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Hip-Hop Invasion! (And other stupid covert Cuba projects)

By Bill Humphrey December 11, 2014 - 8:40 pm December 11, 2014 Arsenal Analysis

The Associated Press has broken yet another story of a mind-blowingly stupid State Department USAID plot to infiltrate Cuba and overthrow the Castro regime, all via a horribly incompetent contractor called “Creative Associates International.” The latest? Trying to infiltrate the country’s underground hip-hop scene to overthrow Castro via angry rap lyrics:

A U.S. agency’s secret infiltration of Cuba’s underground hip-hop groups scene to spark a youth movement against the government was “reckless” and “stupid,” Sen. Patrick Leahy said Thursday after The Associated Press revealed the operation.

On at least six occasions, Cuban authorities detained or interrogated people involved in the program; they also confiscated computer hardware that in some cases contained information that jeopardized Cubans who likely had no idea they were caught up in a clandestine U.S. operation. Still, contractors working for the U.S. Agency for International Development kept putting themselves and their targets at risk, the AP investigation found.

Hip-hop artists who USAID contractors tried to promote either left the country or stopped performing after pressure from the Cuban government, and one of the island’s most popular independent music festivals was taken over after officials linked it to USAID.

“The conduct described suggests an alarming lack of concern for the safety of the Cubans involved, and anyone who knows Cuba could predict it would fail,” said Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the State Department and Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee. “USAID never informed Congress about this and should never have been associated with anything so incompetent and reckless. It’s just plain stupid.”

Before this revelation? The AIDS education plot:

Fernando Murillo was typical of the young Latin Americans deployed by a U.S. agency to work undercover in Cuba. He had little training in the dangers of clandestine operations — or how to evade one of the world’s most sophisticated counter-intelligence services.

Their assignment was to recruit young Cubans to anti-government activism, which they did under the guise of civic programs, including an HIV prevention workshop.

According to internal documents obtained by the AP and interviews in six countries, USAID’s young operatives posed as tourists, visited college campuses and used a ruse that could undermine USAID’s credibility in critical health work around the world: An HIV-prevention workshop one called the “perfect excuse” to recruit political activists, according to a report by Murillo’s group. For all the risks, some travelers were paid as little as $5.41 an hour.

As one Republican put it:

“These programs are in desperate need of adult supervision,” said Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona and longtime critic of USAID’s Cuba programs. “If you are using an AIDS workshop as a front for something else, that’s … I don’t know what to say … it’s just wrong.”

Flake has been particularly loud in criticizing these idiotic policies, as I don’t think he particularly cares about hurting the feelings of the militant, aging anti-Castro bloc in Congress.
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US prepares to give sacred Native land to Australian mining firm

By Bill Humphrey December 11, 2014 - 12:19 am December 14, 2014 Arsenal Pulse

Congress may be about to trade Federal public land in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest that includes a sacred Native American site to a subsidiary of the giant Australian mining company Rio Tinto for copper mining:

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell on Saturday criticized a last-minute addition to a major defense policy bill that would hand 2,400 acres of land in Arizona to an Australian mining corporation.
[…]
But the land also includes sites sacred to the San Carlos Apache tribe, including Apache Leap, where warriors once leapt to their deaths rather than being killed or captured by U.S. troops moving west through the frontier.

The proposed land exchange had failed several times before, including once in 2013 when House Republicans scheduled a vote while Native American leaders were meeting with White House officials in Washington. Tribal activists pressured lawmakers into spiking the vote.

But it returned again this week, in the final version of the National Defense Authorization Act, a must-pass bill that sets the nation’s defense policy.

San_Carlos_Apache_seal This is a yet another demonstration that Federal abuses of the Native American people are still ongoing (and Native interests and voices are still callously disregarded), rather than such treatment being some relic of a harsh but distant past. Interior Secretary Jewell called the provision “profoundly disappointing.”

Activists have launched an official WhiteHouse.gov Petition called Stop Apache Land Grab in an effort to get the provision removed.

China has some thoughts on the US Torture Report

By Bill Humphrey December 10, 2014 - 4:45 pm December 10, 2014 Arsenal Pulse

International reactions to the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s summary of the Torture Report continue to roll out, including China:

China urged the United States on Wednesday to “correct its ways” in the wake of the U.S. Senate report.

“China has consistently opposed torture. We believe that the U.S. side should reflect on this, correct its ways and earnestly respect and follow the rules of related international conventions,” China foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei told a daily briefing.

China is frequently accused by rights groups of using torture. The government has in the past said it has been used and vowed to stamp it out, following a series of cases of wrongful convictions after confessions were extracted under torture.

China and the United States often spar about each other’s human rights records. China has even begun issuing its own annual report on the U.S. rights record, criticising the United States for issues ranging from racism to gun crime and homelessness.

Ouch.

Reminder: CIA spied on Senate Intel committee

By Bill Humphrey December 9, 2014 - 9:59 pm December 9, 2014 Arsenal Pulse

Just a reminder: the CIA has publicly admitted to spying on members of the US Senate Intelligence Committee as it was preparing the Torture Report. New York Times, July 31, 2014:

An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program.

The report by the agency’s inspector general also found that C.I.A. officers read the emails of the Senate investigators and sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information, according to a summary of findings made public on Thursday. One official with knowledge of the report’s conclusions said the investigation also discovered that the officers created a false online identity to gain access on more than one occasion to computers used by the committee staff.

There are people worried about fictional conspiracies and coverups on a wide range of topics from “chemtrails” and the moon landing to Benghazi, even as a US spy agency is admitting to hacking its own supervising Congressional committee and attempting to interfere with its work. I mean, that’s some Nikita-level shenanigans.

A secret organization could probably literally take over the government and the people who seem most concerned about “shadow governments” wouldn’t notice.

Senate Intel committee to release CIA torture report summary

By Bill Humphrey December 8, 2014 - 10:17 pm December 8, 2014 Arsenal Pulse

A 500-page summary of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s secret 6,300 page report on torture by the Central Intelligence Agency during the “War on Terror,” the whole of which the CIA has been trying to suppress for quite some time, will be released tomorrow (Reuters):

The 500-plus page report which the Intelligence Committee has prepared for release — a summary of a much more detailed, 6,000-page narrative which will remain secret – includes a 200-page narrative of the interrogation program’s history and 20 case studies of the interrogations of specific detainees.

Graphic details about sexual threats and other harsh interrogation techniques the CIA meted out to captured militants will be detailed by a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the spy agency’s anti-terror tactics, sources familiar with the document said.
[…]
Some interrogation tactics meant to force detainees to divulge information on terrorist plots and cells, went beyond the harsh techniques authorized by White House, CIA and Justice Department lawyers working for President George W. Bush’s Justice Department, according to the sources familiar with the report.
[…]
Intelligence committee Democrats are expected to post the report on the panel’s website on Tuesday, along with lengthy critiques of it by committee Republicans and the CIA.

The report, which took years to produce, charts the history of the CIA’s “Rendition, Detention and Interrogation” program, which Bush authorized after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Bush ended many aspects of the program before leaving office, and Obama swiftly banned so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which critics say are torture, after his 2009 inauguration.

The committee’s bottom-line conclusion is that harsh interrogations did not produce a single critical intelligence nugget that could not have been obtained by non-coercive means.

Ahead of this publication, which is the type of disclosure that my co-founder Nate and I have been calling for since the first year of our first blog (Starboard Broadside), I have spent the evening moving to this site some of the best posts we had written on this subject in 2009 and 2010 when the highly disturbing so-called “torture debates” (whether the acts were torture, whether they should be disclosed, and even whether they be brought back) were raging in Washington D.C. and in the blogosphere.

Almost six years ago, the newly inaugurated Obama Administration was adamantly opposed to publicly admitting such egregious moral failings and national stains (committed by the prior administration), but they seem to have made peace with it finally. Even so, the Reuters account makes it sound like a parting shot against the report:

Preparing for a worldwide outcry, and possibly even violence, from the publication of such graphic details, the White House and U.S. intelligence officials said on Monday they had taken steps to shore up security of U.S. facilities worldwide.

“There are some indications that … the release of the report could lead to greater risk that is posed to U.S. facilities and individuals all around the world,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.
[…]
Earnest reiterated that President Barack Obama supports making the document public “so that people around the world and people here at home understand exactly what transpired.”

Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence agencies secretly circulated a bulletin warning of possible violent reactions overseas, a senior intelligence official told Reuters. The Pentagon has also warned field commanders they should take appropriate steps to protect U.S. troops and bases overseas.

Intelligence community officials continue to dispute the report’s findings even until the 11th hour, insisting that torture tactics were vital to saving lives, despite internal CIA memos as early as 2004 stating that there was no evidence that any “enhanced interrogation” methods had stopped even one attack.

As quoted from Reuters above, much of tomorrow’s report is expected to make the case that the little intelligence gained from such methods at all did not include anything that likely could not otherwise have been gained through different (non-torture) interrogation methods in an equally timely manner.

capitol-dome-large

AFD Radio Special: Black Lives Matter Protests

By Bill Humphrey December 8, 2014 - 5:00 pm September 15, 2015 Radio Show

Topic: Ferguson and Beyond — What happens next in the growing movement? Panel: Jamie Nesbitt Golden, Ama, and JP. Host: Bill. Recorded: December 7th, 2014.

AFD Episode 110:
Ferguson Special II

Panelist bios

– Jamie Nesbitt Golden, from Chicago: Freelance writer, participant in the August rallies in Ferguson and the November rallies in Chicago
– Ama, from St. Louis County: Lives next to Ferguson, wife owns a business there, 12 year county resident, participant in the August rallies in Ferguson
– JP, from St. Louis County: Lives near Ferguson, 10-year U.S. military veteran, 20 year county resident

Britain, Back to Bahrain

By Bill Humphrey December 7, 2014 - 8:00 am December 7, 2014 Arsenal Pulse

Nearly four and a half decades after withdrawing from its protectorate in August 1971 and turning over its naval base to the United States Navy, the United Kingdom has decided to return to Bahrain with a new permanent base for Persian Gulf activities.

Bahrain, a small oil-producing island nation in the Persian Gulf with a little over twice the land area of the City of Las Vegas, is the permanent home of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet and U.S. Naval Forces Central Command. The country is much smaller but almost as populous as neighboring Qatar (the Gulf’s power-hitting, influential media hub and state terror sponsor.) Bahrain upgrade itself from an emirate to a kingdom back in 2002 and had repeatedly introduced pseudo-democracy without true reforms.

Back a few years ago, during the early 2011 failed Arab Spring uprising in the capital of Bahrain, suppressed eventually with the help of Saudi/UAE Gulf Cooperation Council troops, there was a lot of concern (probably correctly) that the United States was declining to get involved — in any capacity — because of its military base in the country. (And probably also because the protesters were likely somewhat aligned with Iran.)

But there is an a far, far longer history of support for violent autocracy in Bahrain by the United Kingdom. And that might be exactly what’s going on now. Former UK Ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, commended Britain for re-establishing a permanent military presence in Bahrain with the following explanation:

“It will also make it more difficult for some internal cell in Bahrain or UAE or wherever to think they can have a go at the local government if they see some highly trained and capable people standing alongside the government”

In other words, Greenstock believes this military presence will be vital to protect the repressive minority Sunni monarchy of Bahrain from its own population, which is majority Shia.

The unpopular ruling family of Bahrain — originally hailing from southern Iraq in the 18th century — was first explicitly propped up by Britain in an 1868 treaty, after which the British Empire repeatedly suppressed uprisings against the ruling minority. With the discovery of major oil reserves, this became even more important to the British government.

After the 1971 independence agreement (and the base transfer to the United States), the United States has absorbed the role of de facto protector of the ruling family, via extensive heavy arms sales and turning a blind eye during the repeated suppression of protests and uprisings happening just beyond its base perimeter.

Now Bahrain’s rulers can count on not one but two major Western military powers to have their back, in addition to support from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Map of Bahrain (Credit: CIA World Factbook)

Yearly Archives: 2014