| THE HANDSTAND | FEB.-MARCH2011 |
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News Updates from Citizens For Legitimate Government
27 Jan 2011
Utah Army post reopens after VX nerve agent vial found --Dugway Proving Ground Reopens After Lockdown 27 Jan 2011 The Army says Dugway Proving Ground, where military weapons are tested, was locked down for hours because a small [?] amount of a nerve agent was unaccounted for. The military said in a statement Thursday the amount missing was less than one fourth of a teaspoon of VX nerve agent, which affects the body's ability to carry messages through the nerves. The missing vial prompted a lockdown late Wednesday afternoon that lasted until the agent was found early Thursday. [Wikipedia: VX, IUPAC name O-ethyl S-[2-(diisopropylamino)ethyl] methylphosphonothioate, is an extremely toxic substance whose only application is in chemical warfare as a nerve agent. As a chemical weapon, it is classified as a weapon of mass destruction by the United Nations in UN Resolution 687. The production and stockpiling of VX was outlawed by the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993.]
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http://www.legitgov.org/#breaking_news
the drone
US sentences anti-war activists to jail
Mon Jan 31, 2011 6:37PM Share | Email | Print
Anti-war protester Brian Terrell (L) speaks during a rally at the Regional Justice Center against Creech Air Force Base (Photo: Las Vegas Review). Fourteen anti-war protesters have been found guilty of trespassing for a 2009 protest in Nevada against US military drone attacks deployed from the Creech Air Force Base.
The peace activists were attempting to make people aware that the military was directing bombing in Afghanistan from a military base in the Nevada desert.
The judge found Brian Terrell of Maloy guilty of a misdemeanor trespassing charge but gave him and 13 other activists credit for jail time served after their arrests and released them.
"The harm is imminent. The harm is real," Terrell said. "I feel no crime was committed" on April 9, 2009.
Among the "Creech 14" were four priests, a nun and a Des Moines peace activist. The protesters had argued there was "necessity" that compelled them to act. As someone might trespass onto private property to save a child from a burning building, they said they were trying to stop drone warfare from killing civilians thousands of miles away in Afghanistan.
The US military is increasing the use of deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill alleged Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada. However, civilians have been the main victims of violence in Afghanistan, particularly in the country's troubled southern and eastern provinces, where they are killed by both militant and foreign fire. The Afghan interior ministry says more than 2,000 civilians lost their lives in violence across Afghanistan in 2010.
Hundreds of civilians have lost their lives in the US-led airstrikes and ground operations in various parts of Afghanistan over the past few months, with Afghans becoming more outraged over the seemingly endless number of deadly assaults. The non-UN-sanctioned attacks by US unmanned planes on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan claimed the lives of almost 1,200 people last year.
MD/AKM/MMN PressTV http://www.presstv.com/detail/162950.htmlA Nation of Laws? Or Assassins?
Remote control killings by unmanned drones in Pakistan aren't making our country more secure.
By Jim Cason
January 13, 2011 "OtherWords" -- The failure of the U.S. war strategy in Afghanistan to contain the anti-government insurgency has led the Obama administration to expand the undeclared war in Pakistan. According to the Long War Journal, the number of U.S. attacks in Pakistan, using unmanned Predator drones, has gone from five in 2007 to 117 in 2010.
Government officials here in Washington say privately that they expect the covert war to expand even further this year. Yet Congress and the public have undertaken no significant examination of this new war's consequences.
Members of Congress have almost daily reminders of the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the form of the dead and wounded U.S. soldiers that return to this country. Lawmakers travel regularly to attend funerals of the fallen.
The U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan produce many casualties, but none of those killed are citizens of our country. The pilots operating the remote-controlled drones used to launch missile attacks in Pakistan usually sit behind computer screens far from the battlefield. For policymakers in Washington, this is a war without cost or hometown casualties.
The English language press in Pakistan often relays reports of civilians killed in these attacks. But those reports rarely make headlines in the United States. The only ongoing reminder of this war is the occasional headline that suggests the United States has successfully killed another al-Qaeda militant. For most Americans, that's justification enough for this new war by assassination.
Having closely followed the Congressional investigations of CIA assassination attempts in the 1970s, I find the current shift in public attitudes alarming. Back in the 1970s, when investigations led by Senator Frank Church revealed that the CIA had engaged in targeted killings of foreign leaders, President Gerald Ford felt obligated to sign an executive order banning intelligence agencies from engaging in assassinations.
I'm not naïve enough to believe that the United States halted its involvement, but at one time the public attitude was that such assassinations were wrong. We are a nation of laws. As recently as 2001, when Israel engaged in targeted assassinations against Hamas leaders in Gaza, the U.S. ambassador to Israel was forced to go on record against the killings (although our government didn't cut off assistance to the Israeli units involved in these murders).
Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush authorized U.S. intelligence agencies to kill al-Qaeda leaders operating anywhere in the world. In my view, these campaigns were ineffective and violated international law.
President Obama's startling expansion of this drone assassination campaign has gone by largely unnoticed. Missile attacks from drones often target a single person for assassination, but end up killing dozens. Nearly 2,000 people have been killed in Pakistan by drones since 2006, yet Congress has held only one public hearing on these weapons. Instead, Congress inserts even more money than the President requests for them into the Pentagon's budget--and there's even a special caucus to promote the drones.
As the Obama administration exponentially expands the use of remote-controlled drones for assassinations, Congress should take a second look at this new kind of fighting that's done in our name. You don't have to work for a Quaker lobby to question whether remote control killings in Pakistan are helping to make our country more secure. Within Pakistan and Yemen (where the United States has also used such drones), the strikes have become a rallying cry for anti-government political groups and a recruiting tools for the same violent, extremist organizations that the U.S. claims to want to damage.
There's a bumper sticker that sums up this problem. It reads: "We're making enemies faster than we can kill them." Congress, and the nation as a whole, need to decide if our goal is simply to kill more people or to make this country safer. If our goal is the latter, then assassinations by drones or any other means doesn't belong in our policy tool kit.Jim Cason is an associate executive secretary at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker lobby in the public interest. www.fcnl.org
Operation Merlin
CIA Gave Iran Nuclear Blueprints?
By Paul MaudDib
January 20, 2011 "SomethingAwful" -- Jan 07, 2011--- WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Thursday charged a former CIA clandestine officer with leaking classified information about a secret U.S. effort to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program to New York Times reporter James Risen.
Jeffrey Alexander Sterling, who served in the CIA between 1993 and 2002, was arrested by the FBI in St. Louis Thursday and charged in a 10-count indictment with disclosing national defense information and obstruction of justice. At his arraignment later in the day, U.S. Magistrate Judge Terry I. Adelman told him he would be detained through the weekend because the government had declared him a danger to the community. Another detention hearing was scheduled for 2 p.m. Monday.
The case involves the disclosure in Risen’s 2006 book, “State of War,” of a CIA program called “Operation Merlin.” Risen described it as a botched attempt under the Clinton administration to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program by giving flawed blueprints for key components to a Russian nuclear scientist who had defected. The idea was that the Russian scientist, who was covertly working for the CIA, would feed the flawed designs to the Iranians. But according to the book, the CIA’s efforts went awry when the scientist got nervous and instead tipped off the Iranians to the flaws in the designs. According to Risen, this ended up helping Iran “accelerate its weapon development.” The CIA has always insisted that Risen’s reporting was “inaccurate.”
The indictment essentially charges Sterling with leaking to Risen information about the Iranian program in retaliation for the handling of an employment discrimination case he filed against the CIA. It states that Sterling, who worked in the CIA between May 1993 and January 2002, had served for part of that time as the chief operations officer handling a “human asset” in a program related to the weapons capabilities of a foreign country.
Then in April 2003, according to the indictment, Risen contacted the CIA’s public affairs director to say that he planned to write a story about the classified program. That prompted U.S. government officials to meet with Risen and representatives of the Times about the “national security implications” of publishing such information. The Times never published Risen’s story. A senior government official familiar with the case told NBC that Condoleezza Rice, then national security advisor under President George W. Bush, was among those who urged the Times not to publish Risen’s information.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4095150..._news-security/
quote:
As Risen tells it, the CIA prepared the Russian for the operation in a series of meetings at a luxury hotel in San Francisco. At one point, they handed the blueprints to the Russian.
quote:
Within minutes of being handed the designs, [the Russian] had identified a flaw. “This isn’t right,” he told the CIA officers gathered around the hotel room. “There is something wrong.” His comments prompted stony looks, but no straight answers from the CIA men in the room. No one in the San Francisco meeting seemed surprised by the Russian’s assertion that the blueprints didn’t look quite right, but no one wanted to enlighten him further on the matter, either.
In fact, the CIA case officer who was the Russian’s personal handler had been stunned by the Russian’s statement. During a break, he took the senior CIA officer aside. “He wasn’t supposed to know that,” the CIA case officer told his superior. “He wasn’t supposed to find a flaw.”
“Don’t worry,” the senior CIA officer calmly replied. “It doesn’t matter.”
The CIA case officer couldn’t believe the senior CIA officer’s answer, but he still managed to keep his fears from the Russian, and he continued to train him for his mission.In February 2000, the Russian was flown to Vienna by himself to deliver the blueprints to Iran’s mission to the IAEA there. Worried that the CIA was framing him somehow, he wrote a letter to the Iranians that he included with the blueprints.
quote:
What is the purpose of my offer?
If you try to create a similar devise you will need to ask some practical questions. No problem. You will get answers but I expect to be paid for that. Let’s talk about details later when I see a real interest in it.
Now just take your time for professional study of enclosed documentation. My contact info on next page.In other words, the Russian warned the Iranians that there was a flaw in the blueprints.
Three months later, in May 2000, Sterling appears to have been moved off the MERLIN operation and compartmented out of it. On August 2, 2000, Sterling first filed his employment discrimination suit against the CIA. In January 2002, his employment with the CIA ended. In April of that year, the CIA invoked state secrets in his employment discrimination lawsuit. And in January 2003, the CIA’s Publication Review Board told him to include false information in his memoirs. After the CIA rejected his settlement offer in February 2003, he first reached out to Risen. While he kept in contact with him, it may not have been until after Sterling’s employment discrimination suit was rejected in either 2004 (by the VA District Court) or 2005 (by the Appeals Court, though that seems too late to have been included in Risen’s book) that the story made it into Risen’s book.
In any case, this all seems to be about the CIA’s efforts to prevent you from knowing that it gave Iran nuclear blueprints in 2000.http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2...ear-blueprints/
It appears Operation Merlin was an operation to give Iran incorrect nuclear blueprints. It appears to have come to light because a disgruntled former ops officer included it in his memoirs in retaliation for losing his discrimination suit. It is certain that Sterling was an Operations Officer in the CIA's Near East and South Asia division from 1993 to 2001, so he may well the be operations officer assigned to this case given the first person details.
This would obviously be far from the first time that the US's plotting has backfired in its face. Given the sensitivity of the data involved, however, I would have hoped that someone along the way would have showed some common sense. Giving a defecting nuclear scientist plans that may be within has capability to fix is a dumb idea, and continuing the operation even after he realizes this despite the ability to pull the plug is insane.
The reason that this has come up so recently is that charges have just been unsealed against Sterling. What is interesting are the subpoenas on Risen, sincequote:
Justice Department rules say prosecutors may seek subpoenas of journalists only if the information they are seeking is essential and cannot be obtained another way.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment about why Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. approved seeking a subpoena of Mr. Risen in light of the fact that prosecutors could obtain an indictment of Mr. Sterling without it.http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/us/07indict.html?_r=1
One possibility is that John Brennan is pushing the Justice Department to do this to punish Risen for breaking the story about the warrantless wiretapping program which Brennan headed through 2005. Brennan is currently serving as a quasi-Director of National Intelligence on the new National Security Council in order to avoid confirmations which he probably can't pass.
I guess the moral of the story is, if you're trying to keep your operation to give nuclear secrets to rogue states quiet, give your officers money to shut up and go away if they ask for it.See also Ex-CIA officer accused of leak waives extradition: The indictment did not say specifically what information was leaked, but the dates and other details indicate the case centered on leaks to James Risen, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. His 2006 book "State of War" revealed details about the CIA's covert spy war with Iran.
