Big Brother and Block Modeling

Big Brother and Block Modeling

Big Brother and Block Modeling

By Scott A. Boorman and Paul R. Levitt
(New York Times Nov, 20 1983)

As 1984 approaches, a quiet revolution in computers and information gathering may be bringing us closer than we realize to George Orwell’s controlled state of Oceania. The public seems preoccupied with teen-age computer “hackers” accessing sensitive computer systems. But our more enduring fears should focus on a technology that corporations, nonprofit organizations and governments are using with increasing frequency to harness seemingly innocuous data from the personnel or communications departments and adapt it in new and unexpected ways such as targeting individuals for promotion or dismissal.

One name for this new computer game is block modeling – a programming technique that evaluates how employees fit within an organization on the basis of their relations with other employees. Recent impetus has come from such diverse independent quarters as Bell Laboratories, the American Broadcasting Companies, the Wharton School, and even the Institute for Social Management in Bulgaria.

Each of these organizations has recently spent time and money to develop advanced computer methods capable of “X-raying” a complex population- several hundred middle managers for example – to detect structural patterns of interaction and communication. And though these technologies certainly have significant benevolent uses, their premise is a recognizable extension of the “guilt by association” idea, and can therefore be abused.

Most crucially, these methods have the capacity to capitalize on the unguarded moments of ordinary people; to probe organizations for factional alignments in a low-visibility and therefore insidious way; to play to human biases – particularly among managers – to name names; and to give sometimes facile technological rationales for settling complex personnel problems.

Block-modeling does not require particularly sensitive information like tax returns medical histories. Rather, it exploits the unexpected, even uncanny synergy of large masses of “relational” data buried in organizational files. Examples of relevant data: Whom you talk with in your company; whose phone calls you do not return; whom you eat lunch with; whom you have worked with; who owes you favors; to whom to you send carbon copies of memos and letters; even whom you go bowling with. There is every expectation that far more such data bases will be routinely collected in the near future as minicomputer advances merger ever more widely with office information technology.

Only rarely will any relation between two people be very informative in isolation. But as many relations connecting many pairs of people accumulate, block modeling provides ways to distill frequently very striking and revealing patterns. Moreover, by throwing light on interlocking activities of specific people, block modeling goes a step beyond even the most refined kinds of geo-demographical data analysis such as extrapolating people’s characteristics by Postal Zip Code of residence.

The output of a block-model analysis is simple to state – even deceptively so since a large amount of advanced mathematics and computing is involved. The block model of the social structure chops the social group up into “blocs.” As Justice William O. Douglas once observed, a person is defined by the checks he writes. Blocs in similar positions in the relationship networks and who are thus likely to behave similarly in ways important to the organization, and be candidates for receiving similar “treatment.” Blocs can be, but don’t have to be, tightly-knit groups or factions. Two people may never have heard of each other, yet can end up in the same bloc because of common patterns of relationship with third parties.

In the mid-1970’s, we were part of a research team at Harvard that published the first papers on block-modeling’s social applications. The response was revealing. Places like mental institutions and rehabilitation centers in Lithuania were quick to request reprints. Perhaps they saw block-modeling as a way to ferret out dissidents. Later, members of the group received inquiries from the Swiss as well as West Germans whose questions (and travel reports sent back home) were especially exhaustive.

Interest then seemed to wane until two or three years ago, when a wave of, if often unobtrusive interest started coming from American business sources.

Possible uses of blockmodeling, beyond deciding promotions and dismissals, could include the following:

Identifying sources of grassroots opposition in hostile corporate takeover situations or bankruptcy reorganizations.

Indicating where to put the “good stuff” – raises, promotions, funding, new employees and perks.

Obtaining early warning of trouble spots portending possible “blowups”, in organizations, for example when internal tensions get out of hand, producing a wave of firings or resignations.

In fact, one of the earliest application of this class of methods was set in a Roman Catholic monastery which in the late 1960’s was on the brink of organizational collapse. The block model successfully identified three factions – loyalists, “Young Turks,” and outcasts – whose membership foreshadowed the way the organization would unravel. In an application to a more complex organization in difficulties, the block model not only correctly identified the outcast group, whose members would be dismissed, but also detected a submerged case of personnel misassignment in a different corner of the organization.
With proper safeguards, use of such methods can be sound, ethical and constructive. Obviously, internal sudit departments should at times be permitted to scrutinize employees closely. But stride sin the new “guilt-by-association” technologies are easily outstripping the vastly slower evolution of protective legal and administrative responses.

The typical employee whose position is likely to be most vulnerable to a block-model analysis is the middle manager, who has a family, a mortgage and a career locked into the XYZ Corporation. If the model locates him in a favorably regarded bloc, innocence by association prevails and all is well. But if he associated with known non-cooperators, or worse still, is assigned to a bloc judged likely to split off and found a rival company, he then can be passed over in the next promotion.

Inevitably, these new technologies create an unusually sensitive and complex web of management, privacy, information access, social control, and legal liability problems. In the end, the true 1984 threat lies not so much in the computer methods themselves, but in our society’s slowness to react.   http://bahoowah.blogspot.com/2008/10/big-brother-and-block-modeling.html

What's Up With .. The Black Budget ? ~ the $64 Question~

by Catherine Austin Fitts
23 September 2002

from Scoop Website

 http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_blackbudget03.htm

Catherine Austin Fitts is the President of Solari, Inc., a former Assistant Secretary of Housing – Federal Housing Commissioner in the first Bush Administration and a former partner and member of the board of Dillon, Read & Co. Inc and President of Hamilton Securities. She is a member of the advisory board of Sanders Research Associates http://www.sandersresearch.com/ in London and publishes a column in Scoop Media in New Zealand http://www.scoop.co.nz/ called The Real Deal.

"Engrave this upon my heart: There isn't anyone you couldn't love once you've heard their story."
 Mary Lou Kownacki

"What is relevant is what solves the problem. If we had thought through real relevancies, we would be on Sirius by now."
Peter Medewar

It is time to deal with the 64 dollar question - the biggest crazy aunt in the living room.

The questions that need to be raised in any effort to find the truth about a significant event related to power and money in the US - and answered if we are to ever find the truth of how our world works - are:

1. WHAT HAS BEEN THE SIZE OF THE U. S. BLACK BUDGET OVER THE LAST 50 YEARS?
2. WHAT ARE THE SOURCES AND USES OF FUNDS IN THE BLACK BUDGET?
3. WHO GOVERNS AND MANAGES THE BLACK BUDGET AND OPERATIONS?
4. WHY HAVE SO MANY DECENT PEOPLE SUPPORTED AN ILLEGAL BLACK BUDGET OPERATION OF SUCH MAGNITUDE FOR SO LONG?
5. IS THE WAR ON TERRORISM MOVING THE BLACK BUDGET ON BUDGET?

I do not know the answer to these questions. What I do know is that asking these questions brings up a whole pile of challenging uncertainty.

(For background on my experience dealing with black budget/slush fund operations at FHA and Ginnie Mae at the Department of Housing and Urban Development - HUD - Justice, Treasury and the New York Federal Reserve Bank, see my article, "The Myth of the Rule of Law.")

When dealing with challenging uncertainty, I find that many researchers simply delete the existence of such uncertainty from their reality. That is a big mistake - again pretending that we do not have a very big crazy aunt sitting in the living room.

George Orwell once said that,

"Omission is the greatest lie."

Hence, our crazy aunt has to be dealt with.

If you listen to the Ferdinand video/audio depositions in the Carone/Tyree lawsuit, what you will hear is something I have heard many times.

Carone Ferdinand gives his family the sense of all of the organized crime operations by CIA, Army and Mafia through the 1970's as legitimate for national security purposes that then got out of hand and turned bad in the 1980's.

That is, what started out as justifiable got out of hand.

This begs the question,

Why Were Such Activities Considered Justifiable?

The way to deal with uncertainty is with scenario design and probability - i.e. to create a framework of the possible explanations with your best estimate of the plausible scenarios and the probability (all adding up to 100%) of each one being true based on intuition.

Maintaining such a framework allows data collection on key variables and assumptions and an evolution to occur that can enlighten - even determine - concrete questions and answers over time.

So, let me tell a story, give you my framework that I use to handle the fact that I do not have the answers and invite your framework.

I am not looking to hear only what is wrong with my framework. I am looking to improve mine or find a better one. Or better inform my estimate of the probabilities that this one or that one is true. Hence, I invite you to put forward your framework for managing this uncertainty. If we had the truth of the issue I am going to introduce, I dare say we could get to the bottom of 9-11 faster.

In 1998, I was approached by John Peterson, head of the Arlington Institute, a small high quality military think tank in Washington, DC. I had gotten to know John through Global Business Network and had been impressed by his intelligence, effectiveness and compassion. John asked me to help him with a high level strategic plan Arlington was planning to undertake for the Undersecretary of the Navy.

At the time I was the target of an intense smear campaign that would lead the normal person to assume that I would be in jail shortly or worse. John explained that the Navy understood that it was all politics - they did not care.

I met with a group of high level people in the military in the process - including the Undersecretary. According to John, the purpose of the plan - discussed in front of several military or retired military officers and former government officials - was to help the Navy adjust their operations for a world in which it was commonly known that aliens exist and live among us.

When John explained this purpose to me, I explained that I did not know that aliens existed and lived among us. John asked me if I would like to meet some aliens. For the only time in my life, I declined an opportunity to learn about something important.

I was concerned that my efforts with Arlington could boomerang and be connected with the smear campaign and the effects that I was managing. I regret that decision. At John's suggestion I started to read books on the topic and read about 25 books over the next year on the alien question, the black budget, and alien technology.

I had to drop from the project due to the need to attend to litigation and the physical harassment and surveillance of me and some of the people helping me.

This process - which turned out to be incredibly time consuming - I now believe was connected with the black budget/slush fund activities connected with FHA and Ginnie Mae at HUD. (See, "The Myth of the Rule of Law") John then asked me if I would join the board of the Arlington Institute.

When I attended one of my first meetings, I joined in discussion with about 10 people which included James Woolsey, former head of the CIA in the Clinton Administration, Napier Collyns, founder of Global Business Network and former senior Shell executive, Joe Firmage, and other members of the Arlington board.

The main topic of discussion was whether or not the major project for the coming year should be a white paper on how to help the American people adjust to aliens existing and living among us.

I said nothing - just listened. Not that long after, I dropped from the board due to the continued demands related to litigation with the Department of Justice and their informant.

To cut a series of additional long stories short, when I talk with my few sources from the military and intelligence community, I hear the same themes:

1. Aliens exist and live among us;
2. In part for this reason as well the accumulated investment over the last 50 years, the technology we have access to through the black budget is far more advanced than is commonly understood;
3. The black budget/slush fund construct was created to deal with this issue, which is why reasonable people thought selling drugs to the children who were US citizens was the better of several options - including the option of telling the American public the truth and funding the expenses on budget.

As a result of these experiences, here is my framework for dealing with this very large pile of uncertainty.

ONE OF THE THREE FOLLOWING POSSIBLE SCENARIOS MUST BE TRUE

• SCENARIO #1. ENTRE NOUS:
  The alien question is the single largest and most expensive disinformation campaign in the history of our race.
  
  
  A portion of the human race has advanced technologically so far beyond the rest of us - and is attributing various things to aliens as a way of managing their resulting risk - that we have become as aliens to each other.
  
  
  To fully understand this scenario, we need to try to understand the use of individual mind control such as criminal hypnosis to effect financial and government fraud and corruption and the truth, whatever it is, of wider subliminal programming and brainwashing. These are slippery subjects for most people to deal with unless they have the training and ability to do so.
  
  
  % PROBABILITY SCENARIO #1 IS TRUE ______ (You fill in)
  
  
  
  
• SCENARIO #2 - HOLY COW!:
  Aliens exist and live among us. Planet earth is subject to the politics, economics and laws and/or lawlessness of a larger system or systems.
  
  
  The transfer of advanced technology into a society that has not evolved governance and legal systems to manage a world with the presence of such technology and the influence of such other system(s) helps to explain current events.
  
  
  To fully understand this scenario, we must also try to understand the use of individual mind control such as criminal hypnosis to effect financial and government fraud and corruption and the truth, whatever it is, of wide subliminal programming and brainwashing.
  
  
  Again, these are slippery subjects for most people to deal with unless they have the training and ability to do so.
  
  
  % PROBABILITY SCENARIO #2 IS TRUE ______ (You fill in)
  
  
  
  
•  SCENARIO #3 - MUDDLED: Some combination of (1) and (2) above.
  
  
  % PROBABILITY SCENARIO #3 IS TRUE ______ (You fill in)
  
  
  TOTAL % PROBABILITY OF SCENARIOS #1, 2 & 3 BEING TRUE 100%

Could my experiences with Arlington and the Navy or any subsequent contacts fit with a disinformation scenario? Absolutely.

I have no evidence to support any scenario. The only evidence I believe I have is my experience dealing with tremendous amounts of money siphoned off over the years, whether through Iran-Contra S&L, HUD and BCCI fraud, or the latest round of money missing from the federal government in the last five years.

This is all documented in the articles below. This cash flow and the operations and syndicates it appears to fund are important to what drives the governance and allocation of resources in this country and around the globe.

There is a reason that power and money are centralizing and the rich are getting richer. I want to know what it is.

Whichever scenario is true  - and I do not know which one is  - if we had the truth it will help us grapple with 9-11 and the War on Terrorism. It would also help us better understand all the efforts to press for centralization of economic and political power that have grown as the black budget has grown since WWII. The reality is the possibilities of why 9-11 occurred and how it was operationalized are impacted by the facts of the US black budget and the advanced technology it has developed.

Why would sane and even decent people think it was the best option for the good of the whole? We must sit in the shoes of the person or people who gave the order - whoever they may be and wherever they may be - and understand how their power and money worked.

Why would a group with the operational and financial capacity to effect a 9-11 operation give the green light to plan 9-11, finance 9-11, do 9-11, stand down so 9-11 could happen, take advantage of 9-11 or to make sure the truth was not illuminated? My experience in Washington and Wall Street would indicate that there is a reasonable chance that all these various people and many in the food chain Are Not Bad Or Irrational People.

That is, we have a better chance of finding the truth if for purposes of our explorations we assume that the people involved in all these roles were people like you and me - just with a different map of certain parts of the world and dealing with a variety of stress and pressures trying to build cooperation or achieve goals that we do not understand.

Watching the federal government contract announcements and without benefit of seeing the full budget and assuming The Disclosure Project allegations regarding the estimates of the black budget size, if I had to guess today my guess would be that 9-11 has been highly successful in permitting the black budget to be moved on budget, partly in the normal budget and partly in the budget that is only disclosed to the Congressional intelligence committees.

The solution to continued growth and funding of the black budget may have been to steal as much money and assets as possible from the federal budget and then to move the black budget on budget when control of media, Congress, Justice and Securities & Exchange Commission ensured that the legal budget was non-transparent, controlled by private government contractors and could not be harmed or fiddled with by Congress.

(See various stories on the disappearance of over $3.3 trillion from the federal government from fiscal 1998-2001)

Grossly oversimplified, by the end of the 2004 fiscal year, covert operations and the black budget may be fully legal, run and controlled by corporations and banks without interference from knowledgeable career civil service, taxpayer funded, and non-transparent.

Why do I say all of this?

We do not have time to pay attention to people who use smears like "conspiracy theorist" to waste our time. Money, budgets, finance... these are all facts. If something does not work, and it continues to not work, there is a reason.

Systems have a logic. They have a rationale. Money helps explain and illuminate that rationale. Anyone who would smear a serious researcher or writer for trying to understand where a great deal of money is disappearing to as a "conspiracy theorist" is someone who would never be taken seriously or associated with in the circles in which I travel.

The exception is if the person doing the smearing is a professional being paid to smear those who have the scent of "the real deal" - Cointelpro or related public relations. The number of people paid to do such things are many and growing.

9-11 was an operation that was implemented by a conspiracy. To get to the bottom of what happened and why one must develop and use conspiracy theories to research in what can only be described as a conspiracy reality.

We know in regards to 9-11 one of two scenarios must be true - some portion of the US military and intelligence are,

1. complicit and/or
2. guilty of criminal gross negligence

We also know that the official story is not truthful. Either scenario and the reality of the official story beg the question, "why?"

This course always leads us to consider the fact that US military and intelligence have enjoyed significant expansion of their budgets and powers as a result of 9-11. We are rewarding failure. 9-11 was great for business. Lockheed Martin's stock is up over 50% in a falling stock market. The oil companies have their pipeline.

When a system does not work and continues to not work, there is something that prevents its learning.

Ultimately what we must understand that the problem is not that the system does not work and that it is not learning. The problem is that the system is controlled and operated by the most powerful forces in that system and that the system is indeed working and learning in the general direction they want it to go.

This happens in a manner that is highly organic and requires lots of planning, trial and error and factionalism that involves competition and cooperation over time in the pursuit of the system's real goals. Hence, the system is working and is learning. It is our construct that is wrong. We do not understand the system and the goals of the system.

Once we are clear that the system is working and is learning, once we stop falling back on scapegoating as a technique to explain events, we can start to understand the real system that we are a part of. This is how power and money work in reality.

The amount of money and power spent to keep the general population from understanding this - and focused on things like scapegoating which keep us from building a good map of "the real deal" or gaining the power to impact events by using our money and time as a vote in the marketplace in which the banks and corporations must thrive - is immense.

That is why I strongly encourage reading Jon Rappoport's back interviews on his Infomonster and becoming a subscriber for his ongoing interviews.

For those would like to know more, I would refer you to articles on all the money missing from the US Treasury and the manipulation of the gold markets as well as the Disclosure Project video of their event at the National Press Club. 

As for me, I do not have the answers. I wish I did.

That is why I am so appreciative of efforts like UnAnswered Questions and the effort of researchers networking and collaborating globally to illuminate, research and answer the right questions.

Let me close with the unanswered questions with which I began and which I believe are critical to our ongoing collaboration:

1. WHAT HAS BEEN THE SIZE OF THE U. S. BLACK BUDGET OVER THE LAST 50 YEARS?
2. WHAT ARE THE SOURCES AND USES OF FUNDS IN THE BLACK BUDGET?
3. WHO GOVERNS AND MANAGES THE BLACK BUDGET BUDGET AND OPERATIONS?
4. WHY HAVE SO MANY DECENT PEOPLE SUPPORTED AN ILLEGAL BLACK BUDGET OPERATION OF SUCH MAGNITUDE FOR SO LONG?
5. IS THE WAR ON TERRORISM MOVING THE BLACK BUDGET ON BUDGET?

'Minority Report' Is 40 Years Ahead of Schedule: The Fictional World Has Become Reality

Posted by George Freund on December 29, 2015 at 1:55 PM

JOHN W WHITEHEAD | OCTOBER 7, 2015

Here’s how the world around us resembles Philip Dick’s dystopian police state

“The Internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we’re part of the medium. The scary thing is, we’ll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us.”—Director Steven Spielberg, Minority Report

We are a scant 40 years away from the futuristic world that science fiction author Philip K. Dick envisioned for Minority Report in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

Unfortunately, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we may have already arrived at the year 2054.

Increasingly, the world around us resembles Dick’s dystopian police state in which the police combine widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining and precognitive technology to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage. In other words, the government’s goal is to prevent crimes before they happen: precrime.

For John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise), Chief of the Department of Pre-Crime in Washington, DC, the technology that he relies on for his predictive policing proves to be fallible, identifying him as the next would-be criminal and targeting him for preemptive measures. Consequently, Anderton finds himself not only attempting to prove his innocence but forced to take drastic measures in order to avoid capture in a surveillance state that uses biometric data and sophisticated computer networks to track its citizens.

Seemingly taking its cue from science fiction, technology has moved so fast in the short time since Minority Reportpremiered in 2002 that what once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction. Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, Spielberg’s unnerving vision of the future is fast becoming our reality.

Examples abound.

FICTION: In Minority Report, police use holographic data screens, city-wide surveillance cameras, dimensional maps and database feeds to monitor the movements of its citizens.

REALITY CHECK: Microsoft, in a partnership with New York City, has developed a crime-fighting system that “will allow police to quickly collate and visualise vast amounts of data from cameras, licence plate readers, 911 calls, police databases and other sources. It will then display the information in real time, both visually and chronologically, allowing investigators to centralise information about crimes as they happen or are reported.”

FICTION: No matter where people go in the world of Minority Report, one’s biometric data precedes them, allowing corporations to tap into their government profile and target them for advertising based on their highly individual characteristics. So fine-tuned is the process that it goes way beyond gender and lifestyle to mood detection, so that while Anderton flees through a subway station and then later a mall, the stores and billboards call out to him with advertising geared at his interests and moods. Eventually, in an effort to outwit the identification scanners, Anderton opts for surgery to have his eyeballs replaced.

REALITY CHECK: Google is working on context-based advertising that will use environmental sensors in your cell phone, laptop, etc., to deliver “targeted ads tailored to fit with what you’re seeing and hearing in the real world.” However, long before Google set their sights on context advertising, facial and iris recognition machines were being employed, ostensibly to detect criminals, streamline security checkpoints processes, and facilitate everyday activities. For example, in preparing to introduce such technology in the United States, the American biometrics firm Global Rainmakers Inc. (GRI) turned the city of Leon, Mexico into a virtual police state by installing iris scanners, which can scan the irises of 30-50 people per minute, throughout the city.

Police departments around the country have begun using the Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System, or MORIS, a physical iPhone add-on that allows police officers patrolling the streets to scan the irises and faces of suspected criminals and match them against government databases. In fact, in 2014, the FBI launched a nationwide database of iris scans for use by law enforcement agencies in their efforts to track criminals.

Corporations, as well, are beginning to implement eye-tracking technology in their tablets, smartphones, and computers. It will allow companies to track which words and phrases the user tends to re-read, hover on, or avoid, which can give insight into what she is thinking. This will allow advertisers to expand on the information they glean from tracking users’ clicks, searches, and online purchases, expanding into the realm of trying to guess what a user is thinking based upon their eye movements, and advertising accordingly. This information as it is shared by the corporate elite with the police will come in handy for police agencies as well, some of which are working on developing predictive analysis of “blink rates, pupil dilation, and deception.”

In ideal conditions, facial-recognition software is accurate 99.7 percent of the time. We are right around the corner from billboards capable of identifying passersby, and IBM has already been working on creating real world advertisements that react to people based upon RFID chips embedded in licenses and credit cards.

FICTION: In Minority Report, John Anderton’s Pre-Crime division utilizes psychic mutant humans to determine when a crime will take place next.

REALITY CHECK: While no psychic mutants are powering the government’s predictive policing efforts, the end result remains the same: a world in which crimes are prevented through the use of sophisticated data mining, surveillance, community policing and precrime. For instance, police in major American cities have been test-driving a tool that allows them to identify individuals—or groups of individuals—most likely to commit a crime in a given community. Those individuals are then put on notice that their movements and activities will be closely monitored and any criminal activity (by them or their associates) will result in harsh penalties. In other words, you are guilty before you are given any chance to prove you are innocent.

The Department of Homeland Security is also working on its Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST, which will utilize a number of personal factors such as “ethnicity, gender, breathing, and heart rate to ‘detect cues indicative of mal-intent.’”

FICTION: In Minority Report, government agents use “sick sticks” to subdue criminal suspects using less-lethal methods.

REALITY CHECK: A variety of less-lethal weapons have been developed in the years since Minority Report hit theaters. In 2007, the Department of Homeland Security granted a contract to Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc., for an “LED Incapacitator,” a flashlight-like device that emits a dazzling array of pulsating lights, incapacitating its target by causing nausea and vomiting. Raytheon has created an “Assault Intervention Device” which is basically a heat ray that causes an unbearable burning sensation on its victim’s skin. The Long Range Acoustic Device, which emits painful noises in order to disperse crowds, has been seen at the London Olympics and G20 protests in Pittsburgh.

FICTION: A hacker captures visions from the “precog” Agatha’s mind and plays them for John Anderton.

REALITY CHECK: While still in its infancy, technology that seeks to translate human thoughts into computer actions is slowly becoming a reality. Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at UC Berkeley, and his research team have created primitive software capable of translating the thoughts of viewers into reconstructed visual images. A company named Emotiv is developing technology which will be capable of reading a user’s thoughts and using them as inputs for operating machinery, like voice recognition but with brain signals. Similar devices are being created to translate thoughts into speech.

FICTION: In Minority Report, tiny sensory-guided spider robots converge on John Anderton, scan his biometric data and feed it into a central government database.

REALITY CHECK: An agency with the Department of Defense is working on turning insects into living UAVs, or “cybugs.” By expanding upon the insects’ natural abilities (e.g., bees’ olfactory abilities being utilized for bomb detection, etc.), government agents hope to use these spy bugs to surreptitiously gather vast quantities of information. Researchers eventually hope to outfit June beetles with tiny backpacks complete with various detection devices, microphones, and cameras. These devices could be powered by the very energy produced by the bugs beating their wings, or the heat they give off while in flight. There have already been reported sightings of dragonfly-like robotic drones monitoring protesters aerially in Washington, DC, as early as 2007.

FICTION: In Minority Report, Anderton flees his pursuers in a car whose movements are tracked by the police through the use of onboard computers. All around him, autonomous, driver-less vehicles zip through the city, moving people to their destinations based upon simple voice commands.

REALITY CHECK: Congress is now requiring that all new cars come equipped with event data recorders that can record and transmit data from onboard computers. Similarly, insurance companies are offering discounts to drivers who agree to have tracking bugs installed. Google has also created self-driving cars which have already surpassed 300,000 miles of road testing. It is anticipated that self-driving cars could be on American roads within the next 20 years, if not sooner.

These are but a few of the technological devices now in the hands of those who control the corporate police state. Fiction, in essence, has become fact—albeit, a rather frightening one.

# # # #

John W. Whitehead is an attorney and author who has written, debated and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law and human rights. He is the president and spokesperson of the Rutherford Institute. Mr. Whitehead is the author of numerous books on a variety of legal and social issues, including A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Arkansas and a Juris Doctorate degree from the University of Arkansas School of Law, and served as an officer in the United States Army from 1969 to 1971.

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2015/10/07/minority-report-is-40-years-ahead-of-schedule-the-fictional-world-has-become-reality/#sthash.v7uiBeHA.dpuf

Video: Even Funerals Are a Giant Financial Scam in America

Stop playing the game, ladies and gentlemen.      ~ hehe "we" R b'ing HARVESTED   from Birth ~ 2 even AFTER Death     ...amereecans we don't explore fuck~in any~thin any~more ...we just consume & die  Oops

Why Funerals Are a Total Ripoff

by Melissa Melton | Originally published at The Daily Sheeple

Americans don’t realize how much we get ripped off on practically everything in this country. 
That’s why people were rejoicing so hard when big pharma dbag Martin Shkreli was arrested. He bought up the patent for a drug that costs about $13.50 a pill (that people pay about a nickel for in, say, India) and started charging $750 bucks for it, a sum which people who take that drug were forced to pay or die, something he can legally do in this country.
But practically everything is an unnecessary rip off here. We are being forced onto Obamacare, or we have to pay something called the “individual shared responsibility payment,” a penalty fee that will rise to 2.5% of our annual income in 2016, even if we don’t ever go to the doctor so our shared responsibility should be… what?
We have to pay more for Organic food, or food that we can be assured hasn’t been genetically tampered with and grown soaked in multiple types of deadly, carcinogenic pesticides (pesticides being chemicals that kill things).
The average American wedding, the happy day to celebrate a couple coming together for what is supposed to be about love before their friends and family, runs an insane $30,000 on average here now. Maybe this is part of why marriage rates are continuing to drop.
Well, most people end up with a car loan, a student, loan and a bunch of credit cards before they ever get to walk down the aisle, then of course there’s that hard-to-afford, diamond engagement ring (another giant scam) which guys end up spending an average of $4,000 on, too… Gee, no wonder people aren’t buying houses anymore.
Who can afford this ridiculously high-priced lifestyle being billed as “The American Dream”? More like The American SCAM.
Turns out, even in DEATH, Americans are getting ripped off, and the lies about this one go back to at least the days of Abraham Lincoln!
Yep, the average funeral costs about $10,000 in this country, and everything about it, from embalming being “necessary” to have an open casket (lie) to the price of the casket itself (one of the most expensive pieces of furniture most people will buy their entire lives), is misleading to cash in on the last chance to cash in (and at a time when the family is particularly vulnerable and will not know any better and pretty much signs a blank check without too much consideration for the fine print).
Adam Ruins Everything has pointed out how big of a scam American funerals are, right down to the fact that a megacorporation has bought up a majority of the local mom and pop funeral shops but maintained the family business name on the front door, so people never know their loved one is being buried by said megacorporation whose treasurer was quoted as saying, “We really are a cash cow.”
Makes sense. We get ripped off our entire lives, America. Why not get one last ridiculous pay day from our grieving families as we’re headed out the door?       http://truthstreammedia.com/2015/12/23/video-even-funerals-are-a-giant-financial-scam-in-america/

Media Foci Irrelevant: Implantable Microchips and Directed Energy Weapons

jay008 / January 26, 2012http://jaysanalysis.com/2012/01/26/media-foci-irrelevant-implantable-microchips-and-directed-energy-weapons/

Old school airborne laser.

By: Jay
Many of the modern debates we see in politics and on television revolving around social issues are themselves irrelevant.  What Obama is doing is nothing but pure theater, and the absurd tales of bin Laden’s “assassination” are scripted events that only serve to show the guillibility of the masses.   Zbigniew Brzinski’s Between Two Ages was written in 1976 and mentions weather modification and the technotronic era that would arise, at that time still largely a staple of science fiction speculations.  He writes:
“In addition, it may be possible–and tempting–to exploit for strategic-political purposes the fruits of research on the brain and on human behavior.  Gordon J. F. MacDonald, a geophysicist specializing in problems of warfare, has written that timed artificially excited electronic strokes could lead to a pattern of oscillations that produce relatively high power levels over certain regions of the earth…. In this way, one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of very large populations in selected regions over an extended period…. No matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades.” -pg. 57
And in the footnote,
“As one specialist noted, ‘By the year 2018, technology will make available to the leaders of the major nations, a variety of techniques for conducting secret warfare, of which only a bare minimum of the security forces need be appraised.  One nation may attack a competitor covertly by bacteriological means, thoroughly weakening the population (though with a minimum of fatalities) before taking over with its own armed forces.  Alternatively, techniques of weather modification could be employed to produce prolonged periods of drought or storm….(Gordon J. F. MacDonald, “Space,” in Toward the year 2018, p.34). ”
The Department of Defense has on its own website the former Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, speaking candidly about these matters back in 1997:
“But as we’ve learned in the intelligence community, we had something called — and we have James Woolsey here to perhaps even address this question about phantom moles. The mere fear that there is a mole within an agency can set off a chain reaction and a hunt for that particular mole which can paralyze the agency for weeks and months and years even, in a search. The same thing is true about just the false scare of a threat of using some kind of a chemical weapon or a biological one. There are some reports, for example, that some countries have been trying to construct something like an Ebola Virus, and that would be a very dangerous phenomenon, to say the least. Alvin Toeffler has written about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic specific so that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects that can destroy specific crops. Others are engaging even in an eco- type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.” (Source)
The public is still unaware even of weather warfare, much less other policy papers that have been written about microchipping the populace and inserting them into an actual matrix, including a microchip and/or brain implant. The document is public at FAS.org, and comes from the Air University of the Army War College.  This is a 2001 document, and even still the mainline public and academia will mock and deride anyone who mentions the existence of such things, while at the same time, other hands of the establishment announce these trends, while simultaneously selling it as a good idea.  It reads:
“Ethical and Public Relations Issues. Implanting “things” in people raises ethical and public relations issues.¹¹² While these concerns may be founded on today’s thinking, in 2025 they may not be as alarming. We already are evolving toward technology implanting. For example, the military currently requires its members to receive mandatory injections of biological organisms (i.e., the flu shot). In the civilian world, people receive mechanical hearts and other organs. Society has come to accept most of these implants as a fact of life. By 2025 it is possible medical technology will have nerve chips that allow amputees to control artificial limbs or eye chips that allow the blind to see.¹¹³ The civilian populace will likely accept an implanted microscopic chips that allow military members to defend vital national interests. Further, the US military will continue to be a volunteer force that will freely accept the chip because it is a tool to control technology and not as a tool to control the human.”
Notice as well the 1995 image includes Directed Energy Weapons, which are said to not exist, though this has been in fiction as well, for years, such as Ian Fleming’s Man with the Golden Gun, which is developed by Scaramanga.  Directed energy weapons extend back to Tesla’s work, and are even admitted on the Department of Defense’s website, back in 1997. 

Directed Energy Weapons don't exist, unless your professor says they do.

Books like Brave New World and 1984 already predicted a lot of what we are experiencing decades ago, yet academia and its command and control structure inculcate the masses with constant nonsense and distractions as a pyshcological warfare operation.  Formerly psyops were directed at enemy populations, while now, they have been turned against the population itself.   And since the mainline media and politicians don’t even discuss this recolutionary information, they are irrelevant, and function mainly as stage and theater distractions.  Not only are they distractions, they are decades old distractions that aren’t even remotely relevant to the actual praxis of the shadow government for any other reason.

Family columnist warns of 'electronic apocalypse' from online generation of electronics-addicted youth      ~ hehe the "future"  'humans'  & we wonder Y r kids r fucked UP !!!

by L.J. Devon, Staff Writer  http://www.naturalnews.com/z052406_electronic_addition_apocalypse_youth.html

(NaturalNews) Are we living in an electronic apocalypse and not even recognizing it as we text our way down the street, not noticing the people around us? Are we acting like zombies with our minds buried in our screens? In public, everyone is moving along fast, but do we really exist anymore? Are we really alive and free, interacting face to face? Where has the listening ear gone? Is all connection lost?

On Tim Lott's Family column on The Guardian news site, these concerns come to life. High-tech phones and social media platforms have interconnected people over long distances, but humanity's growing obsession and intoxication with the digital world is actually breaking real life bonds, destroying precious eye to eye contact.

We are losing empathy

Researcher Tim Lott longs for the days of old, describing the ugly reality that 21st century humanity is beginning to create. He wrote, "The physical apparatus we use to process the world is being re-shaped, and if we don't preserve what we once had, our very sense of being will shift permanently and irreversibly. The content of our digital lives is no longer an appendage to life -- it is reaching a point where it is life, in the sense that the imagination can conceive of nothing else."

In researching the problem, he found some startling statistics. For one, the average teenager now manages 4,000 text messages a month. Five years ago, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that adolescents from 8 to 18 years of age were spending seven hours a day on handheld devices and phones. Tim also made a startling connection in his research. In a compilation of 72 studies, he found that the current online generation had 40 percent lower levels of empathy than previous generations.

Indeed, throwing away human interaction for electronic communication is destroying the human ability to relate, to perceive, to understand one another, and to accomplish new things. Technology destroys the empathetic connections between people. The addiction to hand-held screens cuts off one's soul from the universe around him and the universe within him. Needing continuous partial attention also corrupts character, destroying human empathy for all living things.

"Human relationships now seem to be marked with what resembles a series of nervous tics -- phone tics, PC tics, tablet tics," wrote Lott.

He continues, "Where is the empty space into which we can climb in order to find ourselves? Not only are we losing its coordinates, a whole generation does not even know that it exists."

Three ways to break the addiction to handheld devices

Here are three methods I have been using to disconnect myself from technology, while reconnecting my spirit with people and my spiritual self.

Leave the house and take a walk in the woods, in the park, in the country. Take no device on your adventure. Take a spouse, a sibling, a friend, if you like.

Invite people over and plan activities that force people to forget their phones and tablets. Board games are great for creating that present moment, face-to-face interaction.

Turn the devices off and practice yoga and meditation, looking inward, reconnecting with self and becoming aware of the energy in your body, not the devices'.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.theguardian.com

Armed civilians save lives and reduce the number killed in mass shootings ... Citizens can respond in 10 seconds (cops take 10 minutes)

Monday, December 28, 2015 by: J. D. Heyes  http://www.naturalnews.com/052450_Gun_control_laws_self_defense_lives_saved.html
Tags: Gun control laws, self defense, lives saved

(NaturalNews) To hear the anti-Second Amendment Left tell it, carrying a firearm for protection – of one's self and of the lives of those around him or her – is a myth perpetuated by the NRA and other gun rights groups and firearm manufacturers.

Writing in the Huffington Post, "cartoonist and blogger" Walker Bragman's attempt to sully the truth and misrepresent the data was typical of a liberal hit job on the effect that guns really have in American society:

"John Lott Jr. and professor Gary Kleck, a criminologist, argue that guns are frequently used for self defense. These claims have also been debunked by peer review. A study by Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig titled 'Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms,' found that Kleck's defensive gun use numbers are 'far too high' to the point of suggesting bias, as are numbers by similar studies. The National Institute of Justice found that there is even an overestimation in Cook and Ludwig's study. Another study by the Berkley Media Studies Group found similar discrepancies with Kleck's and Lott's defensive gun use claims. According to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center a gun in the home is more likely to be used to commit suicide or to threaten or kill an intimate than used to deter an attacker."

Yes, guns do prevent crimes and death

Talk about study bias. Firstly, none of the sources Bragman utilized support the Second Amendment, and secondly, many of the claims the studies (and Bragman) attempt to make are done out of context or in an attempt to mislead. For instance, guns in the home are more likely utilized for suicide because firearms-related suicide deaths account for two-thirds of all firearm deaths each year. That kind of puts a different perspective on the data used by Bragman – doesn't it?

Also, he doesn't say that firearms are never used in self-defense; he merely claims that Kleck's figures are outsized (which is debatable given the study sources). So how can gun use in self defense figures be "debunked?"

In fact, according to a compilation of self-defense cases posted at the website Ammoland, use of firearms in self-defense is not only quite common, but they are often credited with dramatically limiting the carnage a bad guy (or gal) with a gun seeks to inflict on society. Cases in point:

-- John Hendricks of Chicago was driving his personal vehicle for Uber one evening, and had just dropped off a passenger, when he saw a man holler, draw a handgun and start shooting at a nearby crowd. In fact, one of the shooter's bullets struck Hendricks' vehicle, the Chicago Tribune reported. Hendricks pulled his own weapon, shot the armed assailant and called 911. When police arrived, Hendricks walked up to them with his hands raised and his concealed carry license in hand. There is no telling how many people he saved with that action.

-- In Portland, Oregon, a man was turned away from a nightclub and that apparently angered him. He returned wearing a mask and carrying a firearm, shooting one of the bouncers and two other people at the club, wounding one critically, as reported by KOIN. That night, Jonathan Baer was also working as a bouncer and, because he had a concealed carry license, was packing a handgun. He shot and killed the attacker (and was cleared of any wrongdoing by police). Soon after, police discovered multiple bags of varied ammunition, and hundreds of rounds loaded in several magazines that fit a semi-automatic Glock handgun. There is no telling how many more people the suspect was preparing to kill.

And so on. And while Left-wing anti-gun media regularly reports that such uses are "rare," they fail to report that in many cases, if an armed attacker is merely confronted by someone with a gun – where there are no shots ever fired – that is enough to end the confrontation and save lives.

Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention find firearms to be an "important crime deterrent."

Sources:

HuffingtonPost.com

ChicagoTribune.com

Koin.com

CNSNews.com

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/052450_Gun_control_laws_self_defense_lives_saved.html#ixzz3viMEntNA

Seymour Hersh: Obama's Entire Account Of bin Laden's Death Is One Big Lie; This Is What Really Happened

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/11/2015 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-10/seymour-hersh-obamas-entire-account-bin-ladens-death-one-big-lie-what-really-happene

The last time famed US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh made news in the global media was with his massive, 5000-word expose from December of 2013 "Whose sarin?" revealing the true motives behind the Syrian near-war of 2013 including what we had said from the very beginning: the very professionally created YouTube clips showing the consequences of what was said to have been an Assad poison gas attack, were nothing but a fake (subsequent reports identified the propaganda source as Rami Abdul Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, whose entire operation has been funded by an unidentified European country.)
Fast forward to today when in a report whose word count doubles his previous record for the London Review of Books, Hersh targets a topic near and dear to the hearts of many Americans: the story of the capture and death of Osama bin Laden. Or rather the completely false and, according to Hersh, fabricated story, one made up entirely by the US president and spoon fed for popular consumption with the aid of a Hollywood blockbuster whose entire plot line is, if Hersh is correct, one big lie as well.
In a nutshell, and one really needs to read Hersh's magnum opus as no amount of abbreviation will do it justice, Hersh accuses Obama of not only taking credit for the al Qaeda leader's death, but fabricating the story that resulted from what has been widely reported to have been a Navy seal incursion into bin Laden's Abbottabad compound in Pakistan. As a result the military and intelligence communities were forced to scramble and then corroborate the president’s version of events.
Hersh uses several sources for his refutation of the official narrative, including Asad Durrani, who was head of the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence agency in the early 1990s, as well as various American sources, of which the major source "is a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. He also was privy to many aspects of the Seals’ training for the raid, and to the various after-action reports."
Hersh also uses two other US sources, who had access to corroborating information, have been longtime consultants to the Special Operations Command, and also had information "from inside Pakistan about widespread dismay among the senior ISI and military leadership – echoed later by Durrani – over Obama’s decision to go public immediately with news of bin Laden’s death."
Needless to say, the White House did not respond to Hersh's requests for comment.
Among the many allegations of Hersh's report are that:

• bin Laden had been a prisoner of the Pakistan intelligence at the Abbottabad compound since 2006 (something revealed previously in "Osama bin Laden 'protected by Pakistan in return for Saudi cash")
• that the two most senior Pakistani military leaders knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms;
• that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US,
• and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

Hersh notes that the Obama administration originally agreed to announce bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike rather than shot during an active Special Forces mission:

... a carefully constructed cover story would be issued: Obama would announce that DNA analysis confirmed that bin Laden had been killed in a drone raid in the Hindu Kush, on Afghanistan’s side of the border. The Americans who planned the mission assured Kayani and Pasha that their co-operation would never be made public. It was understood by all that if the Pakistani role became known, there would be violent protests – bin Laden was considered a hero by many Pakistanis – and Pasha and Kayani and their families would be in danger, and the Pakistani army publicly disgraced.

It was clear to all by this point, the retired official said, that bin Laden would not survive: ‘Pasha told us at a meeting in April that he could not risk leaving bin Laden in the compound now that we know he’s there. Too many people in the Pakistani chain of command know about the mission. He and Kayani had to tell the whole story to the directors of the air defence command and to a few local commanders.

At the end bin Laden was murdered, plain and simple:

‘Of course the guys knew the target was bin Laden and he was there under Pakistani control,’ the retired official said. ‘Otherwise, they would not have done the mission without air cover. It was clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder.’ A former Seal commander, who has led and participated in dozens of similar missions over the past decade, assured me that ‘we were not going to keep bin Laden alive – to allow the terrorist to live. By law, we know what we’re doing inside Pakistan is a homicide. We’ve come to grips with that. Each one of us, when we do these missions, say to ourselves, “Let’s face it. We’re going to commit a murder.”’ The White House’s initial account claimed that bin Laden had been brandishing a weapon; the story was aimed at deflecting those who questioned the legality of the US administration’s targeted assassination programme. The US has consistently maintained, despite widely reported remarks by people involved with the mission, that bin Laden would have been taken alive if he had immediately surrendered.

Then the original plan was foiled, when Obama decided to make things up on the fly, not least of all because of the downed helicopter whose flaming end scuttled the original narrative:

Should Obama stand by the agreement with Kayani and Pasha and pretend a week or so later that bin Laden had been killed in a drone attack in the mountains, or should he go public immediately? The downed helicopter made it easy for Obama’s political advisers to urge the latter plan. The explosion and fireball would be impossible to hide, and word of what had happened was bound to leak. Obama had to ‘get out in front of the story’ before someone in the Pentagon did: waiting would diminish the political impact.

Obama’s speech was put together in a rush, the retired official said, and was viewed by his advisers as a political document, not a message that needed to be submitted for clearance to the national security bureaucracy. This series of self-serving and inaccurate statements would create chaos in the weeks following.

The widely distributed story involving the Navy seals was also fabricated:

Obama also praised ‘a small team of Americans’ for their care in avoiding civilian deaths and said: ‘After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.’ Two more details now had to be supplied for the cover story: a description of the firefight that never happened, and a story about what happened to the corpse. Obama went on to praise the Pakistanis: ‘It’s important to note that our counterterrorism co-operation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding.’ That statement risked exposing Kayani and Pasha. The White House’s solution was to ignore what Obama had said and order anyone talking to the press to insist that the Pakistanis had played no role in killing bin Laden. Obama left the clear impression that he and his advisers hadn’t known for sure that bin Laden was in Abbottabad, but only had information ‘about the possibility’. This led first to the story that the Seals had determined they’d killed the right man by having a six-foot-tall Seal lie next to the corpse for comparison (bin Laden was known to be six foot four); and then to the claim that a DNA test had been performed on the corpse and demonstrated conclusively that the Seals had killed bin Laden. But, according to the retired official, it wasn’t clear from the Seals’ early reports whether all of bin Laden’s body, or any of it, made it back to Afghanistan.

As a result of Obama's rash decision to improvise lies, the seal had to be silenced:

The White House’s solution was to silence the Seals. On 5 May, every member of the Seal hit team – they had returned to their base in southern Virginia – and some members of the Joint Special Operations Command leadership were presented with a nondisclosure form drafted by the White House’s legal office; it promised civil penalties and a lawsuit for anyone who discussed the mission, in public or private. ‘The Seals were not happy,’ the retired official said. But most of them kept quiet, as did Admiral William McRaven, who was then in charge of JSOC. ‘McRaven was apoplectic. He knew he was fucked by the White House, but he’s a dyed-in-the-wool Seal, and not then a political operator, and he knew there’s no glory in blowing the whistle on the president. When Obama went public with bin Laden’s death, everyone had to scramble around for a new story that made sense, and the planners were stuck holding the bag.’

There is much more on how the White House and the Pentagon scrambled to make up a narrative that made sense in light of Obama's improvisation in Hersh's entire story below, and as Hersh notes, "it was inevitable that the Obama administration’s lies, misstatements and betrayals would create a backlash."
But what about the CIA's report on  torture and the resultant "transformations" in the US secret service? Well, simple: according to Hersh "the report was a victory for the CIA. Its major finding – that the use of torture didn’t lead to discovering the truth – had already been the subject of public debate for more than a decade."

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s long-delayed report on CIA torture, released last December, documented repeated instances of official lying, and suggested that the CIA’s knowledge of bin Laden’s courier was sketchy at best and predated its use of waterboarding and other forms of torture. The report led to international headlines about brutality and waterboarding, along with gruesome details about rectal feeding tubes, ice baths and threats to rape or murder family members of detainees who were believed to be withholding information. Despite the bad publicity, the report was a victory for the CIA. Its major finding – that the use of torture didn’t lead to discovering the truth – had already been the subject of public debate for more than a decade. Another key finding – that the torture conducted was more brutal than Congress had been told – was risible, given the extent of public reporting and published exposés by former interrogators and retired CIA officers. The report depicted tortures that were obviously contrary to international law as violations of rules or ‘inappropriate activities’ or, in some cases, ‘management failures’. Whether the actions described constitute war crimes was not discussed, and the report did not suggest that any of the CIA interrogators or their superiors should be investigated for criminal activity. The agency faced no meaningful consequences as a result of the report.

The retired official told me that the CIA leadership had become experts in derailing serious threats from Congress: ‘They create something that is horrible but not that bad. Give them something that sounds terrible. “Oh my God, we were shoving food up a prisoner’s ass!” Meanwhile, they’re not telling the committee about murders, other war crimes, and secret prisons like we still have in Diego Garcia. The goal also was to stall it as long as possible, which they did.’

Fast forwarding to Hersh's conclusion, none of it should come as a surprise to anyone who has put in more than a second of thought into the now daily lies spewed by the various US government branches in its endless attempt to preserve Pax American around the globe and Pax NSA within the US police state:

Obama today is not facing re-election as he was in the spring of 2011. His principled stand on behalf of the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran says much, as does his decision to operate without the support of the conservative Republicans in Congress. High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no.

No, Obama is not facing re-election. Unfortunately, the person under whose watch the bin Laden "raid" took place, Hillary Clinton, is facing election. And sadly for America, once she takes over Obama's throne, the surge in high-level lying, secret prisons, drone attacks, immunity from checks and balances and forced silencing of all naysayers, no matter the coast, will truly show the world what happens when a former superpower enters its terminal decline phase.

* * *
Seymour M. Hersh's full report on The Killing of Osama bin Laden below, courtesy of the London Review of Books

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’
This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.
‘When your version comes out – if you do it – people in Pakistan will be tremendously grateful,’ Durrani told me. ‘For a long time people have stopped trusting what comes out about bin Laden from the official mouths. There will be some negative political comment and some anger, but people like to be told the truth, and what you’ve told me is essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who have been on a fact-finding mission since this episode.’ As a former ISI head, he said, he had been told shortly after the raid by ‘people in the “strategic community” who would know’ that there had been an informant who had alerted the US to bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad, and that after his killing the US’s betrayed promises left Kayani and Pasha exposed.
The major US source for the account that follows is a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. He also was privy to many aspects of the Seals’ training for the raid, and to the various after-action reports. Two other US sources, who had access to corroborating information, have been longtime consultants to the Special Operations Command. I also received information from inside Pakistan about widespread dismay among the senior ISI and military leadership – echoed later by Durrani – over Obama’s decision to go public immediately with news of bin Laden’s death. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

*

It began with a walk-in. In August 2010 a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer approached Jonathan Bank, then the CIA’s station chief at the US embassy in Islamabad. He offered to tell the CIA where to find bin Laden in return for the reward that Washington had offered in 2001. Walk-ins are assumed by the CIA to be unreliable, and the response from the agency’s headquarters was to fly in a polygraph team. The walk-in passed the test. ‘So now we’ve got a lead on bin Laden living in a compound in Abbottabad, but how do we really know who it is?’ was the CIA’s worry at the time, the retired senior US intelligence official told me.

The US initially kept what it knew from the Pakistanis. ‘The fear was that if the existence of the source was made known, the Pakistanis themselves would move bin Laden to another location. So only a very small number of people were read into the source and his story,’ the retired official said. ‘The CIA’s first goal was to check out the quality of the informant’s information.’ The compound was put under satellite surveillance. The CIA rented a house in Abbottabad to use as a forward observation base and staffed it with Pakistani employees and foreign nationals. Later on, the base would serve as a contact point with the ISI; it attracted little attention because Abbottabad is a holiday spot full of houses rented on short leases. A psychological profile of the informant was prepared. (The informant and his family were smuggled out of Pakistan and relocated in the Washington area. He is now a consultant for the CIA.)
‘By October the military and intelligence community were discussing the possible military options. Do we drop a bunker buster on the compound or take him out with a drone strike? Perhaps send someone to kill him, single assassin style? But then we’d have no proof of who he was,’ the retired official said. ‘We could see some guy is walking around at night, but we have no intercepts because there’s no commo coming from the compound.’
In October, Obama was briefed on the intelligence. His response was cautious, the retired official said. ‘It just made no sense that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad. It was just too crazy. The president’s position was emphatic: “Don’t talk to me about this any more unless you have proof that it really is bin Laden.”’ The immediate goal of the CIA leadership and the Joint Special Operations Command was to get Obama’s support. They believed they would get this if they got DNA evidence, and if they could assure him that a night assault of the compound would carry no risk. The only way to accomplish both things, the retired official said, ‘was to get the Pakistanis on board’.
During the late autumn of 2010, the US continued to keep quiet about the walk-in, and Kayani and Pasha continued to insist to their American counterparts that they had no information about bin Laden’s whereabouts. ‘The next step was to figure out how to ease Kayani and Pasha into it – to tell them that we’ve got intelligence showing that there is a high-value target in the compound, and to ask them what they know about the target,’ the retired official said. ‘The compound was not an armed enclave – no machine guns around, because it was under ISI control.’ The walk-in had told the US that bin Laden had lived undetected from 2001 to 2006 with some of his wives and children in the Hindu Kush mountains, and that ‘the ISI got to him by paying some of the local tribal people to betray him.’ (Reports after the raid placed him elsewhere in Pakistan during this period.) Bank was also told by the walk-in that bin Laden was very ill, and that early on in his confinement at Abbottabad, the ISI had ordered Amir Aziz, a doctor and a major in the Pakistani army, to move nearby to provide treatment. ‘The truth is that bin Laden was an invalid, but we cannot say that,’ the retired official said. ‘“You mean you guys shot a cripple? Who was about to grab his AK-47?”’
‘It didn’t take long to get the co-operation we needed, because the Pakistanis wanted to ensure the continued release of American military aid, a good percentage of which was anti-terrorism funding that finances personal security, such as bullet-proof limousines and security guards and housing for the ISI leadership,’ the retired official said. He added that there were also under-the-table personal ‘incentives’ that were financed by off-the-books Pentagon contingency funds. ‘The intelligence community knew what the Pakistanis needed to agree – there was the carrot. And they chose the carrot. It was a win-win. We also did a little blackmail. We told them we would leak the fact that you’ve got bin Laden in your backyard. We knew their friends and enemies’ – the Taliban and jihadist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan – ‘would not like it.’
A worrying factor at this early point, according to the retired official, was Saudi Arabia, which had been financing bin Laden’s upkeep since his seizure by the Pakistanis. ‘The Saudis didn’t want bin Laden’s presence revealed to us because he was a Saudi, and so they told the Pakistanis to keep him out of the picture. The Saudis feared if we knew we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden start talking to us about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaida. And they were dropping money – lots of it. The Pakistanis, in turn, were concerned that the Saudis might spill the beans about their control of bin Laden. The fear was that if the US found out about bin Laden from Riyadh, all hell would break out. The Americans learning about bin Laden’s imprisonment from a walk-in was not the worst thing.’
Despite their constant public feuding, American and Pakistani military and intelligence services have worked together closely for decades on counterterrorism in South Asia. Both services often find it useful to engage in public feuds ‘to cover their asses’, as the retired official put it, but they continually share intelligence used for drone attacks, and co-operate on covert operations. At the same time, it’s understood in Washington that elements of the ISI believe that maintaining a relationship with the Taliban leadership inside Afghanistan is essential to national security. The ISI’s strategic aim is to balance Indian influence in Kabul; the Taliban is also seen in Pakistan as a source of jihadist shock troops who would back Pakistan against India in a confrontation over Kashmir.
Adding to the tension was the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, often depicted in the Western press as an ‘Islamic bomb’ that might be transferred by Pakistan to an embattled nation in the Middle East in the event of a crisis with Israel. The US looked the other way when Pakistan began building its weapons system in the 1970s and it’s widely believed it now has more than a hundred nuclear warheads. It’s understood in Washington that US security depends on the maintenance of strong military and intelligence ties to Pakistan. The belief is mirrored in Pakistan.
‘The Pakistani army sees itself as family,’ the retired official said. ‘Officers call soldiers their sons and all officers are “brothers”. The attitude is different in the American military. The senior Pakistani officers believe they are the elite and have got to look out for all of the people, as keepers of the flame against Muslim fundamentalism. The Pakistanis also know that their trump card against aggression from India is a strong relationship with the United States. They will never cut their person-to-person ties with us.’
Like all CIA station chiefs, Bank was working undercover, but that ended in early December 2010 when he was publicly accused of murder in a criminal complaint filed in Islamabad by Karim Khan, a Pakistani journalist whose son and brother, according to local news reports, had been killed by a US drone strike. Allowing Bank to be named was a violation of diplomatic protocol on the part of the Pakistani authorities, and it brought a wave of unwanted publicity. Bank was ordered to leave Pakistan by the CIA, whose officials subsequently told the Associated Press he was transferred because of concerns for his safety. The New York Times reported that there was ‘strong suspicion’ the ISI had played a role in leaking Bank’s name to Khan. There was speculation that he was outed as payback for the publication in a New York lawsuit a month earlier of the names of ISI chiefs in connection with the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008. But there was a collateral reason, the retired official said, for the CIA’s willingness to send Bank back to America. The Pakistanis needed cover in case their co-operation with the Americans in getting rid of bin Laden became known. The Pakistanis could say: “You’re talking about me? We just kicked out your station chief.”’

*

The bin Laden compound was less than two miles from the Pakistan Military Academy, and a Pakistani army combat battalion headquarters was another mile or so away. Abbottabad is less than 15 minutes by helicopter from Tarbela Ghazi, an important base for ISI covert operations and the facility where those who guard Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal are trained. ‘Ghazi is why the ISI put bin Laden in Abbottabad in the first place,’ the retired official said, ‘to keep him under constant supervision.’

The risks for Obama were high at this early stage, especially because there was a troubling precedent: the failed 1980 attempt to rescue the American hostages in Tehran. That failure was a factor in Jimmy Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan. Obama’s worries were realistic, the retired official said. ‘Was bin Laden ever there? Was the whole story a product of Pakistani deception? What about political blowback in case of failure?’ After all, as the retired official said, ‘If the mission fails, Obama’s just a black Jimmy Carter and it’s all over for re-election.’
Obama was anxious for reassurance that the US was going to get the right man. The proof was to come in the form of bin Laden’s DNA. The planners turned for help to Kayani and Pasha, who asked Aziz to obtain the specimens. Soon after the raid the press found out that Aziz had been living in a house near the bin Laden compound: local reporters discovered his name in Urdu on a plate on the door. Pakistani officials denied that Aziz had any connection to bin Laden, but the retired official told me that Aziz had been rewarded with a share of the $25 million reward the US had put up because the DNA sample had showed conclusively that it was bin Laden in Abbottabad. (In his subsequent testimony to a Pakistani commission investigating the bin Laden raid, Aziz said that he had witnessed the attack on Abbottabad, but had no knowledge of who was living in the compound and had been ordered by a superior officer to stay away from the scene.)
Bargaining continued over the way the mission would be executed. ‘Kayani eventually tells us yes, but he says you can’t have a big strike force. You have to come in lean and mean. And you have to kill him, or there is no deal,’ the retired official said. The agreement was struck by the end of January 2011, and Joint Special Operations Command prepared a list of questions to be answered by the Pakistanis: ‘How can we be assured of no outside intervention? What are the defences inside the compound and its exact dimensions? Where are bin Laden’s rooms and exactly how big are they? How many steps in the stairway? Where are the doors to his rooms, and are they reinforced with steel? How thick?’ The Pakistanis agreed to permit a four-man American cell – a Navy Seal, a CIA case officer and two communications specialists – to set up a liaison office at Tarbela Ghazi for the coming assault. By then, the military had constructed a mock-up of the compound in Abbottabad at a secret former nuclear test site in Utah, and an elite Seal team had begun rehearsing for the attack.
The US had begun to cut back on aid to Pakistan – to ‘turn off the spigot’, in the retired official’s words. The provision of 18 new F-16 fighter aircraft was delayed, and under-the-table cash payments to the senior leaders were suspended. In April 2011 Pasha met the CIA director, Leon Panetta, at agency headquarters. ‘Pasha got a commitment that the United States would turn the money back on, and we got a guarantee that there would be no Pakistani opposition during the mission,’ the retired official said. ‘Pasha also insisted that Washington stop complaining about Pakistan’s lack of co-operation with the American war on terrorism.’ At one point that spring, Pasha offered the Americans a blunt explanation of the reason Pakistan kept bin Laden’s capture a secret, and why it was imperative for the ISI role to remain secret: ‘We needed a hostage to keep tabs on al-Qaida and the Taliban,’ Pasha said, according to the retired official. ‘The ISI was using bin Laden as leverage against Taliban and al-Qaida activities inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. They let the Taliban and al-Qaida leadership know that if they ran operations that clashed with the interests of the ISI, they would turn bin Laden over to us. So if it became known that the Pakistanis had worked with us to get bin Laden at Abbottabad, there would be hell to pay.’
At one of his meetings with Panetta, according to the retired official and a source within the CIA, Pasha was asked by a senior CIA official whether he saw himself as acting in essence as an agent for al-Qaida and the Taliban. ‘He answered no, but said the ISI needed to have some control.’ The message, as the CIA saw it, according to the retired official, was that Kayani and Pasha viewed bin Laden ‘as a resource, and they were more interested in their [own] survival than they were in the United States’.
A Pakistani with close ties to the senior leadership of the ISI told me that ‘there was a deal with your top guys. We were very reluctant, but it had to be done – not because of personal enrichment, but because all of the American aid programmes would be cut off. Your guys said we will starve you out if you don’t do it, and the okay was given while Pasha was in Washington. The deal was not only to keep the taps open, but Pasha was told there would be more goodies for us.’ The Pakistani said that Pasha’s visit also resulted in a commitment from the US to give Pakistan ‘a freer hand’ in Afghanistan as it began its military draw-down there. ‘And so our top dogs justified the deal by saying this is for our country.’

*

Pasha and Kayani were responsible for ensuring that Pakistan’s army and air defence command would not track or engage with the US helicopters used on the mission. The American cell at Tarbela Ghazi was charged with co-ordinating communications between the ISI, the senior US officers at their command post in Afghanistan, and the two Black Hawk helicopters; the goal was to ensure that no stray Pakistani fighter plane on border patrol spotted the intruders and took action to stop them. The initial plan said that news of the raid shouldn’t be announced straightaway. All units in the Joint Special Operations Command operate under stringent secrecy and the JSOC leadership believed, as did Kayani and Pasha, that the killing of bin Laden would not be made public for as long as seven days, maybe longer. Then a carefully constructed cover story would be issued: Obama would announce that DNA analysis confirmed that bin Laden had been killed in a drone raid in the Hindu Kush, on Afghanistan’s side of the border. The Americans who planned the mission assured Kayani and Pasha that their co-operation would never be made public. It was understood by all that if the Pakistani role became known, there would be violent protests – bin Laden was considered a hero by many Pakistanis – and Pasha and Kayani and their families would be in danger, and the Pakistani army publicly disgraced.

It was clear to all by this point, the retired official said, that bin Laden would not survive: ‘Pasha told us at a meeting in April that he could not risk leaving bin Laden in the compound now that we know he’s there. Too many people in the Pakistani chain of command know about the mission. He and Kayani had to tell the whole story to the directors of the air defence command and to a few local commanders.
‘Of course the guys knew the target was bin Laden and he was there under Pakistani control,’ the retired official said. ‘Otherwise, they would not have done the mission without air cover. It was clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder.’ A former Seal commander, who has led and participated in dozens of similar missions over the past decade, assured me that ‘we were not going to keep bin Laden alive – to allow the terrorist to live. By law, we know what we’re doing inside Pakistan is a homicide. We’ve come to grips with that. Each one of us, when we do these missions, say to ourselves, “Let’s face it. We’re going to commit a murder.”’ The White House’s initial account claimed that bin Laden had been brandishing a weapon; the story was aimed at deflecting those who questioned the legality of the US administration’s targeted assassination programme. The US has consistently maintained, despite widely reported remarks by people involved with the mission, that bin Laden would have been taken alive if he had immediately surrendered.

*

At the Abbottabad compound ISI guards were posted around the clock to keep watch over bin Laden and his wives and children. They were under orders to leave as soon as they heard the rotors of the US helicopters. The town was dark: the electricity supply had been cut off on the orders of the ISI hours before the raid began. One of the Black Hawks crashed inside the walls of the compound, injuring many on board. ‘The guys knew the TOT [time on target] had to be tight because they would wake up the whole town going in,’ the retired official said. The cockpit of the crashed Black Hawk, with its communication and navigational gear, had to be destroyed by concussion grenades, and this would create a series of explosions and a fire visible for miles. Two Chinook helicopters had flown from Afghanistan to a nearby Pakistani intelligence base to provide logistical support, and one of them was immediately dispatched to Abbottabad. But because the helicopter had been equipped with a bladder loaded with extra fuel for the two Black Hawks, it first had to be reconfigured as a troop carrier. The crash of the Black Hawk and the need to fly in a replacement were nerve-wracking and time-consuming setbacks, but the Seals continued with their mission. There was no firefight as they moved into the compound; the ISI guards had gone. ‘Everyone in Pakistan has a gun and high-profile, wealthy folks like those who live in Abbottabad have armed bodyguards, and yet there were no weapons in the compound,’ the retired official pointed out. Had there been any opposition, the team would have been highly vulnerable. Instead, the retired official said, an ISI liaison officer flying with the Seals guided them into the darkened house and up a staircase to bin Laden’s quarters. The Seals had been warned by the Pakistanis that heavy steel doors blocked the stairwell on the first and second-floor landings; bin Laden’s rooms were on the third floor. The Seal squad used explosives to blow the doors open, without injuring anyone. One of bin Laden’s wives was screaming hysterically and a bullet – perhaps a stray round – struck her knee. Aside from those that hit bin Laden, no other shots were fired. (The Obama administration’s account would hold otherwise.)

‘They knew where the target was – third floor, second door on the right,’ the retired official said. ‘Go straight there. Osama was cowering and retreated into the bedroom. Two shooters followed him and opened up. Very simple, very straightforward, very professional hit.’ Some of the Seals were appalled later at the White House’s initial insistence that they had shot bin Laden in self-defence, the retired official said. ‘Six of the Seals’ finest, most experienced NCOs, faced with an unarmed elderly civilian, had to kill him in self-defence? The house was shabby and bin Laden was living in a cell with bars on the window and barbed wire on the roof. The rules of engagement were that if bin Laden put up any opposition they were authorised to take lethal action. But if they suspected he might have some means of opposition, like an explosive vest under his robe, they could also kill him. So here’s this guy in a mystery robe and they shot him. It’s not because he was reaching for a weapon. The rules gave them absolute authority to kill the guy.’ The later White House claim that only one or two bullets were fired into his head was ‘bullshit’, the retired official said. ‘The squad came through the door and obliterated him. As the Seals say, “We kicked his ass and took his gas.”’
After they killed bin Laden, ‘the Seals were just there, some with physical injuries from the crash, waiting for the relief chopper,’ the retired official said. ‘Twenty tense minutes. The Black Hawk is still burning. There are no city lights. No electricity. No police. No fire trucks. They have no prisoners.’ Bin Laden’s wives and children were left for the ISI to interrogate and relocate. ‘Despite all the talk,’ the retired official continued, there were ‘no garbage bags full of computers and storage devices. The guys just stuffed some books and papers they found in his room in their backpacks. The Seals weren’t there because they thought bin Laden was running a command centre for al-Qaida operations, as the White House would later tell the media. And they were not intelligence experts gathering information inside that house.’
On a normal assault mission, the retired official said, there would be no waiting around if a chopper went down. ‘The Seals would have finished the mission, thrown off their guns and gear, and jammed into the remaining Black Hawk and di-di-maued’ – Vietnamese slang for leaving in a rush – ‘out of there, with guys hanging out of the doors. They would not have blown the chopper – no commo gear is worth a dozen lives – unless they knew they were safe. Instead they stood around outside the compound, waiting for the bus to arrive.’ Pasha and Kayani had delivered on all their promises.

*

The backroom argument inside the White House began as soon as it was clear that the mission had succeeded. Bin Laden’s body was presumed to be on its way to Afghanistan. Should Obama stand by the agreement with Kayani and Pasha and pretend a week or so later that bin Laden had been killed in a drone attack in the mountains, or should he go public immediately? The downed helicopter made it easy for Obama’s political advisers to urge the latter plan. The explosion and fireball would be impossible to hide, and word of what had happened was bound to leak. Obama had to ‘get out in front of the story’ before someone in the Pentagon did: waiting would diminish the political impact.

Not everyone agreed. Robert Gates, the secretary of defence, was the most outspoken of those who insisted that the agreements with Pakistan had to be honoured. In his memoir, Duty, Gates did not mask his anger:

Before we broke up and the president headed upstairs to tell the American people what had just happened, I reminded everyone that the techniques, tactics and procedures the Seals had used in the bin Laden operation were used every night in Afghanistan … it was therefore essential that we agree not to release any operational details of the raid. That we killed him, I said, is all we needed to say. Everybody in that room agreed to keep mum on details. That commitment lasted about five hours. The initial leaks came from the White House and CIA. They just couldn’t wait to brag and to claim credit. The facts were often wrong … Nonetheless the information just kept pouring out. I was outraged and at one point, told [the national security adviser, Tom] Donilon, ‘Why doesn’t everybody just shut the fuck up?’ To no avail.

Obama’s speech was put together in a rush, the retired official said, and was viewed by his advisers as a political document, not a message that needed to be submitted for clearance to the national security bureaucracy. This series of self-serving and inaccurate statements would create chaos in the weeks following. Obama said that his administration had discovered that bin Laden was in Pakistan through ‘a possible lead’ the previous August; to many in the CIA the statement suggested a specific event, such as a walk-in. The remark led to a new cover story claiming that the CIA’s brilliant analysts had unmasked a courier network handling bin Laden’s continuing flow of operational orders to al-Qaida. Obama also praised ‘a small team of Americans’ for their care in avoiding civilian deaths and said: ‘After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.’ Two more details now had to be supplied for the cover story: a description of the firefight that never happened, and a story about what happened to the corpse. Obama went on to praise the Pakistanis: ‘It’s important to note that our counterterrorism co-operation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding.’ That statement risked exposing Kayani and Pasha. The White House’s solution was to ignore what Obama had said and order anyone talking to the press to insist that the Pakistanis had played no role in killing bin Laden. Obama left the clear impression that he and his advisers hadn’t known for sure that bin Laden was in Abbottabad, but only had information ‘about the possibility’. This led first to the story that the Seals had determined they’d killed the right man by having a six-foot-tall Seal lie next to the corpse for comparison (bin Laden was known to be six foot four); and then to the claim that a DNA test had been performed on the corpse and demonstrated conclusively that the Seals had killed bin Laden. But, according to the retired official, it wasn’t clear from the Seals’ early reports whether all of bin Laden’s body, or any of it, made it back to Afghanistan.
Gates wasn’t the only official who was distressed by Obama’s decision to speak without clearing his remarks in advance, the retired official said, ‘but he was the only one protesting. Obama didn’t just double-cross Gates, he double-crossed everyone. This was not the fog of war. The fact that there was an agreement with the Pakistanis and no contingency analysis of what was to be disclosed if something went wrong – that wasn’t even discussed. And once it went wrong, they had to make up a new cover story on the fly.’ There was a legitimate reason for some deception: the role of the Pakistani walk-in had to be protected.
The White House press corps was told in a briefing shortly after Obama’s announcement that the death of bin Laden was ‘the culmination of years of careful and highly advanced intelligence work’ that focused on tracking a group of couriers, including one who was known to be close to bin Laden. Reporters were told that a team of specially assembled CIA and National Security Agency analysts had traced the courier to a highly secure million-dollar compound in Abbottabad. After months of observation, the American intelligence community had ‘high confidence’ that a high-value target was living in the compound, and it was ‘assessed that there was a strong probability that [it] was Osama bin Laden’. The US assault team ran into a firefight on entering the compound and three adult males – two of them believed to be the couriers – were slain, along with bin Laden. Asked if bin Laden had defended himself, one of the briefers said yes: ‘He did resist the assault force. And he was killed in a firefight.’
The next day John Brennan, then Obama’s senior adviser for counterterrorism, had the task of talking up Obama’s valour while trying to smooth over the misstatements in his speech. He provided a more detailed but equally misleading account of the raid and its planning. Speaking on the record, which he rarely does, Brennan said that the mission was carried out by a group of Navy Seals who had been instructed to take bin Laden alive, if possible. He said the US had no information suggesting that anyone in the Pakistani government or military knew bin Laden’s whereabouts: ‘We didn’t contact the Pakistanis until after all of our people, all of our aircraft were out of Pakistani airspace.’ He emphasised the courage of Obama’s decision to order the strike, and said that the White House had no information ‘that confirmed that bin Laden was at the compound’ before the raid began. Obama, he said, ‘made what I believe was one of the gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory’. Brennan increased the number killed by the Seals inside the compound to five: bin Laden, a courier, his brother, a bin Laden son, and one of the women said to be shielding bin Laden.
Asked whether bin Laden had fired on the Seals, as some reporters had been told, Brennan repeated what would become a White House mantra: ‘He was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in. And whether or not he got off any rounds, I quite frankly don’t know … Here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks … living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield … [It] just speaks to I think the nature of the individual he was.’
Gates also objected to the idea, pushed by Brennan and Leon Panetta, that US intelligence had learned of bin Laden’s whereabouts from information acquired by waterboarding and other forms of torture. ‘All of this is going on as the Seals are flying home from their mission. The agency guys know the whole story,’ the retired official said. ‘It was a group of annuitants who did it.’ (Annuitants are retired CIA officers who remain active on contract.) ‘They had been called in by some of the mission planners in the agency to help with the cover story. So the old-timers come in and say why not admit that we got some of the information about bin Laden from enhanced interrogation?’ At the time, there was still talk in Washington about the possible prosecution of CIA agents who had conducted torture.
‘Gates told them this was not going to work,’ the retired official said. ‘He was never on the team. He knew at the eleventh hour of his career not to be a party to this nonsense. But State, the agency and the Pentagon had bought in on the cover story. None of the Seals thought that Obama was going to get on national TV and announce the raid. The Special Forces command was apoplectic. They prided themselves on keeping operational security.’ There was fear in Special Operations, the retired official said, that ‘if the true story of the missions leaked out, the White House bureaucracy was going to blame it on the Seals.’
The White House’s solution was to silence the Seals. On 5 May, every member of the Seal hit team – they had returned to their base in southern Virginia – and some members of the Joint Special Operations Command leadership were presented with a nondisclosure form drafted by the White House’s legal office; it promised civil penalties and a lawsuit for anyone who discussed the mission, in public or private. ‘The Seals were not happy,’ the retired official said. But most of them kept quiet, as did Admiral William McRaven, who was then in charge of JSOC. ‘McRaven was apoplectic. He knew he was fucked by the White House, but he’s a dyed-in-the-wool Seal, and not then a political operator, and he knew there’s no glory in blowing the whistle on the president. When Obama went public with bin Laden’s death, everyone had to scramble around for a new story that made sense, and the planners were stuck holding the bag.’
Within days, some of the early exaggerations and distortions had become obvious and the Pentagon issued a series of clarifying statements. No, bin Laden was not armed when he was shot and killed. And no, bin Laden did not use one of his wives as a shield. The press by and large accepted the explanation that the errors were the inevitable by-product of the White House’s desire to accommodate reporters frantic for details of the mission.
One lie that has endured is that the Seals had to fight their way to their target. Only two Seals have made any public statement: No Easy Day, a first-hand account of the raid by Matt Bissonnette, was published in September 2012; and two years later Rob O’Neill was interviewed by Fox News. Both men had resigned from the navy; both had fired at bin Laden. Their accounts contradicted each other on many details, but their stories generally supported the White House version, especially when it came to the need to kill or be killed as the Seals fought their way to bin Laden. O’Neill even told Fox News that he and his fellow Seals thought ‘We were going to die.’ ‘The more we trained on it, the more we realised … this is going to be a one-way mission.’
But the retired official told me that in their initial debriefings the Seals made no mention of a firefight, or indeed of any opposition. The drama and danger portrayed by Bissonnette and O’Neill met a deep-seated need, the retired official said: ‘Seals cannot live with the fact that they killed bin Laden totally unopposed, and so there has to be an account of their courage in the face of danger. The guys are going to sit around the bar and say it was an easy day? That’s not going to happen.’
There was another reason to claim there had been a firefight inside the compound, the retired official said: to avoid the inevitable question that would arise from an uncontested assault. Where were bin Laden’s guards? Surely, the most sought-after terrorist in the world would have around-the-clock protection. ‘And one of those killed had to be the courier, because he didn’t exist and we couldn’t produce him. The Pakistanis had no choice but to play along with it.’ (Two days after the raid, Reuters published photographs of three dead men that it said it had purchased from an ISI official. Two of the men were later identified by an ISI spokesman as being the alleged courier and his brother.)

*

Five days after the raid the Pentagon press corps was provided with a series of videotapes that were said by US officials to have been taken from a large collection the Seals had removed from the compound, along with as many as 15 computers. Snippets from one of the videos showed a solitary bin Laden looking wan and wrapped in a blanket, watching what appeared to be a video of himself on television. An unnamed official told reporters that the raid produced a ‘treasure trove … the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever’, which would provide vital insights into al-Qaida’s plans. The official said the material showed that bin Laden ‘remained an active leader in al-Qaida, providing strategic, operational and tactical instructions to the group … He was far from a figurehead [and] continued to direct even tactical details of the group’s management and to encourage plotting’ from what was described as a command-and-control centre in Abbottabad. ‘He was an active player, making the recent operation even more essential for our nation’s security,’ the official said. The information was so vital, he added, that the administration was setting up an inter-agency task force to process it: ‘He was not simply someone who was penning al-Qaida strategy. He was throwing operational ideas out there and he was also specifically directing other al-Qaida members.’

These claims were fabrications: there wasn’t much activity for bin Laden to exercise command and control over. The retired intelligence official said that the CIA’s internal reporting shows that since bin Laden moved to Abbottabad in 2006 only a handful of terrorist attacks could be linked to the remnants of bin Laden’s al-Qaida. ‘We were told at first,’ the retired official said, ‘that the Seals produced garbage bags of stuff and that the community is generating daily intelligence reports out of this stuff. And then we were told that the community is gathering everything together and needs to translate it. But nothing has come of it. Every single thing they have created turns out not to be true. It’s a great hoax – like the Piltdown man.’ The retired official said that most of the materials from Abbottabad were turned over to the US by the Pakistanis, who later razed the building. The ISI took responsibility for the wives and children of bin Laden, none of whom was made available to the US for questioning.
‘Why create the treasure trove story?’ the retired official said. ‘The White House had to give the impression that bin Laden was still operationally important. Otherwise, why kill him? A cover story was created – that there was a network of couriers coming and going with memory sticks and instructions. All to show that bin Laden remained important.’
In July 2011, the Washington Post published what purported to be a summary of some of these materials. The story’s contradictions were glaring. It said the documents had resulted in more than four hundred intelligence reports within six weeks; it warned of unspecified al-Qaida plots; and it mentioned arrests of suspects ‘who are named or described in emails that bin Laden received’. The Post didn’t identify the suspects or reconcile that detail with the administration’s previous assertions that the Abbottabad compound had no internet connection. Despite their claims that the documents had produced hundreds of reports, the Post also quoted officials saying that their main value wasn’t the actionable intelligence they contained, but that they enabled ‘analysts to construct a more comprehensive portrait of al-Qaida’.
In May 2012, the Combating Terrrorism Centre at West Point, a private research group, released translations it had made under a federal government contract of 175 pages of bin Laden documents. Reporters found none of the drama that had been touted in the days after the raid. Patrick Cockburn wrote about the contrast between the administration’s initial claims that bin Laden was the ‘spider at the centre of a conspiratorial web’ and what the translations actually showed: that bin Laden was ‘delusional’ and had ‘limited contact with the outside world outside his compound’.
The retired official disputed the authencity of the West Point materials: ‘There is no linkage between these documents and the counterterrorism centre at the agency. No intelligence community analysis. When was the last time the CIA: 1) announced it had a significant intelligence find; 2) revealed the source; 3) described the method for processing the materials; 4) revealed the time-line for production; 5) described by whom and where the analysis was taking place, and 6) published the sensitive results before the information had been acted on? No agency professional would support this fairy tale.’

*

In June 2011, it was reported in the New York Times, the Washington Post and all over the Pakistani press that Amir Aziz had been held for questioning in Pakistan; he was, it was said, a CIA informant who had been spying on the comings and goings at the bin Laden compound. Aziz was released, but the retired official said that US intelligence was unable to learn who leaked the highly classified information about his involvement with the mission. Officials in Washington decided they ‘could not take a chance that Aziz’s role in obtaining bin Laden’s DNA also would become known’. A sacrificial lamb was needed, and the one chosen was Shakil Afridi, a 48-year-old Pakistani doctor and sometime CIA asset, who had been arrested by the Pakistanis in late May and accused of assisting the agency. ‘We went to the Pakistanis and said go after Afridi,’ the retired official said. ‘We had to cover the whole issue of how we got the DNA.’ It was soon reported that the CIA had organised a fake vaccination programme in Abbottabad with Afridi’s help in a failed attempt to obtain bin Laden’s DNA. Afridi’s legitimate medical operation was run independently of local health authorities, was well financed and offered free vaccinations against hepatitis B. Posters advertising the programme were displayed throughout the area. Afridi was later accused of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison because of his ties to an extremist. News of the CIA-sponsored programme created widespread anger in Pakistan, and led to the cancellation of other international vaccination programmes that were now seen as cover for American spying.

The retired official said that Afridi had been recruited long before the bin Laden mission as part of a separate intelligence effort to get information about suspected terrorists in Abbottabad and the surrounding area. ‘The plan was to use vaccinations as a way to get the blood of terrorism suspects in the villages.’ Afridi made no attempt to obtain DNA from the residents of the bin Laden compound. The report that he did so was a hurriedly put together ‘CIA cover story creating “facts”’ in a clumsy attempt to protect Aziz and his real mission. ‘Now we have the consequences,’ the retired official said. ‘A great humanitarian project to do something meaningful for the peasants has been compromised as a cynical hoax.’ Afridi’s conviction was overturned, but he remains in prison on a murder charge.

*

In his address announcing the raid, Obama said that after killing bin Laden the Seals ‘took custody of his body’. The statement created a problem. In the initial plan it was to be announced a week or so after the fact that bin Laden was killed in a drone strike somewhere in the mountains on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border and that his remains had been identified by DNA testing. But with Obama’s announcement of his killing by the Seals everyone now expected a body to be produced. Instead, reporters were told that bin Laden’s body had been flown by the Seals to an American military airfield in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and then straight to the USS Carl Vinson, a supercarrier on routine patrol in the North Arabian Sea. Bin Laden had then been buried at sea, just hours after his death. The press corps’s only sceptical moments at John Brennan’s briefing on 2 May were to do with the burial. The questions were short, to the point, and rarely answered. ‘When was the decision made that he would be buried at sea if killed?’ ‘Was this part of the plan all along?’ ‘Can you just tell us why that was a good idea?’ ‘John, did you consult a Muslim expert on that?’ ‘Is there a visual recording of this burial?’ When this last question was asked, Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, came to Brennan’s rescue: ‘We’ve got to give other people a chance here.’

‘We thought the best way to ensure that his body was given an appropriate Islamic burial,’ Brennan said, ‘was to take those actions that would allow us to do that burial at sea.’ He said ‘appropriate specialists and experts’ were consulted, and that the US military was fully capable of carrying out the burial ‘consistent with Islamic law’. Brennan didn’t mention that Muslim law calls for the burial service to be conducted in the presence of an imam, and there was no suggestion that one happened to be on board the Carl Vinson.
In a reconstruction of the bin Laden operation for Vanity Fair, Mark Bowden, who spoke to many senior administration officials, wrote that bin Laden’s body was cleaned and photographed at Jalalabad. Further procedures necessary for a Muslim burial were performed on the carrier, he wrote, ‘with bin Laden’s body being washed again and wrapped in a white shroud. A navy photographer recorded the burial in full sunlight, Monday morning, May 2.’ Bowden described the photos:

One frame shows the body wrapped in a weighted shroud. The next shows it lying diagonally on a chute, feet overboard. In the next frame the body is hitting the water. In the next it is visible just below the surface, ripples spreading outward. In the last frame there are only circular ripples on the surface. The mortal remains of Osama bin Laden were gone for good.

Bowden was careful not to claim that he had actually seen the photographs he described, and he recently told me he hadn’t seen them: ‘I’m always disappointed when I can’t look at something myself, but I spoke with someone I trusted who said he had seen them himself and described them in detail.’ Bowden’s statement adds to the questions about the alleged burial at sea, which has provoked a flood of Freedom of Information Act requests, most of which produced no information. One of them sought access to the photographs. The Pentagon responded that a search of all available records had found no evidence that any photographs had been taken of the burial. Requests on other issues related to the raid were equally unproductive. The reason for the lack of response became clear after the Pentagon held an inquiry into allegations that the Obama administration had provided access to classified materials to the makers of the film Zero Dark Thirty. The Pentagon report, which was put online in June 2013, noted that Admiral McRaven had ordered the files on the raid to be deleted from all military computers and moved to the CIA, where they would be shielded from FOIA requests by the agency’s ‘operational exemption’.
McRaven’s action meant that outsiders could not get access to the Carl Vinson’s unclassified logs. Logs are sacrosanct in the navy, and separate ones are kept for air operations, the deck, the engineering department, the medical office, and for command information and control. They show the sequence of events day by day aboard the ship; if there has been a burial at sea aboard the Carl Vinson, it would have been recorded.
There wasn’t any gossip about a burial among the Carl Vinson’s sailors. The carrier concluded its six-month deployment in June 2011. When the ship docked at its home base in Coronado, California, Rear Admiral Samuel Perez, commander of the Carl Vinson carrier strike group, told reporters that the crew had been ordered not to talk about the burial. Captain Bruce Lindsey, skipper of the Carl Vinson, told reporters he was unable to discuss it. Cameron Short, one of the crew of the Carl Vinson, told the Commercial-News of Danville, Illinois, that the crew had not been told anything about the burial. ‘All he knows is what he’s seen on the news,’ the newspaper reported.
The Pentagon did release a series of emails to the Associated Press. In one of them, Rear Admiral Charles Gaouette reported that the service followed ‘traditional procedures for Islamic burial’, and said none of the sailors on board had been permitted to observe the proceedings. But there was no indication of who washed and wrapped the body, or of which Arabic speaker conducted the service.
Within weeks of the raid, I had been told by two longtime consultants to Special Operations Command, who have access to current intelligence, that the funeral aboard the Carl Vinson didn’t take place. One consultant told me that bin Laden’s remains were photographed and identified after being flown back to Afghanistan. The consultant added: ‘At that point, the CIA took control of the body. The cover story was that it had been flown to the Carl Vinson.’ The second consultant agreed that there had been ‘no burial at sea’. He added that ‘the killing of bin Laden was political theatre designed to burnish Obama’s military credentials … The Seals should have expected the political grandstanding. It’s irresistible to a politician. Bin Laden became a working asset.’ Early this year, speaking again to the second consultant, I returned to the burial at sea. The consultant laughed and said: ‘You mean, he didn’t make it to the water?’
The retired official said there had been another complication: some members of the Seal team had bragged to colleagues and others that they had torn bin Laden’s body to pieces with rifle fire. The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the Seals claimed. At the time, the retired official said, the Seals did not think their mission would be made public by Obama within a few hours: ‘If the president had gone ahead with the cover story, there would have been no need to have a funeral within hours of the killing. Once the cover story was blown, and the death was made public, the White House had a serious “Where’s the body?” problem. The world knew US forces had killed bin Laden in Abbottabad. Panic city. What to do? We need a “functional body” because we have to be able to say we identified bin Laden via a DNA analysis. It would be navy officers who came up with the “burial at sea” idea. Perfect. No body. Honourable burial following sharia law. Burial is made public in great detail, but Freedom of Information documents confirming the burial are denied for reasons of “national security”. It’s the classic unravelling of a poorly constructed cover story – it solves an immediate problem but, given the slighest inspection, there is no back-up support. There never was a plan, initially, to take the body to sea, and no burial of bin Laden at sea took place.’ The retired official said that if the Seals’ first accounts are to be believed, there wouldn’t have been much left of bin Laden to put into the sea in any case.

*

It was inevitable that the Obama administration’s lies, misstatements and betrayals would create a backlash. ‘We’ve had a four-year lapse in co-operation,’ the retired official said. ‘It’s taken that long for the Pakistanis to trust us again in the military-to-military counterterrorism relationship – while terrorism was rising all over the world … They felt Obama sold them down the river. They’re just now coming back because the threat from Isis, which is now showing up there, is a lot greater and the bin Laden event is far enough away to enable someone like General Durrani to come out and talk about it.’ Generals Pasha and Kayani have retired and both are reported to be under investigation for corruption during their time in office.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s long-delayed report on CIA torture, released last December, documented repeated instances of official lying, and suggested that the CIA’s knowledge of bin Laden’s courier was sketchy at best and predated its use of waterboarding and other forms of torture. The report led to international headlines about brutality and waterboarding, along with gruesome details about rectal feeding tubes, ice baths and threats to rape or murder family members of detainees who were believed to be withholding information. Despite the bad publicity, the report was a victory for the CIA. Its major finding – that the use of torture didn’t lead to discovering the truth – had already been the subject of public debate for more than a decade. Another key finding – that the torture conducted was more brutal than Congress had been told – was risible, given the extent of public reporting and published exposés by former interrogators and retired CIA officers. The report depicted tortures that were obviously contrary to international law as violations of rules or ‘inappropriate activities’ or, in some cases, ‘management failures’. Whether the actions described constitute war crimes was not discussed, and the report did not suggest that any of the CIA interrogators or their superiors should be investigated for criminal activity. The agency faced no meaningful consequences as a result of the report.
The retired official told me that the CIA leadership had become experts in derailing serious threats from Congress: ‘They create something that is horrible but not that bad. Give them something that sounds terrible. “Oh my God, we were shoving food up a prisoner’s ass!” Meanwhile, they’re not telling the committee about murders, other war crimes, and secret prisons like we still have in Diego Garcia. The goal also was to stall it as long as possible, which they did.’
The main theme of the committee’s 499-page executive summary is that the CIA lied systematically about the effectiveness of its torture programme in gaining intelligence that would stop future terrorist attacks in the US. The lies included some vital details about the uncovering of an al-Qaida operative called Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who was said to be the key al-Qaida courier, and the subsequent tracking of him to Abbottabad in early 2011. The agency’s alleged intelligence, patience and skill in finding al-Kuwaiti became legend after it was dramatised in Zero Dark Thirty.
The Senate report repeatedly raised questions about the quality and reliability of the CIA’s intelligence about al-Kuwaiti. In 2005 an internal CIA report on the hunt for bin Laden noted that ‘detainees provide few actionable leads, and we have to consider the possibility that they are creating fictitious characters to distract us or to absolve themselves of direct knowledge about bin Ladin [sic].’ A CIA cable a year later stated that ‘we have had no success in eliciting actionable intelligence on bin Laden’s location from any detainees.’ The report also highlighted several instances of CIA officers, including Panetta, making false statements to Congress and the public about the value of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ in the search for bin Laden’s couriers.
Obama today is not facing re-election as he was in the spring of 2011. His principled stand on behalf of the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran says much, as does his decision to operate without the support of the conservative Republicans in Congress. High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no.