In a session that just happened to fall on a day when media is 100% focused on the primary elections, CIA Chief Michael Hayden acknowledged finally that the agency has used waterboarding, though he would only admit to 3 instances (if you sense any doubt in my writing it’s entirely because it’s there). So a US agency has admitted to using an abhorrent torture favored by evil regimes throughout time.

Doesn’t it make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?

The US House of Representatives passed a bill outlawing waterboarding - and other ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’ Shortly afterwards, President George W. Bush threatened to veto it.

The House voted in favor of the bill just about along partisan lines. Many Republicans oppose it because they believe that it would make it difficult if not impossible to interrogate terrorism suspects. Lets, therefore, take a closer look at the bill: (more…)

If you’re going to read just one opinion on the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, read this one by Dennis Ross. Because it should be read in its entirity, I’m not summarizing it, except to cite his final paragraph:

Sadly, it’s now easier for Iran to proceed unimpeded with its nuclear plans. It is far less likely to face the economic (or potentially military) pressures that in 2003 might have persuaded those in the Iranian leadership that the costs of developing their nuclear capabilities were too high. Who in the Iranian elite will argue that or oppose Ahmadinejad’s approach to nukes now? No doubt, that is not what the authors of the NIE sought, but here poor statecraft has trumped our improved efforts at spycraft.

Tom Friedman has just returned from the Bahrain security conference, at which “all the buzz” was about the latest NIE on Iran. Friedman says that it left every Arab and European expert he spoke to “baffled” — “not in its conclusions, but by why those conclusions were framed in a way that is sure to reduce America’s leverage to negotiate with Tehran.”

In his New York Times op-ed, Friedman presents an interesting analogy: (more…)

I understand and respect the views of those who argue that torture — more specifically, waterboarding — is immoral and should never, under any circumstances whatsoever, be employed. Yes, torture is a form of immorality. But it is not the only form of immorality, and there are instances in which the forms conflict with each other.

Before dealing with the current issue — which has been brought into sharp focus by John Kiriakou’s interview on ABC News, let us look back some seventy years. As the war clouds gathered over Europe, pacifists were as devoted to avoiding war — or perhaps better said, to peace at any price — as are those who today affirm that torture should never be employed. While never representing the majority opinion in either the United States or England, pacifism was a force to be reckoned with in both countries.

(more…)

From ABC News, with my emphases [the complete transcript is here and here]:

A leader of the CIA team that captured the first major al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah, says subjecting him to waterboarding was torture but necessary.In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds. (more…)

Consider the following:

• The CIA’s erased tapes date from 2002 and show “enhanced interrogation techniques” — presumably waterboarding — being applied to Abu Zabaida, among others.

• Also in 2002, four members of Congress — including now Speaker of the House Pelosi — attended a secret meeting at which they were shown “a CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects.” Among the techniques was waterboarding, and among the detainees that received such treatment was Abu Zabaida.

Same year (2002), same interrogation technique (waterboarding), same detainee (Abu Zabaida). Could it be that the erased tapes are of the secret meeting that Pelosi and other members of Congress attended? If so, what a scandal it would make. (more…)

Only 18% of the American people believe that Iran has stopped its nuclear weapons program. Why? (more…)

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post about the NIE assessment. Bolton believes that the report is flawed and argues that it may be influenced by (partisan) politics. He is supported by the Wall Street Journal. TIME too implies that politics were involved…

This debate isn’t going away.

The New York Times reports that the CIA “will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency’s worst illegal abuses — the so-called ‘family jewels’ documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s.”

Furthermore, the documents “also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency’s opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of “unwitting” tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.”

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden explained (and warned): “Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA’s history.”

I do not know about you, but I for one intend to read these records the minute they are declassified and put on the Net. Especially after reading the following:

In anticipation of the CIA’s release, the National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government discussions of the abuses. Those documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called “skeletons” in the CIA’s closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts.

A New York Times article by reporter Seymour Hersh about the CIA’s infiltration of antiwar groups, published in December 1974, was “just the tip of the iceberg,” then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned Ford, according to a Jan. 3 memorandum of their conversation.

Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, “blood will flow,” saying, “For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of [Cuban President Fidel] Castro.” Kennedy was the attorney general from 1961 to 1964.

Worried that the disclosures could lead to criminal prosecutions, Kissinger added that “when the FBI has a hunting license into the CIA, this could end up worse for the country than Watergate,” the scandal that led to the fall of the Nixon administration the previous year.

It sounds so bad, it must be good.

Some of the skeletons:

· The confinement by the CIA of a Russian defector, suspected by the CIA as a possible “fake,” in Maryland and Virginia safe houses for two years, beginning in 1964. Colby speculated that this might be “a violation of the kidnapping laws.”

· The “very productive” 1963 wiretapping of two columnists — Robert Allen and Paul Scott — whose conversations included talks with 12 senators and six congressmen.

· Break-ins by the CIA’s office of security at the homes of one current and one former CIA official suspected of retaining classified documents.

· CIA-funded testing of American citizens, “including reactions to certain drugs.”

Yesterday, I published a post about the CIA holding children of terrorists prison. Today, something related:

The CIA ran secret prisons in Poland and Romania from 2003 to 2005 to interrogate detainees in its war on terror, European investigator Dick Marty said in a report released Friday.

The report, citing unnamed CIA sources, said top terror suspects Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were secretly held and interrogated in Poland, and that the “highest state authorities” in countries involved knew of the alleged detention centers…

“The secret detention facilities in Europe were run directly and exclusively by the CIA,” said the report. “While it is likely that very few people in the countries concerned, including in the governments themselves, knew of the existence of the centers, we have sufficient grounds to declare that the highest state authorities were aware of the CIA’s illegal activities on their territories.”

Poland and Romania hosted the prisons under a special post-9/11 CIA program to “kill, capture and detain” so-called high value terrorist suspects, wrote Marty, a Swiss senator investigating the alleged role of Council of Europe states in the CIA program.

Evidence of secret flights — at least 10 flights to Poland between 2002 and 2005 — show the pivotal role played by Poland and Romania as drop-off points, the report says.

“There is now enough evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA did exist in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania,” the report said.

I suggest that these countries, Poland and Romania, explain to the EU why they let the CIA run secret prisons on their territory. As everyone knows, the EU opposes this scheme (and rightfully so).

Making prisoners disappear; taking children prisoner; running secret prisons; sending prisoners to countries where they are tortured… I have to remind myself constantly that we’re not talking about the KGB, but about the CIA here.

Chris, at My Two Sense, comments: “This is a violation of so many conventions, rules of war, etc. that it is shocking.”

Children have become victims of the war on terror, according to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and four other human rights organizations. They describe, among other examples, the fate of Yusuf al-Khalid and Abed al-Khalid, sons of Al-Akadiabrein Sheikh Mohammed al-Khalid. They were arrested in Pakistan, in 2002, together with their mother, where they were interrogated: the interrogators asked questions about their father (who they couldn’t find). According to a fellow inmate, the two little boys will badly treated: sometimes they didn’t receive water and / or food. “They were mentally tortured, by letting ants and other animals crawl on their legs to scare them.”

In March 2003, after Sheikh Mohammed was arrested, were the two boys handed over to the CIA. It remains unclear whether the CIA was involved in earlier interrogations. Of course, the CIA denied torturing them back then:

“We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children,” said one official, “but we need to know as much about their father’s recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care.”

For those who are wondering about who Sheikh Mohammed is, he is the person who, not too long ago, admitted to be responsible for just about every terrorist attack in the last decade or so. He made this confession after being held in Gitmo for four years and after the CIA used his sons against him (from that 2003 article):

Their father, Mohammed, 37, is being interrogated at the Bagram US military base in Afghanistan. He is being held in solitary confinement and subjected to “stress and duress”-style interrogation techniques.

He has been told that his sons are being held and he is being encouraged to divulge future attacks against the West and talk about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

“He has said very little so far,” one CIA official said yesterday. “He sits in a trance-like state and recites verses from the Koran. But while he may claim to be a devout Muslim, we know he is fond of the Western-style fast life.

“His sons are important to him. The promise of their release and their return to Pakistan may be the psychological lever we need to break him.”

Trouw reports that, by now, the sons have been released. I am trying to find information about when they exactly were released. I am asking you to help me find more information about that: how long were they held? When were they released? I get the impression, from this sentence: “They arrested my kids intentionally. They are kids. They been arrested for four months they had been abused,” that they were being held for four months… at least. Again, can anyone help me find more information about that? How were they treated? Can the CIA get away with this?

You can read more about this at the Amnesty International website. Amnesty is concerned about 39 individuals who were taken prisoner by the US and have disappeared since then. Nothing has been heard about their whereabouts.

You can read the report here.

The US should have the moral highground here. Sadly, this is not so. When the CIA makes people disappear, when the CIA holds children to put pressure on their father… the CIA has lost the moral highground (and thus the US as well).

I do not quite understand why there is not a massive movement in the US to do something about this. Not only is it highly immoral, it is also incredibly bad for America’s reputation. Do you really expect Europeans to defend and to support you if you do not respect human rights? Do you expect us to defend and support you when you are holding and interrogating children? Do you expect us to defend and support you when you make people disappear like the KGB once did?

I’m a hawk, I’m a supporter of the US, but the US has to change its policies ASAP. This is highly unacceptable.

UPDATE
Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for linking to this post. Andrew comments:

I tend to think that even Bush’s CIA would not abuse children, apart from imprisoning them for the crimes of their father.

I tend to think the same.

On the other hand, once I also thought that Bush et al. would oppose taking children of terrorists prisoner, just so the CIA can pressure the father into a confession.

But I have learned the bad way that Bush and Cheney cannot be trusted with the humane tradition of American warfare. These children belong, like many others, in the black hole of the Bush-Cheney torture and detention regime, beyond the reach of the law, treaties or civilization. Just as Cheney likes it.

Exactly, and that is an incredbily sad thing.

To Andrew’s readers: if you want to help find out more about this, please send me an e-mail.

The New York Times reports that “a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.”

The psychologists and other specialists, commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board, make the case that more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has yet to create an elite corps of interrogators trained to glean secrets from terrorism suspects.

While billions are spent each year to upgrade satellites and other high-tech spy machinery, the experts say, interrogation methods — possibly the most important source of information on groups like Al Qaeda — are a hodgepodge that date from the 1950s, or are modeled on old Soviet practices.

Molded on old Soviet practices? Well, I am sure it will make many people proud to know that the US used the same interrogation ‘techniques’ as the Soviets did.

And guess what, torture does not work:

In a blistering lecture delivered last month, a former adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called “immoral” some interrogation tactics used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon.

But in meetings with intelligence officials and in a 325-page initial report completed in December, the researchers have pressed a more practical critique: there is little evidence, they say, that harsh methods produce the best intelligence.

“There’s an assumption that often passes for common sense that the more pain imposed on someone, the more likely they are to comply,” said Randy Borum, a psychologist at the University of South Florida who, like several of the study’s contributors, is a consultant for the Defense Department.

Good Lord, have we learned nothing from history? There were thousands of women who admitted to be witches back in the dark ages, after being tortured for hours, even days. The average person would admit to just about everything after being tortured, just to make the pain go away. At a certain moment a person would rather be killed, than endure torture for one minute longer.

It is simple: torture is immoral and “there is little evidence that harsh methods produce the best intelligence.” 1+1=2: no modern government should use torture (or use ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ which means exactly the same thing) against anyone. Whether the one being interrogated is suspected of being a murderer, a thief, or a terrorist: torture is never acceptable.

I find it amazing that this is actually subject of debate: even worse, Republican candidates proudly proclaim that the CIA should use “enhanced interrogation techniques” (read: torture) on terrorism suspects. When they do not (McCain), they are depicted as being weak (on terrorism/ national security).

Do Americans understand how badly this hurts their image abroad? I often wonder about that. This makes America look like the bad guy, even those who tend to support the US, will turn against the US on this subject.

More at Balloon Juice and Obsidian Wings.

Quite some on the right of the blogosphere argued that those who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity, did not really commit a crime, because she was not a covert agent at that moment. Bad news for them: the facts tell a different story.

An unclassified summary of outed CIA officer Valerie Plame’s employment history at the spy agency, disclosed for the first time today in a court filing by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, indicates that Plame was “covert” when her name became public in July 2003.

The summary is part of an attachment to Fitzgerald’s memorandum to the court supporting his recommendation that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former top aide, spend 2-1/2 to 3 years in prison for obstructing the CIA leak investigation…

The unclassified summary of Plame’s employment with the CIA at the time that syndicated columnist Robert Novak published her name on July 14, 2003 says, “Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA employee for who the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.”

Plame worked as an operations officer in the Directorate of Operations and was assigned to the Counterproliferation Division (CPD) in January 2002 at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The employment history indicates that while she was assigned to CPD, Plame, “engaged in temporary duty travel overseas on official business.” The report says, “she traveled at least seven times to more than ten times.” When overseas Plame traveled undercover, “sometimes in true name and sometimes in alias — but always using cover — whether official or non-official (NOC) — with no ostensible relationship to the CIA.”

It is amazing that quite some conservatives actually defended Libby for such a long time. Everything has become a partisan issue. The result: a covert agent has her identity blown.

Nice work.

Perhaps it is time for the “pardon Libby” crowd to shut up?

It seems that the CIA foresaw what the results of overthrowing Saddam Hussein could (would) be. Two assessments particularly were right-on:

In a move sure to raise even more questions about the decision to go to war with Iraq, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will on Friday release selected portions of pre-war intelligence in which the CIA warned the administration of the risk and consequences of a conflict in the Middle East…

In January 2003, two months before the invasion, the intelligence community’s think tank — the National Intelligence Council — issued an assessment warning that after Saddam was toppled, there was “a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other and that rogue Saddam loyalists would wage guerilla warfare either by themselves or in alliance with terrorists.”

It also warned that “many angry young recruits” would fuel the rank of Islamic extremists and “Iraqi political culture is so embued with mores (opposed) to the democratic experience … that it may resist the most rigorous and prolonged democratic tutorials.”…

A second assessment weeks before the invasion warned that the war also could be “exploited by terrorists and extremists outside Iraq.”

The same assessment added, “Iraqi patience with an extended U.S. presence after an overwhelming victory would be short,” and said “humanitarian conditions in many parts of Iraq would probably not understand that the Coalition wartime logistic pipeline would require time to reorient its mission to humanitarian aid.”

Well, they were certainly wrong about the WMDs but they were certainly right about the situation in post-war Iraq. Bush et al. should have paid as much attention to these assessments as they paid to Tenet’s infamous “slam dunk” comment.

More at The Impolitic (Jim Martin).

Well… it was a covert operation…

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a “nonlethal presidential finding” that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran’s currency and international financial transactions…

The sources say the CIA developed the covert plan over the last year and received approval from White House officials and other officials in the intelligence community.

Officials say the covert plan is designed to pressure Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment program and end aid to insurgents in Iraq.

According to The Blotter Bush hopes that the covert action will be successful so that the US does not need to use force against Iran.

Marc Schulman wonders whether the leak was intention (ordered by Bush et al. as to increase the pressure on Ahmadinejad.

Quite some conservative bloggers reacted with anger (to the article at The Blotter):
- Kim Priestap at Wizbang: “Prediction: at some point, the nutroots will accuse Cheney of ordering a member of his staff to leak the President’s secret covert action to ABC in order to force the military strikes that Bush overruled.”

- Hot Air: “whoever’s trying to undermine it at the CIA clearly wants to make sure it’s well and fully out before things get going.”

- Ed Morrissey: “In fact, ABC reports that Dick Cheney preferred the military option, but that Bush overruled him in favor of the covert action instead. As I have written repeatedly here, a military strike is a lousy choice given the terrain, battleground, and options for targets in Iran as well as the political situation on the ground.

Thanks to the loose lips at Langley and ABC, that option may have to go back to the top of the list.”

I am, myself, a bit more careful than especially Ed Morrissey: it seems to me that this could very well have been leaked intentionally by the Bush administration in an effort to increase the pressure on Iran. It could, of course, have been a ‘true’ leak, but I don’t think we should jump to conclusions.

In any case: it’s good to see it confirmed that the US is doing something about the Iranian problem. Force should, if necessary, be used, but, for now, it’s not necessary. If covert operations can achieve what we in the West want to achieve, namely to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, great.

Richard Perle at the Washington Post: “How the CIA Failed America”

George Tenet sets the stage in his memoir by recalling a conversation he claims to have had with me on Sept. 12, 2001: “As I walked beneath the awning that leads to the West Wing[, I] saw Richard Perle exiting the building just as I was about to enter. . . . Perle turned to me and said, ‘Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.’ I looked back at Perle and thought: Who has [he] been meeting with in the White House so early in the morning on today of all days?”

But I was in Europe on Sept. 12, 2001, unable to get a return flight to Washington, and I did not tell Tenet that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, not then, not ever. That should have been the end of the story: a faulty recollection, perhaps attributing to me something he may have heard elsewhere, an honest mistake.

So I was surprised when, having been made aware of his error, Tenet reasserted his claim, saying: “So I may have been off on the day, but I’m not off on what he said and what he believed.”

More:

Understandably anxious to counter the myth that we went into Iraq on the basis of his agency’s faulty intelligence, Tenet seeks to substitute another myth: that the decision to remove Saddam Hussein resulted from the nefarious influence of the vice president and a cabal of neoconservative intellectuals. To advance that idea, a theme of his book, he has attributed to me, and to others, statements that were never made.

Careful readers will see at once that what Tenet calls “corroboration” is nothing of the sort. But Tenet is not a careful reader — a serious deficiency in a CIA director and a catastrophe for an intelligence organization. Indeed, sloppy analysis and imprecision with evidence got Tenet and the rest of us stuck in a credibility gap that continues to damage our foreign policy.

For years the American intelligence establishment has failed to show meticulous regard for the facts that are essential to its mission. The CIA’s assessment that Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons was only the most recent damaging example. The president, the vice president, Congress and others relied on intelligence produced by Tenet’s CIA — and repeated CIA findings that never should have been presented as fact.

There is more, so be sure to read the whole thing.

The clash of the giants?

They are all pointing the blaming finger to each other. It would be nice if someone, anyone, would take responsibility for a change.

The CIA is far from perfect. It has to be improved. It has to take a good, critical, intense look at itself, but Perle, whether he likes it or not, played an important role in the lead-up to the Iraq war as well and he should share in the responsibility for the debacle.

One of the most interesting and novel, websites around, Watching America, has a very interesting article up by Rolando Sarmiento Ricart, for the Adelante newspaper (Cuban), translated by Douglas Myles Rasmussen.

Rasmussen’s introduction:

Has the Bush Administration just released a known terrorist who had a hand in - among other things - the death of John F. Kennedy and the destruction of a passenger aircraft with 73 people aboard? According to this article from Cuba’s state-controlled Adelante, Luis Posada Carriles, who has just been set loose in Miami, is just such a man.

From the article… Read more at The Moderate Voice.

One of America’s best columnists, in my opinion, David Ignatius wrote a fascinating column for today’s Washington Post. The subject? The assassination of U.S. President, John F. Kennedy. Major players: the KGB, the CIA, and spies.

Roll back the tape to January 1964: America is still reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and investigators don’t know what to make of the fact that the apparent assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, lived for three years in the Soviet Union. Did the Russians have any role in JFK’s death?

Then a KGB defector named Yuri Nosenko surfaces in Geneva and tells his CIA handlers that he knows the Soviets had nothing to do with Oswald. How is Nosenko so sure? Because he handled Oswald’s KGB file, and he knows the spy service had never considered dealing with him.

For many spy buffs, the Nosenko story has always seemed too good to be true. How convenient that he defected at the very moment the KGB’s chiefs were eager to reassure the Warren Commission about Oswald’s sojourn in Russia. What’s more, Nosenko brought other goodies that on close examination were also suspicious — information that seemed intended to divert the CIA’s attention from the possibility that its codes had been broken and its inner sanctum penetrated.

The Nosenko case is one of the gnarly puzzles of Cold War history. It vexed the CIA’s fabled counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, to the end of his days. And it has titillated a generation of novelists and screenwriters — most recently providing the background for Robert De Niro’s sinuous spy film “The Good Shepherd.”

Now the CIA case officer who initially handled Nosenko, Tennent H. Bagley, has written his own account. And it is a stunner. It’s impossible to read this book without developing doubts about Nosenko’s bona fides. Many readers will conclude that Angleton was right all along — that Nosenko was a phony, sent by the KGB to deceive a gullible CIA.

Read David’s entire column at The Washington Post.

The cold war, with its conspiracies, spies, traitors, defectors, etc. etc. will fascinate quite some generations to come.

If Nosenko lied, why? “What larger purpose did the deception serve?” Was it to protect “an early mole inside the CIA”? Or…?

The Sunday Times has very, very interesting news (if true of course): the general who defected in Turkey a couple of days ago, Ali Reza Asgari, spied on Iran since 2003 when he left the country for a business trip and was recruited by ‘an’ intelligence agency. The agency? Most likely the Mossad, but it could also be a different agency.

He fled because his cover was about to be ‘blown’: “the escape took several months to arrange. At least 10 close members of his family had to flee the country.” He’s currently believed “to be undergoing debriefing at a Nato base in Germany.” This could be a tremenous source of information, especially considering that “Asgari is said to have carried with him documents disclosing Iran’s links to terrorists in the Middle East.” It is, sadly, “not thought that he had details of the country’s nuclear programme.”

Is the article correct? Did Asgeri spy on Iran (for the Mossad)? Nobody can say for sure right now (well, no bloggers or journalists at least), but, it seems to be quite possible, even likely. Ed Morrissey has a good post up:

Asgari must have provided a wealth of information to his handling agency, whose identity remains unclear. The Times suspects the Mossad, perhaps with a more acceptable (to an Iranian) Western intel agency as a middleman. Asgari might not have information on the nuclear-weapons program, but he has plenty of data on Iranian support for terrorism, especially Hezbollah, and probably good data on other weapons systems and unit dispositions for the Revolutionary Guard. No one has mentioned this yet, but an officer at that level of the intelligence service might also have some information on crypto, which would be a devastating blow to operational security for Iranian military and intelligence agencies.

This is not just ‘big’, this is huge. As Ed also points out, this is obviously very embarrassing to Tehran: an important figure not only defected… he spied on Iran… perhaps even for the, of all agencies, Israeli Mossad. The arch-enemy of the Mullahs.

I have to admit that this amuses me.

Anyway, the question now is what the West / Israel will do with the information Asgari will give. Will it be used to put pressure on Iran behind closed doors, or will, for instance the Bush administration, make some information about how Iran is sponsoring terrorism public? And how will Iran react? Will the Mullahs compromize? And… will the West / Israel be able to hurt not just Iran but terrorist organizations badly?

It’s a fascinating development.

The Telegraph reports that the C.I.A. is intensifying its efforts to capture or kill Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. He is believed to hide in Pakistan, near the border with his former safe haven Afghanistan. Al Qaeda is re-establishing itself, it’s building terrorist training camps in Pakistan.

So, Dick Cheney has put pressure on Musharraf to allow the U.S. to go into Pakistan more to try to get to Bin Laden. “Stephen Kappes, deputy director of the CIA”, gave Musharraf “satellite photographs and details of communications intercepts” in order to convince him of cooperating. It seems to have worked.

It’s now 5.5 years ago that Osama Bin Laden attacked America - and the entire free world. He is still safe. He is still alive. His organization is regaining strength, not just in Pakistan but also in Afghanistan. If those facts aren’t a source of inspiration and, yes, encouragement for terrorists worldwide, I don’t know what is. He has to serve as an example: that terrorists, no matter how rich they are, no matter how well they hide, will be hunted down and held responsible for their crimes.
(more…)

Dafna Linzer reports for the Washington Post that a U.S. intelligence official has said that missing Iranian General Asgari is willingly cooperating with Western intelligence agencies.

Great news - if this is not a defection I don’t know what is. That being said, it seems that he wasn’t involved in Iran’s nuclear program… he was however, deeply involved in building up Hezbollah.

The Raw Story reports that British and Polish intelligence officials have admitted that there was a secret “interrogation and short-term detention facility for suspected terrorists within a Polish intelligence training school with the explicit approval of British and US authorities.”

The Raw Story claims to have seen a memo which indicates that British “Prime Minister Tony Blair told Poland’s then-Prime Minister Leszek Miller to keep the information secret, even from his own government.”
(more…)