CIA has history of blanket denials, even drug running by Wayne Madsen

CIA has history of blanket denials

The Central Intelligence Agency, which lives and breathes according to the mantra of "plausible deniability," has a long history of denying wrongdoing. The current CIA director, John Brennan, has joined with past directors to reject the allegations of torture contained in both the Senate Intelligence Committee report and a classified key findings and conclusions of an internal CIA review commissioned by former CIA director Leon Panetta. The latter information was revealed by Senator Mark Udall when he read on the Senate floor the classified passages into the Congressional Record, an act that automatically and legally declassified the information. Udall said the Panetta Review revealed that the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information on its interrogation program to the Congress, the President, and the public.

In November 1972, the CIA, in an internal memorandum, denied allegations leveled against the agency by reporter Seymour Hersh in a conversation with Representative Lucien Nedzi, the CIA-friendly chairman of the Intelligence Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, the forerunner of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Nedzi was discovered to be so close to the CIA, he resigned his chairmanship and was replaced by the more CIA-hostile Otis Pike.

There was one press allegation that the CIA managed to have "successfully conned all of our congressional oversight committees." The agency's response was "Interesting, if true."

When confronted with Hersh's allegations that CIA director Richard Helms was so ineffective as CIA director that the agency was experiencing unprecedented leaks of information, the CIA countered by blaming "mischievous and troublesome leaks" on three ex-employees. Only Victor Marchetti's name is unredacted, however, one of the other CIA ex-employees is clearly Phil Agee, and the third is Marchetti's former State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research co-author John D. Marks.

The CIA rejected accusations that it failed to keep the Nedzi committee and other committees "adequately informed" of its operations in Laos. The agency also rejected allegations that Helms was a "strong advocate of the so-called 'dirty tricks' component of the Agency." However, the CIA also stated that because of Helms's "long experience in clandestine operations, he occasionally does indeed take an active part in the direction of such operations."

The agency also declared that the "allegation of Agency involvement with the Special Forces to carry out assassinations and sabotage missions in South America have appeared in various forms in the press [REDACTED]. They are completely false." However, the CIA record shows that this statement was a flat out lie and the CIA had been involved in assassinations and terrorist operations in Chile, where the Chilean Army Chief of Staff General René Schneider was shot to death in a botched CIA-led kidnapping operation in 1970, as well as in Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, and Argentina.

The CIA rejected a report by Jack Anderson that Rocky Mountain Airline, a CIA proprietary, was transporting heroin. The CIA admitted there was a "Rocky Mountain Airways" based in Colorado but that it had "no Agency connection." However, the CIA was being purposefully pedantic. There was an Agency proprietary airline called "Rock Mountain Air" that was based near Phoenix and which was established by the CIA's airline chief, George Doole.

As far as a press report that the U.S. bombed Communist-controlled poppy fields in Laos in order to drove the price up to benefit the CIA-led army of Laotian General Vang Pao. The CIA stated this was "totally false." It was later determined that the CIA, using its proprietary Air America airline, was routinely smuggling heroin out of Laos. The CIA contended that "CIA involvement in the drug traffic have been repeatedly investigated and in each case found to be completely without substance." Evidence of CIA involvement in smuggling drugs continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s, especially with regard to U.S. operations in the 1980s in Central America and Colombia. More recently, the agency has been accused of protecting the opium trade in areas of Afghanistan controlled by pro-American war lords.

There was an allegation by Hersh that Representative Bertrand Podell (D-NY) received $10,000 in cash from Israel in return for his "public criticism of the Soviet treatment of Jews." The CIA memo states that Nedzi said "he wouldn't be surprised if this was true," although the CIA claimed it had "no information." In 1973, Podell was indicted on 10 federal corruption counts, including a charge that he received $41,350 in a bribe to ensure that a small Florida airline received government permission to fly a route to the Bahamas. Podell pleaded guilty and served four and a half months in prison.

The CIA said the U.S. Navy was the only government agency that was in a position to comment on a press allegation that "a U.S. submarine on a reconnaissance mission ran aground at Murmansk harbor in 1967, and the U.S. is conducting electronic and photographic reconnaissance in the harbors of both Murmansk and Vladivostok." The CIA claimed it was not in a position to comment. However, in a June 1968 memo, the CIA stated it was well aware that the USS Scorpion, a nuclear submarine, was lost after two acoustic explosions were detected on May 22, 1968. The Scorpion had been diverted from its course back to Norfolk in order to investigate Soviet submarine mine "seeding" operations near the Canary Islands. Such tasking would have involved the CIA as would have submarine espionage missions in Soviet naval ports. The Navy, for two weeks, claimed that the submarine was merely overdue in port and not lost at sea. The CIA's "no comment" on U.S.-Soviet undersea confrontations in Murmansk harbor certainly lends credence to the belief that the Scorpion and a few Soviet submarines sank as a result of hostile actions by the other side.


CIA: a long history of lies and denials

The CIA even rejected reports that "CIA spooks" regularly met at Pouget's Restaurant in downtown Washington, DC to chat freely about CIA operations. The CIA said that when the CIA was headquartered downtown before it moved to Langley, Virginia twelve years earlier, the allegation of CIA lunches at Pouget's was true. However, the agency said that after it moved to Virginia, CIA employees no longer lunched at Pouget's. However, Pouget's was not even located near CIA buildings in Washington but was on Connecticut Avenue in the Cleveland Park neighborhood. The CIA even lied about the fact even after the move to Langley its employees continued to dine at the restaurant for lunch and dinner.

Senate Torture Report exposes bizarre sexual voyeurism of Cheney, others by Wayne Madsen

Senate Torture Report exposes bizarre sexual voyeurism of Cheney, others

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's Study of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program, otherwise known as the "Torture Report," contains a number of references to male sexual abuse also seen in past reports about torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantanamo.

The sexual abuse centers around inserting objects into the rectums of detainees. In the recent Senate report this activity also borders on coprophilia, a fetish that WMR exposed in the past on this website as one of Vice President Dick Cheney's more prurient interests. Coprophilia is defined as "paraphilia involving sexual arousal and pleasure from feces." Upon its release by Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Cheney was quick to defend the interrogation and detention practices revealed in the report.

Not only does the report state that detainees, including Abu Zubaydah, were subject to frequent rectal examinations but they were also subjected to "rectal fluid resuscitation" for "partially refusing liquids." The report states that Majid Khan, a legal resident of the United States from Pakistan, was "very hostile to rectal feeding and removed the rectal tube as soon as he was allowed to."

In addition, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, charged as the planner of the 9/11 attack, was "subjected to rectal rehydration without a determination of medical need, a procedure that KSM interrogator and chief of interrogations, [redacted] would later characterize as illustrative of the interrogator's 'total control over the detainee.'" Another detainee, Marwan al-Jabbur, a native of Pakistan who was later released after being held at various CIA black sites, was subjected to what was originally called an "enema," but was later acknowledged to be rectal rehydration. The report states that Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, charged with being the mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, and Majid Khan were subjected to rectal feeding. The CIA destroyed tapes of al-Nashiri being waterboarded at the CIA black site, called the "Blue Site," in Poland. Three detainees, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Khallad bin
Attash, and Adnan al-Libi, were threatened with rectal rehydration.

Medical professionals contacted by WMR said there is no evidence that any nourishment can be achieved by giving someone a colonic enema or rectal infusion of food matter. The Senate report states that Majid Khan was infused rectally with a pureed "lunch tray" of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins. The CIA's June 2013 Response to the Senate committee failed to address the use of rectal feeding with CIA detainees, but defends the use of rectal rehydration as a "well acknowledged medical technique." Doctors WMR consulted rejected the CIA's statement as nonsense. The report also states that the "CIA leadership, including General Counsel Scott Muller and DDO James Pavitt, was also alerted to allegations that rectal exams were conducted with 'excessive force' on two detainees at DETENTION SITE COBALT [located in Afghanistan and known as the "Salt Pit"]. CIA attorney [redacted] was asked to follow up, although CIA records do not indicate any resolution of the inquiry. CIA records indicate that one of the detainees, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, was later diagnosed with chronic hemorrhoids, an anal fissure, and symptomatic prolapse." Al-Hawsawi, charged with being the financier of the 9/11 attack, remains in detention in Guantanamo.

According to the report, it is quite likely that the "rectal infusions" were contained in CIA videotapes of the interrogations of Zubaydah and al-Nashiri. It is also known that live video streaming of interrogations was viewed by senior U.S. government officials. According to the report, "CIA officers were observing the foreign government interrogations of Ammar al-Baluchi via video feed." Al Baluchi, a native of Kuwait accused of being an Al Qaeda financier in Pakistan and Dubai, was held in a CIA black site and is currently in Guantanamo.

After the Senate Intelligence Committee expressed interest in the torture videotapes, the CIA destroyed them on November 9, 2005, according to the report. The number of videotapes held by the CIA and destroyed is not disclosed. The report indicates that other videotapes of torture were destroyed by the CIA beginning in December 2007.

WMR previously reported that live video streaming equipment used by Vice President Cheney and his aides to view torture sessions in his Old Executive Building office was destroyed by a suspicious fire. On May 28, 2009, WMR reported: "On December 22, 2008, WMR reported on the high-tech support provided the Bush-Cheney White House by Mike Connell's GovTech Solutions and his close colleague Jeff Averbeck's firm SmarTech. Connell died last December when the plane he was piloting crashed short of landing in Akron, Ohio. We have now learned that Connell and Averbeck may have been behind the installation of live streaming black boxes in the White House and the Eisenhower Old Executive Office Building used to stream live video of torture sessions in Guantanamo, Cuba and Abu Ghraib to the Old Executive Office Building office of Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief Counsel David Addington and into the White House, itself."

Addington is mentioned a number of times in the Senate report as being a key player in the torture program.  WMR's May 28, 2009 report continued: "The fire that broke out in an 'electrical closet' in the Old Executive Office Building on December 19, 2007, near Cheney's ceremonial office likely contained the live streaming boxes used to stream torture sessions from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, according to our sources who added that SmartTech and Airnet have been in the live streaming video business since 2002. With the recent statement of retired U.S. Army General Antonio Taguba that rape and other sexual molestation sessions were prevalent at Abu Ghraib and that they were photographed, the stories of the suspicious death of Connell and the White House fire have taken on new relevancy. As reported by WMR on January 10, 2008: 'Army Major General Antonio Taguba's report on Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse stated that the abuse included 'A male MP guard 'having sex' with a female detainee.' 'Having sex' was an obvious attempt to avoid the use of the word 'rape.' It is obvious that Taguba's report was either altered or some evidence was not shared with him and his investigators . . . Another investigation conducted by Lt. Gen. Anthony Jones and Maj. Gen. George Fay of Abu Ghraib reported male homosexual rape of prisoners but not the rape of female prisoners."

The Taguba report on detainee abuse in Iraq also stated that detainees were sodomized with glow sticks. WMR also reported that U.S. sodomized underage teen at Iraqi detention facilities with broom sticks and flashlights and that videotapes of this abuse were made available to senior White House staff for "entertainment" purposes.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also personally oversaw sexual abuse of at least one detainee. A December 2005 internal US Army Inspector General report leaked to the on-line publication Salon.com described how  Rumsfeld personally monitored by telephone the interrogation of Saudi detainee Mohamed el Qahtani, described as the "20th hijacker." Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt reported to the Inspector General that the abuse  of Qahtani "looked like Abu Ghraib." Qahtani was forced to wear women's underwear, perform sex acts in front of a woman, and perform "dog tricks" while wearing a leash. The nudity and "stress position" acts were personally approved by Rumsfeld in December 2002.

However, it is Cheney who has been quick to defend the sexually perverse interrogation practices from which he appears to have derived personal gratification. On October 26, 2006, WMR reported that people who knew Dick Cheney in Wyoming before he served in the Nixon administration claimed he always had an unusual penchant for hanging around young girls, some as young as seven-years old. Cheney reportedly walked around his Wyoming home in his underwear, sometimes when his two young daughters' friends were visiting. Cheney did not seem to mind that his activities around his home would inevitably expose his penis to the young girls.


Senate Intelligence Committee report on rectal rehydration appears to match Dick Cheney's most prurient sexual interests. Cheney's staff suppressed the above edition of The Globe from DC metro area supermarkets.

WMR also reported: "Cheney served as a Congressman from Wyoming from 1979 to 1989. This was during a time when two major page scandals, both involving Republican members of Congress, rocked Capitol Hill. They were the Koreagate scandal and the page/prostitutes visiting the White House in the late 1980s. In 1981, Lynne Cheney wrote "Sisters," an Old West novel containing lesbian themes. Dick Cheney's close friend and former chief of staff Scooter Libby penned a novel called "The Apprentice." The following is an excerpt from Libby's book, which features its main character, Yukiko, drawing hair on the 'mound' of a little girl: 'At age 10 the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.'"

In 2002, Cheney held a reception for the publication of the second edition of Libby's book at the vice president's mansion.

On June 5, 2007, WMR reported on bizarre and kinky sexual practices engaged in by top Bush administration and other Republican officials by clients of "DC Madam" Jeane Palfrey's Pamela Martin & Associates escort service and other services: "The Bush administration's increasing nervousness about Deborah Jeane Palfrey's phone list is understandable after more details have emerged about some of the more bizarre prurient appetites of some past clients of Pamela Martin & Associates clients, said to include top officials of the Bush administration, Congressional members and staffers, and at least two well-known Washington, DC journalists.

Some escorts regularly paid visits to clients with whips and handcuffs as part of their regular ensemble.

Prostitutes hired by Louisiana Senator David Vitter in New Orleans are reporting that Vitter had a bizarre sexual fetish -- he liked to wear diapers during his trysts.

While that may be weird, some other prostitution clients due to be outed in Washington would appear much more bizarre. WMR has learned that certain VIPs who engaged the services of 'fantasy' escorts enjoyed what is known as 'water sports' -- firstly, practices that involve urination and, 'number two,' activities that are even worse.

Cheney's coprophilia fetish was the subject of WMR's April 11, 2008 report, "Cheney, according to knowledgeable sources involved in the Palfrey trial, paid at least one escort to straddle a glass top table and defecate on it while Cheney peered at the bowel "evacuation" from underneath" The act was performed before Cheney became vice president at a town home next door to his own residence at Madison of McLean, an upscale housing development in McLean, Virginia close to the CIA's headquarters. Palfrey, had been found guilty of racketeering, mail fraud, and money laundering on April 15, 2008, just four days after WMR published its report about her escorts being involved in coprophiliac activities with Cheney. On May 1, 2008, Palfrey was found hanging in a utility shed at her mother's home in Tarpon Springs, Florida. Police ruled the death a "suicide."

After WMR's report on Cheney's use of Palfrey's escorts ran on the front cover of The Globe supermarket tabloid, the editor was informed that Cheney's aides pressured two local retailers, Giant Food and Safeway, not to carry that issue. However, CVS pharmacy did sell the issue.

The bottom line on the rectal abuse at the CIA black sites, Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib is that it was performed not to extract any meaningful intelligence but for the sexual gratification of coprohiliacs like Dick Cheney and his closest associates. While squirting a puree of hummus, pasta, nuts and raisins into the rectums of U.S. detainees had no nutritional value for prisoners who refused to eat, the prurient nature of the procedure is in keeping with the bizarre sexual appetites of Mr. Cheney and his entourage.

The CIA-French Gladio plot to kill Eisenhower and Khrushchev by Wayne Madsen

The CIA-French Gladio plot to kill Eisenhower and Khrushchev
WMR has discovered buried deep within the Central Intelligence Agency's declassified archives a file on a proposed operation to be carried out by the CIA under Allen Dulles and right-wing members of France's Gladio "stay behind" network. The operation was to assassinate President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and bring about an all-out war between the two nations.

Details of a secret White House National Security Council report on the plot were leaked to the French Communist Party newspaper, L'Humanité, which published a story on the conspiracy in its March 19, 1960 edition. Although White House Press Secretary James Hagerty called the report "communist propaganda," the French government ordered all editions ofL'Humanité seized before they went on sale. Moreover, the author of the report, General Andrew Goodpaster, was tipped by Eisenhower to be the next CIA director after Eisenhower fired Dulles for his involvement in what would have been a coup against the U.S. and Soviet governments. Eisenhower never did fire Dulles and replace him with Goodpaster. That task was left to Eisenhower's successor, John F. Kennedy, who sacked the CIA chief after the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Goodpaster would later become the supreme commander of NATO under President Richard Nixon.

The planned assassination of Ike and Khrushchev would not be the first time that America's deep state would plan a false flag attack designed to trigger war between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1962, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Lyman Lemnitzer proposed a series of false flag attacks on U.S. and foreign interests in the Caribbean designed to make it appear that Cuba was behind the incidents. Known as Operation Northwoods, the plan was composed of Operation Bingo, a plan to stage an attack on the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay and make it appear that Cuban troops had carried it out; Operation Dirty Trick, which would blame Cuba for electronically interfering with John Glenn's Mercury launch had it been destroyed in an accident; and the hijacking of commercial planes and carrying out attacks on Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago and blaming it all on Cuba. The plan was never carried out. The Northwoods attacks would give the United States a reason to attack Cuba, an event that would have likely resulted in a wider world war.

The French rightist military elements were attached to Gladio units in France designed to carry out attacks against Warsaw Pact forces in the event of a Soviet-led invasion of Western Europe. These French units included La Rose des Vents, Arc-en-ciel ("Rainbow"), the
Western Union Clandestine Committee that worked closely with the FrenchExternal Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service (SDECE), and the 11th Choc parachutist regiment of the French Army. In 1961, many of these units formed the Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS) (Secret Army Organization), which was opposed to Algerian independence and tried to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle.

Contained in the Goodpaster report was a statement from a plot informant: "Obsessed by the idea that a carefully planned political assassination always leads to the necessary war, these officers always are constrained to think of all possible forms of a final action, of which the result could be the assassination by a fanatic of the Russian or American chief of state."

 
Dulles's and French Gladio's fingerprints on plot to assassinate Ike [left] and Khrushchev [right], bringing about World War III.

The Goodpaster report also stated: "Army officers -- those stationed in Algeria as well as those stationed in the south of France -- involved with right-wing Algerian activists, constitute a sort of secret society that is very well hidden."

Later on March 19, 1960, L'Humanité published a special edition but the article on the plot to assassinate Eisenhower and Khrushchev was deleted.

One member of the secret French army group that was to assassinate Eisenhower and Khrushchev was Jean Souetre, aka Michel Roux and Michel Mertz, a Corsican assassin who was deported by the FBI from Dallas, Texas within 48 hours of the November 22, 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. De Gaulle was certain of the "French connection" to Kennedy's assassination. The Washington Post, which originally reported on the Goodpaster report on March 20, 1960, never followed up on Souetre's connection to the OAS and the hit team that was to assassinate Ike and Khrushchev. Allen Dulles was named by President Lyndon Johnson as a member of the Warren Commission that allegedly fully investigated the assassination of President Kennedy.

The CIA Torture Report

CIA Torture Report

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did not want the Senate Intelligence Committee report on U.S. torture of detainees released. Barack Obama and John Kerry wanted the report's release delayed. They are all culpable to varying degrees in covering up huge crimes and violations of law.



Read the entire report by clicking here.