News you may have missed #372

June 10, 2010 by Leave a comment

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News you may have missed #369

June 4, 2010 by 1 Comment

  • UN official criticizes US over drone attacks. The use of targeted killings by the CIA, with weapons like drone aircraft, poses a growing challenge to the international rule of law, according to Philip Alston, United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings.
  • Russian spies less active during Obama administration. The Czech Republic’s Military Intelligence Service said in its annual report on Tuesday that Russian agents have reduced their activities in the country since US President Barack Obama abandoned Bush-era plans for missile defense systems in Eastern Europe.
  • Analysis: A look back at US intelligence reform. The 2004 US Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act was supposed to “address institutional obstacles that had complicated the intelligence community’s struggle to adapt to new technologies and a changing national security environment”. But five years later, many of those original obstacles remain in place.

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Did US airstrike in Yemen kill a mediator by mistake?

May 28, 2010 by Leave a comment

Predator drone

Predator drone

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
While US media are focusing on a questionable attempt by the US military to expand its clandestine activities in the Muslim world, the Pentagon has quietly intensified its unmanned drone strikes on suspected militants. Although the role of the CIA has dominated the debate about these targeted killings, it is not widely known that the US Department of Defense also carries out its own air strikes, which are separate from the CIA’s. The most recent of these was most probably launched against a target in Yemen last Monday night.  The US government refuses to confirm or deny its involvement in the operation, but CBS News reported on Tuesday that the strike was aimed at “a meeting of al Qaeda operatives”. However, a subsequent news report from the Reuters news agency said that the drone strike “missed its mark” and instead killed a Yemeni government-authorized mediator who was trying to negotiate the surrender of Mohammed Jaid bin Jardan, a senior member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #347

May 11, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • CIA drones now target non-listed targets in Pakistan. It used to be the case that the CIA unmanned drone attacks in Pakistan were directed at confirmed Taliban senior operatives. But an American official has said that the CIA does “not always have their names”. Instead, the Agency targets them based on their “actions over time” that make it “obvious that they are a threat”.
  • Democrat Senator presses Obama for more NSA powers. Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) is pressing the Obama Administration to give the National Security Agency more power to oversee privately owned portions of the Internet. Speaking on Thursday, Mikulski complained that “we don’t know who the hell is in charge” over the security of private networks.
  • Lebanese officer charged as Israel spy may get death. A Lebanese prosecutor has requested the death penalty for Gazwan Shahin, an army colonel charged with having provided Israel’s spy agency with pictures, information and coordinates of Lebanese civil and military posts during and after the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

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News you may have missed #343

May 5, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Taliban leader H. Mehsud reportedly not dead. Last February US and Pakistani officials claimed a CIA airstrike had killed Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the largest faction of the Pakistani Taliban. But it now appears that Mehsud is alive and well.
  • Analysis: Operation MINCEMEAT and the ethics of spying. The New Yorker‘s Malcolm Gladwell on operation MINCEMEAT, a World War II British deception plan, which helped convince the German high command that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia in 1943, instead of Sicily.
  • US DoJ announces FISA court appointment. Judge Martin L.C. Feldman, of the Eastern District of Louisiana, has been appointed to a seven-year term on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court, which reviews (and invariably approves) government applications for counterintelligence surveillance and physical search under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

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Analysis: Experts question legality of CIA drone strikes

May 4, 2010 by Leave a comment

Predator drone

Predator drone

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A number of prominent American legal scholars have voiced concerns about the legality of the targeted killings by the CIA of suspected Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Speaking last week before the National Security and Foreign Affairs subcommittee of the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, some of the experts warned that the killings may constitute war crimes. Among them was Loyola Law School Professor David Glazier, who reminded subcommittee members that the CIA remotely navigated drone pilots are not legally considered combatants, and thus employing them to carry out armed attacks “fall[s] outside the scope of permissible conduct”. He also warned that “under the legal theories adopted by our government in prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, these CIA officers as well as any higher-level government officials who have authorized or directed their attacks are committing war crimes”. Read more of this post

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News you may have missed #318

March 30, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • US State Dept. lawyer defends CIA drone attacks. State Department legal adviser Harold Koh has told a conference that “the considered view of this administration” is that the controversial CIA-operated drone attacks inside Pakistan “comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war”.
  • How the CIA let Anwar al-Aulaqi escape to Yemen. Last year, the Yemeni government asked the CIA to help collect intelligence on US-born al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Aulaqi. But the CIA refused, and so did US Special Forces officials, who had been asked by the Yemenis to help them pursue Aulaqi. Just months later, US Army Major Malik Nidal Hasan, who was in contact with al-Aulaqi, killed 13 US soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas.
  • More on alleged Israeli spy caught in Algeria. Algerian authorities insist that a man (identified only as “Alberto”), who was captured after entering Algeria using a forged Spanish passport, is a Mossad agent. There are also rumors that the US embassy in Algiers has been involved in the case, and that it was for this reason that FBI deputy director John Pistole traveled to Algeria last week.

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News you may have missed #311

March 18, 2010 by 1 Comment

Al-Qaeda technical expert believed killed. Hussein Yemeni, an al-Qaeda bomb expert and trainer, is believed to have been among more than a dozen people killed in a CIA strike last week in Miram Shah, the largest town in Pakistan’s North Waziristan. Yemeni is thought to have had a major planning role in the December 30 suicide bombing in Khost, Afghanistan that killed seven CIA officers.

Al-Qaeda on the run, claims CIA director. CIA air attacks against al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal region have driven Osama bin Laden and his top deputies deeper into hiding and disrupted their ability to plan sophisticated operations, CIA Director Leon Panetta said Wednesday. Interesting; that’s not exactly what he said last week.

UK government defends use of foreign intel. The British Foreign Office has defended its use of intelligence obtained by foreign security agencies from terrorism suspects, even when it could not be sure how the informants had been treated. It’s not the first time this opinion has been expressed by a senior UK government source.

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News you may have missed #0277

February 2, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Western officials say a CIA air strike has killed Hakimullah Mehsud. Mehsud was the leader of the largest faction of the Pakistani Taliban, and one of the handlers of Humam Khalil al-Balawi, the Jordanian who killed seven CIA officers last December in Khost, Afghanistan. Mehsud took over the leadership of the Pakistan Taliban last August, after another CIA air strike killed his predecessor, Baitullah Mehsud (no relation).
  • US citizen requests North Korea asylum. An unidentified 28-year-old American man who crossed into North Korea from China has allegedly sought asylum because he did not “want to become a cannon fodder in the capitalist military”. He apparently told North Korean officials that he “wants to serve in the North Korean military” instead.

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News you may have missed #0260

January 20, 2010 by Leave a comment

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News you may have missed #0257 (assassinations edition)

January 18, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Who tried to kill the Israeli diplomats in Jordan? “Whoever placed the bomb targeting the two armored embassy vehicles on their way from Jordan to the Allenby Bridge, last Thursday, appears to have had very good intelligence. They knew that many Israeli diplomats, who normally live in Amman without their families, usually depart for Israel for the weekend on Thursday afternoon, and they knew how to identify the two-car convoy”.
  • Iran insists in Israeli link to Mohammadi assassination. Last week’s assassination of Iranian scientist Massoud Ali-Mohammadi was carried out in a “Zionist style”, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said in his first direct comment on the killing.
  • Pakistanis urge US to stop drone attacks. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has renewed calls on the US to stop its CIA-operated targeted assassinations, using unmanned Predator drone attacks on Pakistani soil, as they “kill civilians and ruin its efforts to isolate militants sheltering with tribes in the border region”.

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News you may have missed #0256

January 17, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Descendant of Richard Sorge’s accomplice receives Soviet-era award. The 81-year-old niece of Yotoku Miyagi, a Japanese accomplice of famous German-born Comintern spy Richard Sorge, has been awarded the Soviet Order of the Patriotic War medal in a ceremony at the Russian embassy in Tokyo, Japan. The medal was originally granted in 1965, but Miyagi was unable to collect it, as he had been executed, along with Sorge, by the Japanese in 1944.
  • Analysis: Alleged US spy’s arrest in Cuba affects bilateral relations. Cuban officials say that a US citizen working for Maryland-based aid group Development Alternatives Inc., who was arrested in Havana last month, was actually recruiting local Cubans to spy on the government. This development means that initial hopes for better US-Cuban relations after Barack Obama’s election success may be fading.
  • CIA, DoD drone attacks in Afghanistan intensify under McChrystal. Under the command of US and NATO forces by US Army general Stanley McChrystal, unmanned drone strikes in Afghanistan have been steadily increasing. A good question to ask is who is in charge of similar strikes in Pakistan, which are also on the increase.

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News you may have missed #0254 (activism edition)

January 15, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • US activists file lawsuit over domestic spying. Anti-war activists in Washington State are suing military analyst John Towery and police officials for allegedly infiltrating and spying on two antiwar groups in Olympia. The suit also names the City of Olympia and a US Coast Guard employee.
  • Antiwar activist to stage sit-in at CIA HQ. American political activist Cindy Sheehan says she intends to stage a sit-in in front of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on January 16, to protest the Agency’s unmanned drone attacks in Pakistan. Sheehan, whose son was killed in the Iraq War in 2004, attracted international attention for her extended protest at a makeshift camp outside President George Bush’s Texas ranch.
  • Is there legal basis for CIA drone strikes in Pakistan? We at intelNews have asked this question before. Now the American Civil Liberties Union is asking it also, and has requested to see the US government’s estimates of civilian casualties caused by the strikes.

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News you may have missed #0250

January 12, 2010 by Leave a comment

  • Pakistanis ask US to quit drone strikes. A Pakistani intelligence official has told the Associated Press that the response to the December 30 suicide bombing that killed seven CIA agents should not include intensifying unmanned drone strikes inside Pakistan. However, the CIA has reportedly “stepped up drone strikes” since the bombing.
  • Bush, Obama administrations guilty for neglecting info sharing. Thomas E. McNamara, former head of the US federal Information Sharing Environment, says the Bush and Obama administrations are both guilty of either losing interest or not focusing at all on promoting information sharing among often-secluded US government agencies.
  • China ends probe into Rio Tinto espionage case. Chinese prosecutors have now taken over the case of Stern Hu, the jailed boss of Anglo-Australian mining corporation Rio Tinto, after officials ended their investigation. Hu was arrested last July on espionage charges.

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Analysis: The Meaning of the Suicide Attack on the CIA

January 2, 2010 by 2 Comments

Forward Operating Base Chapman

Chapman FOB

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS* | intelNews.org |
The recent deaths of seven and the serious injury of another six CIA personnel in Afghanistan’s Khost province has undoubtedly shocked an Agency not used to mass casualties. But what exactly is the significance of Wednesday’s suicide attack at the Forward Operating Base (FOB) Chapman, and how will it affect the US military and intelligence presence at the Afghan-Pakistani border? Given that the CIA team at Chapman FOB could not have consisted of more than 15 to 20 agents, it would be logical to conclude that the attack virtually decimated the CIA presence in Khost. But the impact of this development on US operations in Afghanistan will be minimal, in contrast to operations inside Pakistan, which constituted the primary objective of the CIA team at Chapman FOB. Read article →

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