In 2014 when MH 370 disappeared, McRaven was the Commander of the broader U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), overseeing all special operations branches.
The USSOCOM Commander signs off on administering and deploying personnel in theater, while JSOC is the operational command, coordinated directly with the CIA and the White House.
During the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden (Operation Neptune Spear), Admiral McRaven (then head of JSOC) and CIA Director Leon Panetta worked in a unique dual-hatted structure.
Because the White House placed the operation under the CIA's covert authority (Title 50), the actual combat units bypassed USSOCOM's operational chain of command during the mission. However, the raid would have been impossible without USSOCOM's massive behind-the-scenes involvement.
As I'm sure you've heard, The Panetta Review was a secret, internal investigation ordered by Leon Panetta in 2009 and conducted by the CIA to evaluate its agency's own use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture) on terrorism suspects during the Bush administration.
It became the center of a massive political and constitutional scandal when its existence was revealed to the public in late 2013. The CIA heavily distanced itself from the document, calling it an "incomplete" draft, while federal judges sided with the CIA to rule that the documents were exempt from FOIA disclosure.
At the time, the Senate Intelligence Committee was drafting its OWN massive Senate Torture Report. The CIA publicly fought the Senate's findings, claiming that waterboarding and other brutal tactics were humane, necessary, and directly led to breakthrough intelligence (like locating Osama bin Laden).
Diane Feinstein, Harry Reid,
@MarkWarner,
@MarkUdall, and Jay Rockefeller (who PEW's Tamera Luzatto worked for before Hillary Clinton), and
@SecRubio were all on the SSCI at the time.
During a powerful 50-minute floor speech in December 2014, Senator Mark Udall fiercely condemned the CIA, stating that "the CIA is lying" about the efficacy of its post-9/11 interrogation practices and attempting to cover up the truth.
Udall revealed details of the Panetta Review. He called it a "smoking gun" because it proved the CIA’s internal findings secretly matched the Senate’s conclusions, even while the CIA publicly denied the Senate report.
He emphasized that the harsh tactics were brutal, inhumane, and completely ineffective at saving lives. He also faulted the Obama administration for failing to rein in the CIA, arguing that a deeper, endemic problem existed where the White House provided cover to help the agency hide the truth from the American public.
But John Brennan strongly rejected the committee's claim that harsh tactics yielded no actionable information. He explicitly stated that information extracted from detainees subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EITs) helped locate and kill Osama bin Laden in 2011.
Brennan also consistently refused to label the CIA's techniques as torture. He acknowledged that, in a limited number of cases, agency officers used "unauthorized" and "abhorrent" methods that should be universally condemned. However, he blamed these actions on a few isolated individuals rather than a systemic agency policy.
Retired Admiral McRaven did not issue an immediate public reaction when the Senate report was released in December 2014, but he was repeatedly thrust into the public debate regarding how the intelligence was gathered.
While McRaven always maintained that locating bin Laden was a masterclass in long-term, traditional intelligence analysis (connecting scraps of data over years), the political storm surrounding the Panetta Review forced the military and the CIA to publicly litigate which specific interrogation methods actually yielded the name of bin Laden's courier.
In 2013, it was revealed that McRaven had ordered military files regarding the bin Laden raid to be purged from Department of Defense computers and moved exclusively to the CIA. Media watchdogs accused him of intentionally shifting the records to the CIA to shield them from public FOIAs.
In January 2017, McRaven joined a coalition of 176 retired high-ranking military officers in signing a formal letter directly opposing waterboarding or other EITs. The letter explicitly stated that these techniques constitute unlawful torture under domestic and international law, adding that "torture is unnecessary" because rapport-based interrogation is vastly more effective at eliciting actionable intelligence.
In 2018, when President Donald Trump revoked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan (partly citing Brennan's handling of the 2014 torture report controversy), McRaven published a blistering op-ed in The Washington Post. He called Brennan "one of the finest public servants I have ever known" and asked Trump to revoke his own security clearance in solidarity.
💥💥💥Boom. There you have the coverup. 💥💥💥
But stay with you because it all is not quite as it seems...
My AHIs in December 2017 and April 2018 were in fact - TORTURE. It was a full-on interrogation with threats, sleep deprivation, electroshocks, torture nightmares, and even once imagery while I was awake (a woman doused in the face with gasoline by her own husband).
Did the Trump admin or some in the NSC suspect Iran was using these EIT methods & weapons? Or did this just happen to precede his decision to pull out of the JCPOA (Obama's Iran Deal). President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) in May 2018, calling it "defective at its core."
Because if Iran played a role (even if because Russia, China, or some other group could have stolen Iran's nuclear precursors or materials), then maybe that is where Trump was coming from?
I obviously don't know how bad or prevalent that the CIA (or contractor) torture in Iraq or anywhere else was, but I do know John Brennan is right that EIT can in fact elicit real intelligence. That's not even a question to me.
What is a question is WHAT DID JOHN BRENNAN OR BARACK OBAMA KNOW (if at all) about what happened to me in November 2013 and December 2015 (at PEW and in Rosslyn in plain view of Iwo Jima cameras)?!
Because VP Joe Biden made a sudden trip to Ukraine.
@GenFlynn was in Russia at a Gala with Putin.
CIA materials engineer friend visited me in the hospital.
So how high up did the cover up go? In their defense, the 2013 was not that bad. I didn't need to go to that hospital AT ALL, but my coach convinced my mom and got her upset so they made me. The psych treatment was worse than the crime. In 2015, same story. I could have just gone to bed or taken a few days off work.
I would not have been running around the city like they let me in 2018 all because no one would tell me the truth. I was told (telepathically) that if I didn't stay up for at least 48-hours, they'd torture Eric (my U.S. Navy friend). And this was after they'd already threatened him in December 2017 while I was in the hospital over Xmas.
But neither John Brennan nor Barack Obama was in office at the time. John Bolton was. And THEN guess who was appointed Secretary of State?
@mikepompeo
The same guy who wanted to drone Julian Assange for disclosing classified information about civilian drones. So do you see what someone did here?!? They were using ME - someone with zero access to classified info but surrounded by the
@DeptofWar and
@CIA @FBI to expose what was apparently happening to "dissidents" and whistleblowers.
The media covered up what happen to me. Did they really do so to "protect national security" or did they do so to protect the Obama administration? Because NO ONE was protecting me. I landed in hospital again in August 2018 shortly after he put sanctions back on Iran.
Personally I agree with CIA's decision to highly classify methods that WORK - but I vehemently DISAGREE with them being used on innocent civilians who ARE NOT COMBATANTS NOR IN A COMBAT ZONE. That is a war crime. And somebody is responsible for covering it up. Sadly that includes my own ex-employers.
That makes McRaven a not-so-neutral party here if he has had any exposure to these weapons, EITs, their usage, or how they have been hidden from Congress. And that also gave some people one hell of a strong reason to make sure Trump would never find out what they did.
Did they really think that Bill Burns was just going to wrap it all up under Biden, pin it on Russia, and case closed? I understand why Russia is one of the main suspects because it was my initial thought too, but I'm not sure all these AHIs were the same actors because it definitely was not all the same weapons or techniques.
So it was wrong for Trump to revoke
@JohnBrennan's clearance if he never spoke to him about all this, but it is also wrong if Obama was read-in on critical intelligence to know that Trump wasn't!
If I was CIA/FBI's guinea pig (as it seems I was because instead of admitting I was a victim of these assaults and espionage they seemed to use me to try to gather more intelligence), it should have 100% been my choice to put myself in this level of danger and to give up my privacy.
But it wasn't. The honeytraps were not my choice unless it was done with the good intent of finding me an actual potential HUSBAND. I thought that's what finally they actually did until about summer 2022. That's when it started to go really wrong.
Oddly that lines up with when Jack Smith raided Mar-A-Lago. Then Covington LLP (where my friend and witness worked as a lobbyist since June 2015) represented HIM (2025) instead of helping me. My friend had already quit in February 2024 but other people at that firm know me.
If it was an effort to protect my privacy (and the officers who honeytrapped me) then that is appreciated. But if is a COVERUP this is really f'd up. Either way, a delay is a delay. David Grusch told Congress this issue was urgent in July 2023 because it was!!!
Then what does PEW do? Fire me instead of help?! And they didn't even tell me about Grusch. Who is pulling all the strings??
If
@usairforce had not fired my friend in 2023 maybe he wouldn't have got to go work for
@NORADCommand, which is where it would seem most needed. But also
@USSpaceForce did nothing to protect ME nor care about MY life and my running career. And when he retired, they threw it in my face again. Terrible cover.
Literally the *only* excuse to do protect him but not me is if I am an actual hostage. Considering they shot me twice just 2-3 weeks before I visited him (2021 & 2023), this may be the case. But that's why
@USNavy and the
@FBI should have protected me in the FIRST PLACE.
They didn't. And now I'm learning from Sarah Gamm that the UAP Task Force was all about protecting pilots. They are the top priority along with Navy officers due to where these weapons appear, but that isn't the only people at risk! So who has actually been investigating me?
And who can negotiate my freedom please? Because that would mean I can actually talk to my old friends (if anyone still even cares, it has been so many years).
The right call in 2015 was not the right call in 2018. But what they did to me in July 2014 to forcibly separate me from my entire running team was also a terrible call. So was not letting me do any weekend runs with any of my favorite training partners after 2018. And so was letting GEORGE go to the Olympic Trials and someone quite possibly suiciding my then teammate, after which no one wanted to travel or stay there in Atlanta with me.
The media is supposed to expose civil rights abuses - not cover them up. Or were they being threatened with the Espionage Act if they tried to report that these AHIs even happened?! Notice they couldn't talk about the mental health abuses in the legacy media either.
The only one to get any criticism at all has been the PIW, but the psychological torture with weapons in 2017 and 2018 happened in two different northern VA INOVA locations (not Loudon), which no one wants to admit.
The media also did not report on the local running club discrimination I faced after this that closely paralleled what Kara Goucher and even Mary Cain went through. I did not want to go public, but that didn't mean I didn't deserve any help at all,
@FBI! And trust me when I say many competitive D.C. runners know about it, because this investigation hurt their running and social networks too!
But even if the media can't tell the truth because the CIA or whomever in charge won't let them, they can at least recognize THEY DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH CRITICAL INFORMATION to make such definitive judgments about Trump's decisions and criticism.
That said, I think Brennan and Trump need to work this one out. I think they might have even been on the same page in 2018 if only things hadn't gone so bad once my friend Major Ueki died on November 22, 2019.
I REALLY NEEDED TO KNOW if my best Air Force friends would be there in the end for me or not by March 2023. Because I deserved someone to be there. Ten years of isolation, lack of privacy, and the manipulation of my personal life was way too much. But I would have held on just fine even for a few more YEARS if they just told me they would.
But no one would tell me anything. Instead they burned me in silence like the ones before, and then when I started yelling at them (via private text) they just tell me I have "mental health issues." I'm sorry but no. If you can't plan a covert operation that protects women you need better planners and definitely better CI policies.
Layth got mad at me when I once said maybe Trump was helping me and I just didn't know. But I also hope maybe he was helping me when I didn't know. But I really don't know who my real friends are right now. I just know they asked me to do things I know they can't. And so I'm really tired of waiting for answers that may never come and wasting my life alone.
Please release some NDAs
@POTUS. Because I don't think we can get the real truth any other way.
Good luck with your book,
@GallaudetTim. If at the end of this it needs some revisions or a sequel, I will be more than happy to help.