Tag: cia

Conspiracy Theories Are Caused By Government Secrecy

The DC Circuit has ruled that the CIA is under no obligation to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests pertaining to its involvement with insurgent militias in Syria, overturning a lower court’s previous ruling in favor of a Buzzfeed News reporter seeking such documents.

As Sputnik‘s Morgan Artyukhina clearly outlines, this ruling comes despite the fact that mainstream news outlets have been reporting on the Central Intelligence Agency’s activities in Syria for years, and despite a US president having openly tweeted about those activities.

“In other words, the CIA will not be required to admit to actions it is widely reported as having done, much less divulge documents about them to the press for even greater scrutiny,” Artyukhina writes, calling to mind the Julian Assange quote “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”

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Who is Alexei Navalny? Behind the myth of the West’s favorite Russian opposition figure

Compressed into a two-minute soundbite, the story of Alexei Navalny and the recent protests that have erupted across Russia seems simple enough. The Russian opposition figure who recently survived an attempt on his life — an alleged poisoning delivered via Novichok-laced pants — was arrested and convicted of breaching his bail conditions in a process that can be fairly described as unjust. In response, his supporters took to the streets across the country in protest.

Ask a Russian, like Katya Kazbek, and they will tell you something different: things are way more complicated than they seem. Katya is a writer, translator and the editor-in-chief of arts and culture magazine Supamodu.com who today lives in New York by way of Moscow and Krasnodar Krai in the North Caucuses. In an effort to give some nuance to Navalny and what has been happening overseas, they recently put together a widely shared Twitter thread that served as a highlight reel of Navalny’s political career — and the picture it painted was not pretty. Having read this, I contacted them to ask more about a man whose treatment has been unjust, but who — it turns out — is no hero.

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CIA releases UFO ‘Black Vault’ documents early: How to see them online

Federal intelligence on extraterrestrial technology — at your fingertips.

By way of the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of the CIA documents on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) — or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), as the government calls them — are now accessible via download at the Black Vault, a website operated by author and podcaster John Greenwald Jr.

The CIA claims they have now provided all the information on UAP they have, though there is no way to know that’s true.

“Research by The Black Vault will continue to see if there are additional documents still uncovered within the CIA’s holdings,” Greenwald promised in a statement on his website.

The release comes months before the Pentagon was due to brief Congress on all they know about UAP — a date dictated in the most recent COVID-19 relief bill, of all places, which passed in late December.

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Project Mockingbird / Operation Mockingbird

There have been a lot of rumors and allegations against what “Mockingbird” actually was, but it appears that quite possibly, there were two project names. One has been confirmed while the other remains elusive (if real at all).

Project Mockingbird

PROJECT Mockingbird was a wiretapping operation initiated by President John F. Kennedy to identify the sources of government leaks by eavesdropping on the communications of journalists.

This is the program mentioned in the CIA records below, and The Black Vault also added records from the Gerald Ford Presidential Library on the same.

Operation Mockingbird

OPERATION Mockingbird was a alleged secret campaign by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to influence media. Begun in the 1950s, it was said to be initially organized by Cord Meyer and Allen W. Dulles, it was later led by Frank Wisner after Dulles became the head of the CIA.

The organization recruited leading American journalists into a network to help present the CIA’s views, and funded some student and cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts. As it developed, it also worked to influence foreign media and political campaigns, in addition to activities by other operating units of the CIA.

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Did CIA Director William Casey Really Say ‘We’ll Know Our Disinformation Program Is Complete When Everything the American Public Believes Is False’?

“I am the source for this quote, which was indeed said by CIA Director William Casey at an early February 1981 meeting of the newly elected President Reagan with his new cabinet secretaries to report to him on what they had learned about their agencies in the first couple of weeks of the administration. The meeting was in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House, not far from the Cabinet Room. I was present at the meeting as Assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser to the President. Casey first told Reagan that he had been astonished to discover that over 80 percent of the ‘intelligence’ that the analysis side of the CIA produced was based on open public sources like newspapers and magazines. As he did to all the other secretaries of their departments and agencies, Reagan asked what he saw as his goal as director for the CIA, to which he replied with this quote, which I recorded in my notes of the meeting as he said it. Shortly thereafter I told Senior White House correspondent Sarah McClendon, who was a close friend and colleague, who in turn made it public.”
Barbara Honegger

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