By Andrew Emett

As the government continues to suppress the entire 6,700-page Senate Torture Report, the CIA inspector general’s office recently admitted to “mistakenly” destroying their only copy of the classified report. Although CIA Director John Brennan possesses another copy of the torture report, he refuses to send a replacement to the internal watchdog’s office.

Last summer, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department were privately informed that CIA employees at the inspector general’s office had both destroyed the disk and deleted the file containing the full Senate Torture Report. Despite the fact that the Justice Department ordered all copies of the classified document to be preserved, acting CIA Inspector General Christopher Sharpley was unable to locate another copy and eventually informed the Senate Intelligence Committee that his officers has mistakenly ruined their only copies.

On November 9, 2005, CIA Director of National Clandestine Service Jose Rodriguez Jr. authorized the burning of 92 videotapes depicting the harsh interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In response to the destruction of those tapes, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted to review the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program on March 5, 2009. With access to over six million pages of CIA documents, the Committee merely provided a superficial summary without bothering to interview any participants or victims of the RDI program.

After CIA employees were caught hacking into computers belonging to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, CIA Director Brennan falsely accused the oversight committee of stealing classified files. Refusing to publicly apologize for his false accusations, Brennan later privately apologized to then-Chairperson of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Although then-CIA Inspector General David Buckley found his Agency guilty of hacking into the Senate Intelligence Committee’s computers, a CIA accountability panel later overturned his findings. Since the CIA announced Buckley’s resignation early last year, his deputy CIA inspector general, Sharpley, has been serving as acting IG until the president finally appoints and the Senate confirms a new replacement.

“It’s breathtaking that this could have happened, especially in the inspector general’s office — they’re the ones that are supposed to be providing accountability within the agency itself,” CUNY School of Law Prof. Douglas Cox told Yahoo News. “It makes you wonder what was going on over there?”

Instead of releasing the entire 6,700-page Senate Torture Report, Sen. Feinstein disclosed a roughly 500-page executive summary chronicling the CIA’s kidnapping, torture, and blatant deception towards Congress and the American public. While referencing multiple human rights abuses, including waterboarding, forced rectal rehydration, and the murder of Gul Rahman, the summary neglected to mention the deaths of Abdul Wali and Manadel al-Jamadi under separate CIA interrogations or the rendition and torture of an Egyptian cleric named Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr.

Immediately after replacing Feinstein as the new Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman, Sen. Richard Burr sent a letter to the White House and several other federal agencies in January 2015 demanding they return every copy of the Senate’s full 6,700-page torture report. While ignoring the Burr’s ultimatum to return the classified document, no federal employee appears to have the courage to share the historical document with the American people.

Ordered to preserve the document while not reading it, the CIA inspector general’s office instead uploaded the file onto its internal classified computer system before destroying the disk and “mistakenly” deleting their only copy of the file. On Friday, Feinstein wrote a letter asking CIA Director Brennan to give the inspector general’s office a new copy of the Senate Torture Report.

“Your prompt response will allay my concern that this was more than an ‘accident,’” Feinstein wrote. “The CIA IG should have a copy of the full Study because the report includes extensive information directly related to the IG’s ongoing oversight of the CIA.”

While declining to comment on Feinstein’s letter, Dean Boyd, the CIA’s chief of public affairs, recently told Yahoo News, “I can assure you that the CIA has retained a copy.”

Given the Agency’s history of deception and Brennan’s refusal to provide the inspector general’s office with another copy, the CIA once again appears to be operating without any oversight or accountability. Although the IG is responsible for independent oversight of the CIA, the IG actually reports to the Director of the CIA, according to the Agency’s website.

With the exception of former CIA contractor David Passaro, who beat a detainee to death with a metal flashlight, no CIA officer has yet been charged with committing torture, murder, or destruction of evidence. No charges are expected from the so-called Justice Department.

BY JAKE ANDERSON AT THEANTIMEDIA.ORG

A new report from POLITICO corroborates a suspicion long held by critics of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It affirms the former president and vice president not only had intelligence warning the terror attacks of 9/11 were imminent, but that they repeatedly ignored the CIA’s warnings. The most shocking assertion is that Bush and Cheney actively attempted to hide the paper trail documenting the fact that the evidence was presented to them.

The claim comes from none other than ex-CIA Chief George Tenet, who recounted with palpable frustration how Bush, Cheney, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice ignored multiple warnings from both him and then-counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, during the late spring and summer of 2001.

Previously, the most salient proof the Bush administration had advanced warning of 9/11 was the infamous August 6th edition of the CIA Presidential Daily Brief given to George W. Bush. Titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,”the document has often been cited by journalists and whistleblowers making a case of willful negligence against Bush and Cheney. The new information from Tenet and Black presents a considerably deeper timeline, showing there was a consistent stream of intelligence warnings starting at least four months prior to September 11th.

According to Black, by May of 2001 “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.”

Reacting to the threat, Tenet and Black formulated a plan called “the Blue Sky paper,” which called for a comprehensive but covert CIA and military campaign to wipe out Al Qaeda before it could launch attacks. Specifically, Tenet wanted a paramilitary team deployed to the Afghan sanctuary with the goal of “creating a bridge with Uzbekistan.”

Tenet says the response to the “the Blue Sky paper” was stunning. The administration did not want to address the issue, and notably, “didn’t want the clock to start ticking.” In its report, POLITICO translates this to Tenet claiming Bush and Cheney didn’t want a paper trail of the warnings. It’s unclear whether Tenet directly asserted this sentiment or if reporter Chris Whipple inferred it.

What is clear is that for the entire summer preceding the 9/11 attacks, the administration ignored warnings about the threat of Al Qaeda and outright rejected a CIA plan to destroy the terrorist group.

Tenet gets more specific with the nature of the intelligence:

“The world felt like it was on the edge of eruption. In this time period of June and July, the threat continues to rise. Terrorists were disappearing [as if in hiding, in preparation for an attack]. Camps were closing. Threat reportings on the rise.”

On July 10th, Tenet met directly with Condoleezza Rice at the White House, where Richard Blee, head of the agency’s Al Qaeda division, told the national security advisor, “There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al Qaeda’s intention is the destruction of the United States.”

Rice has consistently downplayed this meeting. In her memoir, she said her recollection of the July 10th warning is not“crisp” because she and Tenet had been regularly discussing the terrorist threat.

How the president’s national security advisor—and the president and vice president themselves—did not prioritize the urgency of new intelligence regarding a terrorist attack against the United States is still a matter of confusion and deep disappointment for Tenet.

“To me it remains incomprehensible still. I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It’s kind of like The Twilight Zone,” says Tenet. “I still look at the ceiling at night about a lot of things. And I’ll keep them to myself forever. But we’re all human beings.”


(blacklistednews.com)

Traders Pull ‘Singed Fingertips’ From Markets as Risks Escalate

Investors are fleeing and volumes are falling due to extreme valuations amid global uncertainties related to monetary policy and political decisions made in wake of the 2007-2009 financial crisis. It’s a flight that’s creating a negative feedback loop.

• "First it’s China, then Japan, then the ECB. When you singe the fingertips of speculators, they don’t like to play anymore," says Brean Capital managing director Russ Certo
• Major banks worldwide are paring trading operations as part of a push to cut costs amid rising regulatory requirements
• Investors "are stewards of other people’s money and they don’t want to allocate capital to a pyramid scheme": Certo
• Speculators in China have retreated as fast as they advanced as trading volumes across nation’s three biggest exchanges are now less than half of what they were at April 22 peak
• Volume of shares changing hands on FTSE 100 Index -21% since Feb.; total volume on U.S. stock exchanges 7.1m May 12 vs 12.5m Jan. 20
• CME Group’s recent monthly trading volume shows m/m declines across interest rate, FX, equity futures and options
• FX futures -6.2% y/y, ~699k contracts/day, -16.2% m/m; FX options -22.5% y/y, ~70k contracts/day, -7.7% m/m
• Rate futures +8.3% y/y, 4.2m contracts/day, -14.2% m/m; options +6.3% y/y, 1.33m contracts/day, -11% m/m
• Equity index futures +31%, ~2.15m contracts/day, -16.5% m/m; equity index options +20.9% y/y, ~544k contracts/day, +0.5% m/m

POLICY RISKS

• Primary risk is that global financial markets are more vulnerable to policy shocks as many assets are reaching extreme valuations; stock indexes near all-time highs and sovereign bond yields near record lows
• Market participants are losing confidence, especially during unexpected central bank decisions like when the BOJ failed to expand monetary stimulus April 27
• Fed: Risk Fed convinces markets it will hike in face of fragile global economic environment or hikes before market prices move; first development would increasingly weigh on risk assets, while second would create a negative shock
• ECB: Risk QE program continue to be ineffective as O/N current account holdings, excess liquidity are near record highs
• BOJ: Risk BOJ loses control of an appreciating JPY, still unable to generate growth or inflation and burdened with Abe’s fiscal policies that continue to be ineffective
• Ongoing risk Basel III, sovereign regulatory rules continue forcing commercial banks to hold more high quality liquid assets (HQLA), exacerbating global liquidity shortage

POLITICAL RISK

• Brexit
• Uncertainty overshadowing Brexit’s impact on markets, GBP or economic policy; Treasury analysis of short-term Brexit impact will be published this month
• Average of half of respondents in Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain and Sweden believe their own country should hold a referendum on staying in the EU, according to a poll by Ipsos Mori published May 9
• ICM poll shows 40% of Britons would vote to remain in EU, 41% to leave; last week’s poll showed 44% stay, 45% leave
• GBP pricing out Brexit risks may be premature; some analysts say the pound’s gain reflects greater certainty the electorate will back the “Remain” camp, though others warn this may reflect a misreading of recent opinion polls
• Core CEE may be most vulnerable to Brexit risk as Poland largest net recipient of EU funds while U.K. 3rd largest net contributor

EUROPEAN UNION

• Rising risk EU nations are unable to stem the flow of migrants creating rising nationalistic fervor and domestic civil strife
• Increased risk European peripheral finances become problematic amid increasing political uncertainty, rising nonperforming loans and slowing economic growth
• Italy: Fails to meet its debt-reduction goal, economy growing less than govt estimates; bank asset quality continues to deteriorate and Atlante fund proves to be ineffective, fund size EU4.25b, gross NPLs EU360b end-2015
• Greece: Risk Greeks prove unable to meet terms of debt relief agreement, forces another series of renegotiations
• Spain: Risk June 26 election creates another stalemate; also risk an anti-establishment coalition is created, unseats Prime Minister Rajoy

CHINA

• Risk China may allow a harder landing than expected; China’s Communist Party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, said China should put deleveraging ahead of short-term economic growth
• China may lose control of deleveraging, which would increase risks of increased financial market volatility and/or economic hard landing
• China may either lose control of capital outflows or be forced to allow CNY to depreciate more quickly; imports from Hong Kong surged 204%, indicated significant capital outflows
• Risk China FX reserve selling continues; reserves rose $11b to $3.316t, though most may have been related to valuation changes to drop of USD
• Intensity of futures trading on Chinese commodities exchanges is making some of the world’s most liquid markets look leisurely; iron ore in free fall as trading frenzy ebbs
• Chinese companies in metals and mining or coal operations industries must repay 239.6b yuan ($36.9b) of notes in the three months through June, the biggest quarterly amount on record, according to data compiled by Bloomberg

OIL

• Low prices may further pressure U.S. oil firms and cause more defaults that cascade into credit problems for smaller banks, private equity firms/hedge funds; this raises potential for downward pressure on other assets sold to cover losses
• OPEC may fail to revive limits on crude output at its June meeting after the failure of talks to freeze production last month, resulting in renewed oil price weakness
• New Saudi boss seen chasing record output to defend market share vs higher-cost shale
• Oil price decline may force Saudis to continue selling reserves to protect FX peg, which increases speculation that the peg may fail; reserve assets are $587b from $745b in Aug. 2014
• Russian economy, which is already enduring the longest recession in two decades, may come under more protracted stress, as oil represents the country’s chief export earner
• EM sovereigns may face increasing pressure as public energy companies have been some of the most profligate borrowers

UNITED STATES

• Political uncertainties aside, there’s risk that U.S. growth may slow further, causing risk asset prices to fall, which would then transmit back to more economic weakness and create downward spiral
• With more than two-thirds of S&P 500 companies having reported earnings this season, outcome has failed to suggest a speedy recovery from what’s shaping up to be a fourth straight quarterly decline
• S&P 500 reported earnings share through May 6 shows 1Q earnings down 7.9%; companies have churned out more than $2t of share repurchases since 2009, though grew less than 4% in 2015
• There have been 40 corporate defaults in the U.S. as of end-April, fastest pace since 2009; there have been 53 global defaults this year vs 67 in 2009
• Puerto Rico Governor Padilla warned bond investors face a cascade of defaults starting in July unless Congress passes legislation; concurrent concern is municipal funds like Oppenheimer that allocated 43% of its Maryland portfolio to Puerto Rican securities

(ZeroHedge)

Western women who join the Islamic State aren’t victims who've been groomed or seduced by men. They’re committed jihadis in their own right.

BY SIMON COTTEE | MAY 17, 2016

What do Western women who join Islamic State want? One prominent theory is what these women “really” want is to get laid. Another is that they don’t know what they “really” want, because what they want has been decided for them by male jihadi “groomers.” Both theories are meant to resolve a seeming paradox: How can any woman who enjoys democratic rights and equality before the law join or support a group which actively promotes her own oppression? But both are misconceived. Indeed, they say more about the gendered assumptions of those who proffer them than about the women they are trying to explain.

The idea that Western Islamic State “fangirls” — as they are often derogatively called — “just wanna have fun” (to paraphrase Cindy Lauper) is the thesis of, among others, Shazia Mirza, a British comedian whose latest show is called “The Kardashians Made Me Do It.” The show’s title references a comment made by one of the sisters of the three East London schoolgirls who absconded to Syria in February 2015. “She used to watchKeeping Up With the Kardashians and stuff like that, so there was nothing that indicated that she was radicalized in any way — not at home,” Sahima Begum said about her missing sister, Shamima. This gives Mirza’s show its central theme, which is that the Western girls who join the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, share the same banal and all-too-human concerns as their non-jihadi Western peers —including, and especially, when it comes to love. Mirza’s argument is that the Islamic State, for teens like Begum, is just another teenage crush. Indeed, the Islamic State, she suggests, is like a boy band — only with guns.

“I’m not being frivolous,” Mirza said in a recent TV interview, “but, these ISIS men, as barbaric as they are, you have to admit, they are hot. They’re macho; they’re hairy; they’ve got guns. And these girls think, ‘These are a bit of all right.’ What they’ve done is sold their mother’s jewelry and bought a one-way ticket to Syria for some halal meat.” Or as Mirza phrased it in her 2015 Edinburgh show, referring to the three East London runaways: “They think they’ve gone on a Club 18-30 holiday to Ibiza.… They’re not religious; they’re horny.”

This is funny — and Mirza, after all, is a comedian. But it isn’t serious as a commentary on the motives of the Western women who have joined, or aspire to join, the Islamic State. Yet many news organizations have taken up the idea as though it were. Earlier this year, for example, CNN ran a news story titled “ISIS using ‘jihotties’ to recruit brides for fighters.” This was only slightly more cretinous than a BBC Newsnight report from March 2015 proclaiming, “Attractive jihadists can lure UK girls to extremism.”

Another way of not taking Islamic State “fangirls” seriously is to suggest that they have been “groomed” over the Internet by shadowy, charismatic men into believing that the Islamic State is the solution to all their problems. In March 2015, Hayley Richardson wrote in Newsweek that militant fighters “are using similar online grooming tactics to paedophiles to lure western girls to their cause.” Sara Khan, the founder and co-director of the anti-extremism NGO Inspire, echoed this. “Just like child abusers groom their victims online and persuade them to leave their homes and meet them,” sheclaimed in the Independent, “male jihadists contact women through social media and online chatrooms, and build trust with them over time.”

This is a gendered reading of radicalization: Young men are not “groomed” by charismatic women who prey on their emotional weaknesses and naivety. Only women are groomed. Only women lack the necessary agency and political engagement to want to support or join the Islamic State. Mirza’s reading of women’s radicalization is similarly patronizing, but it at least puts women on an equal footing with male Islamic State jihadis, who, presumably, from within her one-dimensional worldview, also want to get laid.

The problem with the grooming narrative is that it seriously misrepresents women’s radicalization as an essentially passive process and obscures, asnumerous studies show, the striking degree to which young women themselves are actively involved in recruiting like-minded “sisters” to the cause. It also presents an unreal picture in which women and young girls are somehow “targeted” and then seduced by online recruiters, drastically overestimating the recruiter’s powers of selection and persuasion. Everything we know about radicalization suggests otherwise: that potential recruits actively seek out the message and the messenger (and that the decisive facilitator in radicalization is typically not an anonymous predatory online recruiter, but a trusted friend or family member).

Over the past year, I have spent an unhealthy amount of time tracking the social media activities of Western English-speaking female Islamic State supporters as part of a wider research project on the subculture of Western jihadism. (Most of their accounts have since been shut down.) And what these women — or at least the more brazen and vocal among them — want they have made abundantly clear. Far from being slaves to their sexual desires or victims of the predatory machinations of men, many Western women join or aspire to join the Islamic State because they want to — because the Islamic State, unlike the secular liberal democracies in which they live, makes sense to them and reflects their fundamental moral and political convictions. What they want is to live in a properly authentic Islamic state in which Islamic law — sharia — is fully implemented. Specifically, they want to live under the “caliphate,” which, they believe, it is their divine duty to support. What they do not want is to live in the West, for a multitude of reasons. They do not want freedom, as understood by classical liberal scholars as negative freedom — the freedom to do what you want, so long as you don’t harm others. And they do not want feminism. They want submission: to God’s will and his divine law.

Consider, for example, Umm Muthanna, a 22-year-old British woman and former university student who left for Syria earlier last year. In a flurry of tweets, posted in November 2014, just months before she left Britain, Umm Muthanna recorded an incident in one of her university lectures. It provides fascinating insight into the anti-feminist mindset of the Western women who leave to join the Islamic State:

Todays lecture was on Feminism.… Then on came the seminar.… Subhan’Allah the tutor started discussing gender differences and roles in society. Fine, I will listen and make notes but does not mean I accept your constricted ideologies. Short time after, the tutor asks a question… “Raise your hand if you are a feminist”. I wanted to burst out with laughter, which my niqab helped contain. Result?… Majority of the women, 18/20 put their hands up. I sat there whilst everybody glanced at me! Haha, I felt proud, but pity for their souls.… Then, here it where it gets interesting. The tutor asked, so those who are not feminists, explain why. Everybody turned to me basically.… And I said clearly, Islam has given all my rights to me as a woman and I feel liberated, I feel content and equal in society and all. I explained to them, how both men and women have rights in Islam, given us to in the Qu’raan, (at this point everybody was screwing). I explained to them not everything which a man can do, a woman can also compete with and try do. It’s to do with biology. I explained how this western society has made you think in a certain way, pressurised you to feel weak and always thirsty to make money. Pressurised you to compete with men, when in reality if you knew your place as a woman, if there was Shari’ah implementation, you would not be complaining like you are now. I said all this and basically everybody tried refuting me. These feminists are deluded!

The big taboos for many of these women, as for all religious fundamentalists, are related to sex and gender equality. Peer inside their online lives, and it becomes clear that this is a major animating concern. They cannot abide free mixing of the sexes, which they condemn as a “disease.” They cannot even abide the idea of revealing their eyes, let alone face, in their Twitter profile photos, since this would imperil their sexual modesty — and hence impugn their devotion to God. And they explicitly warn “brothers” not to “DM [direct message]” them. The Islamic State appeals to these women, not, as Mirza insists, because it has a bountiful supply of “halal meat,” but because it perfectly coheres with their militantly conservative notions of sex and gender. Hence, they support the Islamic State not despite, but because of, its aggressively patriarchal worldview.

Scott Atran, an anthropologist at Oxford University and France’s National Center for Scientific Research, in his current research, describes these women as “post-feminist and post-adolescent.” He writes, “They are tired of a seemingly endless, genderless, culturally indistinct coming of age. The Islamic State and al Qaeda provide clear red lines: Men are men, and women are women.” Which is to say that men are warriors and women are mothers, whose primary duty, as Umm Muthanna put it in one tweet, is “to raise the next generation of lions in Islamic State.” “My GOAL,” she declared, “is to have lots of sons & send them off all feesabillilah [“in the cause of Allah”] … under the Islamic State.” The hashtag attached to this tweet was #RealWomanGoals. This does not mean, as Atran and otherresearchers have made clear, that female Islamic State members or supporters are disapproving of violence. On the contrary, many seek to justify and even to encourage it. Umm Osama, for example, who is an online friend of Umm Muthanna, recently felt brave enough to issue an incitement for suicide attacks, reminding brothers of their heavenly rewards on achieving martyrdom. “To brothers,” she tweeted, “when you get so excited hoping for 7ooris” — that is, wide-eyed damsels, or female companions — “remember this n say ‘Mahraha adDugma’ (u can do it).”

These women’s greatest anxieties are related to dunya, or the material world, which they condemn as corrupt and polluting. This is why the niqab is so symbolically important: It acts as a protective shield against worldly poison and vice. As Andrew Sullivan perceptively observed, describing the logic of fundamentalism, “Sin begets sin. The sin of others can corrupt you as well.” Hence the appeal of the caliphate: a state in which sin is violently punished and constantly purged from the public body.

Yet, for all their efforts to escape the polluting stain of the material world, these women are irrevocably marked by it. They enjoy its technologies and blandishments. And, for all their efforts to Islamize their inner and outer selves, there is, as Mirza so humorously shows, an inner Kardashian in these women that coexists uneasily with their righteous selves. these women that coexists uneasily with their righteous selves.

Who is Oum Dujana? She is based in London and may have been born in Belgium or France. She is young — 22, she says — and of North African heritage. Like many female Islamic State supporters, she is precocious, and her tweets show a lively intelligence and active political engagement. (Her account has since been shut down.) She appears to be intensely religious. In one tweet, she makes a reference to being under “heavy obbo,” or observation, and in another refers to a police raid on her house. She also alludes to a husband in a warzone, perhaps Syria, Libya, or Iraq. Either she has tried to leave for Islamic State-controlled territory or she is married to an Islamic State fighter — or both. Regardless, she seems deeply committed to the caliphate ideal and to the Islamic State. It is impossible to know how she acquired that commitment. But infantilizing this woman as a vulnerable child or sexualizing her as a repressed Muslim is unlikely to cast much light on this.

No one is more sensitive to this disparagement than the women themselves. “Idiots that are tweeting this trend,” tweeted Umm Waqqas, a Seattle-based Islamic State online recruiter who was exposed by Britain’s Channel 4 News last year, “should realize that NO SISTER leaves the comfort of their homes just to marry some man.” She was referring to the hashtag #jihadibrides. “They cant fathom the reality,” she immediately added, “that muslims from all ages are leaving to live in a REAL muslim country & to live under the shades of Sharia.” Or as Oum Dujana more succinctly put it last month, “CNN said we [gonna] marry #Jihotties LOOOL.”

Photo credit: MAHMUD HAMS/AFP/Getty Images

(foreignpolicy.com)