Crapaganda.com

“Law must apply to everyone equally or it’s not law at all. Those who are pushing the other view have a misguided idea of what law is all about.” – Benjamin Ferencz

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) released today the results of a landmark investigation that, according to the organization’s press release, “uncovered evidence that indicates the Bush administration apparently conducted illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody.” PHR is asking President Obama to “order the attorney general to undertake an immediate criminal investigation of alleged illegal human experimentation and research on detainees conducted by the CIA and other government agencies following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.” They are also seeking other investigations by Congress, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Justice.

As PHR’s White Paper — “Experiments in Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program” (PDF) — makes clear, illegal experimentation upon human subjects was an integral part of the Bush/Cheney/CIA “enhanced interrogation” program (EIP) from the very beginning. Medical and psychologist monitors were used to collect and analyze data from the EIP interrogations in order “to derive generalizable inferences to be applied to subsequent interrogations.” The use of illegal experimentation both reveals the actual parameters of the torture program, and raises the stakes surrounding the need for accountability for these actions to a new level.

According to PHR’s White Paper:

Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law. These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The charges are expected to resonate throughout the legal, human rights and religious communities. The executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), Rev Richard Killmer, commenting in a press release on PHR’s report, said he deplored the “deeply disturbing evidence that our government committed, in our names, forced human experimentation that recalls some of humanity’s darkest days — charges from which no person of faith can afford to turn away.” (NRCAT has also released a new video today, “Accounting for Torture.”)

Research Violated U.S. and International Law

PHR’s CEO Frank Donaghue states, “The CIA appears to have broken all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation.”

PHR examined three instances of the CIA’s illegal medical research, although it should be understood this most likely does not constitute the full extent of the torture research program. Some of the experiments concerned the elaboration of more extensive forms of waterboarding, testing the use of large-volumes of water, the use of saline solution as a substitute for plain water, as well as the use of ancillary equipment, such as a gurney that could swing the prisoner into different angles, and use of a blood oximeter to measure subject vital signs and calibrate them with experimental techniques. The CIA also experimented on different levels of sleep deprivation in order to assess effects and coordinate practice with legal definitions constructed by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

In one gruesome set of experiments, at least 25 detainees were submitted to both individual and combined use of the different “enhanced interrogation” techniques developed by the CIA through reverse-engineering of the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, techniques which were originally developed to inoculate U.S. military personnel against torture. The purpose of this experiment, monitored by doctors, was to ascertain the effects of the different combinations of techniques as they pertained to “susceptibility to severe pain,” attempting thereby to calibrate levels of pain in order to keep the interrogations within the dubious frontiers of legality proposed by John Yoo and Jay Bybee in their infamous torture memos.

The purpose of this experimental program was apparently to help provide legal cover for the torture program, as well as both examine the effects of torture upon live subjects, and further the design of the torture program itself. No existing research protocol has come to light, and the evidence has been organized via the use of open source documents and FOIA releases. From these sources, one can see that the use of medical monitors and experimental medical data was used as supposed “good faith” evidence against possible prosecution for torture.

A Legal Limbo

The actions of the Bush Administration to legally justify their torture program via the use of executive orders and OLC rulings has been well-documented. Only last February, the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Conduct released their finding that the actions of Yoo and Bybee in constructing the 2002 memos that authorized torture did not amount to unprofessional or unethical conduct, but simply constituted “bad judgment.” Whatever the judgment upon the OLC memos, it is apparent the use of torture pre-dated the OLC approval of the EIP.

While there is some evidence that the Bush administration was concerned with loosening the legal parameters surrounding research using human subjects (story to come), there is no evidence, as PHR’s White Paper points out, that OLC ever considered the legality of the medical monitoring of prisoners as part of the CIA torture program. According to Director of PHR’s Campaign Against Torture and lead report author, Nathaniel A. Raymond, “Justice Department lawyers appear to have never assessed the lawfulness of the alleged research on detainees in CIA custody, despite how essential it appears to have been to their legal cover for torture.” But, after a number of Supreme Court decisions, culminating in the Hamdan v Rumsfeld ruling in June 2006, the government apparently had second thoughts about its legal liabilities.

One of the most original pieces of research in the PHR report concerns the rewriting of the War Crimes Act (WCA) as part of the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA). Concerned, it would seem, over their vulnerability to criminal prosecution for illegal and unethical research conducted upon detainees, including, as I’ve pointed out before, Abu Zubaydah, the Bush administration amended the WCA language in the MCA to weaken the protections against the strict prohibitions against scientific experiments on prisoners found in the Geneva Conventions. These changes were then made retroactive to 1997, which suggests the U.S. government was shielding interrogators and other officials for illegal acts going back four years prior to 9/11. And to their shame, Congress passed this legislation, and the language on the WCA was then retained by the Democratic Party-controlled Congress when the MCA was amended in 2009.

One of PHR’s recommendations in their report is that Congress undertake a revision of the War Crimes Act “to eliminate changes made to the Act in 2006 which weaken the prohibition on biological experimentation on detainees, and ensure that the War Crimes Act definition of the grave breach of biological experimentation is consistent with the definition of that crime under the Geneva Conventions.”

Outstanding Issues To Be Resolved

It has been some years since the experimental aspects of the torture program were first recognized. The breach of medical ethics by doctors was first discussed by M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks in the New England Journal of Medicine in January 2005. In July 2005, a New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, “The Experiment,” looked at the “reverse-engineering” of the SERE techniques, and noted both the prohibition on scientific experiments of prisoners in Geneva, and the “[n]umerous experiments aimed at documenting trainees’ stress levels… conducted by sere-affiliated scientists.”

One of the authors of the PHR report, Stephen Soldz, wrote about the experimental aspects of “behavioral science-based torture techniques” in use at Guantanamo in a August 2006 article. In 2007, physician Steven Miles noted the experimental aspects of the Al Qahtani interrogation at Guantanamo in late 2002 – early 2003. The experimental aspect of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah was broached by FBI agent Ali Soufan in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2009. Soufan’s presence at the Zubaydah interrogation in April-May 2002 led him to characterize a CIA contractor’s treatment of Zubaydah as an experiment (“Once again the contractor insisted on stepping up the notches of his experiment…”). The contractor is believed to have been former SERE psychologist, James Mitchell.

The PHR report should not be seen as a full history of the torture-experimentation program, but is a blueprint offering the outlines of what that program consisted of and how it progressed. For instance, except for Khalid Sheik Mohammed, none of the CIA prisoners are named in the report, although it is noted that “the authorized policy of using multiple ["enhanced interrogation" techniques] simultaneously was officially based on medical observations of 25 detainees.”

A full understanding of all that happened awaits future investigations. A more comprehensive understanding of the issues raised, e.g., the development of the waterboarding and sleep deprivation techniques, has been investigated by Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel/Firedoglake, while the torture of Abu Zubaydah has been intensively covered by Jason Leopold at Truthout. Leopold noted the “extensive back-and-forth between CIA field operatives and agency officials” on matters such as “medical updates” and “behavioral comments.”

In an article last April, I noted that “psychologist’s notes” had been cataloged as a part of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation materials. Such notes would indicate just what variables of interest were being recorded by the psychological experimenter, especially given recent revelations in a story by Jason Leopold that a second taping system was used in the interrogation of Zubaydah, with “torture sessions that were stored on computers and separate hard drives.”

Variables of interest to CIA psychologists might include head movements and hand movements, facial expressions or microexpressions, used in detecting deception or behavioral manifestations of stress. These types of observation are synonymous with computer analysis and argue for the use of a digital video system or the transfer of analog video into data stored on magnetic or optical media. The same release of documents… also described CIA officials asking for “instructions” regarding the “disposition of hard drives and magnetic media” associated with the torture of Zubaydah.

Among the various threads left dangling from the PHR investigation, none concerns me more than the links between the SERE research undertaken by investigators led by Dr. Charles A. Morgan and the CIA experimental torture program, as reported in an appendix to PHR’s report. In an appendix to their report, PHR describes the SERE research undertaken during the years prior to the issuance of the OLC memos, and explains that the results of that research demonstrated how the risk of harm was inherent in the SERE techniques. In addition, they note, “the experimental framework of these studies intentionally or unintentionally laid the groundwork for unethical and illegal human experimentation that would follow.”

The full details of my own investigation into those links were published back in September 2009.

What is indisputable is that by virtue of his position, Dr. Morgan had access to CIA officials just at the time that another department of the CIA, one to which he is affiliated, was, according to the CIA’s own Office of Inspector General Report (large PDF) involved in vetting the SERE techniques for use in interrogations….

… it looks like the CIA used DOD/JPRA as a cover for the safety of techniques that it knew were in fact harmful from their own analysis of the “data.” [JRPA, or Joint Recovery Personnel Agency is, among other things, the "Executive Agency" for the SERE training schools.]

One especially lingering thread concerns the assertion in the PHR report that all of Dr. Morgan’s SERE research had been properly vetted by Institutional Research Boards. While this is true for his published research, a report for which Dr. Morgan is listed as second author, The War Fighter’s Stress Response: Telemetric and Noninvasive Assessment, conducted on behalf of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command at Ft. Detrick, beginning approximately in November 2001, states — even by its final addendum in October 2003 — that “due to Institutional Review Board delays no human subjects data are available.”

The exact interactions between CIA and DoD/JPRA, between the White House and both DoD and CIA, the role of other actors, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency and Joint Special Operations Command, not to mention the actual origins of the torture research program, remain unclear. It is a vital necessity that that investigations take place, and hopefully PHR’s report will provide the added impetus to push this issue to the forefront of a tired, confused, and frightened country, a country misled in so many ways over the past decade, and now forced to confront the full panoply of evil that has resulted from having a portion of the government held apart from public scrutiny. That must end now.

Source: FireDogLake

A little-noticed blog post by a veteran intelligence reporter averred Tuesday that the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group weighed a plan prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion that sought to discredit Saddam Hussein by portraying him as gay.

According to Jeff Stein, a longtime intelligence reporter who first revealed that FBI officials had eavesdropped on a sitting Democratic congresswoman, the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group considered creating a video that would the then-Iraqi leader having intercourse with a teenage boy.

“It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera,” a former CIA official purportedly told Stein. “Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session.”

The CIA would have then “flood[ed] Iraq with the videos,” the official added.

A third former CIA official said that the plan was shot down, in part, because others in the agency thought that claiming Saddam had sex with boys would do little to undermine him.

“Saddam playing with boys would have no resonance in the Middle East — nobody cares,” another purported CIA official is quoted as saying. “Trying to mount such a campaign would show a total misunderstanding of the target. We always mistake our own taboos as universal when, in fact, they are just our taboos.”

A current U.S. official told Stein he couldn’t confirm or deny the former CIA employees’ claims.

“While I can’t confirm these accounts, if these ideas were ever floated by anyone at any time, they clearly didn’t go anywhere,” the official told Stein.

Stein notes, however, that the CIA did make a video in which a fake Osama Bin Laden enjoys a campfire and the company of his associates while bragging about their juvenile paramours.

The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.

Eventually, “things ground to a halt,” the other former officer said, because no one could come to agreement on the projects.

They also faced strong opposition from James Pavitt, then head of the agency’s Operations Division, and his deputy, Hugh Turner, who “kept throwing darts at it.”

Fundamentalists in Iraq have shown disdain for their gay compatriots since Saddam’s fall. In some cases, according to human rights activists, they’ve resorted to grotesque violence.

The television news agency Al Arabiya reported last year that a prominent Iraqi human rights activist asserted that some men have died after gruesome anal torture.

“A prominent Iraqi human rights activist says that Iraqi militia have deployed a painful form of torture against homosexuals by closing their anuses using “Iranian gum,” the network said. “Yanar Mohammad told Alarabiya.net that, “Iraqi militias have deployed an unprecedented form of torture against homosexuals by using a very strong glue that will close their anus.”

“According to her,” the report added, “the new substance ‘is known as the American hum, which is an Iranian-manufactured glue that if applied to the skin, sticks to it and can only be removed by surgery. After they glue the anuses of homosexuals, they give them a drink that causes diarrhea. Since the anus is closed, the diarrhea causes death. Videos of this form of torture are being distributed on mobile cellphones in Iraq.’”

Source: Raw Story

Prosecutors attached to the Audiencia Nacional in Madrid are reportedly requesting that Judge Ismael Moreno issue an order for the arrest of thirteen CIA agents involved in an extraordinary rendition operation from 2004, the newspaper El País reports this afternoon, citing sources within the court.

The case relates to Khaled El-Masri, a greengrocer from Neu-Ulm, Germany, seized by the United States as a result of mistaken identity while he was on vacation in the former Yugoslavia. El-Masri was placed on a CIA-chartered jet that arrived in Macedonia from Palma de Majorca in January 2004, en route ultimately to Afghanistan. It appears that Majorca was used regularly as a refueling and temporary sheltering point for the CIA, with the knowledge of the prior conservative government. While held in the notorious CIA prison known as the Salt Pit, El-Masri was apparently tortured during extensive interrogations before intelligence officers realized that they had seized the wrong man. The Washington Post reported that CIA agents, fearing the consequences of releasing him, argued for his continued detention and in fact held him for at least several weeks after his release had been ordered. Condoleezza Rice, then national security advisor to President Bush, intervened and directed his release. El-Masri’s CIA abductors entered Spanish territory using forged British passports, according to the prosecutors. They are seeking James Fairing, Jason Franklin, Michael Grady, Lyle Edgar Lumsen III, Eric Matthew Fain, Charles Goldman Bryson, Kirk James Bird, Walter Richard Greensbore, Patricia O’Riley, Jane Payne, James O’Hale, John Richard Deckard and Héctor Lorenzo, according to information provided by the Spanish Guardia Civil. The case is also under investigation in Germany.

The Spanish prosecutors have been closely studying the prosecution in Italy of 23 American agents in connection with another extraordinary rendition, involving an Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar, who was seized off the streets of Milan and taken to Egypt, where he was tortured. The Italian proceedings occurred in absentia after the Americans fled to avoid arrest. The trial resulted in the conviction of 23 Americans, 21 of them intelligence operatives. A criminal proceeding relating to the kidnapping and torture of El-Masri is also underway in Germany.

Source: Harpers

More than 30 years after it was written, the Pentagon has released a memorandum detailing its involvement in the CIA’s infamous Cold War mind-control experiments.

But a warning to conspiracy theorists on the lookout for new fodder: This isn’t quite Men Who Stare at Goats II.

The 17-page document (.pdf), “Experimentation Programs conducted by the Department of Defense That Had CIA Sponsorship or Participation and That Involved the Administration to Human Subjects of Drugs Intended for Mind-Control or Behavior-Modification Purposes,” was prepared in 1977 by the General Counsel of the Department of Defense and released on May 6 after a Freedom of Information Act request.

Most of the details have been revealed in earlier CIA papers. And if anything, the Pentagon’s recap is a reminder of how little the Department of Defense cops to knowing about the CIA projects.

Still, there are some tantalizing new details. Take the origins of MK-ULTRA, the notorious CIA program that dosed thousands of unwitting participants with hallucinogenic drugs.

Initially funded by the Navy, the project set out to study the effects of brain concussion. Soon after, scientists noted that a blow to the head prompted amnesia, leading to the pursuit of a drug-based technique to “induce brain concussion … without physical trauma.” Shortly thereafter, the project was transferred entirely to the CIA, because it involved “human experiments … not easily justifiable on medical-therapeutic grounds.”

Other programs, described briefly focused on mind control. MK-NAOMI was after “severely incapacitating and lethal materials … [and] gadgetry for their dissemination,” and MK-CHICKWIT was designed to “identify new drug developments in Europe and Asia,” and then “obtain samples.”

Edgewood Laboratories, where many of the programs were carried out, is also identified as having tested an incapacitating chemical on prisoners and military personnel without the agency’s approval. The drug, EA#3167, was “appl[ied] to the skin” of subjects using an adhesive tape.

Another program, MK-OFTEN, started as a study on dopamine. But the scope was soon expanded to evaluate ibogaine, a hallucinogen, and then several more drugs, in hopes of creating “new pharmacologically active drugs affecting the central nervous system [to] modify men’s behavior.”

And the Navy is reported to have “obtain[ed] heroin and marijuana” in an effort to develop speech-inducing drugs for use on defectors and prisoners of war. The drugs were eventually tested on 14 people: six volunteer research assistants, and eight unwitting Soviet defectors.

The report pins most of the nefarious activities on CIA-funded scientists. But that’s hardly the verdict of subsequent government documents, like a 1994 report from the U.S General Accounting Office. In that report, Pentagon officials are said to have “work[ed] directly with the CIA” and dosed “thousands” of military subjects with LSD and other drugs. Eyewitness accounts, like that of psychiatrist James Ketchum, describe outlandish Army efforts at creating hallucinogenic weapons in conjunction with MK-ULTRA.

And the Pentagon’s had plenty of experience in out-there mind control, even without CIA involvement. Troops have been dosed with LSD and cannabis oil,  and Pentagon officials were reportedly toying with the idea of psychic spies as recently as 2007.

Not surprisingly, the released report also doesn’t address darker questions that persist about the specifics of the CIA projects. Last year, a group of vets sued the agency for illnesses and trauma caused by the “diabolical and secret [MK-ULTRA] testing program,” which they allege included experiments with nerve gas, psychochemicals, and brain implants.
Source: Wired.com

The Obama administration is seeking to compel a writer to testify about his confidential sources for a 2006 book about the Central Intelligence Agency, a rare step that was authorized by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

The author, James Risen, who is a reporter for The New York Times, received a subpoena on Monday requiring him to provide documents and to testify May 4 before a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., about his sources for a chapter of his book, “State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration.” The chapter largely focuses on problems with a covert C.I.A. effort to disrupt alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research.

Mr. Risen referred questions to his lawyer, Joel Kurtzberg, a partner at Cahill Gordon & Reindel L.L.P., who said that Mr. Risen would not comply with the demand and would ask a judge to quash the subpoena.

“He intends to honor his commitment of confidentiality to his source or sources,” Mr. Kurtzberg said. “We intend to fight this subpoena.”

The subpoena comes two weeks after the indictment of a former National Security Agency official on charges apparently arising from an investigation into a series of Baltimore Sun articles that exposed technical failings and cost overruns of several agency programs that cost billions of dollars.

The lead prosecutor in both investigations is William Welch II. He formerly led the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, but left that position in October after its botched prosecution of Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska.

Matthew A. Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, declined to discuss the subpoena to Mr. Risen or to confirm its existence. “As a general matter, we have consistently said that leaks of classified information are a matter we take extremely seriously,” he said.

Mr. Risen and a colleague won a Pulitzer Prize for a December 2005 New York Times article that exposed the existence of the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program. While many critics — including Barack Obama, then a senator — called that program illegal, the Bush administration denounced the article as a damaging leak of classified information and opened an investigation into its sources. No one has been indicted in that matter.

The second chapter in Mr. Risen’s book provides a detailed description of the program. But Mr. Kurtzberg said the Justice Department was seeking information only about Mr. Risen’s sources for the ninth chapter, which centers on the C.I.A.’s effort to disrupt Iranian nuclear research. That material did not appear in The Times.

The book describes how the agency sent a Russian nuclear scientist — who had defected to the United States and was secretly working for the C.I.A. — to Vienna in February 2000 to give plans for a nuclear bomb triggering device to an Iranian official under the pretext that he would provide further assistance in exchange for money. The C.I.A. had hidden a technical flaw in the designs.

The scientist immediately spotted the flaw, Mr. Risen reported. Nevertheless, the agency proceeded with the operation, so the scientist decided on his own to alert the Iranians that there was a problem in the designs, thinking they would not take him seriously otherwise.

Mr. Risen described the operation as reckless, arguing that Iranian scientists may have been able to “extract valuable information from the blueprints while ignoring the flaws.” He also wrote that a C.I.A. case officer, believing that the agency had “assisted the Iranians in joining the nuclear club,” told a Congressional intelligence committee about the problems, but that no action was taken.

It is not clear whether the Iranians had figured out that the Russian scientist had been working for the C.I.A. before publication of Mr. Risen’s book.

The Bush administration had sought Mr. Risen’s cooperation in identifying his sources for the Iran chapter of his book, and it obtained an earlier subpoena against him in January 2008 under Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey. But Mr. Risen fought the subpoena, and never had to testify before it expired last summer. That left it up to Mr. Holder to decide whether to press forward with the matter by seeking a new subpoena.

If a judge does not agree to quash the subpoena and Mr. Risen still refuses to comply, he risks being held in contempt of court. In 2005, a Times reporter, Judith Miller, was jailed for 85 days for refusing to testify in connection with the Valerie Plame Wilson leak case.

Department rules say prosecutors may seek such subpoenas only if the information they are seeking is essential and cannot be obtained another way, and the attorney general must personally sign off after balancing the public’s interest in the news against the public’s interest in effective law enforcement.

Congress is considering legislation that would let judges make that determination, giving them greater power to quash subpoenas to reporters. The Obama administration supports such a media-shield bill, and the House of Representatives has passed a version of it. But a Senate version has been stalled for months.

Source: NY Times

More than seven years ago, a suspected Afghan militant was brought to a dimly lit CIA compound northeast of the airport in Kabul. The CIA called it the Salt Pit. Inmates knew it as the dark prison.

Inside a chilly cell, the man was shackled and left half-naked. He was found dead, exposed to the cold, in the early hours of Nov. 20, 2002.

The Salt Pit death was the only fatality known to have occurred inside the secret prison network the CIA operated abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks. The death had strong repercussions inside the CIA. It helped lead to a review that uncovered abuses in detention and interrogation procedures, and forced the agency to change those procedures.

Little has emerged about the Afghan’s death, which the Justice Department is investigating. The Associated Press has learned the dead man’s name, as well as new details about his capture in Pakistanand his Afghan imprisonment.

The man was Gul Rahman (gool RAHK’-mahn), a suspected militant captured on Oct. 29, 2002, a U.S. official familiar with the case confirmed. The official said Rahman was taken during an operation against Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, an insurgent group headed by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (gool-boo-DEEN’ hek-mat-YAR’) and allied with al-Qaida.

Rahman’s identity also was confirmed by a former U.S. official familiar with the case, as well as by several other former and current officials. A reference to Rahman’s death also turned up in a recently declassified government document.

The CIA’s program of waterboarding and other harsh treatment of suspected terrorists has been debated since it ended in 2006. The Salt Pit case stands as a cautionary tale about the unfettered use of such practices. The Obama administration shut the CIA’s prisons last year.

It remains uncertain whether any intelligence officers have been punished as a result of the Afghan’s death, raising questions about the CIA’s accountability in the case. The CIA’s then-station chief in Afghanistan was promoted after Rahman’s death, and the officer who ran the prison went on to other assignments, including one overseas, several former intelligence officials said.

The CIA declined to discuss the Salt Pit case and denied a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the AP.

Rahman was taken into custody in Islamabad with four others. They included Dr. Ghairat Baheer, a physician who is Hekmatyar’s son-in-law and a leader of Hezb-e-Islami, an insurgent faction blamed for numerous bombings and violence in Afghanistan.

Baheer, who said he spent six months in the Salt Pit during six years in Afghan prisons, said in an interview in Islamabad that he never learned what happened to Rahman. Rahman’s family repeatedly pressed International Red Cross officials about his fate, Baheer said.

“If he died there in interrogation or he died a natural death, they should have told his family and ended their uncertainty,” Baheer said.

This account of the Salt Pit case was assembled from documents and interviews with both militants and officials in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials. The Americans spoke on condition of anonymity because the details of the case remain classified.

Read more »

War on whistleblower: CIA spies on WikiLeaks for ‘Pentagon murder cover-up’ exposure (Russia Today)

CIA officers in Afghanistan were so eager to meet the spy they believed would help them crack al-Qaida’s leadership they planned a birthday celebration for his visit in December, current and former U.S. officials said.

A birthday cake was waiting.

But before they could even begin to question their golden source, he detonated a powerful bomb, killing himself and seven CIA employees in one of the deadliest attacks in the agency’s history.

Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 36-year-old doctor who had been recruited by Jordanian intelligence officials, was really a double agent.

The account of the planned birthday gathering is the latest evidence that CIA officials at the Afghan base trusted the Jordanian and wanted to build rapport with him. It was confirmed by current and former officials briefed on the case, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

The bombing not only weakened U.S. intelligence operations, it touched off a sometimes contentious debate within the close-knit intelligence community about whether such emotions led the CIA to be too lax with its security.

CIA Director Leon Panetta has scoffed at suggestions that security lapses were to blame for the attack. But it remains unclear why there was such a large contingent around al-Balawi when the bomb erupted.

It’s not unusual for CIA officers to offer gestures such as a birthday cake or a small gift for spies they are overseeing, former intelligence officials said. Such gestures lighten the mood and take some of the pressure off. And they tell an informant that he’s important.

“Normally, though, that’s something you do after you’ve established a relationship,” said former CIA and National Security Council official Bruce Riedel, who was not aware of the CIA’s birthday plans for al-Balawi. “It’s not something you do on the first date.”

Such celebrations are typically discreet, small affairs of one or two officers. In this case, many officials were nearby when al-Balawi arrived at the base. Seven were killed and six others were wounded.

In an interview made public after his death, al-Balawi said he knew in advance that he was meeting “an entire CIA team.” He said he had been planning to kidnap or kill his Jordanian intelligence contact, but the chance to take out CIA officers was too tempting.

“We planned for something but got a bigger gift, a gift from Allah, who brought us, through his accompaniment, a valuable prey: Americans, and from the CIA,” al-Balawi said. “That’s when I became certain that the best way to teach Jordanian intelligence and the CIA a lesson is with the martyrdom belt.”

Al-Balawi’s contacts with Jordanian intelligence, one of the CIA’s most trusted partners in the Middle East, gave him credibility. He was thought to have critical intelligence about al-Qaida’s No. 2 official, Ayman al-Zawahri. He was not searched.

Shortly after the attack, Panetta pushed back against criticism that poor spycraft was to blame.

“That’s like saying Marines who die in a firefight brought it upon themselves because they have poor war-fighting skills,” Panetta wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece.

Robert Baer, a former top Middle East CIA operative, heaped criticism on the agency in this month’s GQ magazine. Baer said the top officer at the base “was in over her head” and never should have let so many people meet the source.

“Informants should always be met one-on-one,” Baer wrote. “Always.”

CIA spokesman George Little had harsh words for former employees who criticized the agency from retirement.

“They don’t have all the facts of this case, yet they criticize those who were on the front lines on Dec. 30, including some whose lives were taken. That’s disgraceful,” Little said.

“Informed criticism can be very valuable,” he said. “Some of the junk I’ve seen in the press clearly isn’t.”

Afghan Suicide Bomber Kills 7 C.I.A (Aljazeera)

Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States.

The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed formerC.I.A. and Special Forces operatives. The contractors, in turn, gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said.

While it has been widely reported that the C.I.A. and the military are attacking operatives of Al Qaeda and others through unmanned, remote-controlled drone strikes, some American officials say they became troubled that Mr. Furlong seemed to be running an off-the-books spy operation. The officials say they are not sure who condoned and supervised his work.

It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. Officials said Mr. Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.

Moreover, in Pakistan, where Qaeda and Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding, the secret use of private contractors may be seen as an attempt to get around the Pakistani government’s prohibition of American military personnel’s operating in the country.

Officials say Mr. Furlong’s operation seems to have been shut down, and he is now is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Defense Department for a number of possible offenses, including contract fraud.

Even in a region of the world known for intrigue, Mr. Furlong’s story stands out. At times, his operation featured a mysterious American company run by retired Special Operations officers and an iconic C.I.A. figure who had a role in some of the agency’s most famous episodes, including the Iran-Contra affair.

The allegations that he ran this network come as the American intelligence community confronts other instances in which private contractors may have been improperly used on delicate and questionable operations, including secret raids in Iraq and an assassinations program that was halted before it got off the ground.

“While no legitimate intelligence operations got screwed up, it’s generally a bad idea to have freelancers running around a war zone pretending to be James Bond,” one American government official said. But it is still murky whether Mr. Furlong had approval from top commanders or whether he might have been running a rogue operation.

This account of his activities is based on interviews with American military and intelligence officials and businessmen in the region. They insisted on anonymity in discussing a delicate case that is under investigation.

Col. Kathleen Cook, a spokeswoman for United States Strategic Command, which oversees Mr. Furlong’s work, declined to make him available for an interview. Military officials said Mr. Furlong, a retired Air Force officer, is now a senior civilian employee in the military, a full-time Defense Department employee based at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

Network of Informants

Mr. Furlong has extensive experience in “psychological operations” — the military term for the use of information in warfare — and he plied his trade in a number of places, including Iraq and the Balkans. It is unclear exactly when Mr. Furlong’s operations began. But officials said they seemed to accelerate in the summer of 2009, and by the time they ended, he and his colleagues had established a network of informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan whose job it was to help locate people believed to be insurgents.

Read the rest of the story at: Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants (NY Times)

A 50-year mystery over the ‘cursed bread’ of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.

In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.

For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, however, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.

The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) still haunts the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, southeast France.

On August 16, 1951, the inhabitants were suddenly racked with frightful hallucinations of terrifying beasts and fire.

One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: “I am a plane”, before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.

Time magazine wrote at the time: “Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead.”

Eventually, it was determined that the best-known local baker had unwittingly contaminated his flour with ergot, a hallucinogenic mould that infects rye grain. Another theory was the bread had been poisoned with organic mercury.

However, H P Albarelli Jr., an investigative journalist, claims the outbreak resulted from a covert experiment directed by the CIA and the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

The scientists who produced both alternative explanations, he writes, worked for the Swiss-based Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the Army and CIA with LSD.

Mr Albarelli came across CIA documents while investigating the suspicious suicide of Frank Olson, a biochemist working for the SOD who fell from a 13th floor window two years after the Cursed Bread incident. One note transcribes a conversation between a CIA agent and a Sandoz official who mentions the “secret of Pont-Saint-Esprit” and explains that it was not “at all” caused by mould but by diethylamide, the D in LSD.

While compiling his book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, Mr Albarelli spoke to former colleagues of Mr Olson, two of whom told him that the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident was part of a mind control experiment run by the CIA and US army.

After the Korean War the Americans launched a vast research programme into the mental manipulation of prisoners and enemy troops.

Scientists at Fort Detrick told him that agents had sprayed LSD into the air and also contaminated “local foot products”.

Mr Albarelli said the real “smoking gun” was a White House document sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 to investigate CIA abuses. It contained the names of a number of French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct reference to the “Pont St. Esprit incident.” In its quest to research LSD as an offensive weapon, Mr Albarelli claims, the US army also drugged over 5,700 unwitting American servicemen between 1953 and 1965.

None of his sources would indicate whether the French secret services were aware of the alleged operation. According to US news reports, French intelligence chiefs have demanded the CIA explain itself following the book’s revelations. French intelligence officially denies this.

Locals in Pont-Saint-Esprit still want to know why they were hit by such apocalyptic scenes. “At the time people brought up the theory of an experiment aimed at controlling a popular revolt,” said Charles Granjoh, 71.

“I almost kicked the bucket,” he told the weekly French magazine Les Inrockuptibles. “I’d like to know why.”

Source: French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment (Telegraph UK)