President Trump Nominates Career CIA Officer to Be CIA Director And First Woman To Head CIA

Guy Taylor at the Washington Times offers a piece on Gina Haspel, an outstanding choice to be the new CIA director. 

President Trump’s latest personnel shake-up comes with a historic first: Gina Haspel is in line to be the first woman to head the CIA.

But the low-key, highly decorated CIA veteran, whose rise through the agency’s vaunted Clandestine Service put her at the center of some the most controversial U.S. intelligence missions of the past half-century, could face a tough confirmation battle.

Human rights groups expressed outrage Tuesday over the pick of Ms. Haspel to replace Mike Pompeo. They said her involvement in one the agency’s darkest periods — the waterboarding and rendition programs in the years after the 9/11 attacks — make her an unsuitable candidate to head the agency.

However, several former high-level U.S. intelligence professionals, as well as many lawmakers, heaped praise on Ms. Haspel, saying she represents an unprecedented choice from within the CIA’s ranks and that her rise to the top is an inspiration for America’s career intelligence officials.

“It means a lot to the workforce that one of our own was able to reach the highest ranks of the agency and be promoted to be director,” former CIA Clandestine Service Officer Daniel Hoffman said in an interview. “It’s an incredible statement about how somebody can achieve great things from within. It matters a lot.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/13/gina-haspels-black-site-past-hurdle-cia-director-c/ 

Note: You can also read the earlier CIA announcement that named Gina Haspel as deputy CIA director via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2017/02/gina-haspel-selected-to-be-deputy.html 

How Obama Manipulated Sensitive Secret Intelligence For Political Gain

Guy Taylor and Dan Boylan at the Washington Times offers a piece on the Obama administration’s manipulation of classified information for political gain.

They wanted him dead.

For years, a clandestine U.S. intelligence team had tracked a man they knew was high in the leadership of al Qaeda — an operative some believed had a hand in plotting the gruesome 2009 suicide attack in Afghanistan that killed seven CIA officers.

Their pursuit was personal, and by early 2014, according to a source directly involved in the operation, the agency had the target under tight drone surveillance. “We literally had a bead on this guy’s head and just needed authorization from Washington to pull the trigger,” said the source.

Then something unexpected happened. While agents waited for the green light, the al Qaeda operative’s name, as well as information about the CIA’s classified surveillance and plan to kill him in Pakistan, suddenly appeared in the U.S. press.

Abdullah al-Shami, it turned out, was an American citizen, and President Obama and his national security advisers were torn over whether the benefits of killing him would outweigh the political and civil liberties backlash that was sure to follow.

In interviews with several current and former officials, the al-Shami case was cited as an example of what critics say was the Obama White House’s troublesome tendency to mishandle some of the nation’s most delicate intelligence — especially regarding the Middle East — by leaking classified information in an attempt to sway public opinion on sensitive matters.

By the end of Mr. Obama’s second term, according to sources who spoke anonymously with The Washington Times, the practices of leaking, ignoring and twisting intelligence for political gain were ingrained in how the administration conducted national security policy.

Those criticisms have resurfaced in the debate over whether overall intelligence fumbling by the Obama White House in its final months may have amplified the damage wrought by suspected Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election last year.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/21/barack-obama-used-classified-intelligence-leaks-po/ 

Authorities Believe CIA Employee Or Contractor Supplied Documents To WikiLeaks

Guy Taylor and Andrew Blake at the the Washington Times report that a CIA employee or contractor supplied WikiLeaks with classified documents.

Federal law enforcement authorities believe it was a vetted member of the U.S. intelligence community — either an official CIA employee or a contractor — who supplied WikiLeaks with a trove of documents that the anti-secrecy group published last month purporting to expose the agency’s vast clandestine cyberoperations.

While the CIA has refused to comment on an investigation into the matter, intelligence sources who spoke anonymously with The Washington Times on Thursday did not push back against the veracity of news reports that the agency and the FBI are engaged in a manhunt for the suspected leaker within the U.S. government.

CNN reported Thursday night that federal prosecutors are separately weighing whether to bring criminal charges against members of the WikiLeaks organization, taking a second look at a 2010 leak of diplomatic cables and military documents as well as last month’s CIA leak.

The network cited unnamed sources behind the claim, but noted that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had said at a news conference Thursday that the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been holed up inside the Ecuadoran embassy in London since 2012, is a “priority.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/apr/20/cia-employee-or-contractor-believed-by-authorities/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTjJFNVpHTmlPRFUyT1RWaCIsInQiOiJIcm44ZmFQV2FzNmppazJTdGtvdHN1UFZsK1FGWjBGVzJIMUxYejhZZitaZHRoWGJ5S2hpXC9HTlhEcjE3NWFZZEpBSWNhQUlqd1hxeDJ1RUh1Z3ZxU2NTalVTdVordGVISm5aVFFyTkV2UkhvcDdGTmxOa1pyeDJvaFN1YlJFR0oifQ%3D%3D

Outrage: Apology Video Counters Obama Narrative On Iran’s Release Of Captured U.S. sailors

Guy Taylor at the Washington Times offers a piece on Iran taking American sailors prisoner.

The Obama administration rushed Wednesday to portray the swift return of 10 U.S. sailors taken captive a day earlier by Iran as a vindication of the president’s diplomatic outreach to Tehran, but a video showing the disarmed, kneeling American sailors being watched by Iranian guards and one of the sailors apologizing to his captors quickly undercut the administration’s self-congratulatory message.

The broadcast of the video on Iranian state TV showed how Tehran seized on the incident to score propaganda points at home before returning the sailors to the American Navy fleet in the Persian Gulf.

U.S. officials acknowledged the two Navy boats were detained after they inadvertently strayed into Iranian waters. In one clip, a U.S. sailor that Iranian state TV dubbed as the commander of those taken captive, said: “It was a mistake, that was our fault, and we apologize for our mistake.”

The incident came at a sensitive moment for both the Obama administration and Iran amid the final push to implement the deal struck last summer designed to curb Iran’s suspect nuclear programs while easing international economic sanctions on Iran. With the Obama administration claiming that sweeping sanctions relief for Iran is just days away, and Iranian authorities claiming to have done everything to keep up their end of the accord, both were seen to be carefully spinning the incident — lest it derail the deal’s impending implementation.

But critics said Wednesday that the video and the treatment of the sailor was just the latest example of Iran exploiting the Obama administration’s willingness to tolerate Iranian misbehavior and provocations in other fields to save the president’s prized nuclear deal. The seizure came in the wake of Iranian missile tests in October and December that have been condemned as violations of international sanctions.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jan/13/iran-apology-video-counters-obama-narrative-on-rel/