Luke Ryland on Boiling Frogs.

Is it possible that Grossman has been offering himself as a 'source' to various authors to spin the stories away from the truth?

[...]

Under oath (PDF), Ms Edmonds stated that Marc Grossman was on the payroll of various players in the nuclear black market and that he actively hindered efforts by the CIA to penetrate and unravel the nuclear black market. Ms Edmonds said that, in 2001, Grossman alerted his 'business associates' that nuclear consulting company, Brewster Jennings, was actually a CIA front company which was investigating the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Grossman's outing of Brewster Jennings forced the CIA to shutter the company, doing untold damage to the anti-proliferation efforts, and putting many agents and sources in danger.

In short, Marc Grossman was actually a vital player in the so-called 'AQ Khan network,' and should be facing criminal charges.

Telegraph report.

A report questions claims that the country has faced a "public emergency" every year since 2001 and calls for a complete review of counter-terrorism measures and whether they are all still justified.

The parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights also warns the Government's "narrow" definition of what it considers being complicit in torture could be unlawful.

Times article.

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, has been given 28 days to decide whether a pilot wrongly accused of training the 9/11 hijackers should be exonerated and compensated.

[...]

Mr Raissi was eventually freed in February 2002 but has been unable to resume his career as a pilot because neither the British nor US authorities have been prepared to apologise for falsely accusing him.

Asia Times article.

News that the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had reached a plea bargain with David Coleman Headley, who played a key role in the planning of the terrorist strike in Mumbai in November 2008 in which 166 people were killed, has caused an uproar in India.

The deal enables the US government to hold back from formally producing any evidence against Headley in a court of law that might have included details of his links with US intelligence or oblige any cross-examination of Headley by the prosecution.

[...] A senior Indian editor wrote on Sunday, "Headley ... was convicted on drug charges and sent to jail in the US. We know also that he was subsequently released from jail and handed over to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which said that it wanted to send him to Pakistan as an undercover agent. All this is a matter of public record. What happened between the time the US sent Headley into Pakistan and his arrest at Chicago airport a few months ago? How did an American agent turn into a terrorist? The US will not say."

Daily Pioneer article.

The doubts over the Obama Administration's bona fides are strongest in India's 'strategic community', the charmed circle of diplomats, spooks, security experts and interested politicians. The Headley case has suggested a grey zone of complicity between US Intelligence and its asset who may have turned into a double agent. It is, after all, scarcely conceivable that Headley could have undergone five spells of training in a Lashkar-e-Tayyeba camp, from late-2005 to October 2009, without being on the radar of US counter-terrorism. Circumstantial evidence points to Headley undertaking his jihadi activities with the knowledge, and possibly consent, of US authorities. Till much after the Mumbai attacks, Headley wasn't regarded as a rogue agent.

From the Raw Story.

The White House is threatening to veto a key intelligence funding bill over what it considers to be a dangerous amount of oversight on covert agencies, according to published reports.

The 2010 Intelligence Budget has gone through a number of key changes over the past few months, with House Democrats and the Obama administration butting heads over a number of provisions. Key among them for the latest White House veto threat is a provision that would allow the Government Accountability Office to investigate intelligence agencies.

[...] In a letter to the House and Senate intelligence committees, Office of Management and Budget chief Peter Orszag highlighted several areas of the bill that have intelligence officials worried, including the GAO oversight provision.

{...] Strangely, Orszag additionally called out an effort to re-investigate the 2001 anthrax attacks, which have since been blamed on the deceased government scientist Bruce Ivins. An unnamed Obama administration official told Bloomberg News that if the 2010 Intelligence Budget demands another look at the FBI's conclusions, the bill would be vetoed.

Bruce Gagnon on Global Research.

The Washington Post has introduced us to a controversy over Afghanistan war strategy. The Post reports that operations in Delaram (in the southwest) are "far from a strategic priority for senior officers at the international military headquarters in Kabul. One calls Delaram, a day's drive from the nearest city, 'the end of the Earth.' Another deems the area 'unrelated to our core mission' of defeating the Taliban by protecting Afghans in their cities and towns."

Why then are the Marines fighting in this part of the country?

[...]

When you check the maps above a clearer picture emerges. The bottom map is the proposed pipeline route to move Caspian Sea oil through Turkmenistan into Afghanistan and then finally through Pakistan to ports along the Arabian Sea where U.S. and British tankers would gorge themselves with the black gold.

Guardian article.

Gordon Brown today broke a promise to publish new guidelines for British intelligence officers dealing with the torture and abuse of detainees held abroad after MPs and peers privately warned that existing guidance was unsatisfactory.

The prime minister was locked in a bitter dispute tonight with the parliamentary body set up to monitor the intelligence agencies over his refusal to publish its criticisms of the new guidance.

From Spiegel Online.

New details are emerging about efforts by the German military and by the Defense Ministry in Berlin to conceal the full extent of the controversial Sept. 4, 2009 bombing in Kunduz, Afghanistan, which saw a German-ordered attack result in the deaths of up to 142 people, many of them civilians.

Reuters report.

A Chicago man pleaded guilty in court on Thursday to scouting targets for the 2008 assault on Mumbai that killed more than 160 people, including six Americans.

David Headley, 49, has been cooperating with U.S. investigators since his arrest in October and faces up to life in prison, said U.S. District Court Judge Harry Leinenweber.

Craig Murray comments.

There is a good article in the Guardian by Vikram Dodd on Eliza Manningham Buller's professed ignorance. Some kind people in the comments thread have pointed out that my testimony and documentary evidence directly contradicts Manningham Buller.

Vikram Dodd in the Guardian.

The claim on Wednesday from the former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, that the US hid from the UK security services the torture they were meting out to the Muslim men they had labelled terrorists, comes as a bit of surprise.

[...]

Before her retirement in 2007, then, all that Manningham-Buller needed to have been doing was read a decent newspaper or use a web search, either of which would have produced headlines and articles that would have pricked the curiosity of even the dullest of minds. Never mind those who see themselves as among the sharpest and brightest.

Counterpunch article.

It turns out, however, that the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by major news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point in the conflict.

Guardian report.

Pakistani intelligence officials today denied that an American militant suspect arrested in Karachi was al-Qaida's US-born spokesman.

Yesterday two intelligence officers and a senior government official identified the detained man as Adam Gadahn, a 31-year-old California-born convert to Islam who has appeared on videos threatening the west, including one that emerged earlier the same day.

But a senior government official and two security agents said today the suspect was not Gadahn.

Clive Stafford Smith in the Guardian.

After rubbing the government's nose in its torture cover-up in the case of Binyam Mohamed, we gave the government a chance to come clean this week in the case of Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, a man I met last week in Lahore, Pakistan. Madni was rendered through Diego Garcia to 92 days of particularly gruesome torture in Egypt, followed by time in Bagram and Guantánamo, before being belatedly cleared of any crime and sent home.

The British, sad to say, were again mixed up in all this. We suggested last August that they simply admit it.

[...]

A hearing was set for the case on 4 March 2010. At 5:21pm on 3 March, after the close of business, the government changed its tune. The government now admitted to the court that it was in "possession of documents which have a bearing … on whether any British or American authorities were mixed up in wrongdoing …"

Dave Lindorff on Counterpunch. The Scotsman story that he refers to.

Today's war in Afghanistan also has its My Lai massacres. It has them almost weekly, as US warplanes bomb wedding parties, or homes "suspected" of housing terrorists that turn out to house nothing but civilians. But these My Lais are all conveniently labeled accidents. They get filed away and forgotten as the inevitable "collateral damage" of war. There was, however, a massacre recently that was not a mistake--a massacre which, while it only involved fewer than a dozen people, bears the same stench as My Lai. It was the execution-style slaying of eight handcuffed students, aged 11-18, and a 12-year-old neighboring shepherd boy who had been visiting the others, in Kunar Province, on Dec. 26.