Wayne Madsen

September 18, 2014 could either ensure that the United Kingdom remains a virtual U.S. intelligence «Trojan horse» inside the European Union or could herald a radical shakeup of America’s «Five Eyes» signals intelligence alliance. On a Thursday in September, Scottish citizens will go to the polls to vote «Yes» or «No» on a simple referendum question: «Should Scotland be an Independent Country?» The referendum was worked out in an agreement between Scotland’s Scottish Nationalist Party First Minister Alexander Salmond and British Prime Minister David Cameron.

The United Kingdom intelligence and national security establishment, aided and abetted by the virtually indistinguishable three major British political parties, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and Labor, have all weighed in to urge Scots to vote «No» and remain a part of the United Kingdom.

Conservative Home Secretary Theresa May has issued another in a series of ultimatums to a Scotland that would consider breaking free of English rule: Scotland would find itself severed from the British intelligence agencies of MI6 (foreign intelligence), MI5 (domestic intelligence), and the Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ). The latter is the British component of the «Five Eyes» alliance of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. May stated that Scotland would be at risk because the Five Eyes alliance would cut Scotland off from receiving critical intelligence, including counterterrorism information.

More »

Wayne Madsen

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, attends a coffee ceremony
with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal. (Photo: VOA)

But one thing that is certain about Bandar and his neocon allies in Washington and Israel. When backed up against the wall, they will strike like desert asps.

A number of seasoned observers of Middle Eastern affairs agree that U.S. - Saudi relations are at their lowest ebb since U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt established America’s «special relationship» with the Saudi monarchy on February 14, 1945, just a few months before FDR’s death.

Subsequent to the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt met Saudi King Ibn Saud on board the USS Quincy on Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal in Egypt. Roosevelt and Saud inked the «Quincy Agreement», by which the United States would provide Saudi Arabia with military equipment and training in return for the U.S. establishing a military base at Dhahran in the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia guaranteeing the United States a steady flow of Saudi oil. Except for the Arab oil embargo instituted against the West in the 1970s, the Quincy Agreement has survived six Saudi kings. However, the Quincy Agreement is in trouble.

More »

Wayne Madsen

When information began to surface in the post-Cold War years of the early 1990s that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), responding to changes in the global politico-military realities, was re-focusing some of its signals intelligence (SIGINT) capabilities to the gathering of economic intelligence, a number of NSA senior officials stated that such notions were ridiculous. They maintained that NSA’s goals were purely based on national security concerns, not giving U.S. corporations a leg up on their international competition.

The NSA documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has finally put to rest NSA’s long-held public policy that it does not engage in massive economic intelligence gathering. In fact, NSA, along with its global SIGINT partners, known as «Five Eyes» or FVEY, are targeting communications in order to amass economic intelligence that benefits large multinational corporations that are based in, but owe no real loyalty to, the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

After the end of the Cold War, there was no «peace dividend» in the world of Western intelligence agencies. The threat of «amorphous» terrorism simply replaced the so-called threat of «communism». In the eyes of the Western national security planners, a bogeyman is always required to maintain bloated budgets and privacy-invasive surveillance systems. Almost overnight, the «bogeymen» of Marx, Lenin, and Mao were replaced by Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Mullah Omar. Rather than scale back their massive intelligence infrastructures in the absence of an overly-hyped Cold War threat, the five power UK-USA SIGINT alliance began to modernize its intelligence network and expanding its coverage to include the burgeoning Internet.

More »

Wayne Madsen

Adolf Hitler and other top Nazis were fond of saying, "Heute Deutschland, morgen die Welt!" (“Today Germany, tomorrow the world!”), when describing the Nazi Party’s goals for global domination.

Many of Israel’s dominant political parties espouse the same goals for Zionism, which many observers believe take a page from the Nazi playbook when it comes to expansion not only in the occupied territories of Palestine but beyond to the Golan Heights of Syria, southern Lebanon, Sinai, eastern Libya, northern Iraq, and even further afield.

The top polling Israeli political parties heading into the January 22 election all advocate varying degrees of expansion. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud alliance with former Foreign Minister illegal settler-based Yisrael Beitenu is staking their election bid on building thousands of new housing units in occupied east Jerusalem, starting in the Gilo area. There are also plans to build thousands of more illegal housing units in occupied West Bank towns, including Ariel, Hebron, and the north Dead Sea and Jordan River Valley.

As expansionistic as the Likud-Beitenu bloc is, the rising star of Naftali Bennett, a dual U.S.-Israeli national who leads the new Home Party is even more nationalistic, with its platform centered on annexing 60 percent of the West Bank, referred to as “Area C” in the now all-but-dead Oslo Peace Accords.

Palestinians would exercise nominal control in a Palestine fully dependent on Israel that would resemble the “bantustans” created for blacks by the apartheid government of South Africa: non-contiguous reservations that would be at the mercy of further encroachment by a militarily-dominant Israel.

More »

Wayne Madsen

The UN in Geneva has released its long-awaited report on the use of chemical weapons in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta on August 21.The UN concluded:

1. Sarin gas was used in the attack.
2. The attack used at least two surface-to-surface rockets
3. One of the warheads containing sarin held 56 liters of the deadly chemical.

The UN report did not assign blame for the attack nor was assigning blame in the charter of the team of forensic investigators. However, France and the United States immediately used the report to blame Syria for the attack.

Cited as evidence were the two rockets used: an M14 artillery rocket with Cyrillic markings and a 330-millimeter rocket of unknown origin.

The UN report stated that the evidence found in rebel-controlled territory outside of Damascus could have been manipulated by the rebels or forces allied with the rebels. The CIA and Mossad have a particularly long and jaded history of manipulating evidence in false flag attacks.

Some Syrian rebels, including those affiliated with Al Qaeda, have been known to have access to sarin gas in Iraq. The rebels also have access to mountains of weapons in Iraq once possessed by Saddam Hussein’s armed forces, most of which were of Soviet or Eastern European origin and from countries that use the Cyrillic alphabet, including Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Serbia.

The United States is claiming that the Syrian rebels do not have the means to transport such weapons to Syria and, therefore, it is the Syrian government that is responsible merely by using the process of elimination. However, the Saudi intelligence service, the General Intelligence Directorate or Ri'asat Al-Istikhbarat Al-'Amah and its chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, nicknamed “Chemical Bandar,” does have the capability to pre-position the sarin rockets used in the attack on Ghouta. Saudi Arabia has been providing cash, weapons, training, diplomatic support, and jihadist mercenaries to the Syrian rebels to topple President Bashar al Assad and his government from power.

More »

Wayne Madsen

U.S. President Barack Obama signaled through his press secretary Jay Carney that he would be discussing the recent cancellation by the United States of Obama’s Moscow summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Obama’s press conference, meant to clear the air on U.S.-Russian relations and U.S. intelligence mass surveillance of private communications, left more questions than answers. Obama’s answers to press questions were all over the map, confusing, and at times, deceptive…

Obama’s decision to nix the Moscow meeting prior to attending the G20 Summit in St. Petersburg was said to be a result of Russia’s decision to grant temporary political asylum to National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. However, there are other fractious issues between Washington and Moscow that prompted Obama to abruptly cancel the meeting with Putin.

America’s neo-conservative war hawks in Congress, including Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee and Democratic Representative Eliot Engel of New York, used the summit cancellation to push for renewed development on the U.S. missile “defense” shield that Obama put on the back burner after his re-election. War hawks are now demanding that Obama ignore Russian anxieties over the U.S. ballistic missile shield and begin deployment along Russia’s western borders.

Obama’s press conference came amid talks in Washington between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, so any abrupt change on the U.S. missile shield was not likely as long as the top Russian foreign and defense policy chiefs were talking to their American counterparts.

More »

Wayne Madsen

The Obama administration’s «Asia Pivot» is playing out in earnest in joint U.S.-Indian-Israeli intelligence operations in the Himalayan region. The actions by the three cooperative nations’ intelligence agencies are aimed at limiting Chinese influence here. The strategy in the mountainous area of the Sino-Indian border complements other U.S. strategies now being played out in the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea, the South China Sea, the South Pacific, and the Indian Ocean to box in China and prevent it from challenging America’s military presence in the Asia-Pacific region…

The most recent covert operation in the encirclement of China played out in the recent election in the Buddhist Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan. Under its previous government, led by the first democratically-elected Prime Minister, Jigmi Y. Thinley, Bhutan championed the concept of «Gross National Happiness,» which measured the progress of a nation based on the happiness and well-being of its people rather than by cold economic figures and statistics. Thinley traveled to the UN General Assembly in 2012 to urge the world’s nations to adopt Gross National Happiness as a principal in running their economies.

Such a notion of Gross National Happiness is anathema to the globalist economists and bankers that infest the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and worldwide central banks, and these institutions took note of Thinley’s proposal for a New Bretton Woods system to replace the current domination of the world economy by the World Bank and IMF. However, it was primarily Bhutan’s alteration of its traditional Indian-directed foreign policy that spelled ultimate doom for Thinley.

More »

Wayne Madsen

In many ways, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden is more wanted by the U.S. government than was Osama Bin Laden just six months after the 9/11 attack on the United States. President George W. Bush said during a White House press conference, «Who knows if he’s [Bin Laden] hiding in some cave or not. We haven’t heard from him in a long time. The idea of focusing on one person really indicates to me people don’t understand the scope of the mission. Terror is bigger than one person. He’s just a person who’s been marginalized... I don’t know where he is. I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you».

Compare Bush’s attitude toward Bin Laden to Obama’s obsession with capturing Snowden and the hypocrisy of American foreign policy across the board comes into clear focus.

Barack Obama has made it one of the linchpins of his administration to identify, prosecute, and imprison national security whistleblowers. Obama has charged more government employees under the provisions of the antiquated 1917 Espionage Act than all of his predecessors combined. Edward Snowden was the seventh person charged with violating the Espionage Act after he released to The Guardian and The Washington Post classified documents from the NSA revealing the extent of U.S. communication surveillance of the Internet, phone calls, text messages, and Skype communications within the United States and around the world.

More »

Wayne Madsen

Obama’s personalization of his war against a single American citizen has not only made Snowden a political refugee but an American folk hero.

President Barack Obama has met his unlikely match in a former Army Special Forces recruit-turned CIA technician-turned National Security Agency contractor. Obama has issued what amounts to an «all-points-bulletin» for Edward Snowden who, in May, left his job at NSA Hawaii as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton and departed Honolulu for Hong Kong with a treasure trove of classified documents pointing to NSA’s massive electronic surveillance of Americans without a warrant and billions of people around the world.

Obama, who fancies himself as a cool-under -fire seasoned politician from the rough and tumble south side of Chicago clearly did not like being upstaged by a young white privacy-minded intelligence specialist who grew up in North Carolina and the Maryland suburbs of Baltimore. After all, Obama inherited from George W. Bush the most intrusive surveillance powers ever amassed in a president of the United States and he was not about to have an impudent young man with the Anglo name of Snowden embarrassing the first African-American president, moreover one with a Kenyan last name.

More »

Wayne Madsen

Recent revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency is conducting massive meta-data vacuuming of the phone calls and Internet transactions of tens of millions of Americans and, perhaps, billions of people around the world, with little or no effective oversight by President Obama, the U.S. Congress, or the federal court system means that the intelligence agency has become, in its own right, a global superpower.

NSA acts like a virtual «state within a state». The director of NSA, a four-star flag officer, also wears the hat of Commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, the chief cyber-warfare echelon within the Department of Defense. Just as any nation-state, NSA also has alliances with similar signals intelligence and cyber-warfare agencies around the world, including Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Australia’s Defense Signals Directorate (DSD), Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), and the Government Communications Security Board (GCSB) of New Zealand. These English-speaking partners are known as the «Five Eyes» countries and the signals intelligence alliance began after World War II and grew in scope during the Cold War.

NSA also has «third party» intelligence sharing agreements with a number of other signals intelligence agencies, but these smaller agencies are like NSA;’s very own colonial territories. Third party signals intelligence agencies of countries like Germany, Japan, South Korea, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Spain, and Thailand are expected to feed their intelligence «take» into the massive computer databases NSA maintains at its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, but these Third Party entities receive very little intelligence in return. In fact, the Five Eyes «Second party» partners of NSA receive relatively little intelligence from NSA in exchange for the massive amounts of intercepted communications they make available to NSA. Even more secretive are NSA’s «Fourth Party» partners, including neutral Sweden, Finland, Austria, and Switzerland and, in what may pose a problem for Snowden, last reportedly in Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China has been a «Fourth Party» partner of NSA since the early 1980s. NSA maintained two eavesdropping stations in western China directed against the nuclear testing facilities of the Soviet Union and then Russia.

More »