THE SECRET NESTS
PART I - THE CIA
Sightings from The Catbird Seat
~ o ~
August 20, 2009
AP source: CIA hired
contractor to kill al-Qaida
Associated Press Writer Pamela Hess
WASHINGTON – The CIA hired private contractors from Blackwater USA in 2004 as part of a secret program to kill top-level members of al-Qaida, but a spokesman says it never resulted in the capture or killing of any terrorist suspects.
Former Rep. Porter Goss was CIA director at the time, and the contract ended during his time in office, according to a former senior intelligence official and another person familiar with the program. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Thursday the CIA broke the law by failing to notify Congress about the program earlier, her strongest statement yet condemning the agency's actions.
The CIA began the hit squad program shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but it never became fully operational.
CIA Director Leon Panetta terminated the program in June upon learning of it, then informed the congressional intelligence committees in an emergency briefing the next day. CIA spokesman George Little said the program yielded no successes.
The New York Times, citing unidentified current and former government officials, said Blackwater executives helped with planning, training and surveillance for the program.
The officials told the Times that the CIA's use of an outside company for a potentially lethal program was a major reason Panetta called the emergency congressional briefing. The Times first reported Blackwater's involvement late Wednesday on its Web site.
Blackwater, a North Carolina company now known as Xe Services, has come under heavy criticism for its alleged role in a September 2007 shooting in Baghdad's Nisoor Square that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead.
It was unclear whether the CIA had planned to use the contractors to capture or kill al-Qaida operatives or just to help with training and surveillance. Government officials said bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations, the Times reported.
The Times reported that the CIA did not have a formal contract with Blackwater for this program but instead had individual agreements with top company officials, including founder Erik D. Prince.
The revelation of the program created a small political firestorm on Capitol Hill. The House Intelligence Committee in June launched an investigation to determine whether the CIA broke the law by not informing Congress about the secret program as soon as it was begun.
The program had several lives under four successive CIA directors: George Tenet canceled it during his tenure because it never produced results. His successor, Goss, restarted it and inked the Blackwater contracts. Michael Hayden, Goss' successor, downgraded the program from a planned covert action to an intelligence gathering activity. Panetta drove the final stake into the program in June.
Hayden, speaking Thursday at a panel discussion at the National Press Club, said he was initially puzzled by the urgency and excitement surrounding Panetta's briefing to Congress, knowing what he did already about the program. He said he believes Panetta called the emergency meeting because of the political sensitivity of the program rather than concerns about its legality. Hayden would not discuss details of the still-classified effort.
Jack Devine, a 32-year veteran of the CIA's clandestine operations office, said Thursday that the government should be extremely cautious about outsourcing lethal and sensitive CIA operations, in part because those are important capabilities the spy agency should be developing in-house, but also because it looks bad if the operation becomes public.
"If it won't pass the giggle test, you don't want to be involved in it," Devine said.
Feinstein said Thursday she believes the intelligence agencies are using too many contractors for duties that are inherently the responsibility of the government.
The CIA regularly uses contractors for intelligence analysis and operations, Hayden told Congress last year. Contractors participated in the secret harsh interrogations of terrorist suspects, he said. Contractors are no longer allowed to conduct interrogations, Panetta told Congress in April.
More than a quarter of the U.S. intelligence agencies' employees are outside contractors, hired to fill in gaps in the military and civilian work force. About a quarter of them conduct intelligence collection and operations, according to data released last year by the office of the director of national intelligence.
The CIA lost about 25 percent of its manpower and budget in the post-Cold War years, so when the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks happened the agency was forced to hire a large number of contractors to plug gaps while it recruited more personnel. About half the CIA is made up of officers hired since the attacks.
Calls to Xe spokeswoman Stacy DeLuke were not immediately returned.
* * * * *
SECRETS FROM THE CATBIRD’S NEST!
(S-h-h-h ... don’t tell anybody)
* * * * *
July 20, 2009
Judge: CIA committed fraud
in eavesdropping case
By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON – A federal judge has ruled that CIA officials committed fraud to protect a former covert agent against an eavesdropping lawsuit and is considering sanctioning as many as six who have worked at the agency, including former CIA Director George Tenet.
According to court documents unsealed Monday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth referred a CIA attorney, Jeffrey Yeates, for disciplinary action. Lamberth also denied the CIA's renewed efforts under the Obama administration to keep the case secret because of what he calls the agency's "diminished credibility" and the "twisted history" in the case.
The judge also criticized CIA Director Leon Panetta, saying he's given conflicting accounts about what should be revealed in the case. The ruling led to the unsealing Monday of more than 200 unclassified versions of classified filings in the 13-year-old case.
"The court does not give the government a high degree of deference because of its prior misrepresentations regarding the state secrets privilege in this case," Lamberth ruled.
The court case comes amid increased scrutiny and allegations of lying against the spy agency.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in May that she believes the CIA lied to her about its harsh interrogation program in 2002. Panetta said in June that the CIA had not notified Congress about a secret program to develop hit squads for al-Qaida terrorists. And Congress is investigating whether the agency broke the law by not informing lawmakers about that and other secret activities.
The eavesdropping lawsuit was brought by a former agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency, Richard Horn, who says his home in Rangoon, Burma, was illegally wiretapped by the CIA in 1993. He says Arthur Brown, the former CIA station chief in Burma, and Franklin Huddle Jr., the chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Burma, were trying to get him relocated because they disagreed with his work with Burmese officials on the country's drug trade.
The agency has not said in court filings whether or not it monitored Horn, but Horn claims he was monitored without lawful authority and in violation of his constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Horn says he became suspicious when he came back from a trip out of town to find his government-issued rectangular coffee table replaced with a round one.
Lamberth criticized Panetta for claiming at one point that the CIA's methods for conducting electronic surveillance are state secrets, even though the type of transmitter that Horn claims was used on his coffee table is unclassified and on display at Washington's Spy Museum.
Horn also points to a cable that Huddle sent to Washington quoting his private telephone conversation, which Lamberth labeled "highly suspicious."
Horn sued Brown and Huddle in 1994, seeking monetary damages for violations of his civil rights because of the alleged wiretapping.
Tenet filed an affidavit in 2000 asking that the case against Brown be dismissed because he was a covert agent whose identity was a state secret that must not be revealed in open court. Lamberth granted the CIA's request and threw out the case against Brown in 2004.
But Lamberth found out last year that Brown's cover had been lifted in 2002, even though the CIA continued to file legal documents saying his status was covert. The judge found that the CIA intentionally misled the court and reinstated the case against Brown....
July 10, 2009
Report: Bush surveillance
program was massive
By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON – The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.
The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be "carefully monitored."
The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it. They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years, the report says.
Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known as the "President's Surveillance Program" did not have any connection to terrorism, the report said. But FBI agents told the authors that the "mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile."
The inspectors general interviewed more than 200 people inside and outside the government, but five former Bush administration officials refused to be questioned.
They were Ashcroft, Yoo, former CIA Director George Tenet, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and David Addington, an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney.
According to the report, Addington could personally decide who in the administration was "read into" — allowed access to — the classified program.
The only piece of the intelligence-gathering operation acknowledged by the Bush White House was the wiretapping-without-warrants effort. The administration admitted in 2005 that it had allowed the National Security Agency to intercept international communications that passed through U.S. cables without seeking court orders.
Although the report documents Bush administration policies, its fallout could be a problem for the Obama administration if it inherited any or all of the still-classified operations.
Bush started the warrantless wiretapping program under the authority of a secret court in 2006, and Congress authorized most of the intercepts in a 2008 electronic surveillance law. The fate of the remaining and still classified aspects of the wider surveillance program is not clear from the report.
The report's revelations came the same day that House Democrats said that CIA Director Leon Panetta had ordered one eight-year-old classified program shut down after learning lawmakers had never been apprised of its existence.
The IG report said that President Bush signed off on both the warrantless wiretapping and other top-secret operations shortly after Sept. 11 in a single presidential authorization. All the programs were periodically reauthorized, but except for the acknowledged wiretapping, they "remain highly classified."
The report says it's unclear how much valuable intelligence the program has yielded.
The report, mandated by Congress last year, was delivered to lawmakers Friday.
Rep. Jane Harman, D-Ca., told The Associated Press she was shocked to learn of the existence of other classified programs beyond the warrantless wiretapping.
Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a terse reference to other classified programs during an August 2007 letter to Congress. But Harman said that when she had asked Gonzales two years earlier if the government was conducting any other undisclosed intelligence activities, he denied it.
"He looked me in the eye and said 'no,'" she said Friday.
Robert Bork Jr., Gonzales' spokesman, said, "It has clearly been determined that he did not intend to mislead anyone."
In the wake of the new report, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, renewed his call Friday for a formal nonpartisan inquiry into the government's information-gathering programs.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden — the primary architect of the program_ told the report's authors that the surveillance was "extremely valuable" in preventing further al-Qaida attacks. Hayden said the operations amounted to an "early warning system" allowing top officials to make critical judgments and carefully allocate national security resources to counter threats.
Information gathered by the secret program played a limited role in the FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts, according to the report. Very few CIA analysts even knew about the program and therefore were unable to fully exploit it in their counterrorism work, the report said.
The report questioned the legal advice used by Bush to set up the program, pinpointing omissions and questionable legal memos written by Yoo, in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The Justice Department withdrew the memos years ago.
The report says Yoo's analysis approving the program ignored a law designed to restrict the government's authority to conduct electronic surveillance during wartime, and did so without fully notifying Congress. And it said flaws in Yoo's memos later presented "a serious impediment" to recertifying the program.
Yoo insisted that the president's wiretapping program had only to comply with Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure — but the report said Yoo ignored the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had previously overseen federal national security surveillance.
"The notion that basically one person at the Justice Department, John Yoo, and Hayden and the vice president's office were running a program around the laws that Congress passed, including a reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment, is mind boggling," Harman said.
House Democrats are pressing for legislation that would expand congressional access to secret intelligence briefings, but the White House has threatened to veto it.
From: Global Exchange - Global Justice <globaljustice@globalexchange.org>
Subject: Urgent Action in Solidarity With Honduran Democracy
Date: Sunday, June 28, 2009, 9:35 PM
Global Justice - International
Early Sunday morning, a military coup took place in Honduras.
Sunday was to scheduled to be the day of a national poll on a proposal for a Constitutional Assembly. School of the Americas graduate, General Romeo Vasquez opposed the poll and led a coup which deposed the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya. Zelaya was removed to Costa Rica by the military.
Congressman Cesar Ham, a Zelaya ally and organizer of the national poll was assassinated this morning by a military squad.
Communications have been disrupted, opposition media have been silenced and the military has occupied the entire country.
U.S. Secretary of State Clinton made the following statement:
The action taken against Honduran President Mel Zelaya violates the precepts of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, and thus should be condemned by all. We call on all parties in Honduras to respect the constitutional order and the rule of law, to reaffirm their democratic vocation, and to commit themselves to resolve political disputes peacefully and through dialogue. Honduras must embrace the very principles of democracy we reaffirmed at the OAS meeting it hosted less than one month ago.
That's not good enough. The U.S. has a special responsibility to repudiate this coup since we trained General Vasquez to take this sort of action.
Call the State Department and the White House
Tell them we demand that the United States call for the immediate reinstatement of President Zelaya.
State Department: 202-647-4000 or 1-800-877-8339
White House: Comments: 202-456-1111, Switchboard: 202-456-1414
Global Exchange is considering an Emergency International Delegation to Honduras. We
will notify you of details as they become available.
In Solidarity,
Global Exchange
Global Exchange is an international human rights group that relies on its members - tens of thousands of people like you - to work with us to create social, political and environmental justice.
* * *
OUSTED PRESIDENT, REPLACEMENT DUEL FOR HONDURAS
Associated Press
March 3, 2009
CIA destroyed 92
interrogation tapes
By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer - 27 mins ago
WASHINGTON – New documents show the CIA destroyed nearly 100 tapes of terror interrogations.
The figure is far higher than the handful of recordings the agency has previously admitted destroying, and the revelation comes as a criminal prosecutor is wrapping up his investigation in the matter.
The acknowledgment of dozens of destroyed tapes came in a letter filed by government lawyers in New York, where the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit seeking more details of terror interrogation programs.
The tapes became a contentious issue in the trial of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, after prosecutors initially claimed no such recordings existed, then acknowledged two videotapes and one audiotape had been made.
February 11, 2009
Obama under fire for adopting
Bush's stance on 'state secrets'
By Inter Press Service
William Fisher, Inter Press Service
NEW YORK: President Barack Obama has cast doubt on his promise to put an end to secret government by allowing his Justice Department to follow a path frequently taken by his predecessor.
Before a federal appeals court in San Francisco Monday, lawyers from the Obama Department of Justice invoked the same "state secrets privilege" used by the administration of ex-President George W. Bush to argue that a lawsuit brought on behalf of Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyan Mohammad and four other alleged victims of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program should not go forward because revealing the evidence would harm national security.
If the appeals court agrees, it will mean that the alleged victims will not have their day in court. The court has not yet ruled on the case.
The defendant in the civil lawsuit is known as Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of aerospace giant Boeing, which is alleged to have knowingly provided the CIA with the chartered aircraft used to "render" terror suspects to countries where they were tortured.
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney Ben Wizner, who argued Monday on behalf of Mohammad and the other appellants, told IPS: "To date, not a single alleged torture victim has had his day in court. In this case, most of the evidence is already public. There are no 'state secrets' here."
"And if there were, our federal courts are well prepared to handle this issue," he added.
"This is a betrayal of the rule of law," the attorney said. "It is not the standard we expected from the Obama administration."
The ACLU was encouraged to believe that the Obama Justice Department would break from the practices of the Bush administration. Eric Holder, recently confirmed as the new attorney general, said at his confirmation hearing: "I will review significant pending cases in which DOJ [Department of Justice] has invoked the state secrets privilege, and will work with leaders in other agencies and professionals at the Department of Justice to ensure that the United States invokes the state secrets privilege only in legally appropriate situations."
This appeared to be at odds with testimony by Obama's nominee for director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who told senators at his confirmation hearing that the practice of rendition would be continued, but that "extraordinary rendition" - sending terror suspects to countries where they are likely to be tortured - would end.
In a statement, Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director, said: "Eric Holder's Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government. This is not change. This is definitely more of the same."
He added: "Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama's Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue. If this is a harbinger of things to come, it will be a long and arduous road to give us back an America we can be proud of again."
The Mohammad case stems from a federal lawsuit filed in 2007 by the ACLU against Jeppesen on behalf of five victims of the United States government's "extraordinary rendition" program.
The suit charged that Jeppesen knowingly participated by providing critical flight planning and logistical support services to aircraft and crews used by the CIA to forcibly "disappear" the five men to detention and interrogation.
According to the ACLU, shortly after the suit was filed, "The government intervened and inappropriately asserted the 'state secrets privilege,' claiming further litigation would undermine national security interests, even though much of the evidence needed to try the case was already available to the public."
The case was dismissed in February 2008, and the ACLU then appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the San Francisco Bay area.
According to published reports, Jeppesen had actual knowledge of the consequences of its activities. A former Jeppesen employee informed Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine that, at an internal corporate meeting, a senior Jeppesen official stated: "We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights - you know, the torture flights. Let's face it, some of these flights end up that way."
The case has also caused a furor in Britain and a problem for the US State Department.
In a separate case brought on behalf of Mohammad, who is a legal British resident, Britain's High Court refused to release seven paragraphs that the court had redacted in an earlier opinion. The High Court said that the redacted material lent credence to the torture allegations by Mohammad.
The court said that it reached its decision because of what it called a threat from the United States to reconsider sharing intelligence with the British.
But, in a highly unusual criticism, the High Court expressed dismay that a democracy "governed by the rule of law" would seek to suppress evidence "relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be."
The court said the Bush administration had made the threat in a letter to the Foreign Office last September. It called on the Obama administration to reverse that position.
The British foreign secretary, David Milliband, denied that there was any threat from the US. But, in a statement last week, the State Department said that the United States "thanks the UK government for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information" and that "the United States investigates allegations and claims of torture, and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment such as those raised by Binyam Mohammad."
After Mohammad was captured, then-US Attorney General John Ashcroft said that he had been complicit with Jose Padilla in a plan to detonate a "dirty bomb" in the United States. Padilla was never charged with this plot, but was convicted on other terrorism-related charges by a federal court in 2007. Last year, the Justice Department said it was dropping the dirty-bomb charges against Mohammad, and last October all charges against him were dropped.
The ACLU last week sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to clarify the Obama administration's position on the Mohammad case and to reject what it described as the Bush administration's policy of using false claims of national security to avoid judicial review of controversial programs.
The ACLU's Romero said: "The latest revelation is completely at odds with President Obama's executive orders that ban torture and end rendition, as well as his promise to restore the rule of law."
It has been 50 years since the United States Supreme Court last reviewed the use of the "state secrets" privilege. During the Bush administration, government lawyers invoked the "state secrets" privilege more often than any prior administration to stop cases from proceeding.
Among such cases was that of whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds, who was fired from her position as a language specialist at the FBI's Washington Field Office in March 2002, after she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleging serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence which, she contended, presented a danger to US security.
Her case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear it. And in 2007, the Supreme Court refused to review the "state secrets" privilege in a lawsuit brought by ACLU client Khaled al-Masri, an innocent German citizen who was kidnapped and rendered to detention, interrogation and torture in a CIA "black site" prison in Afghanistan.
See also: Uncle Sam’s Torture Chambers
July 16, 2008
Bush claims executive privilege on CIA leak
By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press
WASHINGTON - President Bush has asserted executive privilege to prevent Attorney General Michael Mukasey from having to comply with a House panel subpoena for material on the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity.
A House committee chairman, meanwhile, held off on a contempt citation of Mukasey — who had requested the privilege claim — but only as a courtesy to lawmakers not present.
Among the documents sought by House Oversight Chairman Henry Waxman are FBI interviews of Vice President Dick Cheney.
They also include notes about the 2003 State of the Union address, during which President Bush made the case for invading Iraq in part by saying Saddam Hussein was pursuing uranium ore to make a nuclear weapon. That information turned out to be wrong.
Waxman rejected Mukasey's suggestion that Cheney's FBI interview on the CIA leak should be protected by the privilege claim — and therefore not turned over to the panel.
"We'll act in the reasonable and appropriate period of time," Waxman, D-Calif., said. But he made clear that he thinks Mukasey has earned a contempt citation and that he'd schedule a vote on the matter soon.
"This unfounded assertion of executive privilege does not protect a principle; it protects a person," Waxman said. "If the vice president did nothing wrong, what is there to hide?"
The assertion of the privilege is not about hiding anything but rather protecting the separation of powers as well as the integrity of future Justice Department investigations of the White House, Mukasey wrote to Bush in a letter dated Tuesday. Several of the subpoenaed reports, he wrote, summarize conversations between Bush and advisers — are direct presidential communications protected by the privilege.
"I am greatly concerned about the chilling effect that compliance with the committee's subpoena would have on future White House deliberations and White House cooperation with future Justice Department investigations," Mukasey wrote to Bush. "I believe it is legally permissible for you to assert executive privilege with respect to the subpoenaed documents, and I respectfully request that you do so."
White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Bush invoked the privilege on Tuesday.
Waxman said he would wait to hold a vote on Mukasey's contempt citation until all members of the panel had a chance to read up on the matter.
The Bush administration had plenty of warning. Waxman warned last week that he would cite Mukasey with contempt unless the attorney general complied with the subpoena. The House Judiciary Committee also has subpoenaed some of the same documents from Mukasey, as well as information on the leak from other current and former administration officials.
Congressional Democrats want to shed light on the precise roles, if any, that Bush, Cheney and their aides may have played in the leak.
State Department official Richard Armitage first revealed Plame's identity as a CIA operative to columnist Robert Novak, who used former presidential counselor Karl Rove as a confirming source for a 2003 article. Around that time Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was criticizing Bush's march to war in Iraq.
Cheney's then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, also was involved in the leak and was convicted of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI. Last July, Bush commuted Libby's 2 1/2-year sentence, sparing him from serving any prison time.
Libby told the FBI in 2003 that it was possible that Cheney ordered him to reveal Plame's identity to reporters.
FORMER CIA DOCTOR SAYS CIA USES SEX SLAVES TO BLACKMAIL POLITICIANS
Sue Arrigo, who worked closely with George Tenet and worked for 40 years at the highest levels of the CIA, says that 'Monarch' children are used to set up Congressmen and other politicians for blackmail purposes. Now you know why many of them never vote according to what their voters want....
She says that she was tortured in Ireland by CIA and British intelligence officers and raped orally and rectally in order to terrorise her so that she would not speak out. Her family were also threatened. She was forced to sign documents that effectively declared her insane and confined to mental hospital. She was given a drug which interfered with REM sleep so that she would become crazy after this torture and brutal treatment.
Arrigo says that DCI Gates told her that the CIA's new policy is to kill the children they kidnap after two years of service as sex slaves....
Arrigo sounds a very credible person. Only the naive and those ignorant about the CIA's MK-ULTRA mind-control program and Monarch sex slave industry will dismiss her claims as fantasy.
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message400379/pg1
~ ~ ~
June 15, 2007
Secrets of the CIA's Global Sex Slave Industry
By Sue Arrigo, MD
This is the story of how the CIA uses "war zones" to garner kids for the sex slave business. You may have heard how the two companies, DynCorp and Halliburton, were caught trafficking in women during the war in Yugoslavia....
In these cases,they were importing and trafficking in Russian and East bloc women as sex slaves.
I want to talk about the children that are native to any war zone. The CIA did this across Africa, and anywhere they went as a standard part of their operations.
The names of the front companies will change over time. I am writing this down from memory after being inside the CIA for decades. Some of the details may be off, but the gist of the material will be correct.
Secrets of the CIA's Global Sex Slave Industry - Part 1
Secrets of the CIA's Global Sex Slave Industry - Part 2
Secrets of the CIA's Global Sex Slave Industry - Part 3
* * *
http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=54794
SEE ALSO
Jim Jones and The People’s Temple
CIA Behavior Control Experiments
~ ~ ~
HIV/AIDS Created by US Government!
Vaccine already developed and easy to make?
Sue Arrigo, MD
California medical license G 50197
As an ex-CIA physician with high level access, I wrote a report for DCI Webster in about 1991 arguing for closure of all the US Bio-Warfare Labs. I did that after reviewing the Ft. Detrick and the CIA's Langley Bio-Warfare Labs's research, looking at their own documents. That review was authorized because Bush, Sr. had sold dangerous Bio-Warfare agents to Hussein, which I ended up having to recover from Iraq. Webster, as a former judge, willing to evaluate the evidence, allowed me to research the field and write a report for him of close to 100 pages and 1000 pages of supporting documents.
Although the focus of my report was why the Bio-Warfare Labs should be closed, the issue of the HIV virus developed by the Ft. Detrick lab formed about 18 pages of my report. At the time I wrote that report, the vaccine for HIV that had been developed in 6 months of work, had already been used by the Cabal since 1983.
It was a crime against humanity that the virus was unleashed on the world, and it continues to be a crime that the vaccine has been kept secret and for private use only. Meanwhile, the outer research to get to a vaccine is an exercise in how not to arrive at a solution before millions more die. The initial "hopes" for HIV per its designers was to be able to walk into Africa and take the resources from a ghost continent. They had hyped it as killing everyone there within a year, in their pre-release reports.
The research at the Labs addressed the fastest way to make vaccines to Bio-warfare agents, both in labs, at a front, and impromptu on a battlefield. That was a pressing concern and one that was researched using millions and millions of dollars.
Vaccine so easy... it can be made in a blender!
Briefly, the consensus at the time was that:
... Any agent from a sick soldier left in a Waring Blender (or any other food blender) for 8 hours would be broken down well enough to not be infective in small doses ( ie. less than a 100 germs). The Labs had made an IgM set of antibodies to sediment out the human HLA antigens by centrifuging it. That allowed the supernatant to be used as a vaccine with little serum sickness problems. A physician in a war zone equipped with a Waring Blender, a blood specimen centrifuge, and a vial of the IgM could make a fast "fresh" vaccine and start inoculating soldiers....
If you know of people doing HIV research who are not controlled by the US govt, could you please pass this information on to them? It would be good to get it out to those who could investigate this information with the intention of saving lives with it. Bio-warfare research is immoral and illegal. Unfortunately the US govt is accelerating that research and production of secret private vaccines.
Sincerely,
http://viewzone.com/aidsmanmade.html
Excerpts from...
9-11
DESCENT INTO TYRANNY
by Alex Jones
Chapter One
The House of World Government
For many years I have been exposing the criminal activities of the global elite, also known as the New World Order. This collection of power-mad megalomaniacs has been engineering a successive string of terrorist events to usher in a corrupt world government--a world government where, public documents show, populations will be herded into compact cities, issued national ID cards, and even given implantable microchips.
In this book we are first going to look at some historical examples of tyrants and governments using disasters (in many cases terrorist events that these tyrants themselves perpetrate against their populations and bureaucracies) to create a crisis in order to convince the people to exchange liberty for so-called security....
FDR and Pearl Harbor
On December 8, 1941, after the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor, the following words were broadcast across the United States by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
Yesterday, December 7, 1941--a date which will live in infamy--the United States of america was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.
It may have been a surprise attack to the American people, but it wasn't to the federal government and the military. Months before the attack, they knew the Japanese were preparing for an all-out assault in the Pacific.
The History Channel and many historical records have reported that twelve days prior to the attack, Rosevelt knew that actual date of the strike. The government had in its possession Admiral Yamamoto's communique reading, "On the morning of December 7, we will attack the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor and deal a death blow."...
The Honolulu Advertiser front-page headline on November 30, 1941 read: "Japan May Strike Over Weekend." Still, the military was told to go to the lowest level of readiness, the ships in the harbor wer lined up in tight rows, and the aircraft on the airfields were put into circles, nose tip to nose tip.
Roosevelt had campaigned to keep America out of the war, but his backers had been funding the Japanese war machine for years. They had also been financing and encouraging Hitler's blitzkrieg.
The Anglo-American establishment based in New York and Londen needed a global crisis to bring in a global government and the birth of the United Nations. That's why six months before the attack of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had the naval command remove the code-breaking machines from Pearl Harbor. They had to have the crisis to justify the creation of this global system of tyranny.
Think of the dastardly deed the White House had committed--leaving our troops, our sailors, our boys to die. The global elite had attempted to create a League of Nations at the end of World War I. When it failed, World War II had to be bigger, on a larger scale, so the people would say, "Give us a global government to protect us from these horrible wars."...
Chapter 3
You've seen the evidence of government-sponsored terrorism throughout history. Now let's take a closer look at what happened on September 11, 2001, and how it is being used to usher in a New World Order.
What is at stake is more than one small country. It is a big idea. A new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together to common cause to achieve universal aspirations of mankind--peace and security, freedom and the rule of law. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective, a new world order, can emerge. Now we can see a new world coming into being, a world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order.
-- President George Bush, State of the Union Address, September 11, 1991
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)--an organization publicly sworn to destroy American national sovereignty and to usher in a tyrannical police state---could not contain its glee on September 14, just days after the tragic attack, when its members announced their New World Order. At a meeting broadcast on C-Span, Gary Hart, co-chair of the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, stated: "There is a chance for the president of the United States to use this disaster to carry out what his father--a phrase his father only used oned, and it hasn't been used since--and that is a New World Order."...
The relationship between the CIA and the Afghan freedom fighters, the Mujhadeen, predates Ronald Reagan. The bonds of rapport formed with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Afghans led to the creation of their super-asset: Osama bin Laden, the rich Saudi Arabian sheik whose family, to this day, builds most United States military bases in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. It is on the record that bin Laden is a CIA asset (MSNBC, "Bin Laden comes home to roost: His CIA ties are only the beginning of a woeful story," by Michael Moran).
So, every time an American president needs a distraction overseas, a ship or an embassy gets blown up. On October 12, 2000, the U.S.S. Cole, while docked at the port of Aden in Yemen, was attacked. Seventeen Americans were killed, and thirty-nine wounded--sacrificed yet again on the alter of globalism.
For examples of this, look at Bill Clinton's presidency. Every time Bill Clinton was in trouble an embassy, a ship, or a barracks would suddenly blow up, just like the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The CIA asset bin Laden was delivering time and time again, and Bill Clinton was there, protecting him, refusing to take files from foreign countries like Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan that indicate where al-Qaeda was in the world, where they were active--even in the continental United States. Sudan offered to arrest bin Laden on three separate occasions. Bill Clinton answered by bombing, with state-of-the-art cruise missiles, their only pharmaceutical plant, denying Africa desperately needed medicines (Los Angeles Times, December 5, 2001...)
In reality the New World Order scheme is a lot bigger than just Republicans of Democrats. The truth is that the Central Intelligence Agency, controlled by Wall Street, has been grooming Bin Laden and his family over the last fifty years to carry out dangerous projects in the Middle Ease, Centerl Asia and North Africa.
Back in 1996, according to the Times of India, the CIA worked in tandem with Pakistan to create the Taliban (Times of India, March 7, 2001, "CIA Worked in Tandem with Pak to Create Taliban").
Then in 1998, when the Afghans offered to arrest bin Laden, the CIA responded by publically telling them to do no such thing. They needed this bogeyman for one more big action (Washington Post, October 29, 2001, "Diplomats Met with Taliban on Bin Laden--Some Contend U.S. Missed Chance").
Through all of this, bin Laden's family was being rewarded with giant satellite company deals, oil company mergers, and some of the biggest construction projects in the world...
The Bush-bin Laden Family Connection
The Bush and bin Laden family connection goes back half a century, and by the 1970s George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, as well as bin Laden's older brother, were already vacationing together, and owning airports and oil companies together (Daily Mail, December 17, 2001. "Bin Laden's family link to Bush.") Even before September 11, the Wall Street Journal had called for the Bush family to end their relationship with the bin Ladens.
The Carlyle Group, Oil, Opium and Bombs
The Carlyle Group is the biggest defense contractor on the planet. The majority owners of the Carlyle Group are the Bush family and the bin Laden family. They are profiting in the hundreds of billions off of this new war (Judicial Watch, September 28, 2001, "Bush Sr. in Business with Bin Laden Family Conglomerate Through Carlyle Group"; The Village Voice, October 11, 2001, "Bush Sr. Could Profit from War"; BBC News, December 4, 1997, "Taleban in Texas for talks on gas pipeline")....
On December 4, 1997, a BBC headline read, "Representatives of the Taleban are in Texas Visiting the Headquarters of Unicol." The article went on to report that they were in Texas with the Halliburton-connected pipeline construction company (Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000), Unicol to negotiate their support for a pipeline, which would be built by Halliburton.
Afghanistan represents the heart of the Central Asian oil reserve. Central Asia has the second largest oil reserves in the world... By April 2002, the head of the World Bank had opened offices in Afghanistan, at which point the World Bank announced it would fund the Afghan pipeline.
Afghanistan alone supplies over a third of the world's opium supply. The region of Central Asia supplies ove half. Since the global occupation armies took control of Afghanistan, opium production has skyrocketed to record levels. Europe is now awash in heroin, and the coffers of Western intelligence agencies ar busting at the seams with utraceable drug money. (London Observer, November 30, 2001, "With Taliban Gone, Afghans Look Forward to Bumper Opium Crop"...)
Dozens of respected publications have asked the simple question, "What brought those building down?" Expecially Building 7, which wasn't even hit by an aircraft. New York firefighter Louie Cacchioli, 51, who was trapped inside the building, reported that multiple bombs were going off all around him (People Magazine, September 21, 2001). Ther were other witnesses, former military munitions experts and police officers, as well as structural engineers who made similar observations. The oldest fire fighting magazine in the country was absolutely outraged, demanding a real investigation. According to their evidence, there is no way aircraft could have brought down those buildings (Fire Engineering, January 2001 Issue, "WTC Investigation? A Call to Action"...)
January 18, 2008
White House missing CIA,
Iraq e-mails
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080119/ap_on_go_pr_wh/white_house_e_mail
Apparent gaps in White House e-mail archives coincide with dates in late 2003 and early 2004 when the administration was struggling to deal with the CIA leak investigation and the possibility of a congressional probe into Iraq intelligence failures.
The gaps — 473 days over a period of 20 months — are cited in a chart prepared by White House computer technicians and shared in September with the House Reform and Government Oversight Committee, which has been looking into reports of missing e-mail.
Among the times for which e-mail may not have been archived from Vice President Dick Cheney's office are four days in early October 2003, just as a federal probe was beginning into the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA identity, an inquiry that eventually ensnared Cheney's chief of staff.
Contents of the chart — which the White House now disputes — were disclosed Thursday by Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who chairs the House committee, as he announced plans for a Feb. 15 hearing.
Waxman said he decided to release details from the White House-prepared chart after presidential spokesman Tony Fratto declared, "we have absolutely no reason to believe that any e-mails are missing."
Among the periods of time for which the chart indicates e-mail is missing is a five-day span starting on Jan. 29, 2004, when the White House was dealing with the possibility of an election-year probe by Congress into Iraq intelligence failures.
Not archived by the office of the vice president is e-mail for Jan. 29-31, 2004, according to chart information released by Waxman. In addition, all e-mail from the White House Office in the Executive Office of the President was listed as missing for one of those days.
The chart indicates that e-mail also was not archived by the White House on the following Monday — Feb. 2, 2004 — the day President Bush took a big step in averting what could have been a politically troublesome congressional inquiry. He ordered an independent investigation into intelligence failures in Iraq.
The president conferred that day with former chief weapons inspector David Kay, declaring, "I want to know all the facts."
The commission named by Bush reached a harsh verdict about the U.S. intelligence community's performance, but the panel stopped short of addressing the White House's use of the intelligence data to support the idea of war with Iraq.
The White House says computer back-up tapes should contain substantially all e-mails between 2003 and 2005. However, the White House recycled backup tapes until sometime in October 2003, taping over existing data. That could mean some e-mail is gone forever if it is also missing from archives.
An example might be any missing e-mail from Cheney's office in the early days of the CIA leak probe. The White House has not said when in October 2003 it halted the recycling of backup tapes.
E-mails in early October 2003 could reveal key discussions between White House personnel in the week after the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the leak of Plame's CIA identity. The White House denied that Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby or top presidential adviser Karl Rove were involved in the leak, an assertion that turned out to be false.
"Can it be a mere coincidence that some of the missing e-mail correspond to a key period during the Valerie Plame investigation?" asked Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "Given everything else we know, that is nearly impossible to believe."
Her organization is one of two private advocacy groups suing the White House in the e-mail controversy.
At issue on Oct. 1, 2003, was the push by congressional Democrats for Attorney General John Ashcroft to step aside and appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate the White House.
Ashcroft eventually recused himself, and at the end of 2003 U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed by a Justice Department official to head the probe. Two years later, Libby was indicted, and he was later convicted of obstructing the investigation. His 30-month prison sentence was commuted by Bush. Rove was questioned by a federal grand jury five times but was never charged.
In January 2006, shortly after Libby was indicted, a letter from Fitzgerald to Libby's lawyers was the first public disclosure that the White House was having a problem with its e-mail system.
Fitzgerald wrote: "We have learned that not all e-mail of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system."
The White House says the e-mail matter arose in October 2005 in connection with the Justice Department's CIA leak probe, in which Fitzgerald later that month obtained a grand jury indictment against Libby for perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI.
http://www.voy.com/129276/972.html
January 2, 2008
Criminal probe opened
over CIA tapes
By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press
The Justice Department opened a full criminal investigation Wednesday into the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes, putting the politically charged probe in the hands of a mob-busting public corruption prosecutor with a reputation for being independent.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey announced that he was appointing John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, to oversee the investigation of a case that has challenged the Bush administration's controversial handling of terrorism suspects.
The CIA acknowledged last month that in 2005 it destroyed videos of officers using tough interrogation methods while questioning two al-Qaida suspects. The acknowledgment sparked a congressional inquiry and a preliminary investigation by Justice into whether the CIA violated any laws or obstructed congressional inquiries such as the one led by the Sept. 11 Commission.
"The Department's National Security Division has recommended, and I have concluded, that there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter, and I have taken steps to begin that investigation," Mukasey said in a statement released Wednesday.
Durham, who has served with the Justice Department for 25 years, has a reputation as one of the nation's most relentless prosecutors. He was appointed to investigate the FBI's use of mob informants in Boston, an investigation that sent former FBI agent John Connolly to prison.
"Nobody in this country is above the law, an FBI agent or otherwise," Durham said in 2002 after Connolly's conviction.
Mukasey made the move after prosecutors from the Eastern District of Virginia, which includes the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Va., removed themselves from the case. CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson, who worked with the Justice Department on the preliminary inquiry, also removed himself.
"The CIA will of course cooperate fully with this investigation as it has with the others into this matter," agency spokesman Mark Mansfield said.
Mukasey named Durham the acting U.S. attorney on the case, a designation the Justice Department frequently makes when top prosecutors take themselves off a case. He will not serve as a special prosecutor like Patrick Fitzgerald, who operated autonomously while investigating the 2003 leak of a CIA operative's identity.
"The Justice Department went out and got somebody with complete independence and integrity," said former Connecticut U.S. Attorney Stanley Twardy, who worked with Durham. "No politics whatsoever. It's going to be completely by the book and he's going to let the chips fall where they may."
The CIA already has agreed to open its files to congressional investigators, who have begun reviewing documents at the agency's Virginia headquarters. The House Intelligence Committee has ordered Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA official who directed the tapes be destroyed, to appear at a hearing Jan. 16.
Rodriguez's attorney, Robert S. Bennett, had no comment.
Durham first gained national prominence following the 1989 murder of Mafia underboss William Grasso, which led to one of the biggest mob takedowns in U.S history. He then turned to Connecticut street gangs, winning dozens of convictions, putting some gang leaders in jail for life.
He supervised the investigation that sent former Republican Connecticut Gov. John G. Rowland and several members of his administration to prison on corruption charges.
"He'll suck the political air right out of the investigation and just go after the facts," said Mike Clark, a retired FBI agent who investigated Rowland. "He's going to do it his way and just keep digging."
In June 2005, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy, who was overseeing a case in which U.S.-held terror suspects were challenging their detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ordered the Bush administration to safeguard "all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay."
ive months later, the CIA destroyed the interrogation videos. The recordings involved suspected terrorists Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The Justice Department has argued to Kennedy that the videos weren't covered by his order because the two men were being held in secret CIA prisons overseas, not at Guantanamo Bay.
The tapes' destruction has riled members of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. In an opinion piece in Wednesday's New York Times, commission chairmen Tom Keane and Lee Hamilton accused the CIA of failing to respond to requests for information about the 9/11 plot.
Anyone at the agency who knew about the tapes and failed to disclose them "obstructed our investigation," said Keane, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, and Hamilton, a former Democratic House member from Indiana.
The CIA has asserted that Keane and Hamilton's panel had not been specific enough in their requests and they should have asked for interrogation videos if that is what they wanted.
On Capitol Hill, the House Intelligence Committee wants to know who authorized the tapes' destruction; who in the CIA, Justice Department and White House knew about it and when, and why Congress was not fully informed.
The committee, which had threatened to subpoena the records if they do not get access, also wants to know exactly what was shown on the tapes.
Since leaving the White House shortly before Christmas, President Bush has not addressed the tapes' destruction. Before going to Camp David, then his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Bush said he was confident that investigations by Congress and the Justice Department "will end up enabling us all to find out what exactly happened."
He repeated his assertion that his "first recollection" of being told about the tapes and their destruction was when CIA Director Michael Hayden briefed him on it in early December.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Mukasey's announcement proved that lawmakers "were right to be concerned with possible obstruction of justice and obstruction of Congress."
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., also lauded Mukasey's decision to launch a criminal inquiry. "The rule of law requires no less," Kennedy said. "Those tapes may have been evidence of a crime, and their destruction may have been a crime in itself."
Sen. Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat seeking his party's nomination for president, said a criminal investigation is no surprise, but suggested that Mukasey should remove himself from oversight of the investigation and appoint a special counsel "completely independent and free from political influence."
Dec. 07, 2007
Commentary: The CIA's Gift to
Conspiracy Theorists
By Robert Baer, Time
The CIA has proved, once again, that the cover up is worse than the crime. Or at least let's hope that's the case.
CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden has admitted that in 2005 the CIA destroyed two videotapes of interrogations of al-Qaeda prisoners, including a central figure in 9/11, Abu Zubaydah. Hayden said the tapes were destroyed to protect the identities of the CIA interrogators from members of al-Qaeda and other terrorists who might try to retaliate. He also claims that the tapes were made to safeguard against unlawful treatment of detainees, and that they were only destroyed after it was confirmed that suspects were not being tortured.
At a time when Congressional Democrats are trying once again to pass a torture ban, it's a given that the revelation is going to further inflame the torture debate — since the tapes apparently showed harsh interrogation techniques. The assumption will be that the CIA did not want the tapes seen in public because they are too graphic and could lead to indictments.
But more to the point, the revelation will raise another question: What other evidence has the CIA destroyed? And can the CIA be trusted to tell us? The CIA had told the 9/11 Commission, when it formally requested such materials, that there was no taping of interrogations. CIA lawyers also told federal prosecutors trying the Zacarias Moussaoui terror case that the agency did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge and Moussaoui's defense lawyers. The CIA insists that the tapes destroyed were not the ones in question.
I would find it very difficult to believe the CIA would deliberately destroy evidence material to the 9/11 investigation, evidence that would cover up a core truth, such as who really was behind 9/11. On the other hand I have to wonder what space-time continuum the CIA exists in, if they weren't able to grasp what a field day the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are going to have with this — especially at a time when trust for the government is plumbing new depths.
I myself have felt the pull of the conspiracy theorists — who believe that 9/11 was an inside job, somehow pulled off by the U.S. government. For the record, I don't believe that the World Trade Center was brought down by our own explosives, or that a rocket, rather than an airliner, hit the Pentagon. I spent a career in the CIA trying to orchestrate plots, wasn't all that good at it, and certainly couldn't carry off 9/11. Nor could the real pros I had the pleasure to work with.
Still, the people who think 9/11 was an inside job might easily be able to believe that Abu Zubaydah named his American accomplices in the tape that has now been destroyed by the CIA.
It isn't going to help that the Abu Zubaydah investigation has a lot of problems even without destroyed evidence. When Abu Zubaydah was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, two ATM cards were found on him. One was issued by a bank in Saudi Arabia (a bank close to the Saudi royal family) and the other to a bank in Kuwait. As I understand it, neither Kuwait nor Saudi Arabia has been able to tell us who fed the accounts.
Also, apparently, when Abu Zubaydah was captured, telephone records, including calls to the United States, were found in the house he was living in. The calls stopped on September 10, and resumed on September 16. There's nothing in the 9/11 Commission report about any of this, and I have no idea whether the leads were run down, the evidence lost or destroyed.
If this sounds like paranoia, it is. But the CIA certainly is not helping by destroying evidence. And they should know better than to destroy evidence in the biggest criminal case in American history. More than anything what we need right now is complete and total transparency on 9/11.
Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, the novel Blow the House Down
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1692518,00.html
October 12, 2007
CIA head ordered probe
of inspector general
Reports: Move raises concerns director
trying to squelch investigations
WASHINGTON - The work of the CIA’s in-house investigator who found fault with the agency’s handling of the Sept. 11 attacks is being subjected to an internal review, published reports say.
The move, which is highly unusual, has raised concerns that CIA Director Michael Hayden is trying to squelch the investigations of Inspector General John Helgerson, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times reported Friday, citing anonymous officials.
Helgerson has been aggressive in his investigations of the CIA, criticizing senior figures including former Director George Tenet and officers involved in the agency’s detention of terrorist suspects.
The CIA rarely comments on media reports but on Thursday night the agency sought to play down the newspapers’ characterizations of the review. A CIA spokesman said in a statement that Hayden firmly believes in the work of the Office of the Inspector General.
'Goal is to help this office'
“Director Hayden ... has, since taking the helm at CIA, accepted the vast majority of its findings. His only goal is to help this office, like any office at the agency, do its vital work even better,” CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said. “That’s why he asked a seasoned observer like Bob Deitz to take a look at the Office of Inspector General and, if need be, suggest specific improvements for consideration by the unit itself.”
Deitz is a longtime adviser to Hayden, the former National Security Agency director, and now serves as his senior counselor at the CIA. “He — like everyone else involved — comes to this task with just one preconception: an absolute belief in the value of an independent, rigorous Office of Inspector General,” Gimigliano said....
Helgerson has been highly critical of the CIA. In a report in August, for example, he concluded that Tenet and other senior leaders never developed a comprehensive plan to stop al-Qaida and missed crucial opportunities to thwart two hijackers in the run-up to the Sept. 11 attacks. The agency recently declassified portions of the embarrassing findings under congressional orders.
Helgerson has also been highly critical, in classified reports, of the agency’s treatment of detainees.
The papers said the review was focusing on complaints that Helgerson’s office has not been impartial and has assumed guilt on the part of agency operatives, particularly those who participated in the agency’s detention programs.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21262180/
August 21, 2007
CIA didn’t do enough to stop 9/11, report finds
Agency watchdog says officials lacked
comprehensive plan to stop al-Qaida
WASHINGTON - The CIA’s top leaders failed to use their available powers, never developed a comprehensive plan to stop al-Qaida and missed crucial opportunities to thwart two hijackers in the run-up to Sept. 11, the agency’s own watchdog concluded in a bruising report released Tuesday.
Completed in June 2005 and kept classified until now, the 19-page executive summary finds extensive fault with the actions of senior CIA leaders and others beneath them. “The agency and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner,” the CIA inspector general found.
“They did not always work effectively and cooperatively,” the report stated.
Yet the review team led by Inspector General John Helgerson found neither a “single point of failure nor a silver bullet” that would have stopped the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
CIA chief: Report a distraction
In a statement, CIA Director Michael Hayden said the decision to release the report was not his choice or preference, but that he was making the report available as required by Congress in a law President Bush signed earlier this month.
“I thought the release of this report would distract officers serving their country on the front lines of a global conflict,” Hayden said. “It will, at a minimum, consume time and attention revisiting ground that is already well plowed.”
The report does cover terrain heavily examined by a congressional inquiry and the Sept. 11 Commission. However, the CIA watchdog’s report goes further than previous reviews to examine the personal failings of individuals within the agency who led the pre-9/11 efforts against al-Qaida.
Helgerson’s team found that no CIA employees violated the law or were part of any misconduct. But it still called on then-CIA Director Porter Goss to form accountability boards to look at the performance of specific individuals to determine whether reprimands were called for.
The inquiry boards were recommended for officials including former CIA Director George Tenet, who resigned in July 2004; his Deputy Director for Operations Jim Pavitt; Counterterrorism Center Chief Cofer Black; and the agency’s executive director, who was not further identified. Other less senior officials were also tagged for accountability reviews, but identifying information was removed from the report’s public version.
In a statement, Tenet said the inspector general is “flat wrong” about the lack of plan.
“There was in fact a robust plan, marked by extraordinary effort and dedication to fighting terrorism, dating back to long before 9/11,” he said. “Without such an effort, we would not have been able to give the president a plan on Sept. 15, 2001, that led to the routing of the Taliban, chasing al-Qaida from its Afghan sanctuary and combating terrorists across 92 countries.”
Glimpse of CIA shortfalls
In October 2005, Goss rejected the recommendation for the inquiry boards. He said he had spoken personally with the current employees named in the report, and he trusted their abilities and dedication. “This report unveiled no mysteries,” Goss said.
Hayden stuck by Goss’s decision.
Providing a glimpse of a series of shortfalls laid out in the longer, still-classified report, the executive summary says:
U.S. spy agencies, which were overseen by Tenet, lacked a comprehensive strategic plan to counter Osama bin Laden prior to 9/11. The inspector general concluded that Tenet “by virtue of his position, bears ultimate responsibility for the fact that no such strategic plan was ever created.”
The CIA’s analysis of al-Qaida before Sept. 2001 was lacking. No comprehensive report focusing on bin Laden was written after 1993, and no comprehensive report laying out the threats of 2001 was assembled. “A number of important issues were covered insufficiently or not at all,” the report found.
The CIA and the National Security Agency tussled over their responsibilities in dealing with al-Qaida well into 2001. Only Tenet’s personal involvement could have led to a timely resolution, the report concluded.
The CIA station charged with monitoring bin Laden — code-named Alec Station — was overworked, lacked operational experience, expertise and training. The report recommended forming accountability boards for the CIA Counterterror Center chiefs from 1998 to 2001, including Black.
Although 50 to 60 people read at least one CIA cable about two of the hijackers, the information wasn’t shared with the proper offices and agencies. “That so many individuals failed to act in this case reflects a systemic breakdown.... Basically, there was no coherent, functioning watch-listing program,” the report said. The report again called for further review of Black and his predecessor.
'We are at war'
While blame is heaped on Tenet and his deputies, the report also says that Tenet was forcefully engaged in counterterrorism efforts and personally sounded the alarm before Congress, the military and policymakers. In a now well-known 1998 memo, he declared, “We are at war.”
The trouble, the report said, was follow-up.
The inspector general did take exception to findings of Congress’ joint inquiry into 9/11. For instance, the congressional inquiry found that the CIA was reluctant to seek authority to assassinate bin Laden. Instead, the inspector general believed the problem was the agency’s limited covert-action capabilities.
The CIA’s reliance on a group of sources with questionable reliability “proved insufficient to mount a credible operation against bin Laden,” the report said. “Efforts to develop other options had limited potential prior to 9/11.”
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, said the CIA has learned from the past and has corrected many of these shortcomings, but has to do more.
“Sadly, the CIA’s 9/11 accountability review serves as a sobering reminder that the Bush Administration policies for the past six years have failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden,” the West Virginia Democrat said. “Nor have the administration’s policies deprived Osama bin Laden and other senior al-Qaida leaders of the safe haven they need to plot against the United States.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20378187/
June 26, 2007
CIA tried to get Mafia
to kill Castro
By Steve Holland and Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA worked with three American mobsters in a botched "gangster-type" attempt to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro in the early 1960s, according to documents released by the CIA on Tuesday.
The CIA hauled the skeletons out of its closet by declassifying hundreds of pages of long-secret records that detail some of the agency's worst illegal abuses during about 25 years of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying and kidnapping.
CIA Director Michael Hayden released the documents to lift the veil of secrecy on the agency's past, even as the Bush administration faces criticism of being too secretive now.
Hayden told agency employees in a statement the trove included "reminders of some things the CIA should not have done" and a glimpse "of a very different era and a very different agency." The documents had been requested 15 years ago by a watchdog group.
Much of the information had been released in various congressional investigations in past years, but the pages provide detailed accounts of CIA activities, much of it against the backdrop of the Cold War.
Some of the CIA's "Family Jewels" describe the agency's initial efforts to get rid of Castro, whose 1959 revolution ushered in communism to the island. Despite the U.S. campaign against him, Castro remains Cuban leader at age 80, although he handed over temporary power to his brother Raul after surgery last July.
The agency's leaders determined "a sensitive mission requiring gangster-type action" was needed. "The mission target was Fidel Castro," the document said.
The CIA contacted Johnny Roselli, believed to have been a high-ranking member of the Mafia and the person who controlled all the ice-making machines on the Las Vegas strip.
The story Roselli was to be told by a go-between was that several international business firms were suffering heavy financial losses in Cuba as a result of Castro's action and they were willing to pay $150,000 for his removal.
"It was to be made clear to Roselli that the United States government was not, and should not, become aware of this operation," a document said.
In documents that often read like a cheap detective novel, the story is outlined: The pitch was made to Roselli at the Hilton Plaza Hotel in New York. Roselli was initially cool.
But the contact led the agency to two top mobsters, Momo Salvatore Giancana and Santos Trafficant, who were both on a U.S. list of most-wanted men, who seemed more interested.
Giancana, who was known as Sam Gold, suggested firearms might be a problem and said using a potent pill that could be slipped into Castro's food or drink might work.
Eventually, six pills of "high lethal content" were provided to Juan Orta, identified as a Cuban official who had been receiving kickback payments from gambling interests, who still had access to Castro and was in a financial bind.
"After several weeks of reported attempts, Orta apparently got cold feet and asked out of the assignment. He suggested another candidate who made several attempts without success," the document said.
'LOCKPICKER'
There was also plenty in the documents on the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon in 1974, which started with a break-in at Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington in June 1972.
A leader in that operation, ex-CIA operative Howard Hunt, that spring requested "a lockpicker who might be retiring or resigning from the agency." Hunt's name surfaces elsewhere in the pages.
There was an extensive effort to infiltrate the U.S. anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s with undercover CIA agents to find out if it was financed from abroad. The CIA also investigated student unrest in the same period.
There were concerns that foreigners might try to disrupt the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in 1972, and one memo said ex-Beatle John Lennon had given money to an anti-war group.
There are also details on such Cold War matters as the three-year incarceration of KGB defector Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko.
The agency was convinced Nosenko, who defected in 1964, was still working for the KGB but was unable to prove it "even after a long period of hostile interrogation."
For more on the “FAMILY JEWELS”, GO TO >>> RICHARD HELMS
May 31, 2007
Ex-CIA Doctor:
AIDS Is Man-Made
Pentagon Conspiracy
by DR. ALAN CANTWELL & DR. SUE ARRIGO
To all persons interested in the man-made origin of AIDS...
I am a physician and AIDS researcher who has authored two books on the man-made origin of HIV/AIDS ("AIDS & THE DOCTORS OF DEATH: AN INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN OF THE AIDS EPIDEMIC" and "QUEER BLOOD: THE SECRET AIDS GENOCIDE PLOT.").
On the eve of the Blue Moon of May 31, 2007, I was sent the most explosive email I have ever received concerning possible insider evidence pertaining to the man-made epidemic of AIDS.
The communication was sent by Sue Arrigo, M.D., who claimed she was a physician licensed in California (G50197). Because her email (attached below) was so mind-blowing, I immediately googled Arrigo and found several entries including a note on one website in which Arrigo claimed to have been kidnapped, raped and threatened with death in 2004 (this was NOT mentioned in her email to me).
In addition, I checked online and verified that she was indeed a licensed CA physician, although her license expired in December, 2006, and her current residence is in Canada.
In her email Dr. Arrigo asked if I would help her get the word out to interested persons. I would ask that anyone who receives this communication to do all they can to spread the word regarding her accusations that AIDS is a man-made disease.
Over the past two decades there have been only a handful of other physicians and health professionals who have had the courage to alert the public to evidence that AIDS is man-made, namely Robert Strecker MD, William Campbell Douglass MD, Eva Snead MD, and Leonard G Horowitz DDS.
In general, their research (books, videos, internet communications) have been ignored by the CDC, the NIH, the AIDS establishment, the major media, etc. -- and merely passed over as "conspiracy theory" and "paranoia."
Dr. Arrigo has a long association with the CIA as an expert on biological warfare, and also has apparent ties to the highest powers (and presidents) in the U.S. government.
Thus, her insider status makes her an extremely valuable witness to the truth about AIDS and its man-made origin.
Please do all you can to confirm or deny the truth of Dr. Arrigo's accusations -- and to publicize her plight -- and to air her plea on behalf of the abominations of secret biological warfare experimentation and use against human beings.
I have attached the google references to "sue arrigo", her email to me in it's entirety, proof of her CA medical credentials, and a website note of her rape and torture.
In truth and justice,
Alan Cantwell M.D.
On May 31, 2007, at 8:32 PM, Sue Arrigo wrote:
Dear Dr. Cantwell,
Thank you for your courage and integrity in speaking the truth.
As an ex- CIA physician with high level access, I wrote a report for DCI Webster in about 1991 arguing for closure of all the US Bio-Warfare Labs. I did that after reviewing the Ft. Detrick and the CIA's Langley Bio-Warfare Labs's research, looking at their own documents.
That review was authorized because Bush, Sr. had sold dangerous Bio-Warfare agents to Hussein, which I ended up having to recover from Iraq. Webster, as a former judge, willing to evaluate the evidence, allowed me to research the field and write a report for him of close to 100 pages and 1000 pages of supporting documents.
Although the focus of my report was why the Bio-Warfare Labs should be closed, the issue of the HIV virus developed by the Ft. Detrick lab formed about 18 pages of my report.
At the time I wrote that report, the vaccine for HIV that had been developed in 6 months of work, had already been used by the Cabal since 1983.
It was a crime against humanity that the virus was unleashed on the world, and it continues to be a crime that the vaccine has been kept secret and for private use only. Meanwhile, the outer research to get to a vaccine is an exercise in how not to arrive at a solution before millions more die.
The initial "hopes" for HIV per its designers was to be able to walk into Africa and take the resources from a ghost continent. They had hyped it as killing everyone there within a year, in their pre-release reports.
The research at the Labs addressed the fastest way to make vaccines to Bio-warfare agents, both in labs, at a front, and impromptu on a battlefield. That was a pressing concern and one that was researched using millions and millions of dollars.
Briefly, the consensus at the time was that
1) Any agent from a sick soldier left in a Waring Blender for 8 hours would be broken down well enough to not be infective in small doses ( ie. less than a 100 germs).
The Labs had made an IgM set of antibodies to sediment out the human HLA antigens by centrifuging it. That allowed the supernatant to be used as a vaccine with little serum sickness problems.
A physician in a war zone equipped with a Waring Blender, a blood specimen centrifuge, and a vial of the IgM could make a fast "fresh" vaccine and start inoculating soldiers.
The labs tested that using a variety of agents and common cold agents. It was only if one wanted to store the vaccine in vials that one got into the problem of denaturing the proteins of the agent due to heat, chemicals,etc. That was where most of the problems of loss of effectiveness crop up.
2) The Labs found that causing a 1cm by 1cm abrasion until one got lymph and applying a drop of the "fresh vaccine" and a band aid, worked almost as well as an injection. The abrasion could be caused by three fast firm strokes of very fine sand paper over a template with a square of skin bulging through it.
This method had much less serum sickness problem. The major problem was occasion keloid and scar formation and superficial infections.
3) The Labs also showed that it was possible to make a crude live vaccine as an emergency directly on the battlefield. The principle was that infection occurs when the body's defenses are overwhelmed but that the body can usually fend off 10 to 50 organisms even of Bio-warfare agents. It was a simple dilution to get the agent into the right ballpark, starting with a secretion of a sick person.
Then a drop of that dilute live agent would be placed on an abrasion. That was also tested during war games with colds etc. The diluted material can't be stored for longer than an hour due to the risk of multiplying the agent.
It was assumed that in the field it would not be known whether the agent was a virus or a bacteria. A bacteria that divided every 20 minutes could be 8 fold in quantity after an hour and risk causing the infection one was attempting to prevent. Of course, such a live agent could be extremely dangerous and except in an extreme emergency would not be used.
4) The issue of how to quickly sterilize a make-shift vaccine was also addressed in the research. The best method was to dry the agent, if time permitted. Second best was to preserve the agent in Vodka (40%), not gin, etc., and then to dilute it down to less than 2% alcohol before applying it to the abrasion.
That means that a simple vaccine for HIV can be made by virtually anyone in the world in a short period of time, though it would likely need to be repeated periodically to get and keep the titers up. But repeating it is a good idea anyway as that helps address the mutation problem. So, suppose one took 1 cc of secretions from each of 10 HIV patients in an area (without fungal infections preferably) and mixed them together to have a range of HIV agents. Then one could add 250 cc of Vodka and let it sit a week. Then one could remove a cc of that and add 20 cc of clean water to get a less than 2% alcohol solution. A drop of that could be applied to an abrasion. That, I believe, would give you about 60% protection.
Repeating that at intervals of about 2 weeks to a month for 6 months and using new HIV secretions every 6 to 12 months, I think would give one fairly good protection in a person with a normal immune system to start with. Of course, that is a crude method and should be tested for efficacy etc. But it is simple enough to test on sex workers, if they were willing to volunteer.
They are at such high risk that the likely benefits almost certainly outweigh the risks. The chief risk would still be sensitization with human HLA proteins. The beauty of using abrasions is that one can wash the vaccine off as soon as any untoward reaction is noticed.
If you know of people doing HIV research who are not controlled by the US govt, could you please pass this information on to them?
It would be good to get it out to those who could investigate this information with the intention of saving lives with it. Bio- warfare research is immoral and illegal. Unfortunately the US govt is accelerating that research and production of secret private vaccines.
Sincerely, Sue Arrigo, MD
(the below is from: http://www.alternet.org/rights/27771/ )
An American Already Tortured
By Cheney's Team in the US
Posted by: kunzangwangmo on Nov 11, 2005 10:16 PM
As a coerced CIA asset, I was asked by Cheney in Aug. 2004 to frame Iran as developing nuclear weapons. Because Cheney was afraid of CIA leaks, he gave me the assignment at a Chinese restaurant in DC after hours. It was not the first meeting that I have ever had privately with him as I acted as a negotiator between him and Tenet.
Within the CIA I had been an outspoken critic of US wars of aggression, its nuclear first strike plans, and its breaking of nuclear arms control treaties. I spent most of my life as an operative risking my life as a remote viewing spy monitoring and recovering lost WMD.
I am a doctor and the assignment Cheney gave me was to go to Iran as a physician. Once in Iran, a camera crew would be filming when an Iranian agent would rush in to say that he knew a secret bunker where the Iranian govt. was developing nuclear weapons.
Cheney admitted that the rest of the filming would occur in Hollywood with a mock up of said lab. Clearly, this was an immoral assignment. There was no way that I was going to have the blood of innocent Iranian women and children on my hands, so I refused. When I did so, Cheney threatened the life of my mother. Since my mother had recently told me she would rather die than have me be emotionally blackmailed in this way, I held to my no.
During the course of our about 40 minute talk, one of his secret service officers interrupted us twice. The next week when I was kidnapped in Virginia, raped and tortured for 4 days, I recognized the voice of that officer as one of the rapists.
It is an outrage that Cheney is advocating torture. He has already shown by his actions, that he will stop at nothing, not even the torture of American born CIA personnel in order to get his way. He has a clear conflict of interest in making money off these wars.
Are we, as Americans, going to torture people just so that corrupt officials can line their pockets with oil and war profiteering revenues?
Please write your congresspersons to prevent others being tortured as I was. Cheney and Bush should be impeached for lying to force us into war. We are not winning the war on terrorism, torture is terrorism as anyone who had been through it knows. I was raped and subjected to three mock executions, when will this US reign of terror end?
Sincerely,
California medical license G 50197
Every Church A Peace Church Speakers Bureau
"In 1951, the CIA decided to coordinate efforts with the US Army, Navy, .... at http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/radio/ckln-hm.htm CKLN42A.tx Sue Arrigo, ...
http://www.ecapc.org/Registry_detail. asp?Type=Ind&ContactID=2171
TvNewsLIES.org :: View topic - Female CIA agent who stood up to ...
The assignment Cheney gave me was to go to Iran as a physician in a humanitarian gesture to treat ... Sue Arrigo, MD California medical license G 50197 ...
tvnewslies.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=6461& sid=935c8b88071f6e893ab7650a3d92f492 - 62k - May 31, 2007
Military and Civilian Perspectives on the Ethics of Intelligence-
A physician at the workshop, Sue Arrigo (my sister), discussed medical .... by the CIA and
the usurpation of military resources for CIA operations [1973, ...
http://www.usafa.af.mil/jscope/JSCOPE01/Arrigo01.html
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?ChannelID=34
http://www.comspiracyplanet.com
See also: Vultures in The Global Fund
September 4, 2005
Cash payoffs, bonds and murder
linked to White House 911 finance
Documents point to attack on America
by White House crime families
by Tom Flocco, www.tomflocco.com
Sioux City, Iowa – According to leaked documents from an intelligence file obtained through a military source in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), on or about September 12, 1991 non-performing and unauthorized gold-backed debt instruments were used to purchase ten-year "Brady" bonds.
The bonds in turn were illegally employed as collateral to borrow $240 billion--120 in Japanese Yen and 120 in Deutsch Marks--exchanged for U.S. currency under false pretenses; or counterfeit and unlawful conversion of collateral against which an unlimited amount of money could be created in derivatives and debt instruments.
The illegal transactions are also linked to the murder of a U.S. Army colonel charged with overseeing approximately 175 secret CIA bank accounts, according to the officer’s wife, Mrs. V. K. Durham. During multiple interviews, Durham told TomFlocco.com that Bush 41 and Clinton administration officials visited her husband Colonel Russell Hermann several times in the months prior to and three days before his torture and murder on August 29, 1994.
Durham told us the $240 billion in stolen currency was obtained resulting from George H. W. Bush’s presidential abuse of power, when he authorized former Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady and former Secretary of State James Baker III to make fraudulent use of the Durham Family Trust collateral without her permission. There is evidence that Colonel Hermann’s and V. K. Durham’s signatures were forged on a Goldman-Sachs bank account certification requesting the conversions to U.S. currency.
The money was never repaid since the ten-year Brady bonds--purchased before September 13, 1991 using the fraudulent collateral and gold bullion as security came due on September 12, 2001--the day after the 9.11 attacks, having allegedly been underwritten and held by the trustee, Cantor-Fitzgerald bond brokerage firm [whose offices on floors 101-105 in the North Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) were destroyed on 9.11 along with the Brady bond evidence].
Three days before his suspicious death, Colonel Hermann told his wife that former President George H. W. Bush, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and U.S. Marine Colonel Oliver North (pardoned by Bush Sr. two years earlier for his Iran contra indictments when Bush Sr. was also facing indictments for his role in Iran contra) all passed V. K. Durham coming up in an adjacent elevator after all three had left Hermann’s room and gone down in another elevator at the Veterans Administration Health Care Center in Marion, Illinois.
Hermann had been probing Bush 41 and Clinton links to narcotics money laundering, according to his wife.
Durham told us that Colonel Hermann told her "Bush, Greenspan and North were trying to get me to sign off on the CI Ltd., the Central Intelligence, Ltd., Iran and Latin American contra accounts. They held about $13-17 billion in physical gold."
This, raising questions about an evidence trail for a grand jury to seek restoration of funds potentially stolen by high government officials from United States taxpayers....
Misused collateral = gold security = bogus bonds =
$240 billion stolen currency
Evidence indicates that on August 19, 1991, John D’ Aquisto of DFG Inc. mailed (1A) Federal Express packages to United States Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan and Bush 41 Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas Brady to communicate details of currency exchange transactions which ultimately led to multiple allegations of bank fraud involving billions of dollars, according to V. K. Durham. It is not known whether this cash was laundered into the Philippines and then used for the "family," referred to in the Wanta-Cheney memo.
The FedEx receipts show contact between Greenspan, Brady and John D’ Aquisto and given the bank fraud links, Greenspan’s visit to Russell Hermann and the close proximity of the transactions to September 11, Durham says prosecutors should interrogate the three about their knowledge of improper banking activities which could be linked to the North Tower attacks at Cantor-Fitzgerald and the Pentagon impact reportedly involving the ONI on September 11--witnesses for a grand jury, should an official entity decide to prosecute mass murder on behalf of U.S. taxpayers....
According to Stewart Webb, Nevada Secretary of State Frankie Sue Del Papa, a Bush shadow government player, participated as a co-conspirator to obstruct justice, intentionally switching forged documents pertaining to registrations and filings of corporations involving Bush 41 and Leonard Millman. One of the corporations connected to the gold-backed Brady bonds above was Cosmos Corporation of Nevada--one of several Cosmos corporations.
Robert D. Hammond, Vice President of the Securities Sales Department, Goldman Sachs & Co., wrote to John D’ Aquisto and DFG, Inc. on August 7, 1991, certifying that DFG had an account with Goldman, number 027-02082-2; however, the letter’s notary seal contained the forged signatures of both V. K. Durham and her husband, Colonel Russell Hermann [ Durham initialed and attested to the alleged bank fraud directly on the notarized document, indicating the signatures Goldman sent to D’ Aquisto were forgeries ]:
"Please be advised that if DFG wishes to engage in foreign currency transactions, Goldman Sachs has extensive capabilities in this area. For instance, upon receipt of approximately 700 million Japanese yen into the above account, Goldman could convert such funds into approximately $5 million U.S. dollars."
D’ Aquisto also complained about more alleged bank fraud by Goldman Sachs in a letter to Phil Roberts in the Bank Fraud Division at the U. S. Department of the Treasury, written on September 10, 1991, regarding suspect banking procedures wherein "funds were reversed and withdrawn from our account without our permission."
In another letter on September 10, 1991 to Karl Ehm, D' Aquisto and Russell Hermann asked "did you receive the return of $5,117,280.00 back from Goldman-Sachs?" The letter also indicated "no zero balance shown after the activity summary," providing no evidence that $5+ million was withdrawn just minutes after it was deposited while showing that the money was still in the account.
The letter specifically referred to a partial Japanese Yen transfer which took place at Goldman’s Los Angeles office prior to the September 13, 1991 ten-year contract. The transaction in California provides potential U.S. jurisdiction and venue for another citizen grand jury should obstruction of justice continue in New York City where Spitzer and Morgenthau refuse to probe the suspect $240 billion dollar financial transaction which came due at Cantor-Fitzgerald two days after the 9.11 attacks:
"On September 10, 1991 we received our August 1st-August 31 statement from Goldman...On the statement enclosed you will see that the Japanese Yen went to Mitsui Bank of Tokyo, which is Goldman Sachs’ correspondent bank. The monies were then credited to the account and exchanged and deposited, U.S.D. equivalent at the rate of exchange. That part of the transaction was perfectly normal."
"What happened next is what concerns me. On August 7, 1991, the funds were reversed and withdrawn from our account without our permission! There is no reference to the whereabouts, or disclosure of the whereabouts of this money, or of the receipt of acknowledgement that this transaction even took place."
"As an ex-banker of 16 years, I feel that my rights have been violated to the highest degree, and the laws of the United States have been broken. I think you would call this bank fraud? According to Goldman Sachs, this was probably a clerical error on their part. I find it hard to believe that a company such as Goldman Sachs would be so negligent as to make a $5,117,280.00 "clerical error....you can call me at our other company Ariel Life Systems Inc., a government contracted corporation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)."...
According to two witnesses, Greenberg-Traurig is allegedly tied to suspect legal entanglements surrounding the challenge for control of New Hampshire 9.11 widow Ellen Mariani's estate and her husband Neil’s death on September 11. Mariani’s litigation in New York and New Hampshire against President Bush and other top officials seeking court-ordered discovery about White House involvement in the attacks and obstruction of justice by members of Congress was blocked due to complications surrounding the challenge for control of her husband’s estate.
Norman Brownstein was a former Director and the current corporate attorney for the late Leonard Millman’s MDC Holdings, Inc., the parent company of Silverado Savings and Loan Association where President George W. Bush’s brother Neil was a Director of the failed institution which cost American taxpayers at least $50 billion dollars.
Webb revealed he has evidence that proves Silverado laundered $12 trillion dollars in narcotics money during the time period that President Bush’s brother Neil was on the board of directors of the failed bank organization.
According to Leonard Millman’s ex-son-in-law Stewart Webb, $2.6 billion in Mena, Arkansas/Iran contra drug money was laundered through the Rose Law firm [where New York Senator Hillary Clinton was a partner] into Millman’s failed M&L Business Machines Company of Denver.
Webb alleged that his documented evidence and first-hand witnesses prove that Hank Greenberg, Leonard Millman and Meyer Blinder were all involved in massive securities fraud involving National Brokerage Group of Companies, and its Stinger Securities, Coral Gables Securities and others that allegedly milked American investors for billions of dollars during the 1980s.
This, while Webb also alleged that Hank Greenberg was involved in re-insurance fraud loans with Millman’s National Acceptance Company which owned First National Acceptance Company, both of which own Bank of America, with the first two being financially connected to AIG.
Attorney General Spitzer is in possession of part of the above evidence relating to Leonard Millman’s links to $6 trillion in American pension fund fraud; moreover, Webb told us that former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr--who the whistleblower said obstructed justice in his investigation of Clinton/Bush-linked narcotics money laundering--had lunch with Mr. Spitzer a few weeks ago, raising additional questions regarding obstruction of justice for a grand jury with subpoena power.
Webb alleges that drug money was laundered by Millman into Hank Greenberg’s AIG and other Wall Street accounts by Gwendolyn Waymark of the Waymark Group and also the Foundations Group--which the Cheney memo above links to boxes of cash moved from the Philippines and tied to both the recently deceased Millman and George H. W. Bush.
The Foundations Group’s laundered drug money paid for a group of 9.11 terrorists secretly headed by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) Gary Best--one of the former Iran contra shadow government players--according to Webb.
Most shockingly, Webb alleges that "ONI-CIA Marine officer Oliver North, CIA-DIA agent Gary Best, CIA agent Terry Lynn Nichols and CIA contract agent Timothy McVeigh were all paid through Waymark’s Foundations Group funding arm--directly or indirectly."
This raises the bar as to why the Vice President has not been subpoenaed when the Wanta memo directly links Cheney, Dr. Rice (and by authority and the obligation to act upon a financial terrorist threat– President Bush) to knowledge of the Foundations Group in what appears to be United States covert black operations involving financial terrorism and mass murder.
Webb told us, "this explosive evidence is why Eliot Spitzer and Robert Morgenthau are obstructing justice to let AIG off the 9.11 hook in the "public" part of their current and high-profile Wall Street probe. But it’s also why the Joint Congressional Intelligence Committee members are obstructing justice and committing treason by refusing to subpoena Cheney and other key intelligence officials regarding their awareness of a "family" extending from the Philippines to Europe and the United States--all with links to financing terrorism."
A comprehensive grand jury investigation, with subpoenas, testimony and interrogation by independent, a-political career prosecutors like Patrick Fitzgerald could well blow the lid off 30+ years of illegal operations, financial terrorism, 9.11 mass murder, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Kennedy assassination and pre-emptive war based upon lies--a lengthy pattern of illegal activities by a succession of White House crime families, according to both Webb and V. K. Durham.
All this, tacitly endorsed by quietly complicit congressmen--either too frightened to speak truth to power due to past small-plane assassinations or having been self-absorbed by pensions, perks and power to exercise their constitutional mandate to protect the very citizenry which honors them with high office.
CIA banker’s strange death
Colonel Russell Hermann--a 53-year career military officer, had been conducting a two-year internal investigation of President Clinton, White House counsel Vincent Foster and protracted drug shipments into Mena, Arkansas; but Central Intelligence would not let him retire since it was too expensive to train new personnel and re-start the investigative trail, according to his wife "V.K." who witnessed the first attempt on her husband’s life from her front porch in 1993.
Durham told us "he traveled in a big black truck with tons of surveillance equipment. I saw it, but he didn’t want me to come near it. He said ‘you don’t want to know about this;‘ and as he put his arms around me and kissed the back of my neck, he said ’we caught President [Clinton’s] man [Vince Foster] with Swiss bank accounts, so now I can file my investigation reports, retire, and we can start living a new life.’ "
"This was July 1, 1993. Vince Foster turned up dead on July 20 and my husband Russell was murdered on August 29, 1994," she said.
"The next day, while mowing his lawn on July 2, 1993, Russell was sprayed with some type of poison gas--possibly sarin--from a passing vehicle. He took a few steps and went down, bleeding from the eyes, ears and nose," said Durham who had married Hermann six years earlier on November 27, 1987.
"Russell had not finished his report on Clinton, Foster and the Mena, Arkansas drug money laundering, she said, adding that her husband had cryptically told her, "If I go to the hospital without that report being finished, I am a dead man." This, reminiscent of Michael Corleone’s "men are coming to kill my father" plea to a lone nurse caring for the Godfather in an empty wing of a New York City hospital.
"There was no sign of an ambulance," said Durham, "a 24 foot white box van with no lettering or markings took Colonel Herman away and he was missing and unaccounted for from 9:00 am till 10:00 pm at night. I found him the next day through a phone call at my neighbors."
"He was at St. Mary’s Hospital in Clayton, Missouri--in a wing all by himself, strapped down to a bed with no life support system when I got to him, nothing," she said, adding "Russell was a U.S. intelligence officer--a full Colonel--and he told me to ‘call my CWO2 [Chief Warrant Officer] and tell him to get my mandatory two men in here to protect my life."
Offering a warning to current CIA officers, Durham said "Russell told me they strung him up on meat hooks on the way to the hospital--I saw the [warning: graphic photos] hook marks under his collar bone: they beat him and burnt him with cigarettes, broke his ribs, left hand and left arm, and shoved a cattle prod into his rectum," said the furious widow, making a clear point: "they’ll do it again to any of the intelligence guys walking around now if they don’t do something to stop these criminals."
St. Mary’s hospital was described to us as some sort of secret military asylum--a hospital of horrors, by Durham, who said "the hospital was filled with naval officers and a woman named Ruth said ‘you have to sign these papers (4-inch stack),’ and I asked ‘where are my husband’s records;’ she pulled them back and shredded them right in front of me--all his military records--a full-bird U.S. Army Colonel."
"When Ruth had her back to me, another woman slipped me a piece of paper of the hours and medical log sheets with the hour Russell was taken to the hospital--helping to fix the hours of his torture and the fact that his ambulance authorization had not even been signed," she said, "proving he was tortured in the back of that white truck--and this is the United Stated Veterans Administration!"
"Russell was kept there against his will after he recovered until November 17, 1993. One of the doctors, another friend of Russell’s and I saw Marine Colonel Oliver North dressed in a white medical coat attempting to disguise himself while visiting Russell’s hospital room on November 13 or 15, just before he was released from the hospital.
Durham told us, "something was going on at that hospital. I saw a Navy Commander strapped to a gurney--from Seal Beach...tied down. A female doctor was sitting there with his wife and they were bartering over his body parts. I heard all this with Russell’s doctor friend. The Commander was alive and strapped there, his eyes looked terrified and his mouth was taped shut," she said, offering "his wife walked over to her husband and said ‘Now I’ll never have to know when you’re coming home again.’ We inquired about him later and found that he had come up ‘missing.’ "
Still weak and declining from the first murder attempt on his front lawn, Colonel Russell Hermann ended up at the Veterans Administration Health Care Center in Marion, Illinois; and Durham told us "Hillary Clinton’s operatives, David Horowitz and Karen Koffee came to meet with Russell, seeking money to underwrite the National Healthcare Program she was pushing in 1994."
"This was on July 20. Russell told me Clinton’s people said ‘you’re going to die before very long and your wife will disappear and no one will know where she is,’ and both of them are accessories to murder as far as I am concerned," said Durham, as we listened in stunned silence.
"Russell was doing pretty well around August, 1994, and on Friday, August 26, he said that George Bush Sr., Alan Greenspan and Oliver North came to see him in his hospital room at the VA, and tried to get him to sign off on the Iran and Latin America contra accounts so they could get control of them," Durham told us, adding, "but Russell told me he just reached down and grabbed a hand-full of excrement from his hospital bowel and threw it at President Bush, saying ‘go to hell.’ Then the three of them left the room as I was coming up the other elevator."
"I was planning to take Russell home from the VA the following Monday, August 29--a couple days after Bush, Greenspan and North visited on Friday. I came in to pick him up and he was dead," she said, adding "the attending physician, Dr. Pettit, refused to do an autopsy, even though Russell’s body was all red and he was given 8 or 9 injections on his hip and the base of his skull, and his back and body were as red as fire--but his eyes were as clear as mine."
"The coroner, Michael Vickery, took a number of photographs and told me ‘this man was murdered,’ and I had been refused possession of his body for six days--from August 29 until September 5--after being told there was evidence that he was frozen alive, she told us while still in stunned silence.
When we asked what happen next, Durham said "I found out the contra accounts were moved from Republic Bank in Texas to Republic Bank in New York; I think Teddy Lloyd was the banker in New York. I believe they knocked Russell out and I thought he was dead. Then they moved him to the Guernsey Islands near England and used his voice-activated and fingerprint codes to sign over control of the $13-17 billion in gold that was in the accounts," providing another paper trail for recovery of missing funds from the U.S. Treasury--but also a public view into the inner-working of intelligence bank account security.
V. K. Durham told us one of Russell’s men contacted her and said there had been a government contract to take out the Colonel by either a Commander McDonough or MacDonald, and that there are transcripts from the tape of his torture and death, but she does not know where they are.
"Control files" blackmail congressional and DOJ officials
Stewart Webb alleges that an important key to the "control" of the U.S. House and Senate has been the use of blackmail via "Operation Brownstone," led by individuals he calls CIA shadow government players like Ted Gunderson, Harold George Pinder and Clint Murchinson Jr. – setting up legislators for blackmail through child pedophilia rings using both vulnerable male and female children from orphanages all across the United States. This, according to scores of documents and witnesses.
Americans who are concerned about pedophilia, with near daily reports of kidnappings or disappearances of young children who later turn up dead or fall victim to Mexican, South American and Middle Eastern child sex slavery need only start with the ongoing cover-up of pedophilia in the halls of Congress and the White House. It’s still a hushed-up secret, waiting for irate parents and family victims to march on Washington.
Other congressional blackmail was employed, according to Webb, by the late Leonard Millman, New York Senator Hillary Clinton, Neil Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush in an entity known as the MCRD-Boulder Properties Limited Partnerships – financed by Silverado Savings & Loan; and Webb says this forced dozens of current and former congressmen into bankruptcy, including high-profile current New York Senator Charles Schumer. [Media Bypass, May, 2000]
Additional bribes and payoffs were affected through Millman’s cutout company, Denver’s M&L Business Machines to David Mann, Asst. DOJ Inspector General, who works under Lee Redneick, DOJ Inspector General, with money also paid to Denver U.S. Attorney Mike Norton and Robert Pence, head of the FBI Denver office.
Illegal campaign money laundering involved Millman’s MDC holdings--fined by the SEC in 1991 and covered up by former Colorado Attorney General Gail Norton, the current Bush 43 Secretary of Interior, according to Webb. [ TIME, "Rush for Gold--How Silverado Operated," 8-14-1990, and TIME "Running With A Bad Crowd," 10-3-1990]
Norman Philip Brownstein, a current Director of Denver’s Chubb Insurance Company, allegedly owned by George H. W. Bush and Webb’s ex father-in-law, the late Leonard Millman – through illegal trusts funded by laundered drug money controlled by Brownstein – paid President Clinton’s legal fees and also paid off Paula Jones in her sexual harassment suit against the President. Clinton’s personal attorney, James M. Lyons--engulfed in the Whitewater scandal--sits on the board of Millman’s MDC holdings.
All this, according to Webb’s documents and first-hand witnesses, but also Webb's grand jury demand--filed three times.
Webb told us as recently as August, 2004 in U.S. Federal Court in Denver [Case No. 95-Y-107], Chief Judge Richard Matsch has continued to ignore and obstruct his explosive evidence in a manner similar to when Matsch ruled in the Oklahoma City bombing case.
Lastly, another illegal operation employed to "control" and pay off House and Senate members was through Apartment Investment and Management Company (AIMCO)--a real estate investment trust (REIT) currently run by former Congressman Terry Considine and Bush 41 attorney Norman Brownstein.
Members of Congress have been bribed via the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) via Millman and Brownstein’s handing over hidden corporate ownerships in AIMCO’s stolen HUD properties, the federal whistleblower has alleged.
According to Webb, AIMCO is the largest landlord of U.S. apartments--with units that were stolen by Millman’s partner Phil Winn of Denver’s Winn Group, the focus of the 1989 congressional "HUD Scandal " investigation which led to Independent Prosecutor Arlen Adams convicting Switzerland Ambassador Phil Winn and others--but three months before leaving office, President Clinton pardoned Winn. And congressmen continue to profit from money stolen from the taxpayers.
All this, as the voices of thousands of American boys cry out from their graves on the bluffs above the Normandy beaches on the English Channel: "France!...now it’s your turn to help America."
Who will guard the guards?
Mary Schneider contributed additional research for this report.
[Mary was illegally fired by the Department of Homeland Security for her whistleblower activity in the Orlando, FL Immigration office to protect America. Rep. Ric Keller (R-8-FL) and Sen. Bill Nelson (R-FL) refused to help Mary even after I flew to Florida and met personally with them....]
www.tomflocco.com/fs/FinancialTerrorism.htm
$ $ $
From Lightscion:
T H E C I A
The CIA's pivotal figure, George Herbert Walker Bush, is a three-time president of the U.S.: vice-president over Ronald Reagan, president, and presiding father over his own son.
The election coup of the year 2000 happened under his planning and influence. The resulting White House cabinet came out as a copy of his former administrations. Now, in the final stages of his life, he wants to achieve what has been his utopian goal all along. Not politics, but seizing power over the government for imperialistic purposes, unwilling to lend any importance to social issues.
In fact, the nation now serves as a mere subsidiary system for the oil and weapons lobbies - the two ultimate instances that threaten the survival of this beautiful planet.
George HW Bush is a long-time CIA agent, is a former CIA director, and in 1999 seized control over the intelligence agency. This was hardly an obscured coup: the headquarters of the CIA are now officially designated as the "George Bush Center for Intelligence", not to honor Bush' long CIA career; but as a purely practical apprehension over the global intelligence power that the agency provides. The CIA is now the White House's private propaganda and black operations army.
George Herbert Walker Bush now commands both.
What is the real function of the CIA? On the one hand: topple foreign governments, through the use of mercenary, guerilla, and terrorist groups, without exposing its own ties, for the purpose of economic domination. On the other hand: take control of foreign leaders, secondly blame them for certain injustices, and thirdly invade the country with military troops. This was done in Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan - all three invasions were done during Bush administrations.
Each time, the CIA provided the world with phony legitimate reasons to attack these countries. Their leaders, however, were put in place or subsidized by the CIA in the first place. By manipulating the mainstream media, the CIA then orchestrates a legitimate political pretext to invade or overthrow foreign democracies.
The CIA cheats, lies, and manipulates on a scale larger than we dare to imagine. The goal of all this, is to bring the world under totalitarian control - in other words: to end the freedom and peace we all aspire in our daily lives and subject us to totalitarian control.
No more, no less....
Originally created to gather technical and military data from foreign political adversaries, the CIA evolved into an active tool for sabotage and destruction of any real or imaginary non-US interests. After trying for decades to topple the Russian economy, it was unable to predict the fall of the Soviet empire; Mikhail Gorbachov kept the honor to himself....
Not the U.S.S.R, but the oil-rich Iraq, Iran, Saudi-Arabia, Columbia, Venezuela are now the enemy. Notice how the upheaval in these countries has risen together with the Bush administration? Not a coincidence; there is lots and lots of oil in those areas. The oil market must be controlled by the U.S. corporations - at all costs. It's their reason for existence.
The CIA is funded and connected with the power players who fundamentally strive for a global oil market dominance (the Bush dynasty, and practically everyone in the White House anno 2000), and is courted by renewed increases in weapons trades ( Carlyle Group )....
This dynamic isn't new, it has been going on since president Roosevelt's days. People climb to the top and try to stay there, by whatever means necessary. The CIA provides those means, and keeps itself alive while doing so - devoid of any democratic approval.
In the eyes of the corporate establishment, great economics is not about a 'free' market (as the founding fathers of liberalism meant it to be), but is about domination over a market, an economical interaction that must be curtailed and fashioned at will, to be able to keep the commercial products at their selling rates and to continue plundering natural resources....
In the United States, where individual ambition and enrichment is the only esteemed moral value, and where self-interest always comes before the care for the others, the CIA is the mechanical realization for the greedy, egocentric needs of the ruling elite...
The CIA is thus not striving for the propagation of the democratic values of the American constitution at all, but is actively occupied in fulfilling the international framework that is needed on behalf of the extreme right-wing corporate employers.
The media approval for this policy is actively modeled, shaped and constructed on a daily basis. With an official annual budget of $30 billion (but expenditures 400 % thereof - gained from drug traffic), there's no telling to what ambitions can be fulfilled, how many people can be bribed, influenced, bought off, hired, blackmailed etc....
The events of 9/11 show a nearly perfect CIA modus operandi: by actively investing money in extremist, terrorist and revolutionary groups, giving them extra warfare education, and igniting their original dismay with extremely fundamentalist feelings - which are evidently receiving spectacular media-attention; secondly, to organize a violent strike on American territory or on military and diplomatic posts abroad, with the aid of mercenary and covert factions; and thirdly, to tie the violence to the foreign fundamentalist groups that were funded and controlled by the CIA in the first place (eg. al Qa'ida).
The CIA orchestrates this in the media by a well funded, cleverly shaped and extremely secretive amount of lies and misinformation. Throughout this long-term strategy, the media are used and abused in the most stunning ways, by planting false stories, forcing confessions, and creating a global terror climate. What happened on September 11th is a perfect example of CIA intelligence creativity. Since then, as a direct result of this, anyone doing anything out of the ordinary in any international airport, is deliberately being profiled as connected to Islamic terrorism, while the arrests are always unsubstantiated, and links to al Qa'ida are never proven....
The media corporations are far from the watchdogs they used to be. To survive in a competitive market, they are pressured to bring both attractive news and keep a good relationship with official intelligence and other agencies, if they are to benefit from further press releases and future cooperation with the ruling power structure....
Thus it has become a unique instrument of tremendous media manipulation. This rarely gets exposed by mainstream journalists who generally prefer a juicy terrorist story above the difficult debunking of a governmental lie.
And so the people are being fooled on a daily basis.
But there are other ways to the truth than those of the classic media. We can rely on the testimonies of ex-CIA employees, ex-military, ex-police officers and so forth.... Under the guise of patriotic duty, these agents and administration workers were recruited from several areas of life and became entrenched in the opaque ways of the Agency.
Getting in wasn't easy, but getting out is a nightmare. Nevertheless, it's only by relying upon this small core of disillusioned ex-CIA employees that some of its highly secret actions can be uncovered. What we come to know about is always but a minor fraction of the whole strategy and practical execution, but is still highly indicative of the CIA's modus operandi and political aim.
We owe a lot to these ex-agent's inside knowledge, because their whistle blowing words are the only way to unveil the truth: what everyone should know about the secretly damaging ways of the Central Intelligence Agency....
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September 29, 2002
For Bush, Saddam is 'the guy that
tried to kill my Dad'
The Straits Times
WASHINGTON - It's getting personal.
Revealing the deep personal animosity below the surface of his Iraq policy on Friday, US President George W. Bush described Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as 'the guy that tried to kill my Dad'....
In a speech to Republicans at a fund-raising dinner in Houston, he referred to Iraq's attempt to assassinate his father in 1993 to explain why the Iraqi President is a threat to the US.
He said: 'There's no doubt his hatred is mainly directed at us. There's no doubt he can't stand us.
'After all, this is the guy that tried to kill my Dad at one time.'
Kuwaiti security officials foiled the alleged car-bomb plot to kill the senior Mr Bush, who was on a victory lap of the Gulf shortly after leaving office in 1993.
The CIA blamed Mr Saddam for the assassination attempt, and in retaliation, then-President Bill Clinton launched several cruise missiles on Iraqi intelligence headquarters in Baghdad....
Copyright @ 2002 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.
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From ENDGAME , Solving the Iraq Crisis, by Scott Ritter (former U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq):
THE GHOST IN
THE MACHINE
... My mind was taken back to a recent discussion I had had with an Iraqi minder, a highly educated and personable engineer colonel - clearly under orders from Iraqi intelligence to befriend me. He and I would sometimes engage in conversations, usually about the domestic situation in Iraq. On this occasion, he turned to me and asked forgiveness for a question he wanted to pose.
"Fire away," I said.
"Mr. Ritter," he began, "you are a man of honor and logic, and we in Iraq trust you. We know that you believe that your investigations are just, but we also know that you are going down a dead-end street with no answers."
This kind of lecture was unusual from him, but he went on.
"I say this, Mr. Ritter, because we are confused as to why you are allowing yourself to be used by the CIA and Mossad for their purposes."
I asked what he meant by that.
"Well, perhaps you are unaware of how you are being used, but we have exposed a plot against our president, a plot planned by the CIA and the Mossad. We have interrogated several of the plotters, who have confessed completely. They claim that they were to time the plot to coincide with your inspection in June, that you were supposed to create a crisis that would provide justification to the United States to launch cruise missiles against presidential security using UNSCOM as an excuse. In the resulting confusion the plotters would attack. Unfortunately for them, their plot was known for some time, and they never had a chance. The question is, why did you allow yourself to be used?"
I had no idea what the colonel was talking about, and said so, adding that it sounded a little too contrived to me. But the document I had found about the 3rd Battalion of the Special Republican Guard being liquidated set me to thinking - all the more so when it soon became public knowledge that the Iraqis had indeed foiled a coup attempt against Saddam Hussein in June 1996, and that the plotters included officers from within the Special Republican Guard. The plot had been mounted by the Amman-based Iraqi National Accord. The INA, a creation of the British MI6, had been working with the CIA since at least 1994, as I've mentioned.
As I read these documents and recalled my conversation with the Iraqi colonel, I began to think about Moe Dobbs. There was no proof of Dobbs's involvement but there was a strong set of coincidences. UNSCOM 150 and the attempted coup had both taken place in June. That inspection was directed almost exclusively at Special Republican Guard sites; the coup plotters were from some of the same units we were trying to inspect. Finally, Dobbs and his his Special Activities Staff operators were the CIA's covert operations experts, one of whose specialties was organizing coups.
As the person in charge of planning the UNSCOM inspections in which Dobbs participated, I have no boubt of the legitimacy of its disarmament objectives. However, looking back at the transcript of Tariq Aziz's statements to Ekéus about the suspicious timing of these inspections, I began to understand the Iraqi point of view....
For more on the alleged attempt on former President Bush's life, see: Part III - The Mossad
x x x
Suppressed Details of Criminal Insider
Trading Lead Directly Into the CIA's
Highest Ranks
CIA Executive Director "Buzzy" Krongard Managed Firm
That Handled "Put" Options On UAL
by Michael C. Ruppert
FTW, October 9, 2001 -- Although uniformly ignored by the mainstream U.S. media, there is abundant and clear evidence that a number of transactions in financial markets indicated specific (criminal) foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
In the case of at least one of these trades -- which has left a $2.5 million prize unclaimed -- the firm used to place the "put options" on United Airlines stock was, until 1998, managed by the man who is now in the number three Executive Director position at the Central Intelligence Agency.
Until 1997 A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard had been Chairman of the investment bank A.B. Brown. A.B. Brown was acquired by Banker's Trust in 1997. Krongard then became, as part of the merger, Vice Chairman of Banker's Trust-AB Brown, one of 20 major U.S. banks named by Senator Carl Levin this year as being connected to money laundering.
Krongard's last position at Banker's Trust (BT) was to oversee "private client relations." In this capacity he had direct hands-on relations with some of the wealthiest people in the world in a kind of specialized banking operation that has been identified by the U.S. Senate and other investigators as being closely connected to the laundering of drug money.
Krongard joined the CIA in 1998 as counsel to CIA Director George Tenet. He was promoted to CIA Executive Director by President Bush in March of this year. BT was acquired by Deutsche Bank in 1999. The combined firm is the single largest bank in Europe. And, as we shall see, Deutsche Bank played several key roles in events connected to the September 11 attacks....
The Scope of Known Insider Trading
On September 29, 2001 -- in a vital story that has gone unnoticed by the major media -- the San Francisco Chronicle reported, "Investors have yet to collect more than $2.5 million in profits they made trading options in the stock of United Airlines before the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks, according to a source familiar with the trades and market data.
"The uncollected money raises suspicions that the investors -- whose identities and nationalities have not been made public -- had advance knowledge of the strikes." They don't dare show up now. The suspension of trading for four days after the attacks made it impossible to cash-out quickly and claim the prize before investigators started looking.
"...October series options for UAL Corp. were purchased in highly unusual volumes three trading days before the terrorist attacks for a total outlay of $2,070; investors bought the option contracts, each representing 100 shares, for 90 cents each. [This represents 230,000 shares]. Those options are now selling at more than $12 each. There are still 2,313 so-called "put" options outstanding [valued at $2.77 million and representing 231,300 shares] according to the Options Clearinghouse Corp."
"...The source familiar with the United trades identified Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown, the American investment banking arm of German giant Deutsche Bank, as the investment bank used to purchase at least some of these options……" This was the operation managed by Krongard until as recently as 1998.
As reported in other news stories, Deutsche Bank was also the hub of insider trading activity connected to Munich Re. just before the attacks.
CIA, The Banks and the Brokers
Understanding the interrelationships between CIA and the banking and brokerage world is critical to grasping the already frightening implications of the above revelations. Let's look at the history of CIA, Wall Street and the big banks by looking at some of the key players in CIA's history.
Clark Clifford -- The National Security Act of 1947 was written by Clark Clifford, a Democratic Party powerhouse, former Secretary of Defense, and one-time advisor to President Harry Truman. In the 1980s, as Chairman of First American Bancshares, Clifford was instrumental in getting the corrupt CIA drug bank BCCI a license to operate on American shores. His profession: Wall Street lawyer and banker.
John Foster and Allen Dulles -- These two brothers "designed" the CIA for Clifford. Both were active in intelligence operations during WW II. Allen Dulles was the U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland where he met frequently with Nazi leaders and looked after U.S. investments in Germany. John Foster went on to become Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower and Allen went on to serve as CIA Director under Eisenhower and was later fired by JFK. Their professions: partners in the most powerful - to this day - Wall Street law firm of Sullivan, Cromwell.
Bill Casey -- Ronald Reagan's CIA Director and OSS veteran who served as chief wrangler during the Iran-Contra years was, under President Richard Nixon, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. His profession: Wall Street lawyer and stockbroker.
David Doherty - The current Vice President of the New York Stock Exchange for enforcement is the retired General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency.
George Herbert Walker Bush -- President from 1989 to January 1993, also served as CIA Director for 13 months from 1976-7. He is now a paid consultant to the Carlyle Group, the 11th largest defense contractor in the nation, which also shares joint investments with the bin Laden family.
A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard -- The current Executive Director of the Central Intelligence Agency is the former Chairman of the investment bank A.B. Brown and former Vice Chairman of Banker's Trust.
John Deutch - This retired CIA Director from the Clinton Administration currently sits on the board at Citigroup, the nation's second largest bank, which has been repeatedly and overtly involved in the documented laundering of drug money. This includes Citigroup's 2001 purchase of a Mexican bank known to launder drug money, Banamex.
Nora Slatkin -- This retired CIA Executive Director also sits on Citibank's board.
Maurice "Hank" Greenburg -- The CEO of AIG insurance, manager of the third largest capital investment pool in the world, was floated as a possible CIA Director in 1995. FTW exposed Greenberg's and AIG's long connection to CIA drug trafficking and covert operations in a two-part series that was interrupted just prior to the attacks of September 11. AIG's stock has bounced back remarkably well since the attacks. To read that story, please go to copvcia.com/stories/part_2.html .
One wonders how much damning evidence is necessary to respond to what is now irrefutable proof that CIA knew about the attacks and did not stop them.
Whatever our government is doing, whatever the CIA is doing, it is clearly NOT in the interests of the American people, especially those who died on September 11....
x x x
From The Buying of the President : . . .
Defense Dollars and
Deal Making
In Feb of 1995, the administration announced that for the first time it would consider the financial state of U.S. defense contractors when negotiating overseas arms sales. The administration has also pushed to relax export restrictions on high-tech equipment used to manufacture sophisticated weapons systems.
Part of what has ingratiated the Clinton administration to weapons manufacturers has been the presence of William J. Perry, first as Deputy Secretary and later as Secretary of Defense.
Perry is a former defense consultant who headed Technology Strategies and Alliances (TSA) between 1985 and 1993.
TSA's 1994 clients included Boeing, Grumman, Lockheed, Martin Marietta, McDonnell Douglas, Northrop, Textron, Texas Instruments, TRW, Westinghouse, and 20 other defense contractors.
While Perry severed his ties with the company, he had amassed more than a million dollars in consulting fees from TSA's clients. Not long after he joined the Defense Department, Perry began going to bat for the industry.
One of Deputy Defense Secretary Perry's extra base hits came when he and then-Defense Undersecretary for Acquisitions and Technology, John Deutch, quietly agreed to provide U.S. defense contractors with taxpayer-finance subsidies for mergers and acquisitions. That was a dramatic shift in Pentagon policy. Usually, such issues are taken before Congress.
Instead, Deutch, in a July 21, 1993 memo, reversed the Pentagon's ban on the subsidies and underwrote $270 million worth of TSA client Martin Marietta's acquisition of General Electric's Aerospace Division.
Just seven weeks earlier, on June 3, 1993, industry CEOs, including Martin Marietta's Norman Augustine, had sent a letter to Perry and Deutch asking for DOD funding of "restructuring costs" for mergers and acquisitions.
Perry also approved Northrop's $2.1 billion acquisition of Grumman. Both were TSA clients. The Pentagon called the policy shift a "clarification" that did not require congressional consent....
The policy shift required both Perry and Deutch to seek ethics waivers from rules that call for a one-year "cooling off" period before Pentagon officials can deal with former clients. They got them from then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin, whom Perry replaced in February 1994. Paul Kaminski got an ethics waiver in November of 1994, when he was named to head the Pentagon's Acquisitions and Technology Department, replacing Deutch.
Deutch remained in the Pentagon loop a while longer and became Deputy Secretary of Defense before moving to the CIA.
Kaminski, who worked at TSA, is responsible for awarding $43 BILLION in defense programs to Pentagon contractors.
The Kaminski appointment marked the first time former defense industry consultants filled the Pentagon's top three policy posts....
x x x
CLINTON'S FINAL DAY INCLUDES PARDONS
WASHINGTON (CNN), 01/20/01: -- President Clinton, just hours before leaving office, pardoned more than 130 people, including Whitewater figure Susan McDougal, former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros, ex-CIA chief John Deutch and publishing heiress Patty Hearst. . . .
And, of course, Marc Rich. . . .
x x x
Wanted: Gen-X Chumps, I Mean, Spooks
by Uri Dowbenko
In case you missed it, the CIA is trolling for fresh blood.
Yes, the US Central Intelligence Agency -- that fun-loving, drug-dealing, government-subverting dinosaur of a bureaucracy -- is running ads for new recruits.
The ad, in the employment section of the Wall Street Journal (September 7, 1999), features a photo of a smug-looking thirty-something woman with her chin in hand, and the preposterous headline -- "Do you have what it takes? Integrity. Intellect. Common Sense. Patriotism. Courage."
Sadly there was no mention of the applicant's ability to actively participate in, or at least look the other way, when confronted with state-sanctioned terrorism, like illegal drug smuggling or money laundering.
Sponsored by the CIA Directorate of Operations, Clandestine Service, the ad says you can't be older than 35 to enter the trainee program. In other words, the ad copy is aimed directly at people who may be unaware of the Agency's bloody and treacherous history.
"For the extraordinary individual who wants more than just a job, this is a unique career, a way of life that will challenge the deepest resources of your intelligence, self-reliance and responsibility," the pitch continues.
"It demands an adventurous spirit, a forceful personality, superior intellectual ability, toughness of mind, and a high degree of personal integrity, courage and love of country."
Give that copywriter a raise. With outrageous lies like these, Gen-Xers could sign up for the Gambino family with a clear conscience.
Then there's the close -- "You will need to deal with fast-moving, ambiguous and unstructured situations that will test your resourcefulness to the utmost."
"Patriotic" CIA Drug Smuggling
Ambiguous? Ask CIA operative Oliver North, aka John Cathey. He could lie to Congress with a straight face.
When veteran FBI Special Agent Richard M. Taus uncovered and reported evidence of CIA drug trafficking by a group called the "K-Team," he was set-up and sent to prison on phony charges.
"The K-Team had a front operation with the patriotic sounding name National Freedom Institute and called its operation the 'Enterprise,' the same that repeatedly surfaced in the Iran Contra congressional hearings," writes Rodney Stich in his ground-breaking book Defrauding America.
Taus discovered that that K-Team was a CIA operation, engaged in drug trafficking, the looting of savings and loans, and other activities related to what later became known as Irangate and Iraqgate.
Another of Stich's sources, Gene "Chip" Tatum confirmed these allegations. He was the helicopter pilot who actually ferried CIA operatives Oliver North, Felix Rodriguez, aka Max Gomez, and William Barr -- CIA's Southern Air Transport attorney and later US President George Bush's Attorney General -- in Central America.
Tatum describes one meeting to "determine where over $100 million in drug money disappeared on the three routes from Panama to Colorado, Ohio and Arkansas. This theft was financially draining the operation known as the 'Enterprise'... The first call was made by Fernandez to Oliver North, informing North that 'the money loss was occurring on the Panama to Arkansas route, and that means either Seal, Clinton or Noriega.'"
Imagine -the late CIA drug transport pilot Barry Seal, former Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, as well as Panama's General Noriega were all suspected of skimming George Bush's cocaine profits.
"Fifteen minutes later the portable phone rang and Vice President George Bush was on the line talking to William Barr," writes Stich. "Barr said at one point, referring to the missing funds, 'I would propose that no one source would be bold enough to siphon out that much money, but it is more plausible that each are siphoning a portion causing a drastic loss.'"
Tatum said that Barr then dialed another number immediately reaching Governor Clinton. Barr explained the missing money problem to Clinton, explaining that over $100 million of the Enterprise monies had disappeared, and warning that the matter must be resolved or "it could lead to big problems."
The problems were evidently ironed out. Bill Clinton became president, one of the CIA's "few groomed men," who was promised his position on the "short list" for the job, according to Terry Reed and John Cummings, authors of Compromised .
In another instance, Tatum described "flying the group to Santa Ana, Honduras meeting with Enrique Bermudez and other Contra leaders and visiting a cocaine processing facility. Tatum described the strong smell of jet fuel and acetone and the large fuel pods that had the tops stripped off them and in which were fuel and leaves," writes Stich.
"Tatum repeated what Oliver North said, 'One more year of this and we'll all retire.'"
The hubris of these criminals is unbelievable. And Oliver North, of course has still not retired.
"North added, 'If we can keep those Arkansas hicks in line, that is," referring to Barry Seal and Governor Clinton... As Tatum listened to these conversations he remembered the army officer's remarks, 'Tell no one. There's no one big enough in your chain of command.'"
No kidding. Hearing Oliver North talk about the involvement of George Bush and Bill Clinton in drug smuggling, Tatum wisely followed the advice.
"Courageous" CIA Money Laundering
Or you could ask Ronald Rewald, an international wheeler-dealer who thought he had it made. Hobnobbing with the world's movers and shakers, Rewald was living the lifestyle of the rich and famous. He had a $2 million estate in Hawaii, a chauffeured limo took him to work everyday, and he even played polo with the Sultan of Brunei, the richest man in the world.
The subject of another book by Rodney Stich called Disavow, Rewald had a dark secret. He was just a front man for the CIA, an informant since college when he began spying on "subversive" organizations like the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) during the late 1960's and 70's.
Later as chairman of BBRDW -- Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald Dillingham and Wong -- a Hawaii-based CIA front masquerading as a worldwide investment company, Rewald thought he had nothing to fear. But then came the setup and the fall. Today after spending ten years in prison as the fall guy for the CIA, Rewald is reportedly still in denial.
According to Stich, BBRDW was a CIA proprietary, a company wholly owned by CIA operatives, started, operated and funded by the CIA in 1979 using many of the same high level people that had staffed Nugan Hand Bank.
Nugan Hand was the infamous Australia-based money laundry used by CIA to disburse Southeast Asian drug revenues.
In a chapter of Defrauding America, Stich writes that "the CIA used BBRDW as an international investment company cover with 120 employees staffing offices in 16 countries including Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, New Zealand, Singapore, London, Paris, Stockholm, Brazil and Chile. CIA personnel opened and operated these far flung offices."
When his cover was blown by a Honolulu reporter, Rewald never saw it coming. Since he'd been working for the CIA since his college days, he just naturally assumed that the CIA takes care of its own. Rewald was wrong.
"Disavowed" by the way, means "once your cover is blown, pal, you're on your own."
The book Disavow by Rodney Stich and T. Conan Russell should be required reading for anyone who's even thinking about working for the so-called "intelligence" agencies -- CIA, DIA, NSA, FBI, ONI, etc.
Just as there is no honor among thieves, there is even less among "spooks" -- the double-dealing spies of the world.
Disavow deals with global realpolitik and the important business of state -- making drug deals, laundering money, buying elections -- the professional expertise for which the CIA is absolutely unparalleled anywhere on earth.
Ronald Rewald found out the hard way. If he ever writes his autobiography, he should call it, "I Was a Chump for the CIA."
In this context, the brazen affront of the CIA's Wall Street Journal ad is absolutely astounding.
"The CIA is an equal opportunity employer and a drug-free work force," the ad continues lying. "We represent America and we want to be representative of America."
By the way, whistleblower and former FBI agent Richard M. Taus is still incarcerated, a political prisoner of the CIA's treachery and phony war on drugs.
(Letters of condolence can be sent to Richard Taus, 91A1040, LH, Clinton Correctional Faciltity, P.O. Box 2001, Dannemora, New York 12929.)
- Uri Dowbenko is CEO of New Improved Entertainment Corp. He can be reached by e-mail at u.dowbenko@mailcity.com
For more on Ron Rewald, GO TO > > > Flying High in Hawaii
* * * * *
Disavow: A CIA Story of Betrayal
By Rodney Stich & T. Conan Russell
The Saga of
Ron Rewald and Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald & Wong
CAST OF CHARACTERS
http://www.namebase.org/sources/ZS.html
* * * * *
August 30, 2000
Quest Continues
Mohamed Al Fayed to Sue U.S. for Diana Info
ABC News - Its been almost three years since Princess Diana and her companion Dodi Fayed died in a Paris car crash, but Fayed's father continues his search for answers. Lawyers for Mohamed Al Fayed today announced they will file a lawsuit against U.S. government agencies they say possess information related to the crash.
The announcement comes on the eve of the third anniversary of the accident. Diana, Princess of Wales, Dodi Fayed and driver, Henri Paul, were killed early Aug. 31, 1997, when their speeding car slammed into the wall of a Paris tunnel. The sole survivor of the accident was Trevor Rees-Jones, a Fayed bodyguard.
U.S. lawyer Mark Zaid, representing Al Fayed, and John Macnamara, the director of security for Harrods Ltd., the London luxury department store Fayed owns, made the announcement at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Documents Sought
In a videotaped statement, Al Fayed accused the CIA and other U.S. agencies were withholding the documents as part of a coverup.
"I believe they are withholding some of the documents at the request of the British secret services," an emotional Al Fayed said. "They cannot afford to let the truth be known because they know exactly where the truth lies."
In a letter read by Macnamara, Al Fayed said the National Security Agency has at least 39 documents totaling more than 1,000 pages relevant to the crash.
"There clearly is U.S. involvement in events prior to and subsequent to the tragedy," Zaid said.
Zaid was careful not to allege that Diana's death was part of a conspiracy between the British and American governments.
Zaid said the lawsuit, to be filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Washington, was an effort under the Freedom of Information Act, in order to further corroborate Al Fayed's suspicions of how his son and Princess Diana died.
'Romeo and Juliet'
Al Fayed believes Diana and his son were killed as part of a British conspiracy arranged by the royal family because they did not like the prospect of Diana ---- the ex-wife of Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, and mother to Princes William and Harry, dating and perhaps marrying a Muslim Egyptian.
"I am now appealing to the American people to help me prove two innocent people were murdered by evil people controlled by a political regime," Al Fayed said in his letter.
Al Fayed has accused Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, of directing British secret services in organizing the crash that killed the couple, and has since announced that the prince is to be barred from Harrods.
"Evil and racist forces working through the British Security services murdered my son and Princess Diana," Macnamara read from Al Fayed's statement.
"The drama of Romeo and Juliet continues to repeat itself almost 500 years after William Shakespeare penned his tragic story."
Inconsistencies Alleged
In his letter, Al Fayed said his team had found some inconsistencies in the French probe of the crash, which said the driver of the car in which the couple was riding had well over the legal limit of alcohol in his blood.
But Al Fayed says the sample of driver Paul's blood was 21 percent carbon monoxide ---- an impossibility, Al Fayed says, because Paul allegedly died on impact and thus could not have breathed in the noxious fumes.
Al Fayed maintains Paul was also employed by MI 6, the British secret service, for three years.
He also alleges French investigators made their conclusion about Paul 36 hours after crash, long before Paul's body samples could be properly analyzed.
This means the blood samples were either switched, or there was a mistake compounded by false statements, Zaid said.
Al Fayed's legal team also said a "prominent Los Angeles attorney" and former American CIA agents had tried to get Al Fayed to pay $20 million for allegedly classified CIA documents revealing a British plot to murder Princess Diana.
The U.S. government failed to fully investigate or prosecute the suspects, the team said.
They said they believe the documents offered were forgeries, but they think the CIA possesses actual documents detailing a similar plan.
The team also revealed a security photo of two men among the hundreds outside the Paris hotel from which Diana, Dodi Fayed and Paul left before their fateful trip.
They said French authorities have not yet been able to identify the men, who they allege were British intelligence agents observing the operation.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
x x x
October 13, 2000
U.S. court rejects al Fayed bid
for CIA documents
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A federal appeals court Friday rejected a request by Mohamed al Fayed to obtain CIA documents relating to the 1997 car crash in Paris that killed Britain's Princess Diana and al Fayed's son, Dodi.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously upheld a federal judge's decision to quash a subpoena seeking the CIA documents.
The appeals court agreed with the judge's decision that the court lacked jurisdiction to issue the subpoena. The judge initially granted the subpoena, but then quashed it after the U.S. government argued the CIA could not be subpoenaed under the law in question.
Al Fayed sought the CIA records as he appealed a decision by a French judge, who concluded that the accident had occurred because the driver of the car was drunk and who declined last year to pursue criminal charges.
Al Fayed also lost a similar bid to obtain secret documents compiled by the U.S. government's National Security Agency. A U.S. appeals court based in Richmond, Virginia, rejected that request in April.
Dodi and Diana died when their limousine smashed into a pillar in a central Paris underpass on August 31, 1997.
Fayed said that his son and Diana were murdered by "evil and racist forces" working through Britain's security service because the Royal family wanted to prevent their marriage.
Fayed, who owns Harrods, a luxury department store in London, has said the documents may prove his theory.
After unsuccessfully seeking to subpoena the secret U.S. government records, lawyers for Al Fayed filed a new lawsuit in August seeking the documents under the Freedom of Information Act. That case is pending.
Copyright 2000 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
See also: Ronald Rewald
x x x
INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 1999
(House of Representatives - May 07, 1998)
A Tangled Web: A History of CIA Complicity in Drug International Trafficking
Institute for Policy Studies
WORLD WAR II
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the CIA's parent and sister organizations, cultivate relations with the leaders of the Italian Mafia, recruiting heavily from the New York and Chicago underworlds, whose members, including Charles `Lucky' Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis, and Frank Costello, help the agencies keep in touch with Sicilian Mafia leaders exiled by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Domestically, the aim is to prevent sabotage on East Coast ports, while in Italy the goal is to gain intelligence on Sicily prior to the allied invasions and to suppress the burgeoning Italian Communist Party.
Imprisoned in New York, Luciano earns a pardon for his wartime service and is deported to Italy, where he proceeds to build his heroin empire, first by diverting supplies from the legal market, before developing connections in Lebanon and Turkey that supply morphine base to labs in Sicily.
The OSS and ONI also work closely with Chinese gangsters who control vast supplies of opium, morphine and heroin, helping to establish the third pillar of the post-world War II heroin trade in the Golden Triangle, the border region of Thailand, Burma, Laos and China's Yunnan Province.
1947
In its first year of existence, the CIA continues U.S. intelligence community's anti-communist drive. Agency operatives help the Mafia seize total power in Sicily and it sends money to heroin-smuggling Corsican mobsters in Marseille to assist in their battle with Communist unions for control of the city's docks.
By 1951, Luciano and the Corsicans have pooled their resources, giving rise to the notorious `French Connection' which would dominate the world heroin trade until the early 1970s.
The CIA also recruits members of organized crime gangs in Japan to help ensure that the country stays in the non-communist world. Several years later, the Japanese Yakuza emerges as a major source of methamphetamine in Hawaii.
(For more on Hawaii’s crystal meth problems, GO TO > > > The Puna Connection)
1949
Chinese Communist revolution causes collapse of drug empire allied with U.S. intelligence community, but a new one quickly emerges under the command of Nationalist (KMT) General Li Mi, who flees Yunnan into eastern Burma. Seeking to rekindle anticommunist resistance in China, the CIA provides arms, ammunition and other supplies to the KMT. After being repelled from China with heavy losses, the KMT settles down with local population and organizes and expands the opium trade from Burma and Northern Thailand. By 1972, the KMT controls 80 percent of the Golden Triangle's opium trade.
1950
The CIA launches Project Bluebird to determine whether certain drugs might improve its interrogation methods. This eventually leads CIA head Allen Dulles, in April 1953, to institute a program for `covert use of biological and chemical materials' as part of the agency's continuing efforts to control behavior.
With benign names such as Project Artichoke and Project Chatter, these projects continue through the 1960s, with hundreds of unwitting test subjects given various drugs, including LSD.
1960
In support of the U.S. war in Vietnam, the CIA renews old and cultivates new relations with Laotian, Burmese and Thai drug merchants, as well as corrupt military and political leaders in Southeast Asia. Despite the dramatic rise of heroin production, the agency's relations with these figures attracts little attention until the early 1970s.
1967
Manuel Antonio Noriega goes on the CIA payroll. First recruited by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 1959, Noriega becomes an invaluable asset for the CIA when he takes charge of Panama's intelligence service after the 1968 military coup, providing services for U.S. covert operations and facilitating the use of Panama as the center of U.S. intelligence gathering in Latin America.
In 1976, CIA Director George Bush pays Noriega $110,000 for his services, even though as early as 1971 U.S. officials agents had evidence that he was deeply involved in drug trafficking. Although the Carter administration suspends payments to Noriega, he returns to the U.S. payroll when President Reagan takes office in 1981. The general is rewarded handsomely for his services in support of Contras forces in Nicaragua during the 1980s, collecting $200,000 from the CIA in 1986 alone.
MAY 1970
A Christian Science Monitor correspondent reports that the CIA `is cognizant of, if not party to, the extensive movement of opium out of Laos,' quoting one charter pilot who claims that `opium shipments get special CIA clearance and monitoring on their flights southward out of the country.' At the time, some 30,000 U.S. service men in Vietnam are addicted to heroin.
1972
The full story of how Cold War politics and U.S. covert operations fueled a heroin boom in the Golden Triangle breaks when Yale University doctoral student Alfred McCoy publishes his ground-breaking study, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. The CIA attempts to quash the book.
1973
Thai national Puttapron Khramkhruan is arrested in connection with the seizure of 59 pounds of opium in Chicago. A CIA informant on narcotics trafficking in northern Thailand, he claims that agency had full knowledge of his actions. According to the U.S. Justice Department, the CIA quashed the case because it may `prove embarrassing because of Mr. Khramkhruans's involvement with CIA activities in Thailand, Burma, and elsewhere.'
JUNE 1975
Mexican police, assisted by U.S. drug agents, arrest Alberto Sicilia Falcon, whose Tijuana-based operation was reportedly generating $3.6 million a week from the sale of cocaine and marijuana in the United States. The Cuban exile claims he was a CIA protege, trained as part of the agency's anti-Castro efforts, and in exchange for his help in moving weapons to certain groups in Central America, the CIA facilitated his movement of drugs. In 1974, Sicilia's top aide, Jose Egozi, a CIA-trained intelligence officer and Bay of Pigs veteran, reportedly lined up agency support for a right-wing plot to overthrow the Portuguese government.
Among the top Mexican politicians, law enforcement and intelligence officials from whom Sicilia enjoyed support was Miguel Nazar Haro, head of the Direccion Federal de Seguridad (DFS), who the CIA admits was its `most important source in Mexico and Central America.' When Nazar was linked to a multi-million-dollar stolen car ring several years later, the CIA intervenes to prevent his indictment in the United States.
APRIL 1978
Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan sets stage for explosive growth in Southwest Asian heroin trade. New Marxist regime undertakes vigorous anti-narcotics campaign aimed at suppressing poppy production, triggering a revolt by semi-autonomous tribal groups that traditionally raised opium for export. The CIA-supported rebel Mujahedeen begins expanding production to finance their insurgency.
Between 1982 and 1989, during which time the CIA ships billions of dollars in weapons and other aid to guerrilla forces, annual opium production in Afghanistan increases to about 800 tons from 250 tons.
By 1986, the State Department admits that Afghanistan is `probably the world's largest producer of opium for export' and `the poppy source for a majority of the Southwest Asian heroin found in the United States.' U.S. officials, however, fail to take action to curb production. Their silence not only serves to maintain public support for the Mujahedeen, it also smooths relations with Pakistan, whose leaders, deeply implicated in the heroin trade, help channel CIA support to the Afghan rebels. [Page: H2956]
JUNE 1980
Despite advance knowledge, the CIA fails to halt members of the Bolivian militaries, aide by the Argentine counterparts, from staging the so-called `Cocaine Coup,' according to former DEA agent Michael Levine. In fact, the 25-year DEA veteran maintains the agency actively abetted cocaine trafficking in Bolivia, where government official who sought to combat traffickers faced `torture and death at the hands of CIA-sponsored paramilitary terrorists under the command of fugitive Nazi war criminal (also protected by the CIA) Klaus Barbie.
FEBRUARY 1985
DEA agent Enrique `Kiki' Camerena is kidnapped and murdered in Mexico. DEA, FBI and U.S. Customs Service investigators accuse the CIA of stonewalling during their investigation. U.S. authorities claim the CIA is more interested in protecting its assets, including top drug trafficker and kidnapping principal Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. (In 1982, the DEA learned that Felix Gallardo was moving $20 million a month through a single Bank of America account, but it could not get the CIA to cooperate with its investigation.)
Felix Gallardo's main partner is Honduran drug lord Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, who began amassing his $2-billion fortune as a cocaine supplier to Alberto Sicilia Falcon. (see June 1985) Matta's air transport firm, SETCO, receives $186,000 from the U.S. State Department to fly `humanitarian supplies' to the Nicaraguan Contras from 1983 to 1985. Accusations that the CIA protected some of Mexico's leading drug traffickers in exchange for their financial support of the Contras are leveled by government witnesses at the trials of Camarena's accused killers.
JANUARY 1988
Deciding that he has outlived his usefulness to the Contra cause, the Reagan Administration approves an indictment of Noriega on drug charges. By this time, U.S. Senate investigators had found that `the United States had received substantial information about criminal involvement of top Panamanian officials for nearly twenty years and done little to respond.'
APRIL 1989
The Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Communications, headed by Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, issues its 1,166-page report on drug corruption in Central America and the Caribbean. The subcommittee found that `there was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zone on the part of individuals Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with the Contras supporters throughout the region.' U.S. officials, the subcommittee said, `failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua.'
The investigation also reveals that some `senior policy makers' believed that the use of drug money was `a perfect solution to the Contras' funding problems.'
JANUARY 1993
Honduran businessman Eugenio Molina Osorio is arrested in Lubbock Texas for supplying $90,000 worth of cocaine to DEA agents. Molina told judge he is working for CIA to whom he provides political intelligence. Shortly after, a letter from CIA headquarters is sent to the judge, and the case is dismissed. `I guess we're all aware that they [the CIA] do business in a different way than everybody else,' the judge notes. Molina later admits his drug involvement was not a CIA operation, explaining that the agency protected him because of his value as a source for political intelligence in Honduras.
NOVEMBER 1996
Former head of the Venezuelan National Guard and CIA operative Gen. Ramon Gullien Davila is indicted in Miami on charges of smuggling as much as 22 tons of cocaine into the United States.
More than a ton of cocaine was shipped into the country with the CIA's approval as part of an undercover program aimed at catching drug smugglers, an operation kept secret from other U.S. agencies....
x x x
From Drugging America , by Rodney Stich:
FBI AGENT EXPOSES
CIA-MAFIA-DRUG TIES
A veteran FBI agent and highly-decorated Vietnam veteran provided still further corroboration to the fact that the CIA has been smuggling drugs for the past 40 years, that the CIA has been engaging in drug trafficking with Mafia segments, and that the CIA has been engaging in drug trafficking with Mafia segments, and that the FBI and other Justice Department divisions have covered up for these interrelated crimes.
Richard M. Taus had been a Special Agent for the FBI from 1978 to 1988, during which time he was assigned to organized crime and foreign counter-intelligence operations....
While he was a helicopter unit commander in Vietnam, Taus discovered and reported to his supervisors widespread drug trafficking by the Central Intelligence Agency. Taus described how the CIA transported drugs that were sold to American GI's in Vietnam and Laos, causing over a third of the armed forces in Vietnam to become drug addicts.
These GI's were often too drugged out to either fight or defend themselves. In addition, in that condition, they often killed their own officers, a practice known as "fragging." ...
I first made contact with Taus in 1997, and he was hesitant about revealing government corruption that he discovered while an FBI agent. I explained to Taus that there was a U.S. Supreme Court decision rendered about 15 years earlier stating that a federal employee had a greater duty to report criminal activities by his superiors than a duty to cover up for such crimes because of any employee secrecy agreement....
Taus said he did all he could to report these criminal activities, but the coverup was too pervasive. The coverup included senior FBI officials such as Oliver "Buck" Revell, who had earlier stalled and stopped legitimate FBI investigations concerning both the Irangate and Iraqgate scandals, similar to his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, protecting organized crime for many years....
He stated in general terms about discovering evidence of major criminal activities involving the CIA, the White House, and other government operations. Over a period of several years, Taus provided me with sufficient data to write a book sole on his disclosures as a military pilot and then an FBI agent....
While Taus was piloting a helicopter in Vietnam he heard over the aircraft radio a distress call from the pilot of an Air America C-46 aircraft about to make a crash landing. Taus proceeded to the crash site and landed, offering to fly the unharmed pilots to their base of operations. But the crew refused to leave the aircraft, saying they would wait for Air America people to arrive. The reason for refusing to leave the aircraft was suggested by the nature of the cargo: it consisted of heroin, estimated at about 4000 pounds.
(Air America and its predecessor airline, Civil Air Transport, among others, was one of many CIA airlines. While I was flying captain for Japan Airlines out of Tokyo, where many of these CIA-associated pilots went for recreation, I learned from them that the CIA was hauling drugs.)
Upon returning to base, Taus made a written report to his military unit commander describing the heroin on the Air America aircraft. He also sent a letter to his New York congressman, reporting the CIA's drug smuggling operation. A congressional "investigation" followed, which covered up for the CIA's drug smuggling - a congressional coverup that has gone on for the past 40 years....
Taus returned to the United States from Vietnam and became part of the New York National Guard, assigned to instructor duties for the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College courses. While on military duty with the National Guard, he was sent to Central and South America several times on special missions, during which he learned more about the global drug trafficking business and the involvement of it of the CIA, State Department, and U.S. military....
After leaving the military, Taus joined the FBI as a Special Agent, and continued his ties to the military as a senior officer in the Army Reserve. During his FBI investigations, Taus discovered covert CIA operations in the United States, including looting the savings and loans, and other criminal activities....
Taus explained how the CIA had infiltrated the FBI and discovered the names of FBI agents and informants, and investigations that could expose covert and criminal CIA operations. The CIA knowingly gave false information to FBI agents, seriously jeopardizing FBI missions and misleading top Justice Department and White House personnel....
Taus was very concerned about the CIA drug smuggling that he observed over a 20-year period of time while an Army officer and then while an FBI Special Agent. This concern was increased by his discovery that the CIA was actively involved in drug trafficking with organized crime figures in the New York area. And if this wasn't enough, his concern was further heightened by FBI supervisors ordering him to shut down his investigation.
Taus and other FBI agents discovered CIA drug trafficking as a result of their investigations into other organized crime activities, and aided by the Pennsylvania Crime Commission Report on drug trafficking among pizza outlets and cheese dealers. The Pennsylvania report described extensive interstate and international drug-trafficking involving Mafia figures throughout the United States and Canada....
Taus, while heading an FBI investigative team, discovered CIA involvement with the American Mafia in drug trafficking during the time when Assistant U.S. Attorney Louis Freeh was prosecuting the Italian Mafia's drug trafficking activities in the Pizza Connection drug cases. Freeh's prosecution of these cases propelled him to prominence in the FBI and he eventually became the director of the bureau.
It was Taus' belief there was a conflict between the Sicilian Mafia drug activities and those of the American Mafia, and that the CIA's connections were with the American Mafia. He felt the selective crackdown on the Sicilian Mafia was to eliminate competition to the CIA-backed American Mafia....
Also, the Pizza Connection drug charges focused on low level Mafia figures while protecting high-level drug kingpins and their accomplices in government. Taus explained the obstacles blocking prosecution by well-placed political figures, judges, and others.
He explained how AUSA Freeh blocked the issuance of subpoenas for such companies as Cremosa and Drexel-Castle, which had CIA connections....
~ ~ ~
A signed affidavit of Richard M. Taus is reproduced in Rodney Stich's book, Drugging America :
Affidavit of Richard M. Taus
I, Richard M. Taus, declare and state: I am a former Special Agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation assigned to the New York Office and the Brooklyn-Queens Metropolitan Resident Agency from July 1978 to November 1988. I was assigned to both the Foreign Counter-Intelligence Division and the Criminal Division.
During this period of time, my investigations into these matters revealed criminal activities and operations which I reported and documented to my superiors in the FBI, as follows:
The involvement of official, agents and operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with organized crime members and drug-trafficking activities. And the participation by members of the CIA who engaged in the looting of the Savings & Loan (Thrift) Industries, financial scams and fraudulent securities transactions.
The involvement of people from the National Security Agency Staff and Council and the White House in criminal activities associated with funding the acquisition of military supplies and equipment, arms and ammunition which were referred to as the Iran-Contra Arms Initiative, known as Irangate, and the Iraqi Scandal, known as Iraqgate.
The associations between known and suspected members of the Mafia and CIA agents in conducting drug-trafficking activities and financial frauds.
I was ordered by my supervisors in the FBI to halt these investigations, destroy my written reports, terminate my informants and make no reference to these criminal and subversive activities implicating high-ranking government officials, politicians, Mafia and business leaders who controlled and manipulated government agencies and operations.
Without any support from my superiors at the FBI New York Field Office, I then sent a letter describing what I had discovered in my official status as an FBI Special Agent to the FBI Director, William Sessions, and this was ignored. I proceeded to write Congressional officials, among them Senators Arlan Spector, Alfonse D'Amato, John Kerry and Congressmen Norman Lent, Charles Schmur, and many others who were on both the Senate and House Intelligence Oversight Committees. None of the above officials or representatives provided any support or assistance in exposing the CIA-White House corruption and the obstruction of justice tactics by my FBI superiors.
My sole purpose in preparing this affidavit, to be used by the former FBI Special Agent-In-Charge of the Los Angeles Field office, SAC Ted Gunderson, is to bring to justice the criminal and subversive activities that I and other government agents and operatives have discovered during our official and government related duties.
I declare and affirm under penalty of perjury that these statements are true to the best of my knowledge and belief. Executed this 13th day of August 1997, in the County of Clinton, State of New York.
(s) Richard M. Taus
For more on the CIA and drugs, GO TO > > > Songs of the Drug Vultures
x x x
From ... and the truth shall set you free , by David Icke:
The Hidden Hand
After a period as the United States representative in China while the Chinese and Henry Kissinger were supporting Pol Pot in Cambodia, George H.W. Bush returned home in 1975. He received a telegram from Kissinger saying that he was being nominated by Ford (Kissinger) to be the Director of the CIA.
This is a major Elite organisation, as is British Intelligence, which is probably above the CIA in the Elite pyramid. It was British Intelligence that helped to set up the CIA after the war. The familiar names step forward again.
A key figure behind the formation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), later the CIA, was General William J. Donovan. He studied law at Columbia University under Professor Harland F. Stone, who would later become US Attorney General and appoint Donovan as his assistant. Another of Stone's protégés was J. Edgar Hoover, who would be head of the FBI, and one of Donovan's classmates was Franklin D. Roosevelt, the future President.
In the First World War and between the wars, Donovan accepted a number of intelligence assignments from the New World Order brigade, including J.P. Morgan, the Rockefellers, and the Rothschilds, and on one occasion he spent an evening with Aldolf Hitler.
In 1941 he was appointed head of the new OSS intelligence agency by his friend from Columbia, Franklin Roosevelt. Donovan was assisted by James Paul Warburg, the son of Paul Warburg. It was James Warburg who said:
"We shall have a world government whether or not you like it - by conquest or consent."
However, it seems Donovan was not actually in charge of the OSS. According to Eustace Mullins in The World Order, Our Secret Rulers, Winston Churchill's military secretary, Colonel E.I. Jacob, was told by Major Desmond Morton Church, the Prime Minister's liaison with British Intelligence, in September 1941.
"Another most secret fact of which the Prime Minister is aware is that to all intents and purposes US Security is being run for them at the President's request by the British. A British officer sits in Washington with Mr. Edgar Hoover and General Bill Donovan for this purpose. It is of course essential that this fact should not be known."
The leading British coordinator of the OSS and its policy was William Stephenson, the head of the Special Intelligence Section of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and he was given a floor of the Rockefeller Center rent free. From there he ran a network of British agents in the United States which, according to Mullins, were involved in the murders of German sailors in New York, acts designed to entice Hitler to declare war on America.
Stephenson and Louis Bloomfield, the head of Permindex, also ran Operation Underworld with the Lansky Syndicate. Mullins suggests that three other members of the British Chiefs of Staff behind the creation of the OSS were: Lord Louis Mountbatten (Committee of 300, Bilderberg), a cousin of the King and related to the Frankfort banking families, Rothschild and Cassel; Charles Hambro, director of Hambros Bank and the Special Operations Executive; and Colonel Stewart Menzies, head of the Secret Intelligence Service. Lord Victor Rothschild was also at the heart of it. . . .
After the war, Donovan was special assistant to the US prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials to ensure that British and American involvement with the Nazis was not revealed. President Truman disbanded the OSS in 1945, but it was reformed as the CIA in 1948 under the control of Allen W. Dulles, a major funder of Adolf Hitler.
Appropriately, Dulles, a director of Hitler's bankers, J. Henry Schroder (Committee of 300), chose them to handle CIA funds. The CIA is an arm of the tax-exempt foundation syndicates controlled by the Rockefellers/Rothschilds, like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Carnegie organisation, through which much of the CIA policy is decided.
But although the CIA is extremely important to the New World Order, the real power in American intelligence circles is the National Security Agency (NSA), an organisation that keeps its head down while the CIA does its dirty work.
So while Bush was head of the CIA and even when he was president, he would be answerable to higher masters within the Elite....
Bush was not heading an independent CIA, but an element within the so called 'Inner Fed' of the secret government which consists of the CIA, NSA, FBI, NASA, and the Federal Reserve.
Much of the funding for this cartel of manipulation comes from its involvement in the hard drugs trade....
For more on Henry Kissinger, GO TO >>> The Kissinger of Death
# # #
S-h-h-h, for a peek at some of these
clandestine birds and their secret nests,
SNEAK ON DOWN!
\/
\/
\/
American International Group - The bigger they are, the harder they are to hide.
From the Wilderness
A.I.G.
by
Michael C. Ruppert
[EDITORIAL NOTE - From The Wilderness is a sole proprietorship and dba. It is written and edited by one person: Me. I do almost all of the research. Therefore, in the following story, for both legal reasons and for better reading I have decided to use the personal pronouns "I" and "me" instead of standard editorial references in the third person.]
----------
This series is dedicated to Mark Swaney of the Ozark Gazette for his intellectual courage and tenacity; to John McGlaughlin, the straightest and toughest man who ever honestly carried a badge; to Celerino Castillo III, with a heart bigger than his beloved Texas; to all the young men and women, mostly minorities, who are serving up to life in prison for crimes that don't remotely compare to those of Carlos Lehder; and to all the innocents in Colombia who stand at the brink of the next Vietnam War.
------------
There are mounting holes in the story of a woman, Coral Talavera Baca (henceforth referred to by her maiden name Talavera), who has claimed to be the wife of Medellin Cartel co-founder, Carlos Lehder, deepening the mystery about relationships between her, Lehder himself, the insurance giant American International Group (AIG), and the Central Intelligence Agency.
These new discrepancies, including her prior confirmation of the authenticity of documents now suspected of being forged, have raised the possibility that the U.S. Government, in partnership with AIG, has been deliberately planting false information in the press to support the woman's claims about Lehder's reported freedom and activities. Talavera has been simultaneously described as either Staff Counsel for AIG's in house San Francisco law firm or as its office manager.
In Part I of this series we reported that other journalists, who have asked not to be identified, had received the same documents we continue to examine here. Some of those documents purport to be official reports from the U.S. Treasury and U.S. Attorney's offices.
As FTW moves deeper into its multi-part investigation - inspired by revelations of possible 1987-92 drug money laundering involving AIG, Goldman Sachs and the Arkansas Development Financial Authority (ADFA) - attention now focuses on Talavera's employer, AIG.
These events increased my interest in the 1987 founding of Coral Reinsurance (Coral Re) by AIG, Goldman Sachs (whose then Vice Chairman Robert Rubin served as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration) and ADFA.
Lehder, arrested in 1987, was allowed to keep almost $3 billion in assets in a move severely criticized by Merkle. Where did that money go? Was it hidden it in a major insurance company with cash flows large enough to conceal it? This question, more than any other, except establishing Lehder's current status, prompted me to begin this investigation. . . .
FTW has also conducted an extensive investigation into AIG and its predecessors, including the C. V. Starr Insurance Companies, revealing deep connections to US intelligence dating back to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II.
These connections include documented CIA operatives connected to drug smuggling from Southeast Asia and a current board member, Frank Wisner, Jr., whose father was a key figure in the creation of the CIA.
History, as well as AIG's current operations, suggest that these relationships continue unabated today.
These connections may go a long way toward explaining the behavior of Talavera, a woman whose education, work experience and history apparently do not qualify her to manage a legal office which, according to AIG spokesman Michael Murphy, specializes in the international operations of a company operating in 130 countries and with year 2000 revenues of $46 billion.
While the mystery deepens about the woman claiming to be his wife, the key question as to whether or not Lehder is free remains unanswered.
~ ~ ~
In Part I of this series I reported that through a number of vehicles including correspondence, e-mails, a telephone listing in the name of Carlos Lehder, tape recorded conversations and in-person statements Coral Talavera had represented to a number of people, including a retired DEA agent, me and others that she was the wife of Medellin Cartel co-founder Carlos Lehder.
In an on-the-record interview and a legally tape recorded conversation she has also vouched for the authenticity of documents that have either been shown to be forged or are now seriously suspected of being forged.
She additionally made it clear that Lehder was out of prison, working for the United States government and directly connected to the CIA and the U.S. Treasury....
All of this begs the question as to why AIG would protect and employ a woman engaged in these and other behaviors and with a history that could only damage the company's reputation.
The one fact of Coral Talavera's life that has not been called into question by any of the sources I have contacted is that Coral knew and had a relationship with Carlos Lehder in the 1980s. The suspicions of many that Lehder is free have not yet been allayed. . . .
So these disturbing developments also drive home the importance of a question that the US government still has not answered.
Where is Carlos Lehder and what motive could the government -- or AIG -- have for wanting some people to believe, or know, that he is free?
If I am so patently wrong in what I have reported in this investigation, including the publication of the tape-recorded conversation wherein Talavera openly talks about Lehder's freedom and says that she is his wife, why doesn't the government just deny it, produce Lehder, discredit Talavera and state that the rest is pure bunk?
Is there a legend -- a cover story -- that the CIA and AIG are trying to protect for the benefit of unknown third parties in other parts of the world?
~ ~ ~
For more, GO TO > > > The Un-American Insurance Group
JIM JONES AND THE PEOPLES TEMPLE
By Jim Hougan
What follows is a work in progress about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple.
In so far as it has a central thesis, it is that Jones initiated the 1978 massacre at Jonestown, Guyana because he feared that Congressman Leo Ryan's investigation would disgrace him. Specifically, Jones was afraid that Ryan and the press would uncover evidence that the leftist founder of the Peoples Temple was for many years an asset of the FBI and the CIA.
This fear was, I believe, mirrored in various precincts of the U.S. intelligence community, which worried that Ryan's investigation would embarrass the CIA by linking Jones to some of the Agency's most volatile programs---including "mind-control studies" and operations such as MK-ULTRA.
This is, I believe, why Jones's 201-file was purged by the CIA immediately after Jones's case-officer, Dan Mitrione, was murdered in Montevideo, Uruguay.
What I believe and what I can prove are, in some instances, two different things. There is no smoking gun in the pages that follow. But I think the reader will agree that there are certainly a great many empty cartridges lying around---enough, perhaps, to stimulate further investigation by others.
Having said that, it should be added that I am hardly the first to suggest that the Jonestown massacre was the outcome of someone's secret machinations. The affair is inherently mysterious, and conspiracy theories abound---the most prominent among them that "Jonestown" was a CIA mind-control experiment.
This is a view that has been put forward in a number of venues. Congressman Ryan's close friend and chief-of-staff, Joe Holsinger, is persuaded of it. The respectable Edwin Mellen Press has gone so far as to publish a book on the subject. And professional conspiracists such as John Judge have embraced the thesis wholeheartedly.
In my view, they're probably mistaken. The truth is darker, the evil more banal...
Read the full story at...
http://jimhougan.com/JimJones.html
For more, GO TO > > > Of Vampires and Daisies
Asa Hutchinson - Congressman from Arkansas.
From The Wilderness
[The man appointed by President Bush to head the Drug Enforcement Administration has been an ally of the CIA and drug smugglers in the past. His true job may be to manage the drug trade so that the profits remain in the pockets of the CIA and Wall Street. Here, veteran Arkansas journalist Mara Leveritt tells you the hidden history of Asa Hutchinson. - Special Presentation from the May 31, 2001 issue of FTW]
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May 25, 2001
Asa and Me
I've wondered for years: What does Hutchinson know
about Arkansas's biggest drug smuggler?
And when did he know it?
By Mara Leveritt, Arkansas Times
Asa Hutchinson and I share a passion for the subject of drugs. As a crusading member of Congress, he talks a lot about them. As a reporter focused on crime, my writing centers on them. Hutchinson wants to intensify this country''s war on drugs. I think three decades of failure have proven the war a disaster.
Now President George W. Bush has nominated Hutchinson to head the DEA, the biggest drug-fighting squad in the world. But before Hutchinson assumes that post, there are some questions about high-level cocaine trafficking in Arkansas while he was a U.S. attorney here that he should be required to answer. The questions have hung about for years, but so far he has managed to dodge them.
They relate to the period from 1982 to 1985, when Hutchinson served as the federal prosecuting attorney for western Arkansas. He speaks often of that time.
"During the 1980s, our nation declared a war against drugs," he proclaimed in a 1997 speech to the House. "I was in that battle as a federal prosecutor. It was during that time that our families, our communities, and our law-enforcement officials mobilized in a united effort to fight this war."
In another speech he observed, "I have seen the drug war from all sides - as a member of Congress, as a federal prosecutor, and as a parent - and I know the importance of fighting this battle on all fronts."
But some strange things happened in Hutchinson's district while he was federal prosecutor that he doesn't mention in his speeches. Specifically, a man identified by federal agents as "a documented, major narcotics trafficker" was using facilities at an airport in Hutchinson''s district for "storage, maintenance, and modification" of his drug-running aircraft, throughout most of Hutchinson's tenure.
The man was Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal. For the last four years of his life - and throughout Hutchinson's term as U.S. attorney - his base of operations was Mena, Arkansas.
In 1982, the year that Hutchinson took office as U.S. attorney and Seal moved to Mena, federal officials were already aware that he controlled "an international smuggling organization" that was "extremely well organized and extensive." Agents for the DEA, FBI, U.S. Customs, and IRS were watching him. They brought Hutchinson evidence that Seal was "involved in narcotics trafficking and the laundering of funds derived from such trafficking."
I knew none of this in the early 1980s. At the time, this was highly secret information, known only to a handful of state and federal investigators and a few politicians, including U.S. Attorney Asa Hutchinson.
My interest in the relationship between Seal and Hutchinson was piqued as I became aware of how heavily drug prosecutions fell on street - and mid-level dealers, while smugglers like Seal, who imported drugs by the ton, rarely ended up in prison. So when rumors surfaced about Seal and his organization, and how they had managed for years to avoid prison, even though the extent of their activities was well known to drug authorities, I wanted to know more.
But getting the story has not been easy. In the early 1990s, I asked Hutchinson about Barry Seal and his associates at Mena. Hutchinson provided no information, and politely dismissed the complaints that had arisen by then about his failure to prosecute Seal. He said he had already resigned as U.S. attorney by the time the matter arose.
Even then I knew better than that. Ignoring sidelong glances from some of my peers, who already equated drug smuggling at Mena with reports of life on Mars, I began collecting official accounts of what had happened there. My main thrust was an attempt to acquire, through the federal Freedom of Information laws, all the documents relating to Seal that were generated by the FBI.
I wish now that I had gone after the DEA's records on Seal, but I was working in the dark. I knew that the FBI had been involved in Seal's case, so I began with what I knew.
The battle to obtain even those documents has now taken longer than the length of time that Seal was based at Mena. At first the FBI denied that it had any records on Seal. When I produced photocopies of FBI memos relating to the Seal investigation, the agency acknowledged that a file existed. But, I was told, it probably would take years to review it, and besides, thousands of applicants for other files were already ahead of me.
That's when I wrote to two members of Congress, asking for their help. Even though Hutchinson is not from my district, I contacted him in hopes that, having been close to the events, he would want to help clear the record. Again, he responded politely.
He told me that it was always good to hear from me, that he had contacted the FBI in my behalf, and that he would be back in touch with me when the agency responded. He included a copy of a federal guide to using the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act, in the hope that it would help in my "research efforts." He thanked me for my patience.
That was the last I heard from Asa Hutchinson until a couple of years later, when I mentioned the incident in a column. At that point, an aide to Hutchinson hastened to apologize for the lack of follow up. But still, there was no help on the Mena front coming from the Hutchinson camp.
Fortunately, Rep. Vic Snyder was more responsive. In fact, Snyder and his staff made repeated attempts to persuade the FBI to release the records I had requested. Finally, after a personal visit from Snyder, the agency agreed to start releasing some of its files on Mena. As a result, during the past two years, I have received several hundred pages of reports relating to Barry Seal. I have posted many of these pages on my website, www.maraleveritt.com, and a new batch will be posted soon. The pages reflect the intensity of activity surrounding Seal, even if, in true wartime fashion, most of the details have been blacked out.
Many of the documents have been so heavily censored that they have been rendered worthless. And hundreds more were withheld altogether. Some of the redactions were made, according to agency notations, to protect the privacy of named individuals. Many others, however, are said to have been made to protect "national security."
In an effort that my children predict I'll still be waging from beyond the grave, I am appealing the national security exclusions. What, I ask, is the connection between Seal and national security?
I have seen the rug of "national security" grow larger by the year, and it concerns me that so many aspects of this war on drugs are piously being swept under it.
Too often "national security" means "don't tell the American people."
I believe that if this country is going to fight a long and costly war, the war's leaders have an obligation to report faithfully on its battles. The incidents that surrounded Seal constituted a major battle. But the faithful report has been missing. For more than 15 years, U.S. government officials, including Hutchinson, who were close to the events have maintained a stony silence.
Yet, despite the former prosecutor's unhelpfulness, chunks of the story have emerged. And scoffs about Mena aside, it is a remarkable one. The stakes with Seal were about as high as they can get in a war. The story is replete with intrigue and layers of betrayal. The losses it reflects were enormous.
Here's a gram of what happened:
Early in 1984, after years of painstaking investigation, law enforcement agencies, including the DEA, were ready to prosecute Seal. But Seal called upon political connections, and they let him become an informant rather than go to prison. The price of Seal''s last-minute deal with the U.S. government was that he was to betray his Colombian allies, toppling the leadership of the Medellin cartel.
But the government lost on the deal. The plan to use Seal to rout the cartel ended in murder and failure. Not only was Seal exposed, and then assassinated, but members of his "extensive" organized crime operation evaded prosecution.
The fiasco left many law enforcement officers who'd worked on the Seal case feeling that they'd been betrayed. I''ve interviewed some of them, and their disillusionment is heartbreaking.
In 1992, I spoke with Jack Crittendon, a sergeant with the Louisiana State Police. He told me that 10 years earlier, in early 1982, he and his partner were building a case against Seal when they were notified that DEA officials in Miami were on the verge of indicting Seal. Armed with that information, Crittendon and his partner confronted Seal at a steak house in Baton Rouge.
"We told him we'd like for him to turn around and cooperate with us and with the DEA and with the U.S. attorney in Baton Rouge," Crittendon recalled. "We were looking across the table at him. Now, the man had a mind for business. With his mind, he could have been the head of a Fortune 500 company. It just so happened that his business was smuggling. We told him we wanted the cartel. He said he'd have to give it some thought."
Ultimately, Seal