Dozens of CIA Agents at Benghazi Attack, Being Kept Quiet w/ Monthly Polygraphs | Hacker News Reader

Dozens of CIA Agents at Benghazi Attack, Being Kept Quiet w/ Monthly Polygraphs

thelead.blogs.cnn.com

44 pointswikiburner16 comments

Whenever the CIA gets brought up I can't help but mention their complacency in the global drug trade.

In the 70s we learned that the CIA was trafficking heroin from Southeast Asia via Air America, an airliner they covertly owned and operated. [1]

We also learned from programs like Project MKUltra that the CIA was forcibly administering LSD on American citizens. [2]

Operation Midnight Climax was a sub-project of MKUltra. The CIA hired prostitutes who were instructed to lure back clients to government safe houses in San Francisco, New York City, and Marin. There they would be injected with a wide range of substances such as LSD and watched behind a one-way glass.

These are not conspiracy theories. They are well-documented facts that everyone seems to forget about. If your interested in this stuff I suggest you read the books The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade [4] and Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond [5].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_South...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Midnight_Climax

[4] http://www.amazon.com/The-Politics-Heroin-Complicity-Global/...

[5] http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0802130623

I wish PG would make flagging more transparent somehow. Maybe with icons, where users could be made aware of the flagging, and have the opportunity to counter or unflag when it's abused. I'm pretty sure flags aren't intended to be downvotes, but that seems to be how they're being used of late.

I'm seeing more and more cases where stories are getting quite a few upvotes, and there are interesting conversations going on without a hint of controversy, and boom - flagged off the front page, most likely because of a small but vocal minority who take special exception to a story for one reason or another.

This is a pretty interesting story, and definitely relevant given all of the intelligence news of late, but it seems to be getting flagged to death because the word "Benghazi" has become so politicized.

Update: And... Dead. Way to go HN!

That's kind of what I've been saying all along:

Define "political post", if you find it undesirable, but almost nobody seemed to care about that.

Also: Maybe the entire discussion needs to be taken elsewhere, to a place which actually favors the discussion of solutions, by providing the necessary tools, maybe a mindmap kind of structure. We might be about to witness the end of real democracy in the western World and there seems to exist no "hub"-like site or platform which provides a total overview of all issues, all potential solutions and all opinions about them.

Maybe The Guardian would be in a good position to take on this role.

Or maybe somebody here has a little time to make this their "pet project"?

EDIT: OK, the post was just killed officially. Not sure what to think about that.

Well as of late, a lot of devs/designers have been coming together for this: http://sina.is/task-force/

The github is here: https://github.com/tfrce

Right now, we're about to get started on a project to get more attention at recruiting fairs at colleges, through adhoc methods, the github will be here on it: https://github.com/tfrce/Big-Brother-on-Campus/

It isn't surprising though, the state apologists usually come in and stomp their influence in some form or manor on HN if the information cannot be disputed easily with a couple of handwaves.

Edit: * /me looks at [Dead] * comme ça…

> In exclusive communications obtained by CNN, one insider writes, "You don't jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well."

> Another says, "You have no idea the amount of pressure being brought to bear on anyone with knowledge of this operation."

I think the implication is pretty clear here.

Reminder: If you plan on applying to an NSA related job (with the goal of keeping an eye on them), learn to play the polygraph, before you go to the interview.

"The goal of the questioning, according to sources, is to find out if anyone is talking to the media or Congress."

Media: okay. I can sort of see why. Congress: What the ... are they hiding?

I thought polygraph tests were a very old technology proven to be unreliable.

It is an approved technology by the US government. It is mostly used as an interrogation tool as opposed to a lie detector. Having only worked with interrogators I only know second hand how it is used, from my understanding it usually used in a good cop/bad cop scenario (such as, "The machine is saying you are lying, let me help you out and tell me what happened.") I am sure there much more knowledgeable people then myself on this forum. Short answer: as a lie detector it is unreliable,but as a interrogation tool fairly effective.

From what I've understood polygraphs aren't actually lie detectors but 'emotional distress' detectors.

That means you don't know whether what's being said is true or not, but you do know when you've found something worth digging deeper into...

Pretty much. They've been sold as lie detectors based on the notion that stress == lies, this is obviously incorrect. The same notion is also what make voice stress analysis unreliable as well.

They work especially well if people think they work.

I think they're considered not reliable enough to count as a testimony in court for sure. That's not to say they don't have uses in other places. The intelligence community uses them quite often. The most common use most folks see is their application in getting and maintaining security clearances. They're part of a larger screening process in that case.

Tedious. If something is on CNN then it is not likely to be 'investigative', is it? You have to read a CNN 'exclusive' as 'why are they trying to tell us this now?'

Also wrong with these type of articles is that they further the myth that the U.S. secret service agencies are omnipotent and omniscient in a way that Hollywood would have you believe. In reality they are not.

Anything by Jake Tapper, wherever he his at the moment (was last at ABC), is very likely real news. Here's Wikipedia's bio on him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Tapper

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