Category Archives: US government

CIA organizational changes could lead to massive expansion of agency

The Washington Post reports: CIA Director John Brennan is considering sweeping organizational changes that could include breaking up the separate spying and analysis divisions that have been in place for decades to create hybrid units focused on individual regions and threats to U.S. security, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said.

The proposal would essentially replicate the structure of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and other similar entities in the agency — an idea that reflects the CTC’s expanded role and influence since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

U.S. officials emphasized that the proposal is in its preliminary stages, and could still be scaled back or even discarded. Already the idea has encountered opposition from current and former officials who have voiced concern that it would be too disruptive and might jeopardize critical capabilities and expertise.

But if Brennan moves forward, officials said, the changes would be among the most ambitious in CIA history — potentially creating individual centers focused on China, Latin America and other regions or issues for which personnel are now dispersed across difference parts of the agency. [Continue reading…]

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Top Senators oppose CIA move to destroy email

The Wall Street Journal reports: The top Democrat and Republican on the Senate intelligence committee announced Wednesday their opposition to a move by the Central Intelligence Agency to eventually destroy email of all but a small number of top agency officials.

The bipartisan opposition to the proposal may derail the CIA’s plans for the eventual elimination of email of all but the highest ranking 22 CIA officials, a move that comes at a time when the Obama administration has been vowing greater transparency by intelligence agencies.

The CIA’s email plans were tentatively approved in August by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, which oversees U.S. government document-retention policies. It spent nearly seven months evaluating the proposal. [Continue reading…]

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NSA phone data collection could go on, even if a law expires

The New York Times reports: A little-known provision of the Patriot Act, overlooked by lawmakers and administration officials alike, appears to give President Obama a possible way to keep the National Security Agency’s bulk phone records program going indefinitely — even if Congress allows the law on which it is based to expire next year.

Senate Republicans on Tuesday night used a filibuster to block consideration of a bill to end and replace the N.S.A. phone records program. The debate about what may happen next has played out based on a widely held premise: that the legal basis for the program, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, will expire on June 1, so if Congress remains gridlocked, the program will automatically shut down.

“I believe that if we do not pass this bill, the metadata program is at risk because the 215 program sunsets next year,” Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said in Tuesday night’s debate. But that premise may be incorrect. If the summer arrives and the program is facing a shutdown, Mr. Obama could invoke the provision to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to keep it going.

Several executive branch officials said the administration had not been studying that option and expressed doubt that Mr. Obama would take such a step, or that the Surveillance Court would agree to it if he tried. Still, the mere existence of a potential way for the program to keep going without congressional action could recast the debate. [Continue reading…]

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Nick Turse: When is a ‘base camp’ neither a base nor a camp?

Sometimes, to see the big picture you need to focus on the smallest part of it, as Nick Turse does in the latest of his dispatches on the U.S. military in Africa.  He takes a look at that military in Chad.  Yep, I said “in Chad.” At least 99% of Americans are undoubtedly unfamiliar with that landlocked African country and most of the remaining 1% have no idea that the U.S. military is already deeply involved in that (if you don’t happen to be Chadian) obscure land.

It’s easy enough to link the word “imperial” to the United States in a lazy fashion.  But if imperial has any meaning in the post-colonial twenty-first century, it certainly means that the (super)power in question has an active interest in attempting to control significant swathes of the planet.  In fact, there has never been a power, no matter how “great,” which has, in such a militarized way, tried to put its stamp of control on so much of Planet Earth.

It has, for instance, garrisoned the Greater Middle East from the Chinese border in Central Asia to the Balkans in an unprecedented fashion.  For decades, it considered the Pacific Ocean an “American lake” and garrisoned islands across it in a similarly unprecedented fashion.  Between 1945 and 1973, it fought two wars in Asia, at the cost of millions of lives, leading to a still-unresolved stalemate in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam; from 1980 to the present, it has fought a barely interrupted war in Afghanistan and since 1990, three wars in Iraq.  It has also conducted air strikes in countries ranging from Pakistan and Yemen to Syria and Somalia, intervened disastrously in Lebanon and Libya, among other places, and come to the edge of war (while launching a “cyberwar”) in Iran.  And that doesn’t even exhaust the list of conflicts.

In recent months, the U.S. has “pivoted” (the term of the moment) back to Iraq even as it has been quietly bolstering its already impressive military strength in a “pivot” to Asia.  At the same time, with a remarkable lack of publicity or media attention, it has begun pivoting into Africa.  Americans know next to nothing about this (unless they’ve been reading the last two years of reporting on the subject by Nick Turse at this site) and yet the U.S. military is now in one fashion or another involved with 49 of the 54 countries on that continent.

If you need evidence that Washington’s intentions are indeed imperial and that the White House and the Pentagon consider just about every patch of land on the planet to be the business of this country, and fertile soil for that military, then spend a little time “in” Chad today.  Once you’ve absorbed just how involved our military already is there, you can multiply those efforts across Africa, across the Middle East where they only intensify, and across Asia where they are also ramping up, and you’ll begin to take in a heavily garrisoned planet of war on which the U.S. remains (however haplessly) the unipolar power.  And tell me that, when you’ve considered the small picture and the big one, we’re not talking about imperial Washington. Tom Engelhardt 

The outpost that doesn’t exist in the country you can’t locate
A base camp, an authoritarian regime, and the future of U.S. blowback in Africa
By Nick Turse

Admit it. You don’t know where Chad is. You know it’s in Africa, of course. But beyond that? Maybe with a map of the continent and by some process of elimination you could come close. But you’d probably pick Sudan or maybe the Central African Republic. Here’s a tip. In the future, choose that vast, arid swath of land just below Libya.

Who does know where Chad is?  That answer is simpler: the U.S. military.  Recent contracting documents indicate that it’s building something there.  Not a huge facility, not a mini-American town, but a small camp.

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The Keystone XL’s Senate failure isn’t the end of the pipeline as an act of war

Vi Waln writes: My Lakota people have a phrase – Mni Wiconi – which means “water of life”. Water is also Pejuta – our primary medicine. It is an extremely sacred element without which we cannot live, yet many people take it for granted. They do not realize: when our drinking-water sources are gone or contaminated, humanity will perish.

Water is also present in every single Lakota ceremony at which I pray – it is essential to our ceremonial way of life. Like our ancestors who sacrificed their very lives for our survival, many of us pray for the descendants who will soon stand in our place, and one of our most important prayers is for our descendants to always have an abundance of clean drinking water.

But TransCanada’s Keystone XL oil pipeline (KXL), which the company has proposed building directly over the Ogallala Aquifer, is still an immediate threat to all of us who drink water from that underground reservoir.

The Ogallala Aquifer is a major water supply for eight states, from here in North Dakota down to Texas and all the way out to New Mexico. Without clean water, these eight states will become uninhabitable. Many people – Indian and non-Indian alike – are prepared to fight the pipeline’s construction to protect the water and land, no matter the result of Tuesday evening’s vote in the US Senate.

Many Lakota people in particular view the construction of this pipeline through our treaty territory as a true act of war. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The most significant attempt yet to force US government approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline failed narrowly to clear the Senate on Tuesday night as a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats fell one vote short of the 60 votes needed for the legislation to pass.

Fourteen Democrats, led by Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu, joined all 45 Republicans in voting for the bill, which called for the controversial energy project to be given immediate go-ahead after years of delay due to environmental concerns.

A similar bill was passed in the House of Representatives on Friday.

But, as expected, the bipartisan coalition failed to win over sufficient wavering Democrats, such as Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and independent Maine senator Angus King, who joined the party’s leadership and opposed the bill for a total of 41 votes against.

Landrieu, who is fighting to hold on to her seat in a run-off election next month, had called for the bill in a last-ditch effort to shore up her support in Louisiana. She attempted to heal party rifts afterwards, telling reporters in the Senate: “there is no blame, there is only joy in the fight”.

Nevertheless the size of the Democratic rebellion may put additional pressure on the White House to approve construction of the pipeline in future if, as promised, Republicans make a fresh attempt to pass legislation when the new Senate is sworn in next January. [Continue reading…]

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Bill to restrict NSA data collection blocked in vote by Senate Republicans

The New York Times reports: Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked a sweeping overhaul of the once-secret National Security Agency program that collects records of Americans’ phone calls in bulk.

Democrats and a handful of Republicans who supported the measure failed to secure the 60 votes they needed to take up the legislation. The vote was 58 to 42 for consideration.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who drafted the bill, blamed what he said was fear-mongering by the bill’s opponents for its defeat. “Fomenting fear stifles serious debate and constructive solutions,” he said. “This nation deserves more than that.” [Continue reading…]

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Michael Klare: The new Congress and planetary disaster

Looking for a little hope on climate change?  Believe it or not, it’s here and it’s real. And I’m not referring to the fact that, at least temporarily, oil prices have gone through the floor, making environmentally destructive “tough oil” projects like western oil-shale fracking and Canadian tar sands extraction look ever less profitable.  Nor do I mean the climate change deal that was just reached at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit and is being called “historic.” It’s true that President Obama made a positive move at that summit, another symbolic gesture in its wake, and is promising more of the same in the future.  These steps to check the worst future depredations of climate change have been hailed as perhaps more transformational than they are.  Nonetheless, in the face of a new Republican Congress in which anti-climate-change hawks may outnumber war hawks (no small feat), this is well worth noting.

I’m talking, of course, about the potentially carbon-reducing long-term deal between the planet’s two major greenhouse gas polluters, between, that is, Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping.  Both of them have been running “all of the above,” drill-baby-drill — or in China’s case dig-baby-dig and import-baby-import — energy programs to devastating effect. China, for instance, is slated to bring online the equivalent of a new coal-powered plant every 10 days for the next decade, even as it’s taken a leading position in developing solar power technology.

The steps agreed to in somewhat hazy language by the two presidents fall far short of what will be needed to keep this planet from overheating drastically, and yet they do at least pave the way for the first global climate change negotiations that might actually matter in a long while.  The genuinely good news, however, was none of the above.  It has to do instead with the thinking behind Obama’s Beijing decision.  The “architect” of the American negotiating position, months in the making, was presidential senior adviser John Podesta. And here’s what you need to know about him: he’s reportedly going to leave the Obama administration early in 2015 to run Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. This means that he’s essentially committed the leading Democratic candidate in 2016 to run her campaign on Obama’s gesture in China and whatever other climate change moves he plans to make in the coming year — on, that is, reducing carbon emissions.

As Coral Davenport of the New York Times explained recently, the thinking behind this is clear.  Despite the historically low-turnout 2014 midterm elections, Podesta — and the Democrats — are making a different kind of bet on 2016 based on polling figures showing that, among key presidential election year Democratic demographics (young voters, Hispanics, African Americans, and unmarried women), concern over climate change is rising in striking ways.  In other words, if you can tune out an election in which an aging 19% of the prospective electorate swept a whole crew of climate deniers into office and focus on deeper, longer-term calculations, something is happening, possibly generationally, that’s potentially big enough to change future elections.

It’s big enough, at least, to catch the attention of pragmatic political types in Washington, and may be the beginning of a tectonic transformation in this country.  Despite the power of Big Energy and the present hue and cry about “job destruction,” a “war on coal,” and all the rest, a rising climate movement could potentially transform our politics and our world.  No one who attended the enormous climate change rally in New York in late September could doubt that this was so, but that John Podesta has also been paying attention matters.  It tells us in a nitty-gritty way that sometimes the work of activists does pay off.

All those years in the (overheating) wilderness organizing and proselytizing, all those years when the mainstream media managed to look the other way, all those years when climate change activists in groups like 350.org had to struggle to avoid despair, may turn out to matter.  That’s the positive side of the picture.  Then there’s the other side, and it couldn’t be grimmer, as TomDispatch’s energy and climate-change expert Michael Klare, author of The Race for What’s Left, makes clear today. Tom Engelhardt

Fossil-fueled Republicanism
The Grand Oil Party takes Washington by storm
By Michael T. Klare

Pop the champagne corks in Washington!  It’s party time for Big Energy.  In the wake of the midterm elections, Republican energy hawks are ascendant, having taken the Senate and House by storm.  They are preparing to put pressure on a president already presiding over a largely drill-baby-drill administration to take the last constraints off the development of North American fossil fuel reserves.

The new Republican majority is certain to push their agenda on a variety of key issues, including tax reform and immigration.  None of their initiatives, however, will have as catastrophic an impact as their coming drive to ensure that fossil fuels will dominate the nation’s energy landscape into the distant future, long after climate change has wrecked the planet and ruined the lives of millions of Americans.

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Americans’ cellphones targeted in secret U.S. spy program

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of mobile phones through devices deployed on airplanes that mimic cellphone towers, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations.

The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program.

Planes are equipped with devices—some known as “dirtboxes” to law-enforcement officials because of the initials of the Boeing Co. unit that produces them—which mimic cell towers of large telecommunications firms and trick cellphones into reporting their unique registration information. [Continue reading…]

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More federal agencies are using undercover operations

The New York Times reports: The federal government has significantly expanded undercover operations in recent years, with officers from at least 40 agencies posing as business people, welfare recipients, political protesters and even doctors or ministers to ferret out wrongdoing, records and interviews show.

At the Supreme Court, small teams of undercover officers dress as students at large demonstrations outside the courthouse and join the protests to look for suspicious activity, according to officials familiar with the practice.

At the Internal Revenue Service, dozens of undercover agents chase suspected tax evaders worldwide, by posing as tax preparers, accountants drug dealers or yacht buyers and more, court records show.

At the Agriculture Department, more than 100 undercover agents pose as food stamp recipients at thousands of neighborhood stores to spot suspicious vendors and fraud, officials said.

Undercover work, inherently invasive and sometimes dangerous, was once largely the domain of the F.B.I. and a few other law enforcement agencies at the federal level. But outside public view, changes in policies and tactics over the last decade have resulted in undercover teams run by agencies in virtually every corner of the federal government, according to officials, former agents and documents. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. weighs expanded CIA training, arming of Syrian allies struggling against Assad

The Washington Post reports: The Obama administration has been weighing plans to escalate the CIA’s role in arming and training fighters in Syria, a move aimed at accelerating covert U.S. support to moderate rebel factions while the Pentagon is preparing to establish its own training bases, U.S. officials said.

The proposed CIA buildup would expand a clandestine mission that has grown substantially over the past year, U.S. officials said. The agency now vets and trains about 400 fighters each month — as many as are expected to be trained by the Pentagon when its program reaches full strength late next year.

The prospect of expanding the CIA program was on the agenda of a meeting of senior national security officials at the White House last week. A White House spokesman declined to comment on the meeting or to address whether officials had reached a decision on the matter. [Continue reading…]

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Exposing the myth of American power

Lots of conspiracy theorists, anti-imperialists and many of those who have positioned themselves as leaders of America’s diverse movements of dissent — truth be known — are unwittingly the most loyal supporters of the status quo.

How so?

The power before which they valiantly declare the truth, is a power which in their eyes is so mighty, it is utterly impervious to these acts of defiance.

Empire is denounced mostly and most vociferously by those who believe their denunciations will be of no effect.

Successes in this quixotic struggle are not measured by changes in law or social transformations. They are reduced to symbolic forms — an interruption in a Senate hearing or a good turnout for a demonstration. Fighting the good fight has less to do with pursuing victories than it has with simply showing up.

Those who wrap themselves in the flag and those who burn it are equals when they elevate American power and see the U.S. government as an indomitable force.

For that reason, I have always believed that there is nothing more instructive about the way government works than the occasional detailed view of its malfunction — the moments where we catch a precious glimpse behind the facade of power.

The latest example comes courtesy of the Secret Service, the men and women who zealously guard the very heart of American power — at least in the movies.

The Associated Press reports: Secret Service officers chasing a Texas Army veteran across the White House lawn in September figured they had him cornered when he encountered the thick bushes on the property.

To their surprise the bushes were no match for the fence-jumper, who dashed into the executive mansion through a pair of unlocked doors, knocking aside an officer physically too small to tackle him. She would then fumble with her own equipment as the man carrying a knife ran deep inside the president’s home, according to a Homeland Security review of the Sept. 19 incident.

The incident occurred shortly after 7 p.m., only minutes after President Barack Obama and his daughters, along with a guest of one of the girls, left the White House aboard Marine One on their way to Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland where Obama and his family were to spend the weekend. First lady Michelle Obama had traveled separately to Camp David and was not at home.

The folly of errors and missteps by Secret Service officers were revealed in a nine-page summary of the government’s investigation of the break-in at the White House by a disturbed Army veteran.

The government determined that lack of training, poor staffing decisions and communication problems contributed to the embarrassing failure that ultimately led to the resignation of the head of the Secret Service, Julia Pierson. The report did not specify any disciplinary actions.

The new report said Omar Gonzalez, 42, cleared the fence where a trident, or ornamental spike, was missing. An officer in the joint operations center who tried to raise the alarm was unaware his warnings weren’t being broadcast to uniformed officers stationed at the executive mansion.

Some officers at a gate on Pennsylvania Avenue failed to see the fence-jumper because their view was obstructed by a construction project. A Secret Service canine officer parked on the White House driveway was using the speaker function on his personal cellphone without his radio ear piece, and a second, tactical radio was stashed away in his locker as the intruder made his way into the secure area.

Two officers wrongly assumed Gonzalez wouldn’t be able to get through thick bushes on the property, the report said. Another officer posted on the portico outside the wooden White House doors mistakenly assumed the doors were locked.

The intruder was able to run into the building before a female officer seated just inside could lock a second set of doors.

That officer tried twice to take Gonzalez down but was unable to because she was smaller than him. She reached for her metal baton but mistakenly grabbed a flashlight. As she dropped the light and drew her gun, the intruder made his way into the East Room before heading back down a hallway on the State Floor deep within the White House.

Gonzalez was eventually tackled by another officer, who was helped by two plainclothes agents just finishing a shift, the report said.

Investigators also said members of an emergency response team didn’t know the layout of the White House and hesitated to go into the mansion after the break-in.

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America’s decrepit nuclear arsenal

The New York Times reports: The Pentagon will have to spend billions of dollars over the next five years to make emergency fixes to its nuclear weapons infrastructure, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will announce on Friday, after two separate Pentagon studies concluded that there are “systemic problems across the nuclear enterprise,” according to senior defense officials.

The reports are a searing indictment of how the Air Force’s and Navy’s aging nuclear weapons facilities, silos and submarine fleet have been allowed to decay since the end of the Cold War. A broad review was begun after academic cheating scandals and the dismissal of top officers for misbehavior, but it uncovered far more serious problems.

For example, while inspectors obsessed over whether every checklist and review of individual medical records was completed, they ignored huge problems, including aging blast doors over 60-year-old silos that would not seal shut and, in one case, the discovery that the crews that maintain the nation’s 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles had only a single wrench that could attach the nuclear warheads.

“They started FedExing the one tool” to three bases spread across the country, one official familiar with the contents of the reports said Thursday. No one had checked in years “to see if new tools were being made,” the official said. This was one of many maintenance problems that had “been around so long that no one reported them anymore.”

Senior officials said they were trying to determine how much the emergency repairs would cost. “It will be billions” over the next five years, one official said, “but not $20 or $30 billion.”

That is in addition to tens of billions of dollars that the Obama administration has already designated to upgrade nuclear laboratories and extend the lives of aging warheads. The huge investment has been hard to explain for an administration that came to office talking about a path to eliminating nuclear weapons around the globe, though President Obama has also pledged to make the country’s nuclear arsenal as safe and reliable as possible. [Continue reading…]

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Independent review of psychologists’ role in torture

The New York Times reports: The nation’s largest organization of psychologists will conduct an independent review into whether it colluded with or supported the government’s use of torture in the interrogation of prisoners during the Bush administration.

The American Psychological Association said in a statement released late Wednesday that its board had named David H. Hoffman, a Chicago lawyer, to conduct the review.

For years, questions about the role of American psychologists and behavioral scientists in the development and implementation of the Bush-era interrogation program have been raised by human rights advocates as well as by critics within the psychological profession itself. Psychologists were involved in developing the enhanced interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency. Later, a number of psychologists, in the military and in the intelligence community, were involved in carrying out and monitoring interrogations.

In an interview, Mr. Hoffman, a former federal prosecutor and onetime inspector general of the city of Chicago, emphasized the independence of his investigation. “We will go wherever the evidence leads,” he said.

Some longtime critics praised the move by the group. “The A.P.A.’s action is a long-needed step toward an independent review of their post-9/11 activities,” said Stephen Soldz, a professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. “It is vital that this review be fully independent and comprehensive in nature.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. bombs Jabhat al-Nusra for third time

AFP reports: American aircraft bombed the Khorasan group in Syria on Thursday, in the third attack on the Al-Qaeda offshoot that is considered an immediate threat to the West, the US military’s Central Command said.

“We can confirm that US aircraft struck a target in Syria earlier today associated with a network of veteran Al-Qaeda operatives, sometimes called the ‘Khorasan group,’ who are plotting external attacks against the United States and our allies,” spokesman Colonel Patrick Ryder told AFP.

He declined to provide further details of the air raid, the latest in a series against the group that US officials say is a collection of militants from Al-Qaeda and the Al-Nusra Front, which is Qaeda’s Syrian branch. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. forces carry out most strikes against ISIS

AFP reports: US forces have carried out the overwhelming majority of airstrikes against Islamic State jihadists since August, with American warplanes conducting about 85 percent of the raids, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

Arab coalition partners have carried out 56 out of 393 airstrikes over Syria, and Western allies have conducted about 70 out of more than 470 bombing raids in Iraq, Col. Patrick Ryder, spokesman for US Central Command, told AFP.

President Barack Obama’s administration frequently touts the vital role of coalition partners in the air war, particularly four Arab states, but the numbers convey how the Americans are bearing most of the burden of the campaign.

Since launching airstrikes on Aug. 8 on IS jihadists in Iraq, and later extending it to Syria on Sept. 23, US forces and allied aircraft have carried out roughly 9,020 flights, including thousands of surveillance and refueling runs, according to the military’s latest tally.

The overwhelming majority of the intelligence and refueling flights also have been conducted by US aircraft, defense officials said.

After more than 800 airstrikes over about three months, US and coalition aircraft have unloaded about 2,400 bombs and missiles, defense officials said. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. military considers sending combat troops back to Iraq

The Guardian reports: The top-ranking officer in the American military said on Thursday that the US is actively considering the use of American troops directly in the toughest upcoming fights against the Islamic State (Isis) in Iraq, less than a week after Barack Obama doubled troop levels there.

General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, indicated to the House of Representatives armed services committee that the strength of Isis relative to the Iraqi army may be such that he would recommend abandoning Obama’s oft-repeated pledge against returning US ground troops to combat in Iraq.

Retaking the critical city of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest, and re-establishing the border between Iraq and Syria that Isis has erased “will be fairly complex terrain” for the Iraqi security forces that the US is once again supporting.

“I’m not predicting at this point that I would recommend that those forces in Mosul and along the border would need to be accompanied by US forces, but we’re certainly considering it,” Dempsey said. [Continue reading…]

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Senator who put Pentagon Papers into public record urges Udall to do same with torture report

Dan Froomkin writes: Article 1, Section 6 of the Constitution establishes an absolute free-speech right for members of Congress on the floor or in committee, even if they are disclosing classified material. It states that “for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

Within hours of Colorado Senator Mark Udall losing his reelection bid last week, transparency activists were talking about how he should go out with a bang and put the Senate intelligence committee’s torture report into the congressional record. The report is said to detail shockingly brutal abuse of detainees by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration, as well as rampant deception about the program by top officials. But the Obama White House is refusing to declassify even a summary of the report without major redactions. And Republicans take over the Senate in January.

Udall is one of two senators — along with fellow Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden — who have consistently demanded greater transparency from the intelligence community. If he made the report public on the Senate floor or during a hearing, he couldn’t be prosecuted.

The last time any senator did anything nearly so grand was in 1971, when Mike Gravel, two years into his 12 years representing the state of Alaska, entered 4,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record just before the U.S. Supreme Court lifted an injunction on publishing them in the press.

Now, Gravel is urging Udall to join the club. [Continue reading…]

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The Pentagon wants an airborne aircraft carrier to launch drones

Dan Lamothe writes: In the 2012 movie “The Avengers,” Captain America, the Hulk, Iron Man and the rest of the gang flew on a massive aircraft carrier that carried dozens of planes through the air and disappeared from plain view with the help of a cloaking device. The idea that the U.S. military could develop something similar is still seen as far-fetched, but this much is true: a Pentagon agency has just launched a new effort to develop an airship sure to draw comparisons.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is exploring whether it would be possible to turn an existing plane into a flying fortress capable of launching and recovering numerous drone aircraft. Doing so would extend the range of drones that gather intelligence and perform other missions while saving money and limiting the risks pilots take, DARPA officials said Sunday.

“We want to find ways to make smaller aircraft more effective, and one promising idea is enabling existing large aircraft, with minimal modification, to become ‘aircraft carriers in the sky,’” said Dan Patt a DARPA program manager. “We envision innovative launch and recovery concepts for new [unmanned aerial system] designs that would couple with recent advances in small payload design and collaborative technologies.” [Continue reading…]

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