Tuesday, November 08, 2005

US spends $44b on intelligence

WASHINGTON: The United States government spends $44 billion a year on its spy agencies, according to a senior official of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The revelation is seen giving ammunition to critics of the Bush administration who have been accusing Washington of misusing intelligence agencies and doctoring intelligence documents related ot the Sept.11, 2001 attack as well as reasons for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The $44 billion amount was seen as an apparent slip by , Mary Margaret Graham, a CIA veteran and deputy director of national intelligence for collection, at an intelligence conference in San Antonio last week.
Journalists who attended the conference was shocked.
Kevin Whitelaw of the News of the World said:
"I thought, 'I can't believe she said that.' The government has spent so much time and energy arguing that it needs to remain classified."
Reports in the last couple of years have estimated the budget at $40 billion but that Graham would say it in public was a surprise, because the government has repeatedly gone to court to keep the current intelligence budget and even past budgets as far back as the 1940s from being disclosed.
Carl Kropf, a spokesman for the office of the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, said Graham would not comment. Kropf declined to say whether the figure was accurate, or whether her revelation was accidental.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, expressed amused satisfaction that the budget figure had slipped out, according to the New York Times.
"It is ironic," Aftergood told the paper. "We sued the CIA four times for this kind of information and lost. You can't get it through legal channels."
The Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists sued for the budget figure under the Freedom of Information Act in 1997. George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, decided to make public that year's budget, $26.6 billion. The next year Tenet did the same, revealing that the 1998 fiscal year budget was $26.7 billion.
The New York Times quoted d Loch K. Johnson, an intelligence historian, as saying that the debate over whether the intelligence budget should be secret dates to at least the 1970s.
He said. the real reason for secrecy might have less to do with protecting intelligence sources and methods than with protecting the bureaucracy.
"Maybe there's a fear that if the American people knew what was being spent on intelligence, they'd be even more upset at intelligence failures," Johnson said.

Chemicals against Fallujians

ROME: A news programme on Italian satellite TV, RAI News 24, has substantiated the claim that the US military has been exploiting the dual use of white phosporus.
In its siege of Fallujah, the US military used the chemical on the civilian population, it said. The La Repubblica newspaper also carried a similar report on Tuesday.
Critics of the US noted that the US military is now accused of carrying out a massacre using unconventional weapons, a charge identifical to which Saddam Hussein stands accused.
An investigation by RAI News 24, the all-news Italian satellite television channel, has pulled the veil from one of the most carefully concealed mysteries from the front in the entire US military campaign in Iraq.
A US veteran of the Iraq war told RAI New correspondent Sigfrido Ranucci: "I received the order use caution because we had used white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military slag it is called 'Willy Pete.' Phosphorus burns the human body on contact--it even melts it right down to the bone."
RAI News 24's investigative story, Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre, was to be broadcast on RAI-3 on Tuesday.
A copy of the footage posted on the Internet in advance contained not only eye-witness accounts by US military personnel but those from Fallujah residents.
"A rain of fire descended on the city. People who were exposed to those multicolored substance began to burn. We found people with bizarre wounds-their bodies burned but their clothes intact," relates Mohamad Tareq Al Deraji, a biologist and Fallujah resident.
"I gathered accounts of the use of phosphorus and napalm from a few Fallujah refugees whom I met before being kidnapped," says Manifesto reporter Giuliana Sgrena, who was kidnapped in Fallujah last February, in a recorded interview." I wanted to get the story out, but my kidnappers would not permit it."
RAI News 24 also broadcast video and photographs taken in the Iraqi city during and after the November 2004 bombardment which prove that the US military, contrary to statements in a Dec. 9 communiqué from the US Department of State, did not use phosphorus to illuminate enemy positions (which would have been legitimate) but instend dropped white phosphorus indiscriminately and in massive quantities on the city's neighbourhoods.
In the investigative story, produced by Maurizio Torrealta, dramatic footage is shown revealing the effects of the bombardment on civilians, women and children, some of whom were surprised in their sleep.
The investigation will also broadcast documentary proof of the use in Iraq of a new napalm formula called MK77. The use of the incendiary substance on civilians is forbidden by a 1980 UN treaty. The use of chemical weapons is forbidden by a treaty which the US signed in 1997

Mehlis credibility questioned

SERIOUS questions are being raised about the credibility of the report prepared by UN investigator and German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis on his findings on the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.
Critics see Mehlis as closely aligned with the US from the mid-80s when he investigated the 1986 bombing of an East Berlin nightclub, La Belle, frequented by American service personnel. Mehlis determined that Libya was behind the blast while evidence that turned up later indicated that Libya could have been falsely charged.
A former operative of Israel's Mossad secret agency revealed that the key evidence cited by Mehlis — intercepted radio communication between Tripoli, Libya, and purported Libyan agents in Europe — orignated from a trasnmitter planted in Tripoli and operated by Mossad. That revelation came too late to exenorate Libya from the East Berlin blast; two people, said to be Libyan agents, were tried, convicted and sentenced by a German court.
However, the Mossad connection was said to have been known to Mehlis, who critics say deliberately depressed that information in his report about the East Berlin blasts at the behest of the US, which wanted to trap Libya in the case.
As Berlin public prosecutor, Mehlis inadvertently but consistently covered up the dubious involvement of US, Israeli and German intelligence interests in the 1986 tattack; actively built a selective politically-motivated case against suspects without objective material proof; while ignoring and protecting a group of suspects with documented connections to western secret services. This background fundamentally challenges the credibility of his investigation of the Hariri assassination, says by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, executive director of the London-based Institute for Policy Research & Development.
y German public television Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) said in August 1998 that h several leading suspects in the Berlin disco bombing were being protected from prosecution by western intelligence services. These included a group of terrorists led by “Mahmoud” Abu Jaber, a man “particularly involved in the preparation of the La Belle attack.” The group lived in East Berlin and met almost daily with the official suspects who were defendants in the court proceedings. According to Russian and East German intelligence services, the grou