Abby and Robbie discuss the reality of war: the pre-propaganda that has manufactured consent for the illegal occupations, video game warfare and cognitive dissonance in combat, the Marine urination scandal; Martin Luther King Jr. and historical revisionism minimizing how anti-imperialism was the main pillar of his philosophical platform; the CIA and the US covert war in Iran; SOPA, PIPA breakdown, the difference between copyright and fair use, the threat to net neutrality and websites like Media Roots under this overarching legislation.

Amir Mirzaei Hekmati

Robert Mackey writes for the New York Times:

According to Iranian state television, a former United States marine who was convicted of spying on Iran and sentenced to death on Monday was also involved in a nefarious plot to brainwash the youth of the Middle East using an unlikely tool: video games.

In a video report broadcast last month, Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, the former marine of Iranian descent who was arrested during a visit to Tehran in August, allegedly confessed to a career in American intelligence that included a stint at a video game company in New York that was “a cover for the C.I.A.”

According to an English translation of the report published by The Tehran Times, an Iranian state-run newspaper, about one-third of the way through the report, Mr. Hekmati said he had worked for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, after he left the Marine Corps in 2005. Then, according to the newspaper’s somewhat oddly worded translation, Mr. Hekmati said in Persian:

After Darpa, I was recruited by Kuma Games Company, a computer games company which received money from C.I.A. to design and make special films and computer games to change the public opinion’s mindset in the Middle East and distribute them among Middle East residents free of charge. The goal of Kuma Games was to convince the people of the world and Iraq that what the U.S. does in Iraq and other countries is good and acceptable.

He reportedly added: “The head of Kuma called me and said, ‘I have received your resume from Darpa, and we have a program in which you can help us.’ ” Kuma, Mr. Hekmati explained, “was also a cover for the C.I.A. and only the chief of company knows that you’re working with the agency.”*

(After the verdict against Mr. Hekmati was reported on Monday, his family, along with the White House and the State Department, flatly denied that he was a spy.)…

Read more here.

Iran protested the United States and United Kingdom for their roles in the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan Wednesday, implicating the two nations in the attack, the official Iranian Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported Saturday.

Iran sent a letter to the Swiss embassy in Tehran – the only official diplomatic channel between Iran and the United States in Tehran – saying that CIA-led operations in the Islamic Republic are known, and blaming the US for supporting “terrorist groups against Iran.”

Tehran also sent a letter to the British Foreign Ministry, claiming British intelligence operations aided in the killing of the 32-year-old Roshan in a car bomb.

The letter cited a quote by Foreign Intelligence Service Head (MI6) John Sawers, who said that the UK was beginning intelligence operations against Iran, according to IRNA.

Iran demanded a response from both governments.

The Islamic Republic has blamed the violent death of Roshan on the CIA, Israel and now MI6. US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton summarily denied the charges and Israeli President Shimon Peres said that Israel had no role in the attack, to the best of his knowledge…

[continues at the Jerusalem Post]

Forget Kenya. Never mind the secret madrassas. The sinister, shocking truth about Barack Obama’s past lies not in east Africa, but in outer space. As a young man in the early 1980s, Obama was part of a secret CIA project to explore Mars. The future president teleported there, along with the future head of Darpa.

That’s the assertion, at least, of a pair of self-proclaimed time-traveling, universe-exploring government agents. Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings insist that they once served as “chrononauts” at Darpa’s behest, traversing the boundaries of time and space. They swear: A youthful Barack Obama was one of them.

Perhaps this all sounds fantastical, absurd, and more than a little nuts. We couldn’t agree more. That’s one of the reasons we love conspiracy theories — the more awesomely insane, the better. Each week during 2012, when the Mayans tell us to expect the apocalypse, Danger Room will peel back a new layer of crazy to expose those oh-so-cleverly hidden machinations powering this doomed plane of existence. Welcome — back — to Tinfoil Tuesday…

What a relief! (I wonder if this woman’s Pleiadian lover knew about this?)

Freeway Ricky Ross. (Patrick Bastien Photography)

The late, lamented Gary Webb never really received the credit he deserved for his investigative journalism blowing open the CIA-Contras drug trafficking scandal. Now Ryan Grim sets the record straight in this article for Huffington Post, ostensibly about Ron Paul and conspiracy theories, but really an opportunity to plug his new book, This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America:

…Earlier this week, I looked into [Ron] Paul’s claim … that the war on drugs had racist origins and that the medical community played a role in lobbying for drug prohibitions. That charge was more or less accurate.

So is Paul’s claim about the CIA and drug trafficking, a connection I explore in the book “This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.” (An excerpt of the chapter on the CIA appeared in The Root.) The following is drawn from my book.

Since at least the 1940s, the American government has organized and supported insurgent armies for the purpose of overthrowing some presumably hostile foreign regime. In Italy, the United States helped pit the Corsican and Sicilian mobs against the Fascists and then the Communists. In China, it aided Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang in its struggle against Mao Zedong’s communist forces. In Afghanistan, it once backed the mujahedeen in their fight against the Soviet Union and today backs warlords in opposition to the mujahedeen.

All of these and other U.S.-supported groups profited, or still profit, heavily from the drug trade. One of the principal arguments made by the Drug Enforcement Administration in support of the global drug war is that the illegal drug trade funds violent, stateless organizations. The DEA refers specifically to al Qaeda and the Taliban, but the same method of fundraising has long been used by other violent, stateless actors whom the United States befriended.

AN ‘UNCOMFORTABLE’ STORY

Douglas Farah was in El Salvador when the San Jose Mercury News broke a major story in the summer of 1996: The Nicaraguan Contras, a confederation of paramilitary rebels sponsored by the CIA, had been funding some of their operations by exporting cocaine to the United States. One of their best customers was a man nicknamed “Freeway Rick” — Ricky Donnell Ross, then a Southern California dealer who was running an operation the Los Angeles Times dubbed “the Wal-Mart of crack dealing.”

“My first thought was, ‘Holy shit!’ because there’d been so many rumors in the region of this going on,” said Farah 12 years later. He’d grown up in Latin America and covered it for 20 years for the Washington Post. “There had always been these stories floating around about [the Contras] and cocaine. I knew [Contra leader] Adolfo Calero and some of the other folks there, and they were all sleazebags. You wouldn’t read the story and say, ‘Oh my god, these guys would never do that.’ It was more like, ‘Oh, one more dirty thing they were doing.’ So I took it seriously.”

The same would not hold true of most of Farah’s colleagues, either in the newspaper business in general or at the Post in particular. “If you’re talking about our intelligence community tolerating — if not promoting — drugs to pay for black ops, it’s rather an uncomfortable thing to do when you’re an establishment paper like the Post,” Farah told me. “If you were going to be directly rubbing up against the government, they wanted it more solid than it could probably ever be done.”

In the mid to late 1980s, a number of reports had surfaced that connected the Contras to the cocaine trade…

[continues at Huffington Post]

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez hinted that the U.S. may be behind a “very strange” bout of cancer affecting several leaders aligned with him in South America.

Chavez, speaking a day after Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, said the Central Intelligence Agency was behind chemical experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s and that it’s possible that in years to come a plot will be uncovered that shows the U.S. spread cancer as a political weapon against its critics.

“It’s very difficult to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what has been happening to some of us in Latin America,” Chavez said in a nationally televised speech to the military. “Would it be so strange that they’ve invented technology to spread cancer and we won’t know about it for 50 years?”

Chavez, who was diagnosed with an undisclosed form of cancer in June and had a baseball-sized tumor removed in Cuba, has called for a regional summit of leaders who have battled cancer including Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva and Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo.

“I’m just sharing my thoughts, but it’s very, very, very strange,” Chavez said. “Evo take care of yourself, Correa, be careful, we just don’t know,” he said, referring to Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, the leaders of Bolivia and Ecuador…

[continues at Bloomberg News]

There are stories that have come to light, over the years, that make the Central Intelligence Agency look like a collection of Looney Tunes shorts. The violence, the slapstick, and the over-the-top ridiculousness of the experiments that have been conducted over the years boggle the mind. They came from the (slightly-boggled) mind of one man: Sidney Gottlieb.

Sidney Gottlieb proved to the world that there are few things more dangerous than a chemist with a metaphysical streak — especially if he collects a few thwarted ambitions. Born in 1918, he was deemed physically unfit for duty in the Second World War. Instead of going to war, he went to the University of Wisconsin, and graduated with a degree in chemistry. His degree didn’t help him into the army, but it did interest the CIA.

The Central Intelligence Agency, barreling into the Cold War, was trying to devise new ways to get an advantage over the enemy. Old warfare strategies wouldn’t work. They had to brainstorm new ones. It’s said that there are no bad ideas in brainstorming. The CIA, at the time, seemed set out to prove that there were no bad ideas at all. And Gottlieb was just the guy to try to help them.

Read More from Esther Inglis-Arkell on io9.com

McLEAN, VA — In an anonymous industrial park, CIA analysts who jokingly call themselves the “ninja librarians” are mining the mass of information people publish about themselves overseas, tracking everything from common public opinion to revolutions.

The group’s effort gives the White House a daily snapshot of the world built from tweets, newspaper articles and Facebook updates.

The agency’s Open Source Center sometimes looks at 5 million tweets a day. The analysts are also checking out TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that people can access and contribute to openly.

The Associated Press got an apparently unprecedented view of the center’s operations, including a tour of the main facility. The AP agreed not to reveal its exact location and to withhold the identities of some who work there because much of the center’s work is secret.

From Arabic to Mandarin, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in a native tongue. They cross-reference it with a local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House. There might be a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.

Read More: AP

Trevor Paglen’s work deliberately blurs the lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. He is also the author of several books: Torture Taxi, the first book to comprehensively cover the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program; I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me, a book looking at the world of black projects through unit patches and memorabilia created for top-secret programs; and Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World, a book that gives a broader look at secrecy in the United States.

More on Media Roots

In New Brunswick, N.J., a building superintendent opened the door to apartment No. 1076 one balmy Tuesday and discovered an alarming scene: terrorist literature strewn about the table and computer and surveillance equipment set up in the next room.

The panicked superintendent dialed 911, sending police and the FBI rushing to the building near Rutgers University on the afternoon of June 2, 2009. What they found in that first-floor apartment, however, was not a terrorist hideout but a command center set up by a secret team of New York Police Department intelligence officers.

From that apartment, about an hour outside the department’s jurisdiction, the NYPD had been staging undercover operations and conducting surveillance throughout New Jersey. Neither the FBI nor the local police had any idea.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the NYPD has become one of the country’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. A months-long investigation by The Associated Press has revealed that the NYPD operates far outside its borders and targets ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government. And it does so with unprecedented help from the CIA in a partnership that has blurred the bright line between foreign and domestic spying.

Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which contributes hundreds of millions of dollars each year, is told exactly what’s going on.

The department has dispatched teams of undercover officers, known as “rakers,” into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They’ve monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing. NYPD officials have scrutinized imams and gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims.

Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD’s intelligence unit…

[continues at Huffington Post]

Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access. At the facility, the CIA runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab, an Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda.

[Continues at AlterNet]

The CIA organised a fake vaccination program in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader’s family. A senior Pakistani doctor was recruited to organize the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the “project” in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic.

DNA from any of the Bin Laden children in the compound could be compared with a sample from his sister, who died in Boston in 2010, to provide evidence that the family was present. It is not known exactly how the doctor hoped to get DNA from the vaccinations, although nurses could have been trained to withdraw some blood in the needle after administrating the drug.

The vaccination plan was conceived after American intelligence officers tracked an al-Qaida courier, known as Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, to what turned out to be Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound last summer. The agency monitored the compound by satellite and surveillance from a local CIA safe house in Abbottabad, but wanted confirmation that Bin Laden was there before mounting a risky operation inside another country.

The doctor went to Abbottabad in March, saying he had procured funds to give free vaccinations for hepatitis B. Bypassing the management of the Abbottabad health services, he paid generous sums to low-ranking local government health workers, who took part in the operation without knowing about the connection to Bin Laden. Health visitors in the area were among the few people who had gained access to the Bin Laden compound in the past, administering polio drops to some of the children.

A nurse known as Bakhto, whose full name is Mukhtar Bibi, managed to gain entry to the Bin Laden compound to administer the vaccines. According to several sources, the doctor, who waited outside, told her to take in a handbag that was fitted with an electronic device. It is not clear what the device was, or whether she left it behind. It is also not known whether the CIA managed to obtain any Bin Laden DNA, although one source suggested the operation did not succeed.

I have on good authority that this song was played at something called the “Jihadi Bar,” a place where CIA interrogators working at a Black Site went to unwind. That and other secrets of undisclosed torture prisons are found within my interview with ex-interrogator Glenn Carle for Danger Room.

Much like at Guantanamo, detainees at this specific Black Site — I don’t know this for sure, but will irresponsibly speculate based on certain clues that it was in Afghanistan but not at Bagram — had heavy metal blasted at loud volumes, constantly, to torture them. Alas, Carle couldn’t tell me if one of the songs he heard there was “Bodies” by Drowning Pool, a staple on the torturers’ mixtape of the 00s.

More on Spencer Ackerman’s Blog

Paul Carr

How long before Paul Carr (author of The Upgrade, coming soon from disinformation) finds his online identity is no longer his own? He takes on Lulzsec in this article for the Guardian, which has been modified after complaints about his original choice of words:

If one is to believe the media coverage – particularly here in the US‚ no one is safe from the ingenious hackers and their devilishly complex attacks. The truth is, there’s almost nothing ingenious about what LulzSec is doing: CIA and Soca were not “hacked” in any meaningful sense, rather their public websites were brought down by an avalanche of traffic – a so-called “distributed denial-of-service” (DDoS) attack. Given enough internet-enabled typewriters, a monkey could launch a DDoS attack – except that mentally subnormal monkeys have better things to do with their time.

Even the genuine hacks are barely worthy of the word. Many large organisations use databases with known security holes that can easily be exploited by anyone who has recently completed the first year of a computer science degree: it’s no coincidence that so many of these hacker collectives appear towards the end of the academic year.

Still, what LulzSec might lack in technical prowess, it certainly makes up for in its ability to grab attention. Hackers have always boasted of their work – leaving messages on their victims’ servers, posting proof of their exploits on bulletin boards‚ so in a world where every criminal and his dog has a YouTube channel and a Facebook fan-page it’s hardly surprising that LulzSec is obsessed with online publicity. The group has been particularly smart in their use of Twitter: in less than two months it has amassed over 240,000 followers which, amusingly, means it can launch a DDoS attack simply by tweeting the web address of its next target and waiting for the tsunami of clicks to have the desired effect.

Given the group’s modus operandi – boasting on social networks, sticking it to the man – it was entirely unshocking when, on Tuesday morning, the police arrested their first suspect: a teenager who, according to his mum, suffers from agoraphobia and “lives his life online”. Ryan Cleary may, of course, be found completely innocent but when the group’s leaders are rounded up it’s a fairly safe bet that none of them will turn out to be attractive, outgoing 30-year-old women…

[continues in the Guardian]

The hacker group Lulz Security has claimed it has brought down the public-facing website of the US Central Intelligence Agency.

The alleged attack on CIA.gov occurred on the same day the group opened a telephone request line so its fans could suggest potential targets.

On its Twitter feed, the group wrote: “Tango down – cia.gov – for the lulz”.

The CIA website was inaccessible at times on Wednesday but appeared to be back up on Thursday.

It was unclear if the outage was due to the group’s efforts or to the large number of internet users trying to check the site.

The CIA would not confirm if it had been the victim of an attack. In a statement, a spokesperson told BBC News: “The CIA’s public web site experienced technical issues that caused it to respond slowly for a short time yesterday evening. Those issues are now resolved.”

[Continues at BBC News]

Photo: Thomas Good (CC)

Is President Obama getting away with some of the same offenses that led to Nixon’s resignation? Daniel Ellsberg thinks so. The Raw Story reports:

Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg said Tuesday that disgraced former Republican President Richard M. Nixon would “admire [President Barack] Obama’s boldness” in trying to stifle whistleblowers.

“Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, might take bittersweet satisfaction to know that he was not the last smart president to prolong unjustifiably a senseless, unwinnable war, at great cost in human life,” Ellsberg told CNN. “And his aide Henry Kissinger was not the last American official to win an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize.”

“He would probably also feel vindicated (and envious) that ALL the crimes he committed against me — which forced his resignation facing impeachment — are now legal,” he continued.

“That includes burglarizing my former psychoanalyst’s office (for material to blackmail me into silence), warrantless wiretapping, using the CIA against an American citizen in the US, and authorizing a White House hit squad to ‘incapacitate me totally’ (on the steps of the Capitol on May 3, 1971)… But under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, with the PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendment Act, and (for the hit squad) President Obama’s executive orders. [T]hey have all become legal.”

[Continues at The Raw Story]

A post on the Washington Post’s defunct blog “Spy Talk” from May of 2010 detailed the CIA’s plans to produce fake Osama bin Laden videos.

Yesterday, the BBC reported on neighbors of the alleged Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad expressing skepticism as to the authenticity of videos released by the White House purporting to show Osama bin Laden watching television.

Here’s what the Agency has to say:

These documents, which describe secret writing techniques and are housed at the National Archives, are believed to be the only remaining classified documents from the World War I era. Documents describing secret writing fall under the CIA’s purview to declassify.

“These documents remained classified for nearly a century until recent advancements in technology made it possible to release them,” CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said. “When historical information is no longer sensitive, we take seriously our responsibility to share it with the American people.”

One document outlines the chemicals and techniques necessary for developing certain types of secret writing ink and a method for opening sealed letters without detection. Another memorandum dated June 14, 1918 – written in French – reveals the formula used for German secret ink.

“The CIA recognizes the importance of opening these historical documents to the public,” said Joseph Lambert, the Agency’s Director of Information Management Services. “In fiscal year 2010 alone, the Agency declassified and released over 1.1 million pages of documents.”

The documents will be available on CIA.gov and in the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST) at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. CREST currently houses over 10 million pages of declassified Agency documents. Since 1995, the Agency has released over 30 million pages as a result of Executive Orders, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Privacy Act, and mandatory declassification reviews.

Here are links to the documents:

Secret writing document one
Secret writing document two
Secret writing document three
Secret writing document four
Secret writing document five
Secret writing document six

Millions of feet of film of historical imagery from intelligence satellites may be declassified this year, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) said.

“The NGA is anticipating the potential declassification of significant amounts of film-based imagery… in 2011,” according to an NGA announcement that solicited contractor interest in converting the declassified film into digital format.

For planning purposes, the NGA told potential contractors to assume the need to digitize “approximately 4 million linear feet of film up to approximately 7 inches in width.” The imagery is “stored on 500 foot spools, with many frames up to several feet in length.” A nominal start date of October 1, 2011 was specified for the digitization project.

The declassification of historical intelligence satellite imagery has been largely dormant for many years. President Clinton’s 1995 executive order 12951 promised a periodic review of classified imagery “with the objective of making available to the public as much imagery as possible consistent with the interests of national defense and foreign policy.” In particular, a review of obsolete film-return systems, such as the KH-8 GAMBIT and the KH-9 HEXAGON, was to be completed within five years. This was not done, or produced no results if it was done.

WASHINGTON –

A presidential finding leaked by various news outlets a few days after the enforcement of a United Nations no-fly zone over Libya evidences Obama’s willingness to deploy America soldiers into Libya weeks before he would tell the American people on television that they would not have to count on “boots on the ground” being deployed into Libya.

If indeed there are flickers of democracy evident in the rage of Libyan family and friends of nonviolent protesters gunned by Gadhafi’s heartless mercenaries, their encouragement by domestic players or foreign interlocutors is curious insofar as so many American public figures feel compelled to fan them solely under the aegis of Libya’s self-determination and sovereignty.

Tyler Bass: “How are you, General? So recently White House Spokesman Jay Carney as well as Barack Obama himself have repeatedly underlined that there are, quote, ‘no boots on the ground’ in Libya, yet there are all these reports coming out of the New York Times and other publications –

Colin Powell: (Off mic) – the sound system is pointed that way – (off mic)

TB: “OK, then I’ll talk more toward you. White House Spokesman Jay Carney –“

CP: “Yeah.”

TB: “—has repeatedly said there are no boots on the ground in Libya. So has Barack Obama, but we have reports from the New York Times and other outlets saying in fact that there are, as well as CIA, which I guess is ‘shoes on the ground,’ right?

So why is – why is Barack Obama saying this? Why is Carney saying it? Or are they not aware, which I think is really unlikely? Or why are they saying it?”

CP: “They’re obviously aware of what’s going on, but what they meant by ‘no boots on the ground’ is that we were not – (off mic) –ground war – (off mic) – sending in our combat units – (off mic) – infantry or armor to fight these units on the ground, but to send in intelligence agents and –“

TB: “Or Special Forces.”

CP: “—or Special Forces –“

TB: “OK.”

CP: “—they are not going to be actively involved in fighting either the government or the rebels, but obviously it’s a way of gathering intelligence and helping the rebels fight more effectively. So there may not be boots on the ground – (off mic) – shoes on the ground – (off mic) –

When Powell had approached the stage, long-time Code Pink Activist Medea Benjamin stood to extend a sign proclaiming him a war criminal. Many students booed her, and she was summarily shown out. Later that evening, I asked her why she had protested the general’s presence. She replied, “Why did I walk on the stage with a sign that said ‘Powell=War Criminal? I was in Baghdad the day Colin Powell got in front of the UN and made a raft of false accusations about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. That sealed the fate of millions of Iraqis who have suffered so much since the US invasion. Powell has the blood of countless Iraqis–as well as thousands of US soldiers–on his hands. He shouldn’t be given huge honorariums for addressing college students; he should be an trial for war crimes.”

In the same moments as he mused upon his teenage grandson’s comfort with Twitter and other social media, for the “Arab world” in particular, Powell repeatedly celebrated the oncoming “information revolution” and the “infonuts” who have enabled it, lauding them for their willingness and ability to “get around the government systems.”

Powell spent time reflecting on the privilege of office. He visibly enjoyed reminiscing in front of AU students about the trappings and perks of his former station. His face glowed as he described the process of walking up the red carpet to his ever-waiting 757 that accompanied him on every trip he took to foreign dignitaries and sovereign leaders. When a foot of his hit the bottom step, he said, one engine would turn on; when another hit the top step, the other engine would go on. Inside his private cabin, a steward would pull out a Diet Coke and, with the clink of the can hitting the surface of the table in front of him, the plane would roll. Half jokingly, he would admit that something was amiss that “they took [the plane] away.” It was a theme that began early in the talk when he lightly mourned his loss of station, holding one hand higher than the other to indicate the psychological toll of settling back into a life of less authority, if more income.

In the early part of the previous decade, his wife, Alma, would browbeat the then former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for even considering treating his new role at the State Department as if the command of a barrack. Powell would iterate that, upon seeing 500 State Department employees his first day as secretary, the department “was [his] infantry battalion” and that he “didn’t know any other way” after having been so thoroughly inculcated into the military meme.

Along the way pulling up a decent Reagan vocal impression, Powell mused on the Soviets repeatedly and the ideological coaching the Soviets and he had received in the interest of hating each other. He recalled his meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev and how the Soviet Communist Party’s final general secretary proceeded to lecture him at length at the series of reforms he had sought to put in place.

Gorbachev, relays Powell, looked at Powell’s scowling face and wasn’t convinced that Powell had bought his sales pitch. The then secretary general looked up and away from Powell and then returned his gaze, this time with a twinkle in his eye. Powell made a point of imitating Gorbachev’s smirk at this juncture. “Thirty years,” he said, “he had invested in this thing,” the Cold War, and he didn’t intend to lessen his condemnation of Soviet ideology on account of Gorbachev’s claims he had impressed a newfound transparency upon the aging Communist regime.

Unconvinced by the full-throated advertisement of “glasnost” and proclaimed attempt at reconciliation, Powell dismissed the Soviet leader as another “commie.” Gorbachev had countered that he had seen Powell’s KGB file and insulted him on the basis of his simply having been a soldier only trained to fight.

Apparently not including former FBI Assistant Director John O’Neill or Counterterrorism Security Group Chair Richard Clarke in his proverbial “we,” the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, “We never thought anything like 9/11 could happen to us.” Yet now implicating a direct foreign threat from Osama bin Laden, the general expressed his determination not to be afraid of “some clown hiding in a cave in Pakistan.”

As was reported previously on Disinfo, there has been much recent inquiry into the idea of our sense of consciousness and agency arising through the interaction of things outside our nervous system, such as bacteria in our stomach:

“The wave of the future is full of opportunity as we think about how microbiota or bacteria influence the brain and how the bi-directional communication of the body and the brain influence metabolic disorders, such as obesity and diabetes,” says Jane Foster, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences of the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine.” ( article.)

This, however, is just one example of “control from afar,” and we see plenty of Manchurian Candidate material in the natural world through parasites, fungus, and bacteria that can selectively control animals to essentially do their bidding at the time and place of their leisure:

Speaking of ants, a study from the science daily on a fungus that can gain control of an ants nervous system to lead them to die in opportune locations.

“The fungus accurately manipulates the infected ants into dying where the parasite prefers to be, by making the ants travel a long way during the last hours of their lives,” Hughes said.

But getting the ant to die in the right spot is only half the battle, as the researchers found when they dissected a few victims.

“The fungus has evolved a suite of novel strategies to retain possession of its precious resource,” said Hughes.

As the fungus spreads within a dead ant’s body, it converts the ant’s innards into sugars which are used to help the fungus grow. But it leaves the muscles controlling the mandibles intact to make sure the ant keeps its death grip on the leaf.”

This fungus, by the way, is cordyceps, which I take frequently as a supplement. It’s one of the few supplements I’ve taken that has shown demonstrable results both as an immune booster and sexual stimulant. It’s a strange world we live in.

Another example of this kind of possession by parasite, is the gordian worm, which can take over a cricket and cause it to commit suicide in water, where the worm can then burst out and enjoy its new watery home.

There are more examples. Parasites that take over crabs. Fish. I speak in the Immanence of Myth, and frequently on Modern Mythology about our concept of self being a function of myth, that the barriers are permeable, that the “center” can indeed be said to be anywhere. But thinking about these interlocking biological systems, vying for supremacy, raises questions about how psych technologies in the future could be leveraged.

It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to wonder who is pulling the strings in many situations. How likely is it that the future could make prophets of the delusions of paranoid schizophrenics everywhere? Genetically engineered bacteria that can turn people into sleeper agents? Maybe madness today, but what about in twenty years? Or,

“Imagine a weapon that creates sound that only you can hear. Science fiction? No, this is one area that has a very solid basis in reality. The Air Force has experimented with microwaves that create sounds in people’s head (which they’ve called a possible psychological warfare tool), and American Technologies can “beam” sounds to specific targets with their patented HyperSound (and yes, I’ve heard/seen them demonstrate the speakers, and they are shockingly effective)” (Wired article.)

Asking this question was of course a big part of the legacy of Philip K Dick but it seems that we are entering that paranoia inducing future where — though government conspiracies are unlikely to ever remain silent or well organized — technology can be used to control minds, and our “true self” is at best a fiction and at worst a much sought after commodity. CIA ops and media obfuscation occur out in the open (making “obfuscation” a possibly inappropriate choice of words) and few seem to notice, or care.

As an example, leading headlines all over the world today spoke of CIA operations in Libya, which was really not hard to predict, any more than the Al Qaeda links with the “rebel forces” or the ongoing curious relationship between this organization and the US. Consider this:

“Why is the United States so opposed to Gadaffi? He is the main threat to US hegemony in Africa, because he attempts to unite the continent against the United States. This concept is called the United States of Africa. In fact, Gadaffi holds all sorts of ideas that are contrary to US interests. The man blames the United States government for the creation of HIV. He claims that Israel is behind the assassination of Martin Luther King and president John. F. Kennedy. He says that the 9/11 hijackers were trained in the US. He also urged Libyans to donate blood to Americans after 9/11. Khadaffi is also the last of a generation of moderate socialist pan-Arab revolutionaries that is still in power, after Nasser and Hussein have been eliminated, and Syria has aligned itself with Iran.” (article from an amusingly biased source but the point about Al Qaeda, as I said, is worth considering.)

Welcome to the bright future. It’s alright though. We all know this is just paranoid make-believe, right?

Via CNN:

CIA operatives are providing intelligence from Libya, where opposition forces are on the run and the defiant government suffered the embarrassing defection of its foreign minister Wednesday.

The NATO-led coalition, which is enforcing a no-fly zone and protecting civilians from the intense fighting, got no help from the weather in its ongoing efforts to protect the fragile opposition movement.

“The weather conditions did not allow close combat support by aircraft in the last couple of days,” said Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Moammar Gadhafi’s government, for its part, kept up the war of words. State-run Libyan TV late Wednesday quoted a military source as saying a “civilian location was shelled tonight in the city of Tripoli by the colonizing crusader aggression.”

Amid debate on whether the allies will arm the retreating and undertrained rebels, a U.S. intelligence source told CNN the CIA is in the country to increase the “military and political understanding” of the situation. “Yes, we are gathering intel firsthand and we are in contact with some opposition entities,” said the source.

For more information, see original article.

Even though this is intended to be a joke, the CIA’s interest in what it calls “open source intelligence” has been documented (see here and here).

Via the Onion:

After years of secretly monitoring the public, we were astounded so many people would willingly publicize where they live, their religious and political views, an alphabetized list of all their friends, personal emails addresses, phone numbers, hundreds of photos of themselves, and even status updates about what they were doing moment to moment. It is truly a dream come true for the CIA.

Duane R. Clarridge parted company with the Central Intelligence Agency more than two decades ago, but from poolside at his home near San Diego, he still runs a network of spies.

Over the past two years, he has fielded operatives in the mountains of Pakistan and the desert badlands of Afghanistan. Since the United States military cut off his funding in May, he has relied on like-minded private donors to pay his agents to continue gathering information about militant fighters, Taliban leaders and the secrets of Kabul’s ruling class.

Hatching schemes that are something of a cross between a Graham Greene novel and Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy,” Mr. Clarridge has sought to discredit Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Kandahar power broker who has long been on the C.I.A. payroll, and planned to set spies on his half brother, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in hopes of collecting beard trimmings or other DNA samples that might prove Mr. Clarridge’s suspicions that the Afghan leader was a heroin addict, associates say.

Mr. Clarridge, 78, who was indicted on charges of lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal and later pardoned, is described by those who have worked with him as driven by the conviction that Washington is bloated with bureaucrats and lawyers who impede American troops in fighting adversaries and that leaders are overly reliant on mercurial allies.

His dispatches — an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports — have been sent to military officials who, until last spring at least, found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes against militants in Afghanistan. They are also fed to conservative commentators, including Oliver L. North, a compatriot from the Iran-contra days and now a Fox News analyst, and Brad Thor, an author of military thrillers and a frequent guest of Glenn Beck.

For all of the can-you-top-this qualities to Mr. Clarridge’s operation, it is a startling demonstration of how private citizens can exploit the chaos of combat zones and rivalries inside the American government to carry out their own agenda.

It also shows how the outsourcing of military and intelligence operations has spawned legally murky clandestine operations that can be at cross-purposes with America’s foreign policy goals. Despite Mr. Clarridge’s keen interest in undermining Afghanistan’s ruling family, President Obama’s administration appears resigned to working with President Karzai and his half brother, who is widely suspected of having ties to drug traffickers…

[continues in the New York Times]

Julian Assange has set the ultimate dead man’s switch: Arrest or kill him and thousands of files will be automatically released, including documents that out CIA-backed Arabs.

The Wikileaks leader had previously claimed to have files on auto-release. That he had info on CIA ties was first-mentioned in an interview yesterday with Al-Jazeera.

This is exactly the type of information that lead people to condemn Wikileaks as dangerous. If released it would certainly endanger many American operatives and cause a massive political disruption.

Read More in Business Insider

While the fiery debates surrounding Wikileaks continue to move from content of cables to personal dramas surrounding founder Julian Assange, hyperbolic accusations of “high tech terrorism” and promises of retribution, the website Cryptome continues to publish its own archives of suppressed information. On Christmas, Cryptome released two documents from the mid-1950’s which briefly highlight the CIA’s interest in using hypnotism as a covert weapon (via Mother Jones) in the cold war against Communism.

The first document, titled “The Military Application of Hypntism (sic),” details two “practical applications” for hypnotism. The first would be using a subject as a courier. A hypothetical colonel would be given a message in deep hypnosis, would have no memory of being hypnotized, the nature or contents of the message. When the hypothetical colonel reached the intended recipient of the message, its recipient would retrieve it via another hypnosis session. The second application would be used on a subject to “establish in them through the use of hypnotism the condition of split personality.” Unconsciously, the hypnotized would remain loyal to the red, white and blue – but on the outside, the subject would be redder than Lenin’s ghost. The author of the document claims “I can, demonstrate all my particular contentions to the satisfaction of the government agencies and request the opportunity to do so.” The author also suggests that Russian literature on the subject of hypnosis is hard to acquire.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

It’s no secret that WikiLeaks’ cable document dumps have caused ripples of concerns and speculation about how well the United States can keep secrets – its own and those of other countries.

It’s been embarrassing to both U.S. diplomats and foreign leaders mentioned in the cables, but there haven’t been any bombshells from the small percentage of documents released so far. The CIA, known for its ability to keep secrets, is taking no chances of being pulled further into the fray. The CIA has only been mentioned a few times in the cables, and has not been hit nearly as hard as other agencies and diplomats, but it does not appear willing to wait on the sidelines.

And it has an answer for WikiLeaks: WTF. Seriously.

In a move that couldn’t be more ironic, and made for headlines such as the above, the CIA adopted a task force. And like all things involving the military, or secrecy, acronyms are huge. So when the CIA developed the WikiLeaks Task Force, naturally, it was likely thinking of the KISS method – Keep It Simple Stupid.

But in doing so, the CIA has proved it either has a really good sense of humor or was trying to send a snarky message, or perhaps someone at the agency just didn’t think hard enough about the name choice.

“Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force,” The Washington Post reports. “But at CIA headquarters, it’s mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: W.T.F.”…

[continues at CNN]

The CIA has pulled its station chief from Islamabad, one of America’s most important spy posts, after his cover was blown in a legal action brought by victims of US drone strikes in the tribal belt.

The officer, named in Pakistan as Jonathan Banks, left the country yesterday, after a tribesman publicly accused him of being responsible for the death of his brother and son in a CIA drone strike in December 2009. Karim Khan, a journalist from North Waziristan, called for Banks to be charged with murder and executed.

In a rare move, the CIA called Banks home yesterday, citing “security concerns” and saying he had received death threats, Washington officials told Associated Press. Khan’s lawyer said he was fleeing the possibility of prosecution.

“This is just diplomatic language they are using. Banks is a liability to the CIA because he’s likely to be called to court. They want to save him, and themselves, the embarrassment,” said lawyer Shahzad Akbar. Pakistani media reports have claimed that Banks entered the country on a business visa, and therefore does not enjoy diplomatic immunity from prosecution.

Read more here.