What the World Might Look Like in 5 Years, According to US Intelligence. Every four years, a group of U.S. intelligence analysts tries to predict the future. And this year, in a report released just weeks before Donald Trump assumes the presidency, those analysts forecast a massive shift in international affairs over the next five years or so: “For better and worse, the emerging global landscape is drawing to a close an era of American dominance following the Cold War,” the study argues. “So, too, perhaps is the rules-based international order that emerged after World War II.” Trump has repeatedly expressed opposition to key elements of this international order—specifically free-trade deals, U.S. alliance arrangements, and America’s promotion of democracy abroad.
But he wants to preserve U.S. dominance in the world; he wants, after all, to once more make America great. And on Tuesday, Michael Flynn, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, suggested that his boss might be more committed to the international system than assumed. John Brennan and Restructuring the CIA. “I had the gravest forebodings about this organization [the Central Intelligence Agency] and warned the President that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or how to control it.”
-Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (1969) The term “restructuring” has deserved, quite rightly, its place in the demonology of sackings, removals and exits that come with every consultant’s manual. When the boss of a unit or company passes the word around, be it in the boardroom or the pressroom, you know that something heavy is bound to fall. Someone, certainly, is in for a “reassignment” or redeployment, maybe even to the unemployment line.
What then, of CIA director John Brennan’s promise to “overhaul” the organisation in what is ostensibly an effort to modernise it? His address to the press was filled with management speak. Spectacular failures dot the CIA resume. Dr. The War Nerd: More proof the US defense industry has nothing to do with defending America. By Gary Brecher On December 18, 2014 KUWAIT CITY—This has been a classic week in the defense procurement industry. The armed services are trying to boost their worst aircraft, the totally worthless F-35, by trashing their best, the simple, effective, proven A-10 Warthog. The A-10 is popular enough that the USAF had to come up with a reason for wanting to get rid of it, and the one it produced is the sort of thing that would make any psych-therapist chuckle with glee: The USAF said it needed maintenance personnel to handle its precious new high-priced fighter, the F-35…and that the only place it could get them from was the maintenance crews currently keeping the A-10 flying.
Nope, there were no other options! The only way to find a good crew is to gut the one effective ground-attack aircraft the USAF has in its inventory, in favor of the worst fighter ever designed. It makes no sense. What is the air force’s job? But there’s a problem with that. Did you catch that last line? Wrong. Sgp/crs/homesec/RL34603.pdf. Report Suggests NSA Engaged In Financial Manipulation, Changing Money In Bank Accounts. Spy Copters, Lasers, and Break-In Teams - By Matthew M. Aid. Between 2006 and 2009, surveillance helicopters conducted daily flights over northwest Washington, D.C., taking high-resolution photographs of the new Chinese Embassy being constructed on Van Ness Street. The aircraft belonged to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which wanted to determine where the embassy's communications center was being located. But the Chinese construction crews hid their work on this part of the building by pulling tarpaulins over the site as it was being constructed.
The FBI also monitored the movements and activities of the Chinese construction workers building the embassy, who were staying at a Days Inn on Connecticut Avenue just north of the construction site, in the hopes of possibly recruiting one or two of them. In recent weeks, the U.S. National Security Agency's efforts to monitor foreign diplomats have become the stuff of worldwide headlines.
Little has changed in the intervening century. The FBI is still conducting these highly sensitive operations. The CIA’s Memory Prison. The memory hole is deep at Guantánamo Bay. Its gaping maw has swallowed international law, the lives of hundreds of detainees and the moral consequences of torture. And now it has quite literally swallowed the memories of five men currently engaged in a prolonged pre-trial process at the infamous prison.
They are the defendants charged with the criminal conspiracy leading to the attacks of 9/11, including the alleged “mastermind” behind the attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But the mind of this master terrorist is not his own. That’s according to a ruling by Army colonel and military commission judge James Pohl, who issued a “protective order” in January of 2013 that, in effect, classified the memories of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other four defendants—Walid Bin Attash and Ramzi bin al Shibh of Yemen, Ammar al Baluchi of Pakistan, and Mustafa al Hawsawi of Saudi Arabia. They cannot. Essentially, the memories of their treatment by the CIA have become the proprietary possession of the CIA. Medical, Military, and Ethics Experts Say Health Professionals Designed and Participated in Cruel, Inhumane, and Degrading Treatment and Torture of Detainees.
New York, NY — An independent panel of military, ethics, medical, public health, and legal experts today charged that U.S. military and intelligence agencies directed doctors and psychologists working in U.S. military detention centers to violate standard ethical principles and medical standards to avoid infliction of harm. The Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers (see attached) concludes that since September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense (DoD) and CIA improperly demanded that U.S. military and intelligence agency health professionals collaborate in intelligence gathering and security practices in a way that inflicted severe harm on detainees in U.S. custody.These practices included “designing, participating in, and enabling torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment” of detainees, according to the report.
How a Telecom Helped the Government Spy on Me. In 2004, my telephone records as well as those of another New York Times reporter and two reporters from the Washington Post, were obtained by federal agents assigned to investigate a leak of classified information. What happened next says a lot about what happens when the government’s privacy protections collide with the day-to-day realities of global surveillance. The story begins in 2003 when I wrote an article about the killing of two American teachers [1] in West Papua, a remote region of Indonesia where Freeport-McMoRan operates one of the world’s largest copper and gold mines.
The Indonesian government and Freeport blamed the killings on a separatist group, the Free Papua Movement, which had been fighting a low-level guerrilla war for several decades. I opened my article with this sentence: “Bush Administration officials have determined that Indonesian soldiers carried out a deadly ambush that killed two American teachers.” The story prompted a leak investigation. I’m not so sure. National Security Agency Tasked with Targeting Adversaries' Computers for Attack Since Early 1997, According to Declassified Document. Washington, D.C., April 26, 2013 – Since at least 1997, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been responsible for developing ways to attack hostile computer networks as part of the growing field of Information Warfare (IW), according to a recently declassified internal NSA publication posted today by the non-governmental National Security Archive ("the Archive") at The George Washington University.
Declaring that "the future of warfare is warfare in cyberspace," a former NSA official describes the new activity as "sure to be a catalyst for major change" at the super-secret agency. The document is one of 98 items the Archive is posting today that provide wide-ranging background on the nature and scope of U.S. cyber activities. The NSA's new assignment as of 1997, known as Computer Network Attack (CNA), comprises "operations to disrupt, deny, degrade or destroy" information in target computers or networks, "or the computers and networks themselves," according to the NSA document.
China May Have Helped Pakistan Nuclear Weapons Design, Newly Declassified Intelligence Indicates. CIA in 1977 Correctly Estimated South Africa Could Produce Enough Weapons-Grade Uranium "to Make Several Nuclear Devices Per Year" Report on the Libyan Nuclear Program Found that "Serious Deficiencies," "Poor Leadership" and Lack of "Coherent Planning" Made it "Highly Unlikely to Achieve a Nuclear Weapons Capability "Within the Next 10 years" Intelligence Estimates on Argentina and Brazil Raised Questions About Their Nuclear Programs and Whether they Sought a Weapons Capability National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 423 Posted - April 23, 2013 Edited by William Burr For more information contact: William Burr - 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu Washington, D.C., April 23, 2013 – China was exporting nuclear materials to Third World countries without safeguards beginning in the early 1980s, and may have given Pakistan weapons design information in the early years of its clandestine program, according to recently declassified CIA records.
Document 1: "Covert Programs"