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    Dianne Feinstein obituary

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    The US senator Dianne Feinstein, who has died aged 90, was long cherished by the CIA and others in the defence and intelligence community as someone whose staunch support they could rely on. Until one day they could not: on 11 March 2009 she launched an investigation into the CIA’s torture of detainees post-9/11.That investigation by the Senate intelligence committee, which she chaired, turned into a bitter struggle with the agency and it tried to block it. She did not buckle and finally, in December 2014, she published her report, revealing the scale and brutality of what the CIA had done and its repeated attempts to mislead Congress and the White House. On top of all that, the report found the torture had proved counter-productive in obtaining valuable intelligence.On the day of publication, she told the Senate: “There are those who will seize upon the report and say ‘see what Americans did’, and they will try to use it to justify evil actions or to incite more violence. We cannot prevent that. But history will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again’.”Her fight was dramatic enough to interest Hollywood, and the film The Report was released in 2019, with Feinstein played by Annette Bening.What made her fight with the CIA so surprising was that it was out of kilter with her career before and after, as a Senate hawk. She voted for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – though she later expressed regret over the former – supported Republicans in defence procurement projects and defended the spy agencies in controversies such as illegal mass surveillance in 2013.Her reputation as a hawk frequently put her at odds with the Democratic left and this disillusionment with her grew rapidly in the latter part of her career.In February this year, facing calls to stand down as her physical and mental health declined, she said she would not seek re-election in 2024.There was much in her life she could look back on with pride: a trailblazer for women in politics; the calm leadership she displayed as mayor in San Francisco after the killings of her predecessor, George Moscone, and of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to an official position in the US; her success, albeit limited, in getting gun control through the US senate in 1994. But it was the torture report she cited as the achievement she was most proud.The first she heard of the torture was in September 2006, when Feinstein and other members of the intelligence committee were privately briefed by the then head of the CIA, Michael Hayden. Although Hayden played down what the CIA euphemistically described as “enhanced interrogation techniques”, Feinstein was troubled by what she heard.When she became chair of the intelligence committee in 2009 – its first female head – she launched the investigation. The final 6,700-page report remains classified, but she got around this by publishing a 500-page executive summary and that was damning enough.Between 2002 and 2008 the CIA had detained 119 men at “black sites” – secret locations around the world – and of these 39 had been subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, stress positions and “rectal rehydration”.In 2015, Feinstein worked with the Republican senator John McCain in steering through the Senate an amendment that reinforced a ban on torture. The McCain-Feinstein amendment was the kind of bipartisan consensus that Feinstein, a centrist, valued. But, as US politics became more polarised, her attempts to work with Republicans increasingly grated with fellow Democrats.When Donald Trump, as president, began to pack the supreme court with rightwingers, Democrats complained that Feinstein, who was the senior Democrat on the judiciary committee, did not put up enough of a fight. After the 2020 confirmation hearings of a Trump appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, Feinstein left Democrats seething when she hugged the chair, Republican Lindsey Graham.Born in San Francisco, Dianne was the daughter of Betty (nee Rosenburg), a model, and Leon Goldman, a surgeon. Her family was affluent but she had a traumatic childhood: her mother was unstable and given to sudden rages due to an undiagnosed brain disorder. According to David Talbot, in his history of San Francisco in the 1960s through to the 80s, Season of the Witch (2012), Betty once chased her daughter with a knife around a dining table.Dianne attended a convent school before going to Stanford University, where she graduated in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and history. She went on to secure a job on the state parole board. Although politics was overwhelmingly male-dominated, she was elected in 1969 on to the 11-member San Francisco board of supervisors, basically the city and county council. Runs for mayor in 1971 and 1975 proved unsuccessful.In 1976, she was the target of a bomb attack on her home claimed by a California-based leftwing terrorist group, the New World Liberation Front. The bomb was planted in a window flower box but failed to go off. A few months later, another group, the Environmental Life Force, claimed responsibility for shooting out the windows of her holiday home with a BB gun.She began to carry a concealed handgun for protection. In 1978, dispirited by the combination of the mayoral defeats and being targeted, she told a reporter she was on the verge of quitting politics.Only hours after this exchange, the mayor of San Francisco, Moscone, and Milk, a fellow supervisor, were shot dead in City Hall by a former supervisor. Feinstein was the first into Milk’s office. She told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008: “It was one of the hardest moments, if not the hardest moment, of my life.” Checking Milk for a pulse, one of her fingers slipped into a bullet hole.As president of the board of supervisors at the time, she was well placed to take over as mayor, which she duly did, becoming the first female to occupy the post.She served until 1988. With Aids rampant, she supported many initiatives to help the gay community. She secured federal funding for an overhaul of the cable car network, which proved popular with residents and tourists.Influenced by seeing the damage to Milk’s body, she introduced in 1982 a local ordinance banning most residents from owning handguns. She had her own gun and 14 others that had been handed over in a buy-back scheme melted down and turned into a cross and given to Pope John Paul II on a visit to the Vatican.After an unsuccessful bid to become governor of California in 1990, she was elected as a US senator from California in 1992. She quickly made an impact, guiding through in 1994 the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, outlawing civilian use of certain semi-automatic firearms, though with a proviso that it would expire in 2004 if not renewed, which it was not.She was ranked in 2018 as the second wealthiest senator, with her fortune estimated at about $88m (about £74m).Feinstein married three times: Jack Berman in 1956, with whom she had a daughter, Katherine, divorcing in 1959; Bertram Feinstein in 1962 until his death in 1978; and Richard Blum from 1980 to his death in 2022.She is survived by Katherine, three stepdaughters, and a granddaughter, Eileen. More

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      Russian spy chief confirms call to CIA director after Wagner revolt

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      Russia’s foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin has said that he and his CIA counterpart discussed the shortlived mutiny a week earlier by Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin and “what to do with Ukraine” in a phone call late last month.Sergei Naryshkin, head of the SVR foreign intelligence service, told Russia’s TASS new agency on Wednesday that Bill Burns had raised “the events of June 24” – when fighters from the Wagner mercenary group took control of a southern Russian city and advanced towards Moscow before reaching a deal with the Kremlin to end the revolt.But he said that for most of the call, lasting about an hour, “we considered and discussed what to do with Ukraine”.The CIA declined to comment on his remarks.The New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported on 30 June that William Burns had called Naryshkin to assure the Kremlin that the United States had no role in the Wagner revolt.Ukraine, which was invaded by Russia in February 2022, says other countries should not negotiate its future on its behalf, and the United States has repeatedly backed this principle, described as “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine”.Burns and Naryshkin have maintained a line of communication since the start of the Ukraine war at a time when other direct contacts between Moscow and Washington are at a minimum, with relations at their lowest point since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.Last November, the two spy chiefs held a rare face-to-face meeting in Ankara, after which US officials insisted that Burns was “not conducting negotiations of any kind” and “not discussing settlement of the war in Ukraine” – after a leak from the Kremlin in the aftermath of Ukraine’s recapture of Kherson.On Wednesday Naryshkin told TASS that negotiations on the war would become possible at some point. The agency did not specify whether this was part of his conversation with Burns.“It’s natural that negotiations will be possible sooner or later, because any conflict, including armed conflict, ends by negotiations, but the conditions for these still need to ripen,” TASS quoted him as saying.Asked about the report, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak told Reuters: “Today, someone like Naryshkin has no leverage over how this war will end.”Podolyak said Russia was losing the war and there could be no negotiations with people like Naryshkin.“This Russian elite perceives events completely inadequately, so there is nothing to talk about with them.”Ukraine, which launched a long-expected counteroffensive last month, has said it will not enter talks at this point as this could effectively freeze the situation on the battlefield, where Russia has seized more than a sixth of its territory. More

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      The Last Honest Man: Frank Church and the fight to restrain US power

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      Frank Forrester Church sat in the US Senate for 24 years. His tenure was consequential. A Democrat, he battled for civil rights and came to oppose the Vietnam war. He believed Americans were citizens, not subjects. Chairing the intelligence select committee was his most enduring accomplishment. James Risen, a Pulitzer-winning reporter now with the Intercept, sees him as a hero. The Last Honest Man is both paean and lament.“For decades … the CIA’s operations faced only glancing scrutiny from the White House, and virtually none from Congress,” Risen writes. “True oversight would have to wait until 1975, and the arrival on the national stage of a senator from Idaho, Frank Church.”For 16 months, Church and his committee scrutinized the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency and their many abuses. Amid the cold war, in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, Congress grappled with the balance between civil liberties and national security, executive prerogative and congressional authority.Political assassinations, covert operations and domestic surveillance finally received scrutiny and oversight. A plot to kill Fidel Castro, with an assist from organized crime, made headlines. So did the personal ties that bound John F Kennedy, mob boss Sam Giancana and their shared mistress, Judith Campbell Exner.Giancana was murdered before he testified. Before John Rosselli, another mobster, could make a third appearance, his decomposed body turned up in a steel fuel drum near Miami.One subheading in the Church committee’s interim report bears the title: “The Question of Whether the Assassination Operation Involving Underworld Figures Was Known About by Attorney General Kennedy or President Kennedy as Revealed by Investigations of Giancana and Rosselli”.Against this grizzly but intriguing backdrop, Risen’s book is aptly subtitled: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys – And One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy. The Last Honest Man is a gem, marbled with scoop, laden with interviews.In 2006, Risen won the Pulitzer prize for his coverage of George W Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program. Risen was also part of the New York Times team that snagged a Pulitzer in the aftermath of September 11. He endured a seven-year legal battle with the Bush and Obama justice departments, for refusing to name a source. Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney general, backed off. But he earned Risen’s lasting ire.In 2015, Risen called the Obama administration “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation”. Holder, he said, “has done the bidding of the intelligence community and the White House to damage press freedom in the United States”.And then came Donald Trump.Risen now describes Dick Cheney’s efforts to block Church’s committee, as chief of staff to Gerald Ford. To Cheney’s consternation, the president “refused to engage in an all-out war”. So Cheney nursed a grudge and bided his time.In 1987, Cheney and congressional Republicans issued a dissent on Iran-Contra, blaming the Church committee for the concept of “all but unlimited congressional power”. Later, as vice-president to George W Bush, Cheney zestily embraced the theory of the unitary executive, the global “war on terror” and the invasion of Iraq.The Last Honest Man also doubles as a guide to high-stakes politics. Risen captures Gary Hart and the late Walter Mondale on the record. Both Democratic presidential hopefuls – Mondale the candidate in 1984, Hart the frontrunner, briefly, in the 1988 race – after sitting on Church’s committee. The three senators were competitors and colleagues. Paths and ambitions intersected.Church entered the 1976 Democratic presidential primary late – and lost to Jimmy Carter. Carter weighed picking Church as his running mate but opted for Mondale instead.“I think he had seen me on a Sunday news talk show, talking about the Church committee, and he liked how I looked and sounded,” Mondale told Risen.It was for the best. Church never cottoned to Carter, failing hide his disdain. Carter and his aides returned the favor. They “hated Church right back”. David Aaron, a Church aide and later deputy to Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, recalls: “I know that whenever Church’s name came up, Brzezinski would grimace.”In 1980, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush beat Carter and Mondale in a landslide. The election also cost Church his seat and the Democrats control of the Senate. Four years later, Mondale bested Hart for the Democratic nomination, only to be shellacked by Reagan-Bush again.Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, leaves his mark on Risen’s pages too. He played a “previously undisclosed role in the Church committee’s investigation of the assassinations of foreign leaders”, Risen reports in a lengthy footnote.In an interview, Ellsberg says he “met privately” with Church in 1975, as the committee investigated assassination plots. In Risen’s telling, Ellsberg cops to handing Church “a manilla envelope containing copies of a series of top-secret cables” between the US embassy in South Vietnam and “the Kennedy White House”.The messages purportedly pertained to the “US role in the planning of the 1963 coup against South Vietnamese president [Ngô Đình] Diệm that resulted in his assassination”. The Church committee interim report referred to cable traffic between the embassy in Saigon and the White House but contained no mention of Ellsberg.In other words, assassinations and coups carry a bipartisan legacy. It wasn’t just Eisenhower and Nixon, Iran and Chile.Risen hails Church as “an American Cicero” who “offered the United States a brief glimpse of what it would be like to turn away from its imperialistic ambitions … and return to its roots as a republic”.He overstates, but not by much. Iraq and its aftermath still reverberate. But for that debacle, it is unlikely Trumpism would have attained the purchase it still possesses. Our national divide would not be as deep – or intractable. Church died in April 1984, aged just 59.
      The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys – And One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy is published in the US by Hachette More

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      Too many with access, too little vetting. Pentagon leaks were ‘a matter of time’

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      Jack Teixeira, 21 years old, clean-shaven, with buzz-cut hair and proudly uniformed, is the face of America’s newest security threat, one it is struggling to resolve.The formidable US counter-intelligence infrastructure is adept at finding spies and rooting out whistleblowers. Teixeira, charged on Friday on two counts of the Espionage Act, is neither spy nor whistleblower.His family history is the epitome of conservative patriotism. His stepfather served in the same unit, the 102nd intelligence wing of the Massachusetts air national guard, and his mother, who worked for years for veterans’ charities, celebrated the fact that her son was following the same path. The young recruit was an observant Catholic, who would pray with other members of his online chat group.But Teixeira’s outlook had taken the same dramatic turn as much of American conservatism, becoming conspiratorial and distrustful of the very institutions earlier generations revered. Friends quoted in the Washington Post said he had come to regret joining up, as his view of the military dimmed.His motive for allegedly sharing hundreds of top secret documents among the 20 or so young men and teenage boys on the Discord gaming server he moderated, at least as he explained it to them, was to alert them to shadowy forces driving world events. He reportedly posted the documents, photographed unfolded and laid on his family’s kitchen counter alongside glue and nail clippers, without commentary or any apparent underlying logic.It seems to have been a way to cement his status as the leader of the group, a man of mystery and action. It was as inchoate as the video he reportedly shared with his group, Thug Shaker Central, (named in apparently ironic spirit after a variety of gay porn), in which Teixeira shouts antisemitic and racist slurs then fires a rifle.This was the young man, clearly still living out his adolescence, who was given one of the nation’s highest security clearances – “top secret/sensitive compartmented information” (TS/SCI) – so that he could do his job maintaining the sealed infranet system at Otis air base on Cape Cod, through which the nation’s most closely guarded secrets flowed.To get that level of clearance you must, in theory, be extensively vetted. The process takes months, as investigators trawl through your history and interview friends and colleagues. But vetting standards differ across agencies, and those of the air national guard may not be on a par with the CIA, yet the staff at both see the same documents.Other security arrangements at the Otis base also appear to have been lax. Teixeira is alleged to have first copied out text from secret documents and, then, in January, began to print them and take them home.“The breakdown in physical security here appears stark and serious,” Bradley Moss, a lawyer specialising in national security, federal employment and security clearance, said. “The after-action review will absolutely need to assess where the process broke down by which no one noticed his removal of the records.”There is another problem with trying to filter out people like Teixeira: the elastic limits of first amendment free speech rights, in a country where what was once extreme is increasingly mainstream.The far-right Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene got Teixeira’s first name wrong on Twitter but hailed him as “white, male, christian, and antiwar”.“That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime,” Greene said.The Fox News talkshow host Tucker Carlson defended Teixeira and complained the airman, arrested by armed FBI agents at his home and charged in a Boston court the next day, was being treated worse than Osama bin Laden, who was shot in the head by US special forces in his bedroom in 2011.The new Republican right views the state as an enemy when it is being run by Democrats or moderate conservatives. Part of the Trump legacy is a preference for foreign dictators over opponents in a democratic system. So weeding out enemies of the state within the intelligence and military community risks angering an increasingly significant and vocal part of the political arena.“It’s difficult to truly quantify the scope of the threat, and part of the problem is simply holding repugnant political views is not truly a security issue. It’s more of an HR issue,” Moss said. He added the vetting process was not “designed to flesh out the details of an individual’s personal political leanings”.“That’s deliberate: the government is largely forbidden from considering your political views in that context unless it implicates a separate concern [such as criminal conduct],” he said.The problem facing the vetters is magnified by the enormous scale of the numbers involved. According to the office of the director of national intelligence, there are more than 1.2 million government employees and contractors with access to top secret intelligence materials.Brianna Rosen, a former White House official, said that was a result of the 9/11 attacks, where some of the intelligence failings that allowed the hijackers to succeed involved a failure to share intelligence with law enforcement agencies.“It’s a double-edged sword because, in one sense, a lack of this kind of information sharing is, in part, what contributed to 9/11,” said Rosen, a senior fellow at Just Security, an online forum on security, democracy, foreign policy and rights. “As a result of all of these increased intelligence-sharing programmes, you do have a situation where there is a vast amount of people that have access to sensitive information that they probably shouldn’t have access to, and that may not have been vetted as thoroughly as they should have been.“It was really only a matter of time until something like this happened, which is why this is really a systemic problem that Congress and the Biden administration needs to address more closely.” More

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      How the Durham inquiry backfired to show weaponization of Trump DoJ

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      How the Durham inquiry backfired to show weaponization of Trump DoJ Investigation into origin of FBI Trump-Russia inquiry is ending with little to show but questions over its own political bias When the Trump justice department tapped a US attorney to examine the origins of the FBI inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, conservatives and many Republicans hoped it would end the idea Donald Trump’s campaign was boosted by Moscow and back his charges that some FBI officials and others had conspired against him.Trump documents: Congress offered briefing on records kept at Mar-a-LagoRead moreBut instead, as the multi-year investigation winds down, it is ending with accusations that unethical actions by that special counsel – John Durham – and ex-attorney general William Barr “weaponized” the US Department of Justice (DoJ) to help Trump.Former DoJ officials and top Democrats are voicing strong criticism that Durham and Barr acted improperly in the almost four-year-old inquiry, citing an in-depth New York Times story that added to other evidence the inquiry looked politically driven to placate Trump’s anger at an investigation he deemed a “witch-hunt”.The Times report provided disturbing new details, for instance, about how a key prosecutor, Nora Dannehy, quit Durham’s team in 2020 over “ethical” concerns, including his close dealings with Barr, and discussions about releasing an unorthodox interim report before the 2020 election that might have helped Trump, but which didn’t come to fruition.Critics of the Durham inquiry also noted early on that Barr on several occasions, and contrary to longtime DoJ policies, suggested publicly that Durham’s inquiry would yield significant results, which in effect would help validate Trump’s charges that some officials at the FBI and CIA had led a political witch-hunt.Further, Barr and Durham, in highly unusual public statements early in their investigation, tried to undermine a chief conclusion of a report by the DoJ inspector general, Michael Horowitz, that the Russia investigation was based on sufficient facts to warrant opening the investigation in 2016.Ex-DoJ officials say the Durham inquiry seemed aimed from the start at boosting Trump’s political fortunes.“It was clear to people following the Durham investigation as it unfolded that it was highly irregular from the start,” said former deputy AG Donald Ayer who served in the George HW Bush administration “Indeed there’s good reason to believe that its purpose and primary function was to create fodder to advance Trump’s election prospects.”Critics note that Barr tapped Durham to lead the investigation just a month after special counsel Robert Mueller issued a large report documenting substantial ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia, and concluded that Moscow tried to sway the election to help Trump in “sweeping” and “systematic” ways, a conclusion Barr and Trump worked to downplay.Despite Trump’s pressures and Durham’s sprawling investigation, including unusual overseas trips with Barr to interview officials in Italy and England about potential flaws in the Russia investigation, the inquiry notched just one minor conviction of a mid-level ex-FBI official for falsifying a document. There were also two embarrassing acquittals.The Times report revealed too that Durham had uncovered evidence during his Italy trip of possible criminal misconduct by Trump, but it’s unknown what that entailed and how much he pursued that element of the inquiry.Durham also reportedly spent time investigating a conspiratorial and dubious lead that seemed aimed at connecting an aide to billionaire George Soros, a leading Democratic donor, to the early Russian meddling investigation and the campaign of Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton.Besides Nora Dannehy, who left Durham’s office in 2020, two other prosecutors on Durham’s team reportedly left later after raising concerns about the wisdom of pursuing a prosecution against a lawyer with ties to Clinton’s campaign that ultimately led to an acquittal.For ex-DoJ leaders and top Democrats, the latest allegations about the political motives that drove Durham and Barr underscore earlier signs that the ‘investigation into the investigators” was handled improperly.“The Durham special counsel investigation was tainted from the outset by the excessive involvement of attorney general Barr and its reaching significant conclusions before it had done any significant investigation,” said the ex-DoJ inspector general Michael Bromwich.Bromwich added: “From the outset, there was no pretense that this was an independent investigation in which the facts would determine the outcome. The scorecard: an interminable, four-year investigation; a single conviction based on a case handed over by the IG on a silver platter; and two humiliating acquittals. There has never been a record like that in the half-century history of independent counsels and special counsels.”Top Democrats too are incensed by the conduct of the Durham investigation and Barr’s role in the inquiry.Congressman Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee who served on the House January 6 select committee that investigated the Capitol insurrection, said:“The whole course of the Durham investigation suggests the heights of prosecutorial misconduct. It’s hard to imagine a better case study of the weaponization of Justice than what Barr was doing with the Durham inquiry.”The Senate judiciary committee chairman, Richard Durbin, said: “These reports about abuses in special counsel Durham’s investigation – so outrageous that even his longtime colleagues quit in protest – are but one of many instances where former President Trump and his allies weaponized the justice department. The justice department should work on behalf of the American people, not for the personal benefit of any president.”Durbin added that the Senate judiciary committee would “take a hard look at these repeated episodes, and the regulations and policies that enabled them, to ensure such abuses of power cannot happen again”.Last September, Durbin notified DoJ that the judiciary panel planned to look into explosive details in a book by Geoffrey Berman, the ex-chief of DoJ’s southern district office in Manhattan, about political interference by Barr and Trump loyalists in several investigations.Trump attorney general Barr a liar, bully and thug, says fired US attorney in bookRead moreBerman wrote that Barr in 2019 sought unsuccessfully to pressure him to reverse the conviction of Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen on campaign finance violations, and to block related investigations into potential campaign finance violations.Barr also pressured Berman to resign with an eye to replacing him with a Trump loyalist, but after Berman refused to step down Trump fired him.Together, the charges by Berman, and the evidence amassed by the Times, paint a troubling picture of how Barr seemed to lean over backwards to boost Trump politically, until after the 2020 election when Barr eventually publicly rejected Trump’s claims of fraud.The justice department did not respond to requests from the Guardian seeking a comment from Durham who is expected to write a final report about his inquiry later this year. Dannehy also did not reply to phone messages asking for comment.Barr last week told the Los Angeles Times: “The idea that there was a thin basis for doing [the Durham investigation] doesn’t hold water.” Barr added that “one of the duties of the attorney general is to protect against the abuse of criminal and intelligence powers, that they’re not abused to impinge on political activity, so I felt it was my duty to find out what happened there”.Critics note that Barr’s defense is weak since Durham was tapped just a month after special counsel Robert Mueller issued an extensive report documenting substantial ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia, and concluded that Moscow tried to sway the election to help Trump in “sweeping” and “systematic” ways.Barr’s defense of the Durham investigation’s launch looks shaky too, given public comments Barr made in congressional testimony at a Senate committee hearing in 2019. Barr was asked several times by then senator Kamala Harris if Trump or any White House officials had suggested or pressured him to launch his sweeping review. Barr was evasive, but acknowledged some “discussions” of the matter had occurred, adding “they have not asked me to open an investigation”.For Raskin, the growing evidence of misconduct in the Durham investigation comes at an ironic moment, as the House Republican majority has created a special panel on the judiciary committee to look into the “weaponization of the government” that’s expected to focus heavily on the Biden administration and the Department of Justice and the FBI.The Republican majority “created a weaponization committee which is a precise and accurate description of their own activities in transforming the government to be a political weapon for Donald Trump and his inner circle”, Raskin said. “Of course, they don’t have any interest in looking at the corruption of the justice system under Trump.”TopicsDonald TrumpFBICIAUS politicsTrump administrationRussiafeaturesReuse this content More

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      Biden’s Hyperbolic Fawning Before the CIA

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      in US Politics

      Bilderberg reconvenes in person after two-year pandemic gap

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      Bilderberg reconvenes in person after two-year pandemic gapThe Washington conference, a high-level council of war, will be headlined by Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general Bilderberg is back with a vengeance. After a pandemic gap of two years, the elite global summit is being rebooted in a security-drenched hotel in Washington DC, with a high-powered guest list that includes the heads of NATO, the CIA, GCHQ, the US national security council, two European prime ministers, a healthy sprinkle of tech billionaires, and Henry Kissinger.What a difference those two years have made. The western world order, which the Bilderberg group has been quietly nudging into shape for the best part of 70 years, is in all kinds of flux.Back in 2019, the last time Bilderberg met in the flesh, the conference kicked off with the optimistic topics “A Stable Strategic Order” and “What Next For Europe?” This year however, the agenda reeks of chaos and crisis. Top of the schedule is the blandly terrifying item “Global Realignments”, followed by “NATO Challenges”, the biggest of which is obviously Ukraine.To be sure, the Washington conference is a high-level council of war, headlined by the secretary general of NATO, Bilderberg veteran Jens Stoltenberg. He’s joined at the luxurious Mandarin Oriental hotel by the Ukrainian ambassador to the US, Oksana Markarova, and the CEO of Naftogaz, the state-owned Ukrainian oil and gas company.They’ll be clinking bespoke cocktails in the Empress lounge with some of the allied war effort’s leading lights, among them Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s half-Ukrainian deputy prime minister.The summit is heaving with experts in Russia and Ukraine, including the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, Celeste Wallander, and ex-deputy national security adviser Nadia Schadlow, who has a seat on the elite steering committee of Bilderberg.The conference room is rigged up with video screens for shy dignitaries to make a virtual attendance, and it’s highly likely that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy will Zoom in for a T-shirted contribution to the talks. Just a few days beforehand, Zelenskiy met with a Bilderberg and US intelligence representative Alex Karp, who runs Palantir, the infamous CIA-funded surveillance and data analysis company.Palantir, which was set up by billionaire Bilderberg insider Peter Thiel, has agreed to give “digital support” to the Ukrainian army, according to a tweet by the country’s deputy prime minister.The participant list is rife with military advisers, one of which is a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and some hefty cogs from the Washington war machine. Among the heftiest is James Baker, head of the ominous sounding office of net assessment.Bilderberg is sometimes dismissed as a talking shop or crazed imagining of conspiracy theorists. But in reality it is a major diplomatic summit, attended this year as ever by extremely senior transatlantic politicians, from the US commerce secretary to the president of the European Council.Many consider it the older, less flashy Davos, staged annually by the World Economic Fund. The two events have a good bit in common: namely, three WEF trustees at this year’s conference, and Klaus Schwab, the grisly head of Davos, is a former member of Bilderberg’s steering committee. His “Great Reset” looms large over the Washington conference, with “Disruption of the Global Financial System” at the heart of the agenda.The conference troubles some ethicists, with politicians thrashing out an “Energy Security and Sustainability” talk with the CEOs of oil giants BP, Shell and Total. There’s also “Post Pandemic Health” with the CEOs of Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, who are locked away for days with Wall Street investors and no press scrutiny.Bilderberg gets scant coverage partly because of its connections to the transatlantic intelligence community.Formed in the mid-1950s as a joint project of British and US intelligence, the conference has kept its cards so close to its chest that the world’s press has given up trying to get a glimpse of them.This year’s conference lineup, led by CIA head William Burns, reflects those roots.Burns is a former US ambassador to Russia and was elected to Bilderberg’s steering committee just a few months before Joe Biden gave him the job, whereupon he discreetly resigned his seat.Three other active intelligence chiefs are attending: the head of the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters; the director of France’s external intelligence agency, DGSE; the leader of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; and Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.Former spy chiefs at the talks include David Petraeus (CIA) and Sir John Sawers (MI6), now a board member of Bilderberg and BP.And of course, holding court at the hotel bar will be Klaus Schwab’s mentor, Henry Kissinger.Incredibly, Kissinger, 99, has been attending Bilderbergs since 1957.The prince of realpolitik has been the ideological godfather of Bilderberg for as long as anyone can remember. And he’s recently co-authored a book, The Age of AI, with Bilderberg steering committee member Eric Schmidt, the former head of Google, and this year’s Washington conference is noticeably rammed with AI luminaries, from Facebook’s Yann LeCun to DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis.Bilderberg knows that however the global realignments play out, and whatever a reset global financial system looks like, the shape of the world will be determined by big tech. And if the endgame is “Continuity of Government”, as the agenda suggests, that continuity will be powered by AI.Whatever billionaire ends up making the software that runs the world, Bilderberg aims to make damned sure that it has its hand on the mouse.TopicsBilderbergNatoUS politicsCIAGCHQnewsReuse this content More

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      in World Politics

      Can Anything About US Foreign Policy Be Normal?

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on CIA torture, two decades on: we need the truth | Editorial

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      The Guardian view on CIA torture, two decades on: we need the truthEditorialThe systematic brutalisation of detainees was pointless as well as cruel. An honest reckoning is long overdue Twenty years ago, in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, the CIA established an international torture programme “rendering” people to secret detention facilities around the world. The full horror of what took place in these black sites is still emerging.We already know of mock executions and sexual violence; of a detainee waterboarded 83 times in a month; of a man dying during an interrogation and another of hypothermia after being left almost naked on a bare concrete floor – on top of the regular use of pain, humiliation and sleep deprivation. This week, we learned that Ammar al-Baluchi suffered brain damage when he was repeatedly slammed against a plywood wall by trainee interrogators using him as a teaching prop. They queued up to hit his head so that the instructor “could certify them on their ability to use the technique”.The details emerged in a damning report written by the CIA’s own inspector general in 2008, but only now released following a court filing. The “war on terror” became an end that was used to justify any means – but never openly. Torture was rebranded as “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Interrogators sought assurances that a detainee would “remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life” before they started work. The programme was pointless as well as brutal. The inspector general noted that the detainee lied to make the torture stop – in line with the 2014 Senate intelligence committee report that found that interrogations frequently produced false testimony (while non-coercive methods elicited useful information). At least 26 of 119 detainees were wrongly held in the first place.Mr Baluchi now faces the death penalty as one of five men at Guantanamo Bay charged with participation in the September 11 plot. The case has been in pre-trial hearings for 10 years, largely due to disputes over the admissibility of testimony obtained after torture. Last week, another Guantanamo detainee – Mohammad Ahmad al-Qahtani, who was suspected of planning to join the plot – was repatriated to Saudi Arabia for mental health treatment. The US dropped plans to try him after concluding he had been tortured at the facility.Despite our growing knowledge, we are still very far from a full acknowledgement of what took place – let alone accountability for it. The supreme court recently blocked two psychologists who designed the programme from being called in a case in Poland, where one of the black sites was located. The 2014 Senate report has never been released in full, though there are now renewed calls for its publication. In the UK, parliament’s intelligence and security committee produced damning reports on British involvement in kidnap and torture in 2018, but the government refused to launch a judge-led inquiry into UK complicity in the programme.On Tuesday, the UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism issued a scathing report on the failure to address the atrocities. “Not a single man who was rendered across borders, tortured, arbitrarily detained, separated from family has received an adequate remedy,” Fionnuala Ní Aoláin said. “Many who were returned home continue to live with long-term social and psychological trauma. No one was held accountable for systematic practices of torture and rendition.” This is not only about an injustice to individuals. The rapporteur suggests that the refusal to acknowledge what happened has helped create an environment in which there appears to be impunity for states conducting mass secret detention. An honest reckoning would help to debunk the dangerous myth that torture works and claims that national security requires unfettered powers used in secrecy. It is an essential part of ensuring such crimes are not committed again.TopicsCIAOpinionTortureGuantánamo BayCIA torture reportUS SenateUS politicsRenditioneditorialsReuse this content More