News you may have missed #0149
October 23, 2009 Leave a comment
- Why is CIA fighting to keep JFK documents sealed? For years, the CIA has fought in US federal courts to keep secret hundreds of documents detailing the relationship between Lee Harvey Oswald and a CIA anti-Castro front group. The Agency says it is only protecting legitimate secrets. But some researchers are questioning this.
- Up to 320 Pakistani civilians killed in US drone war. As many as 320 innocent civilians may have been killed in the CIA-led US drone war in Pakistan, according to an analysis by the New America Foundation. That’s about a third of the 1,000 or so people slain in the robotic aircraft attacks since 2006. Previous research has shown that approximately 80% of the airstrikes have failed to kill what the US Pentagon calls “high value targets”.
- Analysis: What are the risks of the CIA’s covert drone program? “It’s easy to understand the appeal of a ‘push-button’ approach to fighting al-Qaeda, but the embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force. And, because of the CIA program’s secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the US is not at war”.
intelNews.org 
Mexican agency spied on Nobel laureate author Márquez
October 23, 2009 Leave a comment
Márquez
By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Mexico’s defunct Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS) intelligence agency spied on Colombian-born Nobel laureate author Gabriel García Márquez, according to revelations published in El Universal newspaper. The Mexican daily aired declassified documents allegedly showing that the DFS tapped the author’s home telephone, systematically monitored his whereabouts, and kept a “bulging file” on him spanning several decades. The monitoring began in 1967, when Márquez moved from Colombia to Mexico, and continued until at least 1985. The apparent reason for the spying is that the Mexican state considered the best-selling author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude to be a communist sympathizer and even “a Cuban agent”. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (Mexico), CISN (Mexico), Colombia, Cuba, DFS (Mexico), Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Mexico), El Universal (Mexico), Fidel Castro, Gabriel García Márquez, literature, Mexico, News, Nobel Award, Octavio Paz, Salvador Novo