Fret not, drone strike naysayers -- John Brennan has a list, and he's checking it twice:

White House counterterror chief John Brennan has seized the lead in guiding the debate on which terror leaders will be targeted for drone attacks or raids, establishing a new procedure to vet both military and CIA targets.

The move concentrates power over the use of lethal U.S. force outside war zones at the White House.

The process, which is about a month old, means Brennan's staff consults the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies as to who should go on the list, making a previous military-run review process in place since 2009 less relevant, according to two current and three former U.S. officials aware of the evolution in how the government targets terrorists.

In describing Brennan's arrangement to The Associated Press, the officials provided the first detailed description of the military's previous review process that set a schedule for killing or capturing terror leaders around the Arab world and beyond. They spoke on condition of anonymity because U.S. officials are not allowed to publicly describe the classified targeting program.

One senior administration official argues that Brennan's move adds another layer of review that augments rather than detracts from the Pentagon's role. The official says that in fact there will be more people at the table making the decisions, including representatives from every agency involved in counterterrorism, before they are reviewed by senior officials and ultimately the president.

Yep. Nothing beats normalizing the unthinkable via bureaucratic smoke & mirrors. Apparently Arendt's keystone work is to Obama as Orwell's was to W: not a cautionary tale, but, rather, a user's guide.

h/t Roland Paris

Buzzfeed - An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.
..
The new law would give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentagon to push television, radio, newspaper, and social media onto the U.S. public. “It removes the protection for Americans,” says a Pentagon official who is concerned about the law. “It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false.”

words fail

After the EU delisted the MeK on the back of a well-funded lobbying campaign by the MeK and it's neocon allies, there was always going to be huge political pressure for the U.S. to follow suit. The MeK has poured large sums, millions of dollars, into paying for lobbyists and former government officials to speak up on its behalf. Now it seems their efforts are to pay off. The WSJ is reporting insiders who say the delisting is likely to happen.

Glenn Greenwald explains why this is not just a bad idea but encapsulates everything that's wrong with Washington. It will cheapen the terrorist listing into simply a means to punish those the U.S. sees as its enemies, show that the U.S. is indeed an agressor against Iran, prove that national security decisions are available to the highest bidder and make a mockery of the rule of law by showing that the law is "not even a purported constraint on the conduct of Washington political elites".

As Andrew Exum put it this morning: “I guess Hizballah and LeT just need to buy off more former administration officials.”

Sadly I expected this, but it makes it no less disgusting that yet again the Obama administration doesn't even bother to make a passing nod to legality or ethics.

BBC Newsnight, By Peter Taylor, May 9

Secret CIA video tapes of the waterboarding of Osama Bin Laden's suspected jihadist travel arranger Abu Zubaydah show him vomiting and screaming, the BBC has learned.

The tapes were destroyed by the head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez.

In an exclusive interview for Newsnight, Rodriguez has defended the destruction of the tapes and denied waterboarding and other interrogation techniques amount to torture.

The CIA tapes are likely to become central to the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, at Guantanamo Bay.

...I think.

As you no doubt have heard by now, the US foiled a new and improved underwear bombing scheme dreamed up by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (apparently, Al Qaeda has a franchise operation.)

Jingoistic heel-clicking aside, the counterterror operation involved human intelligence and a double agent:

(CBS News) NEW YORK - It's a stunning revelation in the foiled plot to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner: The triggerman chosen by al Qaeda was actually a double agent who was working for the CIA and Saudi intelligence services.

Rupert Neate | May 6

The Guardian - Lloyds Banking Group has become embroiled in a row over its investment in a company accused of involvement in the rendition of terror suspects on behalf of the CIA.

Lloyds, which is just under 40% owned by the taxpayer, is one of a number of leading City institutions under fire for investing in US giant Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), which is accused of helping to organise covert US government flights of terror suspects to Guantánamo Bay and other clandestine "black sites" around the world.

Reprieve, the legal human rights charity run by the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, alleges that during the flights, suspects – some of whom were later proved innocent – were "stripped, dressed in a diaper and tracksuit, goggles and earphones, and had their hands and feet shackled". Once delivered to the clandestine locations, they were subjected to beatings and sleep deprivation and forced into stress positions, a report from the International Committee of the Red Cross says.

CSC, which is facing a backlash for allegedly botching its handling of a £3bn contract to upgrade the NHS IT system, has refused to comment on claims it was involved in rendition. It has also refused to sign a Reprieve pledge to "never knowingly facilitate torture" in the future. The claims about its involvement in rendition flights have not been confirmed.

Reprieve has written to CSC investors to ask them to put pressure on the company to take a public stand against torture.

Some of the City's biggest institutions, including Lloyds and insurer Aviva, have demanded that CSC immediately address allegations that it played a part in arranging extraordinary rendition flights.

WaPo| Greg Miller| May 3

Newly released documents recovered from the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed show that al-Qaeda’s core leaders were divided over how to manage an emerging group of distant affiliates that showed little discipline or willingness to take direction.
* Bin Laden documents (PDF)

Gareth Porter:Finding Bin Laden: The Truth Behind the Official Story - Truthout has been able to reconstruct the real story of bin Laden's exile in Abbottabad, as well as how the CIA found him, thanks in large part to information gathered last year from Pakistani tribal and ISI sources by retired Pakistani Brig. Gen. Shaukat Qadir. But that information was confirmed, in essence, in remarks after the bin Laden raid by the same senior intelligence official cited above - remarks that have been ignored until now.

Ellen Nakashima | May 2

WaPo - Senior military leaders are recommending that the Pentagon’s two-year-old cyberwarfare unit be elevated to full combatant command status, sending a signal to adversaries that the U.S. military is serious about protecting its ability to operate in cyberspace, officials said.

Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will recommend the change to Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters. Final approval rests with President Obama. Little opposition is expected, though the timeline is uncertain.

A Pentagon spokesman, Capt. John Kirby, declined to discuss the pending move.

The elevation of Cyber Command to a level on a par with commands protecting entire regions and continents would give the nation’s top cyberwarriors more direct access to Dempsey and Panetta, allowing them more clout in the struggle for resources.

Created in 2010 at Fort Meade, Cyber Command employs about 750 people — far fewer than most combatant commands — and reports to Strategic Command, based in Omaha. The U.S. military has nine combatant commands, the newest of which, Africa Command, began operations in 2008.

U.S. officials say the establishment of a combatant command for cyberwar fits the administration’s multi-pronged cyber-strategy by projecting military force as a deterrent, even as efforts are ongoing in the diplomatic realm to reduce tensions with adversaries.

The Efficacy and Ethics of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy

Remarks of John O. Brennan – As Prepared for Delivery
Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Monday, April 30, 2012

Now, I want to be very clear. In the course of the war in Afghanistan and the fight against al-Qa’ida, I think the American people expect us to use advanced technologies, for example, to prevent attacks on U.S. forces and to remove terrorists from the battlefield. We do, and it has saved the lives of our men and women in uniform.

What has clearly captured the attention of many, however, is a different practice, beyond hot battlefields like Afghanistan—identifying specific members of al-Qa’ida and then targeting them with lethal force, often using aircraft remotely operated by pilots who can be hundreds if not thousands of miles away. This is what I want to focus on today

ICYMI:

The Senate Intelligence Committee has been reviewing the post-9/11 detention and interrogation practices of the Central Intelligence Agency for four years and is still not finished. But the end appears to be in sight.

“The review itself is nearing completion — before the end of summer — but is not over yet,” a spokesperson for the Committee said. “The release date should be not too far thereafter, but is not set.”

“This review is the only comprehensive in-depth look at the facts and documents pertaining to the creation, management, and effectiveness of the CIA detention and interrogation program,” according to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who was chairman of the Intelligence Committee when the review began in 2008.

Committee staff are said to have reviewed millions of pages of classified documents pertaining to the CIA program.

Well, well, well. After 4 years and several million sheets of classified debasement, it sounds like the report may finally see daylight juuust in time to be placed under the blinding glare of the Campaign 2012 spotlight -- assuming the Village can tear itself away from teh horserace, of course (ooh, shiny).

h/t Daphne Eviatar

Related: Larry Siems of The Torture Report, who has compiled his exhaustive analysis of over 120,000 pages of CIA torture documents in a new book, gives his informed take on what W & co. wrought in the preceding decade:

Our highest government officials, up to and including President Bush, broke international and U.S. laws banning torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Worse, they made their subordinates in the military and civilian intelligence services break those laws for them.

When the men and women they asked to break those laws protested, knowing they could be prosecuted for torture, they pretended to rewrite the law. They commissioned legal opinions they said would shield those who carried out the abuses from being hauled into court, as the torture ban requires. “The law has been changed,” detainees around the world were told. “No rules apply.”

As they say, read the whole damn thing.

Apr 22

Press TV - Senior Iranian military officials say the country has successfully reverse-engineered an advanced U.S. spy drone that violated Iranian airspace in 2011, starting producing the UAV.

Commander of the Aerospace Division of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, said the country's experts have decoded the intelligence gathering system and memory hard discs of the RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone that was downed by Iran in December.

"This plane is seen as a national asset for us and we will not easily disclose our information about it. Yet, I provide four cues to let the Americans know the depth of our penetration into the intelligence systems and devices of this drone," Hajizadeh said.

He stated that the drone parts had been transferred to California for technical works in October 2010, adding that the drone was later transferred to Kandahar, Afghanistan, in November 2010 for a flight there.

The commander said that the drone had experienced some technical flaws in its Kandahar flight in November, but the U.S. experts failed to resolve the problems at the time.

Hajizadeh added that the RQ-170 was then sent back to an airfield near Los Angeles in December 2010 for tests on its censors and parts and had a number of test flights.

As a fourth cue to prove Iran's access to the drone's hidden memory, the commander mentioned that the spy drone's memory device has revealed that it had flown over al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan.

"Had we not accessed the plane's software and hard discs, we wouldn't have been able to achieve these facts," Hajizadeh said, reiterating that Iran's military experts are in full command of the drone and hold a good knowledge of its parts and programs.

Apr 8

The Guardian - In 2004, Fatima Bouchar and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, were detained en route to the UK, and rendered to Libya. This is the story of their imprisonment, and the trail of evidence that reveals the involvement of the British government

Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn't get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move.(they knew she was 4 1/2 months pregnant)

NYPD surveillance: 'It's ridiculous that they would come down to New Orleans' - As documents reveal the NYPD spied on liberal political groups, Jordan Flaherty tells how he was monitored in Louisiana.

NYPD Looks To Send New Officers Overseas - The department is trying to recruit people for its overseas operations.

After 9/11 I thought we spent million( maybe billions?) on intelligence and security so that everyone was on the same page. We were once again robbed:

Iran's U.N. Mission says an Iranian identified in an Associated Press story as being under surveillance by the New York Police Department and as a potential spy by the FBI was being illegally harassed and was not involved in spying

But neither the NYPD nor the FBI knew they were watching the same man, and officials were quoted as saying Hossein has since left the country.

The Stupid, It Burns

Zarari Khan | Islamabad | Mar 20

AP - A Pakistani parliamentary commission demanded Tuesday an end to American drone attacks inside the country and an apology for deadly U.S. airstrikes in November as part of a review of its near-severed relations with the United States.

The commission was tasked with reviewing ties with Washington after errant airstrikes four months ago killed 24 Pakistani soldiers and prompted Islamabad to close its borders to U.S. and NATO supply lines to neighboring Afghanistan.

The incident presented an opportunity for the army - furious at the Americans and under public pressure following the U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden last year that was seen in Pakistan as a violation of the country's sovereignty - to gain a negotiating advantage in its turbulent relationship with Washington.

American officials hope the oft-delayed review will lead to the reopening of the supply lines.

"The U.S. must review its footprints in Pakistan," commission head Raza Rabbani said, reading the recommendations. "This means the cessation of drone strikes inside Pakistan."

This demand could complicate efforts to rebuild the relationship. However, the commission didn't say the supply lines should be permanently closed, as many Pakistanis would like, but rather that the government should charge the U.S. and NATO more money for the privilege. read the rest

I have just skimmed the Executive Order that Pres. Obama issued on Friday, asserting the POTUS's control over national resources for defense preparedness purposes, and my first thought is that the context for updating this longstanding federal law now might be health care reform and infrastructure. In other words, repairing and/or replacing crumbling infrastructure, and having a unified, national system for ensuring that all Americans have access to affordable health care has a national security aspect to it -- a very strong one, in my opinion. With the Supreme Court set to hear arguments in the legal challenge to the health care mandate in the Affordable Care Act, this might be one prong in the legal strategy the Obama administration is preparing.

Glenn Greenwald | Mar 14 | SALON

Jeremy Scahill, The Nation‘s national security correspondent, is easily one of America’s best and most intrepid journalists. He spends his time in dangerous places in order to uncover what the U.S. Government is doing around the world. He often produces vital scoops that, during the Obama presidency, are — for reasons often recounted here — largely ignored by the American establishment media and both political parties. In July of last year, he returned from Mogadishu and documented the Obama administration’s maintenance and proxy operation of secret CIA-run prisons in Somalia of the type that caused so much controversy during the Bush administration and which Obama supporters like to claim the President ended, and last month he returned from tribal regions in Yemen and detailed how U.S. civilian-killing drone strikes (along with its support for Yemeni despots) are the single most important cause fueling Al Qaeda’s growth in that country. But his newest article – describing President Obama’s personal, direct role in ensuring the ongoing imprisonment of a Yemeni journalist – may be his most important one yet; even for those inured to the abuses of the Obama administration, it’s nothing short of infuriating.

read more at link

The Guardian has an article today about the leader of LulzSec, Hector Xavier Monsegur aka "Sabu", being an FBI informant since last August. It contains this curious passage regarding the 5 million Stratfor emails that were leaked to WikiLeaks:

A second document shows that Monsegur [Sabu] – styled this time as CW-1 – provided an FBI-owned computer to facilitate the release of 5m emails taken from US security consultancy Stratfor and which are now being published by WikiLeaks. That suggests the FBI may have had an inside track on discussions between Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and Anonymous, another hacking group, about the leaking of thousands of confidential emails and documents.

So a FBI computer was used to help the Stratfor leaks. It makes me wonder if the American intelligence community decided to let the private emails of a private intelligence company leak as some sort of warning to them.

As you probably know by now, a resolution condemning the tyranny of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was introduced into the Security Council of the United Nations this weekend. It had the backing of the United States and European Union but more important, the strong endorsement of the Arab League.

It was immediately vetoed by the Russians and Chinese. A curious development to be sure: Syria is not a thriving economy like Iran and does not make large purchases of arms from the Russians and Chinese like Iran.

Want to know what President Barack Obama will say to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu when they meet Monday? Obama tells us in his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg.

…our argument [to Prime Minister Netanyahu] is going to be that it is important for us to see if we can solve this thing permanently, as opposed to temporarily. And the only way, historically, that a country has ultimately decided not to get nuclear weapons without constant military intervention has been when they themselves take [nuclear weapons] off the table. That's what happened in Libya, that's what happened in South Africa. And we think that, without in any way being under an illusion about Iranian intentions, without in any way being naive about the nature of that regime, they are self-interested. They recognize that they are in a bad, bad place right now. It is possible for them to make a strategic calculation that, at minimum, pushes much further to the right whatever potential breakout capacity they may have, and that may turn out to be the best decision for Israel's security.

Nobody's posted this yet, but President Obama's interview with Jeffrey Goldberg is really important, with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's visit coming up on Monday.

There's a lot there. Doug Saunders, of the Globe and Mail, likened it to an onion or parfait - many layers, which is what I kept gasping at as I read it.

I'll probably have more to say about it later.

Glenn Greenwald | Feb 28 | SALON

In 2009, The New York Times‘ David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for his two-part series on the use by television networks of retired Generals posing as objective “analysts” at exactly the same time they were participating — unbeknownst to viewers — in a Pentagon propaganda program. Many were also plagued by undisclosed conflicts of interest whereby they had financial stakes in many of the policies they were pushing on-air. One of the prime offenders was Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who was not only a member of the Pentagon’s propaganda program, but also, according to Barstow’s second stand-alone article, had his own “Military-Industrial-Media Complex,” deeply invested in many of the very war policies he pushed and advocated while posing as an NBC “analyst”:
...skip
Apparently, not only does NBC continue to present McCaffrey to its viewers as some sort of objective analyst, but NBC News executives use him as some kind of private consultant and briefer on the news. On January 12, 2012, McCaffrey presented a seminar to roughly 20 NBC executives and producers — including NBC News President Steve Capus — entitled “Iran, Nukes & Oil: The Gulf Confrontation.” We’ve obtained the Power Point document McCaffrey prepared and distributed for his presentation, and in it, he all but predicts war with Iran within the next 90 days: one that is likely to be started by them. The first page of the breathlessly hawkish document is entitled “Iran & the Gulf: Creeping Toward War,” and the first sentence excitedly proclaims (click to enlarge):

continue reading at link

Scramble Is on to Find Deal for 16 Americans in Egypt
David D Kirkpatrick & Steven Lee Myers | Feb 25 | Cairo |NYT

American diplomats scrambled on Saturday to work out a deal to resolve the criminal charges against 16 Americans here on the eve of their scheduled trial in a case that has threatened to upend the 30-year alliance with Egypt.

As late as Saturday evening, United States officials said they still could not predict what would happen when the trial opens Sunday.

If the case is not resolved, Congress and the Obama administration have vowed to cut off the $1.55 billion in annual aid to Egypt, potentially rupturing the three-way alliance among Washington, Cairo and Jerusalem that has been a linchpin of regional stability.

The 16 Americans and 27 others face criminal charges of working for unlicensed nonprofit groups and accepting foreign money to operate them. Nine of the Americans were outside Egypt when the charges were filed, and Egypt has barred the remaining seven, including the son of the United States secretary of transportation, from leaving.

The seven Americans work for a pair of federally financed nonprofit groups with close ties to the Congressional leadership, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, which are chartered to promote democracy abroad. In court papers, Egyptian prosecutors accuse the groups of collaborating with the Central Intelligence Agency in a campaign to destabilize Egypt and manipulate its revolution for the benefit of the United States and Israel.
..
American officials dismiss Egypt’s allegations of subversive aims as political grandstanding playing to domestic anti-American sentiment. The officials say it is implausible that the United States would give about $15 million a year to have the two groups undermine the Egyptian state when it spends $1.3 billion a year to support the Egyptian military.

The secretive military system for prosecuting accused terrorists is a travesty, says the man who once ran it

‎"The U.S. Defense Department specializes in euphemism. “Limited kinetic action” is a polite way of saying “war,” and “collateral damage” does not sound as blunt as “dead children.” When I was chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay during the Bush administration, I was told not to say publicly that a detainee had “attempted suicide.” The government-approved term for the act was “self-injurious behavior.” I could not say “torture,” or as some called it, the “T-word.” Instead, I had to say “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
...
Before being elected to the presidency, Barack Obama condemned what he said were “flawed” Bush-era military commissions. He voted against the Military Commissions Act of 2006 when he was a member of the Senate and he argued that detainees accused of criminal conduct should be tried in federal courts or courts-martial, either of which he said would “demonstrate our commitment to the rule of law.” Six years later it appears all it takes to transform fatally flawed into fundamentally fine for Barack Obama is to tack a new word onto an old title to give it a euphemistic revival: now we have “reformed military commissions.”
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Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the sixth and current chief prosecutor for the military commissions, gave a talk to the New York City Bar Association last month. In it, he used the phrase “reformed military commissions” more than three dozen times. Apparently tacking the word “reformed” onto “military commissions” and using it over and over is supposed to erase a decade-long record of failure that has, as then-Sen. Obama said, tarnished “our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law.” --Morris Davis/SALON/2/7/12