CIA Files Provide Examples That Clearly Expose the Farce of War Reporting

BREAKING!

Renting Judges for Secret Rulings

Judith Resnik, The New York Times

Resnik writes: "Instead of open proceedings, filings would not be docketed, the courtroom would be closed to the public and the outcome would be secret."
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Idaho Gov. Signs 'Ag-Gag' Bill Into Law

Peter Moskowitz, Al Jazeera America

Moskowitz reports: "Idaho on Friday became the first state in two years to pass a bill aimed at stopping filming at farms and dairy producers."
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From the inimitable Coyote Prime at Running Cause I Can't Fly we learn the truth about the venality of those who led us into more and more foreign policy mistakes from the 50's to the present (and their obfuscations about the logical consequences of their brilliant and self-serving military rationales).

Alfond stated, without any challenge or contradiction by the committee, that in 1974, a year after the supposedly complete return of prisoners, the gathered data showed that a person or people had manually entered into the sensors — as U.S. pilots had been trained to do — no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 U.S. POWs who were lost in Laos. Alfond added, according to the transcript, “This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE.”

McCain attended that committee hearing specifically to confront Alfond because of her criticism of the panel’s work. He bellowed and berated her for quite a while. His face turning anger-pink, he accused her of “denigrating” his “patriotism.” The bullying had its effect — she began to cry. After a pause Alfond recovered and tried to respond to his scorching tirade, but McCain simply turned away and stormed out of the room. The PAVE SPIKE file has never been declassified. We still don’t know anything about those 20 POWs.

. . . A series of what appeared to be distress signals from Vietnam and Laos were captured by the government’s satellite system in the late 1980s and early ’90s. (Before that period, no search for such signals had been put in place.) Not a single one of these markings was ever deemed credible.

To the layman’s eye, the satellite photos, some of which I’ve seen, show markings on the ground that are identical to the signals that American pilots had been specifically trained to use in their survival courses — such as certain letters, like X or K, drawn in a special way. Other markings were the secret four-digit authenticator numbers given to individual pilots. But time and again, the Pentagon, backed by the CIA, insisted that humans had not made these markings.

What were they, then? “Shadows and vegetation,” the government said, insisting that the markings were merely normal topographical contours like saw-grass or rice-paddy divider walls. It was the automatic response — shadows and vegetation.

On one occasion, a Pentagon photo expert refused to go along. It was a missing man’s name gouged into a field, he said, not trampled grass or paddy berms. His bosses responded by bringing in an outside contractor who found instead, yes, shadows and vegetation. This refrain led Bob Taylor, a highly regarded investigator on the Senate committee staff who had examined the photographic evidence, to comment to me: “If grass can spell out people’s names and secret digit codes, then I have a newfound respect for grass.”

Read it all here.