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My Lunch With the CIA
Lunch with the Central Intelligence Agency is always interesting, although five gorillas built like brick shithouses staring at me intently didn’t help my digestion.
Obama’s pick of Leon Panetta as the agency’s new director was controversial because he didn’t come from an intelligence background- upsetting the career spooks at Langley to no end. But the President thought a resume that included 16 years as the Democratic congressman from Monterey, California, and stints as Clinton’s Chief of Staff and OMB Director, was good enough. So when Panetta passed through town on his way home to heavenly Carmel Valley for the holidays, I thought I’d pull a few strings in Washington to catch a private briefing.
The long term outlook for supplies of food, natural resources, and energy is becoming so severe that the CIA is now viewing it as a national security threat. Some one third of emerging market urban populations are poor, or about 1.5 billion souls, and when they get hungry, angry, and politically or religiously inspired, Americans have to worry. This will be music to the ears of the hedge funds that have been stampeding into food, commodities, and energy since March. It is also welcome news to George Soros, who has quietly bought up enough agricultural land in Argentina to create his own medium sized country.
Panetta then went on to say that the current monstrous levels of borrowing by the Federal government abroad is also a security issue, especially if foreigners decide to turn the spigot off and put us on a crash diet. I was flabbergasted, not because this is true, but that it is finally understood at the top levels of the administration and is of interest to the intelligence agencies. Toss another hunk of red meat to my legions of carnivorous traders in the TBT, the leveraged ETF that profits from falling Treasury bond prices!
Job one is to defeat Al Qaida, and the agency has had success in taking out several terrorist leaders in the tribal areas of Pakistan with satellite directed predator drones. The CIA could well win the war in Afghanistan covertly, as they did the last war there in the eighties, with their stinger missiles supplied to the Taliban for use against the Russians. The next goal is to prevent Al Qaida from retreating to other failed states like Yemen and Somalia. The Agency is also basking in the glow of its discovery of a second uranium processing plant in Iran, sparking international outrage, and finally bringing Europeans to our side with sanctions against Iran.
Cyber warfare is a huge new battlefront. Some 100 countries now have this capability, and they have stolen over $50 billion worth of intellectual property from the US in the past year. As much as I tried to pin Panetta down on who the culprits were, he wouldn’t name names, but indirectly hinted that the main hacker-in-chief was China. This comes on the heels of General Wesley Clark’s admission that the Chinese cleaned out the web connected mainframes at both the Pentagon and the State Department in 2007. The Bush administration kept the greatest security breach in US history secret to duck a hit in the opinion polls.
I thought Panetta was incredibly frank, telling me as much as he could without those gorillas having to kill me afterwards. I have long been envious of the massive budget that the CIA deploys to research the same global markets that I have for most of my life, believed to amount to $70 billion, but even those figures are top secret. If I could only manage their pension fund with their information with a 2%/20% deal! I might even skip the management fee and go for just the bonus. The possibilities boggle the mind!
Panetta’s final piece of advice: don’t even think about making a cell phone call in Pakistan. I immediately deleted the high risk numbers from my cell phone address book.
I have been pounding the table with these guys for four decades to focus more on the resource issue, but they only seemed interested in missiles, planes, tanks, subs, and satellites. What a long strange trip it’s been. Better take another look at the Market Vectors agricultural ETF (DBA), their agribusiness ETF (MOO), as well as my favorite ag stocks, Monsanto (MON), Mosaic (MOS), Potash (POT), and Agrium (AGU). Accidents are about to happen in their favor.
For more iconoclastic and out of consensus analysis, please visit me at www.madhedgefundtrader.com. And don’t forget the secret knock before entering!
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"More people are profiting more than ever before from the intellegence biz. It's a bull market."
AMEN!
The CIA is the gang that can't shoot straight. It's always one step forward and one step back. Bin Laden and every big time crazy were on their payroll at one time or another. Todays sucess will be tomorrows failure. If you didn't know better you might swear that was the plan. I don't think so, mostly. It's best to think of the CIA as being like Citi. Sure they may go broke every 20 years or so but you can't live without em. (truth be told Citi probably is the CIA)
The world cannot be controlled and people cannot be stopped from trying to control it.
Most of their money goes to contractors now. More people are profiting more than ever before from the intellegence biz. It's a bull market.
CIA = controlled information agency
there's really nothing that intelligent about it.
nothing like declaring everything a national security interest in order to expand the beast of the cia - the same group who with the joint chiefs of staff planned, executed, and covered up the murder of john kennedy because they thought he was a traitor.
us intelligence also brought us the 9/11 debacle.
www.ae911truth.org
Wow! For the benefit of those of us who lack your cutting edge access and intellect, please enlighten us with the rationale behind both of these events.
Hey...I've got a great idea for you! Go to Staten Island where all of the debris from the WTC is piled, and take twenty or so random samples of it to "prove" the existence of nanothermite. Of course maybe you heard that the CIA built the world's most sophisticated micro-sifter in the Amazon jungle and shipped the entire debris pile there to remove every last trace of the nanothermite and the ONLY COPY ON THE FACE OF THE FRIGGIN EARTH of the secret Enron Chronicles, but you might get lucky.
For the sake of humanity I do hope you fail to propagate your gene pool.
I've tried to sift through your criticism, but it is so thick with hard data, that it takes forever to get through. And you're right on a couple of other fronts. The "rationale" is impossible to fathom. History provides us with no examples. Our government (or any for that matter) has never lied to us, never hurt us, never stolen from us, never brought us into war on false pretenses, never planned or executed a false flag operation, never exploited others for natural resources, never taken land by force and never violated any consitutional principles. But you have learned one thing at the foot of the master, if someone disagrees with you or obstructs your goals, simply remove them from the gene pool.
http://www.the-peoples-forum.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=16057
These are the same guys that did not see the fall of the Soviet Union coming.
I wonder what Madame Le Moderateur would say. I would trust her over a bunch of spooks anyday.
.. moderateuse ;)
the muslims, only became a serious problem, after palestine, was illegally given the the khazars, and the western world, started forays into their back yards, and front yards.they're not fighting democracy, and freedom, they are fighting for self determination.
Nonsense. Islam has been on a conquest to rule the world since it's formation. The koran is equal parts battle manual and social guide.
"muslims only became a serious problem after palestine was illegally given..."
And what then do you believe was the purpose of the Crusades if the muslims were not a "serious problem" across Europe? Besides, I seem to recall that happening a *few* years before "palestine was illegally given."
Please, do enlighten us further with your unique understanding of history.
I suggest doing a little reading on the subject of Wahhabism.
"Job one is to defeat Al Qaida"
If we could kill every Al Qaeda member in existence today we'd have replacements by tomorrow night.
Al Qaeda aint the problem, they're a byproduct like CO2 of Islam-which is the real problem, like the religions of Socialism & Communism none can tolerate any competition.
We need a fascist ideology against fascist ideologies.
Look out folks. You can be stopped anywhere and time.
How 'bout we go back to some old technology and drive an old Chevy without On Star?
...and as in the TV commercial, they can just flash the lights!
Yep, only cars you buy are pre 1980 cars... they're cheap to fix and actually even cheaper to mod to use biofuels or electric cells.
"they're cheap to fix and actually even cheaper to mod to use biofuels or electric cells."
puts a whole new twist on 'cash for clunkas' doesn't it?
The mod seed makers have been supressing it valiantly for years, but opinion is building that GMOs might cause massive amounts of long term, chronic human disease.
There is no long term research, or any 3rd party research on this stuff. The mod seed makers could be the new cigarette companies with legal liabilities?
If the US Government is now in charge of all healthcare, you can bet your ass they'll have the power to shut the stuff down. Or have the mod seed makers already bought off the admin. at the potential expense of the citizenry?
Ferts should still be fine.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16747
Great piece. thanks.
I loved the part about G Sorros buying a countries worth of land in Argentina. You could make a movie from this stuff.
Lay low, take care of your family and friends. Mind your own business, but reload your own brass, and pray you have the nerve to shoot the first motherfucker who knocks on your door and demands to inventory your firearms.
LOL You're a dead man walking if you are waiting until they are knocking on your door! Best be gett'n to know your neighors such that its a block party when that time comes!
http://proliberty.com/observer/20071002.htm
If you haven't decided yet you will piss yourself instead of doing something.
I thought by now that Panetta would know that the CIA is Al-Queda, and the primary profiteers in the heroin trade. Taliban heroin =130 metric tons a year. CIA and US. Military Afghan heroin since 2001 = 15,000 metric tons a year. More lies coming from liar mouths.
Author -- I must compliment you on your stenography and have visions of you furiously scribling, underlining, bolding and highlighting Panetta's propaganda monolog.
Stale, stale, conventional partyline stuff. no news. And really, are you even following the latest CIA news
7
"The CIA could well win the war in Afghanistan covertly..."
Agency win war in Afghanistan!! I spit out my coffee. The head of station and 6 CIA agents were just blown up on a US base. If CIA is intrinsic to US campaign success (yes CIA thinks so) we are in heaps of trouble.
next time you meet with CIA, just ask for a a file attachment to upload. Save yourself some time.
Turner: Do we have plans to invade the Middle East?
Higgins: Are you crazy?
Turner: Am I?
Higgins: Look, Turner…
Turner: Do we have plans?
Higgins: No. Absolutely not. We have games. That's all. We play games. What if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way to destabilize a regime? That's what we're paid to do.
Turner: So Atwood just took the games too seriously. He was really going to do it, wasn't he?
Higgins: A renegade operation. Atwood knew 54/12 would never authorize it, not with the heat on the company.
Turner: What if there hadn't been any heat? Suppose I hadn't stumbled on their plan?
Higgins: Different ballgame. Fact is, there was nothing wrong with the plan. Oh, the plan was all right, the plan would've worked.
Turner: Boy, what is it with you people? You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?
Classic scene from "Three Days of the Condor" which was said to be fiction but was too close to the truth for many.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073802/
At the end, Turner tells Higgins (while standing in front of the NY Times building) that he's told his story to the paper and it will be published. Of course, Higgins then asks Turner "How do you know they will publish it?" Good question. The biggest lie of them all in America is that we have a "free" press and anything worth investigating is investigated.
Zero Hedge stands in stark testimony to that fallacy.
"'Three Days of the Condor', which was said to be fiction but was too close to the truth for many."
Who the fuck is "many"? I guarantee not a single one of those "many" is in the Agency. You write that sentence with the implication that you know something. You do not. In such matters, you are completely ignorant, though among the woefully uninformed you have all the makings of a spokesman, and among the paranoid you surely can be a star.
So everything anyone in the government says is a lie, and everything anyone anywhere writes about the Agency---especially if it is negative---is gospel even if the writer made up every word or footnoted someone who had previously made up every word?
I guess if it's on the internet, it MUST be true, eh? Love to see your "drug expose" that made your friend shudder.
Hey, at least the job is exciting. It just riles me on occasion that the average American pinhead is possessed of such idiotic beliefs as evidenced by so many of the conspiratorialists on this site, who haven't the brains to think through the utter absurdity of their claims. So many of you think you know "the truth". You don't know shit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eovei355l4o
You're taking us out to lunch, right? The Carlyle Group gets those briefings but then that's MIC's Private Equity Fund. Flight-by-night hedge funds? I doubt it. Or perhaps a Mockingbird.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
This post sounds like his wife read him Stewert Woods as a bedtime story.
I would only believe the meeting actually happened if SpongeBob and Captain Crab were present otherwise it is the product of a very creative and frustrated artist.
Oh goodie, just what we need. Another war in Africa.
The oil and water issues have been on the CIA's radar for years now. So I'll give
this article a big yawn. No issue and/or reason would better explain
the US war escalation in Afghanistan than these.
However, if anyone wants to know the real
story behind all this, then the only source you
need is this one:
http://www.energybulletin.net/
Btw, MOnsanto is a scourge on the earth that deserves to
die a cruel and painful death. They are the worst
of the worst and admitting buying their stock only
proves your ignorance.
Madhedgefondtrader s lunch with the CIA.
And then he make it public via ZH.
LOL, haha, haha
You are watching too much TV.
Nice piece of fiction but not nearly as creative as Sorcha Faals (some pentagon spook) crap over at Whatdoesitmean.com
-MobBarley
I regard this information as much as I regard research reports from GS. Whoever is putting out the information has an agenda. Hell, water rights are more important than food, but Panetta didn't talk about that, did he? Oh, wait, there is no centralized, global water trading pit....thanks for being Panetta's tool.
Higgins: It's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?
Joe Turner: Ask them?
Higgins: Not now - then! Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!
"Terminator seeds"...another way to control the "little people" of the world, in the guise of increasing agricultural production.
Best stock: Monsanto???
So there is no blood on your hands then, you are just a share holder?
Lets face it, the terminator seed is the worst/most destructive invention of man since the atomic bomb.
Monsanto is behind so much genetic 'modification', and yet, we should buy shares because maybe we will make a few percentage points while they destroy the world and its food supply?
Behind GS, Monsanto is possibly the most sinister corporation in the world.
Herd,
Please, can you respond with as many rational details that support your position on Monsanto?
Regards,
...unexpectedly...
studies have been done by monsanto, and evaluated by outside scientists, who conclude, that some GMO crops cause organ damage, and contribute to the bee colony disorder. what do you expect, when you engineer a seed, that produces its own insecticide?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16747
Here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNezTsrCY0Q
You can find the other parts on there too, or the whole thing on google video.
Fairly sinister stuff.
One sided spin from folks with an agenda. As someone who used to compete with Monsanto in the seed business, and is still involved with agriculture, I can tell you they are no more sinister than any other company trying to maximize profits. They gave farmers exactly what they wanted - a way to farm more efficiently on tight margins. We use WAY less pesticides now than we did 20 years ago, and produce much more food. And the terminator gene is still just talk. It is not in the marketplace (at least around here), nor would any of my farm customers get anywhere close to it. Let's not get our panties in a bunch over this when we've got Gold Mansachs to worry about...
So, we must kill fewer Afghani civies today then we did 20 years ago:
http://mindbodypolitic.com/2010/01/05/doug-valentine-cia-killings-spells...
You have obviously never sat across the table from their legal team after deciding not to buy their seeds anymore....
Yophat:
True, but I cannot imagine why would Monsanto would ever spend money on a "legal team" in the situation you describe. Their seeds are F-1 hybrids, i.e single use. Please elaborate. Maybe a saleperson, but definetly not a legal team.
Regards,
...unexpectedly...
[they are no more sinister than any other company trying to maximize profits]
LOL
LOL,
Why is it nobody "intends" something to happen but still it does?
I love how people think that just because they're moral and the people that they work with (in a large company, I'm talking the people in their immediate circle) are also (apparently) moral, that everyone in the company, including the senior executives, are just as right minded and moral.
When you take a close look at companies like Enron, you find that the vast majority of the people who worked for the company were morally upstanding individuals and each would have sworn on a bible that everyone else working for the company was the same. In fact, they would be insulted if you said otherwise.
Yet out of this assumption there occasionally comes a massive scandal and the people who work there are even more surprised than anyone else to find that they didn't work with equally moral people. Surprise! Immoral people are usually excellent liars and will charm the pants off of you. That's how they get away with their immoral behavior.
Yet in order for people to live their lives basically divorced from anything other than a superficial understanding of what's going on around them, they must basically suspend disbelief and assume that others are watching the ball for them. When people shift their own responsibility to others to watch their own p's and q's, they must also isolate themselves from the emotional risk of being wrong in their superficial assumptions.
So they adapt a belief system that involves them being smart or aware enough to see evil when it lurks and to convince themselves they aren't working or otherwise involved with evil people. This is why they will tell you that they work for a company that is honest. To think otherwise would force them to either spend some time looking closely at their employer (which means being ready to quit if they find something seriously wrong) or brush it off as ridiculous and not give it much thought.
BTW, this also carries over to the government.
I don't believe a word of this piece, starting with the claim that this anonymous stock trading newsletter peddler got a sit down with Leon Panetta. "I thought I'd pull a few strings in Washington to catch a private briefing" (with the director of the CIA). Yeah, that happens every day, just pull a few strings, the CIA Director always has time in his schedule for a chat.
Panetta is so powerful that he has 5 bodyguards at lunch for a confidential discussion with somebody who is then going to post a summary of the conversation on the internet.
Yesterday this clown's appeal to authority was that he was a former colleague and pal of Byron Wien's. Today he's upped the ante.
What a joke.