Faux News, Faux Fair, Faux Balanced, Faux Guest

Fox News Regular Indicted Over Allegedly Concocting Bogus CIA Past:

A frequent guest on Fox News claimed he worked 27 years for the CIA but in fact never worked for the agency, according to a federal indictment announced Thursday.

Wayne Shelby Simmons was arrested following his indictment by a federal grand jury for fraud, accused of lying about his employment at agency, the U.S. Attorney's Office of Eastern Virginia announced. Simmons was often a guest on Fox News and touted as a national security analyst. He is being charged with major fraud against the United States, wire fraud, and making false statements to the government, the U.S. Attorney's Office press release said.

Let's Hunt Down And Kill Oxymoronicy

It is hard for me to understand when there is great uproar and anger over proposed spending by our government (the health care debate), yet little uproar and anger over actual spending by our government. I realize that this is not entirely true, yet it sure seems to be. (Basically what I am trying to say is: Maybe giving a new idea a chance is a good thing. Maybe ideas that have been given a chance and don’t seem to work should be stopped. By the way, I am upset and angry that so much money went to Wall Street, just like the party people. However, I do think that the economy did, and perhaps still does, need some stimulus from the government. Only time will tell.) Do the partiers with tea get upset about the military budget? Do they get upset with actual military ‘death panels?’

The party people who seem drunk on something other than tea do not seem upset by the government's inability to be militarily intelligent. Are any of them upset by our inability to find Osama bin Laden? If so, why no parties about how pissed they are about it?

I propose two changes effective immediately. From this day forward the Central Intelligence Agency shall be called the Central Ignorance Agency, and the phrase military intelligence shall be replaced with the phrase military ignorance.

I also propose that the funding for these two groups be cut to something appropriate to the change in their names, and that the surplus be directed toward funding universal health care.

What is the harm in at least trying to fix our health care crisis? Is something/anything better than nothing? Or is nothing what we want?

Please Remind Me Who The Good Guys Are

From UK government suppressed evidence on Binyam Mohamed torture because MI6 helped his interrogators by Tim Shipman and Melissa Kite:

Material in a CIA dossier on Mr Mohamed that was blacked out by High Court judges contained details of how British intelligence officers supplied information to his captors and contributed questions while he was brutally tortured, The Sunday Telegraph has learned.

Intelligence sources have revealed that spy chiefs put pressure on Mr Miliband to do nothing that would leave serving MI6 officers open to prosecution, or to jeopardise relations with the CIA, which is passing them "top notch" information on British terrorist suspects from its own informers in Britain.

The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed's genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, "is very far down the list of things they did," the official said.

Another source familiar with the case said: "British intelligence officers knew about the torture and didn't do anything about it. They supplied information to the Americans and the Moroccans. They supplied questions, they supplied photographs. There is evidence of all of that."

Religious Duty

When praying isn’t enough for your god, try acquiring a few nukes to appease and glorify him. He'll love it.

From CIA: Bin Laden doesn't oversee day-to-day al Qaeda operations:

Osama bin Laden is no longer believed to be the head of al Qaeda's day-to-day operations, but the United States' capturing or killing him would still have a powerful effect on the organization, CIA Director Michael Hayden said Tuesday.

"Bin Laden said repeatedly that he considers acquisition of nuclear weapons a religious duty, and we know that al Qaeda remains determined to attack our country in ways that inflict maximum death and destruction," he said.

The Shadowland Of Virtual Invisibility

From Secretive Agency Under the Spotlight by Joby Warrick:

Soon after accepting the post of CIA director two years ago, Michael V. Hayden set an unusual goal for his scandal-beset agency: virtual invisibility.

"CIA needs to get out of the news as source or subject," he said in an internal memo to his staff in 2006.

Two years later, that goal is far from met, as Hayden has tacitly acknowledged. In a retirement ceremony last month marking the end of his military career, the Air Force general stressed the need for the agency to "stay in the shadows" while ignoring what he called the "sometimes shrill and uninformed voices of criticism."

Read the rest here.