Tag: cia

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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CIA Partners with Google, Amazon and IBM in Latest Big Tech Procurement Drive

The vaunted “17 intelligence agencies” that comprise the U.S. intel community will be sharing a network of private-sector cloud computing service providers which includes Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of a 15-year contract said to be worth tens of billions of dollars.

AWS currently holds the sole contract to provide cloud computing services to a number of intelligence agencies, including the FBI and the NSA. That contract is set to expire in 2023 and this new award – managed by the CIA – will further weaken Amazon’s once privileged position in the federal money sweepstakes, which had already taken a hard hit when Microsoft was unexpectedly chosen over Bezos’ company for the Department of Defense’s own cloud services contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program.

The Central Intelligence Agency will take full advantage of its access to money without oversight to disburse the government funds at the agency’s discretion. Although speculated to rise into the tens of billions, the CIA has no plans to disclose the real value of the C2E contracts. The Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) procurement program was unveiled in February by the premier U.S. spy agency in a bid to establish a cloud computing service platform for the country’s intelligence agencies separate from JEDI, which remains enmeshed in a protracted legal contest with AWS and is two years behind implementation.

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Search for JFK assassination truth ruined the lives of a prosecutor and a TV star

The one story that still haunts Barbour decades later is former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s probe of the JFK murder.

Barbour twice tried to get Jim Garrison’s story told to a wide audience. Both times he was thwarted.

He ended producing his own documentary based on the most intensive interview Garrison ever gave. Garrison came to focus on the assassination simply because so many of the key figures had operated in Las Vegas, his hometown, prior to the dark events of November 22nd.

Barbour studied the Warren Commission report which put the sole blame on Lee Harvey Oswald. “He realized that, to believe the Warren Report,  you couldn’t read it, so he reopened the investigation into the assassination,” Barbour said during a 2009 interview.

Garrison focused on a CIA connected New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw. His prosecution of Shaw was portrayed in Oliver Stone’s controversial movie, JFK.

Shaw was not convicted, in large part because of overt interference from the CIA, including a smear campaign against Garrison and the infiltration of his office by government agents. “If he had nothing, they would have just stepped aside and let him fall on his face,” Barbour said. “Instead, they spent two years throwing roadblocks in the way.”

Among the most compelling arguments developed by Garrison was the absurdity of the so-called magic bullet theory. More importantly, Garrison used the FBI’s own files to prove that Oswald wasn’t the shooter.

Barbour says the mafia was involved, but only at the direction of those in the government who wanted Kennedy dead. “If the federal government thought that the Mafia had killed Kennedy, there wouldn’t be a pizza parlor in America.”

He believes the plot has its roots in Las Vegas. It began when the CIA asked the late Robert Maheu to recruit mobsters to kill Fidel Castro.

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CIA Democrat House Rep. Takes Lead Over GOP Challenger After 14,616 Votes Found On ‘Memory Stick’

Democratic incumbent Abigail Spanberger, a “former” CIA operations officer, took the lead over her Republican challenger Nick Freitas in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District by 5,134 votes on Wednesday and swiftly declared victory after “14,616 central absentee votes” were found on a “mislabeled memory stick.”

“In CD7, Spanberger now leads by 5,134 votes after Henrico County posts 14,616 central absentee votes that were overlooked on Election night,” The Virginia Public Access Project reported. “Officials overlooked the ballots, which were saved on a memory stick mislabeled as ‘provisional ballots.'”

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