Tag: CIA

The CIA’s Drug Trade

It seems the CIA just canno0t keep its fingers out of the drug trade….now they are involved in the opium production…..

The US is deploying aggressive—and very public—methods these days in its war on international drugs. It’s a sharp contrast to a secret tactic used years ago in Afghanistan that the Washington Post is revealing for the first time. It seems the CIA secretly dropped modified seeds on poppy fields between 2004 and 2015, with the goal of making the resulting heroin less potent. The covert operation, run by the CIA’s Crime and Narcotics Center, was so secretive that many senior officials in the Pentagon and State Department were unaware it existed.

And did it work? The best answer seems to be, kind of. “There was a sense that it worked, but maybe over time, it worked less well,” one former US official familiar with the program tells the newspaper. It was also expensive to run, a big factor in why it ended—”the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze,” is how the official puts it. Still, he calls it “an example of creative, out-of-the-box thinking by the agency. … It was dealing with a problem in a non-kinetic, nonmilitary way.”

Throughout the broader US-led counter-narcotics campaign, American agencies disagreed on the best strategy, with proposals ranging from aerial herbicide spraying to buying up the Afghan crop for pharmaceutical use. The CIA’s secret seed operation took place amid these debates, but official assessments ultimately concluded that no US or allied effort led to lasting reductions in Afghan poppy cultivation or opium production. Read the full story, which notes that the seeds were not believed to have been modified genetically. Instead, they were selectively bred to be less heroin-friendly.

Is this one of their famous ‘cover stories’?

The agency’s history tells a different story…..they have not always been part of the War on Drugs…..they actually were involved in the distribution to help pay for their covert operations.

I am not convinced that they are not part of the opium trade.

How about you?  Does this give one confidence that the CIA is acting in a way that will help the war on drugs?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Oops We Are Doing It Again

The news is not so good surrounding the events unfolding in Venezuela….Donny has ordered the nuking of another boat….you know those small boats that are loaded to the stacks with drugs?

Our Lord High magistrate has also ordered the CIA into action in Venezuela…..(that sound all too familiar)….

The Trump administration has authorized the CIA to take covert action inside Venezuela, including lethal operations, The New York Times reported on Wednesday, as the administration’s push toward regime change heats up.

President Trump later confirmed that he authorized the covert action and said the US was considering attacks on Venezuelan territory. “We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” he said.

US officials told the Times that the authority allows the CIA to take action against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro or his government, either unilaterally or in conjunction with the US military. The report said it is not known whether the CIA is currently planning operations inside Venezuela or if the authority will be used for future plans.

The US military has been drawing up plans to launch strikes on Venezuelan territory and potentially capture strategic ports and airfields, actions that would almost certainly lead to a full-blown war. The US military campaign in the region has so far involved a buildup of warships and about 10,000 US troops in the Caribbean and strikes on five boats that the US has claimed, without providing evidence, were running drugs.

While combating drug trafficking is the pretext for the US military operations, US officials have made clear that the real goal is regime change. Officials are hoping that Maduro steps down voluntarily or that someone in his inner circle turns on him due to the $50 million US bounty on his head, and the deluge of leaks and reports about potential US military action is likely part of the pressure.

(antiwar.com)

This did not work so well in Southeast Asia….but what the Hell let’s give it a go again.

As an added incentive to instill fear in Venezuela…..the butt in control has ordered B-52 flights…..

In less than a week, President Donald Trump has threatened to attack Venezuela using ground troops, confirmed ongoing covert operations inside the country, and ordered bombers capable of dropping nuclear weapons to fly in circles off its coast in what appears to be an unprecedented show of force intended to pressure the Venezuelan president to step down.

On Thursday, the U.S. launched what appears to be the sixth lethal boat strike against an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean Sea this year. A U.S. official, who confirmed the account first reported by Reuters, said there were survivors among the crew.

The White House has defended the extraordinary military operations as necessary to stem the tide of illicit drugs coming to the U.S.

“President Trump believes that Nicholas Maduro is an illegitimate president, leading an illegitimate regime that has been trapped in drugs,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/52s-fly-off-coast-venezuela-show-force-trump/story

Ah bullies and their toys.

After Donny’s and Hogsbreath’s little strut upon the stage in front of our generals one has shown so spine and packed it in….

The head of the US Southern Command, whose job includes overseeing military operations in the area where the Pentagon has been carrying out fatal strikes on what the Trump administration describes as drug-running boats, announced Thursday that he’s leaving the position. Adm. Alvin Holsey has been in the job, which usually is a three-year assignment, less than a year. Neither he nor Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth mentioned any disagreements, but the New York Times reports that Holsey had raised concerns about the attacks near Venezuela and the US military buildup in the region.

In a statement on social media, Hegseth thanked Holsey “for his more than 37 years of distinguished service to our nation as he plans to retire.” The admiral posted on the command’s Facebook page it’s “been an honor to serve our nation, the American people and support and defend our Constitution for over 37 years,” per the AP. His retirement takes effect on Dec. 12, per the Hill. Southcom oversees all US military operations in Central America and South America. A Pentagon official said Thursday that about a force of about 10,000 is supporting the counternarcotics operations in the Caribbean.

Legal experts and members of Congress have questioned the administration’s authority to use lethal force against suspected drug traffickers without congressional authorization. The four-star admiral’s departure is another in a series of high-profile firings or resignations of senior military leaders, many of them women or people of color, during Hegseth’s tenure. Congressional Democrats were critical after the latest announcement. “Prior to Trump, I can’t think of a combatant commander who left his or her post early, ever,” said Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

Bully for him for showing some guts and cajones.

This whole Venezuela debacle is going to come back and bite us in the ass.

And all the we as citizens can do is sit and watch this preening peacock of a leader strut around and thump his chest like some oversexed primate.

Is this our fate for now?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

Bay Of Pigs

I had intended to post this on the anniversary of the attack….but life got in the way as it has often done and it got pushed back and almost forgotten.

As this month comes to a close I would like to reach back in history and write about the US led invasion of Cuba in April of 1961….the invasion force was rather small in the beginning because the US had ruled out using US  troops….A full-scale invasion would have incurred huge US casualties: 40-50,000 according to Department of Defense estimates. There was also public opinion to be considered. Since the introduction of the ‘good neighbor’ policy, US armed intervention was of potential political harm and had been formally ruled out under such commitments as the Charter of the Organization of American States. The US had made political capital during 1956 out of Soviet armed intervention in Hungary and the British-French-Israeli action in Suez. Any involvement in Cuba must be subject to ‘plausible deniability’, with the White House especially untainted by any knowledge or involvement.

Instead the powers decided to use a small force of 1400 men….

The first part of the plan was to destroy Castro’s tiny air force, making it impossible for his military to resist the invaders. On April 15, 1961, a group of Cuban exiles took off from Nicaragua in a squadron of American B-26 bombers, painted to look like stolen Cuban planes, and conducted a strike against Cuban airfields.

However, it turned out that Castro and his advisers knew about the raid and had moved his planes out of harm’s way. Frustrated, Kennedy began to suspect that the plan the CIA had promised would be “both clandestine and successful” might in fact be “too large to be clandestine and too small to be successful.”

Such requirements left Pluto in operational limbo. In the first place, air cover was deemed essential for the invading force to secure the beach-heads; yet control of the skies could not be achieved by the rebels alone. To solve this problem the original landing-site was changed from a point close to the Escambray mountains (good guerrilla territory) to the Bay of Pigs, more difficult terrain for an amphibious operation. Three main groups of rebels existed: insurgents in Cuba killing and sabotaging, but ignored by the CIA; the invasion forces being trained by the CIA mainly in Guatemala, but also within the United States; and the anti-Castro leadership, which divided into two antagonistic groups: the original Batistianos and those who began as Fidelistas, but lost faith in the revolution. The most influential of this disparate trio was the divided leadership, but precisely because of these divisions, their susceptibility to leaks and the unsavory backgrounds of many, such men were cut out of CIA decision-making.

read on….

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/bay-pigs-invasion

This would be invasion lasted about 24 hours before it broke down and was Kennedy’s first international failure.

For more reading this is an excellent account….

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56808455

And the US has been interfering in international situations ever since.

You would think we could learn from that mistake….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

Closing Thought–12Apr22

Did the CIA experiment on orphans?

A new report indicates that it is a possibility that they did……some say to perfect torture techniques….

An extraordinary Danish Radio report exposed how scores of children in Denmark, many of them orphans, were subject to CIA-funded experiments for at least two decades.

The purpose of these activities remains unknown, as authorities continue to actively suppress the truth of what happened in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The startling exposé is based on the work of documentarian Per Wennick, who was one of 311 participants in the mysterious trials. The children never learned the objective of the tortuous assessments to which they were exposed, even after they ended.

Such trials are in conflict with the Nuremberg Code, which enforces the vital requirement of obtaining consent from human subjects in all medical research.

According to Wennick, when he was 11 years old, he was asked at an authoritarian orphanage in Copenhagen if he wanted to try something “fun” at the local municipal hospital. It was vaguely described as an examination of how children “feel”. Believing it would be a welcome diversion, he acquiesced and even received a small sum for his participation.

Wennick went on to undergo a series of regular tests, which included being forced to listen to recordings on headphones of loud noises, screams, and statements intended to scare him. Staff strapped him to a chair while electrodes were placed on his arms, legs, and chest, measuring his heart rate, temperature, and sweat levels.

These experiments continued until 1973, when Wennick was 24-years-old. However, a decade later, while in a hospital due to a skin complaint, he learned his visit—in fact, his every contact with healthcare services— was reported to the Danish Psychological Institute for reasons never made clear to him.

Fast forward to 2018. While at a film festival in the United States, he saw the documentary “Three Identical Strangers,” which tells the story of triplets deliberately separated at birth and offered up for adoption to families of differing socioeconomic backgrounds, in a covert and highly unethical scientific “nature versus nurture” study.

https://thedissenter.org/cia-funded-experiments-on-danish-orphans-for-decades/

Would that surprise you if true?

Keep in mind the experiments that the CIA conducted using LSD and the tests on blacks…..and oh so much more.

This is disgraceful but we will just turn as blind eye and claim “national security” (the refuge of the corrupt)…..

Turn The Page!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Where’s The Outrage?

Let’s step back from Ukraine for awhile and take up another issue that has lost in the media……

Remember when it was revealed that the NSA was collected mega data on US citizens?

There was endless rants and posts about the affront to our rights to privacy…..and yet the newest report of a massive data collection of US citizens is gone by with few writing of the outrage…..

The Central Intelligence Agency has been collecting American’s private data without any oversight or even the minimal legal safeguards that apply to the NSA and FBI, an unconstitutional affront to our civil liberties.

According to a declassified report released yesterday by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), the CIA’s surveillance program is reminiscent of the mass surveillance programs conducted by the NSA, though the details released thus far paint a disturbing picture of potential wide-scale violations of people’s privacy. To start, the CIA program has apparently been conducted outside the statutory reforms and oversight of the intelligence community instituted after revelations by Edward Snowden in 2013. The newly declassified CIA data collection program is carried out in conjunction with Executive Order 12333 and is therefore subject to even less oversight than the woefully under-supervised NSA surveillance programs subject to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The whos, whats, whys, and hows of this semi-disclosed CIA program are still unknown, and the public deserves the right to know exactly what damage has been done. Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich are already pressing for the release of even more information. In a partially-redacted letter sent to the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA Director on April 13, 2021, the senators have called for the public release of the full report about the CIA’s surveillance, which remains classified. The senators’ letter also demands answers about how the agency collects the data, what data is being collected, and the rules governing its storage and retention.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/02/we-need-answers-about-cias-mass-surveillance

Once again the American people show a disturbing indifference to the world around them….as long as their little pathetic sphere is blue skies and unicorns then they could care damn less at the loss of rights.

Collectively the American people could be filed away in the ‘Can’t Fix Stupid’ collection.

Turn The Page!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

CIA And Drugs

I do not know if Americans know of the CIA involvement in the drug trade….if they truly cared then why is this still going on.

This post was inspired by an article I read about the CIA involvement in the drug trade in Afghanistan (you remember than country right?)……..

This is a far cry from the 1970s, when poppy production was minimal, and largely for domestic consumption. But this changed in 1979 when the CIA launched Operation Cyclone, the widespread funding of Afghan Mujahideen militias in an attempt to bleed dry the then-recent Soviet invasion. Over the next decade, the CIA worked closely with its Pakistani counterpart, the ISI, to funnel $2 billion worth of arms and assistance to these groups, including the now infamous Osama Bin Laden and other warlords known for such atrocities as throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women.

“From statements by U.S. Ambassador [to Iran] Richard Helms, there was little heroin production in Central Asia by the mid 1970s,” Professor Alfred McCoy, author of “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,” told MintPress. But with the start of the CIA secret war, opium production along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border surged and refineries soon dotted the landscape. Trucks loaded with U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons would travel from Pakistan into its neighbor to the west, returning filled to the brim with opium for the new refineries, their deadly product ending up on streets worldwide. With the influx of Afghan opium in the 1980s — Jeffrey St. Clair, co-author of “Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press,” alleges — heroin addiction more than doubled in the United States.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2021/06/25/geopolitics-profit-and-poppies-how-the-cia-turned-afghanistan-into-a-failed-narco-state/

After reading this article….my first response is….DUH!

Of course the CIA is involved in drug trafficking….and has been since the 1970s……

Seriously!

But here is a look at the trade and CIA participation….

In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News initiated an extended series of articles linking the CIA’s “contra” army to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles. Based on a year-long investigation, reporter Gary Webb wrote that during the 1980s the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua’s leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to South Central L.A. drug dealer, Ricky Ross. The series unleashed a storm of protest, spearheaded by black radio stations and the congressional Black Caucus, with demands for official inquiries. The Mercury News‘ Web page, with supporting documents and updates, received hundreds of thousands of “hits” a day.

While much of the CIA-contra-drug story had been revealed years ago in the press and in congressional hearings, the Mercury News series added a crucial missing link: It followed the cocaine trail to Ross and black L.A. gangs who became street-level distributors of crack, a cheap and powerful form of cocaine. The CIA’s drug network, wrote Webb, “opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack’ capital of the world.” Black gangs used their profits to buy automatic weapons, sometimes from one of the CIA-linked drug dealers.

https://ips-dc.org/the_cia_contras_gangs_and_crack/

Should not the government cease this involvement…..and what happened to this expensive War on Drugs?

When will the people realize just how dick deep the CIA is in the drug trade?

Here is an unique idea…..stop bitching about drugs and get off your ass and put a stop to the US involvement…..

Just a thought

Turn The Page!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

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Biden’s CIA

I would like to leave behind now the moronic action of 06 January and return to the scrutiny of Biden’s Cabinet picks.

He has made his choice to lead the spy agency, the CIA…..

President-elect Joe Biden announced Monday he has chosen veteran diplomat William Burns to be his CIA director. A former ambassador to Russia and Jordan, Burns, 64, had a 33-year career at the State Department under both Republican and Democratic presidents. He rose through the ranks of the diplomatic corps to become deputy secretary of state before retiring in 2014 to run the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace. Amid tumult in the State Department after President Trump took office in 2017, Burns held his tongue until last year when he began writing highly critical pieces of the Trump administration’s policies in Foreign Affairs and other publications, reports the AP. Burns has been a staunch advocate of rebuilding and restructuring the foreign service, positions Biden has aligned himself with.

In an opinion piece on the pick for the Washington Post, David Ignatius frames the choice: “What’s likely to have appealed to Biden … is [Burns’] reputation as a nonpartisan figure who served in hard places—Russia and the Middle East—and over the years developed close relationships with the countries that are the CIA’s key liaison partners. His biggest challenge will be dealing with a quirky, cliquey CIA culture that is often resistant to change. CIA operatives have been masterful over the years at bending new directors to their priorities.” And from Biden himself: “Bill Burns is an exemplary diplomat with decades of experience on the world stage keeping our people and our country safe and secure. The American people will sleep soundly with him as our next CIA director.”

There you have the fluff piece on the new nominee….a person I am not convinced is the best choice to run the agency…..because he will eventually be consumed by the culture.

In nominating former Deputy Secretary of State William Burns to be CIA director, President-elect Joe Biden has chosen a highly experienced diplomat to lead a hydra-headed agency.

But, if past is precedent, the highest hydras who head calcified fiefdoms at CIA can be expected to resist any real control from the top. They are more likely to try to co-opt top management or make end runs around it. This is not new.

Most senior CIA operations officers, in particular, have never been comfortable with meaningful supervision, lest it lead to reining them in or impinging on their ample budgets. With secrecy always in play (including strict application of the “need-to-know” principle), Burns will need a good deputy – preferably a strong outsider – to avoid being blind-sided – or diddled.

Burns lacks proven experience managing organizations as large and variegated as the agency, so the jury is out on whether he will be able to do it.

Can William Burns Change the CIA?

All in all….it will be “same as it ever was”…..

Watch This Blog!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Looking For a New Job?

In these dark days of the pandemic there are many looking for new employment….well there is a new website to help those find and apply for gainful employment….

Wanted: Spies from all backgrounds and walks of life.

Striving to further diversify its ranks, the CIA launched a new website Monday to find top-tier candidates who will bring a broader range of life experiences to the nation’s premier intelligence agency

The days of all American spies being white male graduates from Ivy League schools are long gone. The CIA director is a woman and women head all five of the agency’s branches, including the directorates of science and technology, operations and digital innovation.

But while the CIA has been diversifying for years, intelligence agencies still lag the federal workforce in minority representation. With thousands of job applicants annually, the CIA wants to do more to ensure its workforce reflects national demographics.

The revamped website has links for browsing CIA jobs complete with starting salaries and requirements, sections on working at the agency, and a streamlined application process.

“We’ve come a long way since I applied by simply mailing a letter marked ‘CIA, Washington, D.C.,’” said CIA Director Gina Haspel, who joined the agency in 1985. She said in a statement that she hopes the new website piques the interest of talented Americans and gives them a sense of the “dynamic environment that awaits them here.”

Haspel has made recruitment a priority since she became the first female director in May 2018. Since then, the CIA has started advertising on streaming services, launched an Instagram account and an online “onion site,” a feature that makes both the information provider and the person accessing information more difficult to trace.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/01/05/cias-new-recruitment-website-aims-diversify-spy-agency.html

If you always wanted to be a James Bond then here is your chance to become a member of an age old profession.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

Closing Thought–15Jan21

UFOS!

THere has much speculation on what the US government knows about so-called UFOs.

Is there a cover-up?

The CIA has finally released some documents to the public.

Want to know the Central Intelligence Agency’s lowdown on UFOs? If you’ve got the time and the curiosity, download every single file that’s in the public domain, because they’re now available for the taking. Motherboard reports that, after years of behind-the-scenes wrangling, declassified-docs repository the Black Vault has opened an archive where anyone can browse and download PDFs of CIA intel on unidentified aerial phenomena (the agency’s fancy alt name for unidentified flying objects, or UFOs), some of them stretching back to the ’80s. Black Vault founder John Greenewald Jr. says he started filing Freedom of Information Act requests for some of the files back in 1996, and the CIA finally acquiesced, as well as on other previously unreleased records, placing them all on a CD-ROM that Greenewald bought from them sometime last year.

t was like pulling teeth,” he tells Motherboard of his efforts to get the files. The New York Post notes Greenewald’s obsession with filing FOIAs with the CIA and getting his hands on such documents began when he was a teen. Users can either download the entire intel collection as Greenewald originally received it from the CIA (though he says those TIF files are “incredibly difficult” to sift through, as they’re not searchable) or as an easier-to-use file, created by him converting the original TIFs to PDFs. The files can also be downloaded individually. The CIA insists this is everything they’ve got on the matter, though Greenewald notes on the Black Vault site we can’t know if that’s really true. If it actually isn’t, Greenewald is on the case. “Research by the Black Vault will continue to see if there are additional documents still uncovered within the CIA’s holdings,” he vows on his site.

This should give the Ancient Alien crowd something to do….before they spin it in their direction.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

All Hail Project Troy

After World War Two the US started fighting a new war, the Cold War….and this was fought mostly on the world stage with the use of propaganda and manipulation…..1954 the CIA won a conflict in Guatemala using psychological warfare….and that brings us to the US program of propaganda and manipulation….Project Troy.

The phrase Cold War didn’t always refer to a time period. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the very years that the battle lines between the United States and the Soviet Union were being drawn, U.S. foreign-policy strategists used the phrase to invoke a specific kind of conflict, one carried out by “means short of war.” If, as NSC-68, a key document of U.S. strategy, asserted in 1950, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an ideological clash of civilizations, a battle between “slavery” and “freedom,” a victory by force would be hollow. If the United States wanted to defeat communism, it needed to do so “by the strategy of cold war,” combining political, economic, and psychological techniques. “The cold war,” NSC-68 warned, “is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.”

This was a new kind of conflict requiring new kinds of weapons: psychological weapons. The question of psychological warfare preoccupied a small but influential group of foreign-policy officials during President Harry S. Truman’s second term. By the time that Truman left office in January 1953, the United States had laid the legal and institutional foundations for overt propaganda campaigns as well as covert action. During that period of experimentation leading up to the Eisenhower presidency, almost anything U.S. strategists could dream up, short of overthrowing foreign governments (that would come later), was up for discussion. Among other things, the Marshall Plan allotted $13 billion to rebuild Western Europe, Voice of America transmitted jazz and news to listeners in 46 languages in more than a hundred countries, and the CIA sent tens of thousands of balloons filled with anti-Communist pamphlets into China.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/project-troy-science-cold-war-psychological-warfare/576847/

The Cold War gave us many new techniques for fighting an enemy without firing a shot in anger……

The history lesson is over for today……

Learn Stuff!

Class Dismissed!