“President Trump’s recent cabinet shake-up looks to be a real boost to hard-line militarism and neo-conservatism. If his nominees to head the State Department and CIA are confirmed, we may well have moved closer to war.”
“February 7, 2002 remains a grim day in the modern American calendar, and one that, I think, should be marked every year, along with other key dates — August 1, 2002, for example, when the ‘torture memos,’ seeking to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA, were issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, written by John Yoo and approved by his boss, Jay Bybee, and December 2, 2002, when Donald Rumsfeld approved his own specific torture program for use at Guantánamo, which was initially intended for use on just one prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, but which ended up being used on one in six of the prisoners, according to a former interrogator who spoke to Neil A. Lewis for a New York Times article in January 2005.”
“The NSA headquarters is located just off a major Washington-area highway and investigators believe it is possible the three men made a wrong turn.”
Read more: http://www.unionleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20180214/NEWS07/180219602
“The House Intelligence Committee’s dueling partisan memos about FBI surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser will result in federal agents keeping secrets to themselves because they no longer trust Congress, experts warn.”
“FISA is a monster. It began as a means of surveilling foreign agents in the U.S., and today it is used for surveilling any American at any time.”
Read more: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/7/a-lawful-means-for-foreign-surveillance-on-us-soil/
“Yes, there was ‘collusion – except it wasn’t a pact between Putin and Trump but rather an alliance between Hillary’s campaign and the national security bureaucracy to get her elected.”
Read more: https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2018/02/04/fisa-gate-plot-destroy-republic/
“Citizens of the United States tend to have short memories. The historical reality is that Iran did have a secular, democratic government, led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh between 1951 and 1953 — but Mossadegh was removed from power in a coup organized and funded by the CIA and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6.”
Read more: https://theintercept.com/2018/02/05/iran-cia-coup-mossadegh-ayatollah/
“Former CIA Director John Brennan has been hired as a paid contributor by NBC and MSNBC, the media company announced. He led the agency from 2013 to early 2017, under President Barack Obama. That Brennan previously lied to an NBC journalist about the CIA’s attempts to thwart a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into the agency’s use of torture was apparently no deterrent to his appointment.”
Read more: https://www.rt.com/usa/417937-cia-john-brennan-nbc/
“The FISA court has been a fount of outrages because it is an American Star Chamber: the court meets in secret, only hears the government’s side, and approves 99 percent+ of all the search warrants requested.”
Read more: http://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/372324-will-fisa-secrecy-doom-democracy
“The involvement of the intelligence community in the 2016 presidential campaign, clumsy and disorganized as it appears to have been, will be part of the next election, and the ones after that. If you’re in search of a constitutional crisis, here it is. After all, when we let George W. Bush create, and Barack Obama greatly expand, the surveillance state, didn’t we think it would eventually come to this?”