News you may have missed #352
May 17, 2010 Leave a comment
- CIA rewarded extraordinary rendition supervisor. A CIA counterterrorism official who supervised the agency’s extraordinary rendition and torture of Khaled El-Masri –a German citizen who was later found to be innocent– has been promoted twice since that episode.
- US Pentagon picks contractors for intel IT. The Defense Intelligence Agency has picked 11 private contractors to compete for up to $6.6 billion in information technology contracts over the next five years. They include the usual suspects, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, General Dynamics Corp, and Northrop Grumman, among others.
- Alleged spy’s lawyers threaten trial boycott in Israel. Lawyers representing Israeli citizen Amir Makhoul, who is accused of spying on behalf of Hezbollah, have threatened to boycott an upcoming trial hearing unless they are allowed to meet with their client.








Some underreported WikiLeaks revelations
November 30, 2010 by intelNews 3 Comments
WikiLeaks
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
There is little point in recapping here the bulk of disclosures contained in the ongoing WikiLeaks revelations. The news sphere is jam-packed with them —and perhaps this is the real story in the WikiLeaks revelations, namely the fact that espionage and intelligence issues have near-monopolized the global news cycle for the first time since the post-Watergate Congressional investigations of the 1970s. But it is worth pointing out a handful of news stories on the WikiLeaks revelations that have arguably not received the media coverage that they deserve. Undoubtedly the most underreported disclosure concerns a 2007 meeting between US officials and Meir Dagan, the then Director of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency. During the meeting, Dagan apparently “presented US with five-step program to perform a coup in Iran“. But there are other underreported disclosures. Take for instance the revelation that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally authorized US diplomats to engage in all-out and indiscriminate spying on senior United Nations officials. Although there is nothing here that will surprise seasoned intelligence observers, the breadth of intelligence collection that US diplomats are instructed to engage in (which includes collecting credit card numbers and biometric data of UN officials) is astonishing and certainly unprecedented. Moreover, it should be noted that many senior UN officials are in fact American, which leads to the intriguing question of whether US diplomats are routinely required to engage in intelligence collection against American UN officials. Read more of this post
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Afghanistan, biometrics, Bolivia, coup plots, DEA, declassification, espionage, Germany, government secrecy, Hillary Clinton, Iran, Israel, Julian Assange, Khaled El-Masri, Meir Dagan, News, secret meetings, Syria, torture, United Nations, United States, USAID, whistleblowing, Wikileaks