1. UKRAINIAN PARTISANS

From 1945 to 1952, the CIA trained and aerially supplied Ukrainian partisan units which had originally been organised by the Germans to fight the Soviets during WWII. For seven years, the partisans, operating in the Carpathian Mountains, made sporadic attacks. Finally, in 1952, a massive Soviet military force wiped them out.

2. CHINESE BRIGADE IN BURMA

After the Communist victory in China, Nationalist Chinese soldiers fled into northern Burma. During the early 1950s, the CIA used these soldiers to create a 12,000-man brigade which made raids into Red China. However, the Nationalist soldiers found it more profitable to monopolise the local opium trade.

3. GUATEMALAN REBEL ARMY

After Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz legalised that country’s Communist party and expropriated 400,000 acres of United Fruit banana plantations, the CIA decided to overthrow his government. Guatemalan rebels were trained in Honduras and backed up with a CIA air contingent of bombers and fighter planes. This army invaded Guatemala in 1954, promptly toppling Arbenz’s regime. (more…)

North Korea on Saturday accused the United States of having conducted at least 2,200 spy plane missions over the communist country this year, its official media said.
“This means six reconnaissance planes were involved in the espionage on a daily average,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.

Pyongyang has said such missions show the US aims to invade North Korea despite Washington’s categorical denials. Both sides are locked in a standoff over North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs.

The KCNA said “the US imperialist aggression forces” had carried out their spy missions with reconnaissance planes including the U-2, RC-135, E-3, EP-3, RC-7B and RC-12, either based in South Korea or overseas. (more…)

The Pentagon is seeking nearly $100 billion for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, a request that, if approved by Congress, would set an annual record for war-related spending.

The $99.7 billion request, detailed in a 17-page internal Defense Department memorandum dated Dec. 7, would be in addition to $70 billion appropriated in September. The request would push the total for the 2007 fiscal year to nearly $170 billion, 45 percent more than Congress provided for 2006.

The request is likely to receive more scrutiny from Congress next year than previous supplemental spending bills, in part because Democrats now control both the House and Senate. Another reason for the scrutiny is that Pentagon officials encouraged the services to ask for “costs related to the longer war against terror,” not just continuing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a memorandum that became public earlier this year. (more…)

Middle East analyst Flynt Leverett, who served under President Bush on the National Security Council and is now a fellow at the New America Foundation, revealed last week that the White House has been blocking the publication of an op-ed he wrote for the New York Times. The column is critical of the administration’s refusal to engage Iran.

Leverett’s op-ed had been cleared by the CIA, where he had been a senior analyst. Today in an op-ed for the New York Times, Levrett explains more:

[The] Op-Ed article we wrote for The Times, [was] blacked out by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Publication Review Board after the White House intervened in the normal prepublication review process and demanded substantial deletions. Agency officials told us that they had concluded on their own that the original draft included no classified material, but that they had to bow to the White House.

The redacted version of Leverett’s original op-ed is here. (more…)

WASHINGTON — En route home from the Persian Gulf on a military supply ship in 2003, merchant seaman James Francis and his mates got an ultimatum: Take anthrax and smallpox vaccinations or lose your jobs.

Francis’ Seattle attorney, Russell Williams, described the shipboard scene the next day off the isle of Crete as: “Wham, bam. ‘Get in line. Take your shots.’”

Within days of taking the two shots, Francis’ feet began to tingle and burn. When he later took the second in a series of six anthrax shots, his health slid downhill. Since then, the 45-year-old messmate from Las Vegas has fought a rare nervous system disease known as Guillain-Barre Syndrome, along with chronic pain, pneumonia and a life-threatening blood clot. (more…)

Film avoids assassination conspiracy questions but Yoko Ono’s cryptic quote lets suspicions linger

The U.S. vs John Lennon is an ultimately uplifting story of how one man put his hard earned fame, fortune and adulation on the line, neutralized the nagging voice of ego and gave up everything including eventually his life to affect change and take on the behemoth of the criminal Nixon administration.

The newly released documentary film charts Lennon’s progression from outspoken Beatle to iconic rallying figurehead for the Vietnam peace movement of the late sixties and early seventies. The U.S. government’s attempt to deport Lennon and derail the political juggernaut that at one point threatened to organize a road show of protests leading up to the 1972 Republican Convention is presented with an implicit knowing wink to contemporary events. (more…)

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon wants the White House to seek an additional $99.7 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to information provided to The Associated Press.

The military’s request, if embraced by President Bush and approved by Congress, would boost this year’s budget for those wars to about $170 billion.

Military planners assembled the proposal at a time when Bush is developing new strategies for Iraq, such as sending thousands of more U.S. troops there, although it was put together before the president said the troop surge was under consideration.

Overall, the war in Iraq has cost about $350 billion. Combined with the conflict in Afghanistan and operations against terrorism elsewhere, the cost has topped $500 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. (more…)

The U.S. military is “planning a major buildup” of its naval forces in the Persian Gulf region “as a warning to Iran,” reports CBS News, as quoted by Reuters.

A senior official in the Department of Defense said “the report was ‘premature’ and appeared to be drawing ‘conclusions from assumptions,’” according to Reuters. The Pentagon declined comment, but an additional Defense official described the report as “speculative.”

CBS said that “the buildup … was not aimed at an attack on Iran but to discourage what U.S. officials view as increasingly provocative acts by Tehran.” (more…)

Flynt Leverett — former CIA analyst, NSC member and established foreign policy expert — has written an op-ed for the NYT bashing the Bush admin. for it’s failed policies towards Iran. The Whitehouse, in typical ruthless and authoritarian form, has pressured the CIA to heavily redact his draft on the grounds that it would reveal national security secrets — something the CIA disagrees with — and have even threatened him with criminal prosecution. Leverett, visibly distraught at his press conference today, has countered that this claim is a “fraudulent” and deliberate attempt to silence a respected critic by politicizing the CIA review process.

MILAN — A few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the CIA station chief in Rome paid a visit to the head of Italy’s military intelligence agency, Adm. Gianfranco Battelli, to float a proposal: Would the Italian secret services help the CIA kidnap terrorism suspects and fly them out of the country?

The CIA man did not identify which targets he had in mind but was “expressly referring to the possibility of picking up a suspected terrorist in Italy, bringing him to an airport and sending him from there to a foreign country,” Battelli, now retired, recalled in a deposition.

This initial secret contact and others that followed, disclosed in newly released documents, show the speed and breadth with which the CIA applied in post-9/11 Europe a tactic it had long reserved for the Third World — “extraordinary rendition,” the extrajudicial abduction of Islamic radicals overseas for interrogation in friendly countries. (more…)

Short documentary on mind control experiments on the humain brain by the CIA.

In a new interview posted on Townhall.com, conservative columnist Cal Thomas asks outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “With what you know now, what might you have done differently in Iraq?” Rumsfeld offers a remarkable response:

I don’t think I would have called it the war on terror. I don’t mean to be critical of those who have. Certainly, I have used the phrase frequently. Why do I say that? Because the word ‘war’ conjures up World War II more than it does the Cold War. It creates a level of expectation of victory and an ending within 30 or 60 minutes of a soap opera. It isn’t going to happen that way. Furthermore, it is not a ‘war on terror.’ Terror is a weapon of choice for extremists who are trying to destabilize regimes and (through) a small group of clerics, impose their dark vision on all the people they can control. So ‘war on terror’ is a problem for me.

Rumsfeld not only used the phrase ‘war on the terror’; he repeatedly criticized anyone who questioned the validity of it. (more…)

WASHINGTON — The United States on Monday denied reports in Britain that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was listening to Princess Diana’s phone calls hours before she was killed in a 1997 automobile accident in Paris. “This is an old story for us. It all started when she died in 1997,” a US official told Deutsche Presse-Agentur, dpa. “In (19)97 we said were were not involved in any way, we’re still standing by that statement.”

“What would American intelligence gain from tapping her phone?” the official added. “It’s all based on rumours.”

The first British report into the death of Diana will be made public this week in London. The long-awaited report by Sir John Stevens, formerly the head of Scotland Yard and Britain’s top policeman, is expected to confirm that the car crash was an accident and refute conspiracy theorist allegations that she was intentionally targeted. (more…)

Internet Search Yields Names Cited in U.N. Draft Resolution

When the State Department recently asked the CIA for names of Iranians who could be sanctioned for their involvement in a clandestine nuclear weapons program, the agency refused, citing a large workload and a desire to protect its sources and tradecraft.

Frustrated, the State Department assigned a junior Foreign Service officer to find the names another way — by using Google. Those with the most hits under search terms such as “Iran and nuclear,” three officials said, became targets for international rebuke Friday when a sanctions resolution circulated at the United Nations. (more…)

Confidential report speaks of ’serious tensions’ in the coalition over strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan

British intelligence officers and military commanders have accused the US of undermining British policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, after the sacking of a key British ally in the Afghan province of Helmand.

British sources have blamed pressure from the CIA for President Hamid Karzai’s decision to dismiss Mohammed Daud as governor of Helmand, the southern province where Britain deployed some 4,000 troops this year. Governor Daud was appointed in mid-year to replace a man the British accused of involvement in opium trafficking, but on Thursday Mr Karzai summoned him to Kabul and sacked him, along with his deputy.

“The Americans knew Daud was a main British ally,” one official told The Independent on Sunday, “yet they deliberately undermined him and told Karzai to sack him.” The official said the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, was “tearing his hair out”. (more…)