What's Inside The CIA's 'Black Site' Database?

What's Inside CIA's 'Black Site' Database? And Were Senate Staffers Allowed to See? -- Eli Lake, Daily Beast

The CIA and the Senators overseeing the agency are nearly at war. And it all revolves around the contents of a secret database documenting the CIA's clandestine prisons.

At the center of CIA director John Brennan’s first major clash with the Senate is a massive database containing millions of pages of secrets about the agency's "black site" prison networks and what the CIA euphemistically labeled “enhanced interrogation.” The rest of the world called it torture.

The CIA created the database in 2009 so that staffers from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence could review the documents at an agency facility as it prepared its own report ontorture. According to one Senate staff member familiar with the database, the computer network contains the cables, spot reports, interrogation logs and other details of the CIA's "black sites," a network of prisons around the world where captured al Qaeda operatives would usually end up for questioning before being sent to Guantanamo Bay.

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My Comment: I thought civilian authority always overruled government organizations like the CIA .... apparently not.

A Look At The Pentagon’s $59 Billion ‘Black Budget’

Read the Pentagon’s $59 Billion ‘Black Budget’ -- Brandy Zadrozny, Daily Beast

The U.S. military has billions of dollars’ worth of secret projects it doesn’t want you to know about. Too bad—here they are.

President Obama proposed a $495.6 billion defense budget yesterday, almost half a billion dollars leaner than the previous year’s. But there’s still one category where the Department of Defense is not scaling back: its secret projects.

According to the budget documents, the DoD plans to spend around $58.7 billion on classified programs (fondly known as its “black budget”) in fiscal year 2015, a 1.5 percent increase from the previous year.

But what exactly is the “black budget?”

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My Comment: $58.7 billion in black projects .... that's a lot of money.

Top Secret Aircraft That Officially Do Not Exist

From Urban Ghosts Media:

There is nothing more fascinating in the aviation world than the “black projects” – aircraft programs that are so secret that even those with the highest security clearance have no idea they exist. But occasionally the veil of secrecy is accidentally lifted, offering a fleeting glimpse into this shadowy world. Here we take to the air with six of the world’s most classified aircraft (assuming they exist, that is!).

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Black Ops And Secret Technologies

Under Cover The Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel, an unmanned reconnaissance drone, is the most recent aircraft to emerge from the military's "black" budget. Nick Kaloterakis

Black Ops: Secret Military Technology in the Age of Terrorism -- Popular Science

Every year, tens of billions of Pentagon dollars go missing. The money vanishes not because of fraud, waste or abuse, but because U.S. military planners have appropriated it to secretly develop advanced weapons and fund clandestine operations. Next year, this so-called black budget will be even larger than it was in the Cold War days of1987, when the leading black-budget watchdog, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), began gathering reliable estimates. The current total is staggering: $58 billion—enough to pay for two complete Manhattan Projects.

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My Comment: What caught my attention was the following sentence ....

Next year, this so-called black budget will be even larger than it was in the Cold War days of1987, when the leading black-budget watchdog, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), began gathering reliable estimates. The current total is staggering: $58 billion—enough to pay for two complete Manhattan Projects.

$58 billion .... now that is serious money.