Fidel Castro claims Osama bin Laden is a US spy

Former Cuban president says the 9/11 mastermind is in the pay of the CIA and cites WikiLeaks as his source

Roland W. Haas, a senior intelligence officer in the U.S. Army Reserve who claimed in a 2007 memoir that he was a CIA assassin, died over the weekend when he accidentally shot himself, police in Georgia said.

According to an account in the Newnan, Ga., Times-Herald, “Passing motorists saw Haas on the side of the road” on Saturday night “and heard the pop of a gunshot.”

A police patrolman soon discovered Haas, 58, lying face down behind his car and pronounced him dead, the paper said.

Haas had shot himself in the femoral artery in his right leg, the Coweta County police told the paper. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation ruled his death accidental.

“Authorities believe the victim was in medical distress at the time of the shooting,” the paper reported. “He was in diabetic shock, he suffered heart disease and had ‘several other things going on,’ ” police said.

In “Enter the Past Tense: My Secret Life as a CIA Assassin,” Haas said he had been recruited by the CIA in 1971, when he was a teenager, to conduct behind-the-lines Cold War assassinations. The account agitated a handful of former CIA officers into protesting his employment as head of intelligence for the U.S. Army Reserve at Ft. McPherson, Ga.

Haas was a fraud, John F. Sullivan, a retired CIA polygrapher, wrote to commanders.

“As one of an increasing number of former intelligence officers who believes that Roland Haas’ book… is a hoax, I find your willingness to tolerate Mr. Haas in his scam very disturbing,” Sullivan wrote.

“I am certain that you are as aware as I am that Mr. Haas’ book is 99 percent fiction, but I know also that for you to acknowledge this would leave your component’s hiring and personnel policies open to criticism. As embarrassing as that might be, it is the right thing to do. At some point, Haas will be exposed, and when that happens, your role in this hoax, however minor, could be addressed.”

A handful of accounts about the Haas controversy, including one by SpyTalk in 2008, have mysteriously vanished from the Internet.

On his Facebook page, Haas described himself as “self-employed” but listed two previous, unenumerated stints with the “Department of Defense.”

“Based on the Herald-Times article, it would appear as if Haas had fallen on hard times,” Sullivan said today. “May he rest In peace.”

[Via:Washington Post]

How did a Mexican drug trafficker manage to use a CIA rendition aircraft to smuggle drugs into the U.S.? The death of drug cartel leader, Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel reveals surprising (or not so surprising) connections.

Earlier this week, Sinaloa drug cartel leader Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel was killed in a raid conducted by the Mexican military. According to several media and official Mexican government reports, Coronel had a long criminal history and played significant roles mostly within the Sinaloa cartel. He was currently a member of the ‘inner circle’ working for Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman –the drug lord listed by Forbes as one of the richest men in the world.

Yesterday, thanks to the arduous work of the Mexican newspaper Por Esto!, it was discovered that Nacho Coronel was literally running “El Chapo” Guzman’s cocaine operations in the Yucatan Peninsula since 2004, when evidently, he became the visible head of the Sinaloa Cartel which operated out of the cities of Merida, Cancun, and Cozumel. This was known as “the Yucatan Peninsula Route.”

Nefarious Connections

Coronel’s Yucatan operations included the transportation of narcotics via air, mainly cocaine from Colombia to be later smuggled into the United States. During that time, Nacho Coronel had the protection and collaboration of corrupt elements from local, state and federal police, as well as from Mexican military. One particular example of the involvement of Mexican military in his operations included the arrest of 11 Mexican Navy officials who were caught smuggling cocaine from Colombia into Yucatan on May 12 of 2006. Coronel had apparently established connections with the Colombian drug cartel known as “Valle del Norte” (North Valley). Further, Nacho Coronel had allegedly established connections with Cuban intelligence agents operating in Cancun, according to Mexican columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio.

The CIA plane crash and the 3 tons of cocaine belonging to the Sinaloa Drug Cartel

On September of 2007, there was a plane crash in Yucatan. When authorities arrived at the crash site, they discovered well over 3 tons of cocaine onboard the Gulfstream II aircraft. The narcotics reportedly belonged to the Sinaloa Drug Cartel, under the command of “El Chapo” Guzman and the local control of Nacho Coronel. However, after further investigations into the origins of the aircraft’s markings and registration number (N987SA), it was discovered that it was used for CIA rendition flights. Later that month, another drug bust took place involving a DC9 aircraft transporting cocaine, registered to an American business (although the American owner was never arrested, and the identity was not publicly revealed).

Confirmed by several sources

The Mexican newspaper El Universal obtained several records pertaining to the ownership and recent flight information for the Gulfstream II aircraft. The plane had recently been purchased by a company registered as “Donna Blue Aircraft Inc.” Some news media outlets and investigators like Daniel Hopsicker discovered that the company known as “Donna Blue Aircraft Inc.” or “DBA” did not exist. He published detailed information about DBA’s phony address and empty offices on his website. According to flight records, the Gulfstream II aircraft had been used by the CIA in rendition flights from Europe to the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo, Cuba.

The flight records obtained from the FAA and the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation or ‘Eurocontrol,’ included a time period from November 17, 2001 through September 18, 2007. A detailed list of some of the flights, including locations, dates, arrivals and departures was published by El Universal.

[Via:DeadlineLive.info]

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.

This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same start-up, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.

America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.

“Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession,” then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. “In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.”

U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.

Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.

“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres’ accusations.

That’s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it’s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency’s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn’t make investments in firms without an “end customer” ready to test out that company’s products.

Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren’t disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Google’s investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.

Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future’s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been “very helpful,” providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it’s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg’s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.

Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: “We are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT’s portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”

Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn’t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google’s critics — including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen — the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama’s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House’s deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.

In some corners, the scrutiny of the company’s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google’s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.

But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)

“Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers’ privacy because its corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’ have been shown by recent events such as the ‘Wi-Spy’ debacle to be unwarranted,” long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA’s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.

But Steven Aftergood, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn’t worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.

“To me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard — from contracts to deliverables — I don’t see a problem with it,” he told Danger Room by e-mail. “But if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason.”

Source: Wired

A federal judge has backed CIA efforts to conceal information about treatment of detainees, even if the suppressed records contain details about illegal activity on the part of the intelligence agency.

Source: All Gov.