The Voice of the White House

            Washington , D.C. , July 12, 2008 : “It is interesting to see the media coverage of what is very obviously the collapse of the American banking and credit system. Yes, I said collapse. These things do not happen all at one time, just like a television drama, but start slowly and grow in speed with the passage of time. Fannie Mae an Freddy Mac are slowly sinking into nothing and a number of the major American banks are joining them. The combination of the rigged mortgages and the hedge fund swindles will very soon become evident. The FDIC only works so long and then it will be impossible for the federal government to cover the losses of bank depositors. We don’t need to go into the reasons for this collapse but to sum them up, it was greed and self-deception and nothing else. The banks, the credit card industry and others, bought up the fake mortgages, dazzled with the prospect of the huge rise in income on flexible rate mortgages when their terms came due. These millions of mortgages were utterly worthless but our bankers bundled them and sold the off to as many foreign investors as they could find before anyone realized that the mortgage holders were virtually insolvent and could never pay the increases the banks were counting on for their huge profits. Everyone suffers and soon the idle rich will discover that their precious hedge funds are nothing but glorified Ponzi schemes and that like the mortgage holders, they will be left holding an empty bag. This is a critical election year and if these crisis peak before November, there will be hell to pay at the polls. Congress can do nothing and Bush will do nothing so we will have a reprise of 1929-1933 and we can watch the enormous finger-pointing derby begin. My advice? Dump your stocks, clean out your certificates of deposit, max our your credit cards and put all of your cash into gold and silver. Don’t trust the gold selling firms that assure you they will keep your gold in their very own wonderful vaults. If you believe that bullshit, you can believe in fried ice cream, kids. Buy easily turned coins or bullion and find a safe place for it and not in the bank safety box. Did you know our very own DHS has the right to go into any safe deposit box anywhere in the United States? And if they are looking for pictures of bin Laden and you have a pile of gold coins loose in the box, guess how many will be left when the agents leave the bank? No, put the gold away somewhere and sit on it. When the banks fold up and other people have lost their deposits, you will be safe. Do it now, not later.”

Conversations with the Crow: Part 15

Editor’s note: When we ran the first conversation  in this series, there was the question of reader interest and acceptability. It is pleasant to report that our server was jammed with viewers and the only other tbrnews story that has had more viewers was our Forward Base Falcon story that had a half a million viewers in less that two days. We are now going to reprint all of the Crowley conversations, including a very interesting one on John McCain,  in chronological sequence. It is also pleasant to note that two publishers and three reporters have all expressed concrete interest in the Crowley conversations. It is even more pleasurable to note that a number of people inside the Beltway and in McLean, Virginia, have been screaming with rage! Here is a partial listing of documents from Crowley’s personal files, now being scanned for publication:

DOCUMENT CATALOG

Catalog Number                   Description of Contents            _______________________________________________________________________________

1000 BH                 Extensive file (1,205 pages) of reports on Operation PHOENIX. Final paper dated January, 1971, first document dated  October, 1967. Covers the setting up of Regional Interrogation Centers, staffing, torture techniques including electric shock, beatings, chemical injections. CIA agents involved and includes a listing of U.S. military units to include Military Police, CIC and Special Forces groups involved. After-action reports from various military units to include 9^th Infantry, showing the deliberate killing of all unarmed civilians located in areas suspected of harboring or supplying Viet Cong units. *

1002 BH                 Medium file (223 pages)  concerning the fomenting of civil disobedience in Chile as the result of the Allende election in 1970. Included are pay vouchers for CIA bribery efforts with Chilean labor organization and student activist groups, U.S. military units involved in the final revolt, letter from  T. Karamessines, CIA Operations Director to Chile CIA Station Chief Paul Wimert, passing along a specific order from Nixon via Kissinger to kill Allende when the coup was successful. Communications to Pinochet with Nixon instructions to root out by force any remaining left wing leaders.

1003 BH                 Medium file (187 pages) of reports of CIA assets containing photographs of Soviet missile sites, airfields and other strategic sites taken from commercial aircraft. Detailed descriptions of targets attached to each picture or pictures.

1004 BH                 Large file (1560 pages) of CIA reports on Canadian radio intelligence intercepts from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa (1958) and a list of suspected and identified Soviet agents or sympathizers in Canada, to include members of the Canadian Parliament and military.

1005 BH              Medium file (219 pages) of members of the German Bundeswehr in the employ of the CIA. The report covers the Innere Führung group plus members of the signals intelligence service. Another report, attached, covers CIA assets in German Foreign Office positions, in Germany and in diplomatic missions abroad.

1006:BH                 Long file (1,287 pages) of events leading up to the killing of Josef Stalin in 1953 to include reports on contacts with L.P. Beria who planned to kill Stalin, believing himself to be the target for removal. Names of cut outs, CIA personnel in Finland and Denmark are noted as are original communications from Beria and agreements as to his standing down in the DDR and a list of MVD/KGB files on American informants from 1933 to present. A report on a blood-thinning agent to be made available to Beria to put into Stalin’s food plus twenty two reports from Soviet doctors on Stalin’s health, high blood pressure etc. A report on areas of cooperation between Beria’s people and CIA controllers in the event of a successful coup. *

1007 BH                 Short list (125 pages) of CIA contacts with members of the American media to include press and television and book publishers. Names of contacts with bios are included as are a list of payments made and specific leaked material supplied. Also appended is a shorter list of foreign publications. Under date of August, 1989 with updates to 1992. Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, Bradlee of the same paper, Ted Koppel, Sam Donaldson and others are included.

1008 BH                 A file of eighteen reports (total of 899 pages) documenting illegal activities on the part of members of the U.S. Congress. First report dated July 29, 1950 and final one September 15, 1992. Of especial note is a long file on Senator McCarthy dealing with homosexuality and alcoholism. Also an attached note concerning the Truman Administration’s use of McCarthy to remove targeted Communists. These reports contain copies of FBI surveillance reports, to include photographs and reference to tape recordings, dealing with sexual events with male and female prostitutes, drug use, bribery, and other matters.

1009 BH                 A long multiple file (1,564 pages) dealing with the CIA part (Kermit Roosevelt) in overthrowing the populist Persian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Report from Dulles (John Foster) concerning a replacement, by force if necessary and to include a full copy of AJAX operation. Letters from AIOC on million dollar bribe paid directly to J.Angleton, head of SOG. Support of Shah requires exclusive contracts with specified western oil companies. Reports dated from May 1951 through August, 1953.

1010 BH                 Medium file (419 pages) of telephone intercepts made by order of J.J. Angleton of the telephone conversations between RFK and one G.N. Bolshakov. Phone calls between 1962-1963 inclusive. Also copies of intercepted and inspected mail from RFK containing classified U.S. documents and sent to a cut-out identified as one used by Bolshakov, a Russian press (TASS) employee. Report on Bolshakov’s GRU connections.

1011 BH                 Large file (988 pages) on 1961 Korean revolt of Kwangju revolt led by General Park Chung-hee and General Kin-Jong-pil. Reports on contacts maintained by CIA station in Japan to include payments made to both men, plans for the coup, lists of “undesirables” to be liquidated  Additional material on CIA connections with KCIA personnel and an agreement with them  to assassinate South Korean chief of state, Park, in 1979.

1012 BH                 Small file (12 pages) of homosexual activities between FBI Director Hoover and his aide, Tolson. Surveillance pictures taken in San Francisco hotel and report by CIA agents involved. Report analyzed in 1962.

1013 BH                 Long file (1,699 pages) on General Edward Lansdale. First report a study signed by DCI Dulles in  September of 1954 concerning a growing situation in former French Indo-China. There are reports by and about Lansdale starting with his attachment to the OPC in 1949-50 where he and Frank Wisner coordinated policy in neutralizing Communist influence in the Philippines.. Landsale was then sent to Saigon under diplomatic cover and many copies of his period reports are copied here. Very interesting background material including strong connections with the Catholic Church concerning Catholic Vietnamese and exchanges of intelligence information between the two entities.

1014 BH                 Short file (78 pages) concerning  a Dr. Frank Olson. Olson was at the U.S. Army chemical warfare base at Ft. Detrick in Maryland and was involved with a Dr. Gottleib. Gottleib was working on a plan to introduce psychotic-inducing drugs into the water supply of the Soviet Embassy. Apparently he tested the drugs on CIA personnel first. Reports of psychotic behavior by Olson and more police and official reports on his defenstration by Gottleib’s associates. A cover-up was instituted and a number of in-house CIA memoranda attest to this. Also a discussion by Gottleib on various poisons and drugs he was experimenting with and another report of people who had died as a result of Gottleib’s various experiments and CIA efforts to neutralize any public knowledge of these. *

1015 BH                 Medium file (457 pages) on CIA connections with the Columbian-based Medellín drug ring. Eight CIA internal reports, three DoS reports, one FBI report on CIA operative Milan Rodríguez and his connections with this drug ring. Receipts for CIA payments to Rodríguez of over $3 million in CIA funds, showing the routings of the money, cut-outs and payments. CIA reports on sabotaging  DEA investigations. A three-part study of the Nicaraguan Contras, also a CIA-organized and paid for organization.

1016 BH                 A small file (159 pages) containing lists of known Nazi intelligence and scientific people recruited in Germany from 1946 onwards, initially by the U.S. Army and later by the CIA. A detailed list of the original names and positions of the persons involved plus their relocation information. Has three U.S. Army and one FBI report on the subject.

1017 BH                 A small list (54 pages) of American business entities with “significant” connections to the CIA. Each business is listed along with relevant information on its owners/operators, previous and on going contacts with the CIA’s Robert Crowley, also a list of national advertising agencies with similar information. Much information about suppressed news stories and planted stories      

                On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA's Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer's Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley's widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley's CIA files.

                Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal , Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment. Three months before, July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

                After Corson's death, Trento and a well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson's bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled 'Zipper.' This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley's involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

                The  small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento's house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

                When published material concerning the CIA's actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA's horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA's activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious 'Regional Interrogation Centers' in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

                A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid "historians" and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

                The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley's survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of  highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by  DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton  conspired to  secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files our of the agency. Crowley did the same thing  right before his own retirement , secretly removing thousands of pages  of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

                Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in military intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

                One of Crowley’s first major assignments within the agency was to assist in the recruitment and management of prominent World War II Nazis, especially those with advanced intelligence experience. One of the CIA’s major recruitment coups was Heinrich Mueller, once head of Hitler’s Gestapo who had fled to Switzerland after the collapse of the Third Reich and worked as an anti-Communist expert for Masson of Swiss counterintelligence. Mueller was initially hired by Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA,  who was running the Gehlen Organization out of Pullach in southern Germany. Crowley eventually came to despise Critchfield but the colonel was totally unaware of this, to his later dismay.

                Crowley’s real expertise within the agency was the Soviet KGB. One of his main jobs throughout his career was acting as the agency liaison with corporations like ITT, which the CIA often used as fronts for moving large amounts of cash off their books. He was deeply involved in the efforts by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, which eventually got him into legal problems with regard to investigations of the U.S. government’s grand jury where he has perjured himself in an agency cover-up

After his retirement, Crowley began to search for someone who might be able to write a competent history of his career. His first choice fell on British author John Costello (author of Ten Days to Destiny, The Pacific War and other works) but, discovering that Costello was a very aggressive homosexual, he dropped him and tentatively turned to Joseph Trento who had assisted Crowley and William Corson in writing a book on the KGB. When Crowley discovered that Trento had an ambiguous and probably cooperative relationship with the CIA, he began to distrust him and continued his search for an author.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas  in 1993  when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. . In 1996, Crowley , Crowley told Douglas  that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.

In 1998, when Crowley was slated to go into the hospital for exploratory surgery,  he had his son, Greg, ship two large foot lockers of documents to Douglas with the caveat that they were not to be opened until after Crowley’s death. These documents, totaled  an astonishing 15,000 pages of CIA classified files involving many covert operations, both foreign and domestic, during the Cold War.

After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.              

                All of this furor eventually came to the attention of Dr. Peter Janney, a Massachusetts clinical psychologist and son of Wistar Janney, another career senior CIA official, colleague of not only Bob Crowley but Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Jim Angleton and others. Janney was working on a book concerning the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, former wife of Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA official, and later the mistress of President John F. Kennedy.  Douglas had authored a book, ‘Regicide’ which dealt with Crowley’s part in the Kennedy assassination and he obviously had access to at least some of Crowley’s papers. Janney was very well connected inside the CIA’s higher levels and when he discovered that Douglas had indeed known, and had often spoken with, Crowley and that after Crowley’s death, the FBI had descended on Crowley’s widow and son, warning them to never speak with Douglas about anything, he contacted Douglas and finally obtained from him a number of original documents, including the originals of the transcribed conversations with Robert Crowley.

                In spite of the burn bags, the top secret safes and the vigilance of the CIA to keep its own secrets, the truth has an embarrassing and often very fatal habit of emerging, albeit decades later.

                While CIA drug running , money-launderings and brutal assassinations are very often strongly rumored and suspected, it has so far not been possible to actually pin them down but it is more than possible that the publication of the transcribed and detailed Crowley-Douglas conversations will do a great deal towards accomplishing this.

            These many transcribed conversations are relatively short because Crowley was a man who tired easily but they make excellent reading. There is an interesting admixture of shocking revelations on the part of the retired CIA official and often rampant anti-social (and very entertaining) activities on the part of Douglas but readers of this new and on-going series are gently reminded to always look for the truth in the jest!

Date:  Tuesday, August 6, 1996

Commenced: 11:10 AM CST

Concluded: 11:47 AM CST

GD: Ah, good morning to you, Robert. How is life treating you today?

RTC: Good morning, Gregory. There are good days and bad days. I’m not sure about today.

GD: Certainty is illusion, Robert. I was talking to an old friend of mine last night. He’s down at Norfolk. Was Navy but retired. I went to school with him. King’s Point and then the NSG.

RTC: King’s Point is Merchant Marine.

GD: I know. They have a reserve commission and they can activate it if they want to. He did. Nuclear vessels surface and then the NSG. He was the Naval Attaché in the Dominican Republic. Worked on the Trujillo assassination. But that’s not the issue now. We got to talking about AIDS and since he had quite a bit of sherry, he told me quite a story about how that originated. I thought you might have some input on that. Want me to go on?

RTC: Why not?

GD: Well, according to him, the Navy had an experimental medical station down in Haiti. They were down there because there was a huge pool of very poor locals they could use as subjects in tests. He said that they were developing something that would lower a person’s resistance to the point where a common cold would put them out of action for weeks.

RTC: Go on. What then?

GD: Well, they hit on a virus that does this, experimented with the locals and when they were sure it actually worked, somehow they got this into local whores whom the Cuban government then shipped over to Angola to service their volunteers fighting there.

RTC: I’ve heard stories about that.

GD: But somehow, the virus mutated into something far more serious. The HIV thing. And they didn’t care if all the Cubans died, or the whores either, but it seems that some the younger Haitians got this and when American gays made excursions down there for some cheap black cock, they got it too and you can see where that went. Then, my friend said, after they found out what had gone wrong, the Navy shut down its facility, disposed of their volunteer locals by taking them out on boats and dumping them into the water. Anyway, that’s what he said and I believe him. That’s what I wanted to ask you about.

RTC: There is something to that. Your friend had best be very quiet or he’ll end up taking a one-way boat trip. And I would be careful not to put any of that into one of your books. If you take my drift.

GD: No, it wouldn’t fit in with the Mueller material. It is true, then?

RTC: Basically it is. Take note that it didn’t start out to kill off all the homos although the Christians thought it was a wonderful thing, but your friend was right when he said it mutated. I was never in that part of the agency but one hears things or talks to colleagues. I mean there was only the intention to interfere with the combat capabilities of enemy troops, not liquidate social outcasts. When we learned about this, the burn bags were used overtime at Langley.

GD: Were you people part of it?
RTC: In a sense. The Navy supplied the tactical and we supplied the strategic. They produced the weapon and we, the targets. We were planning to use this on the Russians.

GD: Well, I know something about that aspect. You know about General Ishi?

RTC: Oh yes, I do indeed.

GD: His Japanese military units had a BW lab up in Manchuria and they used to develop the plague and God knows what else. Poisoned thousands of Chinese, wanted to loose the plague against their Russian neighbors and used Allied pows as lab specimens. Most of them died of plague and other nasty things.

RTC: Ah, the redoubtable Dr. Ishi. After we took over Japan, he was caught along with his staff and they were planning to try him for very ugly war crimes but MacArthur, acting on specific orders from the Pentagon, rescued him, set him with a big lab in Tokyo and back they went to developing the bubonic plague. I guess they were going to use it on the Russians if all else failed.

GD: That I know all about. Not the Japanese but using the plague against the Russians. There was a German Army doctor, a Dr. Walter Schreiber, who was a specialist in communicable diseases. He developed a form of the plague and the military used it to clean out the overcrowded Russian pow cages. Cost too much to feed and guard them. The rationale was that they never used them in the West. Roosevelt, as you might know, was planning to use mustard gas against the Germans in Russia until the Bari raid blew up a boat-full of mustard gas and when Hitler learned of this, he threatened to let nerve gas loose on London and Washington. Amazing how quickly FDR backed off.

RTC: You do your homework, don’t you?

GD: Oh yes. Schreiber came over to us in Berlin after the war and we vetted him and sent him to San Antonio to set up a lab there to cultivate the plague. Again, we planned to use it against the Russians. I don’t what the Russians did to infuriate our sacred leaders but I don’t think they would have deserved that. Schreiber got outed and had to be shipped back to Germany.

RTC: Drew Pearson was the man who did that.

GD: Whatever. Well, the Brits practiced BW when they gave the Indians smallpox laced blankets back in the eighteenth century but Mueller and I were discussing Schreiber’s project. Mueller was very angry when he heard this and rounded Schreiber up. Had to let him go. Orders from on high. Mueller said that there were no customs agents at the borders to stop the spread of such filthiness right back from whence it came. But he told me about a CIA plan to ruin the Asian rice crop. That failed but only barely. It would have spread and ruined everyone’s rice crop. He said that creatures that dabbled in such things should be shot out of hand or they would destroy everyone, good or bad. I suppose the definition of good or bad depends on your politics but the whole thing should be forbidden by law.

RTC: I believe it is but only in theory.

GD: But they put the story out that AIDS came from monkeys in Africa and other funny stories.

RTC: Well, now it’s raging in Africa and they estimate that in ten years, everyone there will be infected. Of course, there is something to be said about depopulating Africa. They’re a bunch of incompetents who are sitting on very valuable natural resources, such as gold and uranium and when they all die, the treasures are there for the finding.

GD: That’s a bit cynical but true. But what about the American homosexuals?

RTC: The Christians and the far right would be in favor of exterminating them all. However, that having been said, we would lose so many really valuable public servants, not to mention all the florists and interior decorators.

GD: Thank God I’m not a Christian. They’re such filthy bigots. If they ever get into power here, I’ll move to some cleaner place.

RTC: I don’t see that happening, Gregory.

GD: I have no problems with the mainline faiths but the extremists are flat out nuts and we don’t need that rampant and fanatical bigotry.

RTC: But it could be useful.

GD: But you can’t really control it. I’ve known a few Jesus freaks and believe me, they are as nutty as they come. Most of them try to hide if from us sane ones but once in a while, it leaks out. It would be entertaining if the head of the Navy’s medical branch caught AIDS from his cousin or how about the DCI?

RTC: Now, now, Gregory, you must realize that accidents happen. Try not to be too judgmental about such things.

GD: It’s bloody difficult not to.

RTC: Look, Africa is full of people who are only a generation or two out of the jungle. They ran out the white people, who set up the business structure, and now they are running around with spears, eating each other. Why be concerned if they pass away and give the civilized part of the world access to their unused natural resources? After all, that’s why we killed off the head of the UN. He was interfering with the uranium business in the Congo so we had a little aircraft accident. We basically shot him out of the air. And that put an end to his meddling in important matters. Uranium, I don’t need to remind you, is vital for our weapon’s programs. Balance that against one meddling Swede and I don’t think there’s much of a problem.

GD: Well, for him…

RTC: Against the common good? You need to consider the practical priorities, Gregory. Believe me, we had no intention of causing AIDS. Our goal was to render a battlefield enemy incapable of combat, that’s all. These things sometimes happen and there is no reason at all to dwell on unexpected and certainly not planned consequences.

GD: Ah, remember that Lenin once said you can’t make an omelets without breaking some eggs. Of course it didn’t originate with him and I know it won’t end there but you take the point because you articulate it. But I have to agree with Mueller when he tore into such projects. And if you know the Bible, remember that he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword. Wars once were conducted by gentlemen with a certain amount of civility but those days are gone. Democracy, not kings, now rules and civility is dead.

RTC: You sound like a monarchist, Gregory.

GD: In many ways I am, Robert. I recall my German grandfather saying that democracy was government of the mentally misfit by the mentally mediocre and tempered by the saving grace of snobbery. Grandfather was usually right I remember once at one of his formal family dinners when one of my idiot aunts was going on about her constant attendance at the local Methodist church and her choir practices. My grandfather turned to me and told me, so the whole table could hear, that I ought to take a lesson in piety from my aunt. I recall saying, and I am not being funny here, that it seemed to me that there was considerable madness in aunt’s Methodism.

RTC: Did you actually say that, Gregory?

GD: Yes, and I was only ten, Robert.

RTC: Your family must have loved you.

GD: I don’t actually think so. When Grandfather said at some other occasion that my aunt and uncle were going to Lower Asbury Avenue, I said that they certainly would if they lived there long enough.

RTC: (Laughter) You must have been a most unpleasant child, Gregory.

GD: I do not suffer fools gladly, Robert. Lincoln has been misquoted. He said, or is supposed to have said, that God must love the common people because he made so many of them. What he actually said was that God must love fools because he had made so many of them.

RTC: Now you can see why our organization is so necessary. Imagine leaving state policy in the hands of idiots.

GD: Point of view here Robert. Whose ox is gored? Destroying the Asian rice crop? Thousands or millions dead of starvation?

GTC: But consider the common good. These are Communists, Gregory, and they want to destroy our system.

GD: Another point of view once more, Robert. Yes, abstract Communism is utopian nonsense, just like abstract Christianity is. No one wants to work to help others but they will help themselves. But that still does not justify slaughtering millions, does it?

RTC: But that is a very extreme and certainly tainted view, Gregory.

GD: Again, it’s the gored ox. But civilized people can disagree with each other and still remain civilized, Robert. Right?

RTC: I assume so but let’s try to be a bit more objective. You need to view the larger picture.

GD: Mueller said it so well to me once, just before one of my nice French dinners. He said that morals and ethics were excellent norms but hardly effective techniques.

RTC: Those sentiments I can agree with.

GD: A difference without much a distinction. Well, enough moralizing here. I’m glad to see that my naval friend was not just engaging in drunken babble.

RTC: I would strongly urge you not to take this issue any further. I would be concerned about your safety if you did.

GD: A point well taken. As a cross between a social Darwinist and a monarchist, even I can see the perils of contemplating moral issues from a neutral point of view.

RTC: And if you felt like giving me your talkative friend’s name and address, it might be appreciated. He ought to be spoken to.

GD: I doubt that I would want to do that, Robert. After all, I have never discussed our conversations with anyone else.

RTC: Point taken.

(Conversation concluded 11:47 AM CST)

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2008, Issue No. 68
July 14, 2008
 
 FOREIGN RELATIONS SERIES STILL FAILS TO MEET LEGAL DEADLINE
 
                The "Foreign Relations of the United States" (FRUS) series, which is the official documentary history of U.S. foreign policy, remains unlikely to meet the legal requirement that it be published no later than 30 years after the events that it describes, an official advisory committee has told the Secretary of State.
 
                "Despite many and repeated assurances that this problem would be addressed by 2010, the committee is now very skeptical that the Office of the Historian will succeed in meeting the 30-year requirement for the Foreign Relations series at any time within the next decade," the State Department Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation wrote in its new annual report.
 
                `Compliance with the 30 year deadline is not optional; it is a binding legal requirement. "The Secretary of State shall ensure that the FRUS series shall be published not more than 30 years after the events recorded," according to a statute enacted in 1991.
 
                But instead of advancing towards that goal, FRUS seems to be retreating further and further away from it. The FRUS series' sparse publication record in 2007 "was a considerable disappointment, and does not bring with it much encouragement for the future," the committee wrote in its report to the Secretary of State.
 
                "Last year the committee reported that 'it is reasonable' to be optimistic that the series would be in compliance with the law by the end of 2010," the committee noted. "We no longer have any reason to be
optimistic, and are frankly very pessimistic."
 
                The annual report, dated May 19, 2008, will appear in the September 2008 issue of Perspectives on History, a publication of the American Historical Association (www.historians.org). An advance copy is available here:
 
                 http://www.fas.org/sgp/advisory/state/hac2007.pdf
 
                "The committee must really be concerned for the report to be so explicit and emphatic," one former State Department official told Secrecy News.
 
                In a delicate allusion to reports of morale problems in the Office of the Historian and the ensuing resignations of professional staff, the Advisory Committee strongly recommended that State Department Human Resources personnel "conduct mandatory exit interviews to determine the principal reasons behind the departure of skilled researchers."
 
                The committee also expressed dismay at plans to provide reduced coverage of U.S. policy during the Reagan Administration.
 
                "The committee is concerned that despite a collection of 8.5 million classified pages in the Reagan Library, compared with the Nixon years' 2.5 million pages, the Office plans substantially fewer volumes of the FRUS series."
 
                "The publication of the Foreign Relations series stands as a symbol of commitment to openness and accountability," the Advisory Committee report affirmed.
 
                Regrettably, with its persistent violation of mandatory publication requirements and its diminishing productivity, the Foreign Relations series may indeed be a fitting symbol of the current state of openness and accountability.
 
 CONTROLLED UNCLASSIFIED INFO MAY BE CLASSIFIED, US-CZECH DOC SAYS
 
                Government agencies may redesignate "controlled unclassified information" (CUI) as classified information in order to prevent its disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, according to an
agreement signed last week between the United States and the Czech Republic.
 
                The July 8 agreement on establishment of a U.S. missile defense radar in the Czech Republic devotes an entire section (Article XII) to "controlled unclassified information," which is defined as "unclassified information to which access or distribution limitations have been applied in accordance with applicable national laws."
 
                The new agreement surprisingly presents national security classification as an option when facing involuntary disclosure of CUI under the Freedom of Information Act:
 
                "Each Party shall take all lawful steps, which may include national classification, to keep controlled unclassified information free from further disclosure (including requests under any applicable domestic legislation)..., unless the originating Party consents to such disclosure."
 
                While there is an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act for "properly classified" information, there is no such exemption for CUI.  (According to a May 7 White House policy statement, "CUI markings may inform but do not control the decision of whether to disclose or release the information to the public, such as in response to a request made pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act.")
 
                Classification of CUI -- which by definition is information that does not meet the standards for classification -- in order to evade the requirements of the FOIA would be a violation of official
classification policy, as set forth in the president's executive order.
 
                Coincidentally or by design, the text of the new Agreement between the U.S. and the Czech Republic has not been made available on any publicly accessible U.S. government web site, though the State Department issued a July 10 Fact Sheet about it. But it was published in the Czech Republic and a copy is available here:
 
 http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2008/07/radar.pdf
 
 
COMPUTING AT LOS ALAMOS IN THE 1940S AND 1950S
 
                Last week, in response to a request from Secrecy News for a copy of a thirty year old history of computer development at Los Alamos in the 1940s and 1950s, a reference librarian at Los Alamos National
Laboratory apologetically explained that she could not release the requested document.
 
                "We are sorry but due to a mandate from NNSA to the Laboratory and Research Library policies, we are unable to provide technical reports until further notice," the librarian wrote. You want information from the Library? Don't be silly!
 
                Fortunately, a copy of the document, which was not otherwise available online, was obtained independently and it has been added to our Los Alamos document collection.
 
                Among other curiosities, the report describes work on an early chess-playing program for the MANIAC computer in the 1950s:
 
                "Because of the slow speed of MANIAC (about 10,000 instructions per second) we had to restrict play to a 6 by 6 board, removing the bishops and their pawns. Even then, moves averaged about 10 minutes for a two-move look-ahead strategy."
 
                See "Computing at LASL in the 1940s and 1950s" by Roger B. Lazarus, et al, report number LA-6943-H, May 1978:
 
                http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/LA-6943-H.pdf

US Terrorism Watch List Tops 1 Million

July 14, 2008

by Randall Mikkelsen

Reuters

WASHINGTON - A U.S. watch list of terrorism suspects has passed 1 million records, corresponding to about 400,000 people, and a leading civil rights group said on Monday the number was far too high to be effective.

The Bush administration disagreed and called the list one of the most effective tools implemented after the September 11 hijacked plane attacks — when a federal “no-fly” list contained just 16 people considered threats to aviation.

The American Civil Liberties Union publicized the 1 million milestone with a news conference and release.

It said the watch list was an impediment to millions of travellers and called for changes, including tightening criteria for adding names, giving travellers a right to challenge their inclusion and improving procedures for taking wrongly included names off the list.

“America’s new million-record watch list is a perfect symbol for what’s wrong with this administration’s approach to security: it’s unfair, out-of-control, a waste of resources (and) treats the rights of the innocent as an afterthought,” ACLU technology director Barry Steinhardt said in a release.

President George W. Bush ordered in the current list in September 2003 as a way to wrap several growing terrorism watchlists into a single government database compiled and overseen by the FBI, through a Terrorist Screening Center.

Suspected terrorists or people believed to have links to terrorism are included on the list, which can be used by a wide range of government agencies in security screening. About 50,000 individuals are included on the Transportation Security Administration “no-fly” or “selectee” lists that subject them to travel bans, arrest or additional screening.

Critics have pointed to troubles that figures such as U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, 1960s civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis and singer Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) have had with watch lists as evidence the consolidated database is poorly managed.

The Terrorism Screening Center, which maintains the list, has already put in place several steps to ensure the list is accurate and up-to-date, spokesman Chad Kolton said.

He cited a report last year by the Government Accountability Office that said there was general agreement within the federal government that the watch list had helped to combat terrorism.

“The list is very effective. In fact it’s one of the most effective counterterrorism tools that our country has,” he said.

About 400,000 individuals are included on the list, about 95 percent of whom are not U.S. citizens or residents, Kolton said. The watch list also includes separate entries with aliases, fake passports and fake birth dates, bringing the total number of records to more than 1 million, he said.

TSA spokesman Christopher White said the agency’s “no-fly” watchlists to screen travellers were “scrubbed” last year to remove about half of the names, leaving them with somewhat fewer than 50,000.

He said Kennedy and Lewis were never on the list, and that problems they reported were due to their misidentification with names properly on it.

Pull-out Demand Signals Final Bush Defeat in Iraq

July 11, 2008

by Gareth Porter

 Inter Press Service

WASHINGTON - Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s demand for a timetable for complete U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, confirmed Tuesday by his national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, has signaled the almost certain defeat of the George W. Bush administration’s aim of establishing a long-term military presence in the country.

                The official Iraqi demand for U.S. withdrawal confirms what was becoming increasingly clear in recent months — that the Iraqi regime has decided to shed its military dependence on the United States.

The two strongly pro-Iranian Shiite factions supporting the regime in Baghdad, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) and al-Maliki’s own Dawa Party, were under strong pressure from both Iran and their own Shiite population and from Shiite clerics, including Ayatollah Ali Sistani, to demand U.S. withdrawal.

The statement by al-Rubaei came immediately after he had met with Sistani, thus confirming earlier reports that Sistani was opposed to any continuing U.S. military presence.

The Bush administration has had doubts in the past about the loyalties of those two Shiite groups and of the SIIC’s Badr Corps paramilitary organisation, and it manoeuvred in 2005 and early 2006 to try to weaken their grip on the interior ministry and the police.

By 2007, however, the administration hoped that it had forged a new level of cooperation with al-Maliki aimed at weakening their common enemy, Moqtada al-Sadr’s anti-occupation Mahdi Army. SIIC leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim was invited to the White House in December 2006 and met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in November 2007.

The degree of cooperation with the al-Maliki regime against the Sadrists was so close that the Bush administration even accepted for a brief period in late 2007 the al-Maliki regime’s argument that Iran was restraining the Mahdi Army by pressing Sadr to issue his August 2007 ceasefire order.

In November, Bush and al-Maliki agreed on a set of principles as the basis for negotiating agreements on stationing of U.S. forces and bilateral cooperation, including a U.S. guarantee of Iraq’s security and territorial integrity. In February 2008, U.S. and Iraqi military planners were already preparing for a U.S.-British-Iraqi military operation later in the summer to squeeze the Sadrists out of Basra.

But after the U.S. draft agreement of Mar. 7 was given to the Iraqi government, the attitude of the al-Maliki government toward the U.S. military presence began to shift dramatically, just as Iran was playing a more overt role in brokering ceasefire agreements between the two warring Shiite factions.

The first indication was al-Maliki’s refusal to go along with the Basra plan and his sudden decision to take over Basra immediately without U.S. troops. Petraeus later said a company of U.S. army troops was attached to some units as advisers ‘just really because we were having a problem figuring where was the front line.’

That al-Maliki decision was followed by an Iranian political mediation of the intra-Shiite fighting in Basra, at the request of a delegation from the two pro-government parties. The result was that Sadr’s forces gave up control of the city, even though they were far from having been defeated.

U.S. military officials were privately disgruntled at that development, which effectively cancelled the plan for a much bigger operation against the Sadrists during the summer. Weeks later, a U.S. ‘defence official’ would tell the New York Times, ‘We may have wasted an opportunity in Basra to kill those that needed to be killed.’

In another sign of the shifting Iraqi position away from Washington, in early May, al-Maliki refused to cooperate with a Cheney-Petraeus scheme to embarrass Iran by having the Iraqi government publicly accuse it of arming anti-government Shiites in the South. The prime minister angered U.S. officials by naming a committee to investigate U.S. charges.

Even worse for the Bush administration, a delegation of Shiite officials to Tehran that was supposed to confront Iran over the arms issue instead returned with a new Iranian strategy for dealing with Sadr, according to Alissa J. Rubin of the New York Times: reach a negotiated settlement with him.

The al-Maliki regime began to apply the new Iranian strategy immediately. On May 10, al-Maliki and Sadr reached an accord on Sadr City, where pitched battles were being fought between U.S. troops and the Sadrists.

The new accord prevented a major U.S. escalation of violence against the Mahdi Army stronghold and ended heavy U.S. bombing there. Seven U.S. battalions had been poised to assault Sadr City with tanks and armoured cars in a battle expected to last several weeks.

Under the new pact, Sadr allowed Iraqi troops to patrol in his stronghold, in return for the government’s agreement not to arrest any Sadrist troops unless they were found with ‘medium and heavy weaponry’.

The new determination to keep U.S. forces out of the intra-Shiite conflict was accompanied by a new tough line in the negotiations with the Bush administration on status of forces and cooperation agreements. In a May 21 briefing for Senate staff, Bush administration officials said Iraq was now demanding ’significant changes to the form of the agreements’.

The al-Maliki regime was rejecting the U.S. demand for access to bases with no time limit as well as for complete freedom to use them without consultation with the Iraqi government, as well as its demand for immunity for its troops and contractors. The Iraqis were asserting that these demands violated Iraqi sovereignty. By early June, Iraqi officials were openly questioning for the first time whether Iraq needs a U.S. military presence at all.

The unexpected Iraqi resistance to the U.S. demands reflected the underlying influence of Iran on the al-Maliki government as well as Sadr’s recognition that he could achieve his goal of liberating Iraq from U.S. occupation through political-diplomatic means rather than through military pressures.

Iran put very strong pressure on Iraq to reject the agreement, as soon as it saw the initial U.S. draft. It could cite the fact that the draft would allow the United States to use Iraqi bases to attack Iran, which was known to be a red line in Iran-Iraq relations.

The Iranians could argue that an Iraqi Shiite regime could not depend on the United States, which was committed to a strategy of alliance with Sunni regimes in the region against the Shiite regimes.

Iran was able to exploit a deep vein of Iraqi Shiite suspicion that the U.S. might still try to overthrow the Shiite regime, using former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and some figures in the Iraqi Army. When the U.S. draft dropped an earlier U.S. commitment to defend Iraq against external aggression and pledged only to ‘consult’ in the event of an external threat, Iran certainly exploited the opening to push al-Maliki to reject the agreement.

The use of military bases in Iraq to project U.S. power into the region to carry out regime change in Iran and elsewhere had been an essential part of the neoconservative plan for invading Iraq from the beginning.

The Bush administration raised the objective of a long-term military presence in Iraq based on the ‘Korea model’ last year at the height of the U.S. celebration of the pacification of the Sunni stronghold of Anbar province, which it viewed as sealing its victory in the war.

But the Iraqi demand for withdrawal makes it clear that the Bush administration was not really in control of events in Iraq, and that Shiite political opposition and Iranian diplomacy could trump U.S. military power.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy.

The Biggest Transfer of Wealth in History  
by Bill Bonner

The Daily Reckoning

This week began with alarm bells. First Bridgewater Associates broke the glass and pulled the handle; it said the conflagration in the credit markets might lead to losses four times higher than previous estimates – at $1.6 trillion. A lot of money – even for someone who lives in London.

 Bridgewater helpfully pointed out that this was just the beginning; the world would lose an additional $12 trillion in foregone credit. When the going is good, each ounce of a bank’s share capital grows into as much as a pound of credit available to borrowers. But when the cycle turns, the shrinkage takes your breath away. Remove a dollar from a bank’s balance sheet and you wipe out a ten-spot of credit. Bad news for people in Britain and America who are accustomed to living off of credit. Bad news for their economies, too. Without access to the fire hose of easy credit, the consumer economy goes up in smoke.

To give you an idea of the scale of a $12 trillion problem, the entire U.K. economy generates only $2.8 trillion of output annually. The U.S. economy – at $13.8 trillion – is only slightly bigger than the anticipated damage.

 When the alarums quieted and the flames died down, hopeful analysts sifted the ruins and wondered where the City and Wall Street might find the resources to restock their shelves. Suddenly, all heads rocked towards the East. Visions of myrrh and incense danced before their greedy eyes. Sultans as rich as Croesus...oil sheiks with sand dunes for brains...maharajas of motor industries and mandarins of manufacturing. Enriched by the black gold flowing from deep holes in Arabia...or from commerce on the trade routes between Hong Kong and Long Beach, these princes of modern finance have trillions. Surely they will come to the aid of those who had made them rich?

 The gist of the following reflection is this: no, they won’t. Just because people are rich doesn’t mean they are stupid.

 Outside the Bank of England and the U.S. Fed lies some $5.3 trillion in central bank reserves. In foreign government pension reserves and other accounts is another $6.1 trillion. Add $3 trillion more now in the hands of Sovereign Wealth Funds. The IMF says these SWFs will grow to $12 trillion within four years. Morgan Stanley estimates a $17.5 trillion pot by 2017. Altogether, this is enough moolah to buy control of every public company in Britain and America combined.

 Few people bother to ask where they got all that money. Never mind, we will answer the question anyway: it is the fruit of a monumental hornswoggle.

 “It is the biggest transfer of wealth in history,” says T. Boone Pickens, speaking of the oil trade. Americans alone import 3.6 billion barrels of oil a year. In 2003, the tab for all that goo was only about $70 bil