a “state secrets” claim to block Zubaydah’s lawyers from serving subpoenas on the psychologist masterminds of the CIA torture program to learn the details of his interrogation in Poland. The court’s ruling also blocks Polish investigators seeking information about the crimes committed at a CIA torture site in their nation. 

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CIA ‘used 9/11 suspect as living prop to teach trainee interrogators torture techniques’ – including ‘bouncing his head off a plywood wall and leaving him with brain damage’

US officials at a notorious CIA detention site in Afghanistan used a detainee as a living prop to teach interrogators torture techniques, newly declassified documents reveal, bouncing the man’s head off a wall until he was left with permanent brain damage.

The shocking report, which dates back to 2008 but was unsealed Thursday, details the repeated torture of Ammar al-Baluchi, a current Guantanamo Bay captive and suspect in the 9/11 attacks, at the former CIA ‘black site’ Cobalt, north of Kabul.

Interrogators at the site, known both as Cobalt and ‘the Salt Pit,’ went beyond the CIA’s guidelines in torturing Baluchi, the documents reveal, testing techniques and their effectiveness without the agency’s approval.  

Baluchi is one of five set to face military tribunal for his alleged part in the 9/11 plot, a case that’s been stuck in pre-trial proceedings for more than a decade due to a legal dispute over legal admissibility of testimony gathered from the defendants after they were tortured.        

The redacted report from the CIA inspector’s general details some of the torture wreaked on Baluchi, 44, who, according to the documents, was taken out of Pakistani custody to the site in 2003 ‘extra-legally,’ due to his being under Pakistani jurisdiction at the time and not an immediate terrorist threat.

Baluchi, a Kuwaiti citizen, was then brought to ‘Cobalt’ – a secret torture den referred to by detainees as ‘the dark prison’ or ‘the darkness, a previous 2012 CIA report revealed.

Reports of the site, where prisoners would routinely become so broken that they would voluntarily climb onto waterboards and complaints over hypothermia concerns were rampant, unsealed documents have revealed, first surfaced in 2005.

The recently unsealed report, declassified as part of a court filing by Baluchi’s lawyers to get him an independent medical examination, described how for years interrogators at the site used Baluchi’s body as a living doll for unapproved torture techniques that left the still imprisoned man brain-damaged. 

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A Surprising Explanation Of Russia’s Invasion From A Former Top-Level CIA Official

A surprising op-ed in MSNBC arguing that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was likely “preventable” if the US and NATO had merely tried to take a path of muscular diplomacy and potential compromise appears to have slipped passed the mainstream media censors and gate-keepers. 

Since the start of the Thursday Feb.24 invasion, the prevailing narrative concerning Russia’s motives has been largely limited to an ultra-simplistic hollywoodwesque story that goes something like this: one day a big bully and monster named Putin decided he wanted to invade and kill people in a neighboring country, and that he further wants to “resurrect the old Soviet Union”. 

But in a refreshingly realist op-ed piece, MSNBC political columnist Zeeshan Aleem exposed the self-serving Washington narrative which was intended more for the consumption of masses as false. Aleem points to a much more complex and nuanced reality, reminding the public of what should be obvious to any student of history – that the top diplomats and US officials who oversaw post-Soviet negotiations with Russia over Europe’s security order in the 1990’s knew full well that if NATO ever got expanded up to Russia’s borders, it would be suicide. It was predicted decades ago that war would be triggered in such a scenario.

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CIA Front Group Hides Records Showing Tens of Millions Paid Out to Ukrainian Puppet Government

The National Endowment of Democracy (NED), a CIA-backed front group for regime change abroad, is frantically deleting evidence of their illicit activities in Ukraine.

NED has greatly enriched the Ukrainian puppet government since they were put into power. They sent a total of $22,394,281 through 334 different awards granted to Ukraine between 2014 to the present day, according to an archived website that has now been scrubbed from the internet.

NED has bragged publicly that they are “proud partner of Ukraine’s civil society groups, media outlets, and human rights defenders since 1989—before the Ukrainian people declared independence in 1991—as they have confronted enormous challenges in building an independent and free country.”

Covert Action Magazine has noted that NED and its partners carefully curate propaganda in order to demonize Russians and foment hostilities. They highlight supposed Russian war crimes while ignoring the brutal massacres of Russian-sympathizing Ukrainians in Donbass by neo-Nazi militias as part of the 2014 color revolution coup backed by globalists.

Additionally, NED gave $4.6 million to Ukraine in 2020 to gin up anti-Russian fervor throughout Ukraine. This deep state organization has contributed greatly to the animus that has erupted into a nightmare that may result in World War 3.

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