U.S. Government Could Hide Existence of Records Under Proposed Freedom of Information Act Rule
Open government? Jennifer LaFleur writes on ProPublica:
A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requesting certain law-enforcement or national security documents that records don’t exist — even when they do.
Under current FOIA practice, the government may withhold information and issue what’s known as a Glomar denial that says it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.
The new proposal — part of a lengthy rule revision by the Department of Justice — would direct government agencies to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.”
Open-government groups object. “We don’t believe the statute allows the government to lie to FOIA requesters,” said Mike German, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes the provision.
How America Planned For An Attack On Britain In 1930
David Gerrie writes in the Daily Mail:
Details of an amazing American military plan for an attack to wipe out a major part of the British Army are today revealed for the first time. In 1930, a mere nine years before the outbreak of World War Two, America drew up proposals specifically aimed at eliminating all British land forces in Canada and the North Atlantic, thus destroying Britain’s trading ability and bringing the country to its knees.
Previously unparalleled troop movements were launched as an overture to an invasion of Canada, which was to include massive bombing raids on key industrial targets and the use of chemical weapons, the latter signed off at the highest level by none other than the legendary General Douglas MacArthur.
The plans, revealed in a Channel 5 documentary, were one of a number of military contingency plans drawn up against a number of potential enemies, including the Caribbean…
Media Roots Interview with Black Ops/Secrecy Researcher Trevor Paglen
Via Media Roots:
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.
Dick Cheney Had Secret Resignation Letter
Other than his health, what were some other things he was concerned about that prompted him to pre-write his resignation? One of many ’secrets’ revealed in Cheney’s new book, In My Time, set to be released at the end of the month. Via Reuters:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney signed a secret resignation letter shortly after taking office in 2001 and kept it in a safe, according to an excerpt of an NBC interview released on Wednesday.
Cheney, who has a long history of heart disease, said concern about a possible health crisis was one of the main reasons he kept the letter. Former President George W. Bush knew about it and so did a Cheney staff member.
“I did it because I was concerned … for a couple of reasons,” Cheney said.
“One was my own health situation. The possibility that I might have a heart attack or a stroke that would be incapacitating.…
Wikileaks’ Julian Assange to Address 9/11 Conspiracy?
Via Prison Planet Live:
Julian Assange may be about to address concerns over his comments last year that 9/11 truth was a “false conspiracy” which he found “annoying”. Assange made the statement despite Wikileaks’ 2009 release of half a million pager messages on the day of 9/11 from New York City officials, many of which contradicted the official story.
The Wikileaks founder is currently in London embroiled in an extradition appeal relating to allegations of rape, which many suspect are unfounded and part of a smear campaign against Assange.
An increasing number of activists are questioning Assange’s motives, including some of his former colleagues like Cryptome’s John Young. However, we have noted that Anonymous, the hacking collective that has vigorously defended Assange, is doing excellent work in exposing the power elite head on, particularly with their intention to shine a light on the secretive gathering of globalists at this week’s Bohemian Grove confab.
Grand Funk Railroad: The Sounds of Secret CIA Torture Prisons
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.
The Secret History of Iraq’s Invisible War
Noah Shachtman writes in Wired’s Danger Room:
In the early years of the Iraq war, the U.S. military developed a technology so secret that soldiers would refuse to acknowledge its existence, and reporters mentioning the gear were promptly escorted out of the country. That equipment – a radio-frequency jammer – was upgraded several times, and eventually robbed the Iraq insurgency of its most potent weapon, the remote-controlled bomb. But the dark veil surrounding the jammers remained largely intact, even after the Pentagon bought more than 50,000 units at a cost of over $17 billion.
Recently, however, I received an unusual offer from ITT, the defense contractor which made the vast majority of those 50,000 jammers. Company executives were ready to discuss the jammer – its evolution, and its capabilities. They were finally able to retell the largely-hidden battles for the electromagnetic spectrum that raged, invisibly, as the insurgencies carried on. They were…
WikiSecrets: The Inside Story of Bradley Manning & The Largest Intelligence Breach in U.S. History (Video)
Worth watching, available now on Frontline’s website. Here’s part one of five:
Beware Of The Real Men In Black
For decades – or perhaps even for centuries, some firmly believe – the infamous Men in Black have been elusive, predatory, fear-inducing figures that have hovered with disturbing regularity upon the enigmatic fringes of the subject of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), coldly nurturing, and carefully weaving, their very own unique brand of horror and intimidation of a definitively other-world variety.
The preferred tools of terror of the MIB are outright menace, far less than thinly-veiled threats, and overwhelming, emotionless intimidation. And they are relentless when it comes to following their one and only agenda – that is, to forever silence witnesses to, and investigators of, UFO encounters. Unfortunately, it has to be admitted, they have been highly successful in achieving their unsettling goal, too. Indeed, and without any shadow of doubt whatsoever, the long and winding history of UFO studies is absolutely littered with fraught, frightened and emotionally-shattered figures that have…
US, UK Nuclear Submarine Secrets Accidentally Published Online
The original is no longer available, but the redacted PDF is here. Via Yahoo News:
A “technical error” has caused Britain’s Ministry of Defense to inadvertently publish classified sections of a report containing sensitive information about US Navy and British military nuclear submarines, the BBC reports.
Sensitive information in the report, which was published to Parliament’s website after a Freedom of Information request by anti-nuclear campaigners, includes how much structural damage British subs can take before a full meltdown takes place, as well as US vessels’ abilities to handle nuclear core failure.
The “schoolboy error,” as the MoD has called it, was due to improper redaction in the PDF document. As British tabloid the Daily Star Sunday, which first reported the gargantuan slip-up, points out, “anyone wanting to read the censored sections just had to copy the text.” This was most likely because whomever attempted to redact the document did so with the…
How Anything May Signify Anything: William Friedman And The Biliteral Cipher
Cabinet Magazine has a fascinating and mysterious article on William F. Friedman, perhaps the greatest code-breaker in modern history. Friedman became a hero of World War II by breaking Japan’s PURPLE code and inventing the Army’s best cipher machine. He did it all using the ‘biliteral cipher’, a simple but powerful encoding technique invented in the sixteenth century, which allows for hidden messages to be conveyed by anything from flower petals to musical notes to faces in a photograph:
It is unlikely that Bacon’s cipher system was ever used for the transmission of military secrets, in the seventeenth century or in the twentieth. But for roughly a century from 1850, it set the world of literature on fire.
A passion for puzzles, codes, and conspiracies fueled a widespread suspicion that Shakespeare was not the author of his plays, and professional and amateur scholars of all sorts spent extraordinary amounts of time, energy, and money combing Renaissance texts in search of signatures and other messages that would reveal the true identity of their author. Even after the recent publication of James Shapiro’s comprehensive history of the authorship controversy, Contested Will, it is difficult for us to appreciate the depth of conviction — among writers as diverse and as distinguished as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Henry Miller, and even Helen Keller — that Shakespeare’s texts contained the secret solution to what was widely considered to be “the Greatest of Literary Problems.”…
America’s Secret Plan To Arm Libya’s Rebels
Robert Fisk writes in the Independent:
Desperate to avoid US military involvement in Libya in the event of a prolonged struggle between the Gaddafi regime and its opponents, the Americans have asked Saudi Arabia if it can supply weapons to the rebels in Benghazi. The Saudi Kingdom, already facing a “day of rage” from its 10 per cent Shia Muslim community on Friday, with a ban on all demonstrations, has so far failed to respond to Washington’s highly classified request, although King Abdullah personally loathes the Libyan leader, who tried to assassinate him just over a year ago.
Washington’s request is in line with other US military co-operation with the Saudis. The royal family in Jeddah, which was deeply involved in the Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, gave immediate support to American efforts to arm guerrillas fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan in 1980 and later – to America’s chagrin –…
Coca-Cola’s Secret Recipe Finally Revealed
Well, no surprise there’s no cocaine in it (it hasn’t had that “health elixir” for quite some time) but interesting to note there’s one ingredient only Coca-Cola can get — fluid extract of coca (the leaves stripped of cocaine) — due to a deal with the DEA. Casey Chan writes on Gizmodo:
The secret recipe of Coke has been hidden and locked down for 125 years. But apparently, not anymore. This American Life says they’ve found the ingredients that make up the delicious bubbly cola and have revealed it to our delight.
The story starts with John Pemberton, a Civil War veteran who’s credited with inventing Coca-Cola. His original recipe was written down in a recipe book of various ointments and medicines that was passed down from generation to generation.
A photograph of that recipe, from that very recipe book, was taken in the Feb. 18, 1979, edition of the Atlanta-Journal Constitution and only…
Julian Assange Defends WikiLeaks on ‘60 Minutes’ (Video)
Reports 60 Minutes:
Julian Assange, the controversial founder of WikiLeaks, speaks to Steve Kroft about the U.S. attempt to indict him on criminal charges and the torrent of criticism aimed at him for publishing classified documents.
USDA Admits To Causing Mass Bird Death With Poison
At least one of the mysterious mass wildlife deaths of the past month has a (bizarre) explanation. The USDA acknowledged that hundreds of birds in South Dakota were poisoned as part of a massive and longstanding government bird-killing operation, normally kept under wraps, called Bye Bye Blackbird. The Christian Science Monitor sheds some light:
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) took responsibility for hundreds of dead starlings that were found on the ground and frozen in trees in a Yankton, S.D., park on Monday.
The USDA’s Wildlife Services Program, which contracts with farmers for bird control, said it used an avicide poison called DRC-1339 to cull a roost of 5,000 birds that were defecating on a farmer’s cattle feed across the state line in Nebraska. But officials said the agency had nothing to do with large and dense recent bird kills in Arkansas and Louisiana.
Nevertheless, the USDA’s role in the South Dakota…
What Did We Learn From WikiLeaks?
The mainstream media’s coverage of WikiLeaks has largely focused on Julian Assange’s sexy exploits — to the extent that one might forget about the actual leaked files. CBS admirably has an overview of the wealth of enlightening and interesting information that WikiLeaks has revealed to us. For starters:
- The Obama administration worked with Republicans during his first few months in office to protect Bush administration officials facing a criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies that some considered torture.
- Anglo-Dutch oil giant Royal Dutch Shell PLC has infiltrated the highest levels of government in Nigeria.
- Pope Benedict impeded an investigation into alleged child sex abuse within the Catholic Church.
- BP suffered a blowout after a gas leak in the Caucasus country of Azerbaijan in September 2008, a year and a half before another BP blowout killed 11 workers and started a leak that gushed millions of gallons of oil…
WikiLeaks Set To Reveal U.S.–UFO War?!?
WikiLeaks Set To Reveal U.S.–UFO War?!?
This has got to be the weirdest potential WikiLeak yet. Thanks to Annalee Newitz on io9.com for discovering this EU Times story:
A new report circulating in the Kremlin today prepared for President Medvedev by Russian Space Forces (VKS) 45th Division of Space Control says that an upcoming WikiLeaks release of secret US cables details that the Americans have been “engaged” since 2004 in a “war” against UFO’s based on or near the Continent of Antarctica, particularly the Southern Ocean.
According to this report, the United States went to its highest alert level on June 10, 2004 after a massive fleet of UFO’s “suddenly emerged” from the Southern Ocean and approached Guadalajara, Mexico barely 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) from the American border. Prior to reaching the US border, however, this massive UFO fleet is said in this report to have “dimensionally returned” to their Southern Ocean “home base”.
The fears…
Alien with Size 440 Shoe Among New Zealand’s Recently Declassified UFO Sightings
New Zealand’s military has made public hundreds of documents dating back to 1954 of UFOs, include drawings of flying saucers and alleged samples of alien writing. My favorite so far has been reported in the Telegraph:
A man who in 1995 met the giant alien with size 440 shoes says the being told him that on dying humans ascend as hydrogen atoms. “You will remain in hydrogen form for 150 years. Then it will change to sodium.”
Looking forward to my post-death atomic experience. Turning into hydrogen sounds pretty cool but I don’t know how I feel about sodium.
WikiLeaks Gets … Leaked?
Assange has only released around 2,000 of the U.S. embassy cables WikiLeaks obtained but now a Norwegian paper is claiming access to the 250,000 cable motherload. If this is true, prepare for all hell to break loose. Devin Dwyer reports on ABC News:
Norway’s main business newspaper reported Wednesday that the Aftenposten news service has obtained unfettered and unauthorized access to the entire cache of secret government documents held exclusively by Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange.
If true, Aftenposten would be the only international news organization to have direct possession of the entire trove of U.S. diplomatic cables and military records believed to have been originally leaked by U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning.
The paper does not reveal who leaked the documents from inside Wikileaks’ operations.
“I have no comments on how we have secured access to the documents. We never give our sources, even in this case,” Aftenposten news editor Ole Erik Almlid…
