Monday, October 27, 2014

Domestic intelligence operations ratcheted up against whistleblowers by Wayne Madsen




Domestic intelligence operations ratcheted up against whistleblowers

The Obama administration is already known as the most hostile in U.S. history toward whistleblowers and leakers, so it should come as no great surprise that the number of "black bag" breaking and entering incidents directed against public and private sector whistleblowers are increasing. Under the USA-PATRIOT Act, "National security letters" unsigned by federal judges are all that are required for the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies to conduct "sneak and peek" operations inside the offices and homes of surveillance targets.

The CIA under its thuggish director John Brennan, the man who originated the agency's controversial rendition, detention, and interrogation program, has been turning up the heat on whistleblowers and leakers. The CIA hacked into the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee and sent agents, masquerading as committee staffers, to determine what information the committee had on the CIA programs. Brennan later apologized for spying on committee computers but earlier he had denied such surveillance was taking place.

WMR has learned over the past few weeks that unknown parties have entered the South Carolina home of one protected witness who has both knowledge of and documentation on the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" or torture program in Iraq. Compact disks and paper copies of email to and from Iraq were found strewn on the floor of the residence. The individual has been threatened in the past by contractors for the firms CACI and Titan for revealing their role with the CIA's and Pentagon's interrogation program in Iraq. In addition, the whistleblower is aware that many of the leaders of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) were not only detainees at U.S. military prisons in Iraq but were turned into U.S. intelligence assets after their release.

Not only is Brennan spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee to ascertain what it knows about the CIA's past role with some of ISIL's leaders but he is now willing to conduct "sneak and peek" operations on private residences.

WMR is aware of another case in which an individual with detailed knowledge of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center has experienced at least one recent breaking and entering of his residence.

WMR's editor has received a series of unusual phone calls from unidentified individuals inquiring as to where we received our information on the U.S. military's weaponization of the Ebola virus. After describing the contents of the main document, a 2009 U.S. embassy Berlin cable to the State Department and Pentagon stating that the German government was withholding permission for a German medical firm to export Ebola and other dangerous hemorrhagic viruses to the U.S. bio-laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland unless assurances were given that the cultures would not be weaponized, the inquiring individuals on the phone responded by saying that the cable was insufficient documentation to prove a "conspiracy theory."

There is ample evidence that the U.S. pursued the development of biological warfare agents long after signing the 1972 convention with Britain and the USSR outlawing such weaponry. The "Gulf War Syndrome" of as British troops call it, "Desert Fever," suffered by many veterans of Operation Desert Storm may have been the result of U.S. attacks on stockpiles of biological agents supplied to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s by then Special Envoy to Iraq Donald Rumsfeld. The Pentagon long denied that Gulf War Syndrome was associated with any weapons or vaccines administered to U.S. troops but Secretary of Defense Les Aspin confirmed the presence in Iraq and Saudi Arabia of banned Sarin and mustard gas. There were also reports at the time that U.S. forces, under the orders of then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, deployed banned chem-bio weapons to the theater to "prove" that Saddam Hussein not only had them in his possession but had used them against allied forces. Saddam's use of the weapons would be used as a predicate to justify an allied occupation of Iraq in 1991. However, George H W Bush and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell would not go along with the neocon plan to toppled Saddam and the new CIA line was that no chem-bio weapons were used or accidentally released during Desert Storm. CIA director John Deutch actually disputed Aspin's proof of past use of chem-bio weapons.


At a 1993 press conference, Defense Secretary Les Aspin shows the locations where chem-bio weapons were detected during Desert Storm. He contradicted denials from his own deputy and later CIA director John Deutch that such weapons were detected by U.S., British, and Czechoslovak units. In December 1993, Aspin suddenly resigned for "personal" reasons, said to be health-related. In May 1995, Aspin suffered a sudden stroke and died. 

WMR is providing the documentation on the U.S. weaponization of hemorrhagic fevers. We have made it clear many times to various agencies of the U.S. government that any and all forms of intimidation and/or harassment are studiously ignored.

Click here for U.S. Embassy Berlin cable.

Click here on August 28, 1975 CIA memo to CIA director from deputy director of CIA for plans Thomas Karamessines on the CIA's stockpile of bio-weapons at Fort Detrick, including anthrax, tuleremia, encephalitis, Valley Fever, brucellosis, tuberculosis, salmonella, smallpox, botulism, paralytic shellfish poison, lethal snake venom, intestinal influenza, and toxiferine.

Other bio-weapons used by the CIA included African swine fever deployed against Cuba's swine stock; blue tobacco mold and cane smut used against Cuba's tobacco and sugar cane crops, respectively; Dengue fever used against Cuba's human population; malaria, yellow fever, crop-destroying Thrips palmi insects used against Cuba; and the HIV/AIDS virus used against Cuban troops fighting in Angola.

Click here for U.S. patent application by Centers for Disease Control (CDC) for Ebola Bundibugyo (Uganda) strain:
US Ebola Patent Application