Over the years, the American Central Intelligence Agency has gained a reputation for being the most far-reaching, sophisticated, and effective government intelligence agency on the planet. At the same time, the CIA has also become known for its incredible paranoia and propensity to undertake costly, sometimes illegal, and often downright absurd projects in the name of gaining an edge on the competition. From spy cats to psychic hippies, the following are ten of the weirdest spy programs the government has proposed and funded over the years.

As President Barack Obama's attack on Syria appears to have been delayed for the moment, it is remarkable that Secretary of State John Kerry was meeting, on Sept. 11, with one of his predecessors, Henry Kissinger, reportedly to discuss strategy on forthcoming negotiations on Syria with Russian officials. The Kerry-Kissinger meeting, and the public outcry against the proposed attack on Syria to which both men are publicly committed, should be viewed through the lens of another Sept. 11 ... 1973.

On that day, 40 years ago, the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was violently overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup. Gen. Augusto Pinochet took control and began a 17-year dictatorial reign of terror, during which more than 3,000 Chileans were murdered and disappeared - about the same number killed on that later, fateful 9/11, 2001.

Allende, a socialist, was immensely popular with his people. But his policies were anathema to the elites of Chile and the U.S., so President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state and national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, supported efforts to overthrow him.

Kissinger's role in plotting and supporting the 1973 coup in Chile becomes clearer as the years pass and the documents emerge, documents that Kissinger has personally fought hard to keep secret. Peter Kornbluh of the nonprofit National Security Archive has been uncovering the evidence for years, and has recently updated his book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. Kornbluh told me that Kissinger was "the singular most important figure in engineering a policy to overthrow Allende and then, even more, to embrace Pinochet and the human-rights violations that followed." He said that Kissinger "pushed Nixon forward to as aggressive but covert a policy as possible to make Allende fail, to destabilize Allende's ability to govern, to create what Kissinger called a coup climate."

Syrian President Bashar Assad said Thursday that his government would put its chemical weapons under international supervision within a month after it signs the UN Chemical Weapons Convention, but only if the United States stops its "policy of threats."

"Syria will send an appeal to the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in a few days. [The appeal] will have the technical documents necessary to sign the agreement," Assad said in an interview with Rossiya-24 television.

"These are standard procedures, and we will follow them," he added, speaking in Arabic with a Russian translation.

Assad emphasized, however, that Syria would not follow such procedures unilaterally while facing US threats and international support of rebel forces.

The NSA regularly shares raw US intelligence data with Israel without even removing information about American citizens, according to the latest revelation published by the Guardian. The report is based on a document leaked by Edward Snowden.

On Tuesday, September 11, the Guardian published a previously undisclosed document which revealed top-secret policies in place since 2009 that are used to share personal phone and Internet data pertaining to United States citizens with American ally Israel.

The document, a five-page memorandum authorized by the National Security Agency near the beginning of US President Barack Obama's first administration, outlines a deal between the NSA and Israel's SIGINT National Unit, or ISNU.

The Syria researcher and commentator who was cited by US leaders who have called for military action against the Middle Eastern country has been fired from her Washington-based think tank for lying about her qualifications.

"The Institute for the Study of War has learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O'Bagy does not in fact have a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University," the research group announced in an online statement Wednesday. "ISW has accordingly terminated Ms. O'Bagy's employment, effective immediately."

Both US Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator John McCain referenced an editorial she had written in the Wall Street Journal during congressional hearings during which they argued in favor of US military strikes against Syria. The 26-year-old wrote that "contrary to many media accounts, the war in Syria is not being waged entirely, or even predominantly, by dangerous Islamists and Al-Qaeda die-hards."

During a short interview with Germany's DW News last Monday, former US National Security Adviser and Trilateral Commission co-founder Zbigniew Brzezinski commented on the growing inefficiency of war due to the increased political knowledge of the public.

"Given the contemporary reality of what I have called in my writings 'Global Political Awakening,' a policy of force based primarily on Western and in some cases former colonial powers does not seem to me a very promising avenue to an eventual solution to the regional problem," said Brzezinski, referring to the situation in Syria.

Despite Brzezinski's noted long-term relationship with Obama which included a top foreign policy adviser position, Brzezinski denied any specific knowledge of his plans regarding Syria, saying that if the administration has a strategy, it's a "very well-kept secret."

My thanks to Michele Casati for the Heads-up on this blistering three minute speech by UKIP leader Nigel Farage in the European Parliament. He lambasts EU supremo Jose Manuel Baroso for the stupidity of the Green Agenda pursued by the E.U.'s leadership over the last decade, and the fuel poverty and industrial flight it has caused. Baroso's following two minute hate is well worth a watch too. In it he claims the scientific consensus on global warming is now up to 99%. It'll be 104% next year and all targets for the five year plan will have been met...


Keep fighting everyone. We are winning.

A comparison between what we are told and what we can see, with our own eyes. World Trade Center 7 collapsed after having been damaged by fire and falling debris, but the collapse looks very much like a controlled demolition.

Domenico Quirico and Pierre Piccinin de Prata were kidnapped in April

The pair say that they overheard a conversation on Skype in English

They claim one of the men identified himself as a Free Syria Army general

The pair were released and returned to Italy and Belgium on Sunday

An Italian journalist and a Belgian writer who were held hostage in Syria for five months have claimed that they overheard a conversation suggesting that rebel forces were behind a chemical weapon attack on Damascus and not President Assad's army.

Domenico Quirico and Pierre Piccinin de Prata were kidnapped while working in the war torn country in April.

The pair were released on Sunday night and have now said that they heard a conversation between their captors in English on Skype in which they allegedly revealed that rebels launched the attack to prompt Western forces to intervene.

More than 1,100 who rushed to the aid of those stricken on 9/11 have been diagnosed with cancer directly related to the September 11 attacks.

According to the Center for Diseases Control's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), 1,140 people have been officially classed as suffering from a WTC-related cancer and that number is expected to grow.

'There are more cases out there, because we just know of the people in our government-funded medical programs, not those who have been treated by their private doctors,' said Dr. Jim Melius, chairman of the WTC Responder Medical Program, to the New York Daily News.

The NIOSH figures are as recent as August and a Mount Sinai Medical Center study also found a 15 percent higher cancer rate among 9/11 responders than those who were not exposed to the toxic cloud that bellowed out from Ground Zero.

'Because of the carcinogens in the air at ground zero, people who were exposed are vulnerable. And with cancer, there is a delay,' said Dr. Melius to the New York Daily News.