Analysis: Who is giving Obama advice on national security?

December 16, 2008 by Leave a comment

On Monday, US President-Elect Barack Obama chaired the first official meeting of the national security team he assembled earlier this month. But according to an article published today in The International Herald Tribune, an extended list of national security advisers to the President-Elect includes several conservatives, such as Brent Scowcroft, George Shultz and even Richard Armitage (!), whom he has contacted seeking counsel. Why does Barack Obama continue to court such Reaganite and neoconservative figures? Is he simply contacting them as a standard procedural duty, wishing perhaps to ensure some kind of managerial continuum between the current and incoming administrations? But if this is the case, then why do his senior advisers insist on releasing these names to the press in connection with the very first official meeting of Obama’s national security team? Read Article →

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Analysis: Former CIA clandestine officer paints bleak picture of Agency

December 15, 2008 by Leave a comment

In a brutally honest exposé, a 25-year veteran of the CIA has publicly described the Agency as an organization mired in failure, mediocrity and incompetence. Art Brown, who headed the Asia division of the CIA’s Clandestine Service from 2003 to 2005, has called the Agency’s seven-year, multi-billion operation to find Osama bin Laden a “failure” that “no amount of ‘rendition’ of bin Laden lieutenants can mask”. Writing in The New York Times, the CIA veteran has revealed that Syria’s alleged construction of a nuclear reactor in the country’s eastern desert came “as a surprise” to the Agency. Read more of this post

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Whistleblower who disclosed NSA domestic spying program comes forth

December 15, 2008 by Leave a comment

Exactly three years ago, New York Times journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed NSA’s domestic warrantless spying program, which was secretly authorized by the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11. Nearly a dozen undisclosed insiders helped the two journalists unravel the NSA scheme. But the initial tip came from what Lichtblau describes in his book, Bush’s Law, as a “walk-in” source with intimate knowledge of the US intelligence community’s practices. That “walk-in” source has now come forth. His name is Thomas M. Tamm, a former US Justice Department official who held a Sensitive Compartmented Security clearance (“a level above Top Secret”) issued by the US government. Read more of this post

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Analysis: Obama urged to get to bottom of NSA warrantless wiretap scheme

December 15, 2008 by Leave a comment

Patrick Keefe, Century Foundation fellow and author of Chatter: Uncovering the Echelon Surveillance Network and the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, has published an editorial in The New York Times urging US Congress and President-Elect Barack Obama to engage in a “thorough course correction on domestic surveillance”. Keefe describes the post-9/11 enhancement of the domestic wiretapping powers of the National Security Agency (NSA) as a direct violation of “one of the signature prohibitions of the post-Watergate era”, which allowed the US government to turn “its formidable eavesdropping apparatus on its own citizens”. Read more of this post

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Two US spies killed in Mumbai attack, Indian government sources claim

December 13, 2008 by Leave a comment

Yesterday, intelNews discussed the apparent zeal with which the US State Department is monitoring the Indian and Pakistani responses to the recent militant attack on Mumbai. Visiting New Delhi on Friday, US Deputy Secretary of State, John Negroponte, made sure to remind the Indian government that “there were United States casualties as well. So we are also victims of these attacks”. Today The Express adds another possible explanation for the State Department’s “unprecedented” interest in the attacks. The Indian newspaper cites “reliable sources in [the Indian] government” in asserting that “two senior espionage officials from the US were among the eight Americans killed in the […] attacks”. The newspaper alleges that the news of the two officials’ deaths, who were reportedly shot at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel on the night of November 27, “rankled the White House”. It is not clear from the report whether the two agents were staying at the hotel, were attending a meeting there, or rushed there from elsewhere in Mumbai in response to the attacks. [JF]

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British assisted abduction of Iranian police officers, says senior official

December 13, 2008 by Leave a comment

Last July, Jundullah, a separatist Sunni Islamic organization operating in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province, abducted and subsequently murdered 16 Iranian police officers stationed in Saravan, Iran. Now Iran’s First Deputy Judiciary Chief, Ebrahim Raisi Ghraib, has said the Islamic Republic has “obtained information” that British forces helped Jundullah fighters abduct the police officers by providing them with “critical intelligence” during the operation. Read more of this post

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Senate Committee report blames Bush Administration for detainee torture

December 13, 2008 by Leave a comment

In 2004, after the eruption of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, the US Department of Defense dismissed the torture practices as the work “of a few bad apples”. Now a report by a bipartisan Senate committee concludes that the abuses conducted by CIA and US military guards and interrogators were direct results of the Bush Administration’s detention policies and “should not be dismissed as the work of bad guards or interrogators”. The report, detailing a two-year study by the US Senate Armed Services Committee, has yet to be made public and much of it will remain classified. This being the case, it is not expected to have any impact on the Bush administration, which “continues to delay and in some cases bar members of Congress from gaining access to key legal documents and memos about the detainee program”. [IA]

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Analysis: Should US cybersecurity be managed by the White House?

December 13, 2008 by Leave a comment

Ars Technica has published a well-written analysis of the recent report on US cybersecurity by the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency. It examines the question of whether it would be wise for US cybersecurity to be managed by the White House. It concludes that “[w]hile big-picture proposals for reorganizing US cybersecurity efforts tend to grab headlines, it’s likely to be easier to establish consensus around some […] more specific proposals […] such as merging ‘national security’ and ‘homeland security’ advisory functions that bear on network security”, and that “it may make more sense” at this point in time “to focus on these less sexy reforms first”. The article is available here. [IA]

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Candidates currently considered by Obama for top intelligence posts

December 13, 2008 by Leave a comment

According to the Associated Press, some of the top candidates considered by US President-Elect Barack Obama’s transition team for Director of the CIA are: John Gannon (CIA’s Deputy Director of Intelligence during the Clinton Administration); Jami Miscik (CIA’s former chief analyst); Steve Kappes (current Deputy Director at the CIA); Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA, leader of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence); and John McLaughlin (former interim CIA chief). For the post of Director of National Intelligence, the top considerations are: Denny Blair (retired US Navy Admiral and former commander of the US Pacific Command); Don Kerr (currently Deputy Director of National Intelligence); Jami Miscik (see above); and former Rep. Tim Roemer (D-IN). IntelNews has previously reported on the possibility that Barack Obama may in fact retain the current CIA leadership “for a while”. [JF]

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CIA holds symposium on Polish Cold War asset Col. Kuklinski

December 13, 2008 by 1 Comment

As intelNews reported on December 10, Dariusz Jablonski’s documentary War Games, about the life of Polish spy Ryszard Kuklinski, was shown at the CIA headquarters during a “Symposium on the Polish Martial Law” held on December 11. Kuklinski, a Polish Army Colonel who spied for the US and NATO from 1972 until 1981, supplied his handlers with microfilms of over 40,000 documents detailing Soviet tactical plans for Poland and the rest of Europe. Read more of this post

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Official history of Israeli spy services acknowledges US spying against Israel

December 11, 2008 by Leave a comment

American espionage conducted against Israel is hardly news. It is rare, however, that such operations –which are routine in nature– are acknowledged in official histories of intelligence institutions. Yet this is exactly what will happen this coming January, when a new official history of Israel’s intelligence services is published in Israel. Read more of this post

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Comment: Bush blaming intelligence for Iraq debacle is cowardice

December 10, 2008 by Leave a comment

US President George W. Bush commented on ABC News last week that the biggest regret of his Presidency is “the intelligence failure in Iraq” and that he “wish[es] the intelligence had been different, I guess”. This response by the President to a question concerning his Presidency’s “do-overs” represents the ultimate political cowardice. In blaming the intelligence services for the Iraq invasion debacle, George Bush knows that, as a matter of standard policy, the intelligence community is unable to respond to these allegations. Read Article →

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Film on spy Col. Kuklinski premiered in Poland

December 10, 2008 by Leave a comment

Dariusz Jablonski’s eagerly awaited War Games documentary, about the life of Polish spy Ryszard Kuklinski, has been shown for the first time at the Warsaw Philharmonic Hall in Poland. The film, whose first official screening was attended by a number of Polish government ministers, will be shown at the CIA headquarters on Thursday, Polskie Radio reports. Kuklinski, a Polish Army Colonel, was an instrumental US and NATO asset during the Cold War, thanks to his crucial post as Polish General Staff’s liaison to the Warsaw Pact. Read more of this post

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Rift between CIA and Obama transition team continues

December 10, 2008 by Leave a comment

During the past several weeks we have been reporting that US President-Elect Barack Obama’s plans for the CIA have “created anxiety in the ranks of the agency’s clandestine service”, as the The New York Times put it. The Agency has effectively warned Obama a that he “may have difficulty finding a candidate who can be embraced by both veteran officials at the agency and the left flank of the Democratic Party”. It is believed that Obama is trying to alleviate the agency’s “anxiety” by proposing to retain the CIA’s current leadership. On Tuesday the Democratic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Silvestre Rees of Texas, was enlisted by the CIA to pressure Obama to “keep the country’s current national intelligence director and CIA chief in place for some time to ensure continuity in US intelligence programs”. Read more of this post

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Analysis: Is Latvia Turning into a Security State?

December 9, 2008 by Leave a comment

Seventeen years after gaining its formal independence from the USSR, Latvia has been admitted to the Council of Europe, NATO and the European Union. It has even joined Washington’s visa waiver program, which gives all Latvians the right to travel to the US without a visa. George W. Bush says he “love[s] the fact that [Latvia is] a free nation and willing to speak out so clearly for freedom”. And yet last month a law-abiding Latvian economist and a pop singer were summarily arrested by the Latvian Security Service, an agency normally responsible for counterespionage and antiterrorism operations. Their crime? Daring to publicly express doubts about the Latvian government’s handling of the economy. Joseph Fitsanakis explains some strange goings on in the tiny Baltic state. Read article →

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