David Davis, the former shadow Home Secretary, last night used parliamentary privilege to directly accuse MI5 of “outsourcing torture”.
The Tory said there was clear evidence that British security services had been complicit in the mistreatment of at least 15 terror suspects in foreign jails.
David Davis MP accuses MI5 of ‘outsourcing torture’
Taking advantage of the legal protection that covers statements made in the House of Commons, he cited the case of Rangzieb Ahmed, the Rochdale-born al-Qaeda leader who claims his fingernails were pulled out during interrogations in Pakistan.
Mr Davis said that MI5 allowed Ahmed to leave Britain despite having enough evidence to charge him with terrorist offences, only to suggest his arrest to Pakistani authorities. Mr Davis said he had not seen a clearer case of “passive rendition”.
In response Ivan Lewis, the Foreign Office minister, said that he could not discuss Ahmed’s case for legal reasons.
Ahmed, who is serving a life sentence after he was found guilty of leading an al-Qaeda cell in Manchester, is challenging his conviction and claims that British officials colluded in his torture in Pakistan.
Earlier this week he claimed in an interview from prison that he was offered money or a reduced sentence by MI5 in return for dropping the torture allegations.
Mr Davis, the MP for Haltemprice and Howden, finished second behind David Cameron in the 2005 Tory leadership race but left the shadow cabinet last year when he resigned as an MP to force a by-election to debate the erosion of civil liberties.
Under the “absolute privilege” of the House, MPs can say what they like without fear of being sued for defamation. Their words can also be reported by the press under “qualified privilege”.
MI5 and MI6 have come under increased scrutiny for failing to prevent the alleged torture of terrorism suspects in foreign prisons.
In March the Attorney General launched a police investigation into the alleged collusion of MI5 in the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, the former Guantánamo Bay prisoner.
WASHINGTON — Current and former top Central Intelligence Agency officers have appeared before a federal grand jury in Virginia as part of an 18-month investigation into the agency’s destruction of 92 videotapes depicting the brutal interrogations of two Qaeda detainees.
The witnesses recently called by the special prosecutor, former government officials said, include the agency’s top officer in London and Porter J. Goss, who was C.I.A. director when the tapes were destroyed in November 2005.
The grand jury testimony of C.I.A. officers is further evidence that, despite President Obama’s pledge not to punish agency operatives for their role in the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects, the shadow of the controversial program still looms over the agency’s daily operations.
The court appearances are tied to a criminal investigation led by John L. Durham, whom the Justice Department appointed in January 2008 to investigate the destruction of the tapes. The tapes had shown C.I.A. officers using harsh interrogation methods, including waterboarding, on two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.
Mr. Durham has shrouded his investigation in a level of secrecy rare even by the normally tight-lipped standards of special prosecutors, and after 18 months it is still difficult to assess either the direction or the targets of his investigation.
Current and former intelligence officials say the tapes were ordered destroyed by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the C.I.A.’s clandestine branch. Mr. Rodriguez had worried that the tapes might be leaked and put undercover operatives in legal and physical jeopardy.
One top C.I.A. officer who recently appeared before Mr. Durham’s grand jury is the agency’s station chief in London, who had worked with Mr. Rodriguez when he led the agency’s Counterterrorism Center and who eventually became his chief of staff at the clandestine branch.
Because she remains undercover, The New York Times is not publishing her name. She is said by former agency officers to have helped carry out Mr. Rodriguez’s order to destroy the tapes.
The tapes had been kept in a safe at the C.I.A. station in Thailand, the country where the interrogations took place.
Mr. Goss, whom President George W. Bush removed from the C.I.A in May 2006, is said by several former C.I.A. officials to have opposed the destruction of the tapes.
Mr. Rodriguez has not yet testified before the grand jury, two former C.I.A. officers said.
In a court filing last year, Mr. Durham indicated he planned to wrap up interviews for the investigation by late February, but Obama administration officials have indicated more recently that Mr. Durham could continue his work through the summer. One reason for the pace of the investigation, officials said, is that the grand jury convenes only once a month to hear testimony.
The current and former government officials interviewed for this article all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing details of a continuing criminal investigation.
Besides the question of who at the C.I.A. and White House might have authorized the destruction of the tapes, Mr. Durham is investigating the legal guidance Mr. Rodriguez received before giving the order. One issue is whether the agency might have broken the law by destroying tapes that could have been introduced as evidence in federal trials.
Mr. Rodriguez told colleagues at the time that two lawyers inside the agency’s clandestine branch, Steven Hermes and Robert Eatinger, had advised him that there was no legal impediment to destroying the tapes and that he had the authority to give the order.
But the advice of the two lawyers was careful, the former officials said, and they never gave official approval for the tapes’ destruction.
The C.I.A. never disclosed the existence of the tapes to either the Sept. 11 commission or federal courts that had been hearing the cases of Qaeda suspects in American custody.
At the time the tapes were destroyed, lawyers for Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 plot, were seeking information from the Bush administration about the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah that might have pertained to Mr. Moussaoui’s role in the 2001 attacks.
Some legal experts said Mr. Durham might have trouble building a criminal case around the role of the C.I.A. lawyers.
“It seems difficult to prove that lawyers had criminal intent,” said John Radsan, a former C.I.A. lawyer and federal prosecutor who now teaches at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, “and they didn’t have Rodriguez’s personal interest in getting rid of the tapes.”
“Incompetence does not equal obstruction of justice,” Mr. Radsan said.
As Mr. Durham’s investigation proceeds, the Obama administration has also been forced under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to make public a number of top-secret documents related to the C.I.A. detention program.
On Thursday, the Justice Department sent a letter to a judge in New York saying that it would need until Aug. 31 to produce a copy of a 2004 report by the agency’s inspector general detailing a number of abuses at C.I.A. prisons overseas.
By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent and Paul Cruickshank
At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.
Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.
Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.
Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.
Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.
The graphic nature of some of the images may explain the US President’s attempts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published.
Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.
“I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one and the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them, and British troops who are trying to build security in Afghanistan.
“The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.”
In April, Mr Obama’s administration said the photographs would be released and it would be “pointless to appeal” against a court judgment in favour of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
But after lobbying from senior military figures, Mr Obama changed his mind saying they could put the safety of troops at risk.
Earlier this month, he said: “The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to inflame anti-American public opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”
It was thought the images were similar to those leaked five years ago, which showed naked and bloody prisoners being intimidated by dogs, dragged around on a leash, piled into a human pyramid and hooded and attached to wires.
Mr Obama seemed to reinforce that view by adding: “I want to emphasise that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.”
The latest photographs relate to 400 cases of alleged abuse between 2001 and 2005 in Abu Ghraib and six other prisons. Mr Obama said the individuals involved had been “identified, and appropriate actions” taken.
Maj Gen Taguba’s internal inquiry into the abuse at Abu Ghraib, included sworn statements by 13 detainees, which, he said in the report, he found “credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses.”
Among the graphic statements, which were later released under US freedom of information laws, is that of Kasim Mehaddi Hilas in which he says: “I saw [name of a translator] ******* a kid, his age would be about 15 to 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn’t covered and I saw [name] who was wearing the military uniform, putting his **** in the little kid’s ***…. and the female soldier was taking pictures.”
The translator was an American Egyptian who is now the subject of a civil court case in the US.
Three detainees, including the alleged victim, refer to the use of a phosphorescent tube in the sexual abuse and another to the use of wire, while the victim also refers to part of a policeman’s “stick” all of which were apparently photographed.
The Pentagon wants to spend just over $50 billion on classified programs next year, newly-released Defense Department budget documents reveal. “That’s the largest-ever sum,” according to Aviation Week’s Bill Sweetman, a longtime black-budget seer — a three percent increase over last year’s total.
It makes the Pentagon’s secret operations, including the intelligence budgets nested inside, “roughly equal in magnitude to the entire defense budgets of the UK, France or Japan,” Sweetman adds. All in all, about seven and a half percent of the Defense Department’s total spending is now classified.
Black-world weapons-buying “remains dominated by the single line item,” according to Sweetman. (You can find it under the Air Force’s “other procurement” section, on page F-21 here.) “This year’s number stands just above $16 billion. In inflation-adjusted terms, that’s 240 per cent more than it was ten years ago.”
Many of the secret budgets still remain clandestine, however. In the research budget, the line item for a “Special Program”of the super-secret National Security Agency is a string of zeros. Same goes for an NSA “Cyber Security Initiative” kitty. And don’t even ask about NSA’s “Intelligence Support to Information Operations” account. That’s a blank slate, too.
The CIA has released a devastating document detailing the dates and explicit details of secret Congressional briefings in which members of Congress were told of the Bush administration’s torture techniques and when they had been used.
Most damning, perhaps, is its description of a meeting held between CIA staff and then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss and now-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which shows that Pelosi was briefed on the Bush Administration’s torture techniques in 2002 — even though she’s publicly said she was never told about the use of waterboarding.
Equally striking, however, is the volume of the briefings that have been conducted on the CIA’s interrogation practices since 2002. The document runs ten pages, with up to four briefings a page.
Briefings given to Democrats are of particular significance because the party has been the most vocal about the Bush Administration’s torture practices. Apparently, however, they had known about the practices for years. At least 19 Democrats were briefed about the techniques in detail by end of 2006.
Those briefed earliest on the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” included Pelosi, Goss, Rep. Jane Harman, then-Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), Sen. John Rockefeller (D), Sen Patrick Roberts (R-KN) and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL).
On Sept. 6, 2006, the CIA briefed the full Senate Intelligence Committee, excluding Sen. Ron Wyden (D-WA), who did not attend. According to the document, “Significant details of EITs were provided in this briefing to include mentions of waterboarding, diet manipulation, nudity, walling, and stomach slap.” EIT is shorthand for “Enhanced Interrogation Technique.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — Senior CIA officials ordered that waterboarding and other brutal tactics be used on a suspected terrorist even though interrogators believed he had already said all he knew, a newspaper reported Saturday.
The rough interrogation of al-Qaeda prisoner Abu Zubaydah included confining him in boxes and slamming him against the wall, and was prompted by a highly inflated assessment of his importance, The New York Times reported, citing former intelligence officials and a newly released legal memorandum.
One former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case said Zubaydah already had provided valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsh tactics did not result in a breakthrough. Rather, his captors suffered great distress witnessing his torment, the official said.
“Seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect,” the official told the newspaper.
President Obama authorized the release of graphic “torture memos” that outlined the harsh interrogation tactics the CIA used during the administration of George W. Bush. The disclosures, which came Thursday, went against the advice of some Obama advisers, including CIA Director Leon Panetta. He argued that releasing vivid descriptions of brutal tactics could set a dangerous precedent for future disclosures of intelligence sources and methods.
A footnote to another memo described a rift between the officers questioning Zubaydah at a secret CIA prison in Thailand, who thought he was being compliant, and their bosses at headquarters, who believed he was withholding information.
A legal opinion dated Aug. 1, 2002, shows that the U.S. misunderstood the importance of Zubaydah from the beginning. Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan in 2002 after a gunfight with Pakistani officers backed by CIA and FBI officers. The Bush administration portrayed him as an al-Qaeda leader, and the memo described him as a “senior lieutenant” to Osama bin Laden.
Zubaydah made his most important revelation early, naming Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the main organizer of the Sept. 11, 2001 plot. His interrogators surmised he was not a leader, but a training camp personnel clerk who arranged false documents and travel for the jihadists.
CIA headquarters insisted he must know more and ordered repeated waterboarding — a harsh tactic that simulates drowning — against Zubaydah.
“He pleaded for his life,” one of the former intelligence officials told the Times. “But he gave up no new information. He had no more information to give.”
Obama: No trials for the Bush administration over CIA’s harsh tactics
The Justice Department Thursday released memos from the Bush administration that authorized the CIA to use harsh interrogation methods against suspected terrorists, but the Obama administration said CIA staffers won’t be tried for “mistakes of the past.”
WASHINGTON – Seeking to move beyond what he calls a “a dark and painful chapter in our history,” President Barack Obama said Thursday that CIA officials who used harsh interrogation tactics during the Bush administration will not be prosecuted.
The government released four memos in which Bush-era lawyers approved in often graphic detail tough interrogation methods used against 28 terror suspects. The rough tactics range from waterboarding — simulated drowning — to keeping suspects naked and withholding solid food.
Even as they exposed new details of the interrogation program, Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, offered the first definitive assurance that those CIA officials are in the clear, as long as their actions were in line with the legal advice at the time.
Obama said the nation must protect the identity of CIA contractors and employees “as vigilantly as they protect our security.”
“We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history,” the president said. “But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”
Holder told the CIA that the government would provide free legal representation to CIA employees in any legal proceeding or congressional investigation related to the program and would repay any financial judgment.
“It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department,” Holder said.
The CIA has acknowledged using waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning, on three high-level terror detainees in 2002 and 2003, with the permission of the White House and the Justice Department. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said waterboarding has not been used since, but some human rights groups have urged Obama to hold CIA employees accountable for what they, and many Obama officials and others around the world, say was torture.
Further, the statements accompanied the Justice Department’s release of four significant Bush-era legal opinions governing — in graphic and extensive detail — the interrogation of 14 high-value terror detainees using harsh techniques beyond waterboarding, the officials said. One of the memos was produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in August 2002, the other three in 2005.
The memos, released to meet a court-approved deadline in a lawsuit against the government in New York by the American Civil Liberties Union, detail the dozen harsh techniques approved for use by CIA interrogators, the officials said. One memo also specifically authorized a method for combining multiple techniques, a practice human rights advocates argue crosses the line into torture even if any individual methods does not.
The Obama administration last month released nine legal memos, and probably will release more as the lawsuit proceeds. But the four released Thursday represent the fullest, and now complete, accounting by the government of the methods authorized and used, the officials said.
Those include keeping detainees naked for long periods, keeping them in a painful standing position for long periods, and depriving them of solid food. Other tactics included using a plastic neck collar to slam detainees into walls, keeping the detainee’s cell cold for long periods, and beating and kicking the detainee. Sleep-deprivation, prolonged shackling, and threats to a detainee’s family were also used.
Among the things not allowed in the memos were allowing a prisoner’s body temperature or caloric intake to fall below a certain level, because either could cause permanent damage, said senior administration officials. They discussed the memos on condition of anonymity to more fully describe the president’s decision-making process.
The ACLU suit has sought to use the Freedom of Information Act to shed light on the treatment of prisoners — even though the Bush administration eventually abandoned many of the legal conclusions and the Obama administration has gone further to actively dismantle much of President George W. Bush’s anti-terror program.
Aiding the enemy?
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden says the Obama administration is endangering the country by releasing the memos.
Hayden tells The Associated Press the release will give terrorists a precise guide for what to expect in a CIA interrogation if those methods are ever approved for use again.
The Obama administration outlawed the techniques but has a task force reviewing the military’s interrogation methods to determine if they are sufficient for CIA use.
Hayden says he worries the revelations will also deter other governments from cooperating with the United States because it shows the U.S. “can’t keep anything secret.”
“The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.”
- Former CIA Director William Colby
Tom and Joan Braden with their eight children in an undated photograph. The family’s misadventures provided amusing grist for many of Braden’s newspaper columns and led to the ABC comedy-drama “Eight Is Enough,” which aired from 1977 to 1981.
He also wrote ‘Eight Is Enough,’ a 1975 memoir that spawned the popular TV series.
Tom Braden, a former CIA operative who became a syndicated newspaper columnist, liberal co-host of the CNN talk show “Crossfire” and author of “Eight Is Enough,” a 1975 memoir that spawned the popular television series, died of natural causes Friday at his Denver home, his family said. He was 92.
Braden was the father of eight children whose misadventures provided amusing grist for many of his newspaper columns and led to the ABC comedy-drama “Eight Is Enough,” which aired from 1977 to 1981 and starred Dick Van Patten as Tom Bradford, a Sacramento columnist with a brood of children ages 8 to 23.
But Braden was also prominent as one of the original co-hosts of “Crossfire,” the topical show that made its debut in 1982 and pitted him against former Nixon aide and political commentator Pat Buchanan.
His varied careers also included a Cold War-era stint with the CIA’s International Organizations Division, which secretly funded anti-communist front groups and promoted American culture in Europe by sponsoring visits of American symphonies and publishing Encounter magazine. He defended the covert operations in a controversial 1967 article in the Saturday Evening Post titled “Why I’m Glad the CIA Is Immoral.”
Braden was born in Greene, Iowa, on Feb. 22, 1917. His father worked a variety of jobs, including at a tie store and a bank. His mother was a writer for American Mercury, the magazine founded by H.L. Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan.
Braden dropped out of high school during the Depression and worked briefly for a printing press in New York. He wanted to go to college and applied to Dartmouth, which was one of the few schools that accepted students without a high school degree. He was interested in journalism and became editor of the campus newspaper. He graduated in 1940.
In 1941, he went to England and was among a small group of Americans who enlisted in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps in the British Army to fight in World War II. He later joined the U.S. Army and shifted to intelligence work for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA.
With Stewart Alsop, the columnist and political analyst who had also fought with the British Army and joined the OSS, Braden wrote the book “Sub Rosa: The OSS and American Espionage” (1946).
After the war, he taught for a few years at Dartmouth, where he met poet Robert Frost, who encouraged him to pursue journalism. But in 1950 he joined the CIA and worked for Allen Dulles, who became CIA director in 1953. One of Braden’s duties was to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars to anti-communist elements in labor unions such as the AFL-CIO.
He also helped the agency wage a propaganda war by sponsoring cultural events, including a European tour of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and placing agents in various organizations, including Encounter magazine. Braden himself was a covert cultural agent who worked as executive secretary at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
After leaving the CIA in 1954, he moved with his family to California, where he became involved in politics. During most of the 1960s, he was president of the state Board of Education, where he often feuded with Max Rafferty, the conservative superintendent of public instruction. In 1966, he ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor against Democratic incumbent Glenn M. Anderson.
For 13 years, he also published an Oceanside newspaper, the now-defunct Blade-Tribune, which he had purchased in 1954 with a $100,000 loan from Nelson Rockefeller, the industrialist who became New York governor. He repaid Rockefeller when he sold the paper for more than $1 million in 1968.
After selling the newspaper, he moved with his wife, Joan, and their large family to Washington, D.C., where he became a columnist.
He started to tangle with Buchanan after a writing a column critical of the Nixon special assistant in 1973. Buchanan fired back with an angry letter.
Four years later, Braden was tapped to replace Frank Mankiewicz, a former Robert Kennedy campaign aide, on a nationally syndicated radio program called “Confrontation” on which Buchanan provided the opposing viewpoint. In 1982, they took their bruising debates to CNN, launching “Crossfire.” Braden argued from the left for seven years, until he was replaced by Michael Kinsley in 1989.
As a columnist, Braden often struggled to find material. “When he was desperate for a column, he wrote about us,” his daughter Susan Braden said in an interview Friday.
He turned the pieces about his children into a book after a Washington colleague, columnist Joseph Alsop, told him that his best writing involved his family’s ups and downs.
The book didn’t sell well at first, despite the many entertaining tales Braden told, such as when one son was arrested on marijuana charges and when a daughter’s pet boa constrictor went missing. He also told of the time the family’s lamb nuzzled up against a famous dinner guest, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.
Braden’s wife died in 1999. His son Tommy, the seventh of his eight children, died in 1994. His surviving children are David Braden of Taipei, Taiwan; Mary Poole of Alexandria, Va.; Susan Braden of Takoma Park, Md.; Joannie Braden, Nancy Basta and Elizabeth Braden, all of Denver; and Nicholas Braden of Washington, D.C. He also leaves 12 grandchildren.
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Related
Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation
Mockingbird was an immense financial undertaking with funds flowing from the CIA largely through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) founded by Tom Braden with Pat Buchanon of CNN’s Crossfire.
Congressman Larry McDonald on Crossfire – 1983
May 1983 Broadcast of Crossfire in which Congressman Larry McDonald takes on Pat Buchanan and Tom Braden. They wrangle over the John Birch Society, the CFR, the CIA and the NWO.
Operation Mockingbird
In May 1967 Thomas Braden responded to this by publishing an article entitled, I’m Glad the CIA is Immoral, in the Saturday Evening Post, where he defended the activities of the International Organizations Division unit of the CIA. Braden also confessed that the activities of the CIA had to be kept secret from Congress.
An enormous electronic espionage programme run from servers in China has been used to spy on computers in more than 100 countries, according to two reports published at the weekend.
The reports, published by the universities of Cambridge and Toronto, detail a “murky realm” where cyber spooks infiltrate email, take over humble desktop computers and use them to spy on organisations, individuals and governments.
The reports name the system GhostNet, and claim that it has been used to attack governments in south and south-east Asia as well as the offices of the Dalai Lama. In two years, the reports suggest, the operation infiltrated 1,295 computers in 103 countries.
While one of the reports remains mute on the identity of the perpetrators, the other has no such qualms, warning that the Chinese government ran a series of cyber attacks on Tibetan exile groups. The Chinese foreign ministry could not be reached for comment.
“What Chinese spooks did in 2008, Russian crooks will do in 2010 and even low-budget criminals from less developed countries will follow in due course,” conclude the Cambridge authors of The Snooping Dragon: Social Malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement.
But the authors of Tracking GhostNet argue that things may not be as they seem in the world of electronic espionage. “We’re a bit more careful about it, knowing the nuance of what happens in the subterranean realms,” said Ronald Deibert from the University of Toronto. “This could well be the CIA or the Russians. It’s a murky realm that we’re lifting the lid on.”
The attacks were simple and direct. Infected emails bearing attachments or links to websites were sent to organisations including the private office of the Dalai Lama. Once opened, the virus allowed hackers to operate the host computer, including moving files and sending and receiving data. Their potential control was such that they could turn on an infected computer’s camera and microphone, creating a surveillance bug.
The investigations began after Toronto researchers were asked by the Dalai Lama’s offices to examine their computers. Officials had become concerned that communications were being intercepted. The researchers found that computers had been infected by a virus created by malicious software – or malware. That discovery led them to a group of servers on Hainan Island, off China. Other servers they tracked were based in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region, where intelligence units dealing with Tibetan independence groups are based.
“We uncovered real-time evidence of malware that had penetrated Tibetan computer systems, extracting sensitive documents from the private office of the Dalai Lama,” researcher Greg Walton said.
The 10-month investigation also detected bugged computers in the foreign ministries of several countries, including Iran and Indonesia, and in the embassies of India, South Korea, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan.
The reports come in the wake of the annual report of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, published in November, which found the computer systems of US government agencies and defence companies had been compromised by Chinese hackers.
The Snooping Dragon, produced by two researchers at Cambridge University’s computer laboratory, warns that what they term “social malware surveillance” are likely to spread. Defence, they suggest, is almost impossible.
“Although the attack we describe came from a major government, the techniques their agents used are available even to private individuals and are quite shockingly effective,” they write.
“[Their god is] the Brotherhood. It’s very German, it has Masonic leanings. They’re all Masons. This Brotherhood — Opus Dei — they’re the Mob. The Marine Corps are the hit men. They’re mercenaries. They’ll work for anybody. They’ll switch hats. My husband said it’s no big deal. I’ll go work for the State Department.”
Kay Griggs was a Southern divorcee who rented a room to Marine Corps colonel George Griggs in the late 1980s. She was impressed by his clipped manner, his education, his good looks. Two months later she married him. What she found out about world affairs as George Griggs’ wife was astounding.
Colonel Griggs was a Marine Corps Chief of Staff, as well as head of NATO’s Psychological Operations. He was also, his wife realized, entirely mind-controlled. Kay, a self-declared Christian, became privy to the real workings of the United States military, leadership training, drug-running and weapons sales, and the secret worldwide camps that train professional assassins.
These interviews with Pastor Rick Strawcutter of Adrian, Michigan were conducted in 1998, before September 11th and the installation of U.S. President George W. Bush. Kay Griggs’ report of world events and the power elite paints a picture that begins to explain the hows and whys of our current global scenario.
Quotes from Kay Griggs:
“They took with them the most perverted aspects of Nazi Germany and brought them over to the United States.”
“They get rid of the good guys. The Marine Corps are the assassins for the Mob. The military is run by the Mob. The military IS the Mob.”
“He told me what they did. They nurture–they cultivate–the sons of prominent families. They’re called “rising stars.” They rope them in. Then they “turn” them.”
ON ASSASSINS: “What my husband does for a living is train mercenaries — young boys from countries like Romania, Dominican Republic, Haiti. They’re training them to be murderers, and the taxpayers’ dollars are paying for this. They psychologically profile them. The profile is similar to my husband’s and Lee Harvey Oswald’s and [Timothy] McVeigh’s, and others who were all part of this program. Jeffrey Dahmer was part of this program. They’re all Army. They were all picked out because they were perverted or twisted. [The military profiles for] strong mother, weak father, no father, poor. Because these guys are looking for security, so they will stay in the military and do anything for that security.” (Interviews, Disk 1)
“When you work in the White House, you work under the Army. The Marines have no overlord, as such. They can float. They’re run out of New Orleans, just like Oswald was. Oswald was homosexually recruited by Jack Rubinstein, who was Jack Ruby. All of the funding for these operations goes through the “joint” — the Mob. Oswald was a loner, brilliant — and a perfect candidate. His [profile] and my husband’s profile almost look alike.” (Interviews, Disk 2)
ON TRUTH TELLERS: “St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, like the Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, has Army intelligence people in there. They’re targets — people who have decided to tell the truth. People who believe in the American dream, who are Christians, who are trying to get things straightened out. If they transgress that line where they upset somebody in high command — just like in Germany — they all of a sudden move from being a person to being a target. Therefore, the enemy. Why are good people silenced, why are their papers gone through?” (Interviews, Disk 3)
ON THE CIA: “This CIA thing, from my experience, is bogus. Every person I’ve known who was in the CIA was in military intelligence first. For example, my husband. He works under the Army. He’s a Marine Corps high-level intelligence officer, but he’s under all these Army people.” (Interviews, Disk 3)
ON LOYALTY: “Now these generals in the Marine Corps and Army, according to my husband, they are ordered. My husband, being Chief of Staff, told his men it was like this: It’s the Marine Corps first — the Brotherhood, the Cherry Marines, the bonding that goes on. The Marine Corps comes before God, before Jesus Christ, before the country. My husband is not a Christian, he’s an existentialist, and most of these guys are. [Their god is] the Brotherhood. It’s very German, it has Masonic leanings. They’re all Masons. This Brotherhood — Opus Dei — they’re the Mob. The Marine Corps are the hit men. They’re mercenaries. They’ll work for anybody. They’ll switch hats. My husband said it’s no big deal. I’ll go work for the State Department.
“The Marine Corps is just a smoke-and-mirrors thing. On [my husband's] level, he said we’ve never been an enemy to the Soviet Union. They work with these Communists. The man who started this whole intelligence operation — OSS [Office of Strategic Services] — he was recruiting known Communists who were involved in subverting Spain. They’re not Americans. They’re not Christians. They’re German existentialists. Now what are they doing running our nation? They have more affinity for the State of Israel than they do our nation. They don’t care about American citizens. The judges now in the courts are all military officers following chain-of-command orders. They’re not independent judges.” (Interviews, Disk 4)
Most damning, perhaps, is its description of a meeting held between CIA staff and then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss and now-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which shows that Pelosi was briefed on the Bush Administration’s torture techniques in 2002 — even though she’s publicly said she was never told about the use of waterboarding.
Kay Griggs was a Southern divorcee who rented a room to Marine Corps colonel George Griggs in the late 1980s. She was impressed by his clipped manner, his education, his good looks. Two months later she married him. What she found out about world affairs as George Griggs’ wife was astounding.
