Retrial of Joshua Schulte begins for allegedly leaking CIA “Vault 7” documents to WikiLeaks

The second federal trial of former CIA software engineer Joshua Schulte on espionage charges began on Tuesday in a New York court with opening statements by the prosecution and the defendant telling the jury he was innocent and the victim of a political witch-hunt.

Schulte, 33, was charged in June 2018 with 13 counts and accused of stealing and leaking a trove of CIA cyberespionage tools known as “Vault 7” to WikiLeaks, which published them in March 2017. His first trial in 2020 ended with a hung jury on eight espionage counts, but Schulte was convicted on a lesser contempt of court charge and another charge of making false statements to the FBI.

Schulte, who is representing himself in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, told the jury that the evidence will “absolutely prove my innocence.” He said the leak of 7,000 pages and millions of lines of malware code, developed by the CIA for hacking smartphones and other consumer devices such as smart TVs, was the result of the government’s “wildly insecure” intelligence servers.

— source wsws.org | Kevin Reed | 15 Jun 2022

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A Whistleblower’s Agony

A C.I.A. whistleblower languishes awaiting trial in a federal prison under inhumane conditions and almost nobody is paying attention.

Joshua Schulte is a former C.I.A. hacker, one of those computer geniuses whose job it is to work his way into the computer systems of our country’s enemies in support of some of the most highly-classified operations the C.I.A. carries out.

The government believes that Schulte was a malcontent who released to WikiLeaks in 2017 the equivalent of 2 billion pages of top secret C.I.A. data with code names like Brutal Kangaroo, AngerQuake and McNugget.

These programs, collectively known as Vault 7, were custom-made techniques used to compromise Wifi networks, hack into Skype, defeat anti-virus software and even hack into smart TVs and the guidance systems in cars. They were the C.I.A.’s modern-day crown jewels. One senior C.I.A. officer likened the revelations to “a modern-day Pearl Harbor.”

The C.I.A. accused Schulte of stealing the data in 2016 and of sending it to WikiLeaks in 2017. He was eventually charged with 13 felonies, mostly related to the Espionage Act.

— source scheerpost.com | John Kiriakou | Jun 15, 2022

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The secret wars of the CIA

John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA’s secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned. Stockwell’s book In Search of Enemies, published by W.W. Norton 1978, is an international best-seller.

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“I did 13 years in the CIA altogether. I sat on a subcommittee of the NSC, so I was like a chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like 3-star generals) Henry Kissinger, Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA, making the important decisions and my job was to put it all together and make it happen and run it, an interesting place from which to watch a covert action being done…

I testified for days before the Congress, giving them chapter and verse, date and detail, proving specific lies. They were asking if we had to do with S. Africa, that was fighting in the country. In fact we were coordinating this operation so closely that our airplanes, full of arms from the states, would meet their airplanes in Kinshasa and they would take our arms into Angola to distribute to our forces for us….

What I found with all of this study is that the subject, the problem, if you will, for the world, for the U.S. is much, much, much graver, astronomically graver, than just Angola

— source libcom.org | wojtek | Dec 11, 2012

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Why He Left The CIA

WE HAVE NOT MET and will not have the opportunity of working together, as you are coming into the Central Intelligence Agency as I am leaving. Although I am disassociating myself from the Agency, I have read with considerable interest about your appointment and listened to some of your comments. You have clearly committed yourself to defending the Agency from its detractors and to improving its image, and this has stirred a wave of hope among many of its career officers. However, others are disappointed that you have given no indication of intention or even awareness of the need for the internal housecleaning that is so conspicuously overdue the Agency.

You invited Agency officers to write you their suggestions or grievances and you promised personally to read all such letters. While I no longer have a career interest, have already submitted my resignation, numerous friends in the DDO [Deputy Directorate for Operations] have encouraged me to write you, hoping that it might lead to measures which would upgrade the clandestine service from its present mediocre standards to the elite organization it was once reputed to be. While I sympathize with their complaints, I have agreed to write this letter more to document the circumstances and conditions which led to my own disillusionment with CIA.

First, let me introduce myself. I wa until yesterday a successful GS-14 with 12 years in the Agency, having served seven full tours of duty including chief of base, Lubumbashi; chief of station, Bujumbura; officer in charge to Tay Ninh Province in Vietnam, and chief, Angola Task Force. My file documents what I was told occasionally, that I could

— source washingtonpost.com | Apr 10, 1977

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The CIA guides Greece’s post-war plan to “kill the communists”

In 1936, Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas became a pro-Nazi dictator with the support of King Geórgios II. Metaxas’ death in 1941 bolstered the Greek Communist Party’s (KKE) anti-Nazi resistance. The KKE had established ELAS, the People’s Liberation Army, to fight the occupying Nazis. Until 1943, ELAS was initially trained by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), a top-secret unit designed to train European paramilitaries. Indicative of the power of Greek leftism, ELAS’s political wing, the National Liberation Front (EAM), boasted 2 million members.

The British Foreign Office fought to restore Geórgios II, explicitly citing his anti-left credentials. Working with Cyprus’s fascist battalion X, the Brits set up a new army unit, the Hellenic Raiding Force, to hunt and kill ELAS members. The Syntagma Square demonstrations in 1944 against the British and fascists ended in a massacre of 25 protestors, including a young child. A year later at the Yalta/Crimea Conference, Stalin agreed to allow Britain and the US to occupy Greece in exchange for Bulgaria and Romania. In 1947, Britain asked the US for support to purge leftist ideologies from the Greek public’s mind.

— source thegrayzone.com | T.J. Coles | Apr 20, 2022

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Down the JFK Rabbit Hole

Oliver Stone
Empire Files

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Lithuania pays compensation to al Qaeda suspect at CIA jail it hosted

Lithuania has paid 100,000 euros awarded by the European Court of Human Rights to a suspected high-ranking al Qaeda figure in Guantanamo Bay who was found to be held in a secret CIA prison in Lithuania almost two decades ago, a government lawyer said. Washington’s so-called rendition programme is still shrouded in secrecy, more than a decade after it ended. Washington has acknowledged it held al Qaeda suspects in jails outside U.S. jurisdiction, but it has not provided a full list of locations.

The Strasburg-based court said in May 2018 Lithuania hosted a CIA jail between February 2005 and March 2006, and that a stateless Palestinian, Zayn Al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, also known as Abu Zubaydah, had been held in Lithuania, which continues to deny its culpability in the case. Zubaydah was captured in 2002 in Pakistan and has been held by the United States since then without charges. He has been in the American naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for 15 years.

— source reuters.com | Jan 11, 2022

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Lithuania to sell secret U.S. ‘rendition’ site

A huge steel barn outside Lithuania’s capital, whose long corridor and windowless rooms with carpets and soundproof doors once served as a CIA detention centre, will soon go on sale.

Washington’s so-called “rendition programme”, under which suspected Islamist militants from conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were spirited to jails outside U.S. jurisdiction, remains shrouded in secrecy more than a decade after it ended.

European Court of Human Rights has confirmed that the 10-room building, in snowy pine forest in the village of Antaviliai outside Vilnius, was used by the CIA to hold terrorist suspects from 2005-2006.

It was known as “Project No. 2” or “Detention Site Violet”.

— source wtvbam.com | Andrius Sytas | Jan 24, 2022

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CIA Funded Experiments On Danish Orphans For Decades

An extraordinary Danish Radio report exposed how scores of children in Denmark, many of them orphans, were subject to CIA-funded experiments for at least two decades. The purpose of these activities remains unknown, as authorities continue to actively suppress the truth of what happened in the 1960s and early 1970s. The startling exposé is based on the work of documentarian Per Wennick, who was one of 311 participants in the mysterious trials. The children never learned the objective of the tortuous assessments to which they were exposed, even after they ended.

Such trials are in conflict with the Nuremberg Code, which enforces the vital requirement of obtaining consent from human subjects in all medical research.

According to Wennick, when he was 11 years old, he was asked at an authoritarian orphanage in Copenhagen if he wanted to try something “fun” at the local municipal hospital. It

— source thedissenter.org | Jan 26, 2022

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Secret ‘CIA-funded’ group linked to UK ministers

Two current ministers and two recent justice ministers have been funded by an opaque transatlantic right-wing group which includes members of the intelligence community. Declassified finds eight current Conservative parliamentarians are associated with the organisation.

The group, known as Le Cercle, was described by former Conservative minister Alan Clark in his diaries as “a right-wing think (or rather thought) tank, funded by the CIA, which churns Cold War concepts around”.

Le Cercle has existed since the 1950s but has no public presence, and has never revealed its funders. Even the group’s existence is only occasionally disclosed. It is unclear how influential Le Cercle – which is believed to meet twice a year, once in Washington DC and once elsewhere – actually is.

Declassified has found that eight current Conservative parliamentarians are associated with the group. Two current ministers – business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng and his deputy

— source declassifieduk.org | Matt Kennard, Mark Curtis | 9 Dec 2021

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