CIA Pushes for Expansion of Secrecy Law to Stifle Public Criticism

Invoking Wikileaks and Torture Report

By Kevin Gosztola

Global Research, July 16, 2019

Shadowproof 11 July 2019

When the CIA and other agencies in the United States government pushed for the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) in 1981, it was crafted to exclude “covert agents” who resided in the U.S.

There was consideration by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of how the legislation might “chill or stifle public criticism of intelligence activities or public debate concerning intelligence policy.”

More than three decades later, the CIA is apparently unsatisfied with the protections the bill granted covert agents. It has enlisted a select group of senators and representatives to help expand the universe of individuals who are protected, making members of the press who cover intelligence matters more vulnerable to prosecution.

Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the House intelligence committee, was involved in adding language to expand the IIPA to the Intelligence Authorization Act moving through Congress.

“Schiff is once again putting the interests of the intelligence agencies in concealing their misdeeds ahead of protecting the rights of ordinary Americans by criminalizing routine reporting by the press on national security issues and undermining congressional oversight in his Intelligence Authorization bill,” declared Daniel Schuman, who is the policy director for Demand Progress.

Schuman added,

“Schiff’s expansion of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act beyond all reason will effectively muzzle reporting on torture, mass surveillance, and other crimes against the American people—all at the request of the CIA. Schiff is clearly the resistance to the resistance, and he should drop this provision from his bill.”

The CIA put their specific request for what language they would like amended in writing and sent it to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Their request was essentially copied and pasted, with no changes, into the intelligence bill.

“Undercover agency officers face ever-evolving threats, including cyber threats,” the CIA argued. “Particularly with the lengths organizations such as WikiLeaks are willing to go to obtain and release sensitive national security information, as well as incidents related to past agency programs, such as the RDI investigation [CIA torture report], the original congressional reasoning mentioned above for a narrow definition of ‘covert agent’ no longer remains valid.”

“This proposal would provide protection for all undercover agency officers by allowing for the prosecution of individuals responsible for disclosing the identities of those officers, regardless whether the undercover officer serves inside or outside of the United States,” the agency additionally stated.

Schiff supports the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and shares the CIA’s view that WikiLeaks is a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” not a media organization.

In 2018, when Assange was willing to speak with investigators about the Russia probe, he replied,

“Our committee would be willing to interview Julian Assange when he is in U.S. custody, not before.”

“I deplore the potentially treasonous disclosure of classified and sensitive national security information, and urge the Department of Justice to bring any responsible party to justice,” Schiff stated in 2010.

Senator Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said he is concerned about how the bill expands the IIPA so that it applies indefinitely, including to individuals who have been in the United States for decades and have become senior management or have retired.”

The Revenge of the CIA: “National Security State v. The Public’s Right to Know.” Scapegoating Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling

“I am not yet convinced this expansion is necessary and am concerned that it will be employed to avoid accountability,” Wyden declared. “The CIA’s request that the Committee include this provision, which invoked ‘incidents related to past Agency programs, such as the RDI [Rendition, Detention and Interrogation] investigation,’ underscores my concerns.”

Gina Haspel, the CIA director, likely favors the law because she faced scrutiny over her role in the destruction of torture tapes that showed the waterboarding of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. She was still a “covert agent” when news of this scandal erupted, and the protection of her identity played a role in enabling her ascension to the top of the agency.

Various groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Demand Progress, Human Rights Watch, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Physicians for Human Rights, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Society of Professional Journalists, wrote a letter objecting to the proposed expansion that was sent to both intelligence committees.

“The provision would expand the definition of ‘covert agent’ for purposes of prosecution under the Intelligence Identities Protection act, in what appears to be a clear attempt to subvert transparency, oversight, and accountability,” the groups assert.

The groups contend it would “harm congressional oversight of the intelligence community, making it much more difficult to obtain information about almost any individual’s relationship to intelligence agencies and allowing the executive branch to avoid oversight through arbitrary classification. Additionally, it would potentially make it more difficult for intelligence community whistleblowers to approach Congress with reports of fraud, waste, and abuse.”

The letter further argues it would be “significantly damaging” because it is an “extremely broad expansion of felony criminal penalties and delegates authority to when those penalties apply to the executive branch.”

“Because of the potentially widespread legal ramifications for working with individuals who have retired or otherwise left their work with the intelligence community, this provision would likely have a profound chilling effect on journalists’ and public interest organizations’ work,” they conclude.

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When the IIPA was drafted in 1981, the ACLU initially opposed [PDF] it. Yet, as Angus MacKenziedescribed, ACLU attorney Jerry Berman and Morton Halperin, who became the ACLU director in 1984 after passage of the bill, worked with the CIA on a compromise in July 1981, which offered journalists some small measure of protection.

“Halperin’s compromise was a signal that the ACLU would not mobilize its quarter million members to lobby Capitol Hill in defense of the First Amendment rights of government employees or reporters,” MacKenzie wrote. “As the ACLU position became clear in the ensuing months, the traditional liberal coalition against secrecy began to disintegrate both inside and outside Congress. Over the next twelve years, the Reagan and Bush administrations were emboldened to invent new means to control information.”

Nonetheless, before the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, which was part of the Judiciary Committee, Halperin articulated a case against the IIPA on May 8, 1981.

Halperin suggested it would be better for the government to focus on taking steps to “make it impossible for foreign terrorist groups or American citizens” to “identify covert agents.” Legislation impinging on the First Amendment should not be passed for a “symbolic purpose.” It should pass because it will have some “real effect on protecting lives.”

The ACLU and other organizations believed the legislation, as it was drafted, would make it a crime “for the press to publish information which it lawfully acquires, whether it acquires that information from foreign intelligence sources, from foreign governments, from foreign newspapers, [or] from official publications of the United States government.”

“It would be a crime for a reporter or a scholar to engage in an effort to mine those sources to learn the identities of agents and to publish, for any purpose, even to ferret out corruption or illegal activities,” Halperin said.

There was nothing in the language that required a “bad purpose” to exist in order for a person to be prosecuted.

It is not like the law has not been abused by the U.S. government.

In 2013, the Justice Department successfully prosecuted former CIA officer John Kiriakou for confirming the name of an officer involved in the CIA’s RDI program to a reporter, even though he did not have a “pattern of activity” which involved trying to out “covert agents.”

Members of Congress specified in the IIPA that a person must be engaged in a “series” of acts or a “pattern of activity” that was intended to “impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States by the fact of such identification and exposure.”

It was viewed as a kind of protection for journalists. However, in Kiriakou’s case, there was enough ambiguity to deploy it against a former officer who had a public record of opposing the agency’s use of waterboarding against detainees in the “war on terrorism.”

The Justice Department did not use the law when CIA officer Valerie Plame had her cover blown by officials in President George W. Bush’s administration. Her outing was retaliation against her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, who exposed part of the fabricated case for regime change in Iraq.

Former CIA case officer Philip Agee, who sought to reveal how the CIA was involved in “secretly intervening in country after country to corrupt politicians and to promote political repression,” was the key inspiration for the CIA push to pass the IIPA. Agee published a column, “Naming Names,” that outed agents allegedly involved in the activities he exposed.

In 1975, Agee was blamed by the CIA for the murder of Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, but Agee maintained the publication had nothing to do with the murder of Welch.

“By removing the mask of anonymity from CIA officers, we make it difficult for them to remain at overseas posts,” Agee wrote. “We hope that the CIA will have the good sense to shift these people to the increasingly smaller number of safe posts, preferably to a desk inside the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. In this way the CIA will protect the operatives named—and also the lives of their potential victims.”

Three decades ago, the CIA mobilized to protect itself from radical acts of transparency, and now, with the internet and organizations like WikiLeaks, it hopes to be able to further isolate and criminalize those who directly challenge the agency’s activities.

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Kevin Gosztola is managing editor of Shadowproof. He also produces and co-hosts the weekly podcast, “Unauthorized Disclosure.”

Featured image is from American Free Press

The original source of this article is Shadowproof

Copyright © Kevin Gosztola, Shadowproof, 2019

https://www.globalresearch.ca/invoking-wikileaks-torture-report-cia-pushes-expansion-secrecy-law-stifle-public-criticism/5683742

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The EU Votes and the CIA Wins Again

By Aidan O’Brien

Global Research, June 05, 2019

The European Union voted last month but not one of its 21st century war crimes and war criminals were a topic of conversation. The real possibility of a nuclear war between the EU and Russia wasn’t an issue either. The great European economic crime – bank bailouts and austerity – was brushed aside too. Instead the talk was about an abstract parliament of an even more abstract Europe. Like children in a playground, the 400 million EU voters are oblivious to the world around them. And so they voted in favor of the status quo.

The European Parliament decides nothing of substance within the EU, nonetheless it indicates the state of mind of the EU. And to say that that mindset is somnolent is an understatement.  The people of the EU are sleepwalking amidst wars and into a possible Armageddon. But don’t wake them up! They’re dreaming of “common values” and having nightmares about immigrants.

The EU’s real issues are decided by non-Europeans. The Pentagon, Wall Street and the White House determine Europe’s economic and foreign policies, as well as its “security”. And the CIA covertly polices it all. These are the unspoken truths about the EU. And have been since the beginning of the European experiment – way back in the 1940s.

European integration was an American idea. As the preeminent neoconservative, Robert Kagan, points out in the latest Foreign Affairs magazine, the whole point of American policy in Western Europe, after the Second World War, was to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Keeping “the Americans in” being the key objective.

With this in mind, the Americans began to construct a solid anticommunist block in the West of Europe in the late 1940s. Today’s EU is the result of this US / CIA fanaticism. Writing in 2016, in the conservative British newspaper The Telegraph, the journalist, Ambrose Evans Pritchard, notes that:

“declassified documents from the State Department archives [show] that US intelligence funded the European movement secretly for decades, and worked aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into the project.”

Pitchard adds:

“The Schuman Declaration that set the tone of Franco-German reconciliation – and would lead by stages to the European Community – was cooked up by the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson at a meeting in Foggy Bottom. “It all began in Washington,” said Robert Schuman’s chief of staff.”

“And the CIA? “one memorandum [within the declassified documents] dated July 26, 1950, reveals a campaign to promote a full-fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the Central Inteligence Agency.

“The key CIA front was the American Committee for a United Europe (ACUE), chaired by Donovan. Another document shows that it provided 53.5 per cent of the European movement’s funds in 1958. The board included Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles, CIA directors in the Fifties, and a caste of ex-OSS officials who moved in and out of the CIA.

“Papers show that it treated some of the EU’s ‘founding fathers’ as hired hands, and actively prevented them finding alternative funding that would have broken reliance on Washington.”

This exposure of the deep ties between the EU and the CIA concurs with the book edited by Philip Agee and Louis Wolf, Dirty Work, the CIA in Western Europe (1978). In the middle of the book we read the following:

“The chief vehicle in the covert funding of pro-Europe groups was the CIA-created American Committee on a United Europe. Founded in 1949 by Major General William J. Donovan, head of American wartime intelligence, the committee kicked off its pro-Europe campaign by inviting leading Europeans over to speak in America, among them Sir Winston Churchill, Lord Layton, EEC founders Paul Henri-Spaak and Robert Schuman. More formally organized in 1950, the Committee coopted long-time CIA director Allen Dulles to be its Vice Chairman, and employed Tom Braden as its Executive Director. Braden at the time was head of a division of the CIA’s “department of Dirty Tricks” which, he later revealed, ran an entire network of political “front” organizations which served CIA purposes. In 1967, it was revealed that the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom and its London magazine, Encounter, were part of this network. But until recently little was known about the secret work of the American Committee on a United Europe.

The Committee made no secret of its Cold War views. To its delight, the nascent European Movement wanted a supranational Western bloc, a United States of Europe….”

None of this information is top secret but it might as well be, because it is almost never brought up by the European mainstream media whenever the nature or purpose of the EU is being discussed. As a result, the consequences are deadly.

They are deadly because the EU, with practically no internal debate, is finding itself in more and more American wars around the world. For example, America’s absurd War on Terror has impacted Europe more than the USA. Yet no politician campaigning to be elected to the European Parliament in May bothered to question this totalitarian war.

Why? NATO is one reason – European aggression is “nation-state” based and Brussels bound. But the EU itself is another reason. The same “nation-states” that go to war for NATO are EU leaders and are also Brussels bound. The EU acts like an innocent Eurocentric body but it is a flawed organization that facilitates wars of aggression – inside and outside Europe. Under the EU umbrella and behind its benign blue flag malignant imperialists are at work.

The EU’s cancerous DNA is to blame. The paradox is that the EU is more American than European. Its roots in the deep American state, in particular the CIA, is proof of this.

The same US intelligence apparatus that teamed up with the Corsican and Sicilian mafias after the Second World War, manufactured the movement towards the European Union. The same organization – the CIA – that revived and expanded the global heroin market after the Second World War, initiated the EU. The same organization that systematically helped Nazis escape justice not only laid the foundations of the EU, but built its house as well.

The CIA made the EU for the Cold War. But this war never ended for America’s secret army. This means that its assets during the original Cold War continue to be its assets today – in the new Cold War. And, indeed, EU policies today imply that this is exactly the way it is.

Ukraine is a case in point. And so too is Venezuela. The CIA’s aggressive push into Ukraine in 2014 depended on EU cover. The EU’s flag hid America’s anti-Russian intentions. And when Europe’s “star spangled banner” wasn’t needed, the US in the person of Victoria Nuland, discarded it like a piece of trash – without a word of complaint from the EU.

The CIA’s attempts to overthrow the government of Venezuela this year also have made use of EU cover. To give its criminal actions in Latin America some credibility, the US has needed the support of the nation states of the EU and the EU Parliament. And despite the obvious illegality and brutality of US actions in Venezuela, the Europeans have shamelessly given their moral support to the CIA. In 2019, therefore, the EU unambiguously obeys the US Empire rather than the UN Charter.

Instead of weakening, this EU obedience has been strengthening in the 21st century. From Iraq to Yemen, the EU has been cooperating nonstop with US war crimes. Indeed the EU has led the savagery in Libya and Syria. The founding fathers of the EU – the Nazi tinged CIA, not their European fronts – would be proud.

It’s wrong therefore to expect a sudden change in EU behavior because of the recent EU elections. There are no real signs of critical intelligence within the main body of Europe. When it comes to western imperialism – the right, left and center of the European Parliament are supportive. The populists and the greens will change nothing.

The possibility of Iran or Russian gas breaking the CIA’s grip on the European movement remains to be seen – the US Empire is stretching itself. But the chances are very slim. For seventy five years the West European body and mind has been a CIA captive. As a result its growth and development has been seriously compromised.

Historical Origins of US Covert Operations to “Assimilate Europe” Into A Federal State

However, when did western Europe ever show that it was capable of developing and growing in a mature and responsible way? For thousands of years it had the chance to join the civilized world but failed to do so.

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Aidan O’Brien is a hospital worker in Dublin, Ireland.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Aidan O’Brien, Global Research, 2019

https://www.globalresearch.ca/eu-votes-cia-wins-again/5679587


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The CIA has Attempted to Assassinate 50 Foreign Leaders Including Hugo Chavez

By William Blum and John Robles

Global Research, February 06, 2019

Voice of Russia and Stop NATO

First published by Global Research in March 2013

The late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was warned by Fidel Castro to be careful of a very specific attack, namely a quick jab from an infected needle. Such a warning coming from a leader who has reportedly been the target of CIA assassination plots more than 600 times in over 50 years, was sure to be heeded.

Was the illness of Hugo Chavez a completely deniable assassination by the CIA? William Blum spoke with the VOR’s John Robles and discussed this issue and more.

Robles: I’ve read your Anti-Empire report regarding Hugo Chavez. Can you give us your comments on speculation that he was assassinated by the CIA?

Blum: I cannot prove it of course, but I believe he was. It would be totally in keeping with the entire history of the CIA and its attitude towards people like Hugo Chavez.

The CIA has attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders and successfully at least half the time. And very few of them were as despised by the US government as Chavez was, I would say. So, there would be no reason at all to expect that the CIA would not at least plan on killing, and the nature of his ailment is very odd.

He went from a cancer, which would not go away despite several sessions of chemotherapy and what have you. Then it went to serious lung infections, which would not go away no matter what they did. And then it went to, suddenly, a massive heart attack. All in the same man with no apparent cause, he was only 58-years-old, and as far as we know he was a very healthy until this happened, it is all very odd.

And given the great motivation that the US Government and the persons in the CIA has put for killing a man like Hugo Chavez, I’m pretty sure that the CIA played a role in this.

Robles: Do you know or have you heard of any credible new technology or new programs that could deliver such a cancer?

Blum: The means would be a needle with a quick, sharp jab and what you need is getting one person close enough to Chavez to do that.

Chavez was always in the public eye, he was always embracing people. There must have been countless occasions in the past few years when he was vulnerable to a quick jab by a needle that would be the method of transmitting the ailments.

Robles: Did he ever complain that he had been poked by something in public? Were there any reports of anything like that happening that you had heard about?

Blum: He did mention that Fidel Castro warned him about just that. He said: “A quick jab with a needle, and they’ll do…I don’t know what!” Actually he was told by Fidel.

Robles: A quick jab with a needle. Do you think that happened with Fidel because he had become very ill?

Blum: Well, Fidel…According to Cuban intelligence, there were more than 600 attempts on the life of Fidel Castro by the CIA. There is an entire book on that subject by Cuban intelligence.

William Blum: Anti-Imperial Advocate

And many of the methods were pretty bizarre, including an exploding cigar, but over the course of 50 years the Cubans claim there were more than 600 attempts on his life and it may have taken just one with Chavez.

Robles: Have you heard anything from your sources or from where you get some of your information? Have you heard anything detailing any connection between these two US Air Force attaches that were expelled from the country and the death of Hugo Chavez?

Blum: No. I would assume that there is a connection but I don’t know if the Venezuelan government has actually said so.

Getting back to Chavez’s case, we have to keep in mind that four other South American leaders, prominent people on the left, all came down with cancer within the past year or two.

Robles: I think it was seven, wasn’t it, altogether?

Blum: The four that I named in my report…You can add the ones that you know just for my information… were Cristina Fernandez…

Robles: De Kirchner, right…

Blum: of Argentina, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, the former Brazilian head of state Lula da Silva. Who would you add into that list?

Robles: Well, and then of course Hugo Chavez himself…

Blum: Castro is one of them…

Robles: I would add Castro to the list and Kirchner’s husband who died of a mysterious heart attack as well.

Blum: Right.

Robles: We might add that as a mysterious illness, not exactly a cancer but…

Blum: Right! If the CIA was involved it doesn’t have to be cancer necessarily of course.

Robles: Oh, sure, it could be anything. Have you heard anything about cancer strains or any kind of killing weapons like this, any kind of biological weapons that would give maybe cancer-like symptoms, not exactly a certain type of cancer?

Blum: I very well may have read of such over the years. I have read so much about the CIA, but at the moment I can’t think of anything to supply you with that information. Although we do know, it is well known, that for decades the CIA was looking for a method of killing somebody which would not leave a trace. The CIA itself has used those words. For the entire period of the Cold War that was a major stated project of the CIA. But where that stands today, I have no idea.

Robles: Yes, of course that is all very secret and no one is going to talk about it, but perhaps there are some echoes or some whispers? Maybe somebody has come out and said something? What other reasons would you give to back up the argument that he was assassinated?

Blum: I will mention there is no one in the entire universe who was more hated, no leader more hated than Chavez was by the US government. In the eyes of the US power that be, Chavez was worse than Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende.

Robles: Why was he so hated?

Blum: Because he was the most outspoken leader in the world when it came to criticizing US foreign policy. He never pulled his punches for a moment, he made a claim that it was all crimes against humanity and the US leaders were war criminals, and he said so explicitly. It is unusual for a head of state to be talking that way. And at the UN he attacked Bush in front of the whole world.

Robles: Oh yes, I remember he said that the Devil had been there the day before or something, and it still smelled like sulfur.

Blum: Yes, Bush had spoken to the UN before Chavez from the same platform. And Chavez said there was a smell of sulfur in the air because of that.

Robles: That’s usually the domain of the United States, I mean… Isn’t it? I mean Bush was calling everybody the axis of evil, and all this stuff, branding everyone evil. Wasn’t that kind of a shock to see the same thing done to an American leader?

Blum: Yeah, it is a shock for anyone under any circumstances to be so outspoken in the criticism of the US foreign policy. It is a point in Chavez’s favor that he could have the honesty and the courage to say such things, which very much needed to be said.

Robles: So, you supported the way he stood up?

Blum: Well, in general yes. I think there certainly were times when he may have overdone it, even for me. I mean, he felt obliged to comment on everything under the sun, and I thought several times that he could have held off on saying certain things, they were not serving any good purpose. But that’s a minor criticism of his overall marvelous record.

Robles: You say he had a marvelous record. What do you think were his major achievements in your opinion?

Blum: What he’s brought to the poor people of Venezuela in the way of education and healthcare, and housing, and what have you. And what he brought to the rest of the South America, he formed various anti-US empire blocs which stood in the way of expansion of the US influence.

He and others formed a new…A counter to the OAS, the Organization of American States, which for decades has been dominated and corrupted by the US and Canada. And they formed a new organization in South America excluding the US and Canada. So it was that simple.

Robles: Do you think his achievements will continue or do you think the US will be successful in rolling back everything he did? Which of course I assume they would want to.

Blum: Yes, they would want to. But if Maduro who was chosen and backed by Chavez, wins, and he is expected to win in the election next month, then most of it will continue, I assume.

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The original source of this article is Voice of Russia and Stop NATO

Copyright © William Blum and John Robles, Voice of Russia and Stop NATO, 2019

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cia-has-attempted-to-assassinate-50-foreign-leaders-including-chavez/5326864


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