The FBI's Clandestine Cellphone Tracking Tool

The FBI calls it a “sensitive investigative technique” that it wants to keep secret. But newly released documents that shed light on the bureau’s use of a controversial cellphone tracking technology called the “Stingray” have prompted fresh questions over the legality of the spy tool.

Functioning as a so-called “cell-site simulator,” the Stingray is a sophisticated portable surveillance device. The equipment is designed to send out a powerful signal that covertly dupes phones within a specific area into hopping onto a fake network. The feds say they use them to target specific groups or individuals and help track the movements of suspects in real time, not to intercept communications. But by design Stingrays, sometimes called “IMSI catchers,” collaterally gather data from innocent bystanders’ phones and can interrupt phone users’ service—which critics say violates a federal communications law.

The FBI has maintained that its legal footing here is firm. Now, though, internal documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group, reveal the bureau appears well aware its use of the snooping gear is in dubious territory. Two heavily redacted sets of files released last month show internal Justice Department guidance that relates to the use of the cell tracking equipment, with repeated references to a crucial section of the Communications Act which outlines how “interference” with communication signals is prohibited. 

It’s a small but significant detail. Why? Because it demonstrates that “there are clearly concerns, even within the agency, that the use of Stingray technology might be inconsistent with current regulations,” says EPIC attorney Alan Butler. “I don't know how the DOJ justifies the use of Stingrays given the limitations of the Communications Act prohibition.”

The FBI declined a request to comment on specific questions related to the legality of Stingrays, as it says the matter remains in litigation. Spokesman Christopher Allen told me by email that “in general the FBI cautions against drawing conclusions from redacted FOIA documents.”

A potential legal conflict, however, is not all the documents draw attention to. They disclose that the feds have procedures in place for loaning electronic surveillance devices (like the Stingray) to state police. This suggests the technology may have been used in cases across the United States, in line with a stellar investigation by LA Weekly last year, which reported that state cops in California, Florida, Texas, and Arizona had obtained Stingrays. More still, the trove offers a rare hint at the circumstances in which Stingrays are deployed. “Violent Gang Safe Street Task Forces Legal Issues" is the title of one newly released set of FBI presentation slides related to tracking tactics.

It’s likely that in the months ahead, a few more interesting nuggets of information will emerge. The FBI has told EPIC that it holds a mammoth 25,000 pages of documents that relate to Stingray tools, about 6,000 of which are classified. The Feds have been drip-releasing the documents month by month, and so far there have been four batches containing between 27 and 184 pages each. Though most of the contents—even paragraphs showing how the FBI is interpreting the law—have been heavy-handedly redacted, several eyebrow-raising details have made it through the cut. As I reported back in October, a previous release revealed the Feds have an internal manual called “GSM cellphone tracking for dummies.”

The release of the documents was first prompted last year after EPIC launched a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The suit was triggered after it emerged during a court case in 2011 that the feds had used a cell-site simulator in order to track down a suspect, with one agent admitting in an affidavit that the tool collaterally swept up data on “innocent, non-target devices” (U.S. v. Rigmaiden). The government has previouslyargued that tools like the Stingray are permissible without a search warrant—outside the search and seizure protections offered by the Fourth Amendment—because they use them to gather location data, not the content of communications. The Justice Department says cellphone users have no reasonable expectation of privacy over their location data—a claim that has incensed privacy and civil liberties groups.

Via: "Slate"

The Seeds Of This Clandestine Alliance

The Free Syrian Army, The West, Israel and The Gulf Cooperation Council

The seeds of this clandestine alliance go back more than five years, when Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker that the Bush administration had “cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations” intended to weaken the Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon. “The US has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria,” wrote Hersch, “a byproduct of which is “the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups” hostile to the United States and “sympathetic to al-Qaeda.”

He also noted that “the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria,” with a view to pressure him to be “more conciliatory and open to negotiations” with Israel. One faction receiving covert U.S. “political and financial support” through the Saudis was the exiled Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.

Such intrigue continued post-Bush. According to Alastair Crooke, a former MI6 officer and Middle East advisor to EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, the Saudis have eagerly played the role of proxy partner in a bid to mobilize Islamist extremists in the service of regional U.S. interests: “US officials speculated as to what might be done to block this vital corridor [from Iran to Syria], but it was Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia who surprised them by saying that the solution was to harness Islamic forces. The Americans were intrigued, but could not deal with such people. Leave that to me, Bandar retorted.” This region-wide strategyinvolves the sponsorship of extremist Salafis in Syria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq “to disrupt and emasculate the awakenings that threaten absolute monarchism.”

No wonder that John Hannah, former national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, remarked early last year that “Bandar working as a partner with Washington against a common Iranian enemy is a major strategic asset.” Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to Washington, knew Osama bin Laden well – indeed, the late arch-terrorist thanked Bandar personally for the Prince’s “efforts to bring the Americans... to help us against... the communists” during the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan. The same logic still applies. Mobilizing extremist Sunnis “across the region” under “Saudi resources and prestige” can “reinforce US policy and interests,” rejoiced Hannah. They can “weaken the Iranian mullahs; undermine the Assad regime; support a successful transition in Egypt; facilitate Qaddafi’s departure; reintegrate Iraq into the Arab fold; and encourage a negotiated solution in Yemen.”

The strategy is strengthening Islamist terrorists – perhaps deliberately. The wave of suicide bombings in Syria underscores the infiltration of al-Qaeda's ideology into Syria, including an influx of fighters from neighboring Iraq and other parts of the Middle East. “To them,” reports The Globe and Mail, “the real target is Shi’ism, and Iran, and the crescent of Shia forces from Tehran to Beirut.” One former U.S. Army intelligence officer noted the “rapidly evolving prowess” of the FSA, particularly in the “manufacture and use of bombs,” which comes in part from Syrian insurgents “who learned bomb-making while fighting US troops in eastern Iraq.”

According to Israeli intelligence officials, the presence of al-Qaeda fighters in the conflict is not a mere unfortunate accident. NATO and Turkish military authorities have discussed “a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels. The Turkish army would house these volunteers, train them and secure their passage into Syria.”

It is therefore far from clear that the FSA represents the sentiments of Syrian civil society. Even its civilian benefactor, the Syrian National Council (SNC) – an umbrella body for Syrian opposition groups formally recognized by the West as “a legitimate representative of all Syrians” – is merely a “liberal front for the Muslim Brotherhood,” according to Kamal Labwani, who resigned from his SNC post earlier this year. Labwani slammed the Council’s drift away from “democracy and modernity...towards a renewed form of [religious] despotism,” a complaint corroborated by activists on the ground, including the Council’s own Local Coordination Committees. “One day we will wake up to find an armed militia... controlling the country through their weapons,” warned Labwani.

Another SNC member, Randa Kassis, warned of “insurmountable differences” between “Islamist fighters and the majority of the population.” The Islamist groups, he said, “which are superbly financed and equipped by the Gulf states, are ruthlessly seizing decision-making power for themselves.” He warns of the danger that the Islamists will “replace the corrupt terrorism of the Assad regime with a religious tyranny.” Although the puritanism of the Islamists “makes a rapid end to the war unlikely,” unfortunately “the Americans have put their money on the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The continued militarization of the conflict only exacerbates internal friction, with opposition groups fundamentally disagreeing on foreign intervention, dialogue with Assad, and relations with the FSA. Andrew Spath of the Foreign Policy Research Institute warns that “A turn to violent opposition of any kind plays directly into the hands of government as it attempts to divide, and thereby weaken, the opposition.”

Many in the opposition know this. Representatives of a dozen Syrian opposition groups, for instance, convened in Rome earlier this month calling for a ceasefire and an internationally mediated national dialogue to craft a viable political solution, firmly rejecting violence. One delegate, Abdul Aziz Alkhayer of the National Coordination Body – who had been imprisoned by Assad for 14 years – said, “weapons just kill people, destroy things. They cannot build anything.” But continued disagreement has weakened the wider opposition movement dramatically.

How liberal democracy will emerge from this process is difficult to imagine. The Syrian people – the driving force of the peaceful protests against Assad’s regime – are faced with a “choice” between Assad’s brutal dictatorship and U.S.-sponsored Islamist rebels allied with an exiled Muslim Brotherhood-dominated opposition. They have become unwitting pawns on a geopolitical chessboard in which the principal players are fighting a proxy war for strategic influence.

While the West steps up its covert support for the rebels, a fleet of Russian warships is now on the Syrian coast, amassing a contingent of marines in the event that Western or Israeli forces launch a direct assault on Assad’s regime. One of Russia’s growing concerns is Assad’s potential deployment of his chemical and biological weapons arsenal. Israel, Turkey, and Jordan would be first on his hit list, which could precipitate a regional war.

For the United States and United Kingdom, the three main goals are complementary and interlocking: first, to shore up the autocratic regional petroleum order in the Gulf against expanding Iranian power, and to defuse the impact of popular uprisings in the wider region; second, to counter the growing reach of traditional rivals Russia and China into the Middle East and Mediterranean; and third, to protect Israel against Iranian influence in the Levant through Syria.

But just as the West’s Islamist gambit during the Cold War (and after) paved the way for the global acceleration of al-Qaeda’s operations, the implications of this ill-conceived strategy could well be even more devastating. 

Equally, it is clear that Assad – like his contemporaries Mubarak and Gaddafi – is utterly bankrupt, his regime devoid of legitimacy. Unfortunately, foreign powers across the world are exploiting the crisis for their own short-term geopolitical gains. While publicly touting Kofi Annan’s peace plan, they have quietly undermined it by sponsoring violence. In the meantime, the specter of further militarization promises to escalate the bloodshed, empower the most criminal elements of both sides, and alienate the opposition movement’s support base.

The West should also be deeply wary of escalating military support for the rebels, since such intervention will provoke escalating military support to Assad’s regime from Russia, China, and Iran. This “arms race” dynamic suggests that there can be no military solution to the crisis. The Security Council powers should therefore consider coordinating maximum pressure on both sides to cease the use of force and come to the negotiating table through cessation of military and financial assistance, including sanctions on Assad’s regime. But sanctions will lack teeth if they do not also have buy-in from the other members of the Security Council. This is only conceivable if the great powers pull back and recognize that further militarization will thwart their respective geostrategic ambitions by intensifying sectarian conflict, accelerating anti-Western terrorist operations, and potentially destabilizing the whole Levant in a way that could trigger a regional war.

Via: "Foreign Policy In Focus" 

Pentagon Establishes New Espionage Unit: "Defense Clandestine Service"

By Greg Miller,
Published: April 23, 2012
Courtesy Of "The Washington Post"

The Pentagon is planning to ramp up its spying operations against high-priority targets such as Iran under an intelligence reorganization aimed at expanding on the military’s espionage efforts beyond war zones, a senior defense official said Monday.

The newly created Defense Clandestine Service would work closely with the CIA — pairing two organizations that have often seen each other as rivals — in an effort to bolster espionage operations overseas at a time when the missions of the agency and the military increasingly converge.

he plan, the official said, was developed in response to a classified study completed last year by the director of national intelligence that concluded that the military’s espionage efforts needed to be more focused on major targets beyond the tactical considerations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The new service will seek to “make sure officers are in the right locations to pursue those requirements,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the “realignment” of the military’s classified human espionage efforts.

The official declined to provide details on where such shifts might occur, but the nation’s most pressing intelligence priorities in recent years have included counter­terrorism, nonproliferation and ascendant powers such as China.

Creation of the new service also coincides with the appointment of a number of senior officials at the Pentagon who have extensive backgrounds in intelligence and firm opinions on where the military’s spying programs — often seen as lackluster by CIA insiders — have gone wrong.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who signed off on the newly created service last week, served as CIA director at a time when the agency relied extensively on military hardware, including armed drones, in its fight against al-Qaeda.

Michael Vickers, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the main force behind the changes, is best known as one of the architects of the CIA’s program to arm Islamist militants to oust the Soviets fromAfghanistan in the 1980s. He is also a former member of U.S. Special Operations forces.

The realignment is expected to affect several hundred military operatives who already work in spying assignments abroad, mostly as case officers for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which serves as the Pentagon’s main source of human intelligence and analysis.

The official said the new service is expected to grow “from several hundred to several more hundred” operatives in the coming years. Despite the potentially provocative name for the new service, the official played down concerns that the Pentagon was seeking to usurp the role of the CIA or its National Clandestine Service.

This “does not involve new manpower . . . does not involve new authorities,” the official said. Instead, the official said, the DIA is shifting its emphasis “as we look to come out of war zones and anticipate the requirements over the next several years.”

Congressional officials said they were seeking more details about the plan.

“My question is, why? What’s missing and what’s going on?” said a senior Senate aide who had been given a preliminary briefing on the new service.

In some respects, the broad outlines of the plan are reminiscent of Pentagon efforts under Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to move the military into areas of intelligence that had long been the domain of the CIA.

But a second congressional official, who also was not authorized to discuss the program publicly, said the coordination behind the new plan, in which the DIA’s program will be more closely modeled on its CIA counterpart, has eased some of those long-standing concerns.

“If this were an attempt of the type we saw during the Rumsfeld years to consolidate human intelligence to have a better bulwark against what the CIA is doing, that would be a concern,” the second congressional official said. “But I don’t think that’s what's going on.”

The plan was unveiled about a week after a senior U.S. Army officer with extensive experience in Special Operations and counter­insurgency fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan was nominated to serve as the next chief of the DIA.

While serving in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn published a harsh critique of intelligence operations in that country,criticizing collectors as being too focused on tactical threats and failing to understand the broader demographic and political context of the battlefield.

About 15 percent of the DIA’s case officers will be part of the Defense Clandestine Service, the defense official said. New, more clearly delineated career paths will give DIA case officers better opportunities to continue their espionage assignments abroad, he said.

The new service fits into a broader convergence trend. U.S. Special Operations forces are increasingly engaged in intelligence collection overseas and have collaborated with the CIA on missions including the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and ongoing drone strikes in Yemen.

The blurring is also evident in the organizations’ upper ranks. Panetta previously served as CIA director, and that post is currently held by retired four-star Army Gen. David H. Petraeus.

CIA Faulted In Downing Missionary Plane

CIA Faulted In Shooting Down Of Missionary Plane

By Ross Colvin
Source: Reuters North American NewsService
Nov 20, 2008 18:14 EST
Courtesy Of Wire Dispatch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA obstructed inquiries into its role in the shooting down of an aircraft carrying a family of U.S. missionaries in Peru in 2001, the agency's inspector general has concluded.

The inspector-general's report said a CIA-backed program in Peru targeting drug runners was so poorly run that many suspect aircraft were shot down by Peruvian air force jets without proper checks being made first.

Unclassified portions of the report were made public for the first time Thursday by U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, who criticized the CIA for the "needless" deaths.

Central Intelligence Agency spokesman Paul Gimigliano said the agency's director, Michael Hayden, had received the full classified report in August and passed it on to the Justice Department, which declined in 2005 to bring any prosecutions.

A small plane carrying Veronica Bowers, her husband Jim, their son Cory and infant daughter Charity was shot down by a Peruvian jet on April 20, 2001, after it was tracked by a CIA surveillance plane that suspected it was carrying drugs.

Veronica and Charity Bowers were killed, while their pilot, Kevin Donaldson, who crash-landed the bullet-riddled plane into the Amazon River, was badly injured.

Videotape later released showed confusion on the CIA surveillance plane over whether or not the missionary aircraft was running drugs. The American pilot urged a Peruvian officer on board to force it to land to make sure.

The CIA plane was taking part in a program, since ended, to prevent planes smuggling cocaine in Peru and Colombia.

PROCEDURES IGNORED

The inspector-general's report said that in the aftermath of the 2001 incident the CIA sought to characterize it as a one-time mistake in an otherwise well-run program.

"In fact this was not the case. The routine disregard of the required intercept procedures ... led to the rapid shooting down of target aircraft without adequate safeguards to protect against the loss of innocent life," the report said.

Peruvians and Americans involved in the program told investigators that following the proper identification procedures could have given suspect aircraft time to escape. It was also sometimes simply easier to shoot down the aircraft than to force it down, they said.

"The result was that in many cases, suspect aircraft were shot down within two to three minutes of being sighted by the Peruvian fighter -- without being properly identified, without being given the required warnings to land," the report said.

The New York Times reported in 2001 that Peru had shot down or strafed more than 30 planes since 1995.

The inspector general said the CIA found "sustained and significant" violations of procedure in its own internal investigation but had denied Congress, the National Security Council and the Justice Department access to its findings.

"Between 1995 and 2001, the agency incorrectly reported that the program complied with the laws and policies governing it," the report said.

The CIA's general counsel advised agency managers not to write anything down in an effort to avoid criminal charges being brought against CIA officers. The agency also ignored questions from Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, on the conduct of the program.

"This issue goes to the heart of the American people's ability to trust the CIA," Hoekstra said. "Americans deserve to know that agencies given the power to operate on their behalf aren't abusing that power or their trust."

CIA spokesman Gimigliano said director Hayden had not yet made any decisions based on the inspector-general's recommendations but the "CIA takes very seriously questions of responsibility and accountability." (Additional reporting by Randall Mikkelsen, editing by Anthony Boadle)

Churchill's Secret Army Lived On

By Sanchia Berg
Today Programme
Page last updated at 06:01 GMT, Saturday, 13 December 2008
Courtesy Of The BBC

Files released this autumn at the National Archives in Kew include one dossier showing how the Special Operations Executive - Churchill's "secret army" - was not disbanded at the end of the Second World War, as is commonly thought.

Instead, nearly 300 agents were brought into the Secret Intelligence Service - later MI6.

Officially SOE, the organisation set up to run resistance in occupied countries, was "liquidated" in January 1946.

SOE operatives were trained in all aspects of clandestine operations. They organised sabotage, guerrilla actions, black propaganda operations and financial warfare. They were active in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

SOE researchers had perfected secret communications and even developed weapons such as exploding rats.

Training schools, like the one at Beaulieu in Hampshire, taught agents all manner of spy techniques, including how to kill an opponent with their bare hands.

When peace came, some in Churchill's government argued that SOE could have a valuable role. Lord Selborne, the minister responsible, suggested it could be used to run clandestine operations in communist Europe and elsewhere. But the incoming Labour Government was less enthusiastic. It was Clement Attlee who oversaw its demise.

Secret Operations

The recently released file reveals the liquidation was a front. One briefing paper for the Chiefs of Defence Staff from January 1946 shows that while the "liquidation party" at SOE's headquarters was closing down the office, 280 of its personnel were becoming "Special Operations Branch".

The plan was for them to be headed by "C" - the head of SIS - but to work independently.

SOE agents were trained in secret locations around Britain

However, in just a matter of weeks "C" - Sir Stewart Menzies - had decided that the idea of a separate branch was "unsound". He told the Chiefs of Defence Staff that he believed it would be better simply to merge them.

Though in wartime SIS and SOE had sometimes worked well together, they were in many ways quite different.

SIS had been founded in 1909, to secretly acquire intelligence. SOE - founded in 1940 - was far brasher, by the end of the war far bigger, and operated in a way that was closer to the James Bond idea of the secret agent.

So did merging the two mean the transformation of the secret service?

Dr Philip Davies, author of "MI6 and the Machinery of Spying", knew about the merger - though he had not seen the detailed manpower figures - and considers it more of a takeover.

He says that it was the acquisition of the training and research staff which was probably most significant, as SIS had few facilities in this area.

When it came to operations, Sir Stewart Menzies made sure that any decisions were left to SIS staff, and the Foreign Office had to approve foreign actions, so the intake of SOE staff didn't mean that James Bond came to SIS.

Nonetheless, some of the SOE staff brought in did run clandestine operations within the expanded service.

SOE and SIS

David Smiley, one of the SOE officers who operated behind enemy lines

I met probably the only surviving senior officer who did so - Colonel David Smiley, now 92.

The first time he went into Albania was with SOE in 1943. His task was to organise partisans to fight the Nazis. It was a difficult assignment. The conditions were harsh - and the Albanians reluctant to fight.

In Albania he had poor experience of the "other" service. An SIS agent had "hijacked" one of his supply drops.

"There was no love lost between SOE and SIS" he told me.

At the end of the war, David Smiley was invited to join SIS. As far as he knew, he was one of only three ex-SOE agents to do so.

In the late 1940s he was given another Albanian assignment - his first for SIS.

This time, David Smiley was to train pro-British Albanians and then infiltrate them into the newly Communist state from a base in Malta.

The operation ran from 1949 -1950. His task ended once the Albanians had gone in.

David Smiley was very concerned to discover later that his agents had been quickly captured.

He told me that for years he wondered how it had come about: had one of "his" Albanians been taken and "spilled the beans"?

He later learned that the operation had been betrayed by Kim Philby.

According to Dr Philip Davies, SIS ran similar operations in Ukraine, and the Baltic States.

Pro-British Albanians were trained by the SIS after WWII

The aim was to send in "stay behinds" - nationals of the country, working for the West, who would only become active in case of war. But here too, the networks were betrayed and the agents captured by the communists.

Other files uncovered at the National Archives show that it was the Russian nuclear bomb which put a stop to these adventures.

Once the Russians had tested their device, and there was evidence that they could deploy nuclear weapons, a secret Cabinet committee decided it was too risky to continue with such clandestine operations. Any escalation would be far too dangerous.

This part of history seems to be emerging in fragments - a veteran's recollections here, the odd file coming out at the National Archives.

MI5 - the domestic security service - is making its archive public. So far, the files run to the early 1950s.

By contrast, SIS, or MI6, has no plans to release any part of its own archive. The documents I found were in a folder from the Air Ministry.

Life with the partisans behind the lines in WWII In pictures

More CIA Killings, Lies, and Cover-Ups

By Jacob G. Hornberger
Hornberger’s Blog Index
Friday, November 21, 2008
Courtesy Of The Future Of Freedom Foubdation

In June 2001 I wrote an article entitled “Drug-War Killings in Peru,” which condemned the CIA’s participation in the drug-war killings of a 35-year-old missionary named Veronica Bowers and her 7-month-old baby Charity. They had been flying in a small private plane in Peru when CIA officials advised the Peruvian military that the plane might be smuggling drugs. A Peruvian military plane proceeded to shoot down the plane, only to find that it was all a mistake. More fortunate was Bowers’ husband, who survived the attack.

In 2005, the Justice Department shut down its investigation into the matter without prosecuting anyway based partly on representations by the CIA that it had followed standard drug-war procedures prior to the shoot-down.

According to a 2008 report by the CIA’s inspector general, it turns out that CIA officials knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately lied to investigators and covered up CIA wrongdoing in the killings. According to the New York Times :

“According to Mr. Helgerson’s report, C.I.A. officials ‘within hours’ of the downing explained the accident as a one-time mistake in an otherwise sound counternarcotics program. ‘In fact, this was not the case,’ the report said. It said that the C.I.A. repeatedly misled the White House and Congress between 1995 and 2001 about the Peru operation. The inspector general’s report said that after the downing of the missionaries’ plane, the C.I.A. had conducted internal reviews ‘that documented sustained and significant violations of required intercept procedures.’ But it said that the agency had denied Congress, the Department of Justice and the National Security Council access to these findings. Mr. Hoekstra said Thursday that the inspector general’s investigation specifically named C.I.A. officials responsible for the alleged cover-up, but he declined to name those officers.”

Republican Congressman Peter J. Hoekstra, who released unclassified portions of the report, observed, “This is about as ugly as it gets.”

Will the Justice Department pursue criminal prosecutions against the CIA officials involved in the lying and cover-up, as it did against Martha Stewart?

Will U.S. officials ask Peru to indict the CIA agents involved in the killings for murder, manslaughter, or negligent homicide?

Don’t hold your breath.

As most everyone knows, the CIA is not just above the law, it is the law. And the CIA knows what everyone else knows — that few members of Congress and the executive branch will dare to touch an agency whose power is omnipotent and whose mission includes murder, assassination, torture, spying, and destruction.

After all, has any CIA official been indicted for the murder or torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib? Of course not. How many members of Congress have criticized that?

Has any CIA official been extradited to Italy to stand trial for kidnapping? Of course not. How many members of Congress have criticized that?

Has any CIA official been indicted for kidnapping and renditioning Maher Arar to Syria, whose government President Bush (falsely) claims U.S. officials don’t talk to, for the purpose of torture? Of course not. How many members of Congress have criticized that?

While we’re on the subject of the CIA, given that tomorrow is the 45th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, wouldn’t that be a good day for the CIA to finally release all its files on the JFK assassination — well, at least the ones the CIA hasn’t destroyed? Isn’t 45 years of resistance to releasing such files long enough? A good place to start would be those files relating to CIA agent George Joannides, who knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately obstructed justice in the JFK investigation.

Don’t hold your breath.

Hornberger’s Blog Archives

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.