U.S. Researching Interrogation Techniques

An elite US interrogation unit will conduct “scientific research” to find better ways of questioning top suspected terrorists, US intelligence director Dennis Blair said Wednesday.

“It is going to do scientific research on that long-neglected area,” Blair told the House Intelligence Committee, without elaborating on the nature of the techniques being tested.

A spokesman for Blair, Ross Feinstein, also declined to detail “specific research projects” but stressed that any such projects would follow US law, which forbids torture, and abide by internal review safeguards.

Blair said the task would fall to an interagency group of top US interrogators from across the intelligence community dubbed the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG).

“We’ve given it the responsibility of doing the scientific research to determine if there are better ways to get information from people that are consistent with our values,” he said.

Blair said the HIG charter required it to abide by the US Army Field Manual, which forbids abusive interrogation techniques.

US interrogation tactics in the global war on terrorism have drawn heavy scrutiny in the United States and overseas because of the past use of techniques like waterboarding that meet international definitions of torture.

Obama formally abolished such methods shortly after taking office, drawing fire from former vice president Dick Cheney, who described them as critical to thwarting terrorist attacks in the wake of the September 11, 2001 strikes.

Asked to detail the research, Feinstein replied: “We are not going to discuss specific research projects, but Intelligence Community-sponsored research is performed in accordance with the law and institutional review board processes.”

Israeli Spy Elephant in the Room

Ask a counterintelligence officer in the US government and they’ll tell you that Israel is not a friend to the United States.

This is because Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the US.  The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject discussed in the media or in the circles of government, due to the extreme sensitivity of the US-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state.  The void where the facts should sit is filled instead with the hallucinations of conspiracy theory – the kind in which, for example, agents of the Mossad, Israel’s top intelligence agency, engineer the 9/11 attacks, while 4,000 Israelis in the Twin Towers somehow all get word to escape before the planes hit.  The effect, as disturbing as it is ironic, is that the less the truth is addressed, the more crazy the wild stories get.

The espionage Israel performs on the U.S. however, is a matter of public record, and neither conspiracy nor theory is needed to present the evidence.   When the FBI produces its annual report to Congress concerning “Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage,” Israel and its intelligence services often feature prominently as a threat second only to China. In 2005 the FBI noted, for example, that Israel maintains “an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States.”  A key Israeli method, said the FBI report, is computer intrusion.  In 1996, the Defense Intelligence Agency, a branch of the Pentagon, issued a warning that “the collection of scientific intelligence in the United States is the third highest priority of Israeli Intelligence after information on its Arab neighbors and information on secret US policies or decisions relating to Israel.”  In 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a scathing survey of Israeli intelligence activities that targeted the US government.  Like any worthy spy service, Israeli intelligence early on employed wiretaps as an effective tool, according to the CIA report.  In 1954, the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv discovered in his office a hidden microphone “planted by the Israelis,” and two years later telephone taps were found in the residence of the US military attaché.  In a telegram to Washington, the ambassador at the time cabled a warning: “Department must assume that all conversations [in] my office are known to the Israelis.” The former ambassador to Qatar, Andrew Killgore, who also served as a foreign officer in Jerusalem and Beirut, told me Israeli taps of US missions and embassies in the Middle East were part of a “standard operating procedure.”

According to the 1979 CIA report, the Israelis, while targeting political secrets, also devote “a considerable portion of their covert operations to obtaining scientific and technical intelligence.” These operations involved, among other machinations, “attempts to penetrate certain classified defense projects in the United States.”   The penetrations, according to the CIA report, were effected using “deep cover enterprises,” which the report described as “firms and organizations, some specifically created for, or adaptable to, a specific objective.”  At the time, the CIA singled out government-subsidized companies such as El Al airlines and Zim, the Israeli shipping firm, as deep cover enterprises.  Other deep cover operations included the penetration of a US company that provided weapons-grade uranium to the Department of Defense during the 1960s; Israeli agents eventually spirited home an estimated 200 pounds of uranium as the bulwark in Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program.  Moles have burrowed on Israel’s behalf throughout the US intelligence services.  Perhaps most infamous was the case of Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish-American employed as a civilian analyst with the US Navy who purloined an estimated 800,000 code-word protected documents from inside the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and numerous other US agencies.  While Pollard was sentenced to life in prison, counterintelligence investigators at the FBI suspected he was linked to a mole far higher in the food chain, ensconced somewhere in the DIA, but this suspected Israeli operative, nicknamed “Mr. X,” was never found.   Following the embarrassment of the Pollard affair – and its devastating effects on US national security, as testified by then Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (who allegedly stated that Pollard “should have been shot”) – the Israeli government vowed never again to pursue espionage against its ally and chief benefactor.
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Did the U.S. Sneak Weapons to Georgia

Russia says there are ’suppositions’ that U.S. ships which delivered humanitarian aid to Georgia have also brought weapons to the country.
In a Monday press conference, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko suggested that the U.S. military ships delivered more than just humanitarian aid to Georgia, adding that their cargo included ‘military components’.
Nesterenko said such suspicions have prompted a decision by Russia to call for an arms embargo against Georgia. He also urged further presence of an international police and more Western military observers in South Ossetia.

Earlier on Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called for an arms embargo on Georgia until a change of leadership takes place in the Caucasus state.

Georgia’s military offensive into South Ossetia in August 7 to reclaim the de-facto region, prompted Russia to send its troops into the area. Each side has announced contradictory figures on how many people died in the conflict.

Diplomatic relations between Moscow and Washington, already tense over US plans for a missile shield in Europe, strained further over the Georgia crisis.

Earlier, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin blamed the United States for provoking the Georgia conflict in order to give an advantage to ‘one of’ the U.S. presidential candidates. Washington, however, has denied the allegation.

The United States is Georgia’s principal military supporter, and has provided the country with significant quantities of military aid in recent years.

According to the Associated Press, Human Rights Watch has announced that it had received an official letter from Georgia’s Defense Ministry that admitted the use of M85 cluster munitions in its military offensive in South Ossetia.

Intelligence Agencies Describe U.S. in 20 Years

An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.

The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority — military power — will “be the least significant” asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because “nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force.”

Fingar’s remarks last week were based on a partially completed “Global Trends 2025″ report that assesses how international events could affect the United States in the next 15 to 17 years. Speaking at a conference of intelligence professionals in Orlando, Fingar gave an overview of key findings that he said will be presented to the next occupant of the White House early in the new year.

“The U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished,” Fingar said, according to a transcript of the Thursday speech. He saw U.S. leadership eroding “at an accelerating pace” in “political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas.”

The 2025 report will lay out what Fingar called the “dynamics, the dimensions, the drivers” that will shape the world for the next administration and beyond. In advance of its completion, intelligence officials have begun briefing the major presidential candidates on the security threats that they would be likely to face in office. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) received an initial briefing Sept. 2, with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) expected to receive one in the coming days, intelligence officials said.

As described by Fingar, the intelligence community’s long-term outlook has darkened somewhat since the last report in 2004, which also focused on the impact of globalization but was more upbeat about its consequences for the United States. The new view is in line with that of prominent economists and other global thinkers who have argued that America’s influence is shrinking as economic powerhouses such as China assert themselves on the global stage. The trend is described in the new book “The Post-American World,” in which author Fareed Zakaria writes that the shift is not about the “decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.”

In the new intelligence forecast, it is not just the United States that loses clout. Fingar predicts plummeting influence for the United Nations, the World Bank and a host of other international organizations that have helped maintain political and economic stability since World War II. It is unclear what new institutions can fill the void, he said.

In the years ahead, Washington will no longer be in a position to dictate what new global structures will look like. Nor will any other country, Fingar said. “There is no nobody in a position . . . to take the lead and institute the changes that almost certainly must be made in the international system,” he said.

The predicted shift toward a less U.S.-centric world will come at a time when the planet is facing a growing environmental crisis, caused largely by climate change, Fingar said. By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.

For poorer countries, climate change “could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Fingar said, while the United States will face “Dust Bowl” conditions in the parched Southwest. He said U.S. intelligence agencies accepted the consensual scientific view of global warming, including the conclusion that it is too late to avert significant disruption over the next two decades. The conclusions are in line with an intelligence assessment produced this summer that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.

Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world. But among industrialized states, declining birthrates will create new economic stresses as populations become grayer. In China, Japan and Europe, the ratio of working adults to seniors “begins to approach one to three,” he said.

The United States will fare better than many other industrial powers, in part because it is relatively more open to immigration. Newcomers will inject into the U.S. economy a vitality that will be absent in much of Europe and Japan — countries that are “on a good day, highly chauvinistic,” he said.

“We are just about alone in terms of the highly developed countries that will continue to have demographic growth sufficient to ensure continued economic growth,” Fingar said.

Energy security will also become a major issue as India, China and other countries join the United States in seeking oil, gas and other sources for electricity. The Chinese get a good portion of their oil from Iran, as do many U.S. allies in Europe, limiting U.S. options on Iran. “So the turn-the-spigot-off kind of thing — even if we could do it — would be counterproductive.”

Nearly absent from Fingar’s survey was the topic of terrorism. Since the last such report, the intelligence community has projected a declining role for al-Qaeda, which was deemed likely to become “increasingly decentralized, evolving into an eclectic array of groups, cells, and individuals.” Inspired by al-Qaeda, “regionally based groups, and individuals labeled simply as jihadists — united by a common hatred of moderate regimes and the West — are likely to conduct terrorist attacks,” the 2004 document said.

The new assessment saw a continued threat from Iran, however. Fingar predicted steady progress in the Islamic republic’s attempts to create enriched uranium, the essential fuel used in nuclear weapons and commercial power reactors. For now, however, there is no evidence that Iran has resumed work on building a weapon, Fingar said, echoing last year’s landmark National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which concluded that warhead-design work had halted in 2003.

He said Iran’s ultimate decision on whether to build nuclear weapons depended on how its leaders viewed their “security requirement” — whether they thought their government sufficiently safe in a region surrounded by traditional enemies.

Iranians are “more scared of their neighbors than many think they ought to be,” Fingar said. But he noted that the United States had eliminated two of Iran’s biggest enemies: Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

“The United States took care of Iran’s principal security threats,” he said, “except for us, which the Iranians consider a mortal threat.”

Government not Trusted by 60%

A recent poll conducted by the World Public Opinion (WPO) has found that over 60% of the population of Great Britain and the United States do not trust their governments. The poll showed that 67% of Brits have low levels of trust in the Labour Government while 60% of Americans feel the same way about the Bush Administration.

Overall dissatisfaction of government responsiveness was much higher with 77% of Brits and an even higher percentage, 83% of Americans.

With each passing year, we see Western Governments becoming more brazen with lies and imposing limits on our freedoms and privacy.

The poll also asked “Whose Benefit is Country Run For?”

Unsurprisingly, 60% of Brits perceive their government as serving powerful special interests rather than the interests of the people as a whole, likewise 80% of Americans said the same.

Distain for corporate influence on governments is clear, but perhaps the lack of faith in the government goes even deeper. Obviously there has been fabrication of evidence and spinning lies to the population in order to gain support for the illegal invasion and occupation of nations.

Then there is the use of outlawed weapons in those occupied countries, which cause damage for generations to come, and of course the propaganda which is fed to and disseminated by the mainstream media, all which is becoming increasingly less effective as the ‘alternative’ media grows.

Maybe issues closer to home has also damaged trust in the government. A weakening economy while national debt goes through the roof, or possibly the high levels of surveillance we must endure thanks to new anti terrorism laws which give the government access to every aspect of our lives.

This is of course just the tip of the iceberg; there is no single issue that has caused the majority of the population to mistrust their government. It is an accumulation of constant betrayal over many years which has lead to the decay in trust and possibly more importantly, the loss of hope within the people.