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Announcing TBR Ebooks!

Starting with a new publication concerning the background behind the 9/11 attacks, TBR News will be presenting a series of interesting, informative and definitive works for our readers. Future titles will include the complete Voice of the White House with much more added material that was considered too controversial to post, the heavily-censored Armenian Holocaust of 1916, the Bush-Lay private correspondence, the Assassination of JFK,Pearl Harbor intrigues and rare documents, Malaparte’s inside study of the making of revolution, sensational selected articles from the German Rudolf historical revision files, unpublished before Rudolf’s arrest and forced deportation to Germany, World War II studies of holocaust history, taken from secret German files and much more. Please see the title page for more information.

The Editors

Descending Into Darkness: The Harring Report

A well-researched study into the background of the 9/11 attack: Who knew what and when did they know it. Russian and German intelligence material, not published before show that the U.S. had ample warning...and did nothing about it.

THE VOICE OF THE WHITE HOUSE

The full collection of the twice-weekly commentary of what is really going on inside the corrupt Bush White House. The spectrum includes the Gannon scandal, the planned invasion of Iran, many stories of stupidity and corruption coupled with biting sarcasm. Interesting to note that many, if not most, of the predictions have come true.

REGICIDE The Official Assassination of John F. Kennedy

A landmark book that sold very well in hardback, this work contains actual intelligence documents concerning the inside U.S. plans to kill Kennedy; the reasons, the methods and the results.

The Final Reckoning: An Analysis of Demographics in Holocaust Literature

By Harold Kreig, Lt.Col, AUS ret.

This is the first rational, heavily documented work on the subject of the Holocaust. Colonel Krieg has taken thousands of documents, including the official SS concentration camp records from 1935 through 1945 and official U.S. government postwar analysis of the system and the casualties and causes of death and produced a book that is highly informative and readable.  Heavily footnoted and annotated, ‘The Final Reckoning’ is logical and compelling and is an historical work that should be read through by any student of the period and subject.

Coup D’Etat: The Technique Of Revolution

By Curzio Malaparte

First published in Italy by Curzio Malaparte in 1928, this is a seminal work on historical seizures of power from Napoleon through Hitler.

Gestapo-Chief: The CIA & Heinrich Müller by Gregory Douglas

                In 1948, the former head of Hitelr’s Gestapo was interviewed by senior officials of the CIA in Switzerland where Müller had been in hiding since the end of the Second World War. His interview, for Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA’s Gehlen Organization, runs to nearly a thousand pages and for years was hidden in the CIA’s files.

                This is a translation of a part of the interview, which was initially conducted in German and then translated into English for CIA use.

                It is a fascinating series of historical episodes covering both the Axis and Allied sides with comments on Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, Winston Churchill, the 20^th of July bomb plot against Hitler, Bishop von Galen’s heroic, and successful, attacks on the Nazis and their euthanasia program, the concentration camps, the Duke of Windsor, the Roger Casement diaries and many more fascinating and insightful views of a man who ran the most effective counter-intelligence agency in modern times. 

                There is also extensive information on the attempts on the part of the CIA to silence or discredit the fact that the Gestapo Chief worked for the United States and eventually came to live in Washington, D.C. as part of the notorious “Operation Paperclip.”

                Fascinating inside views of many top Nazis and CIA officials. 

The CIA COvenant: Nazis in Washington

by Gregory Douglas

* From the end of World War II, the American CIA imported thousands of Nazis into the United States to work for them, many on the list of wanted war criminals

*One of the most important of these was Heinrich Mueller, once head of Hitler's Gestapo. Mueller was recruited by Colonel James Critchfield who ran the CIA's "Gehnel Organization' in Munich.

* Mueller kept journals and this book is a translation of three years (1948-1951) of notes and observations made of top CIA officials, President Truman, top U.S. government officials, plans for murder, thefts, kidnappings, wholesale thefts of public money and a terrifying pattern of uncontrolled ambition, unchecked by any person or agency.

* Also included are CIA and other agency's activities that have never been revealed.

*Mueller's deals in stolen Nazi art for the CIA are covered in detail.

*Also to be found are the steps the frightened CIA have taken to prevent the publication, sales or distribution of this work.

An Essay on the Principle of Population

by Thomas Malthus

The 1798 classic study of how supplies of food do not keep up with an expanding population

Malthus' theory is that population growth is geometric while the food supply increase is arithmetic.

A very literate and current study that clearly highlights present and current population problems

With the world's population higher than ever before, this is a work of great and current interest

CONSPIRACIES for Fun and Profit

Contents
The Evil Catholics Murdered Abraham Lincoln
TWA Flight 800: The Gathering of the Nuts
The Real Truth About the Kennedy Assassination!
The Great 9-11 Plot
Who is Sorcha Faal?
The Bush Indictments
Faked Conspiracy photos
The Sinking of the MV Estonia
The German Guy and the Destruction of Houston
The Great Contrail Conspiracy
Planet X
Remote Viewing unveiled

The Voice of the White House

Washington , D.C. , April 30, 2008 : “ I have been listening to various friends and children of friends about the growing home repossession crisis. It seems that many young, first time home buyers, were deliberately mislead by crooked mortgage brokers into buying their new home with very little down and small monthly payments. Most of these buyers were really unaware of the fact that after a period of time had elapsed, the mortgage holder could, and would, triple the monthly payments.

The banks who bought these crooked mortgages, crooked in that many of the buyers were known to the brokers as being unable to meet higher payments, quickly “bundled” them and sold them off at a good profit.

Now, we have some interesting facts. Most of the people being told to pay up or vacate do not know that it is virtually impossible to locate the actual mortgage holder and the law requires that said mortgage holder alone can repossess a home with delinquent payments.

Many judges ignore this but more than a few are requiring the actual holder of the mortgage to appear. This is impossible to do in most cases so young couples and poorer people should have their lawyers, assuming they can afford them, look into this.

Also, many infuriated home owners, upon being tossed out on the street, have taken to doing damage to their homes. I am going to discuss this aspect of the crisis here. I will, as an exercise in black humor, explain methods for teaching the banks a badly needed lesson.

Smashing up the house is stupid and futile. People who take tools and smash windows and rip out drywall could be prosecuted by the mortgage holder.

Better to consider some of these small advices instead.

Perhaps one could get a screwdriver, six or seven bottles of crazy glue, several bottles of Metamucil, a six pound hammer, a quantity of fresh or frozen crab meat and several dozens of large, cooked shrimp or prawns. That’s all you need to leave nothing behind. Oh yes, you can also get a large sack of rocksalt, available in any supermarket for use in water softeners, and fifty pounds of plaster of Paris. And a brace and bit too. That’s all you need. First, remove all the light switch and electric outlet plates in every room. Put some crab meat or a large prawn or two into the cavity and put the plates back on. When the shellfish goes off, the stench would kill a maggot. The meat will not only rot and give an unholy odor, it will eventually liquefy and vanish.

Having done that, pour a gallon of hot Ritz dye into the middle of the largest wall to wall carpet in the house. A puddle that looks like an accident. The carpet is ruined and it all has to be ripped out.

If there are wood floors or other horizontal wood surfaces, pour some acetone onto them and the finish is ruined and has to be redone. If the kitchen or entrance hall has ceramic tile, take a hammer and crack one or two of the tiles. If you have a tile kitchen sink cover, knock out one or two tiles or knock off one of the edge pieces.

You can pour the Metamucil down the drains in the kitchen. It will plug up the pipes for yards. You can also mix  the big bag of plaster of Paris and pour it into all the toilets and down the bathtub and shower drains. After the toilets are firmly plugged, take nice dump on top of it. Then, when a disgusted bank representative comes to visit, and overcomes the vomit-inducing stench of rotting shellfish, they will lift the toilet lid, make a face and pull the handle. This will result in a flood of water and turds onto the floor.

You can take the brace and bit, climb up on a chair and drill a hole in the top of your hollow core room doors and drop shrimp or crab down into the cavity. The stench will be matched by the staining of the wood at the bottom, stains that will smell for decades.

Fishing leader let down into the garbage disposal will ruin it and if you keep the power on, you will burn out the bearings. If you can’t get the stove out, piss into a large, ovenproof bowl, turn on the heat and put the bowl inside the oven.

Also, if you plug up the shower or bathtub drains, you can always turn on the taps, very gently, before you leave. If this is on an upper floor, the water will eventually spill over, spread out all over the floor, ruining the carpets and the floors before it leaks through and causes the plasterboard ceiling below to cave in.

If you want to be really bad, rip the electric cord off of an old lamp and put alligator clamps on each wire. Then, remove the cable box back or the telephone line cover and hook the clamps to each terminal and plug it into the household current. Five minutes of this and all the phone and cable lines are permanently fried. Put the cover back on again so as not to alert the bank people.

When you have done all of the above, take the crazy glue in hand and seal up every door in the house. Close the door first. Then note that the doorknob has a part that is fixed to the door itself and another part, the knob, that turns. Pour crazy glue over this junction. It will quickly settle in, effectively sealing the door.

You can also take out all the window blinds and curtains. If they won’t fit in your new apartment, put them into a dumpster. And be sure to leave the front door lock untouched.

Outside, locate the gas meter and pour a large circle of the salt around it with a trail leading in a straight line to the street. Either turn on the sprinklers for a while, allowing the salt to penetrate into the ground and kill the grass, or wait for a rain to hopefully arrive before the bank. In either case, wait for about a week, then call the gas company and complain of a leak. When the service people come out, they will see the dead grass and just know that there must be a leak. What will they do? If it looks like the line into the house is somehow leaking, they will get a backhoe and make the yard look like the battle of the Marne was fought there.

And you can dump the rest of the salt into the flower gardens and scatter the bits of it all over the lawn.

All of this may take some time and cost a few dollars, but believe me, the results are worth it. Vomiting bank visitors and huge bills for refinishing the floors, replacing the carpets, and if you use crazy glue on the sliding windows, much trouble there.

All it all, not a sound to annoy the neighbors and you leave little bits of joy behind. Trust me, children, the bank will have to spend many dollars to put the place back in service for the market and when the new owners try to install a telephone or put in cable, there will be even more delightful surprises.

My motto? Don’t get mad, get even.”

US Troop Death Toll Hits A 7-Month High in Iraq

April 30, 2008

by Slobodan Lekic

AP

BAGHDAD - The killings of three U.S. soldiers in separate attacks in Baghdad pushed the American death toll for April up to 47, making it the deadliest month since September, the military said Wednesday.

One soldier died when his vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb. The other died of wounds sustained when he was attacked by small-arms fire, the military said. Both incidents occurred Tuesday in northwestern Baghdad .

A third soldier died in a roadside bombing Tuesday night in the east of the capital, the military said.

The statement did not give a more specific location. But the eastern half of Baghdad includes embattled Sadr City and other neighborhoods that have been the focus of intense combat between Shiite militants and U.S.-Iraqi troops for more than a month.

In all, at least 4,059 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

“We have said all along that this will be a tough fight and there will be periods where we see these extremists, these criminal groups and al-Qaida terrorists seek to reassert themselves,” U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner told reporters in Baghdad .

“So, the sacrifice of our troopers, the sacrifice of Iraqi forces and Iraqi citizens reflects this challenge,” Bergner said in response to a question about what’s behind the increase in American troop deaths.

The latest fighting erupted at the end of March after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched a crackdown against Shiite militias in the southern port city of Basra . But it quickly spread to Baghdad ’s Sadr City , a sprawling slum with about 2.5 million people that is a stronghold of the Mahdi Army militia of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

The militiamen have used the district as a base to fire barrages of missiles and mortar rounds at the U.S.-protected Green Zone which houses much of the Iraqi government and Western diplomatic missions, including the U.S. and British embassies.

They also have fought running street battles in which hundreds have died. The U.S. military says those killed have been mainly gunmen. But police and medical authorities in Sadr City say innocent civilians have frequently gotten caught up in the fighting.

Such street battles — in tight confines and amid frightened civilians — are increasingly becoming a hallmark of the drive into Sadr City and recall the type of head-on clashes last seen in large numbers during last year’s U.S. troop buildup in Baghdad and surrounding areas.

The Sadr City violence continued overnight with the destruction of a school in the district. AP Television News footage showed that parts of the two-floor Baghdad Girls’ School had pancaked as the result of an explosion. Desks were hanging down from the slanting classrooms where the outer walls were blown out by the blast.

Local officials said the school was the target of an airstrike on Tuesday evening.

An official at the local hospital, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, said two people were killed and 16 wounded overnight in Sadr City . He said this brought the death toll in the district since Tuesday to 31, with 107 wounded.

The U.S. military had no comment about the school but said an Abrams tank fired at gunmen shooting at U.S. troops in Sadr City , killing all three. In another part of Sadr City , an unmanned drone fired a missile at a group of men planting a roadside bomb and killed one, the military said.

On Wednesday, al-Maliki accused the Mahdi Army of using civilians as human shields, and vowed to continue the crackdown against militias.

“We can’t build a state along with militias,” he told reporters at a news conference. “We want to build a single national army.”

Al-Maliki also said that militants had killed the nephew of an Interior Ministry spokesman and hanged the body from an electric pole in Baghdad . The attack Tuesday was in apparent retaliation for the spokesman’s role in a government crackdown against Shiite militias.

Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf was in charge of the crackdown on the Mahdi Army that began in Basra in late March and has survived past assassination attempts. His nephew was killed in Sadr City district, al-Maliki said.

Associated Press writers Sinan Salaheddin and Qassim Abdul-Zahra contributed to this report.

April 29, 2008    Soldier Spc. David P. McCormick, 26, of Fresno , Texas , died April 28 in Baghdad , Iraq , of wounds suffered when his forward operating base came under rocket attack.

April 25, 2008    Soldier Staff Sgt. Shaun J. Whitehead, 24, of Commerce, Ga. , died April 24 in Iskandariyah , Iraq , of wounds suffered when he encountered an improvised explosive device while on a dismounted patrol.  Soldier Staff Sgt. Ronald C. Blystone, 34, of Springfield , Mo. , died April 23 in Baghdad , Iraq , from wounds suffered when he encountered small arms fire during a dismounted patrol.

Two Marines died April 22 from wounds suffered while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq :  Lance Cpl. Jordan C. Haerter, 19, of Sag Harbor , N.Y. , Cpl. Jonathan T. Yale, 21, of Burkeville , Va. Two soldiers died April 23 in Golden Hills , Iraq , of injuries suffered in a vehicle incident: Pfc. John T. Bishop, 22, of Gaylord , Mich. ,  1st Lt. Timothy W. Cunningham, 26, of College Station , Texas . Soldier Sgt. Guadalupe Cervantes Ramirez, 26, of Fort Irwin , Calif. , died April 23 at Camp Arifjan , Kuwait , of injuries suffered in a vehicle incident.

April 24, 2008   Marine 1st Lt. Matthew R. Vandergrift, 28 of Littleton , Colo. , died April 21 from wounds he suffered while conducting combat operations in Basrah , Iraq .

April 23, 2008   Soldier Pvt. Ronald R. Harrison, 25, of Morris Plains , N.J., died April 22 at Forward Operating Base Falcon near Baghdad , Iraq , of a non-combat related injury.  Two soldiers died April 21 in Bayji , Iraq , of wounds suffered when their vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.: Spc. Steven J. Christofferson, 20, of Cudahy , Wis. ,  Sgt. Adam J. Kohlhaas, 26, of Perryville , Mo.

April 22, 2008   Sailor Petty Officer 1st Class Cherie L. Morton, 40, of Bakersfield , Calif. , died April 20 in Galali, Muharraq , Bahrain . The cause of death is under investigation. Sailor Airman Apprentice Adrian M. Campos, 22, of El Paso , Texas , was found dead in Dubai on April 21 due to a non-combat related incident.

April 21, 2008   Soldier Spc. Lance O. Eakes, 25, of Apex, N.C., died April 18 in Baghdad , Iraq , of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device. Soldier Spc. Benjamin K. Brosh, 22, of Colorado Springs , Colo. , died April 18 at Forward Operating Base Anaconda in Balad , Iraq , of wounds suffered in Paliwoda , Iraq , when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.

April 19, 2008  Soldier Staff Sgt. Jason L. Brown, 29, of Magnolia, Texas, died April 17 in Sama Village, Iraq, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked using small arms fire and grenades.

April 18, 2008   Two Marines died April 15 while conducting combat operations in Kandahar province, Afghanistan : 1st Sgt. Luke J. Mercardante, 35, of Athens , Ga. ,,Cpl. Kyle W. Wilks, 24, of Rogers , Ark.

April 15, 2008 Soldier Sgt. Joseph A. Richard III, 27, of Lafayette , La. , died April 14 in Baghdad , Iraq , of wounds sustained when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device. Soldier Spc. Arturo Huerta-Cruz, 23, of Clearwater , Fla. , died April 14 in Tuz , Iraq , of wounds sustained when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.   Two Marines died April 14 while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq : Cpl. Richard J. Nelson, 23, of Racine , Wis , Lance Cpl. Dean D. Opicka, 29, of Waukesha , Wis.

April 14, 2008   Soldier Spc. William E. Allmon, 25, of Ardmore , Okla. , died April 12 in Baghdad , Iraq , of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.

April 11, 2008   Soldier Spc. Jacob J. Fairbanks, 22, of Saint Paul , Minn. , died April 9 in Baghdad , Iraq , of injuries suffered in a non-combat related incident. Soldier Sgt. Jesse A. Ault, 28, of Dublin , Va. , died April 9 in Baghdad , Iraq , from wounds suffered in Tunnis , Iraq , when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.

April 10, 2008 Soldier Sgt. Shaun P. Tousha, 30, of Hull , Texas , died April 9 in Baghdad , Iraq , from wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.  Airman Tech. Sgt Anthony L. Capra, 31, of Hanford , Calif. , died April 9 near Golden Hills , Iraq , of wounds suffered when he encountered an improvised explosive device. Soldier Spc. Jeremiah C. Hughes, 26, of Jacksonville , Fla. , died April 9 in Balad Iraq , of injuries sustained in a non-combat related incident in Abu Gharab , Iraq .  Soldier Staff Sgt. Jeffery L. Hartley, 25, of Hempstead , Texas , died April 8 in Kharguliah , Iraq , of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.

April 9, 2008   Soldier Maj. Mark E. Rosenberg, 32, of Miami Lakes , Fla. , died April 8 in Baghdad , Iraq of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device. Two soldiers died April 7 in Sadr City , Iraq , when enemy forces attacked using a rocket propelled grenade: Spc. Jason C. Kazarick, 30, of Oakmont , Pa ,. Sgt. Michael T. Lilly, 23, of Boise , Idaho . Soldier Sgt. Timothy M. Smith, 25, of South Lake Tahoe , Calif. , died April 7 in Baghdad , Iraq of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.

April 8, 2008 Soldier Staff Sgt. Jeremiah E. McNeal, 23, of Norfolk , Va. , died April 6 in Baghdad , Iraq , of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.  Soldier Sgt. Richard A. Vaughn, 22, of San Diego , Calif. , died April 7 in Baghdad , Iraq from wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked using a rocket propelled grenade, improvised explosive device and small arms fire. Two soldiers died April 6 in Baghdad , of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked their unit with indirect fire: Col. Stephen K. Scott, 54, of New Market, Ala. , Maj. Stuart A. Wolfer, 36, of Coral Springs , Fla.   Soldier Staff Sgt. Emanuel Pickett, 34, of Teachey , N.C. , died April 6 in Baghdad , Iraq , of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked with indirect fire.

April 7, 2008   Soldier Pfc. Shane D. Penley, 19, of Sauk Village , Ill. , died April 6 at Patrol Base Copper, Iraq , from wounds suffered while on duty at a guard post. The incident is under investigation. Two soldiers died April 6 in Balad , Iraq , when their vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device:. Capt. Ulises Burgos-Cruz, 29, of Puerto Rico . , Spc. Matthew T. Morris, 23, of Cedar Park , Texas .

April 5, 2008  Soldier Sgt. Nicholas A. Robertson, 27, of Old Town, Maine, died April 3 at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany, of wounds suffered April 2 while conducting dismounted combat operations in the Zahn Khan District, Afghanistan.

April 4, 2008 Soldier Spc. Charles A. Jankowski, 24, of Panama City , Fla. , died March 28, in Arab Jabour, Iraq , of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Airman Staff Sgt. Travis L. Griffin, 28, of Dover , Del. , died April 3 near Baghdad , Iraq , of wounds suffered when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device.

April 3, 2008 Soldier Sgt. Dayne D. Dhanoolal, 26, of Brooklyn , died March 31 in Baghdad , of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.

April 2, 2008 Soldier Sgt. Jevon K. Jordan, 32, of Norfolk , Va. , died Mar. 29 at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center , Landstuhl , Germany , from wounds suffered Mar. 23 in Abu Jassim , Iraq , when his vehicle encountered an improvised explosive.  Maj. William G. Hall, 38, of Seattle , died March 30 from wounds he suffered while conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province, Iraq , on March 29.

April 1, 2008 Soldier Cpl. Steven I. Candelo, 20, of Houston , died March 26 in Baghdad , when his vehicle was struck by a rocket propelled grenade. Soldier Sgt. Terrell W. Gilmore, 38, of Baton Rouge , La. , died March 30 in Baghdad , when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Two soldiers died March 29 in Baghdad from wounds suffered when they encountered an improvised explosive device and small arms fire: Spc. Durrell L. Bennett, 22, of Spanaway , Wash. , and Pfc. Patrick J. Miller, 23, of New Port Richey, Fla.

Cheney Lawyer Claims Congress Has No Authority Over Vice-President

April 29, 2008

by Elana Schor

The Guardian

The lawyer for US vice-president Dick Cheney claimed today that the Congress lacks any authority to examine his behaviour on the job.

The exception claimed by Cheney’s counsel came in response to requests from congressional Democrats that David Addington, the vice-president’s chief of staff, testify about his involvement in the approval of interrogation tactics used at Guantanamo Bay .

Ruling out voluntary cooperation by Addington, Cheney lawyer Kathryn Wheelbarger said Cheney’s conduct is “not within the [congressional] committee’s power of inquiry”.

“Congress lacks the constitutional power to regulate by law what a vice-president communicates in the performance of the vice president’s official duties, or what a vice president recommends that a president communicate,” Wheelbarger wrote to senior aides on Capitol Hill.

The exception claimed by Cheney’s office recalls his attempt last year to evade rules for classified documents by deeming the vice-president’s office a hybrid branch of government - both executive and legislative.

The Democratic congressman who is investigating the legal framework for the violent interrogation of terrorist suspects, John Conyers, has asked Addington and several other top Bush administration lawyers to testify. Thus far all have claimed their deliberations are privileged.

However, Philippe Sands QC, law professor at University College , London , has agreed to appear in Washington and discuss the revelations in Torture Team, his new book on the consequences of the brutal tactics used at Guantanamo .

Excerpts from Torture Team were previewed exclusively by the Guardian earlier this month.

Two witnesses sought by Conyers, former US attorney general John Ashcroft and former US justice department lawyer John Yoo, claimed that their involvement in civil lawsuits related to harsh interrogations allows them to avoid appearing before Congress.

In letters to attorneys representing Ashcroft and Yoo, Conyers shot down their arguments and indicated he would pursue subpoenas if their clients did not testify at his May 6 hearing.

“I am aware of no basis for the remarkable claim that pending civil litigation somehow immunises an individual from testifying before Congress,” Conyers wrote.

Conyers, who chairs the House of Representatives judiciary committee, also questioned the reasoning of Cheney’s lawyer in a letter to Addington.

“It is hard to know what aspect of the invitation [to you] has given rise to concern that the committee might seek to regulate the vice president’s recommendations to the president,” Conyers wrote.

“Especially since far more obvious potential subjects of legislation are plentiful,” he added, mentioning several: US laws on the use of torture on terrorist suspects, the 15-year-old War Crimes Act, and the rules that allowed the Bush White House to receive legal advice from a specialised office within the justice department.

Letters to the Editor

From: cfowles@comcast.net

To: tbrnews@hotmail.com

Subject: Libraries

Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:42:01 -0700

Dear TBR News:

I'm an assistant city librarian in a small town in the NW United States. This statement:

'You might have relatives in a nursing home, send money by Western Union or use Google or check out books from the local library.' is false.

It is Library policy to protect patrons' privacy from even the local police. The idea of libraries transferring records to some databank in Bethesda , Maryland is ludicrous. We do not keep local lists of what patrons have read. Patrons ask us all the time because they don't emember what they've already checked out. We can't help them because we don't keep records of that. Even when we phone to let patrons know books are available that they've placed on hold, we are instructed to not tell spouses or any other person the title of the item. Librarians are at the forefront protecting privacy rights and if you had read the news sometime back, you'd know that when the Patriot Act was passed, Librarians flat out told the Feds they would not comply. Period.

Name and location withheld.

Response:

Dear Name Withheld:

Very sorry to inform you but you are dead wrong.

The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are mandated to use library records to check on the reading habits of 'suspect persons.'

This has received considerable authoritative attention in the American media in the past. Perhaps if your personal reading transcended the 'Weekly Reader' you might have noticed this.

I would suggest that you consult an information service, excluding Wikipedia which is a mass of errors, and study this subject further. And you will also find that Western Union records have been and are being monitored for money transfers to foreign countries. If you believe that this does not happen, I feel sorry for you. Next, you will be telling me that there is an Easter Bunny or actually was a Jesus Christ.

I would also doubt if a  'small town in the NW United States' would harbor anything more dangerous than furtive cross-dressers so it is more than likely that you have not become acquainted with the realities of life in more populated areas.

I have lived in very small and remote towns before and there, the big news is when a stray cow wandered into a Baptist Church on a Sunday and was accidentally baptized.

WS

Response:

From: C. Fowles (cfowles@comcast.net

Sent: Wed 4/30/ 08 12:53 PM

To: walter storch (tbrnews@hotmail.com

I think you may not have understood that there are no library records maintained about who has read what. Let me repeat, there are no records maintained of who has read what. The only records we potentially could "share" are only what a patron currently has checked out. I'm not kidding when I tell you we are expressly forbidden to give out that information. We have to refer the police to the Library Director, who will explain why they will not be given out without a court order or subpoena. The Library Director then has the FBI talk to the City Counsel. And then the FBI is invited to sue in court for the records.

Link to case in Connecticut that finally ended when the FBI dropped the demand for records after a court battle:

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/011619.html#011619

Bottom line, the FBI is not getting the records because of some stinking NSL. They will have a legal fight on their hands if they try. Your article implied that library records were somehow routinely being captured and stored in a database in Bethesda , Maryland .

Wire transfers of money are a different animal altogether and are being tracked and have been tracked even prior to 911 as part of the so-called "war on drugs" and other anti-organized crime law enforcement. We know how effective that was in stopping the terrorists!  On principle, tracking money illegally obtained is an entirely different thing from policing thoughts. The courts recognize the right of privacy to think what one will! The FBI is having a hell of a time convincing the courts there's probable cause of a crime being committed by someone for merely reading publicly available information at a public library.

Having said that, I do feel along with you and many people that our privacy is being invaded all the time. I had my picture taken by the State Patrol for standing on a street corner waving an anti-war sign. It really made me uncomfortable and ticked off when I became aware that the uniformed guy across the street was photographing me. So I looked straight into the camera held my sign up so he could get a good view and posed for him. He looked more than a little annoyed.

I don't know how this spying is going to play out and if we will ever have out Constitution restored. I too am very scared. I was slightly heartened to learn that Congress quietly revoked Bush's mandate to declare martial law. The appointment of Alito and Roberts to the Supreme Court however will be a slow motion disaster for years.

Response:

I understand you but in some areas, librarians and their employers do fully cooperate with government snoops. I am sure that in your area, it is as you say. If you stand up to them, they back off.

While the DHS has the legal right to get into a private lock box at the bank, the only areas in which they do so are, as I am constantly told, is in California where the eager Bank of America, like SBC, AT&T and, of course, AOL, welcome investigators and in the case of the telephone and other communications systems, actually allow agents unlimited access to all their facilities without any specific court order.

This means that I nor any of my acquaintance use any of the services of willing cooperators in such illegal activities. AOL has basically vanished from the scene and recent reports indicate that BoA is in very deep trouble because of its frenzy to acquire faulty mortgages.

I believe small, local banks are the best place for banking as most, if not all, of the larger banking firms are teetering on the brink of collapse.

You speak of an anti-war demonstration.

At this moment, the befuddled American population is watching the sleazy FOX network's 'American Idol' or the endless coverage of the mindless political warfare. The death tolls in both Afghanistan and Iraq are rising, we have lost the official assistance of Pakistan , oil has soared beyond belief and the worthless Bush is holding press conferences that are embarrassing to watch. WS

Microsoft device helps police pluck evidence from cyberscene of crime

April 28, 2008

by Benjamin J. Romano

Seattle Times

Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes.

The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB "thumb drive" that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.

The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer's Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer.

It also eliminates the need to seize a computer itself, which typically involves disconnecting from a network, turning off the power and potentially losing data. Instead, the investigator can scan for evidence on site.

More than 2,000 officers in 15 countries, including Poland , the Philippines , Germany , New Zealand and the United States , are using the device, which Microsoft provides free.

"These are things that we invest substantial resources in, but not from the perspective of selling to make money," Smith said in an interview. "We're doing this to help ensure that the Internet stays safe."

Law-enforcement officials from agencies in 35 countries are in Redmond this week to talk about how technology can help fight crime. Microsoft held a similar event in 2006. Discussions there led to the creation of COFEE.

Smith compared the Internet of today to London and other Industrial Revolution cities in the early 1800s. As people flocked from small communities where everyone knew each other, an anonymity emerged in the cities and a rise in crime followed.

The social aspects of Web 2.0 are like "new digital cities," Smith said. Publishers, interested in creating huge audiences to sell advertising, let people participate anonymously.

That's allowing "criminals to infiltrate the community, become part of the conversation and persuade people to part with personal information," Smith said.

Children are particularly at risk to anonymous predators or those with false identities. "Criminals seek to win a child's confidence in cyberspace and meet in real space," Smith cautioned.

Expertise and technology like COFEE are needed to investigate cybercrime, and, increasingly, real-world crimes.

Home prices sink at record clip; foreclosures keep mounting

April 29, 2008

by J.W. Elphinstone

Associated Press

NEW YORK - In a bad omen for sellers and lenders this spring home selling season, the erosion of house values is accelerating and foreclosure filings are doubling, new data showed Tuesday.

A closely watched index of home prices in 20 cities fell almost 13 percent in February from a year earlier, a record for the seven-year-old S&P's/Case-Shiller Home Price index. The report follows news that foreclosure filings between January and March also hit a new high, and comes a day after the government said the number of vacant homes on the market also hit a record.

"Month-to-month, it gets consistently worse," said David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P, noting that February also marked the sixth straight month that all 20 cities experienced declines. "The slope is one direction. There is no sign of a bottom."

He said 17 of the metro areas the index tracks reported record annual declines, led again by Miami and Las Vegas .

Charlotte , N.C. , was the only city to post an annual gain of 1.5 percent, but Blitzer noted that Charlotte 's positive returns continue to diminish with each month and it was the last city in the index to reach its peak.

The lopsided market, of course, means home buyers with good credit have an abundance of options.

Jody Hanson and her boyfriend Scott Harrison want to buy a two-story house with at least three bedrooms in Las Vegas for no more than $225,000. So far they have been out-bid on four foreclosed homes.

"There are just a ton of people here getting foreclosed upon," Hanson said, "so there are just so many deals waiting for you."

Half of all sales in Las Vegas are foreclosures, said Karen Wilson, a local Century 21 agent, though she said the glut of homes on the market has started to wane and transactions have picked up.

Nevada posted the country's worst foreclosure rate in the first quarter, RealtyTrac Inc. said Tuesday, with one in every 54 households receiving a foreclosure-related notice.

Nationwide, one in every 194 households received a foreclosure filing during the quarter, more than double the same period last year.

The most recent quarter marked the seventh consecutive quarter of rising foreclosure activity.

"What would normally alleviate the foreclosure situation in a normal market is people starting to buy properties again," said Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac's vice president of marketing.

However, people without perfect credit and a significant down payment are having trouble getting loans, and that is slowing the market's recovery, he said.

Falling home prices are driving up the number of loan defaults and foreclosures, deepening the toll lenders are paying for their reckless lending practices during the housing boom.

On Tuesday, Countrywide Financial Corp. said it lost $893 million in the first quarter after setting aside $1.5 billion to cover losses on unpaid home loans. The staggering lender agreed in January to sell itself to Bank of America Corp. for about $4 billion in stock.

The housing crisis, coupled with soaring food and fuel prices, are making consumers more pessimistic. A widely watched gauge of consumer sentiment hit a five-year low, a private research group said Tuesday, which doesn't bode well for a housing turnaround.

"Once the market starts in a given direction, the momentum will carry it down, even below the (historic) trend line, until something happens to change the overall psychology," said Jim Gaines, a research economist at Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University.

AP Business Writer Alex Veiga in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Why This Crisis is Still Far From Finished

April 29, 2007

by Mohamed El-Erian

The Market Oracle

During the past few weeks we have seen a growing number of market participants predict an end to the dislocations that erupted last summer and claimed victims throughout the financial system and beyond. While their predictions are understandable, they are premature. The dynamics driving the disruptions are morphing and may again move ahead of both the market and policy responses.

The optimistic view is based on two distinct elements. First, that the de­leveraging process is reaching its natural end as valuations stabilize and institutions come clean about their losses and raise capital; second, that a series of previously unthinkable policy responses have been effective in restoring liquidity to the financial system.

Both views have merit. Financial institutions, particularly in the US , have recognized the scale of the problem and are taking remedial steps. Just witness the recent round of capital raising by Citigroup , Merrill Lynch , JPMorgan and Wachovia . At the same time central banks in Europe and the US have opened up their financing windows, expanding the size of the financing, the range of institutions that can access it and the list of eligible collateral.

Yet, consistent with what we have seen since last summer, the dislocations are entering a new phase. As such, bold reactions on the part of policymakers may, once again, prove to be too little and too late.

Persistent financial dislocations have now caused the real economy to become, in itself, a source of potential disruption. During the next few months there will be a reversal in the direction of causality: the unusual adverse contamination by the financial sector of the real economy is now morphing into the more common phenomenon of recessionary forces threatening to undermine the financial system.

Economic data in the US have taken a notable turn for the worse . Most im­portantly, the already weakening employment outlook is being further undermined by a widely diffused build-up in inventory and falling profitability. History suggests that the latter two factors lead to significant employment losses.

Pity the US consumers. Their ability to sustain spending is already challenged by the declining availability of credit, a negative wealth effect triggered by declining house values, and a lower standard of living as the result of higher energy and food prices and a depreciating dollar. Job losses will accentuate the pressures on consumers, leading to income declines and a further loss of confidence.

While the financial system has taken steps to enhance balance sheets, they speak essentially to addressing the consequences of excessive leveraging and imprudent financial alchemy. As such, the nasty turn in the real economy may fuel another wave of disruptions that, this time around, would also have an impact on mid-size and smaller banks.

It is thus too early to declare the end of the turmoil that started last summer. Instead, during the next few months we may witness a new phase of dislocations, led this time by the real economy. The blame game will intensify; political pressure will continue to mount; momentum will build for greater and broader regulation of financial activities within the banking system and beyond.

The focus will also be on the reaction of policymakers. Here the outlook is mixed. The good news is that the crisis is now moving to an area where traditional policy tools are more effective. This is in sharp contrast to the situation of the past few months, where central banks were forced to use instruments that were too blunt for the purpose at hand.

But there is also bad news. The sharp slowdown in the US real economy will occur in the context of continued global inflationary pressures. As such, the Federal Reserve's dual objectives - maintaining price stability and solid economic growth - will become increasingly inconsistent and difficult to reconcile. Indeed, if the Fed is again forced to carry the bulk of the burden of the US policy response, it will find itself in the unpleasant and undesirable situation of potentially undermining its inflation-fighting credibility in order to prevent an already bad situation from becoming even worse.

It is still too early for investors and policymakers to unfasten their seatbelts. Instead, they should prepare for renewed volatility.

SECRECY NEWS

from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Volume 2008, Issue No. 42

April 30, 2008

SECRET LAW DEBATED IN SENATE HEARING

Secret law that governs the conduct of government activities but is inaccessible to the public is "a particularly sinister" phenomenon that is "increasingly prevalent," said Senator Russ Feingold today at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution.

The hearing produced a particularly rich record on the subject of secret law from a broad and diverse set of perspectives (including one view that "there is no such thing" as secret law).

In my own testimony, I provided a catalog of the many current forms of "secret law" and some of their objectionable consequences.

"If the rule of law is to prevail, the requirements of the law must be clear and discoverable," I suggested. "Secret law excludes the public from the deliberative process, promotes arbitrary and deviant government behavior, and shields official malefactors from accountability."

http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2008/043008aftergood.pdf

The classification of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memorandum of torture authored by John Yoo was "one of the worst abuses of the classification process I have seen during my career," testified J.

William Leonard, the former director of the Information Security Oversight Office.

More generally, "OLC has been terribly wrong to withhold the content of much of its advice from Congress and the public," said Prof. Dawn E. Johnsen, former head of the OLC, "particularly when advising the executive branch that in essence it could act contrary to federal statutory restraints."

Current OLC director John P. Elwood contended that current OLC disclosure policy "is consistent with the approach of prior Administrations."

Brad Berenson, a former associate counsel to the President, articulated "legitimate interests in secrecy" and cautioned against disclosure initiatives that could have unintended consequences.

Prof. Heidi Kitrosser explained the constitutional framework within which secrecy disputes take place and urged more "effective congressional oversight" to restrain abuses of secrecy.

Attorney David Rivkin, a frequent defender of Administration policies, said that the "law of war" paradigm with all of its attendant secrecy remains the appropriate one.

Sen. Sam Brownback expressed skepticism about new disclosure requirements, while Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse probed the destabilizing implications of the Administration view that executive orders can be "waived" by the President without notice to Congress or the public.

The prepared statements from the Senate hearing are available here:

http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearing.cfm?id=3305

For all of the differences of opinion, there was also a provisional consensus that the executive branch should be required to report to Congress when it significantly interprets or reinterprets a statutory requirement.

Chairman Feingold announced that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had notified him that several long-sought opinions of the Office of Legal Counsel concerning interrogation of enemy combatants would be provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee and possibly, in some form, to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sen. Feingold said he would continue to seek public disclosure of the opinions, a move that is not currently contemplated by the Administration.

HOUSE JUDICIARY QUESTIONS SECRECY OF OLC OPINIONS

The House Judiciary Committee has asked the Attorney General to report on the classification status of all written opinions of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued since 2001 that deal with national security, terrorism, civil or constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, or presidential, judicial or congressional power.

"While we appreciate the need to hold closely certain types of information in certain circumstances, we are skeptical that more information regarding the Department's analysis of relevant and important legal issues cannot responsibly be made public," wrote Rep. John Conyers, Jr., chair of the House Judiciary Committee and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, chair of the Subcommittee on the Constitution.

Citing a recent story in Secrecy News, they told the Attorney General that "Recent revelations about the nature and extent of such secret opinions make plain the need for Congress and the American public to receive information on this subject."

See their April 29, 2008 letter here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2008/hjc042908.pdf

A Litany of Horrors: America ’s University of Imperialism

April 30, 2008

by Chalmers Johnson

TomDispatch.com

This essay is a review of Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire by Alex Abella (Harcourt, 400 pp., $27)

The RAND Corporation of Santa Monica , California , was set up immediately after World War II by the U.S. Army Air Corps (soon to become the U.S. Air Force). The Air Force generals who had the idea were trying to perpetuate the wartime relationship that had developed between the scientific and intellectual communities and the American military, as exemplified by the Manhattan Project to develop and build the atomic bomb.

Soon enough, however, RAND became a key institutional building block of the Cold War American empire. As the premier think tank for the U.S. ’s role as hegemon of the Western world, RAND was instrumental in giving that empire the militaristic cast it retains to this day and in hugely enlarging official demands for atomic bombs, nuclear submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers. Without RAND , our military-industrial complex, as well as our democracy, would look quite different.

Alex Abella, the author of Soldiers of Reason, is a Cuban-American living in Los Angeles who has written several well-received action and adventure novels set in Cuba and a less successful nonfiction account of attempted Nazi sabotage within the United States during World War II. The publisher of his latest book claims that it is “the first history of the shadowy think tank that reshaped the modern world.” Such a history is long overdue. Unfortunately, this book does not exhaust the demand. We still need a less hagiographic, more critical, more penetrating analysis of RAND ’s peculiar contributions to the modern world.

Abella has nonetheless made a valiant, often revealing and original effort to uncover RAND ’s internal struggles — not least of which involved the decision of analyst Daniel Ellsberg, in 1971, to leak the Department of Defense’s top secret history of the Vietnam War, known as The Pentagon Papers to Congress and the press. But Abella’s book is profoundly schizophrenic. On the one hand, the author is breathlessly captivated by RAND’s fast-talking economists, mathematicians, and thinkers-about-the-unthinkable; on the other hand, he agrees with Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis’s assessment in his book, The Cold War: A New History, that, in promoting the interests of the Air Force, RAND concocted an “unnecessary Cold War” that gave the dying Soviet empire an extra 30 years of life.

We need a study that really lives up to Abella’s subtitle and takes a more jaundiced view of RAND’s geniuses, Nobel prize winners, egghead gourmands and wine connoisseurs, Laurel Canyon swimming pool parties, and self-professed saviors of the Western world. It is likely that, after the American empire has gone the way of all previous empires, the RAND Corporation will be more accurately seen as a handmaiden of the government that was always super-cautious about speaking truth to power. Meanwhile, Soldiers of Reason is a serviceable, if often overwrought, guide to how strategy has been formulated in the post-World War II American empire.

The Air Force Creates a Think Tank

RAND was the brainchild of General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Corps from 1941 until it became the Air Force in 1947, and his chief wartime scientific adviser, the aeronautical engineer Theodore von Kármán. In the beginning, RAND was a free-standing division within the Douglas Aircraft Company which, after 1967, merged with McDonnell Aviation to form the McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft Corporation and, after 1997, was absorbed by Boeing. Its first head was Franklin R. Collbohm, a Douglas engineer and test pilot.

In May 1948, RAND was incorporated as a not-for-profit entity independent of Douglas , but it continued to receive the bulk of its funding from the Air Force. The think tank did, however, begin to accept extensive support from the Ford Foundation, marking it as a quintessential member of the American establishment.

Collbohm stayed on as chief executive officer until 1966, when he was forced out in the disputes then raging within the Pentagon between the Air Force and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara’s “whiz kids” were Defense intellectuals, many of whom had worked at RAND and were determined to restructure the armed forces to cut costs and curb interservice rivalries. Always loyal to the Air Force and hostile to the whiz kids, Collbohm was replaced by Henry S. Rowan, an MIT-educated engineer turned economist and strategist who was himself forced to resign during the Ellsberg-Pentagon Papers scandal.

Collbohm and other pioneer managers at Douglas gave RAND its commitment to interdisciplinary work and limited its product to written reports, avoiding applied or laboratory research, or actual manufacturing. RAND ’s golden age of creativity lasted from approximately 1950 to 1970. During that period its theorists worked diligently on such new analytical techniques and inventions as systems analysis, game theory, reconnaissance satellites, the Internet, advanced computers, digital communications, missile defense, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. During the 1970s, RAND began to turn to projects in the civilian world, such as health financing systems, insurance, and urban governance.

Much of RAND ’s work was always ideological, designed to support the American values of individualism and personal gratification as well as to counter Marxism, but its ideological bent was disguised in statistics and equations, which allegedly made its analyses “rational” and “scientific.” Abella writes:

“If a subject could not be measured, ranged, or classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all — the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical.”

In my opinion, Abella here confuses numerical with empirical. Most RAND analyses were formal, deductive, and mathematical but rarely based on concrete research into actually functioning societies. RAND never devoted itself to the ethnographic and linguistic knowledge necessary to do truly empirical research on societies that its administrators and researchers, in any case, thought they already understood.

For example, RAND ’s research conclusions on the Third World , limited war, and counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War were notably wrong-headed. It argued that the United States should support “military modernization” in underdeveloped countries, that military takeovers and military rule were good things, that we could work with military officers in other countries, where democracy was best honored in the breach. The result was that virtually every government in East Asia during the 1960s and 1970s was a U.S.-backed military dictatorship, including South Vietnam , South Korea , Thailand , the Philippines , Indonesia , and Taiwan .

It is also important to note that RAND ’s analytical errors were not just those of commission — excessive mathematical reductionism — but also of omission. As Abella notes, “In spite of the collective brilliance of RAND there would be one area of science that would forever elude it, one whose absence would time and again expose the organization to peril: the knowledge of the human psyche.”

Following the axioms of mathematical economics, RAND researchers tended to lump all human motives under what the Canadian political scientist C. B. Macpherson called “possessive individualism” and not to analyze them further. Therefore, they often misunderstood mass political movements, failing to appreciate the strength of organizations like the Vietcong and its resistance to the RAND-conceived Vietnam War strategy of “escalated” bombing of military and civilian targets.

Similarly, RAND researchers saw Soviet motives in the blackest, most unnuanced terms, leading them to oppose the détente that President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger sought and, in the 1980s, vastly to overestimate the Soviet threat. Abella observes, “For a place where thinking the unthinkable was supposed to be the common coin, strangely enough there was virtually no internal RAND debate on the nature of the Soviet Union or on the validity of existing American policies to contain it. RANDites took their cues from the military’s top echelons.” A typical RAND product of those years was Nathan Leites’s The Operational Code of the Politburo (1951), a fairly mechanistic study of Soviet military strategy and doctrine and the organization and operation of the Soviet economy.

Collbohm and his colleagues recruited a truly glittering array of intellectuals for RAND , even if skewed toward mathematical economists rather than people with historical knowledge or extensive experience in other countries. Among the notables who worked for the think tank were the economists and mathematicians Kenneth Arrow, a pioneer of game theory; John Forbes Nash, Jr., later the subject of the Hollywood film A Beautiful Mind (2001); Herbert Simon, an authority on bureaucratic organization; Paul Samuelson, author of Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947); and Edmund Phelps, a specialist on economic growth. Each one became a Nobel Laureate in economics.

Other major figures were Bruno Augenstein who, according to Abella, made what is “arguably RAND’s greatest known — which is to say declassified — contribution to American national security: . . .the development of the ICBM as a weapon of war” (he invented the multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle, or MIRV); Paul Baran who, in studying communications systems that could survive a nuclear attack, made major contributions to the development of the Internet and digital circuits; and Charles Hitch, head of RAND’s Economics Division from 1948 to 1961 and president of the University of California from 1967 to 1975.

Among more ordinary mortals, workers in the vineyard, and hangers-on at RAND were Donald Rumsfeld, a trustee of the Rand Corporation from 1977 to 2001; Condoleezza Rice, a trustee from 1991 to 1997; Francis Fukuyama, a RAND researcher from 1979 to 1980 and again from 1983 to 1989, as well as the author of the thesis that history ended when the United States outlasted the Soviet Union; Zalmay Khalilzad, the second President Bush’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations; and Samuel Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb (although the French military perfected its tactical use).

Thinking the Unthinkable

The most notorious of RAND’s writers and theorists were the nuclear war strategists, all of whom were often quoted in newspapers and some of whom were caricatured in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. (One of them, Herman Kahn, demanded royalties from Kubrick, to which Kubrick responded, “That’s not the way it works Herman.”) RAND’S group of nuclear war strategists was dominated by Bernard Brodie, one of the earliest analysts of nuclear deterrence and author of Strategy in the Missile Age (1959); Thomas Schelling, a pioneer in the study of strategic bargaining, Nobel Laureate in economics, and author of The Strategy of Conflict (1960); James Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense from 1973 to 1975, who was fired by President Ford for insubordination; Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War (1960); and last but not least, Albert Wohlstetter, easily the best known of all RAND researchers.

Abella calls Wohlstetter “the leading intellectual figure at RAND ,” and describes him as “self-assured to the point of arrogance.” Wohlstetter, he adds, “personified the imperial ethos of the mandarins who made America the center of power and culture in the postwar Western world.”

While Abella does an excellent job ferreting out details of Wohlstetter’s background, his treatment comes across as a virtual paean to the man, including Wohlstetter’s late-in-life turn to the political right and his support for the neoconservatives. Abella believes that Wohlstetter’s “basing study,” which made both RAND and him famous (and which I discuss below), “changed history.”

Starting in 1967, I was, for a few years — my records are imprecise on this point — a consultant for RAND (although it did not consult me often) and became personally acquainted with Albert Wohlstetter. In 1967, he and I attended a meeting in New Delhi of the Institute of Strategic Studies to help promote the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was being opened for signature in 1968, and would be in force from 1970. There, Wohlstetter gave a display of his well-known arrogance by announcing to the delegates that he did not believe India , as a civilization, “deserved an atom bomb.” As I looked at the smoldering faces of Indian scientists and strategists around the room, I knew right then and there that India would join the nuclear club, which it did in 1974. ( India remains one of four major nations that have not signed the NPT. The others are North Korea , which ratified the treaty but subsequently withdrew, Israel , and Pakistan . Some 189 nations have signed and ratified it.) My last contact with Wohlstetter was late in his life — he died in 1997 at the age of 83 — when he telephoned me to complain that I was too “soft” on the threats of communism and the former Soviet Union .

Albert Wohlstetter was born and raised in Manhattan and studied mathematics at the City College of New York and Columbia University . Like many others of that generation, he was very much on the left and, according to research by Abella, was briefly a member of a communist splinter group, the League for a Revolutionary Workers Party. He avoided being ruined in later years by Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI because, as Daniel Ellsberg told Abella, the evidence had disappeared. In 1934, the leader of the group was moving the Party’s records to new offices and had rented a horse-drawn cart to do so. At a Manhattan intersection, the horse died, and the leader promptly fled the scene, leaving all the records to be picked up and disposed of by the New York City sanitation department.

After World War II, Wohlstetter moved to Southern California, and his wife Roberta began work on her pathbreaking RAND study, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962), exploring why the U.S. had missed all the signs that a Japanese “surprise attack” was imminent. In 1951, he was recruited by Charles Hitch for RAND ’s Mathematics Division, where he worked on methodological studies in mathematical logic until Hitch posed a question to him: “How should you base the Strategic Air Command?”

Wohlstetter then became intrigued by the many issues involved in providing airbases for Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers, the country’s primary retaliatory force in case of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. What he came up with was a comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated basing study. It ran directly counter to the ideas of General Curtis LeMay, then the head of SAC, who, in 1945, had encouraged the creation of RAND and was often spoken of as its “Godfather.”

In 1951, there were a total of 32 SAC bases in Europe and Asia , all located close to the borders of the Soviet Union . Wohlstetter’s team discovered that they were, for all intents and purposes, undefended — the bombers parked out in the open, without fortified hangars — and that SAC’s radar defenses could easily be circumvented by low-flying Soviet bombers. RAND calculated that the USSR would need “only” 120 tactical nuclear bombs of 40 kilotons each to destroy up to 85% of SAC’s European-based fleet. LeMay , who had long favored a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union , claimed he did not care. He reasoned that the loss of his bombers would only mean that — even in the wake of a devastating nuclear attack — they could be replaced with newer, more modern aircraft. He also believed that the appropriate retaliatory strategy for the United States involved what he called a “Sunday punch,” massive retaliation using all available American nuclear weapons. According to Abella, SAC planners proposed annihilating three-quarters of the population in each of 188 Russian cities. Total casualties would be in excess of 77 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe alone.

Wohlstetter’s answer to this holocaust was to start thinking about how a country might actually wage a nuclear war. He is credited with coming up with a number of concepts, all now accepted U.S. military doctrine. One is “second-strike capability,” meaning a capacity to retaliate even after a nuclear attack, which is considered the ultimate deterrent against an enemy nation launching a first-strike. Another is “fail-safe procedures,” or the ability to recall nuclear bombers after they have been dispatched on their missions, thereby providing some protection against accidental war. Wohlstetter also championed the idea that all retaliatory bombers should be based in the continental United States and able to carry out their missions via aerial refueling, although he did not advocate closing overseas military bases or shrinking the perimeters of the American empire. To do so, he contended, would be to abandon territory and countries to Soviet expansionism.

Wohlstetter’s ideas put an end to the strategy of terror attacks on Soviet cities in favor of a “counter-force strategy” that targeted Soviet military installations. He also promoted the dispersal and “hardening” of SAC bases to make them less susceptible to preemptive attacks and strongly supported using high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft such as the U-2 and orbiting satellites to acquire accurate intelligence on Soviet bomber and missile strength.

In selling these ideas Wohlstetter had to do an end-run around SAC’s LeMay and go directly to the Air Force chief of staff. In late 1952 and 1953, he and his team gave some 92 briefings to high-ranking Air Force officers in Washington DC . By October 1953, the Air Force had accepted most of Wohlstetter’s recommendations.

Abella believes that most of us are alive today because of Wohlstetter’s intellectually and politically difficult project to prevent a possible nuclear first strike by the Soviet Union . He writes:

“Wohlstetter’s triumphs with the basing study and fail-safe not only earned him the respect and admiration of fellow analysts at RAND but also gained him entry to the top strata of government that very few military analysts enjoyed. His work had pointed out a fatal deficiency in the nation’s war plans, and he had saved the Air Force several billion dollars in potential losses.”

A few years later, Wohlstetter wrote an updated version of the basing study and personally briefed Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson on it, with General Thomas D. White, the Air Force chief of staff, and General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in attendance.

Despite these achievements in toning down the official Air Force doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD), few at RAND were pleased by Wohlstetter’s eminence. Bernard Brodie had always resented his influence and was forever plotting to bring him down. Still, Wohlstetter was popular compared to Herman Kahn. All the nuclear strategists were irritated by Kahn who, ultimately, left RAND and created his own think tank, the Hudson Institute, with a million-dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

RAND chief Frank Collbohm opposed Wohlstetter because his ideas ran counter to those of the Air Force, not to speak of the fact that he had backed John F. Kennedy instead of Richard Nixon for president in 1960 and then compounded his sin by backing Robert McNamara for secretary of defense over the objections of the high command. Worse yet, Wohlstetter had criticized the stultifying environment that had begun to envelop RAND .

In 1963, in a fit of pique and resentment fueled by Bernard Brodie, Collbohm called in Wohlstetter and asked for his resignation. When Wohlstetter refused, Collbohm fired him.

Wohlstetter went on to accept an appointment as a tenured professor of political science at the University of Chicago . From this secure position, he launched vitriolic campaigns against whatever administration was in office “for its obsession with Vietnam at the expense of the current Soviet threat.” He, in turn, continued to vastly overstate the threat of Soviet power and enthusiastically backed every movement that came along calling for stepped up war preparations against the USSR — from members of the Committee on the Present Danger between 1972 to 1981 to the neoconservatives in the 1990s and 2000s.

Naturally, he supported the creation of “Team B” when George H. W. Bush was head of the CIA in 1976. Team B consisted of a group of anti-Soviet professors and polemicists who were convinced that the CIA was “far too forgiving of the Soviet Union .” With that in mind, they were authorized to review all the intelligence that lay behind the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimates on Soviet military strength. Actually, Team B and similar right-wing ad hoc policy committees had their evidence exactly backwards: By the late 1970s and 1980s, the fatal sclerosis of the Soviet economy was well underway. But Team B set the stage for the Reagan administration to do what it most wanted to do, expend massive sums on arms; in return, Ronald Reagan bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Wohlstetter in November 1985.

Imperial U.

Wohlstetter’s activism on behalf of American imperialism and militarism lasted well into the 1990s. According to Abella, the rise to prominence of Ahmed Chalabi — the Iraqi exile and endless source of false intelligence to the Pentagon — “in Washington circles came about at the instigation of Albert Wohlstetter, who met Chalabi in Paul Wolfowitz’s office.” (In the incestuous world of the neocons, Wolfowitz had been Wohlstetter’s student at the University of Chicago .) In short, it is not accidental that the American Enterprise Institute, the current chief institutional manifestation of neoconservative thought in Washington , named its auditorium the “ Wohlstetter Conference Center .” Albert Wohlstetter’s legacy is, to say the least, ambiguous.

Needless to say, there is much more to RAND’s work than the strategic thought of Albert Wohlstetter, and Abella’s book is an introduction to the broad range of ideas RAND has espoused — from “rational choice theory” (explaining all human behavior in terms of self-interest) to the systematic execution of Vietnamese in the CIA’s Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. As an institution, the RAND Corporation remains one of the most potent and complex purveyors of American imperialism. A full assessment of its influence, both positive and sinister, must await the elimination of the secrecy surrounding its activities and further historical and biographical analysis of the many people who worked there.

The RAND Corporation is surely one of the world’s most unusual, Cold War-bred private organizations in the field of international relations. While it has attracted and supported some of the most distinguished analysts of war and weaponry, it has not stood for the highest standards of intellectual inquiry and debate. While RAND has an unparalleled record of providing unbiased, unblinking analyses of technical and carefully limited problems involved in waging contemporary war, its record of advice on cardinal policies involving war and peace, the protection of civilians in wartime, arms races, and decisions to resort to armed force has been abysmal.

For example, Abella credits RAND with “creating the discipline of terrorist studies,” but its analysts seem never to have noticed the phenomenon of state terrorism as it was practiced in the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America by American-backed military dictatorships. Similarly, admirers of Albert Wohlstetter’s reformulations of nuclear war ignore the fact that these led to a “constant escalation of the nuclear arms race.” By 1967, the U.S. possessed a stockpile of 32,500 atomic and hydrogen bombs.

In Vietnam , RAND invented the theories that led two administrations to military escalation against North Vietnam — and even after the think tank’s strategy had obviously failed and the secretary of defense had disowned it, RAND never publicly acknowledged that it had been wrong. Abella comments, “ RAND found itself bound by the power of the purse wielded by its patron, whether it be the Air Force or the Office of the Secretary of Defense.” And it has always relied on classifying its research to protect itself, even when no military secrets were involved.

In my opinion, these issues come to a head over one of RAND’s most unusual initiatives — its creation of an in-house, fully accredited graduate school of public policy that offers Ph.D. degrees to American and foreign students. Founded in 1970 as the RAND Graduate Institute and today known as the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS), it had, by January 2006, awarded over 180 Ph.D.s in microeconomics, statistics, and econometrics, social and behavioral sciences, and operations research. Its faculty numbers 54 professors drawn principally from the staffs of RAND ’s research units, and it has an annual student body of approximately 900. In addition to coursework, qualifying examinations, and a dissertation, PRGS students are required to spend 400 days working on RAND projects. How RAND and the Air Force can classify the research projects of foreign and American interns is unclear; nor does it seem appropriate for an open university to allow dissertation research, which will ultimately be available to the general public, to be done in the hothouse atmosphere of a secret strategic institute.

Perhaps the greatest act of political and moral courage involving RAND was Daniel Ellsberg’s release to the public of the secret record of lying by every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Lyndon Johnson about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam . However, RAND itself was and remains adamantly hostile to what Ellsberg did.

Abella reports that Charles Wolf, Jr., the chairman of RAND ’s Economics Department from 1967 to 1982 and the first dean of the RAND Graduate School from 1970 to 1997, “dripped venom when interviewed about the [Ellsberg] incident more than thirty years after the fact.” Such behavior suggests that secrecy and toeing the line are far more important at RAND than independent intellectual inquiry and that the products of its research should be viewed with great skepticism and care.

Chalmers Johnson’s latest book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, now available in a Holt Paperback. It is the third volume of his Blowback Trilogy. To view a short video of Johnson discussing military Keynesianism and imperial bankruptcy, click here.