CIA Ray, our "diplomat"

Way to stay on the down low, Ray.

U.S. officials Monday acknowledged for the first time that former Special Forces soldier Raymond Davis, held in detention in Pakistan for killing two armed men, works for the Central Intelligence Agency, but said he was not directly involved in spying operations.

Now, that's a marvelous statement, isn't it?  Yes, we first denied that Ray was with the CIA and insisted that he was a "diplomat," but now have to admit that Ray in indeed CIA Ray.  And despite the fact that the now admitted CIA Ray dumped a couple of "thugs" and a dozen slugs in the streets of Lahore in broad daylight, we will further insist he CIA "Shooter" Ray "was not directly involved in spying operations."  So, this was a side gig?

CIA Pak Whack Yanks

... Hayden had told Zardari that “many Westerners, including some U.S. passport holders, had been killed five days earlier on the Kam Sham training camp in the tribal area of North Warziristan,” Woodward writes. “But the CIA would not reveal the particulars due to the implications under American law.”

“A top secret CIA map detailing the attacks had been given to the Pakistanis,” Woodward continues. “Missing from it was the alarming fact about the American deaths … The CIA was not going to elaborate.”

The CIA does not comment on drone strikes. Neither Hayden nor Kappes could be immediately reached for comment.

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CIA celebrates Operation ST Circus and the Dali Lama's "Warriors"

From not acknowledging to "paying tribute" to the Dali Lama's "warriors." Betcha didn't know the Dali Lama had warriors. 'Course you did.

Hundreds of Tibetan warriors who doggedly fought a 15-year guerrilla war against the Chinese in Tibet after being trained and armed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) now have a memorial that is likely to ruffle Beijing.

The US has, for the first time, paid a tribute to the resistance forces and acknowledged the CIA's role in training them as the agency is erecting a memorial plaque at Camp Hale, a training base in Colorado for US troops during World War II.

Unknown to the local residents, who were told it was an atomic testing site, Camp Hale served as a training camp for nearly 2,000 Tibetan warriors who were taught the art of guerrilla warfare by the CIA from 1957 to 1972 to fight China's People's Liberation Army that attacked Tibet in 1949 and annexed the Buddhist kingdom within two years.

The event last week saw former CIA agents, Tibetans involved in the operation, and representatives of the US Forest Service and the Tibetan-American community in Colorado gather at Camp Hale.

What once was viewed as underhanded, dirty, possibly illegal, and therefore deemed a national security secret, now is celebrated as vital cog in the struggle 'gin those commies! Ahhh, the sweet smell of progress!

CIA Dispatch: Dengue's Friend in Florida

The Dengue virus in Florida: sweats, headache, body ache, vomiting, oral/nasal/rectal bleeding, feverish visions that the CIA is, somehow, behind it all.

It appears highly unlikely that any “detective work” performed by the CDC and Florida health officials will unearth any evidence of dengue fever being imported into Florida, but the evidence certainly exists. Prior to the recent Key West findings and still today, the CDC has consistently reported that there have been no outbreaks of dengue fever in Florida since 1934, and none in the continental U.S. since 1946. Remarkably, this report is incorrect.

Unknown to most Americans is that dengue fever has been the intense focus of U.S. army and CIA biological warfare researchers for over fifty years. As early as the 1950s, the army’s Fort Detrick in partnership with the CIA launched a multi-million dollar research program under which dengue fever and several addition exotic diseases were studied for use in offensive biological warfare attacks. Indeed, as several CIA documents, as well as the findings of a 1975 Congressional committee reveal that 3 sites in Florida, Key West, Panama City, and Avon Park, as well as 2 other locations in central Florida, were used for experiments with mosquito borne dengue fever and other biological substances.

The experiments in Avon Park, about 170 miles from Miami, were covertly conducted in a low-income African American neighborhood that contained several newly constructed public housing projects. CIA documents related to Project MK/NAOMI clearly indicate that the mosquitoes used in Avon Park were the Aedes aegypti type. Interestingly, at the same time experiments were conducted in Florida there were at least two cases of dengue fever reported among civilian researchers at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Avon Park residents still living in the area say that the experiments resulted in “at least 6 or 7 deaths". One elderly resident told this journalist, “Nobody knew about what had gone on here for years, maybe over 20 years, but in looking back it explained why a bunch of healthy people got sick quick and died at the time of those experiments.”

A 1978 Pentagon publication, entitled Biological Warfare: Secret Testing & Volunteers, reveals that the Army’s Chemical Corps and Special Operations and Projects Divisions at Fort Detrick conducted “tests” similar to the Avon Park experiments in Key West, but the bulk of the documentation concerning this highly classified and covert work is still held by the Pentagon as “secret.” One former Fort Detrick researcher says that the army “performed a number of experiments in the area of the Keys” but that “not all concerned dengue virus.”

In the spring and summer of 1981, Cuba experienced a severe hemorrhagic dengue fever epidemic. Between May and October 1981, the island nation had 158 dengue-related deaths with about 75,000 reported infection cases. Prior to this outbreak, Cuba had reported only a very small number of cases in 1944 and 1977. At the same time as the 1981 outbreak, covert biological warfare attacks on Cuba’s residents and crops were believed to have been conducted against the island by CIA contractors and military airplane flyovers. Particularly harmful to the nation was a severe outbreak of swine flu that Fidel Castro attributed to the CIA.

In 1985 and 1986, authorities in Nicaragua accused the CIA of creating a massive outbreak of dengue fever that infected thousands in that country. CIA officials denied any involvement, but army researchers admitted that intensive work with arthropod vectors for offensive biowarfare objectives had been conducted at Fort Detrick in the early 1980s, having first started in the early 1950s. Fort Detrick researchers reported that huge colonies of mosquitoes infected with not only dengue virus but also yellow fever were maintained at the Frederick, Maryland installation, as well as hordes of flies carrying cholera and anthrax, and thousands of ticks filled with Colorado fever and relapsing fever.

A review of declassified Army Chemical Corps documents reveal that the army may have also been engaged in dengue fever research as early as the late 1940s. Several redacted Camp Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal reports indicate that experiments were conducted on state and federal prisoners who were unwittingly exposed to dengue fever, as well as other viruses, some possibly lethal. Freedom of Information requests filed months ago for details on these early experiments remain unanswered.

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CIA violated ...

There's a newish report out by PHR (Physicians for Human Rights), documenting the various roles played by medical personnel in the CIA torture programs during the Bush years. Many of these so-called medical professionals appear to have a rather unseemly hankering for understanding the effects of torture on the human subject. Fascinating, to be sure, but that "do no harm" thing also seems a quaint anachronism in our doped up and fiendish times.

Now, the CIA part:

said the report appears to demonstrate that the CIA violated "all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation."

Which, with the addition of the words 'has continually,' is pretty much a summary of the CIA, which has repeatedly demonstrated an insistent vector toward human experimentation with drugs and torture, all in violation of "accepted legal and ethical standards" since inception. In 1953, the CIA, in combine with the DoD, sprayed LSD on a small town in France. They or their proxies have jacked up unwitting subjects with all manner of dope and ghoulish enterprise, but especially, the CIA liked LSD. Still do. Today, in the 21st century, the CIA are still whacking up subjects, now "detainees," with who knows what cocktails of drugs and ghoulish enterprise. Well, we have some idea.

Of course, the CIA doesn't have dink-weed operations out there yowling about violations of accepted legal and ethical standards by the CIA. Oh, no. They have Congress for that. And congress do about as much as PHR will manage to do with this report.

CIA in the House! Abarelli talks

Ok, the CIA are not actually in the house. Just the letters, so far as we know, make it in, as Abarelli talks about, what else? The CIA.

CIA calls it way back

More missing the boat, smelling the coffee, hammering own thumb.

Declassified CIA documents on South Korea show that the spy agency was surprised by the 1979 assassination of its dictatorial president by his intelligence chief, did not anticipate the military coup d'etat that ensued, and dismissed the strength of growing unrest that eventually erupted in near-civil war.

Following the coup, in May 1980, protest and civil unrest in the southern city of Kwangju plunged the country into near anarchy. President Jimmy Carter, upon the advice of the U.S. State Department and the CIA, and fearing North Korea might take advantage of the instability, authorized U.S.-led South Korean troops to put down the Kwangju “uprising,” resulting in the deaths of hundreds of protesters.

The documents were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Tim Shorrock, a Washington-based journalist and longtime human rights activist, who published them Tuesday on the Web site of Foreign Policy in Focus, a project of the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies.

Shorrock reports that “months before” the uprising, “in an analysis entitled ‘The Outlook for President Pak [Chung Hee] and South Korea's Dissidents,’ the CIA dismissed the worker and student resistance, as well as the political opposition, as unorganized and ineffectual and unable to muster public sympathy for its demands for greater democracy and worker rights.”