Senior Officer: Fort Hood mystery suspect whisked away by “men in suits”

Surviving Fort Hood shooting suspect arrested at golf course, officer says

CNN | Nov 5, 2009

(CNN) — A senior officer who was playing golf  Thursday near Fort Hood, Texas, told CNN he witnessed the arrest of one of the two surviving suspects of the shooting at the Army installation.

Shortly after the shooting, the officer said, military police told him to clear the course and he saw other MPs surround the building that held the golf carts, he said.

The senior officer said he ducked into a nearby house for cover as 30 to 40 cars carrying MPs approached.

He said he saw a soldier in battle-dress uniform, his hands in the air. The MPs ordered him to lie on the ground and open his uniform, presumably to ensure he was not carrying explosives, the senior officer said.

He said an MP told him that authorities considered the man to be a suspect in the shootings after having overheard the man say he was with the shooter.

The man was surrounded for 25 to 30 minutes, until a convoy of vehicles arrived, led by a Ford Crown Victoria and carrying men in suits, and he was taken away, the senior officer said.

The golf course is about 2.5 miles from Fort Hood, the officer told CNN.

________

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Second Gunman In Custody At Army’s Fort Hood -Report

DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

A second gunman is in custody after a shooting at the Army’s Fort Hood in Texas in which at least seven people were killed and 12 wounded, reports KCEN-TV of Waco. The report comes about two hours after a first suspect was captured, shortly after gunfire broke out.

Authorities say the gunmen were dressed in fatigues, though it’s not confirmed whether they are militarypersonnel. It’s also not known if the victims were military personnel or civilians.

The incident reportedly began at Fort Hood’s theater and then moved to the Soldier Readiness Processing Center, Killeen City Public Information Officer Hillary Shine told Fox News. A graduation ceremony was scheduled to take place Thursday.

Three gunmen kill 12 at Fort Hood

NBC News

The U. S. Army now confirms at least 12 people are dead, another 31 wounded in a mass shooting at the massive fort hood army base near Waco, Texas.

General Bob Cone confirms one gunman is dead and was himself, in the army, as are two other suspects in custody.

“Shooter was killed…. two additional soldiers apprehended,”  he said.

An army spokesman at the pentagon says the shootings began at a personnel and medical processing center at Fort Hood.

“It’s a terrible tragedy, it’s stunning,”  said Cone.

Neither the identities of the two soldiers in custody nor those of the victims have been released yet.

Major Nadal Malik Hasan is the Main Suspect in Fort Hood Shootings

Associated Content

Interestingly, the major graduated from Virginia Tech, the site of another heinous slaughtering a few years ago. He majored and earned his degree in biochemistry, but became a psychiatric mental “specialist.”

Army: Fort Hood shooting rampage suspect is alive

AP

Authorities said immediately after the shootings that they had killed the suspected shooter, but later in the evening they recanted and said that he was alive and in stable condition at a hospital, watched by a guard. His death is not imminent,” said Lt. Gen. Bob Cone at Fort Hood. He offered little explanation for the mistake, other than to say there was confusion at the hospital.

Former UK ambassador: CIA sent people to be ‘raped with broken bottles’

Raw Story | Nov 4, 2009

By Daniel Tencer

The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”

Human rights groups have long been raising the alarm about the legal system in Uzbekistan. In 2007, Human Rights Watch declared that torture is “endemic” to the country’s justice system.

Murray said he only realized after his stint as ambassador that the CIA was sending people to be tortured in Uzbekistan, country he describes as a “totalitarian” state that has never moved on from its communist era, when it was a part of the Soviet Union.

Suspects in Uzbekistan’s gulags “were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they’d been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes.”

“I was absolutely stunned — it changed my whole world view in an instant — to be told that London knew [the intelligence] coming from torture, that it was not illegal because our legal advisers had decided that under the United Nations convention against torture, it is not illegal to obtain or use intelligence gained from torture as long as we didn’t do the torture ourselves,” Murray said.

UK/USA made use of Uzbek torture

Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region.

Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan’s natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.

“The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,” Murray noted.

Murray said part of the motive in hyping up the threat of Islamic terrorism in Uzbekistan through forced confessions was to ensure the country remained on-side in the war on terror, so that the pipeline could be built.

“There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, it’s about oil, it’s not about democracy.”

The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is slated to be completed in 2014, with $7.6 billion in funding from the Asian Development Bank.

Murray was dismissed from his position as ambassador in 2004, following his first public allegations that the British government relied on torture in Uzbekistan for intelligence.

The following videos were posted to YouTube by the Real News Network on Oct. 26 and Nov. 4, 2009.

Former Scientology members pursued, detained, interrogated and enslaved by Church intelligence officers

David Miscavige, leader of the Church of Scientology. Photograph: Luke MacGregor/Reuters

Florida newspaper exposé reveals allegations of campaign to gather information on high-level defectors

Former Scientology members tell of group’s efforts to track them down

Guardian | Nov 3, 2009

In the latest chapter of an extraordinary exposé of the Church of Scientology, the St Petersburg Times has described the group’s strenuous efforts to track down and bring back members who try to leave.

Former Scientology members have told the Florida newspaper of being pursued and detained, cut off from family and friends and subjected to months of interrogation, humiliation and manual labour. What is particularly damaging is that these allegations come from former high-ranking Scientology officials who allegedly coordinated the intelligence gathering and supervised the retrieval of staff at the behest of the church’s leader.

The latest instalment of the series – What Happened in Vegas – includes detailed allegations of a campaign to gather information on a group of high-level defectors.

According to the paper, two couples and a man who left in 1990 to set up a mortgage business in Las Vegas were infiltrated by a mole who would send reports on the group to the church’s office of special affairs’ (OSA) intelligence unit back in Hollywood.

The church’s alleged interest in the group’s activities had to do with the two women, who were sisters. Terri and Janis Gillham were two of the original four “messengers” for L Ron Hubbard, the pulp novelist who founded Scientology. As his messengers they fetched people for private audiences and carried his handwritten notes – bulletins in red ink and policy orders in green.

For the story, the St Peterburg Times interviewed high-ranking defectors, including Mike Rinder, the former director of OSA, and Marty Rathbun, the former inspector general of the Religious Technology Centre, the church’s top ecclesiastical authority. A Scientology spokesman “categorically denied” that Miscavige knew about or was involved in the pursuit of runaways or spying on former members.

The Church of Scientology has been battered by negative publicity in the last few days. Last week one of the most high-profile members, Hollywood film-maker Paul Haggis, quit the organisation in protest at its stance on same-sex marriages. In an explosive letter of resignation, Haggis claimed he could no longer “be a member of an organisation where gay-bashing is tolerated”.

On this side of the Atlantic two flagship branches of the church in France were ordered to pay fines of over €600,000 (£550,000) after being convicted of “fraud in an organised gang” by a court in Paris. The latest piece from the St Petersburg Times just piles on the bad publicity for the church founded by Hubbard in 1952.

CIA Invests In Social Media Monitoring Technology

Investment arm In-Q-Tel is funding Visible Technologies, making its online brand analysis capabilities available to U.S. intelligence agencies.

InformationWeek | Oct 22, 2009

By J. Nicholas Hoover

Businesses are increasingly looking to social media to monitor and manage their brands online. U.S. intelligence agencies now have similar capabilities as part of their technology portfolios.

In-Q-Tel, the investment firm established by the CIA to support U.S. intelligence agencies, has invested in Visible Technologies, a start-up that monitors social media content on the Web.

Visible Technologies’ software-as-a-service apps are used by companies to monitor and manage their brands by observing and analyzing public opinion on the Web in real-time.Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Hormel Foods, Xerox (NYSE: XRX), Panasonic, and marketing and public relations firms are among its customers.

U.S. intelligence organizations could use Visible Technologies’ service to monitor and analyze public opinion on the Web, much as private sector companies do.

Related

The Death of Privacy: Technology and the Challenge for Social Activists

Visible Technologies’ TruCAST engine “casts a net on whatever the client wants to know more about,” said senior VP Blake Cahill. TruCAST pulls information from blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, news sites, and Web forums, though it can’t reach into places like Facebook and MySpace where users have set privacy controls. Using that information, companies can run sentiment and relevancy analysis, look at a commenter or blogger’s level of influence, and search for posts based on defined criteria.

CIA invests in firm that monitors Internet

Visible Technologies has been focusing increasingly on the government sector, and it has done some work through the General Services Administration, according to Cahill. Concepts & Strategies, a consultancy that advises the Department of Defense, is one of its partners.

In-Q-Tel has invested in more than 175 companies, including ArcSight (security information management), Lucid Imagination (open source search), Endeca (search), Adapx (smart pens) and Keyhole, the developer of foundational technology used in Google Maps.

Visible Technologies has raised $23.5 million in funding since its inception in 2005, including $8 million since December. Terms of In-Q-Tel’s investment weren’t disclosed.

Rock rages against the torture machine

The list of music used included death metal band Deicide’s F..k Your God

Air Force lieutenant colonel Dan Kuehl, who teaches psychological operations to the US military, invoked the Old Testament use of loud music. “Joshua’s army used horns to strike fear into the hearts of the people of Jericho.”

The Australian | Oct 24, 2009

by Tim Reid

A COALITION of musicians including Pearl Jam and REM. has backed a formal demand to be told if their songs have been used to torture detainees in Guantanamo Bay and Iraq.

Many former prisoners have claimed they were blasted with excruciatingly loud music for months on end – a tactic banned under the UN Convention Against Torture but not yet from the US Army Field Manual.

The musicians spoke out yesterday as a Freedom of Information request was lodged by the US campaign group No More Guantanamos, a legal move backed by the British human rights group Reprieve, which has been campaigning against “music torture” for more than a year.

According to evidence gained by human rights organisations, the list of music used included songs ranging from death metal band Deicide’s F..k Your God, Sesame Street tunes, and the song most frequently blasted at inmates, I Love You by the children’s TV character Barney the Purple Dinosaur.

Former detainees have said the tactic was one of the worst and most painful used against them. The National Security Archive, a freedom of information organisation helping the musicians, said the playlist also featured cuts from AC/DC, Britney Spears, the Bee Gees, and Marilyn Manson.

Archive executive director Thomas Blanton said: “At Guantanamo the US government turned a jukebox into an instrument of torture. The musicians and the public have the right to know how an expression of popular culture was transformed into an interrogation technique.”

Tom Morello, guitarist with the band Rage Against the Machine – whose song Killing in the Name of was also used – said: “The fact that music I helped create was used as a tactic against humanity sickens me.”

The musicians’ campaign comes as the Obama administration has been forced to concede that the President’s pledge to shut Guantanamo by January will fail. His bold promise to close the prison within a year of coming to office has run into myriad political and logistical problems, including fierce opposition at home to the transportation of detainees to US prisons and a reluctance by Western allies to receive many of the remaining inmates. Congress is refusing to fund the closure of the facility, which still holds about 220 prisoners.

After the September 11 attacks and the war on terror it appears the use of loud music first became common inside Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, scene of the infamous inmate abuse photographs.

Haj Ali, the hooded man in one of the most notorious pictures, told of being stripped and forced to listen to a looped version of David Gray’s Babylon at a volume so loud that he said he thought his head “would explode”. Metallica’s Enter Sandman was often used in Guantanamo Bay, while Queen’s We Are the Champions was a favourite among US guards at Camp Cropper in Iraq. One Iraqi talked of being taken to an unidentified location and blasted with music in a building referred to as “the disco”.

In one case interrogators allegedly played music to “stress” Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a citizen of Mauritania, who has been at Guantanamo for more than seven years, because he believed music was forbidden.

Slahi said he was questioned over a 10-day period in July 2003 by an interrogator called “Mr X” while being “exposed to variable lighting patterns” and repeated playing of a song called Let the Bodies Hit the Floor by the band Drowning Pool.

Last year, retired US air force lieutenant colonel Dan Kuehl, who teaches psychological operations to the US military, invoked the Old Testament use of loud music. “Joshua’s army used horns to strike fear into the hearts of the people of Jericho,” he told the St Petersburg Times in Florida. “His men might not have been able to break down literal walls with their trumpets but the noise eroded the enemy’s courage.”

Afghan President Karzai’s drug gangster brother on CIA payroll

Ahmed Wali Karzai, right, the brother of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, at a campaign event in Kandahar in August. Banaras Khan/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images

Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A. Payroll

NY Times | Oct 28, 2009

by Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.

The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America’s increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.

More broadly, some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful figure in a large area of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, undermines the American push to develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw.

“If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves,” said Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan.

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Karzai’s brother on CIA payroll

Ahmed Wali Karzai: Afghani Gangster

Reports Link Karzai’s Brother to Afghanistan Heroin Trade

Karzai’s Brother Is a CIA Asset

At this point, everything about the U.S. policy toward the Afghan drug trade — from tolerance to eradication during the Bush administration to an evolving approach to cultivating alternatives — now ought to be questioned.

Ahmed Wali Karzai said in an interview that he cooperated with American civilian and military officials, but did not engage in the drug trade and did not receive payments from the C.I.A.

The relationship between Mr. Karzai and the C.I.A. is wide ranging, several American officials said. He helps the C.I.A. operate a paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, that is used for raids against suspected insurgents and terrorists. On at least one occasion, the strike force has been accused of mounting an unauthorized operation against an official of the Afghan government, the officials said.

Mr. Karzai is also paid for allowing the C.I.A. and American Special Operations troops to rent a large compound outside the city — the former home of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s founder. The same compound is also the base of the Kandahar Strike Force. “He’s our landlord,” a senior American official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Karzai also helps the C.I.A. communicate with and sometimes meet with Afghans loyal to the Taliban. Mr. Karzai’s role as a go-between between the Americans and the Taliban is now regarded as valuable by those who support working with Mr. Karzai, as the Obama administration is placing a greater focus on encouraging Taliban leaders to change sides.

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article.

“No intelligence organization worth the name would ever entertain these kind of allegations,” said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman.

Some American officials said that the allegations of Mr. Karzai’s role in the drug trade were not conclusive.

“There’s no proof of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s involvement in drug trafficking, certainly nothing that would stand up in court,” said one American official familiar with the intelligence. “And you can’t ignore what the Afghan government has done for American counterterrorism efforts.”

At the start of the Afghan war, just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, American officials paid warlords with questionable backgrounds to help topple the Taliban and maintain order with relatively few American troops committed to fight in the country. But as the Taliban has become resurgent and the war has intensified, Americans have increasingly viewed a strong and credible central government as crucial to turning back the Taliban’s advances.

Now, with more American lives on the line, the relationship with Mr. Karzai is setting off anger and frustration among American military officers and other officials in the Obama administration. They say that Mr. Karzai’s suspected role in the drug trade, as well as what they describe as the mafialike way that he lords over southern Afghanistan, makes him a malevolent force.

These military and political officials say the evidence, though largely circumstantial, suggests strongly that Mr. Karzai has enriched himself by helping the illegal trade in poppy and opium to flourish. The assessment of these military and senior officials in the Obama administration dovetails with that of senior officials in the Bush administration.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money are flowing through the southern region, and nothing happens in southern Afghanistan without the regional leadership knowing about it,” a senior American military officer in Kabul said. Like most of the officials in this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the information.

“If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck,” the American officer said of Mr. Karzai. “Our assumption is that he’s benefiting from the drug trade.”

American officials say that Afghanistan’s opium trade, the largest in the world, directly threatens the stability of the Afghan state, by providing a large percentage of the money the Taliban needs for its operations, and also by corrupting Afghan public officials to help the trade flourish.

The Obama administration has repeatedly vowed to crack down on the drug lords who are believed to permeate the highest levels of President Karzai’s administration. They have pressed him to move his brother out of southern Afghanistan, but he has so far refused to do so.

Other Western officials pointed to evidence that Ahmed Wali Karzai orchestrated the manufacture of hundreds of thousands of phony ballots for his brother’s re-election effort in August. He is also believed to have been responsible for setting up dozens of so-called ghost polling stations — existing only on paper — that were used to manufacture tens of thousands of phony ballots.

“The only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone,” General Flynn said.

In the interview in which he denied a role in the drug trade or taking money from the C.I.A., Ahmed Wali Karzai said he received regular payments from his brother, the president, for “expenses,” but said he did not know where the money came from. He has, among other things, introduced Americans to insurgents considering changing sides. And he has given the Americans intelligence, he said. But he said he was not compensated for that assistance.

“I don’t know anyone under the name of the C.I.A.,” Mr. Karzai said. “I have never received any money from any organization. I help, definitely. I help other Americans wherever I can. This is my duty as an Afghan.”

Mr. Karzai acknowledged that the C.I.A. and Special Operations troops stayed at Mullah Omar’s old compound. And he acknowledged that the Kandahar Strike Force was based there. But he said he had no involvement with them.

A former C.I.A. officer with experience in Afghanistan said the agency relied heavily on Ahmed Wali Karzai, and often based covert operatives at compounds he owned. Any connections Mr. Karzai might have had to the drug trade mattered little to C.I.A. officers focused on counterterrorism missions, the officer said.

“Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade,” he said. “If you are looking for Mother Teresa, she doesn’t live in Afghanistan.”

The debate over Ahmed Wali Karzai, which began when President Obama took office in January, intensified in June, when the C.I.A.’s local paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, shot and killed Kandahar’s provincial police chief, Matiullah Qati, in a still-unexplained shootout at the office of a local prosecutor.

The circumstances surrounding Mr. Qati’s death remain shrouded in mystery. It is unclear, for instance, if any agency operatives were present — but officials say the firefight broke out when Mr. Qati tried to block the strike force from freeing the brother of a task force member who was being held in custody.

“Matiullah was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Mr. Karzai said in the interview.

Counternarcotics officials have repeatedly expressed frustration over the unwillingness of senior policy makers in Washington to take action against Mr. Karzai — or even begin a serious investigation of the allegations against him. In fact, they say that while other Afghans accused of drug involvement are investigated and singled out for raids or even rendition to the United States, Mr. Karzai has seemed immune from similar scrutiny.

For years, first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration have said that the Taliban benefits from the drug trade, and the United States military has recently expanded its target list to include drug traffickers with ties to the insurgency. The military has generated a list of 50 top drug traffickers tied to the Taliban who can now be killed or captured.

Senior Afghan investigators say they know plenty about Mr. Karzai’s involvement in the drug business. In an interview in Kabul this year, a top former Afghan Interior Ministry official familiar with Afghan counternarcotics operations said that a major source of Mr. Karzai’s influence over the drug trade was his control over key bridges crossing the Helmand River on the route between the opium growing regions of Helmand Province and Kandahar.

The former Interior Ministry official said that Mr. Karzai was able to charge huge fees to drug traffickers to allow their drug-laden trucks to cross the bridges.

But the former officials said it was impossible for Afghan counternarcotics officials to investigate Mr. Karzai. “This government has become a factory for the production of Talibs because of corruption and injustice,” the former official said.

Some American counternarcotics officials have said they believe that Mr. Karzai has expanded his influence over the drug trade, thanks in part to American efforts to single out other drug lords.

In debriefing notes from Drug Enforcement Administration interviews in 2006 of Afghan informants obtained by The New York Times, one key informant said that Ahmed Wali Karzai had benefited from the American operation that lured Hajji Bashir Noorzai, a major Afghan drug lord during the time that the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, to New York in 2005. Mr. Noorzai was convicted on drug and conspiracy charges in New York in 2008, and was sentenced to life in prison this year.

Habibullah Jan, a local military commander and later a member of Parliament from Kandahar, told the D.E.A. in 2006 that Mr. Karzai had teamed with Haji Juma Khan to take over a portion of the Noorzai drug business after Mr. Noorzai’s arrest.

Dexter Filkins reported from Kabul, and Mark Mazzetti and James Risen from Washington. Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington.

Fidel Castro’s sister was a CIA agent

Fidel Castro’s sister Juanita Castro. Photograph: AP

Memoir reveals details of secret messages and codes

guardian.co.uk | Oct 26, 2009

by Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent and Giles Tremlett in Madrid

To the CIA she was Donna: a Cuban spy who hid documents inside cans of food and sent secret messages via a clandestine radio and two tunes – a waltz and a song from the opera Madame Butterfly.

Today, Donna was revealed to the rest of the world as Juanita Castro – the sister of Fidel and Raúl, rulers of Cuba and legendary conquerors of US espionage efforts – when she blew the whistle on her career as a CIA agent.

The rogue sibling revealed extraordinary details of her hidden identity in a memoir, Fidel and Raúl, My Brothers: The Secret History, which could force a partial revision of the CIA’s role in Cuba. For half a century its efforts against Fidel were considered fiascos, prompting recrimination and ridicule. It tried and failed to kill him, tried and failed to invade Cuba, and tried and failed to foment revolt.

Cuba was just 90 miles off Florida, but its ruler was thought too wily and his regime too hermetic for the hapless American spies. Now, in what she describes as the family’s best-kept secret, Juanita has revealed that the CIA infiltrated the world’s most famous communist clan.

The 76-year-old Miami exile recounts how she sheltered government opponents in her Havana home, among other subversive acts, before leaving Cuba in 1964 and publicly denouncing Fidel and Raul as despots, a bombshell which damaged the revolution’s image in Latin America.

There had been widespread speculation for many years about Juanita’s recruitment, said Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst who is now a senior researcher in Cuba studies at the University of Miami, and author of the book After Fidel. “She was considered a success by the CIA. It was very pleased with her, especially after she left Cuba. She was very outspoken and played a critical propaganda role in travelling around Latin America. She had quite an impact in Chile’s 1964 election.”

Juanita initially hailed the revolution’s 1959 triumph over the US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and supported its social programmes by working in health clinics. But executions of opponents and the squelching of democratic hopes disillusioned her. She was already discreetly aiding dissidents when, according to her book, the wife of the Brazilian ambassador in Havana, Virginia Leitao da Cunha, asked her to meet a CIA agent, Tony Sforza. Sforza had previously worked on a Cuba-related CIA project known as Operation Mangosta.

“Many of our men are working there [in Cuba] and run the risk of being discovered,” Sforza told her at the Hotel Camino Real in Mexico City. “The mission involves protecting them and helping them move from one place to another with as much security as possible, finding them places to stay in houses that are safe.” Her family links gave her invaluable access to prisons, he added.

Juanita agreed to take on the code name Donna and gave Sforza two tunes that, when played over a clandestine radio, would signify that she had, “or did not have”, a message. One of them was Madame Butterfly; the other was a waltz, Fascinación.

Her first mission was to take money, messages and documents back to Cuba from Mexico, hidden inside cans of food. She also carried a codebook back with her and, after receiving a shortwave radio, persuaded two former school friends to aid her. She says she refused to take part in anything that would cause bloodshed and refused payment for her services.

Her cooperation was a rare cold war success for spymasters tasked with toppling the Soviet Union’s tropical ally. The Kennedy White House authorised many CIA assassination attempts – ensuing decades racked up 638 efforts, according to one estimate – as well as the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion by exiles.

Juanita held no senior government rank and was not thought to be privy to official secrets, but her enlistment by the US, if verified, dents the reputation of Cuba’s formidable intelligence service.

Raúl, the then defence minister and now president in place of the ailing Fidel, knew of their sister’s wayward political views in 1964, but still approved her trip to Mexico, where she defected.

The revelation that the CIA appeared to have been pulling strings, and not simply applauding, is likely to annoy Cuba’s government, even though the events were so long ago, said one western diplomat in Havana. “Under Obama, relations between the US and Cuba are going in a slightly better direction. This won’t help that process.”

State media will report the news if authorities calculate they can turn the story to their advantage, said the diplomat. “Even if the media here ignore it, the story will do the rounds among the public. But it’s history, and Cubans are used to not being surprised by anything.”

This week the UN will take its annual vote against the US embargo of the island, a 49-year-old policy widely deemed anachronistic and unjustified.

It is unclear why Juanita, who spent the past two decades quietly working in a pharmacy in Miami, waited until now to tell her story. She began working on the book, published by Santillana, with her co-author, the journalist Maria Antonieta Collins, in 1999, but then stopped and resumed only this year.

Published simultaneously in the US, Mexico, Colombia and Spain, the memoir had Harry Potter-style secrecy and was kept in sealed boxes and secured pallets to avoid leaks.

Family business

• “Fidel always had a strong personality … He was always the leader of the brothers. He got on well with all his siblings, though he was never as affectionate, attentive or kissy as the others.”

• “Ramon, Fidel and Raul were all very independent and different to each other. Raul was mother’s favourite, perhaps because he was the youngest. She called him “my little muse” and he, in turn, was always very close to her.”

• “Fidel’s radical conversion to communism was not made from political conviction but simply because he needed power, which is the only thing that he has ever cared about. Without the Russians he would not have been able to carry on.”

• Juanita believes, however, that Eisenhower missed a chance to change the history of Cuba by failing to meet Fidel Castro when he visited the US shortly after the revolution in April 1959. Eisenhower instead sent his vice-president, Richard Nixon. “That was taken in Cuba as if they had turned their back on Fidel,” she explains.

“The polls at that time showed that 90% of Americans supported Fidel,” she continues.

“That decision put an end to any chance of reconciliation. If things had not happened that way Fidel might not have turned to the Soviet Union.”

______

William A. Wieland, who led the State Department’s Caribbean office in Washington, told Earl Smith, who was ambassador to Havana in 1957: “Cuba has been assigned to you to oversee the fall of Batista. The decision has been made: Batista must go.”

Cuban dictator Fidel Castro with Vice President Nixon at The White House in April 1959 following his takeover of Havana earlier that year.

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Fidel Castro Supermole

In his well read column Drew Pearson revealed, on May 23, 1961, that persistent rumors in the diplomatic corps indicated that the CIA had been helping to put Castro in power for years. The rumors had further stated that the CIA agents, in their efforts to get rid of President Batista, had supplied arms and ammunitions to Castro during his guerrilla war in the mountains.

There are more reasons to believe that the CIA, in fact, delivered weapons to Fidel. When he was in the Sierra Maestra fighting Batista’s troops. Castro received some weapons delivered by the International Armaments Corporation, the company that sent weapons to Guatemala, under the CIA’s orders, to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz’s government, and also because the Company was organized by Samuel Cummings, a former CIA operative.26 Also, there is evidence, that between October 1957 and the middle of 1958, the CIA gave no less than fifty thousand dollars to Castro’s men in Santiago de Cuba.

Architects of Deception

Robert Hill, US ambassador to Mexico, said under oath in a Senate hearing: “Individuals in the State Department, and individuals in The New York Times, put Castro in power.” These individuals included Robert McNamara, Theodore C. Sorenson, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, Roy Rubottom, McGeorge Bundy, J. William Fulbright, Herbert Mattews, and Roger Hilsman.

The afore-mentioned William A. Wieland claimed that the authorities and the military intelligence knew in advance of Castro’s plans to enforce communism. Even so, the American press portrayed him as a patriotic and benevolent leader. Several observers were of the opinion that the Bay of Pigs operation on 17 April 1961 intended to get rid of Castro, was a deliberate failure.

Earl Smith, 87, Ambassador to Cuba in the 1950’s

Sent by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as Ambassador to Havana in 1957, Mr. Smith resigned in 1959, soon after the fall of the Government of Fulgencio Batista. He contended that Mr. Castro could not have come to power without the aid of the United States.

His account of the Communist revolution in Cuba appeared in his 1962 book, “The Fourth Floor,” which is to be published again next month by the Selous Foundation Press of Washington. His main theme was that Mr. Castro’s victory was a disaster for both Cuba and the United States and could have been avoided.

Earl T. Smith

If we are to intervene sufficiently to bring about the overthrow of dictatorships, then we should intervene to whatever extent is required to fulfill our purpose. Otherwise, in my opinion, we must wait for the normal self-development of a people and not assist revolution. And we must be prepared to receive the criticism of supporting friendly governments recognized by the United States, although they have been labeled dictatorships. To make my point more clear, let me say that, we helped to overthrow the Batista dictatorship which was pro-American only to install the Castro dictatorship which is pro-Russian.

Castro’s Cuba: A Testing Ground for the NWO?

There is the possibility that Castro’s Cuba is a large scale experiment in social engineering, a test run of the New World Order[8] before its implementation worldwide.

This perhaps explains why some people at the State Department, the CIA, and at the highest levels of the American society, helped Castro to come to power in Cuba. It may also explain why President Kennedy changed the original invasion plans and sent the Cuban patriots to die at the Bay of Pigs and why Castro, unchallenged by the U. S., has been in power in Cuba for more than forty years creating havoc all around the world.

Skull and Bones Fostered Russian Communism

William Bundy’s brother McGeorge Bundy (CFR) (Skull& Bones) was National Security advisor during the Vietnam War where he practiced the “no win” strategies of George Kennan. Like a loyal Illuminati “wise man” Bundy screened all material that went to the President. The installation of Castro’s Communism in Cuba can be laid at his feet. McGeorge Bundy was President of the Ford Foundation. Another former president of the Ford Foundation, H. Rowan Gaither Jr., said the Ford Foundation’s …”purpose was to so alter the United States that it would comfortably merge with the Soviet Union.”

Rockefeller & Global Mind Control

“For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure–one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

David Rockefeller

In his extensive world travels, flying from country to country in his private jet, he has met a vast range of world leaders, including Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev and, notably, Saddam Hussein. Other notable figures whom he has counted amongst his personal friends include members of the Rothschild, Henry Ford and Dulles families, along with such high profile individuals as Katharine Graham, of the Washington Post, Brooke Astor, Nelson Mandela and Peter G. Peterson, chairman of the Blackstone Group, who succeeded Rockefeller as chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1985.

Abbey Rockefeller (b. 1943) — The eldest and most rebellious daughter, she was drawn to Marxism, was an ardent admirer of Fidel Castro and a late 60’s/early 70’s radical feminist who belonged to the organization Female Liberation, later forming a splinter group called Cell 16. An environmentalist and ecologist, and an active supporter of the Women’s Liberation movement, she also funded Ramparts, a left-wing magazine.

The Cuban Coverup

Yet another critic of Kremlin intelligence agency assassinated

Magomed Hazbiyev, the companion-in-arms of killed opposition activist Maksharip Aushev, mourns over his body at Aushev’s father’s house in Nazran, southern Russia October 25, 2009. REUTERS/Kazbek Basayev

Opposition figure in Ingushetia is killed

Human rights activist had led protests against Russian security forces

Washington Post | Oct 26, 2009

By Philip P. Pan

MOSCOW — A popular opposition figure in Russia’s restive Ingushetia province was gunned down Sunday morning in the latest killing of a government critic in the North Caucasus, prompting outrage from human rights groups and raising fears of further violence in the region.

Maksharip Aushev, a businessman who had led mass protests against alleged abuses by the government’s security forces, was driving on a major highway in the neighboring province of Kabardino-Balkaria when a passing vehicle sprayed his car with more than 60 bullets, authorities said. The attack also seriously wounded a passenger.

Colleagues condemned the slaying as an attempt to silence voices critical of the authorities. They said it sent an especially chilling message because Aushev held a post on a human rights council established by Moscow and enjoyed the support of Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, the local governor appointed by President Dmitry Medvedev last year.

Yevkurov has reached out to human rights activists and the opposition, offering them a degree of protection, but Aushev’s killing suggests that he, and by extension the Kremlin, may be losing control over the overlapping law enforcement agencies fighting a growing Islamist insurgency in the region.

In an interview with The Washington Post this month, Aushev accused the security forces of conducting an indiscriminate campaign of abductions, torture and killings in Ingushetia that had only strengthened the rebels. He singled out the powerful Federal Security Service, one of the successors of the KGB, as well as local police controlled by Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin’s strongman in neighboring Chechnya.

“I don’t consider them officers. I consider them bandits,” Aushev said over dinner during the wedding of one of his sons.

Two years ago, another son and a nephew were abducted, taken to Chechnya and tortured. Aushev blamed the FSB and won their release by organizing huge street protests, emerging as one of the most outspoken leaders of the opposition to Ingushetia’s governor at the time, Murat Zyazikov, a former KGB officer and an ally of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

After another opposition figure, Magomed Yevloyev, was shot to death in police custody last year, Aushev agreed to take over his Web site, a news operation that infuriated the authorities with its reports on corruption and human rights violations. He later led protests that helped persuade the Kremlin to fire Zyazikov and bring in Yevkurov.

In a show of support for the new governor, Aushev said he retired from politics and no longer considered himself a member of the opposition. But he had no illusions about the new governor’s ability to rein in the security forces. “From day one, they’ve been sabotaging him, undermining his authority and continuing with the illegal executions and torture,” he said.

Aushev added that the FSB still considered him “enemy number one.”

A month ago, the security forces stopped his car and attempted to take him into custody after he left a meeting with the government. He escaped only because a crowd of motorists, including an aide to the governor, surrounded him.

“If I had been a half-meter closer, they would have tied me up and I would have disappeared without a trace,” he told Caucasian Knot, a Web site that covers the region.

In a statement Sunday, Yevkurov described Aushev’s slaying as a “heinous crime intended to destabilize the region” and vowed to do everything in his power to punish the killers.

One of the governor’s aides, Musa Pliyev, a former member of the opposition who had worked closely with Aushev, said there was little doubt “the murder was a political one” but stopped short of blaming the security services.

“If the authorities who should guarantee the freedom and safety of their citizens fail to do this, then they must be blamed for Aushev’s death and many other human rights activists and journalists who have been killed recently,” he added.

The shooting follows the execution-style killings of two charity workers in the Chechen capital of Grozny in August and of Natalya Estemirova, Chechnya’s most prominent human rights activist, whose body was found in Ingushetia in July.

Russia in U.N. rights dock for journalist murders

U.N. experts grill Russia on Politkovskaya, other murders, ask about independence of judges, Chechnya abductions

Reuters | Oct 15, 2009

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA, Oct 15 (Reuters) – Russia was grilled on Thursday by U.N. human rights experts over murders of journalists and activists, the independence of its judiciary and abductions during counter-terrorism campaigns in Chechnya.

Georgy Matyushkin, deputy justice minister, led a 24-member delegation sent to defend Russia’s record at the U.N. Human Rights Committee, where debate continues on Friday.

The discussion came one day after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Moscow and called on Russia to prevent attacks on activists challenging the Kremlin. [ID:nLE140486]

“The physical danger to people who speak out on human rights in Russia is still striking,” said Ruth Wedgwood, an American expert on the U.N. panel. “People who are either journalists or human rights activists seem to have a very high mortality rate.”

Wedgwood cited the unsolved murder cases of Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya, her Novaya Gazeta newspaper colleague Anastasia Baburova, Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov and human rights activist Natalia Estemirova.

Politkovskaya, a 48-year-old mother of two, was shot entering her Moscow home on Oct. 7, 2006. Her family voiced doubts last week about the guilt of two men accused of playing a role in her killing and about the Kremlin’s will to catch the main suspects. “I think that the past still hangs heavily on society. Things from the past can set the tone of lawlessness which is very hard to tamp down,” added Wedgwood, an international law professor at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.

Committee members also voiced concerns at the effectiveness of criminal investigations in Russia, discrimination against homosexuals in the workplace, police raids on gay clubs and hate speech by some officials.

Nigel Rodley, a British committee member, cited allegations that people were mistreated in police custody in Russia, but acknowledged that the situation had improved since he visited the country as U.N. torture investigator in 1994.

A new mechanism for monitoring human rights in places of detention was encouraging and should help curb abuses, he said.

“Those responsible for questioning (detainees) and interrogations need to know that they don’t know when they might be caught in the act,” Rodley said.

The U.N. committee, composed of 18 independent experts, is examining the compliance of five states including Russia with an international treaty on civil and political rights. Its findings will be issued at the end of the three-week session on Oct. 30. (Editing by Diana Abdallah)

U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

Danger Room | Oct 19, 2009

By Noah Shachtman

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

CIA invests in firm that monitors Internet

“Who knows? The next commenter on your blog might be the CIA.”

Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (”Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.

Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns against the company.

“Anything that is out in the open is fair game for collection,” says Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues at the Federation of American Scientists. But “even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source.’”