Tom Fingar Wins Sam Adams Award 242


The following press release is from the Oxford Union:

The Oxford Union will be hosting the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award presentation on 23 January 2013. The ceremony will feature several individuals well known in intelligence and related fields, including, via video-stream, remarks by Julian Assange, winner of the Sam Adams award in 2010.

The annual award presentation provides a rare occasion for accolades to “whistleblowers” — conscience-driven women and men willing to take risks to honor the public’s need to know.

This year’s Sam Adams recipient is Professor Thomas Fingar, who is now teaching at Stanford University. Dr. Fingar served from 2005 to 2008 as Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

In that role, Dr. Fingar oversaw preparation of the landmark 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, in which all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded with “high confidence” that Iran had halted its nuclear weapon design and weaponization work in 2003. The Estimate’s key judgments were declassified and made public, and have been revalidated every year since.

Those pressing for an attack on Iran in 2008 found themselves fighting uphill. This time, thanks largely to Dr. Fingar and the professional intelligence analysts he led in 2007, intelligence analysis on Iran was fearlessly honest. A consummate intelligence professional, Fingar would not allow the NIE to be “fixed around the policy,” the damning phrase used in the famous “Downing St. Memo” of July 23, 2002 to describe the unconscionable process that served up fraudulent intelligence to “justify” war with Iraq.

We are delighted to be welcoming several previous Sam Adams awardees, including Coleen Rowley, Katharine Gun, Craig Murray, Thomas Drake, and Julian Assange (by video-stream) — as well as other Sam Adams associates from both sides of the Atlantic, including Ray McGovern, Brady Kiesling, Davdi McMichael, Elizabeth Murray, Todd Pierce and Ann Wright.

We feel that the Oxford Union, dedicated to upholding freedom of speech and providing a platform for all points of view, is a fitting venue. The traditional acceptance speech by Dr. Fingar will be followed by briefer remarks by a few previous Sam Adams awardees. They will be followed by Julian Assange who will speak for 20 minutes immediately before the Q&A, during which the audience will be invited to put questions on any topic to any of the presenters.

Assange is clearly a figure who generates controversy for reasons ranging from the allegations made against him in Sweden, to the perceived recklessness of some WikiLeaks activities. We would therefore encourage those who disagree with him, or with any of our other speakers, to participate in the Q&A session.

Last but not least, we are happy to note that Dr. Fingar, will be with us for the entire term. Professor Fingar has just begun teaching a course at the University of Oxford on global trends and transnational issues, as part of Stanford’s Bing Overseas Studies Program. He will also give guest lectures and public talks while here at Oxford (January-March 2013).

Professor Fingar holds a PhD in political science from Stanford. His most recent book is Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence Analysis and National Security (Stanford University Press, 2011).


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242 thoughts on “Tom Fingar Wins Sam Adams Award

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  • Paul

    Aaron Swartz should be mentioned for his attempt to free up JSTOR and his hounding which resulted in a tragic young life being lost!

  • Nextus

    Thanks for the notification, Craig. If I’m in Oxford that day, I’ll call in to cheer you on.

  • Arbed

    Truthout article that ties together all the disparate threads regarding the CIA cocaine smuggling plot against Ecuador’s president Correa which, of course, we all first heard about here in Craig’s blog. Craig gets mentioned quite a lot in this. There’s also a VERY intriguing parallel between Swedish accuser Anna Ardin’s association with CIA-backed activity in Cuba and those of the woman accusing Chilean whistleblower Patricio Merybell in the Chile/Ecuador subplot; the recent extraordinary rendition of UK and Swedish citizens to the US from Djbouti; and the rape smears/attempted extradition of Julian Assange – all covered here.

    A Tale of Cocaine-trafficking, Sex crime charges, Extraordinary rendition and Julian Assange:

    http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/a-tale-of-cocaine-trafficking-sex-crime-charges-extraordinary-rendition-julian-assange/

    Also details Craig’s and other whistleblowers’ stories of similar sex crime smears, and Craig’s speech outside the Ecuadorian embassy back in the summer. Recommended reading.

    And here’s an update from Sweden on the Djbouti rendition story, courtesy of Rixstep. It’s starting to get a LOT of attention in the Swedish MSM. (It’s almost like journos there don’t dare touch on the Assange case, but they are starting to cover this one properly, so the parallels are becoming clear.) Swedish intelligence was following the two Swedish guys for four years but promptly closed their investigation (and therefore any reason to bring them back to Sweden) as soon as the US request came in. Ditto the timing of the UK’s stripping of citizenship from the third suspect looks a bit suspicious:

    http://rixstep.com/1/20130112,00.shtml

    Cage Prisoners also tweeted this link last night, along with the message “Does the #extradition of Swedish national M.Yusuf to US set a dangerous precedent for #julianAssange?”.

    European terrorism suspects secretly held in New York under false names:

    http://www.cageprisoners.com/learn-more/news/item/5758-european-terrorism-suspects-secretly-held-in-new-york-under-false-names

  • Mark Golding - Children of Conflict

    A particularly stirring and moving appreciation Craig; I too look forward to a fearless Thomas Fingar esp his thoughts on global trends, notably his reasoning and interpretation of the bilateral relationship between China and the United States.

  • A Node

    The case of Tony Farrell, chief intelligence analyst for S. York-shire police force for 12 years, is not as well known as it should be in whistleblowing circles.

    He was asked in 2010 to prepare a terrorist threat assessment for that force. As a result of research he had done into 9/11 and then 7/7, he found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to tell his bosses that Western intelligence services were the biggest threat. They claimed he was having mental problems but psychiatrists gave him a clean bill of health. He was asked 3 times to rewrite his report, despite the chief Constable admitting to him that he might very well be correct in his assessment. When he refused, he was sacked for holding beliefs incompatible with his job.

    http://newsworldwide.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/top-police-intelligence-analyst-challenges-the-govt-77-narrative/

  • lwtc247

    Will the learned Prof Fingar address global usury and global pan-Zionism? Let’s hope so.

  • Mark Golding - Children of Conflict

    The United States in its union with Israel has embroiled itself in labyrinthine conflicts that have constrained the country’s economic growth. Together with the sub-prime debt critical situation it turned into a financial crisis affecting the globe.

    High sovereign debt, a weak economic recovery, and high unemploymeny has forced America to rethink it’s role in Asia especially as China’s GDP has now reached $7.3 trillion, accounting for 48% of US GDP, and ranked second in the world. Given China’s territory, population and economic size, this development is unprecedented in recent history.

    American’s sense of being “threatened” has become acute. A public opinion poll conducted by the Pew Research Center showed that 49% of Americans polled supported a tougher attitude towards China than a stronger relationship with China (42%), explaining why in the US election last year both candidates were relying on tough China rhetoric.

    The world does not trust an aggressive and deceptive America that relies on a ‘scout party’ of drones and CIA mercenaries funded by drug running to smash countries deemed a threat to Israel and world dominance. That path leads nowhere. Today attempts to involve West Africa in the North is another ‘war on terror’ plan which in my opinion will disrupt China-Africa ties that have matured over the past decade, substantially altering the make-up of Africa’s political and economic milieu.

    Africa’s importance to China has increased, accounting for 3.8% of China’s exports, from 2% in 2002. African imports from China expanded by 23,7% last year to $73bn.

    President Jacob Zuma and Chinese President Hu Jintao at a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the nuclear security summit that took place in Seoul both agreed that BRIC emerging economies “form an important part of common development of the world, which is conducive to a more balanced world economy, more reasonable international relations, more effective global governance and more durable world peace.”

    I hope the Oxford Union platform will open a new juncture for improved relations with China and her friends Russia and Iran. The threat of nuclear confrontation is more than the wave of a red flag – it is the final collapse of mother earth.

  • Mary

    Now Obama has announced that he is going to support the French in Mali. The escalation in yet another war has been rapid.

  • Kempe

    “The case of Tony Farrell, chief intelligence analyst for S. York-shire police force for 12 years, is not as well known as it should be ”

    The question isn’t why was he sacked but how anyone so naive and gullible got the job in the first place.

    Of course there may be something else at play here; maybe he has a book to sell.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    This is not exactly on-topic, but people must’ve noticed that the second Al Hilli thread is continuing and is now well beyond 11,000 posts (and that thread followed-on from another on the same subject which extended to 8,000 posts). This is a fascinating and exciting phenomenon which, as far as I am aware, has not happened before on this blog.

    It has become a loculated entity, a pulsating blog-within-a-blog, a insistent, low-pitched thrum of huddled voices, almost an instrumental drone. Few of the commentators who regularly contribute there also post in other areas of the site. One of the previous commentators on those ‘Al Hilli’ threads has even died since it began.

    It has developed the cyber-dimensionality of the blog along a sort of spatial, somewhat geopoetic axis. There have been many other posts about equally controversial subjects and yet they have not resulted in that type of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ elongation – so, why this one? Interesting, blogologically-speaking. Schlobalob… Be.

  • David

    Why is it naive and gullible to assert that a rapacious war mongering military industrial complex is a greater threat than the usual bogeymen trotted out by media?

    Is it because it isn’t true or just that he should have kept quiet about the truth?

  • Mark Golding - Children of Conflict

    In a war David, any war, people are sacrificed to save the many. It is a military doctrine and I have detailed that axiom here with facts from David Hart Dyke, captain of HMS Coventry recalling the fatal attack during the Falklands war.

    Just like the folks on that ship we, the people, are pawns, sacrificial lambs and victims in another war, a global war on terror. We too can be sacrificed, lost to an arcane contempt for life from bellicose dark actors commanded by the unknown faces of world sovereignty, dominion and financial supremacy.

  • David

    Mark

    I’m not sure this chap was sacrificed to save the many. He was sacked because he wasn’t following the global elite’s script. IOW he spoke the truth.

    I agree that ordnance will often be sacrificed to protect what is considered more vital, but I don’t accept that civilians will be sacificed to protect the many. It’s more common that they’ll be sacrificed to protect the few!

    Anyway, here’s Pilger’s long interview with Assange:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9A26WOvkMzo#!

  • Villager

    In early use, the word “naive” meant natural or innocent, and did not connote ineptitude. (Wiki)

    I like that colour of naive.

    BTW, Suhayl what does Schlobalob mean? I tried googling the word but it bowled me a googly.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Villager (at 10:56pm on 14.1.13), yes, as in the style known as ‘Naive Painting’.

    “Schlobalob” comes from the original 1960s BBC children’s TV series, ‘Bill and Ben, Flowerpot Men’. The two flowerpot men used to say the nonsense word repeatedly, it was their monicker. The new versions don’t seem to say it and there’s no helium-inhaled “Wee-eed” either. It was a word-play on “blogalogically-speaking”, which itself was a sort of composite neologism from ‘psychologically-speaking’ and ‘blog’. Blogalog, schlobalob…

    Brings back memories of ‘Clockwork Orange’.

  • A Node

    A Node:

    “The case of Tony Farrell, chief intelligence analyst for S. York-shire police force for 12 years, is not as well known as it should be ”

    Kempe:

    “The question isn’t why was he sacked but how anyone so naive and gullible got the job in the first place.
    Of course there may be something else at play here; maybe he has a book to sell.”

    My question is “Why did you say that, Kempe?” You made two points and both are provably stupid.

    (1) “how [did] anyone so naive and gullible got the job in the first place.” Please list your qualifications to call him that. He was head of intelligence analysis for 12 years and you, you, … er … well you tell me.
    (2) “maybe he has a book to sell.” He hasn’t. All you had to do was put {Tony Farrell + book} into Google and you wouldn’t have made yourself look stupid.

    In the last thread you smeared Sizer but couldn’t back it up when your ‘evidence’ was questioned. If you can’t support your book smear of Tony Farrell with real evidence, I won’t be the only one here who concludes that your purpose here is sinister.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Surely, a genuine whistleblower has to produce new information – or at least some actual evidence to support confirmation of suspicions.

    From what I’ve read over the web so far – I accept that I may have missed something, big or small – in the case of Mr Farrell, he seems to have done neither, but simply seems to have reproduced material from a variety of other people’s sites. As Principal Intellligence Officer, one would have thought that he would be privy to whatever subterfuges the nexus of the Police/MI5 get up to. There has got to be a lot of such info. on which someone in his position as a whistleblower would have been able to blow the whistle. Yet where is this information, where are these revelations – information and revelations that might lend at least some credibility to what he, and others, are alleging?

    I think that we need to have a high threshold of skepticism for this kind of thing. It would be a good way of discrediting lots of oppositional figures, a sort of honey-trap of the mind, for a figure to emerge and then later make all of those who supported him seem mad, gullible, or both. So in the end, it would discredit alternative hypotheses and discredit future real whistleblowers too. But perhaps I have become too cynical.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    So, it’s qualitatively different from, say, Craig Murray, who, when he makes an assertion, generally provides the evidence to back it up (eg. over Fox-Werrity) and who admits when he’s got it wrong (eg. Steel). Craig has a scientific approach, in other words. It is not sufficient simply to say, “I believe…” for people to believe one. I don’t see any of that from Mr Farrell. Instead, I see material about Freemasons and all the usual stock characters of those who, it seems to me, seek to conflate genuine crime – war-crimes, black sites, torture, kidnapping, wars of aggression, the arms industry, etc. – with such tropes. Look, we know the international banking system is screwing most of the world’s population, we know the arms industry is killing millions of people and making a killing and we know that the MIC has acquired immensely dispropotionate – not absolute – power within the US decision-making process. The USA/NATO/WTO/IMF behaves an a set of imperial entities. None of this is news to many of us. But to bring in Satanism and so on, as Mr Farrell seems to be doing, only serves to debunk serious political analysis and oppositional organising. It’s like Icke et al. I am deeply suspicious.

  • David

    Suhayl

    He doesn’t have to be a whistleblower. His sacking and the facts surrounding it are interesting in and of themselves. He’d asked for more time to investigate the Intel services to see what threat they posed to the people of South Yorkshire but was unable to complete his investigation because he was suspended.

    But I agree that one has to be careful of Greeks bearing gifts.

  • A Node

    Suhayl Saadi
    I take your point about whistleblowing, maybe that wasn’t the best description for him. I also take your point about the dangers of taking such people at face value. There are indeed traps laid for the unwary.

    However, in the end, each of us have to weigh the clues and make a judgement. I’ve twice watched Tony Farrell in long interviews, the kind that our sound-bite media don’t do any more. I believe he is genuine. I don’t believe he could act so well and so consistently. However, I appreciate that’s a subjective opinion and won’t help you make your mind up.

    Incidentaly, did anyone else here used to watch Edge Media, channel 200, in particular the On The Edge programme. Every Thursday night, 8.00 pm, a 2 hour interview with someone with an “alternative view”. Theo is a great interviewer and over 2 hours you could be confident that the guest had nowhere to hide. Anybody can turn up at a studio with a couple of soundbites and a smile, but that won’t get you through 2 hours. I’d love to see Cameron try it.

  • Villager

    David, thanks for Pilger’s interview with Assange. Am surprised that it has such few (88,000) views.

    Arbed, i’m watching it now. I intuit that the main wikileaks imperatives of justice and transparency need to be got more out there again. I know you’re doing your bit.

    Lets hope there isn’t a Women’s Campaign here to block him from speaking.How silly they were in Cambridge.

  • Mark Golding - Children of Conflict

    Hi Suhayl – have you been buried in the Al-Hilli thread? I know your penchant for the intriguing.

    Al-Hilli had sound nuclear knowledge gained from the “Osiris”-class nuclear reactor from France and supplied to Iraq. He worked at the Rutherford Appleton research centre in the 1980s. I believe he was quietly helping Iran overcome some technical difficulties in their nuclear program particularly metal erosion and for that his card was marked. The RAF guy recorded the deed by a motor-cyclist in black (remember Iran’s scientists…) . Simple but very sad. Love to Saad’s two surviving daughters.

  • Arbed

    Hi Villager, unfortunately there is a protest planned against Assange speaking at the Oxford Union. The usual sorry mixture of presumed-guilt and woeful ignorance of the facts of the case:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/01/09/julian-assange-speak-oxford-university-protests_n_2440339.html?utm_hp_ref=uk

    Backed to the hilt, of course, by the Guardian:

    https://twitter.com/santaevita/status/289082517594710016

    (note: this woman’s twitter account was set up literally one day before this tweet, so seemingly specifically for this protest. Talk about jumping on bandwagons…)

    She refuses to look at any ‘source’ about the case other than David Allen Green’s Legal Myths article in the New Statesman, despite having now been warned that it contained serious factual errors and was later (partially) corrected by Glenn Greenwald, here:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/24/new-statesman-error-assange-swedish-extradition

    Never mind… what can you do with people like this? As the protest is planned for both Oxford and outside the Ecuadorian embassy, a counter-protest is also planned (a dignified silent vigil). Here’s a factsheet that’s been produced to give out at the counter-protest if anyone fancies shuffling down to Hans Crescent, SW1 on 23 January:

    http://wikileaksetc.blogspot.ch/2013/01/fact-sheet-julian-assange-his-asylumand.html

  • Arbed

    Thanks Mark – I shall be there myself, so it will be great to meet any others from here who are going.

  • Noid

    Surely no one gets this prize from a bunch of retired CIA spooks without serving either the CIA or a CIA-affiliated agency. So what agency does Assange work for? Or CM?

  • English Knight

    A Node said “In the last thread you smeared Sizer but couldn’t back it up when your ‘evidence’ was questioned. If you can’t support your book smear of Tony Farrell with real evidence, I won’t be the only one here who concludes that your purpose here is sinister.”

    Kempe is an extremely highly cunning hasbaric sayanim who needs to be bid sayonara from this blog, mebbe Craig tolerates his now crass attempts at fooling us dumb goyim, as eye-openers on how the devil of spin operates!

    Witness this post (or words thereabout)in the al-Hilli Blog ” mebbe al-hilli was targeted due to his over active anti-israel blog posting activity” Meaning anti-israel blog posters beware mossad will get ua ass too!

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