Secret meetings reported between CIA and Saddam loyalists

July 6, 2009 by 2 Comments

Al-Douri

Al-Douri

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The CIA is reportedly participating in a series of secret meetings with the two main leaders of the Ba’athist insurgency in Iraq. According to Intelligence Online and United Press International, CIA agents have entered truce negotiations with Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri (photo) and Mohammed Yunis al-Ahmad, who head most of the armed Sunni groups in Iraq. Until the 2003 US invasion, Al-Ahmad was an army general during the latter part of Saddam’s reign, while al-Douri was vice-president and deputy chairman of the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council. The US has put out a reward of $1 million for Al-Ahmad, who is reportedly operating out of Syria. Al-Douri, who is said to be in Syria as well, is also wanted by the US in exchange for a $10 million reward. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0018

July 4, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • Retired Romanian football star now admits being a spy. Earlier this week, Gheorghe Popescu, whose international career included playing for British teams, denied reports that he was an informer for Romania’s Securitate, the secret service of communist Romania. But on Thursday morning, the former Tottenham Hotspurs defender admitted that he did inform on teammates and other colleagues while playing for Universitatea Craiova. 
  • Grand jury hears from top CIA officers on destruction of tapes. A federal courtroom in Virginia has become the latest frontline in the Justice Department’s effort to uncover who at the CIA ordered in November of 2005 the incineration of 92 videotapes containing footage of torture applied on several “war on terrorism” detainees. Apparently, the tapes were kept for a long time in a safe at the CIA station in Thailand, where the interrogations took place. 
  • NSA to help defend civilian agency networks. The Obama administration is said to have decided to proceed with a Bush-era plan to use National Security Agency assistance in screening government computer traffic on private-sector networks. The decision, which had been rumored since last spring, was one of the reasons behind the March 2009 resignation of Rod Beckstrom, who headed the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Center.

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News you may have missed #0017

July 3, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • Spain’s chief spy resigns in financial scandal. Alberto Saiz, who headed Spain’s National Intelligence Center, was accused by the daily newspaper El Mundo of using public money for diving and hunting trips in Mexico, Senegal, Mali and Morocco. He denied the accusations, but on July 2, he resigned “to prevent further damage to the reputation of the intelligence agency and the government”. 
  • FBI declassifies reports on agents’ interviews with Saddam. Just-declassified FBI reports reveal that FBI special agents carried out 20 formal interviews and at least 5 “casual conversations” with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein after his capture by US troops in December 2003. Interestingly, the declassified reports include nothing about “Iraq’s complicated relationship with the US”, especially the alleged role of the CIA in facilitating the Ba’ath party’s rise to power in the 1960s. 
  • Release of CIA report on detention, interrogation, delayed (again). Like many others, we at intelNews were eagerly expecting this previously classified CIA report on detention and interrogation under the Bush administration to be released last Wednesday. It was initially going to be released in mid-June, but was then delayed until July 1. Now the CIA says it won’t be able to release the report until the end of August. The ACLU says it will wait for as long as it has to.

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News you may have missed #0016

July 3, 2009 by 1 Comment

  • Wife of cleric kidnapped by CIA seeks European Court trial. Nabila Ghali, the second wife of Hassan Mustafa Omar Nasr, who was kidnapped by the CIA from a street in Milan, Italy, in 2003, announced plans to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights against the Italian government’s state secrecy clauses that are hampering the Italian trial on Nasr’s abduction. 
  • NSA to build huge facility in Utah. The National Security Agency, which is tasked with worldwide communications surveillance, as well as communications security, is in the process of renovating its soon-to-be-unveiled 470,000-square-foot Texas Cryptology Center, which will cost upwards of $130 million and be used primarily to store intercepted communications data. This is now to be coupled with another, 1-million-square-foot data center, to be built at Utah’s Camp Williams. 
  • US government to keep CIA black sites open, for now. A government prosecutor has disclosed during the ongoing trial of former Guantanamo detainee Ahmed Galani that the CIA does not plan to close down its black sites “for now”.

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News you may have missed #0015

July 3, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • Recession woes prompt rise in CIA applications. CIA recruiters point to the deep economic recession currently experienced in the US to explain the record numbers of applications for the Agency’s relatively few job openings this year. CIA recruiters say they have so far received “90,000 resumes and  […] will probably get close to 180,000 resumes” by the end of the year. The Agency employs around 20,000 people. The final number of job applications received in 2009 could be the largest number of job applications the Agency has ever received.
  • Ex-CIA analyst says only a new strike on US soil can help increase US security. Michael Scheuer, former chief of the Osama bin Laden unit at the CIA said during an interview with Fox News that “the only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States”.

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Fears raised of Iranian-style surveillance in the US

July 2, 2009 by 1 Comment

NSN Logo

NSN Logo

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Nokia Siemens Networks has denied allegations, published in The Wall Street Journal and reported by intelNews, that it helped the Iranian government acquire what experts describe as “one of the world’s most sophisticated mechanisms” for spying on Iranian telecommunications users. But critics remain unconvinced and are raising concerns about the use of similar intrusive capabilities by Internet service providers (ISPs) in the US. The Open Internet Coalition, a consortium of online business and consumer groups, has sent letters [.pdf] to US Congress members urging them to consider regulating the use of deep packet inspection technology. In addition to blocking or monitoring target communications, deep packet inspection enables ISPs and monitoring agencies to trace and alter the content of messages exchanged between users. Read more of this post

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Former CIA station chief regrets “trail of evidence” in Italy abduction

July 2, 2009 by Leave a comment

Hassan Nasr

Hassan Nasr

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
For over two years, Italian justice has been after 26 Americans and five Italians who kidnapped a Muslim cleric suspected of terrorist ties and secretly flew him to Egypt, where he was secretly renditioned. The cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, who was kidnapped while walking down a street in Milan, says that his Egyptian jailers held him for years without formal charges and tortured him severely. The Italians’ search for the 26 Americans, all of them almost certainly CIA personnel, has been met with a “no-comment” policy from Washington and the CIA. But now one of the 26, Robert Seldon Lady, has given a rare interview to Italy’s Il Giornale newspaper, in which he essentially admits that the CIA was behind the operation.   Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0014

July 2, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • Belarus releases US lawyer jailed for industrial espionage. Emmanuel Zeltser who spent a year in jail in Belarus, is a lawyer with “a vast knowledge of organized crime, particularly the practice of money laundering”.
  • US Pentagon supplying intelligence to Pakistani armed forces. IntelNews has been keeping an eye on the intelligence side of the ongoing Pakistani offensive in the country’s North-West Frontier Province. Chinese intelligence involvement has already been established, and there have been allegations of Indian and Israeli involvement. It has now emerged that the US military has resumed surveillance flights over Pakistan, a clear sign of increased US-Pakistani intelligence collaboration.
  • US Congressional intel committee issues warnings. The US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has approved, as expected, the 2010 fiscal intelligence authorization bill, but it said that “funding for cybersecurity programs may need to be reduced or slowed until the future direction for cybersecurity is better defined”. It also urged US intelligence agencies to expand ethnic diversity among employees and improve training on foreign languages.

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Coalition requests disbarment of government lawyers behind CIA torture

July 1, 2009 by Leave a comment

John Rizzo

John Rizzo

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Yesterday I wrote about John A. Rizzo, the CIA Acting General Counsel who is preparing to step down from his post despite being termed “the most influential career lawyer in CIA history”, according to The Los Angeles Times. The reason behind his sudden early retirement is the discovery earlier this month by several anti-torture critics in Congress that he gave the CIA legal advice in support of the Agency’s “enhanced interrogation” program. But the controversy over Rizzo’s role in the torture scheme is likely to stay with him even after he leaves Langley. Yesterday, the Velvet Revolution, an activist network of over 120 groups, issued formal requests with the New York and DC bar associations to disbar Rizzo and two other government lawyers behind the CIA torture program. Read more of this post

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Canadian intelligence agency admits withholding evidence in terrorism case

July 1, 2009 by Leave a comment

Hassan Almrei

Hassan Almrei

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Less than a month after the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was found to have omitted polygraph evidence in an alleged terrorism case, the scandal-prone agency has admitted even worse shortcomings in a second investigation. Specifically, it has acknowledged that it “failed to disclose evidence” in the case of Hassan Almrei, a Syrian immigrant who was arrested in Canada in 2001 on suspicion of belonging to an Islamist-tied forgery group. Almrei was the first terrorism suspect to be arrested under Canada’s security certificate provision, which allows the government to use secret evidence in order to detain and deport foreigners living in Canada and deemed dangerous for national security. Security certificates prevent even the suspects themselves from being exposed to the secret evidence against them. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #0013

July 1, 2009 by Leave a comment

  • CIA report on detention, interrogation to be released later today. We were expecting this internal CIA report, on the Agency’s secret detention and interrogation practices under the Bush administration, to come out a fortnight ago, but it was delayed “over debates about how much of it should be censored”. An earlier version of the report was “published” late last year, but was over 90% redacted.  Watch this space for more information.
  • Retired Romanian football star denies being a spy. Gheorghe Popescu, whose international career included playing for British teams, has denied reports (here and here) in Romanian daily Adevarul that he was an informer for Romania’s Securitate, the secret service of communist Romania. () 
  • Ex-CIA chief in Algiers formally charged with sexual abuse. Back in February, intelNews reported on the Agency’s station chief in Algiers, who was unceremoniously recalled to Washington after being accused of drugging and raping two Algerian women at his official residence. He has now been “indicted in Washington on a charge of sexual abuse involving an alleged sexual assault of an unidentified Algerian woman”. He could face a life sentence, if convicted.

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