Intelligence Agency Corruption News Articles
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The Trump administration held secret meetings with rebellious military officers from Venezuela over the last year to discuss their plans to overthrow President Nicols Maduro. One of the Venezuelan military commanders involved in the secret talks ... is on the American governments own sanctions list of corrupt officials in Venezuela. He and other members of the Venezuelan security apparatus have been accused by Washington of a wide range of serious crimes, including torturing critics, jailing hundreds of political prisoners, wounding thousands of civilians, trafficking drugs and collaborating with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which is considered a terrorist organization by the United States. In a series of covert meetings ... the military officers told the American government that they represented a few hundred members of the armed forces who had soured on Mr. Maduros authoritarianism. The officers asked the United States to supply them with encrypted radios, citing the need to communicate securely, as they developed a plan to install a transitional government. American officials did not provide material support, and the plans unraveled after a recent crackdown that led to the arrest of dozens of the plotters. On Feb. 1, Rex W. Tillerson ... delivered a speech in which he said the United States had not advocated for regime change or removal of President Maduro. Yet, responding to a question afterward, Mr. Tillerson raised the potential for a military coup.
Note: The US has a long history of supporting coups and human rights abuses in Latin America. The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas, graduated more than 500 human rights abusers. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
An American doctor and Naval reserve officer who has done extensive medical evaluation of a high-profile prisoner who was tortured under the supervision of Gina Haspel privately urged Sen. Mark Warner, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to oppose Haspels confirmation as CIA director. I have evaluated Mr. Abdal Rahim al-Nashiri, as well as close to 20 other men who were tortured in U.S. custody, including several who were tortured as part of the CIAs RDI [Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation] program. I am one of the only health professionals he has ever talked to about his torture, Dr. Sondra Crosby, a professor ... at Boston University, wrote to Warners legislative director. He is irreversibly damaged by torture that was unusually cruel. In my over 20 years of experience treating torture victims from around the world, including Syria, Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mr. al-Nashiri presents as one of the most severely traumatized individuals I have ever seen. Nashiri was ... rendered to Afghanistan by the CIA and eventually taken to the Cats Eye prison in Thailand that was run by Haspel from October to December 2002. On Monday, The Intercept reported that a ... classified memo compiled by the [Senate Intelligence Committee] and aimed at examining Haspels full involvement with torture and destruction of evidence was removed from the Senate. It was supposed to be housed in a secure facility inside Congress, so senators and their staff could read it.
Note: The above article contains graphic descriptions of torture overseen and then covered up by Gina Haspel. Another article, by a former CIA counterterrorism officer who was imprisoned for blowing the whistle on the CIA torture, referred to Haspel's actions as "war crimes, crimes against humanity". For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing intelligence agency corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
Ecuador has cut Julian Assanges communications with the outside world from its London embassy, where the founder of the whistleblowing WikiLeaks website has been living for nearly six years. The Ecuadorian government said in statement that it had acted because Assange had breached a written commitment made to the government at the end of 2017 not to issue messages that might interfere with other states. The move came after Assange tweeted on Monday challenging Britains accusation that Russia was responsible for the nerve agent poisoning of a Russian former double agent and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury earlier this month. Ecuador previously cut Assanges internet access in the embassy in October 2016 over fears he was using it to interfere in the US presidential election following Wikileaks publication of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clintons campaign adviser, John Podesta. In May 2017 the Ecuadorian president, Lenin Moreno, again asked Assange to refrain from commenting on Spains dispute with the separatist region of Catalonia. Assange had tweeted that Madrid was guilty of repression. As part of a subsequent agreement between Assange and the Ecuadorian government, he is not permitted to send any messages that could interfere with Ecuadors relations with other countries.
Note: Despite the "legal limbo" and propaganda campaign carried out against Assange and Wikileaks, Assange was recently granted Ecuadorian citizenship. A 2016 United Nations panel found that authorities in Sweden and the UK have acted unlawfully with regard to Assange. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
Mysterious metal towers are popping up at local tunnels, and soon theyll start appearing at bridges, too. But even people on the MTA board in charge of the towers cant say why theyre being used or whats in them. Its a $100 million MTA project shrouded in secrecy, with 18 of them for tunnels and bridges. So what are they exactly? The MTAs man in charge of the bridges and tunnels, Cedrick Fulton, dodged Carlins questions Wednesday. I said no comment, he said. Some MTA board members, including New York City Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, say they know too little about the towers - even with half the money already spent and some of the towers already up. A lot of the board members felt they didnt have all the details they would have wanted, myself included, she said. Residents suspect there is much more going on in the towers than meets the eye and wonder if theyll ever really know whats going on inside of them. CBS2 demanded answers from MTA Chairman Joe Lhota. Carlin: Some of your own board members say they dont know the specifics. Lhota: The base of these new pieces that are going up include whatever fiber optics are necessary for those Homeland Security items. In other words, anti-terror technology. Could that one day include facial recognition? We dont know and Lhota wont say. Im not at liberty to discuss that, he told Carlin. Lhota said all necessary Homeland Security technology remains in place at all crossings, even the ones that dont have the new towers yet.
Note: See video of these strange new towers containing secret Homeland Security technology at the link above. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy.
Senators, spies and a president spent years in a pitched battle over how the history is told of one of the most controversial chapters of Americas campaign against terrorism, the detention and interrogation of prisoners in secret C.I.A. jails. Congressional officials said on Friday that the [Trump] administration had begun returning to Congress copies of a 6,700-page Senate report from 2014 about the C.I.A. program. The move raises the possibility that most of the copies could be locked in Senate vaults indefinitely or even destroyed. The classified report [tells] the story of how ... the C.I.A. began capturing terrorism suspects and interrogating them ... beyond the reach of the American judicial and military legal systems. The central conclusion of the report is that the spy agencys interrogation methods - including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other kinds of torture - were far more brutal and less effective than the C.I.A. described to policy makers, Congress and the public. The Senate Intelligence Committee, which was run by Democrats when the executive summary was released, sent copies of the entire report to at least eight federal agencies, asking that they incorporate it into their records a move that would have made the documents subject to requests under the Freedom of Information Act. The agencies all refused to add the report to their records, and instead kept their copies locked up, prompting the American Civil Liberties Union to sue the C.I.A. for access to the full report.
Note: See a revealing New York Times article listing seven key points from this torture report. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about corruption in government and in the intelligence community.
The days leading up to last Fridays release of director Oliver Stones Snowden looked like one long movie trailer. The American Civil Liberties Union ... announced a campaign to win a presidential pardon for Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contract employee who leaked hundreds of thousands of its highly classified documents. The next day, the House Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan letter to the president that advised him against any pardon. The week before, Stone had invited me to a private screening of his movie, [along with] a small group of former government employees who were whistleblowers before Snowden and paid a high price for it. The reason they had been persecuted is that U.S. law makes no distinction between revealing illegal government activity to the press about eavesdropping on Americans or engaging in torture, and betraying the country by passing secrets for money or ideology to foreign governments. The Espionage Act was enacted nearly a century ago following World War One, and has already been amended several times. One key issue confronting the next president ... is whether the law needs to be amended again this time to separate the whistleblowers from the spies. Today ... the battle lines have been drawn between those in government both the executive branch and Congress who view the theft of government secrets as espionage, regardless of the motive, and those in civil-liberties groups and the media who see motive as a critical distinction.
Note: The above was written by James Bamford, whistleblower and author of "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing intelligence agency corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
A specialist unit created by the British domestic counterintelligence and security agency MI5 to get inside the heads of terrorists has helped foil seven attacks in the past year. The Behavioural Science Unit at Thames House, the headquarters of MI5 [establishes] whether people flagged as potential threats are "talkers" or "walkers" - those who simply boast or those who are preparing to act. Research by MI5 shows that more than 60 per cent of so-called lone wolves unwittingly provide clues that they are preparing to strike. The BSUs work involves picking up signs of such changing behaviour. Neil, an Arabic and Norwegian speaker who has worked for the unit for six years, said ... his team is passed intelligence by officers that is gleaned from a network of informants and the public. The BSU then looks for signs of unusual activity. The BSU team pays close attention to lone-actor terrorists. The number of experts working in the BSU, which was created in 2004, has more than doubled since ... 2013. We deal with probabilities and that is the nature of our work, said Neil, [adding that] some of those they profiled lied to themselves about their intention and the ultimate aim was to persuade them to abandon their radical ideology. He said the assumption that many extremists had mental health problems was wrong. Only 2 per cent of members of terrorist organisations suffer from mental health problems, compared with an average of up to 30 per cent of members of the public, Neil said.
Note: See the full text of this article on this webpage. If this article is accurate, MI5 is using very different tactics than those used by the FBI to fight the war on terror.
For the first time, a federal judge is letting a civil lawsuit proceed against two CIA contract psychologists who designed and supervised brutal interrogation tactics that critics called torture. The ruling allows two former CIA detainees and the family of another who died in agency custody to try to win damages in federal court for the abuse they suffered at then-secret CIA prisons in the early 2000s. According to the lawsuit and a Senate Intelligence Committee report, the mistreatment included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, confinement in small boxes, rectal feeding and beatings. As the lawsuit progresses, it may shed more light on the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques that the CIA used in an effort to collect intelligence ... after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Its unprecedented, [said] Dror Ladin, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who argued the plaintiffs' case in court. No CIA torture victim has ever taken this step toward accountability. Every previous lawsuit has been shut down before this stage. It gives our clients a chance to ... finally get some justice, he said. The Department of Justice had blocked previous lawsuits aimed at the CIA's now-barred detention and interrogation program on grounds that any case could reveal secrets and compromise national security. That changed after the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report in December 2014 that exposed details about the program, including the role played by [psychologists Bruce] Jessen and [James E.] Mitchell.
Note: Read more in this ACLU article. For more along these lines, read about how the torture program fits in with a long history of human experimentation by corrupt intelligence agencies working alongside unethical scientists. For more, see this list of programs that treated humans as guinea pigs.
Canada's electronic spy agency broke privacy laws by sharing information about Canadians with foreign partners, a federal watchdog said Thursday. Commissioner Jean-Pierre Plouffe said in his annual report that the Communications Security Establishment passed along information known as metadata to counterparts in the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Metadata is information associated with a communication, such as a telephone number or email address, but not the message itself. The communications agency intercepts and analyzes foreign communications for intelligence information of interest to the federal government. The agency is legally authorized to collect and analyze metadata churning through cyberspace. Plouffe, who keeps an eye on the highly secretive agency, said he found that it lacks clarity regarding the sharing of certain types of metadata. Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan said the sharing won't resume until he is satisfied that the proper protections are in place. Plouffe's report noted that certain metadata was not being properly minimized, or rendered unidentifiable, prior to being shared. The CSE's failure to strip out certain Canadian identity information violated the National Defense Act and therefore the federal Privacy Act as well. Privacy advocates have stressed that metadata is far from innocuous since it can reveal a great deal about a person's online behavior and interactions.
Note: Many countries do not allow their intelligence agencies to spy on their own citizens without going through a legal process. The easy way around this that has been used for decades is to simply getting the information from a friendly country. So if the CIA wants information on you in the US, they can't spy directly, but they can ask the UK to do so and pass the information to them and thus get around the laws. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing intelligence agency corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
The Navys SEAL Team 6 ... best known for killing Osama bin Laden, has been transformed by more than a decade of combat into a global manhunting machine. That role reflects Americas new way of war, in which conflict is distinguished ... by the relentless killing of suspected militants. While fighting grinding wars of attrition in Afghanistan and Iraq, Team 6 ... joined Central Intelligence Agency operatives in an initiative called the Omega Program, which offered greater latitude in hunting adversaries. Team 6 has successfully carried out thousands of dangerous raids that military leaders credit with weakening militant networks, but its activities have also spurred recurring concerns. Afghan villagers and a British commander accused SEALs of indiscriminately killing men in one hamlet; in 2009, team members joined C.I.A. and Afghan paramilitary forces in a raid that left a group of youths dead and inflamed tensions between Afghan and NATO officials. When suspicions have been raised about misconduct, outside oversight has been limited. This is an area where Congress notoriously doesnt want to know too much, said Harold Koh, the State Departments former top legal adviser. Like the C.I.A.s campaign of drone strikes, Special Operations missions offer policy makers an alternative to costly wars of occupation. But the bulwark of secrecy around Team 6 makes it impossible to fully assess its record and the consequences of its actions, including civilian casualties or the deep resentment inside the countries where its members operate.
Note: Drone strikes almost always miss their intended targets. Casualties of war whose identities are unknown are frequently mis-reported to be "militants". For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about military corruption and high level manipulation of mass media.
James Risen, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for exposing the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, has [been] threatened with prison by the Obama Justice Department. [This] is almost certainly the vindictive by-product of the U.S. governments anger over his NSA reporting. He has published a new book on the War on Terror entitled Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War. Risen's [critique] is one of the first to offer large amounts of original reporting on ... a particular part of the War on Terror, namely the way in which economic motives, what [he] calls the Homeland Security Industrial Complex, has driven a huge part of the war. GLENN GREENWALD: How much of this economic motive is the cause of the fact that weve now been at war for 13 years? RISEN: It plays a really central role. After so many years theres ... a post-9/11 mercenary class thats developed that have invested. Not just people who are making money, but people who are in the government. Their status and their power within the government are invested in continuing the war. Theres very little debate about whether to continue the war. When Dick Cheney said, the gloves come off, ... that really meant, Were going to deregulate national security, and were going to take off all the rules that were imposed in the 70s after Watergate. That was just a dramatic change. Its been extended to this whole new homeland security apparatus. People think that terrorism is an existential threat, even though its not, and so theyre willing to go along with all this.
Note: The complete interview at the link above provides details of James Risen's fight to preserve journalistic integrity against a corrupted government's attempts to manipulate the news. For more on Risen's deeply revealing investigation of the Homeland Security Industrial Complex, see this recent NPR interview.
A destructive Trojan Horse malware program has penetrated the software that runs much of the nations critical infrastructure and is poised to cause an economic catastrophe, according to the Department of Homeland Security. National Security sources told ABC News there is evidence that the malware was inserted by hackers believed to be sponsored by the Russian government. The hacked software is used to control ... oil and gas pipelines, power transmission grids, water distribution and filtration systems, wind turbines and even some nuclear plants. The hacking campaign has been ongoing since 2011, but no attempt has been made to activate the malware. DHS sources ... fear that the Russians have torn a page from the old, Cold War playbook, and have placed the malware in key U.S. systems as a threat, and/or as a deterrent to a U.S. cyber-attack on Russian systems. The hack became known to insiders last week when a DHS alert bulletin was issued. The bulletin said the BlackEnergy penetration recently had been detected by several companies. DHS said BlackEnergy is the same malware that was used ... to target NATO and some energy and telecommunications companies. The hacked software is very advanced. It allows designated workers to control various industrial processes through the computer, an iPad or a smart phone, sources said.
Note: For an example of a computer-based attack on industrial infrastructure, read how a malware called Stuxnet targeted Iranian nuclear facilities. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.
Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden responded to questions from The Washington Post following the release of an e-mail he had sent while working for the National Security Agency. Q: How do you respond to todays NSA statement and the release of your email with the Office of General Counsel? A: The NSAs new discovery of written contact between me and its lawyers - after more than a year of denying any such contact existed - raises serious concerns. It reveals as false the NSAs claim ... that after extensive investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowdens contention that he brought these matters to anyones attention. Todays release is incomplete, and does not include my correspondence with the Signals Intelligence Directorates Office of Compliance. [But] whether my disclosures were justified does not depend on whether I raised these concerns previously. Thats because the system is designed to ensure that even the most valid concerns are suppressed and ignored, not acted upon. The fact that two powerful Democratic Senators - Ron Wyden and Mark Udall - knew of mass surveillance that they believed was abusive and felt constrained [not] to do anything about it underscores how futile such internal action is -- and will remain -- until these processes are reformed. Still, the fact is that I did raise such concerns both verbally and in writing, and on multiple, continuing occasions - as I have always said.
Note: For more on the Snowden case, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
The widespread surveillance of Spanish citizens by the US National Security Agency, which caused outrage when it was reported this week, was the product of a collaboration with Spain's intelligence services, according to one Spanish newspaper. Spanish agents not only knew about the work of the NSA but also facilitated it, El Mundo reports. An NSA document entitled "Sharing computer network operations cryptologic information with foreign partners" reportedly shows how the US relies on the collaboration of many countries to give it access to intelligence information, including electronic metadata. According to the document seen by El Mundo, the US classifies cooperation with various countries on four different levels. In the first group "Comprehensive Cooperation" are the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The second group "Focused Cooperation" of which Spain is a member, includes 19 countries, all of them European, apart from Japan and South Korea. The third group "Limited cooperation" consists of countries such as France, Israel, India and Pakistan; while the fourth "Exceptional Cooperation" is made up of countries that the US considers to be hostile to its interests. The NSA documents [suggest] the Spanish intelligence services were working hand in hand with the NSA, as were other foreign agencies. But if there was any doubt as to who held the upper hand, the NSA documents make clear that any collaboration was always to serve the needs of protecting American interests.
Note: For more on the realities of intelligence agency activities, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
The shooter behind the deadly massacre at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin [on August 5, 2012] has been identified as 40-year-old Wade Michael Page. Page previously served in the U.S. military, but was no longer on active duty. Page enlisted in the Army in April 1992 and was given a less-than-honorable discharge in October 1998. He was last stationed in Fort Bragg, N.C., serving in the psychological operations unit. Authorities said Page strode into the temple carrying a 9mm handgun and multiple magazines of ammunition and opened fire without saying a word. When the shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in suburban Milwaukee ended, six victims ranging in age from 39 to 84 years old lay dead. Three others were critically wounded. The suspect was shot and killed by police. Page joined the military in Milwaukee in 1992 and was a repairman for the Hawk missile system before switching jobs to become one of the Armys psychological operations specialists assigned to a battalion at Fort Bragg, N.C. As a psyops specialist, Page would have trained to host public meetings between locals and American forces, use leaflet campaigns in a conflict zone or use loudspeakers to communicate with enemy soldiers. He never deployed overseas while serving in that role, Pentagon spokesman George Wright said. The FBI was leading the investigation because the shooting was considered domestic terrorism, or an attack that originated inside the U.S. The agency said it had no reason to believe anyone other than Page was involved. The shooting also came two weeks after a gunman killed 12 people at movie theater in Colorado.
Note: For more on US military and intelligence agency mind control programs and the creation of assassins ("Manchurian Candidates"), click here.
The Pentagon is planning to ramp up its spying operations against high-priority targets such as Iran under an intelligence reorganization aimed at expanding on the militarys espionage efforts beyond war zones. The newly created Defense Clandestine Service would work closely with the CIA ... in an effort to bolster espionage operations overseas at a time when the missions of the agency and the military increasingly converge. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who signed off on the newly created service last week, served as CIA director at a time when the agency relied extensively on military hardware, including armed drones. Michael Vickers, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the main force behind the changes, is best known as one of the architects of the CIAs program to arm Islamist militants to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan in the 1980s. He is also a former member of U.S. Special Operations forces. Despite the potentially provocative name for the new service, the official played down concerns that the Pentagon was seeking to usurp the role of the CIA or its National Clandestine Service. The new service fits into a broader convergence trend. U.S. Special Operations forces are increasingly engaged in intelligence collection overseas and have collaborated with the CIA on missions. The blurring is also evident in the organizations upper ranks. Panetta previously served as CIA director.
Note: For lots more from major media sources on the activities of government intelligence agencies, click here.
Since September, at least 60 people have died in 14 reported CIA drone strikes in Pakistans tribal regions. The Obama administration has named only one of the dead, hailing the elimination of Janbaz Zadran, a top official in the Haqqani insurgent network, as a counterterrorism victory. The identities of the rest remain classified, as does the existence of the drone program itself. The administration ... has parried reports of collateral damage and the alleged killing of innocents by saying that drones, with their surveillance capabilities and precision missiles, result in far fewer mistakes than less sophisticated weapons. Yet in carrying out hundreds of strikes over three years resulting in an estimated 1,350 to 2,250 deaths in Pakistan it has provided virtually no details to support those assertions. The rapid expansion in the size and scope of the drone campaign as the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been winding down has led to increased criticism from human rights and international law experts, many of whom dispute the legal justification for the program. Much of the resistance to increased disclosure has come from the CIA, which has argued that the release of any information about the program, particularly on how targets are chosen and strikes approved, would aid the enemy. The Defense Departments Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which has carried out strikes in Yemen and Somalia, refuses to discuss drones or any other aspect of its secret counterterrorism operations.
Note: For key reports from major media sources on government secrecy, click here.
Buried in FBI laboratory reports about the anthrax mail attacks that killed five people in 2001 are data suggesting that a chemical may have been added to try to heighten the powder's potency, a move that some experts say exceeded the expertise of the presumed killer. The lab data, contained in more than 9,000 pages of files that emerged a year after the Justice Department closed its inquiry and condemned the late Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins as the perpetrator, shows unusual levels of silicon and tin in anthrax powder from two of the five letters. Those elements are found in compounds that could be used to weaponize the anthrax, enabling the lethal spores to float easily so they could be readily inhaled by the intended victims, scientists say. The existence of the silicon-tin chemical signature offered investigators the possibility of tracing purchases of the more than 100 such chemical products available before the attacks, which might have produced hard evidence against Ivins or led the agency to the real culprit. But the FBI lab reports released in late February give no hint that bureau agents tried to find the buyers of additives such as tin-catalyzed silicone polymers. The apparent failure of the FBI to pursue this avenue of investigation raises the ominous possibility that the killer is still on the loose.
Note: For key articles from reliable sources on government corruption, click here.
Doctors and psychologists the CIA employed to monitor its "enhanced interrogation" of terror suspects came close to, and may even have committed, unlawful human experimentation, a medical ethics watchdog has alleged. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a not-for-profit group that has investigated the role of medical personnel in alleged incidents of torture at Guantnamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other US detention sites, accuses doctors of being far more involved than hitherto understood. PHR says health professionals participated at every stage in the development, implementation and legal justification of what it calls the CIA's secret "torture programme". The most incendiary accusation of PHR's latest report, Aiding Torture, is that doctors actively monitored the CIA's interrogation techniques with a view to determining their effectiveness, using detainees as human subjects without their consent. The report concludes that such data gathering was "a practice that approaches unlawful experimentation". Human experimentation without consent has been prohibited in any setting since 1947 [with] the Nuremberg Code, which resulted from the prosecution of Nazi doctors. In April, a leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross found that medical staff employed by the CIA had been present during waterboarding, and had even used what appeared to be a pulse oxymeter, placed on the prisoner's finger to monitor his oxygen saturation during the procedure. PHR is calling for an official investigation into the role of doctors in the CIA's now widely discredited programme. It wants to know exactly how many doctors participated, what they did, what records they kept and the science that they applied.
Note: To watch a video of a Democracy Now! segment on the PHR report, click here. For astounding information on how MDs participated in the CIA's mind control experiments in the past, click here.
U.S. military defense lawyers for accused 9/11 conspirator Ramzi bin al Shibh cannot learn what interrogation techniques CIA agents used on the Yemeni before he was moved to Guantánamo to be tried as a terrorist, an Army judge has ruled. Bin al Shibh, 37, is one of five men charged in a complex death penalty prosecution by military commission currently under review by the Obama administration. But his lawyers say he suffers a "delusional disorder," and hallucinations in his cell at Guantánamo may leave him neither sane enough to act as his own attorney nor to stand trial. Prison camp doctors treat him with psychotropic drugs. Army Col. Stephen Henley, the military judge on the case, has scheduled a competency hearing for mid-September. Meantime, the judge ruled on Aug. 6 that "evidence of specific techniques employed by various governmental agencies to interrogate the accused is . . . not essential to a fair resolution of the incompetence determination hearing in this case." Prosecutors had invoked a national security privilege in seeking to shield the details from defense lawyers. Many of the techniques used on the men have already been made public. They included waterboarding, sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation methods meant to break a captive's will. But Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, the Yemeni's Pentagon appointed defense attorney, said court-approved mental health experts -- as well as the judge -- need to know the specifics to assess her client's mental illness. If he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his CIA interrogations, there may be PTSD treatments that could make him competent.
Note: For many reports from reliable sources on the hidden realities of "the war on terror," click here.
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