Tag: cia

CIA-Backed Afghan Death Squads Massacred Children Inside Religious Schools in Campaign of Terror

A shocking exposé in The Intercept reveals CIA-backed death squads in Afghanistan have killed children as young as 8 years old in a series of night raids, many targeting madrassas, Islamic religious schools. In December 2018, one of the death squads attacked a madrassa in Wardak province, killing 12 boys, of whom the youngest was 9 years old. The United States played key roles in many of the raids, from picking targets to ferrying Afghan forces to the sites to providing lethal airpower during the raids. The Intercept reports this was part of a campaign of terror orchestrated by the Trump administration that included massacres, executions, mutilation, forced disappearances, attacks on medical facilities, and airstrikes targeting structures known to house civilians. “These militias … were established in the very early days of the Afghan War by CIA officers, many of whom had been brought back into the fold after the invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 who had previously been working in Afghanistan during the 1980s,” says reporter Andrew Quilty. “This network of militias was set up and appear to be entirely under the control of the CIA but made up entirely of Afghan soldiers.”

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Palantir’s Tiberius, Race, and the Public Health Panopticon

Operation Warp Speed, the “public-private partnership” created to produce and allocate COVID-19 vaccines to the American populace, is set to begin rolling out a mass-vaccination campaign in the coming weeks. With the expected approval of its first vaccine candidate just days away, the allocation and distribution aspects of Operation Warp Speed deserve scrutiny, particularly given the critical role one of the most controversial companies in the country will play in that endeavor.

Palantir Technologies, the company founded by Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, and a handful of their associates, has courted controversy for its supporting role in the US military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as its participation in the detention of “illegal” immigrants through their contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and in “predictive policing” law enforcement programs that disproportionately affect minority neighborhoods. Equally controversial, but perhaps lesser known, is Palantir’s long-standing and enduring ties to the CIA and intelligence community at large, which was intimately involved in the development of Palantir’s products that now run on the databases of governments and corporations around the world.

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So We’re Already At The ‘Chinese Super Soldiers’ Part Of The Propaganda Campaign

Completely unburdened by any need to provide evidence or even anything resembling subtlety, Ratcliffe lists as reasons we should all be afraid of China’s sinister desire to “subordinate the rights of the individual to the will of the Communist Party” such things as intellectual property theft and the fact that China (like all major nations) often seeks to influence US politics. Slipped in among these mundane and unimpressive claims, Ratcliffe writes that “China has even conducted human testing on members of the People’s Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities.”

A claim without evidence made by a spy chief about the world being threatened by Chinese supervillains with extraordinary powers given to them by unethical Chinese mad scientists should of course be dismissed with a scoff and a vulgar gesture. Instead, CIA assets like Dilanian are leading the charge to throw the entire might of the plutocratic media into driving this nonsense as far into western consciousness as possible. This ridiculous story has been picked up not just by Murdoch outlets like The New York Post, but by outlets like The Guardian and NBC as well.

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The CIA’s Secret Global War Against the Left

Forty-five years ago, under a cloak of secrecy, Operation Condor was officially launched: a global campaign of violent repression against the Latin American left by the region’s quasi-fascist military dictatorships. The US government not only knew about the program — it helped to engineer it.

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Will Obama Torture Apologists Make a Triumphant Return to Joe Biden’s White House?

President-elect Joe Biden is being warned not to bring torture apologists who served under President Barack Obama into his administration.

The Daily Beast reported this week that Biden was considering Michael Morell as a potential CIA director, but Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) had objections. Wyden publicly warned that Morell, who served as deputy director of the CIA under Obama, shouldn’t be considered due to his past ties in obscuring CIA torture. CNN subsequently interviewed Wyden:

“No torture apologist can be confirmed as CIA director. It’s a nonstarter,” Wyden told CNN, referring to Morell’s previous suggestions that the agency’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” of terrorists was both effective and moral—claims that go further than those made by other officials who have faced scrutiny over the agency’s handling of detainees at black sites, including former Director John Brennan and current Director Gina Haspel.

Wyden isn’t the only person trying to raise alarms about Morell. Over at Just Security, Scott Roehm, along with Daniel Jones (who investigated the CIA torture and wrote the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on it),also warned against Morell. They note Morell’s role in essentially absolving CIA staff (including current CIA Director Gina Haspel) of responsibility for destroying tapes of CIA torture of suspected terrorists during the Iraq War. He was also responsible for the CIA’s response to the Senate’s torture report, insistingthat the CIA’s methods had resulted in actionable intelligence.

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