From Washington Post:

The Justice Department on Monday charged a former CIA officer with repeatedly leaking classified information, including the identities of agency operatives involved in the capture and interrogation of alleged terrorists.

The case against John Kiriakou, who also served as a senior Senate aide, extends the Obama administration’s crackdown on disclosures of national security secrets. Kiriakou, 47, is the sixth target of a leaks-related prosecution since President Obama took office, exceeding the total number of comparable prosecutions under all previous administrations combined, legal experts said.

Kiriakou, who was among the first to go public with details about the CIA’s use of water-boarding and other harsh interrogation measures, was charged with disclosing classified information to reporters and lying to the agency about the origin of other sensitive material he published in a book. He faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted.

I remember when Kiriakou was making the media rounds talking about enhanced interrogation. He was on “60 Minutes,” “20/20,” and several other shows.

This article titled “Stasi files row as Britain refuses to return documents to Germany” was written by Helen Pidd in Berlin, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 28th December 2011 22.04 UTC

Britain has been accused of “sheltering communists” after refusing to hand over a cache of Stasi files revealing the names of British spies who worked for the East German secret intelligence agency during the cold war.

The cache belongs to a set of mysterious microfilm images, known as the Rosenholz (Rosewood) records, that contain 280,000 files giving basic information on employees of the foreign intelligence arm of the former GDR.

The records were obtained by the CIA in murky circumstances shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. American agents analysed the data before distributing relevant portions to countries in which the Stasi were active.

A swath of files relating to Stasi activity in the UK were given to MI5 by the Americans in the 1990s. Now Germany wants the files back, to add to its extensive archives on the GDR’s ministry for state security, commonly known as the Stasi.

If the files are returned to Germany, they will be made available, unredacted, to scholars and historians. That means that British Stasi sympathisers and spies could be outed for the first time.

Today, Germany only has those sections of the Rosenholz discs pertaining to activity in former West Germany – though the governments of Norway, Denmark and Sweden recently indicated they were ready to hand over the Rosenholz files they were given by the CIA more than 10 years ago.

Since the return to Berlin of the West German portion of the Rosenholz files in 2003, a number of public figures have been outed as Stasi collaborators, most recently a priest who allegedly spied on Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI .

“We need access to these British files in order to understand the cold war, which was a war fought by secret intelligence operatives all over the world,” said Helmut Müller-Enbergs, one of the world’s leading scholars on the Stasi.

With fellow academics, he is demanding that Britain return the Rosenholz files to the Stasi archives in Berlin. “Given that the Brits have long been considered world class in intelligence gathering, it is especially important for us to understand how the Stasi was able to operate in the UK.”

“The UK is not a country known for sheltering communists, so why then will they not reveal to us who in Great Britain was working for a communist regime?” said Müller-Enbergs, a researcher at the Stasi archives in Berlin (BStU) and visiting professor at Gotland University, Sweden.

Roland Jahn, the federal commissioner for the Stasi archive, said: “These records could offer an important complement to those Stasi files we already have, and thus make an important contribution to the reappraisal of the role of East German state security in Europe.”

The Stasi archives already encompass 69 miles (111km) of files, including 39m index cards, 1.4m photos and 34,000 video and audio recordings. But the Rosenholz files are key because of the systematic and deliberate destruction of most of the records relating to a Stasi division known as the Hauptverwaltung A (HVA), which was responsible for running an extensive network of spies in the west.

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, a high level committee agreed (with the blessing of the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl) that the HVA archives should be destroyed – a decision described by Die Zeit recently as one of the worst mistakes made during reunification .

The microfilmed files obtained by the CIA – in what the Americans described as a “clandestine operation” which may have included a pay-off to a rogue KGB agent – are the key because they contain copies of the card indexes of the HVA, listing the real names of all the agents, informers and targets of the Stasi’s foreign operations.

Put together with files already in the BStU’s possession, they allow scholars to build up a picture of who the spies were, who they were spying on and how the Stasi carried out missions abroad.

Herbert Ziehm, deputy head of the disclosure/information division of the BStU, said it would be “lovely” for Britain to return their portion of the Rosenholz files. “Then we would be able to see exactly who was spying for the Stasi in Britain – from other sources we already know what information they were delivering, but this would enable us to work out who they were,” he said.

Ziehm was part of the negotiating team which persuaded the US to hand over the Rosenholz discs to Germany’s Stasi archives in 2003.

Even just getting those Rosenholz files pertaining to east and west was a drawn-out process, he said: “The negotiations took a number of years. “The Americans were reluctant to co-operate for some time.One CIA agent put it like this: when you get some loot from a mission, you don’t share it.” Ziehm believes the CIA obtained the files in 1992 “at the very latest”.

Ziehm said the files are important in puzzling how the Stasi operated abroad. “We already had three-quarters of the information – Rosenholz gives us the opportunity to gain the missing quarter,” he said.

Thomas Wegener Friis, an associate professor at the Centre for Cold War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, said the return of the files was about transparency rather than naming and shaming.

“It’s not just a question of outing people – though we should not be shy to name those who worked for the Stasi abroad,” he said. “More important is being able to understand how intelligence agencies worked on an operational level during the Cold War. It will allow us to learn lessons for the future.”Asked by the Guardian why Britain refused to hand over the Rosenholz files, the Foreign Office, which handles press requests for MI5 and MI6, said: “We don’t comment on intelligence matters.”

No Briton has ever been prosecuted in the UK for spying for East Germany, according to Anthony Glees, professor of politics at the University of Buckingham and director of its Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies.

In 1999, the then home secretary, Jack Straw, told MPs that MI5 was investigating more than 100 Britons suspected of having been Stasi agents.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

This article titled “Lithuania faces legal action over prisons set up for CIA rendition programme” was written by Ian Cobain, for The Guardian on Thursday 27th October 2011 20.05 UTC

The Lithuanian government is facing legal action in the European court of human rights over secret prisons that the CIA established in the country as part of its worldwide “extraordinary rendition” programme.

It becomes the third European government to face proceedings as a result of its support for the agency’s operations, Macedonia and Poland having already been accused of breaches of the European convention on human rights.

The Lithuanian parliament has acknowledged that the CIA established two prisons with the help of the country’s own security service, the SSD. One was at a riding school in a village 12 miles north of the capital, Vilnius, while the second is thought to have been at a guest house in Vlinius. The parliamentary report failed, however, to establish whether any prisoners had been held at the sites.

Lawyers representing the militant known as Abu Zubaydah say he was detained in Lithuania, and they began court proceedings in Strasbourg on Thursday. They allege that the Lithuanian government is guilty of multiple breaches of the European convention on human rights, first by allowing the CIA to fly Abu Zubaydah to the country and detain him in one of the secret prisons, and then by failing to investigate the matter itself.

The International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights, a London-based organisation bringing the proceedings along with Abu Zubaydah’s US lawyers, said the case highlighted the level of European co-operation in the systematic use of illegal detention and torture after 9/11.

Helen Duffy, special counsel at the organisation, said: “While this was clearly led by the CIA, it would not have been possible without the co-operation of the European authorities. We need to find out what happened to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Crofton Black, a researcher with the legal charity Reprieve, which has mounted its own inquiries into the CIA’s Lithuanian operations, said: “Lithuania’s investigations have so far been manifestly insufficient in scope and rigour.”

There was no immediate response from the Lithuanian government.

The first details of the CIA’s secret Lithuanian connection emerged in 2009 in the US, where the media quoted former agency staff as saying that the government in Vilnius had granted permission for the establishment of the prisons in an attempt to bolster relations with Washington. One told ABC News that neither the agency nor the Bush administration offered the Lithuanian government anything in return, adding: “We didn’t have to. They were happy to have our ear.”

The riding school is said to have been sold in March 2004 – a month before Lithuania joined Nato – to a now defunct company called Elite LLC registered in Delaware and Panama. According to the AFP news agency, the US embassy in Vilnius funded the purchase at a cost of 2m litas (£510,000).

English-speaking construction contractors are said to have embarked on redevelopment work, and local people who asked for work say they were turned away by English-speaking guards. ABC News reported that the CIA constructed a cell block inside the covered riding area of the school and converted the stables into accommodation for interrogators.

According to the documents submitted to the court at Strasbourg, the site was sold to the Lithuanian government in January 2007 and now houses an SSD training centre.

The US media reports led to an inquiry by the national security committee of the Lithuanian parliament, the siemas, which confirmed the existence of the prisons and the arrival of CIA aircraft. The committee’s report said: “Three occasions were established on which, according to the testimony of the SSD officers, they received the aircraft and escorted what was brought by them with the knowledge of the heads of the SSD.” Despite this, the committee concluded that there was no evidence that any detainees had been taken to either prison.

A criminal investigation was subsequently opened by the prosecutor general’s office but later abandoned, with prosecutors saying they were unable to unearth any evidence that either facility was used to interrogate or detain al-Qaida suspects.

The lawyers representing Abu Zubaydah say the Lithuanian authorities are ignoring evidence, including flight records, that they say show a number of the CIA’s detainees were taken to the country. Abu Zubaydah is said to have been flown from Morocco to Vilnius in February 2005, and to have spent about 12 months there before being moved to Afghanistan.

He had previously been held in Guantánamo Bay, possibly Poland, and Thailand, where he was waterboarded 83 times in one month, according to a US justice department memorandum. He is currently back at Guantánamo, where the authorities are refusing permission for his statement to be passed to the court in Strasbourg.

The Polish government is facing European court proceedings over its assistance for CIA rendition operations, while Macedonia is facing proceedings after the country’s intelligence agents seized a German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, and handed him to the CIA to be flown to Afghanistan. He was released five months later after the agency realised they had the wrong el-Masri.

According to several media reports in the US, the CIA also operated a secret prison in the centre of Bucharest, raising speculation that Romania may also face proceedings in the European court.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

According to Politico, Attorney General Eric Holder has secretly expanded the scope of his investigation into the Bush-era CIA.  Now he’s trying to prosecute CIA interrogators from Abu Ghraib.

A federal prosecutor has launched a secret grand jury to investigate possible CIA war crimes at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Time magazine reported.

Federal prosecutor John Durham, who was first appointed to probe the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes by Attorney General Michael Mukasey in 2008, is now working on an expanded probe authorized by the Obama Justice Department that includes cases of alleged abuse of terror suspects in U.S. custody.

Time reported on Monday that one Durham-issued subpoena said the federal grand jury “is conducting an investigation of possible violations of federal criminal laws involving War Crimes (18 USC/2441), Torture (18 USC 243OA) and related federal offenses.”

The case centers around the death of Iraqi prisoner Manadel al-Jamadi, who was known as “the Iceman” because after killing him, U.S. forces wrapped him in ice in an attempt to alter his postmortem appearance. In a photograph that drew worldwide scorn, Army Spc. Charles Graner was photographed giving a “thumbs-up” sign while posing over al-Jamadi’s dead body.

Citing “those close to the case,” Time said the probe is believed to target CIA interrogator Mark Swanner, the last person to question al-Jamadi before his death.

Bad ideas never seem to die in this administration. They just get put back on the shelf for a while until Obama thinks the public has forgotten about it. Obama and Eric Holder have been fantasizing about prosecuting someone in the CIA for war crimes since day one. What a disgrace.

Time magazine scored the first interview with CIA chief Leon Panetta since he oversaw the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. He speaks frankly about Pakistan and says what most of us assumed. They did not tell Pakistan about the mission to get bin Laden because they feared Pakistani intelligence would tip him off. The upside to all this is that we now have new leverage over Pakistan. They’re on the defensive now since Bin Laden was living openly a mere 1000 ft from an Army training facility. The idea that they didn’t know where he was is ludicrous.

Source: Associated Press
President Barack is shaking up his national security team by naming a new secretary of defense and director of the CIA. AP White House Correspondent Mark Smith reports.

According to a the Los Angeles Times, the CIA is no longer in the detention and interrogation business. An extremely high level terrorist was recently captured in Pakistan, but we’re not going to question him. Thanks to Barack Obama’s new warm and fuzzy version of the War on Terror we don’t do things like that anymore.

He’s considered one of world’s most dangerous terrorism suspects, and the U.S. offered a $1-million reward for his capture in 2005. Intelligence experts say he’s a master bomb maker and extremist leader who possesses a wealth of information about Al Qaeda-linked groups in Southeast Asia.

Yet the U.S. has made no move to interrogate or seek custody of Indonesian militant Umar Patek since he was apprehended this year by officials inPakistan with the help of a CIA tip, U.S. and Pakistani officials say.

The little-known case highlights a sharp difference between President Obama‘s counter-terrorism policy and that of his predecessor,George W. Bush. Under Obama, the CIA has killed more people than it has captured, mainly through drone missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. At the same time, it has stopped trying to detain or interrogate suspects caught abroad, except those captured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The CIA is out of the detention and interrogation business,” said a U.S. official who is familiar with intelligence operations but was not authorized to speak publicly.

The fact Obama has said CIA must stick to the Army Field Manual for interrogations is one reason. The other is that interrogators are still living under the threat of prosecution from Eric Holder and his rogue DOJ. This has created an atmosphere of hesitation and fear in the intelligence community. CIA now prefers to sit back and wait for an interrogation report from a 3rd party that may or may no be accurate.

This is such an outrage. Obama’s ACLU friendly policies are putting this entire country in danger.

This article titled “Robert Gates: No US ‘boots on ground’ in Libya” was written by Paul Harris in New York, for The Guardian on Thursday 31st March 2011 19.12 UTC

Robert Gates, the US secretary of defence, emphatically ruled out deploying American ground troops inside Libya as details emerged of CIA intelligence teams being sent to the country.

Gates, testifying before the House of Representatives armed services committee, repeatedly denied that there were any plans for American soldiers to go into Libya. “Not as long as I am in this job,” he said at one point.

But he declined to comment on questions about CIA activities there, apparently making the distinction between intelligence teams sent into Libya and uniformed military personnel. “I can’t speak to any CIA activities, but I will tell you that the president has been quite clear that in terms of the United States military there will be no boots on the ground,” Gates said.

US newspaper reports have said the CIA teams working on the ground include agents who were posted to the embassy in Tripoli and others put into the country since the rebellion began. They have been acting as spotters to identify military targets for air strikes and cruise missiles. But they have also been gathering intelligence on the nature of the Libyan rebel leadership, who to some extent remain an unknown quantity to US political and military leaders.

It has also been revealed that Barack Obama has signed a secret order that paves the way for CIA help to the Libyan rebels. Known as a “finding”, the order was signed within the last three weeks amid a fierce debate as to whether the US and its allies should start to arm and train the rebels.

Intelligence sources insisted that the sort of order signed by Obama did not yet authorise such a large operation. Further authorisations would be needed if that decision was ever taken, one US intelligence source said. “Rather than full go ahead, the idea is that there is a nuance to this process,” the source told the Guardian.

Experts said there was little surprise that CIA teams, as well as British agents and special forces, were already operating in Libya given the scale of the military strikes and a lack of information about the rebels. “If the CIA does not exist for this purpose, then what’s the point?” said Professor Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University, who has advised the CIA on counterterrorism.

Hoffman said deployment of the CIA carried risks as agents could be killed or captured. Such an incident could feed into fears of the US being drawn much more directly into the conflict. “There are so many unknowns that carry a range of dangers. But so far it seems a modest effort,” Hoffman said.

Other intelligence experts said the CIA teams needed a clearer mission to be effective. Larry Johnson, an ex-CIA agent and former counterterrorism expert at the state department, said Obama had not been clear enough on what the goal of US involvement in Libya was and that could hamper CIA operations. Obama had said the US did not intend regime change by force but at the same timeinsisted that Muammar Gaddafi must step down. “What’s the mission? The CIA is simply a tool and the tool can only be as effective as the policy behind it,” Johnson said.

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This article titled “CIA chief in Pakistan leaves after drone trial blows his cover” was written by Declan Walsh in Islamabad, for The Guardian on Friday 17th December 2010 16.46 UTC

The CIA has pulled its station chief from Islamabad, one of America’s most important spy posts, after his cover was blown in a legal action brought by victims of US drone strikes in the tribal belt.

The officer, named in Pakistan as Jonathan Banks, left the country yesterday, after a tribesman publicly accused him of being responsible for the death of his brother and son in a CIA drone strike in December 2009. Karim Khan, a journalist from North Waziristan, called for Banks to be charged with murder and executed.

In a rare move, the CIA called Banks home yesterday, citing “security concerns” and saying he had received death threats, Washington officials told Associated Press. Khan’s lawyer said he was fleeing the possibility of prosecution.

“This is just diplomatic language they are using. Banks is a liability to the CIA because he’s likely to be called to court. They want to save him, and themselves, the embarrassment,” said lawyer Shahzad Akbar. Pakistani media reports have claimed that Banks entered the country on a business visa, and therefore does not enjoy diplomatic immunity from prosecution.

The recall comes at a sensitive moment for Washington. This week’s Afghanistan policy review brought fresh focus on Taliban safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal belt. Meanwhile CIA drone attacks – which are co-ordinated from the Islamabad embassy – have reached a new peak. Three drones struck targets in Khyber, a previously untouched tribal agency, on Friday, reportedly killing 24 people and signalling a widening of the CIA covert campaign.

The drones enjoy quiet support from the Pakistani government and military but are intensely unpopular among the wider public. Public anger over civilian casualties has focused on Karim Khan, who first publicised his case with a 0m (£323m) civil law suit that named Banks, CIA director Leon Panetta and the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, as respondents.

Few legal experts expect the case to succeed, but it has renewed uneasiness over drones. There have been over 100 strikes so this year, twice as many as in 2009.

The identity of the CIA station chief is a closely guarded secret in any country. Khan’s lawyer said he had obtained Banks’s name from one Pakistani journalist and confirmed it with a second. “I asked around, then got an answer after three or four days of searching,” he said.

There was also speculation that Banks could have been named by a disgruntled element within Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency. Last month, several senior ISI officials were named in a New York legal action brought by relatives of the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

It is unusual for the CIA to recall such a senior spy. Station chiefs were recalled from Israel in 1999 and Argentina in 2001 after being identified in the local media. Today, several US media outlets did not name Banks, citing national security concerns. His identity has been widely reported in Pakistan and India.

Akbar, the lawyer, said the unusual legal action had attracted another 14 families of alleged drone victims from the tribal belt. They intend to bring a class action suit against the CIA in early January, he said.

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Our latest humiliation on the world stage…