We previously discussed how the CIA has delivered millions in cash in bags to the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Karzai’s family and friends are have been denounced as openly corrupt. Despite these reports of grotesque corruption, the money continues to flow into Karzai’s pockets even as he attacks the U.S. and Americans as “demons”, and moves to shift alliances to Iran and China. The news of the CIA’s bag men produced outrage among many, but once again the objections over the corruption and waste in this country has no effect on the CIA. Karzai insisted that the cash keep flowing and even went public to say that the CIA assured him that the deliveries to him would continue regardless of the objections of U.S. citizens.
Karzai appears to have been irate at the thought that the CIA cash bags would stop and he is so immune from any standards of decency or legality that he went public to declare victory over public objections. Karzai declared “Yes, we received cash from the CIA for the past 10 years. It was very useful, and we are very thankful for this aid.” Of course, Afghanistan has received billions in “aid” — much of which simply “disappeared.” Karzai added that “Yesterday, I thanked the CIA’s chief in Kabul and I requested their continued help, and they promised that they will continue.”
Karzai simply dismissed objections to the overt corruption perpetrated by the CIA and himself. He insisted “[t]his is not unusual” and “[t]his is the choice of the American government.”
It certainly is not “unusual” for Karzai and his corrupt family. So let’s catch up. Karzai has praised the Taliban and called the U.S. as “demons.” He is working with Iran and asking China to come into this country as a new ally. His government is denying rights to women and religious minorities. Corruption is open and grotesque. The response of the CIA is to openly continue deliveries of cash in suitcases and the Administration continues to lose American lives and billions of dollars to prop up this government.
It has long been evident that the opposition of the public to this war and the outcry over corruption is meaningless. We appear to have no effect on policy even when it comes to the obscene delivery of millions of cash to Karzai. The public and American values be damned.
Source: CNN
Payments to Karzai are probably done in order to facilitate CIA involvement
in the Heroin business.
The masters of the CIA have a mindset that creates elites, indicating they are operatives of the elites.
They treat Karzai as an elite that can mouth off without accountability.
General Smedley Butler said (Dec. 1933) that is the way of the 1%:
(The Universal Smedley). Sound familiar?
When Asadullah Khalid, the current chief of the NDS or National Directorate of Security (comparable to the CIA) and former governor of Ghazni and Kandahar provinces was seriously hurt at the end of last year, the US rushed him out of the country. As he laid in bed in VA recovering, Pres. Karzai and several US government officials, including Pres. Obama, showed up to wish him a speedy recovery. I wonder how many bags of CIA money they dropped off at his bedside before he was released about a month ago and returning to pick up where he left off. It’s been known for years by many that Khalid has been on the CIA’s payroll. It’s also been known for years that he is but one of the many brutal men in Karzai’s government. He stands accused of major human rights abuses, including very credible reports that he himself engaged in torture in his secret prisons while he was governor of Kandahar as well as of ordering the downing of a plane carrying five UN workers. As a US commander told me some years ago, he told the Provincial Regional Team of the US Military which poppy fields they were allowed to burn down and which ones to ignore: those of his friends and allies of course. He’s been named as a major drug mafia gangster. His henchmen in Ghazni province would routinely intimidate the local people, smuggle artefacts out of the country, transport Afghan women across the country for prostitution, engage in extrajudicial killings and steal from funds for reconstruction in the province.
The US, in their eagerness to install a new government after rooting out the Taleban, helped install the warlords, many of them brutal major human rights abusers and this against the will of Pres. Karzai. These warlords were the reason the Taleban became so popular among so much of Afghanistan. In my modest opinion and while I don’t care much about Pres. Karzai, ultimately it is Karzai who has outwitted the US and CIA, enriching himself and his supporters and allowed them to smuggle out of the country huge amounts of money, our tax payer monies that is, to invest in places like Dubai. War is bad but it’s good for some. In the end it is the vast majority of poor people who may turn against the Afghan government again and welcome back the Taleban. The US contractors who stole so much from our tax monies as well are licking their chops at the prospect of the US involvement in Syria. Before we know it, we’ll be back in Afghanistan fighting the Taleban again. It will be our young men and women who will be sent in again to lose life and limb. We will probably use the ‘plight of Afghan women’ as one of the reasons to return. Sad.
Why don’t they spend some of that money here. It might stimulate the economy. Maybe spend it on public schools.
I consider this particular series of JT posts to be just whining. But I would also say Obama’s number one item every day should be getting us the hell out of there.
Larry beat me to the punch, exactly what I was going to say.
Just remember we created this mess in Afghanistan and it had little or nothing to do with 9/11, and everything to do with energy resources and our election of 2000 placing a criminal class in charge of the WH. Afghanistan was a mess before us, but it was their mess. Now it’s ours.
The Blame Game Begins: Who Will Be Held Responsible for Creating the Afghan “Vertically Integrated Criminal” Government?
Posted on May 5, 2013 by emptywheel
http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/05/05/the-blame-game-begins-who-will-be-held-responsible-for-creating-the-afghan-vertically-integrated-criminal-government/
Get out of Afghanistan & Iraq now…..totally out. Close down those billion $$ embassies and give them to the people of Iraq & Afghanistan to turn into living/business quarters. Get rid of that Nazi sounding Dept of Homeland Security, Get the CIA back under control, cut off this insane money business………..Sheeze, if only we had a decent congress.
Cut Karzai off now. Leave Afghanistan now. That was easy!
I would say Karzai distributes cash bribes to various places to buy a little peace and time. It beats fighting, killing, and dead US soldiers. Of course it can’t go on this way, and the longer we wait the more difficult the transition may become, but for now it is the process there. And the fact Karzai certainly skims to the tune of enormous personal wealth, and that he is as corrupt as humanly possible, and is turning to the Chinese and Iran, is all just part of the pile we stepped in years ago when we elected a corrupt government of our own to make such decisions. Get it? It’s not Karzai, it’s us.
anonymously posted 1, May 6, 2013 at 10:26 am
…
Look Who’s Listening; The C.I.A. Widens Its Domestic Reach
==============================================
The F.B.I. may be their surrogates, or competitors:
(CNN Interview of a former FBI counter terrorism agent, Guardian). One has to wonder if they practice on foreign nations first, such as Karzai, then perfect it here, or vice versa.
JT pointed out “The public and American values be damned”, which seems to be the government’s foreign as well as its domestic policy.
Look Who’s Listening; The C.I.A. Widens Its Domestic Reach
By TIM WEINER
Published: January 20, 2002
Published: January 20, 2002
(Page 2 of 2)
But those laws created artificial legalistic barriers between law-enforcement and foreign intelligence, the government now contends. The perceived problem was succinctly stated by Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, whose wife, Barbara, died in the plane that hit the Pentagon on Sept. 11: ”The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand’s doing.”
With some exceptions, F.B.I. wiretap information and criminal evidence gathered in grand jury investigations was not shared with the C.I.A. Secret intelligence with criminal implications developed by the agency was not routinely passed on to the bureau. Yet the once firm fire wall between the agencies was breached well before the new laws took effect.
The F.B.I. has greatly expanded its presence overseas.
The C.I.A. has redoubled the work of its domestic stations, from New York to Los Angeles, shifting spies from foreign bases and striving to recruit foreigners in the United States — especially Iranians, Afghans, Iraqis and Arabs of many lands. For example, an office in Germany that monitored Iranians was shut down and some of its staff relocated to Los Angeles, which has the largest Iranian population of any city outside Iran, according to The Los Angeles Times.
Ultimately, the goal of the new laws and the proposed ones is to allow the C.I.A. to collect more secret information, in concert with the F.B.I.
But, as every recent official study points out, American intelligence has for years collected far more information than it can analyze in depth. That problem may lie at the heart of the surprise achieved by the terrorists on Sept. 11.
”They are now proposing to add e-mail communications in God knows how many difficult languages to these cubic acres of untranslated, unread, unanalyzed, unabsorbed information,” said Thomas Powers, author of ”The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the C.I.A.,” whose critiques of intelligence work are uniquely well-respected by veterans of the agency.
”The request for broader powers is the excuse of first resort of anyone who’s failed at national security or law-enforcement tasks,” said Mr. Powers. ”This notion — that if we could only read every e-mail message in the universe, that no one could cause us trouble — is a big mistake.”
The bid for increased surveillance and intelligence-gathering will become a very big mistake if Congress grants the F.B.I. and C.I.A. more power but fails to investigate what went wrong on Sept. 11, Mr. Powers argues.
”There is a reluctance to open up an investigation,” he said, because ”somewhere in the oceans of intelligence collected over the past years they will eventually find hundreds of pieces of information that would have predicted Sept. 11. Everybody’s afraid. They know they screwed up and if you have an investigation people will find out how.”
The ranks of former C.I.A. officers who want the agency to succeed but openly criticize it as wayward have been growing since the end of the cold war.
One, Robert D. Steele, now a consultant, says these new laws are cosmetics that cannot conceal a ”decrepit and dysfunctional” clandestine service, unable to penetrate hostile foreign governments, much less terrorist groups.
Mr. Steele says intelligence-sharing within the government remains blocked by ”a cult of secrecy” and ”bureaucratic infighting.”
Outside critics, including some in Congress, say the laws that created the present national-security structure back in 1947 need an overhaul.
But the political atmosphere today is less conducive to fixing whatever might have been broken on the eve of Sept. 11 than to increasing the government’s power to spy in the future, abroad and at home.
As long as Al Qaeda remains a threat, Americans may take the advice of the late John C. Stennis of Mississippi, who once beseeched his fellow senators ”to shut your eyes some and take what is coming” when it came to the C.I.A. History suggests that in times of great fear — in wars cold and hot, under threat by unseen forces — the tug-of-war between secrecy and democracy in the United States has gone in the direction of the secret institutions of the state.
As far back as 1787, during the debates on the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton warned that a loss of liberty was a natural consequence of war. Americans would ”resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights,” he wrote. ”To be more safe they, at length, become willing to run the risk of being less free.”
Job security.
Start trials for the CIA….don’t take “National Security” as an excuse for their criminal acts….
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/weekinreview/20WEIN.html
Look Who’s Listening; The C.I.A. Widens Its Domestic Reach
By TIM WEINER
Published: January 20, 2002
THE charter of the Central Intelligence Agency expressly denies the spies any domestic police powers. President Harry S. Truman was vigilant in wanting no secret police. Nor did he want J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. cloaked in the cover that espionage demands. The spies and the G-men had two distinct roles, two distinct sets of rules.
So the boundaries were drawn at the dawn of the cold war. The C.I.A. would find out what was going on outside the United States — and so prevent a second Pearl Harbor. The F.B.I. would work inside the United States to catch criminals and foreign agents.
That once bright line has blurred since Sept. 11.
Congress has given the C.I.A. new legal powers to snoop on people in the United States — not limited to investigating groups like Al Qaeda. It has been granted these new powers, along with billions of dollars, without any public post-mortem into how all these guardians of national security failed to protect against the September attacks.
The C.I.A. is now permitted to read secret grand jury testimony, without a judge’s prior approval. It can obtain private records of institutions and corporations seized under federal court-approved searches.
In proposed legislation circulated on Capitol Hill last month, the C.I.A. is also seeking the power to intercept e-mail messages routed through the United States from abroad, on the say-so of the director of central intelligence, without a warrant. In addition, the F.B.I. would like to expand its ability to eavesdrop on individuals in the United States.
A United States intelligence official, speaking on behalf of the C.I.A., points out that the agency does not seek law-enforcement powers — only access to information. And the government argues that keeping the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. in different rooms and locking the door will hamper investigations into terrorist suspects.
So the door is now open.
”The case for breaking down the barriers to work against international terrorists seeking to kill Americans is absolutely compelling,” said Morton H. Halperin, himself the target of an illegal wiretap when he worked in the Nixon White House. After many years of court battles, he won a belated apology from his former boss, Henry A. Kissinger.
”But the government insistently refused to limit it to that,” he said. ”Most of the new authorities are directed as much at American citizens as foreigners.”
The expansion of government power to spy at home is taking place in a political environment charged by the attacks. To oppose the powers that the government seeks, Attorney General John Ashcroft warned Congress last month, is to side with the terrorists.
”The whole momentum has shifted because of Sept. 11, and there is far more cooperation than before” between intelligence and law-enforcement officials, said Kenneth C. Bass 3rd, an lawyer who oversaw foreign intelligence wiretaps at the Justice Department from 1977 to 1981.
”These people are good soldiers and they will respond to orders,” he said. ”The concerns are in the momentum: the whole thrust of being in a wartime environment, and how one responds to that, introduces concerns with respect to overkill. The zeal, the momentum, needs to be checked and balanced.”
Zeal has been a problem in the past.
In its first quarter-century, the C.I.A. did what Truman feared: it spied on Americans, opened their mail, tapped their phones. When those skeletons came tumbling from the closet in the mid-1970’s — and after the F.B.I.’s illegal surveillance of real and perceived enemies of the state was revealed — new laws took effect to guard against eavesdropping abuses by American intelligence and security agencies.
(end of page 1)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/weekinreview/20WEIN.html
Get out of the Middle East.
“That they are at the vanguard of corruption foreign and domestic was inevitable. A lack of accountability breeds the notion of an entitlement to criminal action without fear of sanction.” -Gene H.
Repeating: “That they are at the vanguard of corruption foreign and domestic…” “…and domestic…”
“NYPD CIA Anti-Terror Operations Conducted In Secret For Years”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/24/nypd-cia-terrorism_n_934923.html
“On Capitol Hill, where FBI tactics have frequently been criticized for their effect on civil liberties, the NYPD faces no such opposition.
In 2007, Sanchez testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee and was asked how the NYPD spots signs of radicalization. He said the key was viewing innocuous activity, including behavior that might be protected by the First Amendment, as a potential precursor to terrorism.
That triggered no questions from the committee, which Sanchez said had been “briefed in the past on how we do business.”
The Justice Department has the authority to investigate civil rights violations. It issued detailed rules in 2003 against racial profiling, including prohibiting agencies from considering race when making traffic stops or assigning patrols.
But those rules apply only to the federal government and contain a murky exemption for terrorism investigations. The Justice Department has not investigated a police department for civil rights violations during a national security investigation.
“One of the hallmarks of the intelligence division over the last 10 years is that, not only has it gotten extremely aggressive and sophisticated, but it’s operating completely on its own,” said Dunn, the civil liberties lawyer. “There are no checks. There is no oversight.”
The NYPD has been mentioned as a model for policing in the post-9/11 era. But it’s a model that seems custom-made for New York. No other city has the Big Apple’s combination of a low crime rate, a $4.5 billion police budget and a diverse 34,000-person police force. Certainly no other police department has such deep CIA ties.
Perhaps most important, nobody else had 9/11 the way New York did. No other city lost nearly 3,000 people in a single morning. A decade later, police say New Yorkers still expect the department to do whatever it can to prevent another attack. The NYPD has embraced that expectation.
As Sanchez testified on Capitol Hill: “We’ve been given the public tolerance and the luxury to be very aggressive on this topic.””
Again, “We’ve been given the public tolerance and the luxury to be very aggressive…” – Sanchez
I think Karzai should receive a pressure cooker in his next bag.
Truman only made one correct decision as President and forming the CIA in the manner that he did wasn’t one of them. He should have stuck to haberdashery. That they are at the vanguard of corruption foreign and domestic was inevitable. A lack of accountability breeds the notion of an entitlement to criminal action without fear of sanction.