Somalia Special: The CIA's Secret Bases (Scahill)

Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access. At the facility, the CIA runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab, an Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda.

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Iran Video: Taking Apart The Regime's Documentary on the "US Spy Network"

The significance of the programme's immediate claims --- amidst interviews with someone detained long before the spring but also those claiming to have been innocent dupes of recruiters, amidst disappearing websites but also established companies and trade associations --- is not clear.

What is clear, however, is the intent. A couple of individual cases of Iranians pursuing job opportunities is used to explain the arrests in May, even though the mystery remains --- note that none of the 30 suspects is actually named in the documentary. And, perhaps more importantly, it is magnified into a massive, omni-present US operation, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars.

As the programme moves into reconstruction of what could happen to an Iranian if he/she falls for the CIA's ruse and then puts a specific (unfounded) warning to students: "$3 million" has been devoted by the Americans to recruit them, the message takes shape: whatever the internal issues in Iran, it is the Americans who are always the primary threat.

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Yemen Snapshot: CIA Planning to Expand US Drone Campaign (Gorman/Entous)

The Central Intelligence Agency is preparing to launch a secret program to kill al Qaeda militants in Yemen, where months of antigovernment protests, an armed revolt and the attempted assassination of the president have left a power vacuum, U.S. officials say.

The covert program that would give the U.S. greater latitude than the current military campaign is the latest step to combat the growing threat from al Qaeda's outpost in Yemen, which has been the source of several attempted attacks on the U.S. and is home to an American-born cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who the U.S. sees as a significant militant threat.

The CIA program will be a major expansion of U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Yemen. Since December 2009, U.S. strikes in Yemen have been carried out by the U.S. military with intelligence support from CIA. Now, the spy agency will carry out aggressive drone strikes itself alongside the military campaign, which has been stepped up in recent weeks after a nearly year-long hiatus.

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Arab Spring Alert: Why, Oh Why, Are You Ruining Our Fight Against Terrorism?

Britain's Tony Blair & Muammar Qaddafi, 2004You might think that the "Arab Spring" would bring hope to everyone, given calls for democracy, justice, civil society, political representation, freedom of expression and media.

Nope.

There is one group which is worried that all of these demonstrations and discussions might be aiding terrorism. "European and Israeli intelligence officers" are worried that friendly intelligence services --- you know, Mr Qaddafi's men in Libya, Mubarak's in Egypt, Ben Ali's in Tunisia --- are being disrupted by all this fuss on the streets.

Read on....

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Snap Reaction: The Significance of Killing Bin Laden

Will this development make a significant difference? Al Qa'eda's main symbol is now dead, but the movement may already have been dying --- its leadership structure in tatters, and the Muslim world turning away from terrorism and towards democracy, their influence was already waning.

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Pakistan Feature: Is This a "Crisis" in Relations Between CIA and Islamabad?

On Tuesday, both The Washington Post and The New York Times reported on Pakistani demands that the Central Intelligence Agency restrict its operations, including drone strikes, inside the country. The Post reported, from US and Pakistani officials, of Pakistan's demand that Washington "impose new limits on CIA drone strikes in their country and...expel agency operatives whose missions are not approved by Islamabad".

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Afghanistan: US Military Admits to "Black Site" Prisons

Photo: APThe CIA's infamous secret network of "black site" interrogation centers is gone. But suspected terrorists in Afghanistan are being held and interrogated for weeks at temporary sites, including one run by the elite special operations forces at Bagram Air Base, according to U.S. officials who revealed details of the detention network to The Associated Press.

The Pentagon has previously denied operating secret jails in Afghanistan, although human rights groups and former detainees have described the facilities. U.S. military and other government officials confirmed that the detention centers exist but described them as temporary holding pens whose primary purpose is to gather intelligence.

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Libya: The CIA Operations Inside the Country (Mazzetti/Schmitt)

Lots of flutter this morning about this story in The New York Times by Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt over US covert operations inside Libya.

Personally, I'm shrugging my shoulders about some of this. Air operations often require "spotters" on the ground --- consider Pakistan, for example, where this type of assistance to drone strikes has been going on for years. Far more interesting are the US attempt at a bit of psychological warfare --- "[Information from covert operations] might help weaken Libya’s military enough to encourage defections within its ranks" --- and this political nugget: "The American spies are meeting with rebels to try to fill in gaps in understanding who their leaders are and the allegiances of the groups opposed to Colonel Qaddafi."

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Intelligence Alert: CIA Starts WikiLeaks Task Force (WTF); STFU to Follow

On the heels of forming its new WikiLeaks Task Force (WTF), the CIA said it was establishing a new division called Stop Terrorists From Uniting (STFU).

CIA director Leon Panetta spoke about the agency's plans for both WTF and STFU at the CIA's new headquarters, the Langley Operations Location (LOL).

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The Punishment for Torture? Former US Intelligence Officials Take a Caribbean Cruise (Shephard)

About 30 minutes into an interview on an outdoor deck aboard the “spy cruise,” the issue of Osama bin Laden arises.

“What can you do with him?” asks Porter Goss, the former head of the CIA, as he settles back in a padded lounge chair.

“Are we going to sit him on a deckchair and ask him to cooperate? Or are we going to put him in a place where he can’t leave?”

Goss’s point is this: Now that the Obama administration has outlawed harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, shut the CIA covert “black sites” around the world and frowned upon renditions, what are the options open to America’s intelligence service?

He insists the CIA “enhanced” methods worked.

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