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2009/07/13 00:41:58
Subject: Place your bets now! Just what have the CIA been up to?
The existence of the programme, set up after 9/11, was hidden for eight years and even now its nature is not known.
Anyone care to place a bet as to what Cheney ordered the CIA to do? Covert assassinations? Hiding proof of UFO's? Discovering the Secret Recipe for KFC?
I do love a good mystery.
"And if we've learnt anything over the past 1000 mile retreat it's that Russian agriculture is in dire need of mechanisation!"
2009/07/13 00:47:46
Subject: Re:Place your bets now! Just what have the CIA been up to?
After the former VP watched The Spy who loved me a time too many the CIA started their own 00 program including guys named with letters and a bunch of tuned Aston Martins.
M.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2009/07/13 02:23:55
Jenkins: You don't have jurisdiction here!
Smith Jamison: We aren't here, which means when we open up on you and shred your bodies with automatic fire then this will never have happened.
About the Clans: "Those brief outbursts of sense can't hold back the wave of sibko bred, over hormoned sociopaths that they crank out though."
2009/07/13 02:50:02
Subject: Place your bets now! Just what have the CIA been up to?
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2009/07/13 02:50:26
Anuvver fing - when they do sumfing, they try to make it look like somfink else to confuse everybody. When one of them wants to lord it over the uvvers, 'e says "I'm very speshul so'z you gotta worship me", or "I know summink wot you lot don't know, so yer better lissen good". Da funny fing is, arf of 'em believe it and da over arf don't, so 'e 'as to hit 'em all anyway or run fer it.
2009/07/13 04:01:50
Subject: Place your bets now! Just what have the CIA been up to?
I personally think it was a private army or some kind of Death Squad organisation.
Cheney's a nutter. I wouldn't put anything past him.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2009/07/13 04:13:20
People are like dice, a certain Frenchman said that. You throw yourself in the direction of your own choosing. People are free because they can do that. Everyone's circumstances are different, but no matter how small the choice, at the very least, you can throw yourself. It's not chance or fate. It's the choice you made.
2009/07/13 05:13:53
Subject: Re:Place your bets now! Just what have the CIA been up to?
Probably to do with the program to search phone communications in the US for key words without obtaining a warrant.
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
2009/07/13 05:59:08
Subject: Re:Place your bets now! Just what have the CIA been up to?
The existence of the programme, set up after 9/11, was hidden for eight years and even now its nature is not known.
Anyone care to place a bet as to what Cheney ordered the CIA to do? Covert assassinations? Hiding proof of UFO's? Discovering the Secret Recipe for KFC?
I do love a good mystery.
They already have reports out now (so much for secrecy evidently he had a point) but I'd proffer it was a secret kegger stash. Cheney's wild frat style parties have been rumored about for years...
NYT photo of Cheney in the Rose Garden-March 2008
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2009/07/13 15:08:51
-"Wait a minute.....who is that Frazz is talking to in the gallery? Hmmm something is going on here.....Oh.... it seems there is some dispute over video taping of some sort......Frazz is really upset now..........wait a minute......whats he go there.......is it? Can it be?....Frazz has just unleashed his hidden weiner dog from his mini bag, while quoting shakespeares "Let slip the dogs the war!!" GG
-"Don't mind Frazzled. He's just Dakka's crazy old dude locked in the attic. He's harmless. Mostly."
-TBone the Magnificent 1999-2014, Long Live the King!
2009/07/13 15:05:18
Subject: Re:Place your bets now! Just what have the CIA been up to?
It's probably something kind of underwhelming. But IMO Dick Cheney will go down in history as one of the shadiest characters ever in the executive branch. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if even Bush wasn't fully briefed on some things Cheney was doing, and I'm not saying that lightly.
Its a smokescreen to try to give Pelosi cover for her lies about not knowing about the waterboarding of three Al Qaeda.
WASHINGTON -- A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative terminated by Director Leon Panetta was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter.
View Full Image
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Sen. Dianne Feinstein said CIA Director Panetta, above, told lawmakers Vice President Cheney ordered information be withheld from Congress.
The precise nature of the highly classified effort isn't clear, and the CIA won't comment on its substance.
According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn't become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it.
In 2001, the CIA also examined the subject of targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders, according to three former intelligence officials. It appears that those discussions tapered off within six months. It isn't clear whether they were an early part of the CIA initiative that Mr. Panetta stopped.
The revelations about the CIA and its post-9/11 activities have emerged amid a renewed fight between the agency and congressional Democrats. Last week, seven Democratic lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee released a letter that talked about the CIA effort, which they said Mr. Panetta acknowledged hadn't been properly vetted with Congress. CIA officials had brought the matter to Mr. Panetta's attention and had recommended he inform Congress.
Neither Mr. Panetta nor the lawmakers provided details. Mr. Panetta quashed the CIA effort after learning about it June 23.
The battle is part of a long-running tug of war between the executive branch and the legislature about how to oversee the activities of the country's intelligence services and how extensively the CIA should brief Congress. In recent years, in the light of revelations over CIA secret prisons and harsh interrogation techniques, Congress has pushed for greater oversight. The Obama administration, much like its predecessor, is resisting any moves in that direction.
Most recently, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in a dispute over what she knew about the use of waterboarding in interrogating terror suspects, has accused the agency of lying to lawmakers about its operations.
View Full Image
European Pressphoto Agency
Dick Cheney
Republicans on the panel say that the CIA effort didn't advance to a point where Congress clearly should have been notified.
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said the agency "has not commented on the substance of the effort." He added that "a candid dialogue with Congress is very important to this director and this agency."
One former senior intelligence official said the program was an attempt "to achieve a capacity to carry out something that was directed in the finding," meaning it was looking for ways to capture or kill al Qaeda chieftains.
The official noted that Congress had long been briefed on the finding, and that the CIA effort wasn't so much a program as "many ideas suggested over the course of years." It hadn't come close to fruition, he added.
Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said little had been spent on the efforts -- closer to $1 million than $50 million. "The idea for this kind of program was tossed around in fits and starts," he said.
Senior CIA leaders were briefed two or three times on the most recent iteration of the initiative, the last time in the spring of 2008. At that time, CIA brass said that the effort should be narrowed and that Congress should be briefed if the preparations reached a critical stage, a former senior intelligence official said.
Amid the high alert following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a small CIA unit examined the potential for targeted assassinations of al Qaeda operatives, according to the three former officials. The Ford administration had banned assassinations in the response to investigations into intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Some officials who advocated the approach were seeking to build teams of CIA and military Special Forces commandos to emulate what the Israelis did after the Munich Olympics terrorist attacks, said another former intelligence official.
"It was straight out of the movies," one of the former intelligence officials said. "It was like: Let's kill them all."
The former official said he had been told that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney didn't support such an operation. The effort appeared to die out after about six months, he said.
Former CIA Director George Tenet, who led the agency in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, declined through a spokesman to comment.
Also in September 2001, as CIA operatives were preparing for an offensive in Afghanistan, officials drafted cables that would have authorized assassinations of specified targets on the spot.
One draft cable, later scrapped, authorized officers on the ground to "kill on sight" certain al Qaeda targets, according to one person who saw it. The context of the memo suggested it was designed for the most senior leaders in al Qaeda, this person said.
Eventually Mr. Bush issued the finding that authorized the capturing of several top al Qaeda leaders, and allowed officers to kill the targets if capturing proved too dangerous or risky.
Lawmakers first learned specifics of the CIA initiative the day after Mr. Panetta did, when he briefed them on it for 45 minutes.
House lawmakers are now making preparations for an investigation into "an important program" and why Congress wasn't told about it, said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, in an interview.
On Sunday, lawmakers criticized the Bush administration's decision not to tell Congress. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California, hinted that the Bush administration may have broken the law by not telling Congress.
"We were kept in the dark. That's something that should never, ever happen again," she said. Withholding such information from Congress, she said, "is a big problem, because the law is very clear."
Ms. Feinstein said Mr. Panetta told the lawmakers that Mr. Cheney had ordered that the information be withheld from Congress. Mr. Cheney on Sunday couldn't be reached for comment through former White House aides.
The Senate's second-ranking official, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, and Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, echoed those concerns and called for an investigation, an indication of how the politics of intelligence continue to bedevil the CIA.
Separately, Attorney General Eric Holder is considering whether to order a criminal probe into whether treatment of terrorism detainees exceeded guidelines set by the Justice Department, administration officials said.
President Barack Obama and Mr. Holder have said they don't favor prosecuting lawyers who wrote legal justifications for interrogation methods that the president and his attorney general have declared to be torture. They have sought to protect CIA officers who followed the legal guidelines.
"The Department of Justice will follow the facts and the law with respect to any matter," said Matthew Miller, a department spokesman. "We have made no decisions on investigations or prosecutions, including whether to appoint a prosecutor to conduct further inquiry."
—Evan Perez and Elizabeth Williamson contributed to this article.
Write to Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com
-"Wait a minute.....who is that Frazz is talking to in the gallery? Hmmm something is going on here.....Oh.... it seems there is some dispute over video taping of some sort......Frazz is really upset now..........wait a minute......whats he go there.......is it? Can it be?....Frazz has just unleashed his hidden weiner dog from his mini bag, while quoting shakespeares "Let slip the dogs the war!!" GG
-"Don't mind Frazzled. He's just Dakka's crazy old dude locked in the attic. He's harmless. Mostly."
-TBone the Magnificent 1999-2014, Long Live the King!
2009/07/13 15:54:39
Subject: Re:Place your bets now! Just what have the CIA been up to?
BrookM wrote:They've been taking people for covert sleepovers with extreme truth or dare and bottle spin games.
Pics or it didn't happen.
People are like dice, a certain Frenchman said that. You throw yourself in the direction of your own choosing. People are free because they can do that. Everyone's circumstances are different, but no matter how small the choice, at the very least, you can throw yourself. It's not chance or fate. It's the choice you made.
2009/07/13 17:03:39
Subject: Re:Place your bets now! Just what have the CIA been up to?
The CIA has been trying to infiltrate GW and find a release schedule that covers more than the next three months!
My guess is there was a lot of talk and not much action. After various scandals, the CIA tends to be fairly conservative. If they're being asked to do something questionable, they usually want it in writing with a note from the AG saying, "I say this is legal." The CIA has been left holding the bag too much in the past. And while their might be a few loose cannons in the Agency, most employees are not going to risk a lengthy stay in prison for doing something (like lying to Congress) without a paper trail.
There is one exception to the above, which came up during the Iraq war. Let the Contractor do it. I could easily see the CIA knowing the Contractors are doing questionable, even illegal things, and not doing anything about it. They'd feign deniability and/or unaccountability ("Well, I knew that so and so was going to assassinate some terrorists, but they said that their contract allowed it, so I didn't worry about it.")
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2009/07/13 17:41:36
In the dark future, there are skulls for everyone. But only the bad guys get spikes. And rivets for all, apparently welding was lost in the Dark Age of Technology. -from C.Borer
2009/08/07 00:14:27
Subject: Re:Place your bets now! Just what have the CIA been up to?
gorgon wrote:It's probably something kind of underwhelming. But IMO Dick Cheney will go down in history as one of the shadiest characters ever in the executive branch. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if even Bush wasn't fully briefed on some things Cheney was doing, and I'm not saying that lightly.
Yeah, remember when he shot his buddy in the chest from like 5 feet away with a shotgun in a "hunting accident"? And how many heart attacks did he have there for awhile and then he was -abbra cadabra- fine. Probably because they killed some pro-am athlete and transplanted his heart into him. The guy is like a real live Darth Vader.
2009/08/07 16:56:01
Subject: Place your bets now! Just what have the CIA been up to?
The normal stuff, messing up the the world. Just because some slow in the 80s did not have the minimal brain function to realise that giving hordes of cash and weapons to crazy people in Afganistan. Was going to send it rigth back in their faces sooner or later.
Or perhaps another epic fail when it commes to knocking of democraticly elected goverments. One never knows those people.
Lenge leve Norge, måtte hun altidd være fri
Disciples Of Nidhog 2500 (CSM)
Order of the bloodied sword
2009/08/07 21:45:13
Subject: Place your bets now! Just what have the CIA been up to?
Anyone care to place a bet as to what Cheney ordered the CIA to do?
Protect the CIA's financial interests in Al Qaeda's Heroin business, both here in the US and overseas.
Mannahnin wrote:A lot of folks online (and in emails in other parts of life) use pretty mangled English. The idea is that it takes extra effort and time to write properly, and they’d rather save the time. If you can still be understood, what’s the harm? While most of the time a sloppy post CAN be understood, the use of proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling is generally seen as respectable and desirable on most forums. It demonstrates an effort made to be understood, and to make your post an easy and pleasant read. By making this effort, you can often elicit more positive responses from the community, and instantly mark yourself as someone worth talking to.
insaniak wrote: Every time someone threatens violence over the internet as a result of someone's hypothetical actions at the gaming table, the earth shakes infinitisemally in its orbit as millions of eyeballs behind millions of monitors all roll simultaneously.
2009/08/08 02:29:13
Subject: Place your bets now! Just what have the CIA been up to?
Neat little idea, they bring it out every now and then for future use. It goes something like this.
CIA: "We have a secret plan. its very secret and we stopped it long ago because it was wrong."
Public: "What horror
Other public: "You admitted it, so some of you are good, isnt our great democracy working wonderfully"
Two days later....
Public at large: "CIA are saying no more. So lets talk about something else now, howa bout a reality TV show or sports."
Then they wait....
Eventually a scandal emerges about some wrongdoing, any wrongdoing.
CIA: "That was the secret plan we confessed to, do not worry as we said we ended the project long ago because some of our leaders are men you can trust in."
Public at large: "*baaaaa* <bleet> *baaaaaa* *baaaa* <bleet> *baaaa*"
Who says people in government never think beyond the immediate term.
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2009/08/08 02:32:48
n'oublie jamais - It appears I now have to highlight this again.
It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion. By the juice of the brew my thoughts aquire speed, my mind becomes strained, the strain becomes a warning. It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion.
2009/08/08 02:32:54
Subject: Place your bets now! Just what have the CIA been up to?
Anyone care to place a bet as to what Cheney ordered the CIA to do?
Protect the CIA's financial interests in Al Qaeda's Heroin business, both here in the US and overseas.
You mean like by bombing poppy fields? Sweet!
You know that was to just decrease supply so they could raise prices again.
Mannahnin wrote:A lot of folks online (and in emails in other parts of life) use pretty mangled English. The idea is that it takes extra effort and time to write properly, and they’d rather save the time. If you can still be understood, what’s the harm? While most of the time a sloppy post CAN be understood, the use of proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling is generally seen as respectable and desirable on most forums. It demonstrates an effort made to be understood, and to make your post an easy and pleasant read. By making this effort, you can often elicit more positive responses from the community, and instantly mark yourself as someone worth talking to.
insaniak wrote: Every time someone threatens violence over the internet as a result of someone's hypothetical actions at the gaming table, the earth shakes infinitisemally in its orbit as millions of eyeballs behind millions of monitors all roll simultaneously.
2009/08/08 16:19:56
Subject: Re:Place your bets now! Just what have the CIA been up to?
