Archive for the 'CIA' Category

He seems nice:

Former Senior Intelligence Service officer at the CIA, Marc Polymeropoulos published a Sunday piece declaring that that techniques once used to fight radical Islam should be turned against the against the right-wing in America.

Polymeropoulos’ piece for NBC News Think warned that propagandists, whether Islamic terrorists or Republicans, should be subject to counterterrorism and counterradicalization techniques.

“I worked in counterterrorism operations for nearly my entire career at the CIA before retiring in 2019. The battle we engaged in with international terrorist groups like Al Qaeda wasn’t just with their legions of foot soldiers but with their highly effective propaganda arms as well,” he wrote. “The U.S. and our allies considered those propagandists fundamental cogs in a terror group’s machinery, and just as culpable as any other terrorist. So we held them accountable when innocent civilians were killed.”

Polymeropoulos suggested that the attack of Paul Pelosi was evidence that the American government needs to take a firmer approach to its own citizenry.

“Lone wolves are a thorn for domestic U.S. law enforcement as well, as we saw last week when a man not affiliated with any known group but immersed in right-wing propaganda attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,” he wrote. “While the authorities have taken appropriate action against him, there are few signs that the government is taking the big-picture approach needed to combat the violence-inducing propaganda behind his crime.”

He appeared to lament that the U.S. Constitution gives American citizens more rights than foreign enemies.

“The Constitution confers certain free-speech protections for extremist propaganda in the U.S. that prevent authorities from exactly replicating our foreign counterterrorism strategy here at home. But there are important lessons we can and should apply,” he said. “For one thing, we can exercise free speech to proclaim that the normalization of violence against politicians is dangerous and unacceptable. Some violent rhetoric might not be illegal, but it is all morally repugnant.”

Polymeropoulos also seemed to equivocate demonizing an opposing politician with calling for violence against them.

“To start with, we need to clearly identify what crosses the line into the realm of dangerous rhetoric. That means calling out those in the right-wing ecosphere who for years have demonized, and at times even promoted and encouraged, attacks on Pelosi,” he claimed.

There are more bizarre, rambling, semi-coherent, partially partisan political ravings at the source. He seems to have spent just a little too much time inside the intel machine. All a hammer sees, after all, are nails.

Via WoG.

I was watching “13 Hours” again a few nights ago, and recalled when Delta showed up at the airport in Tripoli, and when asked where Delta was, one of them said, “We’re it, brother.”  There were two of them.

Now, I won’t rehearse the air power assets that could have been brought to bear from Sigonella, the lies that surrounded the event from the administration, the pre-planned execution of the attack (which involved combined arms, known coordinates, fighter assets in position, etc.).  Nor will I rehearse what my own readers pointed out about these things, nor the fact that General Ham went quietly into the night without saying so much as a word (probably because of an NDA).

But I will observe something I didn’t know about Delta that night at the airport (and their actions in Benghazi).  First, they were there for document destruction, and they did that to the best of their abilities.  But they also assisted the fighting, and did so heroically as did the other men in that engagement.

But did you know this?  One of the Delta operators was a Marine.

Jolly, who declined a request for an interview, would ultimately be awarded the Navy Cross for his heroism there. The soldier with him, Master Sgt. David Halbruner, received the Army’s Distinguished Service Cross. The valor awards are exceeded only by the Medal of Honor.

Little has been known about the Jolly’s actions in Benghazi. There was no public ceremony when he received his valor award and, until recently, his name has not been publicly tied to the mission in media reports.

His hometown paper in North Carolina, the Wilkes Journal-Patriot, recently reported that the 36-year-old who’d graduated from high school about 90 miles north of Charlotte was the Marine who’d gone above and beyond to save other Americans. Jolly recently retired as a master sergeant.

According to testimony, public documents and the person familiar with his actions, Jolly was calm in the face of deadly chaos. He and Halbruner are credited with saving numerous lives that day.

With a rifle strapped to his back amid an onslaught of mortars and machine-gun fire, Jolly tended to the wounded, at one point throwing a man onto his back and shuffling him down a ladder amid a barrage of enemy fire. He helped some get back into the fight and provided vital care to others with life-threatening injuries.

Here’s how then-Gunnery Sgt. Jolly helped get other Americans to safety during a situation that caused a years-long political firestorm thousands of miles away in Washington, DC.

Jolly, an infantry assault Marine, was assigned to a Delta Force detachment in Libya at the time of the Benghazi attack. It’s rare, though not unheard of, for Marines to join the elite Army special-operations teams.

The Marine had deployed to Iraq twice before joining the secretive counterterrorism force, spending about five years carrying out clandestine missions before the Benghazi attack and another five after, according to information about his career obtained by Military.com.

He racked up more than a dozen total deployments with Delta Force.

The Navy Cross Jolly received for his actions in Benghazi was his fourth valor award. He has two Bronze Stars with combat “V” devices – one of which he earned for undisclosed reasons during his time with Delta Force, and a second from a 2004-2005 deployment to Ramadi, Iraq.

Jolly also earned a Navy Commendation Medal with combat distinguishing device and a Purple Heart for injuries sustained during that deployment.

On the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Jolly was about 600 miles away from Benghazi in Tripoli – roughly the same distance between Chicago and Washington, DC. Since Jolly and Halbruner were some of the only troops in-country, the operation was coordinated not by US Africa Command, but the CIA.

Team Tripoli, made up of Jolly, Halbruner and five others, arrived in Benghazi at about 1:30 a.m. That was about four hours after the attack began and two since Ambassador Christopher J. Stevens had last been seen alive.

The team was led by Glen Doherty, a Global Response Staff (GRS) security officer and former Navy SEAL, who was later killed. He was Team Tripoli’s medic.

The plan, according to the person familiar with the mission, was to leave the airport and head to the hospital, where they believed Stevens was being treated. When they found out Stevens had died, the first ambassador to be killed in the line of duty since 1979, the team headed to the consulate to bolster the diplomatic security personnel and GRS, a group of private military contractors who were fending off the attackers.

“It could’ve gone really, really bad,” said the source familiar with the mission. “It could’ve become 30 American hostages in North Africa. There were seven shooters going in to protect people who don’t shoot for a living.”

By the time they arrived, Sean Smith, a State Department foreign service officer, had also died. It was still dark, just after 5 a.m., according to a congressional timeline of the attack. Within minutes, the first mortar hit.

The attacks continued, with one witness estimating there were as many as 100 insurgents spotted surrounding their location in 20- or 30-man groups. It was a skilled enemy, one of the troops there later told members of Congress.

“It’s not easy … to shoot inside the city and get something on the target within two shots – that’s difficult,” the witness testified. “I would say they were definitely a trained mortar team or had been trained to do something similar to that.”

“I was kind of surprised,” the service member added. “… It was unusual.”

They were there a matter of hours, but at times witnesses said the team feared they wouldn’t make it out alive. It began to “rain down on us,” one of them told lawmakers.

”I really believe that this attack was planned,” the witness said. “The accuracy with which the mortars hit us was too good for any regular revolutionaries.”

In total, six 81-millimeter mortars assaulted the annex within a minute and 13 seconds, a congressional report on the attack states. Doherty and Tyrone Woods, another former SEAL with the GRS, didn’t survive.

[ … ]

Jolly and Halbruner were determined to save them. Amid the fight, they were tying tourniquets to the men’s bodies.

Ubben is alive because Jolly helped move him from the rooftop to a building where diplomatic personnel were hunkered down. Gregory Hicks, who became the acting chief of mission after Stevens died, later described how the gunny did it during a congressional hearing.

“One guy … full of combat gear climbed up [to the roof], strapped David Ubben, who is a large man, to his back and carried him down the ladder, saved him,” Hicks said.

Jolly and Halbruner also went back out to the rooftop to recover the bodies of the fallen.

“They didn’t know whether any more mortars were going to come in. The accuracy was terribly precise,” Hicks said. “… They climbed up on the roof, and they carried Glen’s body and Tyrone’s body down.”

It was for Jolly’s “valorous actions, dedication to duty and willingness to place himself in harm’s way” to save numerous unarmed Americans’ lives that he earned the Navy Cross, according to his citation.

I’m not so sure about that last part.  In the movie there’s a lot made of the fact that the “D boys” threw the bodies off the roof because there wasn’t time to do it any other way and the enemy was still shooting.

Anyway, We Are The Mighty has coverage as well, as does Wilkes Journal-Patriot and Military.com.

In addition to Tate Jolly, David Halbruner was there for Delta.  I can’t find any information on him.

I feel that there’s a whole lot of information I still don’t know about this engagement, and it would be good one day to interview participants in the event, as well as construct a detailed time line of everything that happened.

One thing is for sure.  We’ll never hear the full truth from FedGov.

Kaiserworks had this to say.

Time to keep eyes open for Agent Provocateurs in the pro 2A rallies or an incident directed at an anti-2A Politician. I can tell you right now that when you see ‘breaking news’ and the badged orcs kitted up responding to some crisis, it will not be from our side. I implore those at the rallies, that if they see anyone smelling of an undercover Fed, contractor or even someone off their meds, be vocal and notify all those around you to the Trojan horse in your midst. Early warning and exposure may be the only thing that can derail a psyop or blackhat operation in progress.

It’s really a shame we are where we are, but this is a recurring theme.  See this reddit/firearms discussion thread.

As the grassroots 2A Sanctuary movement continues to gain momentum and traction in Virginia, what do you think the odds are that a conveniently timed and horrific mass shooting event will occur in VA within the next month?

[ … ]

My theory is “they” will infiltrate a crazy person into being deputized, who will then shoot up a school or something using their new deputy status to get into the property with a gun.

The black hats may be CIA, they may be Dyncorps, they may be three or four tiers deep and never known, completely removed from those who sent them on their nefarious mission.  But with the increased momentum of the 2A rights movement in Virginia, the soccer moms from Alexandria need some ideological and emotional support.

That’s how the theory goes, anyway.  And I’m not going to say that it’s wrong, just that it is so very difficult to collect meaningful and actionable facts after such events, and this is all likely by design.  The .gov hides everything behind the cloud of “ongoing investigation,” and then the MSM gets involved printing inaccurate and incorrect crap.

So here’s a quick note to the black hats.  Upon any such event, 2A supporters will blame it all on you.  Just realize that’s where we are.

Got it?  Are we clear?  And this post is now indexed and ready for linking in the future.

NextGov:

The FBI still has not assessed whether its facial recognition systems meet privacy and accuracy standards nearly three years after a congressional watchdog—the Government Accountability Office—raised multiple concerns about the bureau’s use of the tech.

Since 2015, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have used the Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System, which uses facial recognition software to link potential suspects to crimes, pulling from a database of more than 30 million mugshots and other photos.

In May 2016, the Government Accountability Office recommended the FBI establish checks to ensure the software adhered to the Justice Department’s privacy and accuracy standards, but according to a report published Wednesday, the bureau has yet to implement any of the six proposed policy changes.

And they won’t.  If you have a Facebook account or a federal compliant driver’s license, you’ve already given them your photograph.

On a related note, do you recall this scene from Sicario, where he says, “The CIA can’t operate within U.S. borders without a domestic agency attached?”

So how does the FBI, local law enforcement, state law enforcement, and the CIA all cooperate “within the law?”  This may not be a surprise to my readers, but it’s called the JTTF, and the field implementation involves a network of cameras that would put the U.K. to shame, all managed out of field offices called “Fusion Centers.”

It’s not the stuff of conspiracy theory.  It’s real, today, right now, and they track you everywhere you go.

Tell me if you would your interest in these subjects.

I’ll give you equal time to explain why you’re interested in these subjects.  Is that a deal?

Randolph Scott concerning the CIA:

I would choose to get rid of the agency. As the pricks walk out the door arrest every single one of them, everyone including pissy secretaries, readers, do nothings, mail clerks, janitors, every single living human being even remotely associated with that agency. Hold them all in jail and question every single one of them and if anyone is implicated in a seditious, treasonous or criminal offense prosecute and complete the execution by public hanging. Next burn the buildings down and grind the rubble to dust.

That is how you drain the swamp. When this is done move on to the next 3 letter agency.

PJM:

… the spooks are warning Pompeo not to get too uppity in draining the John Brennan swamp. The last pol who tried to grapple with the Agency was Porter Goss, and look what happened to him.

Hence, all the more reason that swamp must be drained.  Off hand, I’d say firing every last one of them and restaffing with new personnel would be a good start.

The CIA is filled with ne’er-do-wells, statists, self-aggrandizing control freaks and criminals.  Get rid of them, or get rid of the agency.  They are nothing more than an organ of state control anyway.

Remember when I said this?

Here is something else.  Since some of the malware is stolen from Russia, no one can ever, ever again trust the CIA when they say something like “this malware or hacking attack has a known Russian [or any other country for that matter] signature.”  Never.  Not that I ever trusted the CIA anyway.

NYT:

The Justice Department charged two Russian intelligence officers on Wednesday with directing a sweeping criminal conspiracy that stole data on 500 million Yahoo accounts in 2014, deepening the rift between American and Russian authorities on cybersecurity.

The Russian government used the information obtained by the intelligence officers and two other men to spy on a range of targets, from White House and military officials to executives at banks, two American cloud computing companies, an airline and even a gambling regulator in Nevada, according to an indictment. The stolen data was also used to spy on Russian government officials and business executives, federal prosecutors said.

Russians have been accused of other cyberattacks on the United States — most notably the theft of emails last year from the Democratic National Committee. But the Yahoo case is the first time that federal prosecutors have brought cybercrime charges against Russian intelligence officials, according to the Justice Department.

Particularly galling to American investigators was that the two Russian intelligence agents they say directed the scheme, Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev and Igor Anatolyevich Sushchin, worked for an arm of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., that is supposed to help foreign intelligence agencies catch cybercriminals. Instead, the officials helped the hackers avoid detection.

I don’t believe you.  See how that works?

It’s called Vault 7, concerning the CIA hacking tools.  If you haven’t taken the time to read through it, you should.  I’m going to link, paste some of the content, and comment on an article at NRO today concerning this release, but before I do, you really need this reddit discussion thread as an antidote to the jingoistic silliness in the article.  There are other articles out there, but they pale in comparison to the stupidity of this one at NRO.

According to press reports, WikiLeaks today released thousands of highly classified CIA documents on methods the CIA allegedly is using to conduct cyber warfare. If these documents are legitimate, this illegal release will ruin cyber programs worth billions of dollars that the CIA was using to do battle with America’s enemies, especially terrorist groups.

The CIA officer who took the law into his or her hands to release this material justified this release by claiming this data “urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency.” The source also said he or she “wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.”

What nonsense. If the traitor truly believed this program violated U.S. law or endangered the privacy rights of America, there are numerous legal avenues he or she could have used, including the CIA inspector general and the House and Senate intelligence committees. CIA officers take an oath to protect classified national-security information. Such a massive illegal disclosure in violation of the CIA secrecy oath is not an act of courage or whistleblowing, it was “a Snowden” — an act of cowardice by a disgruntled individual who never should have been hired by the CIA.

The only nonsense is in this article.  I’ve copied and pasted enough now.  If you read any more, you’re head is liable to explode due to the overpressure from flow of stupidity.

So let’s rehearse what we do know, not what we can posture and preen about.  First of all, Edward Snowden told us about illegal surveillance being conducted on Americans.  Let’s note that again.  What the NSA was doing when Snowden made his revelations was illegal, and they’re still doing it.  There is absolutely no statutory basis for what they’re doing.

Next, Edward Snowden would be charged with crimes if he were to return to the U.S.  If he had taken this information to the Senate or House, it would have been pushed off to a committee, hidden, and nothing done about it, right after Snowden was arrested.  We know that for a fact because to this date, nothing whatsoever has been done about Snowden’s revelations.  The Senate and House are all compromised in “Brownstone operations” (and we’ll rehearse that in a moment).

What Wikileaks revealed today was that not only is the NSA doing it, but the CIA is doing it as well, and not only that, they’re possibly doing it better.  And no, this isn’t restricted to overseas targets or terrorists, it’s being used on literally anyone and everyone they want to target.  We also know that there is absolutely no statutory basis or justification for what the CIA is doing.  None.

Next, consider what the CIA is doing.  They are quite literally buying the vulnerabilities in U.S.-made software.  They are paying money to keep the vulnerabilities in software and hardware in order to exploit those weaknesses.  One more time so you get the point.  They are creating and buying zero-day exploits for systems and of course refraining from telling the manufacturers of those devices.  This is irresponsible and dangerous to the point of being criminal.  It isn’t negligent, it’s intentionally criminal.

This lends itself to fraud, abuse, extortion, potential convictions in a courtroom with the use of illegally obtained material, material that violates the Fourth Amendment to the constitution.  Here is something else.  Since some of the malware is stolen from Russia, no one can ever, ever again trust the CIA when they say something like “this malware or hacking attack has a known Russian [or any other country for that matter] signature.”  Never.  Not that I ever trusted the CIA anyway.

We would all love to live in a country in which we know with certainty that the men and women in responsible charge of the nation’s international security target only the known enemies of state, i.e., foreign enemies.  But that’s not reality, and only a fool or simpleton believes things like that.  We know that this lust for knowledge, this consuming drive for power, is emblematic of the fall in Genesis, where they wanted to be like God.  Statism is a wicked religion, and jingoism is its bread and butter.

So why would this writer, who wrote the same thing at Center For Security Policy, weigh in with such an article as this?  Why would he beclown himself in this way?  I can think of only two reasons.  The first is that he really doesn’t understand the nature of the deep state.

No, I’m not talking about the deep state in the way Bill Kristol talks about the deep state, with utter ignorance of the subject.  I mean the true nature of the deep state.  CIA, DynCorp (former SpecOps who handles the military operations of the CIA), the State Department, The Clinton Foundation, The Clinton Global Initiative, some FBI (e.g., Andrew McCabe and others), some generals (e.g., Petraeus), and other actors in the corporate world, have participated in nation-toppling in North Africa and the Middle East for the last ten or more years, going after oil, money, precious metals, weapons, human organs and human trafficking (read here child trafficking).

Their bread and butter for extortion is “Brownstone operations,” and their military bread and butter in North Africa has been coupling with the Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow countries and destabilize entire regions.  Of course, money from George Soros came in quite handy.  If this writer doesn’t know about George Webb on YouTube (who is being assisted by FBI by his own admission), the Reddit discussion threads, the Voat discussion threads, and if this writer doesn’t know about “FBIAnon” and “DHS Insider” who is assisting some of these citizen investigations, then the writer is incompetent and should be fired.

If he worked for the CIA all these years and yet doesn’t know about the current war within the IC, then he is a buffoon.  On the other hand, if he does know about all of this, and if he does understand that both the NSA and CIA are engaging in illegal surveillance against American citizens, and yet he supports these programs anyway, then he is a traitor.  The second possibility is darker than the first.

Either way, the MSM is chock full of articles and commentaries today on this subject, and amusingly none of the articles display any significant degree of indignation.  When Nixon’s men broke into Watergate, the whole nation was outraged (except for Lynyrd Skynyrd).  Today, everyone is being recorded, every text message is being sent to storage from one of a few main internet nodes, every phone call is being recorded, and every penny made is being cataloged by the U.S. government.  And no one is batting an eyelid.

It’s a sad commentary on the state of affairs, a state that would have sickened our founders and caused rebellion at one tenth of what we’ve witnessed.  Our founding fathers would have already burned Washington, D.C. to the ground.  The war of independence was started over taxes and gun control.  The saddest part is that nothing is likely to happen as a result of the revelations today.  This too will pass, I predict, just like Snowden’s revelations.

John Jay has related thoughts.  WRSA also links a good video.

News from the rectum of America.

Some congressional Republicans were quick to agree Thursday with Democrats calling for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election, following leaks and media reports that Sessions met with Moscow’s ambassador twice last year.

The allegations, leaked from intelligence sources, were first reported by The Washington Post.

“I have not met with any Russians at any time to discuss any political campaign,” Sessions said Wednesday evening when confronted with the allegations. “And those remarks are unbelievable to me and are false. I don’t have anything else to say about that.”

A Sessions spokesperson elaborated on why Sessions had been truthful.

“He was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign — not about meetings he took as a senator and a member of the Armed Services Committee,” Sessions spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores explained.

In January, Sessions was asked by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) for answers to written questions, including if he had “been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after Election Day?” The attorney general was not asked if he had been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government for any reason during the entire course of the year.

Nevertheless, a number of Republicans were quick to give in to the media narrative.

During a town hall with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on CNN Wednesday evening, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) said that if Sessions had spoken with the Russian ambassador, “then for sure you need a special prosecutor.”

Graham did later call demands for Sessions’ resignation “crazy” in a series of Thursday tweets, but added “Sessions needs to explain his contacts with the Russian ambassador during his service as a Senator – that’s appropriate.”

“AG Sessions should clarify his testimony and recuse himself,” House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) tweeted early on Thursday.

“I think, the trust of the American people, you recuse yourself in these situations,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Thursday morning.

McCarthy, in a later appearance on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” backtracked and said he wasn’t calling on Sessions to recuse himself.

“I’m not calling on [Sessions] to recuse himself,” McCarthy said. “It’s amazing how people spin things so quickly.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) joined in during an appearance on NPR on Thursday morning. “It is potentially the case that there is going to be Justice Department recommendations or referrals based on anything regarding the campaign, he said. “Depending on what more we learn about these meetings, it could very well be that the attorney general, in the interest of fairness and in his best interest, should potentially ask someone else to step in and play that role.”

[ … ]

Not every Republican declined to defend Sessions, however.

“What we are seeing is a lot of political theater,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said on “Morning Joe.”

“This morning, everyone is in high dudgeon about the meeting,” Cruz continued. “The underlying meeting is a nothing burger. It’s what senators do every day. Meeting with foreign ambassadors, that’s part of the job,” he said.

“I think everyone is getting all worked up because it’s a chance to beat up the attorney general and to beat up the president,” said Cruz.

Mark my words.  Hear me carefully.  Every politician, from democrats to republicans (most democrats, Graham, Rubio, McCain, McCarthy, etc.) who calls for a full investigation into the awful Russian things, they know not what they are, is hiding something.

Every … one … of … them … is compromised by or implicated in pedogate, nation toppling in North Africa, oil plays, money laundering, human trafficking, human organ harvesting, weapons and precious metals, along with DynCorp, the CIA, the State Department, the Clinton Global Initiative, and part of the FBI (Andrew McCabe, call your office).  Every one of them.

Cruz is not implicated.  Read it all again.  Their words prove them out.  It’s easiest when the guilty self identify.  It makes our job quicker.

This all has nothing whatsoever to do with Russia.  It’s all a smokescreen to hide the real evil, a subterfuge, a magician’s distraction from the real trick.  But not a good one for educated men and women.  We all know better.

Death to the deep state.