The Voice of the White House

                Washington , D.C. , August 7, 2008 : “ I have spent the better part of this week; to include last weekend, listening to tapes of high-level conversations and reading computer intercepts to and from the Israeli Embassy, courtesy of friends at the Pentagon. I was not permitted to either make notes or make any tapes of the sessions, which were held in a suite at the Hay-Adams Hotel here in Washington , but during piss breaks, I made many, many notes in a book which I stashed under one of the counters. I was fascinated by what I learned and thought it might be interesting to present an overview of my adventures.

                 I am positive that Israeli supporters (who infest the Internet like fleas) will now begin to screech that I have either no right to dare to publish such awful lies about Sacred Israel, or, more likely, order me to produce some proof. I have to do no such thing and in advance, I tell such whiners to go and tell their Mammas that she needs them. Or, they could also stick their penis in an electric pencil sharpener and turn it on for a second bris..

                First off, the military has been very actively spying on the Israelis ever since the Pollard business. They have tapped their important phones, intercepted high-level scrambled radio messages and broken all of their algorithmic codes and look at all supposedly unbreakable diplomatic messages. From all of this, it appears very evident that the military has been absolutely right in snooping on “our best Ally!” The public may forget Pollard and many others as well as the USS Liberty, but the military, thank God, has not. The Isreali lovers are now in basic control of the CIA but not the Pentagon.

                It is also evident that these walking scumbags have been spying relentlessly on us for years, getting armies of their co-religionists to pass top secret material to them and through Israeli communications companies working in plain sight in America today, to listen to any selected telephone conversation within the United States .

                The military has a long, long list of these spies and traitorous sympathizers and some day, it will become public, home addresses and all.

                 In the meantime, a few random notes.

                In recent months, the government of Israel has been making frantic attempts to get the United States to attack Iran .

                 They have carried on a propaganda campaign in America, via their co-religionists’ almost total control of the American media, that makes constant reference to the ‘certainty’ that Iran is trying to develop atomic weapons, solely to attack poor Israel who really loves its neighbors and tries so hard to help them..

                The military tells me that there is absolutely no proof of this but the Bush- Cheney Axis of Evil goes right along with it and weekly make threatening statements about Iran . All of this sleazy, and McCain-like, propaganda seems to have very little impact on any targeted American audience so, realizing that Bush, Cheney and the Rodent Club will soon be gone and forgotten, they are ramping up their efforts to get him to have our Air Force carpet bomb Tehran .

                 This, I am assured, will not happen, but the pressure to do so at once  is steadily building via a flood of phone calls both to Bush and Cheney, virtually begging them to launch a surprise attack before it is too late….for them.

                Odious creeps like Addington and Lieberman are targets of their constant wailings and importunings as well, but in the end, there is strong doubt in Tel Aviv that we will, once again,  pull their chestnuts out of the Islamic fire

                Also, the Israelis are livid with rage that both Russia and China have been making very strong, but private, protests to the Bush creeps that an attack on Iran would not be a good idea. Bush might not listen and Cheney is so crazy that he can’t, but others are listening.

                There is no question that John McCain is willing and eager to give all aid he can to Blessed Israel should he be elected. In return for American media support, the Israeli puppet masters have suggested that Crazy John put one of their fellows on the ticket. It is well-known in elevated circles  that McCain is old, getting feeble and prone to various forms of cancer. With One of Their Own ready and waiting until the easily predictable death or disability of the President, seen lurking in the wings of history, America would have its first Jewish President and I think the rest would be horribly obvious.

                 One of the very top-level conversations broken into, deals with the hope that Obama can be convinced to destroy Iran if he is elected. Obama, the Unknown Factor, is very, very smart and unlikely to mire himself in a no-win addition to a useless, rigged Israeli-inspired Iraq war that he will have to end.

                Anyway, I did have a wonderful break from my work and the food at the Hay-Adams is very good.”

The 'down side' to an attack on Iran
August 1, 2008

by Jim Lobe

Asia Times

                WASHINGTON - Amid rising speculation about the possibility of an Israeli or United States bombing attack on Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this month, a major study produced for the US Air Force by a top defense think-tank concluded that US military action against Iran was "likely to have negative effects for the United States".

                The study, by the Rand Project Air Force, a division of the California-based Rand Corporation, was released on July 9, the same day that Tehran test-fired medium- and long-range missiles in an apparent response to reports the previous week that Israel had carried out secret exercises designed to simulate a raid on Iran 's nuclear facilities the previous month.

                Amid all the fireworks, however, the report, which also called for amulti-faceted strategy designed to encourage democratic development in Iran , was ignored by the mainstream media.

                Entitled " Iran 's Political, Demographic, and Economic Vulnerabilities", the 156-page report also called for Washington to "tone down" its policy statements supporting "regime change" and to "discourage Iranian ethnic groups from revolting against the regime". Both policies, it said, are likely to be counter-productive.

                Instead, according to the three main authors of the study, Washington should adopt a more patient approach, "designed to create conditions for effective relations [with Tehran ] over the long haul".

                As with the Soviet Union, "[W]ith Iran, the US government will again need to keep an eye on the long term, communicating with the current government but also encouraging more discussion among Iranians and more contacts and interactions between Iranians and Americans."

                "Societies and governments change. The US government has some ability to foster favorable trends in Iran , but these policies will take time to come to fruition," said the report, which also noted that Iran "appears to be on its way to becoming a nuclear power".

                Speculation about a possible attack on Iran 's nuclear facilities has, in fact, subsided somewhat over the past three weeks, although the issue has flared again as a result of successive visits by Israel 's chief of staff and defense minister, Ehud Barak, over the past week. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times reported on Wednesday that top US officials had reassured Barak that the military option was still "on the table".

                Still, most analysts believe that while such an attack - either by Israel or the US - remains possible, it is not probable, if for no other reason than the military brass in the Pentagon, especially the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, has made its opposition to the idea increasingly clear over the past month.

                In addition, the decision to send a high-ranking State Department official to participate for the first time in talks 10 days ago with Iran as part of the "Iran Six" process that also involves France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China has been taken as a signal that Washington is increasingly committed to diplomacy as the means to address its concern over Tehran's nuclear program.

                If, in addition, the State Department receives White House approval for opening an Interests Section in Tehran - a move that is currently the subject of discussions at the highest level of the administration - the likelihood of an attack before President George W Bush leaves office will recede even further.

                In that respect, the Rand study bolsters those who favor engagement with Iran , even as it also supports the maintenance of certain kinds of sanctions, notably the embargo on certain high-tech gas liquefaction technologies, as a bargaining chip for future negotiations with Tehran . To increase pressure on the regime, the report also recommends expanding contingency plans to seize Iranian foreign bank and commercial accounts and encouraging US allies to bar certain Iranian officials associated with the nuclear program from obtaining visas for foreign travel.

                As for the possibility of an attack, however, the report is clear that such an option will almost certainly be counter-productive, particularly with respect to Washington 's hopes that it could result in diminished support for the regime or even its overthrow.

                "A large majority of Iranians strongly believe that Iran has the same right as other nations to develop nuclear energy, including the construction and operation of nuclear enrichment facilities," it said. "If Iran 's facilities were to be bombed, public support for any retaliation its government took would likely be widespread."

                The most likely response, indeed, would be a "strong push to retaliate [as] [c]ritics of such a policy would likely choose to keep silent" in the nationalist backlash that would ensue.

                Moreover, such an attack "would be unlikely to stop the Iranian nuclear program," according to the authors. While it might set back the economy in certain ways, the resulting increase in oil prices would enable the government "to finance the reconstruction of the facility and continue the current program without major budgetary consequences".

                Another option, a blockade of Kharg Island, Iran's main loading terminal, or the Straits of Hormuz to prevent Iranian oil from being exported, would indeed have a "devastating effect" on Iran's economy, but it would also "probably do more to solidify public support for the regime than weaken it", according to the report, which also noted the likelihood that such a step would ensure a sharp rise in global oil prices and probably result in Iranian attacks on tanker traffic in the Gulf.

                The report also warned against covert action programmes designed to aid minority opposition groups, as "Iranian security forces have convincingly shown that they can handle restive ethnic groups, and violent opposition to Iranian rule is more likely to entrench the current security and political forces than to elicit a positive change in regime policies."

                Instead, Washington should concentrate its efforts on fostering conditions for a more pluralistic Iran in favor of a more patient approach toward a regime that the report said "most Iranians perceive ... as legitimate". It called for greater funding for program that facilitate contacts between Iranians and US citizens and to encourage US officials and citizens to provide interviews and commentary for Iranian media ..." At the same time, it should "mute US policy statements advocating regime change" as the government often uses these as "an excuse for detaining individuals seeking more freedom".

                The report also calls for support of International Monetary Fund and World Bank efforts to encourage better economic management and cease US opposition to Iran 's accession to the World Trade Organization.
               
                Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign policy, and particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

Conversations with the Crow: Part 21

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:  Sunday, October 6, 1996

Commenced:  8:45 AM CST

Concluded:  9:38 AM CST

GD: Hello to you this morning, Robert. Up and around?

RTC: Well, the sun did come up and animal instincts get us going. And then there is coffee. Are you a coffee drinker, Gregory?

GD: I never used to be but I am now. I hate the taste of the stuff which is funny because my grandfather was a big-time coffee broker. We had coffee all over the kitchen in little bags. My uncle was an expert and when my father got out of the business, he continued long after my grandfather died. Coffee gets you going but if I drink too much of it, my wiring gets fried.

RTC: The world runs on coffee.

GD: They buy a lot of it. My grandfather wasn’t exactly poor. That’s how I know about your people and the Guatemala business. My uncle was involved in it and it was well-known around the house. Grandfather was tied up with Levi and Zentner…the United Fruit people…. and the Grace Steamship company. Uncle was born in Petropolis in Brazil and was fluent in a number of languages, including Portuguese. Yes, there seemed to have been quite a connection between American business and the CIA. And of course, the White House and Congress.

RTC: Well, you’ve seen the tip of the big iceberg, haven’t you, Gregory?

GD: How big is it?

RTC: It’s not so much the size but the power of it. This country isn’t run by little local political action groups or small town newspapers. Democracy is only a word that sounds good. The public hates to vote although I understand that in Switzerland it is mandatory. They don’t care as long as they make money. Do you know how much money it costs to run for Congress? Many millions. And where does the money come from? Aunt Anna’s cookie and mad money jar? No, it comes from corporate interests who want to keep things balanced on their side of the books.

GD: That’s not a great revelation, Robert. No one really cares, as you say, as long as they have television and a car. Back in the Depression days when people didn’t have television sets and no cars, a lot of the underpaid and overworked workers were Communists. Once Roosevelt got the war started for us, business boomed and the workers ceased to be Communists.

RTC: Oh, that’s absolutely true, Gregory, but don’t underestimate the power of the Communist bugaboo to terrify the public into letting us do what we wanted.

GD: Gehlen told me that in ’48 when he was asked by the Army brass to prepare an intelligence paper proving the Russians were about to launch a huge attack on the West, there were two forces behind all of this bullshit. The first was the Army who didn’t like to be reduced in size. Generals had to retire you know and they didn’t like that. And, business had been booming during the war and they, like the generals, didn’t much like shutting down plants and making less money. This from the horse’s mouth so to speak. Oh, and it worked. Leaked to Congress and Harry Truman, it started the Cold War.

RTC: Nicely put and remember this for Critchfield. Yes, that’s basically the long and short of it. At this moment, the United States is run by four major power sources. They are all inter-connected and they have the common goal of protecting their asses and increasing their profits. We have what they call big business which consists of international companies, mostly the huge New York banking giants but some manufacturing companies as well. This country got great by being a manufacturing country but that’s slipping a bit. At the turn of the century is was railroads and steel but that has faded a little…

GD: A little? A lot.

RTC: Yes, a question of degree I suppose. Anyway, we have really big business as one entity. The other is the political part of our society. Most Congressmen are put into office to take care of business.

GD: And then we have Huey Long, who was not interested in business.

RTC: Yes, and Roosevelt had him shot very dead, didn’t he?

GD: Yes.

RTC: But Congress passes the laws and since most of them are on the take, they are careful not to pass too many laws to injure their business paymasters.

GD: But under Roosevelt they went the other way.

RTC: But Roosevelt is dead and when he died, we had a new dawn of commerce. And Congress knows where the money comes from and acts accordingly. Eventually we will see someone in the Oval Office who is also Chairman of the Board of Chase Bank. Just joking but there are those who would love the concept. We have business and political and then we have the Mafia. Yes, it is a huge industry, spawning billions of dollars in revenue. Joe Kennedy turned to them to get Jack elected and then turned on them and began to persecute him using the other brother. Look at all the damage that short-sighted behavior did to the family. And that leads us into our very own CIA. We are at the top of the pyramid, Gregory, for a number of reasons. As you know, we started out as a small advisory group whose job it was to supply Harry Truman accurate international intelligence. Harry never trusted the Army and he found out about the humped Gehlen Report and wanted more facts to work with. Now we got Allan Dulles whose brother, John Foster, was a lawyer with Sullivan and Cromwell in New York. Sullivan and Cromwell was, in essence, a Nazi establishment. They were firm supporters of Hitler and worked with the Schroeder bank in Cologne. And you ought to know that when he was Ambassador to England, Joe Kennedy did business with Hitler and got huge blocks of I.G. Farben stock. It got taken away at the end of the war, siezed by the Justice Department and one of the first things Joe did when Jack became President was to have him put Bobby in as AG so he could get his stock back. Oh yes, those people were for Hitler right up to the last week of the war. And even afterwards as well. Of course now that Jews are getting more power here and especially in the CIA, we do not mention any of this. Same thing with your Mueller friend. Of course we used him because he was the top Nazi expert on Communists. Why not? But, of course, if the Jews ever had to face that fact, they would come unglued. Can you imagine the huge headlines in the New York Times?

GD: Yes, I can. We called that Second Coming Type.

RTC: Wrong. The New York Times is run by Jews and sucks at Israel’s tit but they would never discuss this, let alone put it on the front page. Why? Because we have control over what they print. You see, we help our friends in business with delicate political nuisance problems. Like the nice Belgians in the Congo who had all that uranium. Kill off the left wing politicos who tried to grab it all. They really weren’t Communists planning to give uranium to Russia but that’s what we told the President and that’s what our friends who publish the New York Times heard. And that’s what they published and that’s what they condoned. Naturally, with such a dangerous menace, the CIA rushed up to save us all and kill off old Patrice. Same in Guatemala and the same in Iran with Mossadegh. The enemy is identified as dangerous to our business

friends. We do studies to prove it to the rabble such as …fake documents and all that…that these enemies are vile Communists, working for the Soviet Union, and a real danger to all of America. On the one hand, get permission to destroy these enemies and on the other, launch a publicity campaign through our many friends in the media to make it just another heroic crusade.

GD: Oh, say it isn’t so, Robert.

RTC: I see you are a baseball fan, Gregory.

GD: No, that’s where it came from but I am not a baseball fan. I was feigning shock and horror at your dastardly revelations. Do go on, though.

RTC: So we have business, the press, the mob on one side thanks to Jim Angleton’s organization, the legislative branch and that’s it. We don’t control, Gregory, we influence. A press campaign, planned in our offices, here and an assassination or bomb blast there. We have it down to an exact science. A nice balance at that.

GD: And the Mueller business?

RTC: A mere bump in the road. If you had brought this up twenty years before, they would have killed you but by now, it’s unpleasantly cold coffee. They’ll just ruin your reputation by using paid hacks. They media would never discuss this, believe me. You could have Heinrich Mueller’s body in a glass case and the press would be as silent as the grave. We would ask them nicely to drop it and guess what? They would.

GD: The machine seems to run well enough.

RTC: We’ve had time to perfect it. There are always glitches but so far, we have been able to repair them. But it isn’t like it used to be, Gregory. Then it was a band of brothers and now the whole agency has gotten too big, too compartmentalized and too stiff. The power is there but it is an old power, not a dynamic one. One of these days, parts will start falling off and then it will be replaced with another group that will march to a different drummer.

GD: Things always change, Robert, mark that.

RTC: I’m afraid I’m stuck in the old days, thinking the old thoughts and doing what I got used to doing. I told you not to get old, Gregory. I’ve seen it before. Sweet children grow up to be anarchists, faggots, drug addicts, bank robbers, drunks and so on. Wives leave you for someone else, your business changes way past recognition and you become redundant and out you go. You don’t recognize the cars in the street, the music is terrible and the trouble is you remember too much.

GD: And tend to romanticize the past instead of learning from it.

RTC: We write books but in my case, I can’t. In the first place, I am forbidden to by contract with the Agency and in the second, I can write reports but not books. You write books, though. Of course so do Joe and Susan. I don’t think very much of Joe, Gregory but I think you might do well to write things up. Joe can see for about two inches in front of his nose but I find you can see for miles.

GD: It’s a blessing and a curse. I have a secret for you Robert. You won’t believe me, of course, but here it is, For reasons I don’t even begin to understand, I can meet a new person and almost at once see right into them and know just who and what they are. They may be a professional football player but if I talk with them for three minutes, I can see that they are gay. Or a religious leader and see he is a drunk. But only face to face. Can’t do it on the phone or by mail. And I think sometimes these people sense I am poking around inside their psyche. I never say a thing to them but some people can sense my invasion of their often rotten souls. And for no reason apparent to a, say, neutral observer, they suddenly hate me.

RTC: They’re afraid of you, Gregory. People fear the predator.

GD: Yes, I’m sure they do but I am not predatory. I am very understanding of other people.

RTC: Trust me, Gregory, you’re a born predator. That’s one of the reasons I trust you. I prefer to know a wolf as a wolf than a yapping little dog that sneaks around and bites you in the lower leg. You would go for the throat and the kill. No, seeing into people is a gift. I ran enough agents in my time and I know. Always go for the throat.

GD: Yes. I was once confronted with six armed men who were trying to kill some people I happened to be with. I had a gun, a Belgian Browning 9mm. The High Power model with a 13 shot box mag. These fellows were shooting at my friends and at me. I had nothing to do with the business but I had the gun. I got it out and I nailed all six. Five through the head and one in the neck. Before I left the scene with my wounded friend, I went over and shot that one through the head. I didn’t want any witnesses. And I got my brass.

RTC: I never knew that one, Gregory. How old were you at the time?

GD: Seventeen and a couple of months.

RTC: You were in the service?

GD: No. A tourist.

RTC: Six at one throw?

GD: Five on the spot and one a few moments later.

RTC: A dumb question here but did it bother you?

GD: Yes, terribly. My friend bled all over my shoes before I got him to a safe place. It took a lot of work to get the blood off. And I ruined a very good tie. He got it in the upper leg so I used the tie to keep him from bleeding out. Fortunately, the artery was spared and he survived.

RTC: And it never bothered you?

GD: Why should it? These jerks were shooting at me and in time, they might have killed me too. Fuck them, Robert. Now they’re turning green in a box somewhere, waiting for the Last Trumpet. Yet in my flesh shall I see God? Oh, I think not. Heaven’s doormat will be a horrible, oozing mess come trumpet day.

RTC: Predatory, Gregory, in word and deed. No wonder the club does not like you.

GD: Club?

RTC: Bill, Tom, Trento and a few others. They warn me about you. I can see why. Their old warning system, the cave man one, is still fitfully working and they can sense you are a danger. Seventeen? Was that the first time?

GD: No, when I was in Germany just before that, I got jumped by a DP. He had an iron bar and I emptied a clip from a .380 into his pump. They had quite a bit of trouble from these DPs from Poland. They were all Polish Jews from the liberated camps and until the Army rounded them all up and shipped them, under guard, to Israel, they cut quite a path. And I got another one over by a putting green. He pulled a knife and his buddy had a wooden pistol. My friend got him and broke his neck and I got the one with the knife using a nine iron. I ruined the club but you should have seen his head. It looked like a cherry pie dropped on the sidewalk. Dragged both of them into the hedges and off we went. The club went into the river. I guess they found them later by the stench and all the flies.

RTC: Very predatory, Gregory.

GD: Self-defense, Robert, self-defense. What else would you call it?
RTC: Good reflexes among other things.

GD: God must hate me for making his doormat so filthy,

(Concluded at 9:38 AM CST)

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2008, Issue No. 78
August 6, 2008
 

DISABLED INTEL SATELLITE RESTORED TO OPERATION BY NRO
 
                A U.S. intelligence satellite that had ceased to function was recently restored to operation by engineers from the National Reconnaissance Office and its industry affiliates, the NRO said.
 
                The episode was first publicly described last month in a glossy two-page NRO brochure, which simply said: "Technical experts from both the NRO and industry recently performed extraordinary engineering on the ground that returned a non-operating satellite to full operation."
 
                See "National Reconnaissance Office Accomplishments," July 2008 http://www.fas.org/irp/nro/accomplish.pdf
 
                Secrecy News asked NRO spokesman Rick Oborn to elaborate on the statement in the promotional brochure. ("I didn't know anyone actually read that," he said.)
 
                He said the action occurred around "one and a half or two months ago," after the satellite in question had been "non-responsive for a while."
 
                It was a "very interesting and pretty extraordinary" turn of events and "much to everybody's semi-surprise," satellite operation was restored.
 
                What kind of satellite was it? "I can't tell you that," he said.
 
                When was it launched? "That would reveal too much."
 
                How long was the satellite non-operational? "I don't think I'm going to tell you." And he didn't.
 
                Mr. Oborn said that NRO had prepared a classified account of the matter which was circulated in the intelligence community and to Congress.
 
                The story shows, he said, that "we've got some really smart people doing the job."
 
 NRC PROPOSES TO INCREASE OPENNESS ON SECURITY INFO
 
                Rather unexpectedly, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is asking for public comment on whether and how it should disclose more information to the public on the security of nuclear power plants and other facilities.
 
                "We view nuclear regulation as the public's business and believe it should be transacted as openly and candidly as possible," said NRC Executive Director of Operations Bill Borchardt.
 
                Among other things, the NRC wants to know what currently undisclosed information members of the public would like to have released: "What specific details would increase your level of satisfaction in our regulatory oversight of licensed facilities?"
 
                The NRC published a request for comment in the Federal Register on July 29, along with related background material.  http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2008/07/nrc072908.html
 
                It is practically a law of bureaucratic physics that government agencies do not spontaneously seek to become more transparent and accountable absent some significant change in personnel or other
triggering event.
 
                According to David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, the triggering event in this case was congressional outrage at the NRC's concealment of a major "nuclear
safety event" in 2006 at the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Erwin, Tennessee.
 
                In that case, approximately 35 liters of highly enriched uranium solution leaked and spilled, creating the possibility of a criticality accident, i.e. an uncontrolled chain reaction. Yet "NRC failed to
notify the public or Congress for 13 months regarding this serious incident," complained Rep. John Dingell in a July 3, 2007 letter to NRC Chairman Dale E. Klein.
 
                "We call on NRC to make every effort to withhold from public view only those documents that contain security sensitive information, and restore to the public all other documents that have been withheld....," Rep. Dingell wrote last year.  http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/nrc/dingell070307.pdf
 
                The current NRC request for public comment on ways to increase openness, Mr. Lochbaum told Secrecy News, "is the agency's bureaucratic effort to extricate themselves from the hole they dug."
 
                In 2003 congressional testimony, Mr. Lochbaum described the NRC's past refusal to engage with outside experts and public interest organizations on security policy.
 
                "The net effect of the agency's actions is to exclude the public from intervening on security issues in specific licensing cases and also to exclude the public from participating, even in the limited capacity of
merely expressing concerns, in security policy discussions," Mr. Lochbaum testified at that time.
  http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/jump.jsp?origID=pdf-1008
 
 ACLU SEEKS TO INTERVENE IN FISA COURT PROCEEDINGS
 
                The American Civil Liberties Union is petitioning the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for leave to participate in future proceedings regarding the constitutionality of government procedures under the recent FISA Amendments Act, which expanded government authority to conduct intelligence surveillance.
 
                The government opposes the ACLU petition. Justice Department attorneys wrote in a July 29 opposition motion that since the relevant procedures are classified, "there is nothing that the ACLU could contribute to the Court's resolution...."
 
                The government's opposition is misplaced, the ACLU replied yesterday, noting that it does not seek access to classified information, but only wishes to address the constitutionality questions that are before the Court.
 
                "Because the FISA Amendments Act has such sweeping implications for the  rights of U.S. citizens and residents, any consideration of these issues should be adversarial and as informed and transparent as possible," the August 5 ACLU reply stated.
 
                "This Court should not issue a secret opinion after hearing secret arguments -- and from only one side," the ACLU reply said. (I am mentioned in a footnote.)
 
                In a separate proceeding, the ACLU is also challenging the constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act in federal district court. See "ACLU Challenges Unconstitutional Spying Law":
  http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspying/faachallenge.html
 
                The pleadings submitted to the FISA Court are also copied here: http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/index.html#aclu2008
 
                 `While it isn't Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the famously interminable lawsuit in Dickens' Bleak House, the current ACLU proceeding before the FISA Court is, strangely enough, Jaffer v. Jaffer.
 
                `The lead attorney on the ACLU petition is the estimable Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Program. Among the Justice Department attorneys opposing the ACLU petition is Jamil N. Jaffer, Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General.

Controlling the News

Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2008 19:25:46 -0500 (CDT)
From: Federal Bureau of Investigation fbi@service.govdelivery.com

To: Media Advisory Commission

Subject Principles to assure coordination of Gray Activities   

1. Purpose
   1.1 To assure coordination of information (which term as used in this paper includes propaganda and other related activities) unattributed to the U.S. Government, the National Security Council, in NSC 165/1, 2 dated 24 October 1953:
   
   
2. a. Authorized the U.S. Information Agency, when considered advisable, and except in the case of operations of the Voice of America, to communicate with other peoples without attribution to the U.S. Government on matters for which attribution could be assumed by the Government if necessary, and
   b. Directed that the Operations Coordinating Board agree upon principles which will govern such unattributed activities (hereinafter such activities are included in the definition of gray).
   
   
3. 2. Definitions
   For the purpose of this paper, the following definitions of terms are used in describing both the content of information and the type of activity.
   
   
4. White Acknowledged as an official statement or act of the U.S. Government, or emanates from a source associated closely enough with the U.S. Government to reflect an official view-point. The information is true and factual. It also includes all output identified as coming from U.S. official sources.
   
   
5. Gray The true source (U.S. Government) is not revealed to the target audience. The activity engaged in plausibly appears to emanate from a non-official American source, or an indigenous, non-hostile source, or there may be no attribution.¹ Gray is that information whose content is such that the effect will be increased if the hand of the U.S. Government and in some cases any American participation are not revealed. It is simply a means for the U.S. to present viewpoints which are in the interest of U.S. foreign policy, but which will be acceptable or more acceptable to the intended target audience than will an official government statement.
   
   
6. Black The activity engaged in appears to emanate from a source (government, party, group, organization, person) usually hostile in nature. The interest of the U.S. Government is concealed and the U.S. Government would deny responsibility. The content may be partially or completely fabricated, but that which is fabricated is made to appear credible to the target audience. Black activity is also usually designed to cause embarrassment to the ostensible source or to force the ostensible source to take action against its will.
   __________

1 In areas where activity is conducted without any attribution and it may result in embarrassment to an agency of the U.S. Government, liaison officers will carefully weigh all aspects of the proposed activity before deciding whether such an operation should be undertaken

(Report follows)

The Bush Legacy: The Hitler Connection

Prescott Bush  May 15, 1895-October 8, 1972

 Senator Prescott Bush             Senator Bush’s Nazi Decoration

Certificate of presentation for the German Eagle Order, signed by Hitler

Prescott Sheldon Bush,  (father of George Herbert Walker Bush, grandfather of President George W. Bush), a Senator from Connecticut; born in Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio, May 15, 1895; attended the Douglas School of Columbus, Ohio, and St. George’s School, Newport, R.I., 1908-1913; graduated from Yale University in 1917; enlisted in Connecticut National Guard in 1916 and served as captain of Field Artillery in American Expeditionary Forces 1917-1919; engaged in hardware business as a warehouse clerk in St. Louis, Mo.; moved to Greenwich, Conn., in 1924; engaged in banking business in New York City 1926; moderator, Greenwich Representative Town Meeting 1935-1952; trustee, Yale University; unsuccessful Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1950; elected on November 4, 1952, as a Republican to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the death of James O’Brien McMahon; reelected in 1956 and served from November 4, 1952, to January 2, 1963; was not a candidate for reelection in 1962; resumed his career in the banking and investment field; died in New York City, October 8, 1972; interment in Putnam Cemetery, Greenwich, Conn

In 1926, after Prescott Bush had married George Herbert Walker's daughter, Dorothy, Walker brought Bush in as a vice president of the private banking and investment firm of W.A. Harriman & Co., also located in New York. Bush became a partner in the firm that later became Brown Brothers Harriman and the largest private investment bank in the world. Eventually, Bush became a director of and stockholder in UBC.

After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, government documents were located in The National Archives and Library of Congress that clearly reveal that Prescott Bush, served as a business partner of, and U.S. banking operative for, the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his "enemy national" partners.

The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler's rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law.

Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial tycoon for nearly a year after the U.S. entered the war.

For six decades these historical facts have gone unreported by the mainstream U.S. media. The essential facts have appeared on the Internet and in relatively obscure books, but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes. This story has also escaped the attention of "official" Bush biographers, Presidential historians and publishers of U.S. history books covering World War II and its aftermath.

The unraveling of the web of Bush-Harriman-Thyssen U.S. enterprises, all of which operated out of the same suite of offices at 39 Broadway in New York under the supervision of Prescott Bush, began with a story that ran simultaneously in the New York Herald-Tribune and Washington Post on July 31, 1941. By then, the U.S. had been at war with Germany for nearly eight months.

"Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank," declared the front-page Herald-Tribune headline. The lead paragraph characterized Fritz Thyssen as "Adolf Hitler's original patron a decade ago." In fact, the steel and coal magnate had aggressively supported and funded Hitler since October 1923, according to Thyssen's autobiography,’ I Paid Hitler.’ In that book, Thyssen also acknowledged his direct personal relationships with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess.

The Herald-Tribune also cited unnamed sources who suggested Thyssen's U.S. "nest egg" in fact belonged to "Nazi bigwigs" including Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, or even Hitler himself.

The bank, founded in 1924 by W. Averell Harriman on behalf of Thyssen and his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. of Holland, was Union Banking Corporation (UBC) of New York City. According to government documents, it was in reality a clearing house for a number of Thyssen-controlled enterprises and assets, including as many as a dozen individual businesses. UBC also bought and shipped overseas gold, steel, coal, and U.S. Treasury bonds. The company's activities were administered for Thyssen by a Netherlands-born, naturalized U.S. citizen named Cornelis Lievense, who served as president of UBC. Roland Harriman was chairman and Prescott Bush a managing director.

The Herald-Tribune article did not identify Bush or Harriman as executives of UBC, or Brown Brothers Harriman, in which they were partners, as UBC's private banker. A confidential FBI memo from that period suggested, without naming the Bush and Harriman families, that politically prominent individuals were about to come under official U.S. government scrutiny as Hitler's plunder of Europe continued unabated.

After the "Hitler's Angel" article was published Bush and Harriman made no attempts to divest themselves of the controversial Thyssen financial alliance, nor did they challenge the newspaper report that UBC was, in fact, a de facto Nazi front organization in the U.S.

Instead, the government documents show, Bush and his partners increased their subterfuge to try to conceal the true nature and ownership of their various businesses, particularly after the U.S. entered the war. The documents also disclose that Cornelis Lievense, Thyssen's personal appointee to oversee U.S. matters for his Rotterdam-based Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V., via UBC for nearly two decades, repeatedly denied to U.S. government investigators any knowledge of the ownership of the Netherlands bank or the role of Thyssen in it. Brown Brothers Harriman sent letters to the government seeking reconsideration of the seizures by using false information.

UBC's original group of business associates included George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, who had a relationship with the Harriman family that began in 1919. In 1922, Walker and W. Averell Harriman traveled to Berlin to set up the German branch of their banking and investment operations, which were largely based on critical war resources such as steel and coal.

The Walker-Harriman-created German industrial alliance also included partnership with another German titan who supported Hitler's rise, Friedrich Flick, who partnered with Thyssen in the German Steel Trust that forged the Nazi war machine. For his role in using slave labor and his own steel, coal and arms resources to build Hitler's war effort, Flick was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to prison.

However, the government documents note that Bush, Harriman, Lievense and the other UBC stockholders were in fact "nominees," or phantom shareholders, for Thyssen and his Holland bank, meaning that they acted at the direct behest of their German client.

What has rarely been mentioned, is that Hitler presented Prescott Bush the German Eagle Order, Third Class, on March 7, 1938.

On October 20, 1942, under authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act, the U.S. Congress seized UBC and liquidated its assets after the war. The seizure is confirmed by Vesting Order No. 248 in the U.S. Office of the Alien Property Custodian and signed by U.S. Alien Property Custodian Leo T. Crowley. (see official report below)

In August, under the same authority, Congress had seized the first of the Bush-Harriman-managed Thyssen entities, Hamburg-American Line, under Vesting Order No. 126, also signed by Crowley. Eight days after the seizure of UBC, Congress invoked the Trading with the Enemy Act again to take control of two more Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses - Holland-American Trading Corp. (Vesting Order No. 261) and Seamless Steel Equipment Corp. (Vesting Order No. 259).

The documents from the Archives also show that the Bushes and Harrimans shipped valuable U.S. assets, including gold, coal, steel and U.S. Treasury bonds, to their foreign clients overseas between 1931-33, as Hitler engineered his rise to power.

.  Major U.S. media outlets, including ABC News, NBC News, CNN, The New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times and Miami Herald, as well as Knight-Ridder Newspapers, have repeatedly declined to investigate the story when information regarding discovery of the documents was presented to them beginning Friday, August 29. Newsweek U.S. correspondent Michael Isikoff, famous for his reporting of big scoops during the Clinton-Lewinsky sexual affair of the 1990s, declined twice to accept an exclusive story based on the documents from the archives.

In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate, with no press accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past. There is no record of any U.S. press coverage of the Bush-Nazi connection during any political campaigns conducted by George Herbert Walker Bush, Jeb Bush, or George W. Bush..  

Playing the Rove card
August 5, 2008

by Muhammad Cohen

Asia Times

            HONG KONG - Republican Senator John McCain's campaign couldn't have scripted it much better. When Democratic Senator Barack Obama accused Republicans of broadcasting that Obama "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills", the McCainaics got a two-fer.

                First, they got to deny that the implied racism charge in the absence of any smoking gun. The Republican punditocracy and blogosphere may be buzzing with tales about Obama's secret plan to appoint Louis Farrakhan attorney general and redefine the traditional January white sale, but the McCain campaign keeps it all at arm's length.

                In the second volley, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis accused Obama of "playing the race card", with advisor Steve Schmidt and the Republican nominee-in-waiting himself chiming in to agree. That not only slugged the Democratic contender and his campaign with the nasty charge of playing fast and loose in America's most sensitive political nether regions, it also effectively put public focus on the race issue, exactly where McCain's campaign wants it. The McCain team got to talk about race and blame the other guy for bringing it up.

Something about him is different

                Although he probably now wishes he'd left the dead presidents out of it, Obama was making a valid point about the McCain campaign's recent tactics. The various portrayals of Obama as different from the rest of us - whether it's calling him "arrogant" or "presumptuous" or comparing him with Paris Hilton - are subtle reminders of the biggest difference of all.

                That's garden variety low-road campaigning. The McCain team's triple-barreled race card reaction to Obama's remarks took the campaign full speed down the on ramp into the Karl Rove tunnel. Moreover, the reaction's swiftness and slickness - neither McCain campaign trademarks - indicate that they've been waiting for the moment to start playing their "race card" card from the Rove deck that won a pair of presidential elections for George W Bush.

                The McCain campaign said it was merely defending itself to slip the trap the Obama campaign set in the primary race. McCain's campaign says Hillary Clinton's campaign had its criticism of Obama unfairly deflected as racism. That's a compelling tale, but simply not true: it was Clinton's campaign that brought up race, comparing Obama's South Carolina primary win to Jesse Jackson's to dismiss it as a black thing, pointing to significant African-American populations in other states Obama won, and targeting his weakness among white working-class voters to woo superdelegates. If the Obama campaign "played the race card" in the primary campaign, it was because the Clinton team kept dealing it.

Hit them where you're weak

                One of former presidential advisor Rove's signature tactics is to attack the opponent in the areas where your side seems most vulnerable. Traditional polite politics calls for tiptoeing around your weaknesses and playing to your own strengths; the Rove way tries to recast the opponent's strengths as weaknesses. For example, National Guard no-show Bush's 2004 campaign attacked decorated combat veteran John Kerry over his war record. Bush invaded Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction and destroy links to global terrorism that weren't there, so then said he really did it to free the Iraq people from a dictator and restore women's rights; naturally, he accused his opponent of being a flip-flopper.

                The mother of all Rove reversals involves the September 11, 2001, attacks. Every time you hear a Republican declare that the Democrats' policies will make the US vulnerable to attack, remember which party was in charge on September 11, occupying the White House and ignoring a national security briefing memo entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside US" that outlined a plan to use hijacked planes as missiles against skyscrapers.

                Facts are not important in Rovean politics, except that any fact that can be harmful to the candidate must be redirected to the opposition, by whatever means necessary. The McCain campaign's zeal to accuse Obama of using racism is an attack to immunize themselves against accusations of racism. They protest just a little too much about how their side has never made race any issue. Well, not in this campaign at least.

Helms' favorite Black

                McCain adviser Charles Black won his political spurs in campaigns for senator Jesse Helms (See Thank you, Senator Helms, July 12) in North Carolina. Black has affirmed that he's proud of his association with Helms, who served 30 years in the senate as an unreconstructed bigot.

                In two races against black opponent Harvey Gant, Helms' campaign was widely accused of making race an issue. One Helms ad that's drawn comparisons with the McCain attack ad linking Obama with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears depicted a white woman saying, "Call me, Harvey," raising the specter of miscegenation.

                McCain himself lugs baggage on racial issues. As a congressman in 1983, he voted against creating the federal Martin Luther King commemorative holiday. He also initially backed Arizona's initiative not to recognize the holiday led by right-wing radical governor Evan Meacham. "I was wrong," McCain now says of his stand, and in 1990, supported a state ballot initiative to recognize the holiday. Asked at the Urban League last week about his subsequent opposition to federal funding for the holiday, McCain pleaded memory lapse, but such a vote would fit his pose as the toughest guy on the block when it comes to opposing what he considers wasteful government spending.

                McCain has worked hard to win a pass on his opposition to the MLK holiday, but he still has the wrong moves on racial issues. Last week, McCain unequivocally supported an Arizona ballot initiative that would ban affirmative action.

Don't quota me

                "I do not believe in quotas," McCain said, adopting the straw man created by opponents of affirmative action. Affirmative action isn't about quotas, it's about removing barriers to ensure fair consideration for all. It's not about discriminating against the best and the brightest in society, but recognizing that all segments of society must compete fairly for that distinction to be meaningful. It means recognizing society's diversity is as much a legitimate interest in college admissions as the ability to shoot a basketball, bake heavenly bread or potentially win an Oscar or Pulitzer, things that admissions officers should and do consider along with test scores.

                Not all opponents of affirmative action are racists, but supporting anti-affirmative action referenda effectively endorses the message from the motley collection of racists behind the measures that minorities should know their place and respect their betters. "[R]ather than engage in divisive ballot initiatives, we must have a dialogue and cooperation and mutual efforts together to provide for every child in America to fulfill their expectations," said one Arizona elected official opposing the state's 1998 affirmative action referendum. His name is John McCain, but in 1998 he wasn't running for president and trying to protect his right flank.

                Aside from the phony quotas argument, I'd like to hear McCain's reasons for opposing affirmative action this time around. Whatever they are, though, you can be sure he'll accuse you of trying to play the race card just for asking while he runs a campaign for president against an opponent with whom he has "stark differences" that he wants make sure the public doesn't miss.

                Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America’s story to the world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air (www.hongkongonair.com), a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance and cheap lingerie.

 

ARTFRAUD

                We are pleased to initiate a long series of factual articles by Claude du Plessis, an art expert and specialist on art frauds. M du Plessis has written on many topics which include: Counterfeit Asian art, Jackson Pollack fakes, Frederic Remington remakes, Louis XV and XVI furniture, the secrets of the ’rare’ coin market, reproduction Monets, Renoirs and Picassos, counterfeit Russian icons, the great ‘Elmali hoard’ of fake Greek coins, modern ‘Etruscan’ art, the great ‘1804 U.S. silver dollar’ hoax and many more entertaining stories of past and current fraud and fakery, and a lengthy dissection of the ‘art as investment’ scams. Foreign and domestic art auction houses and galleries are dissected and the truth of the origins of a number of famous pieces are professionally dissected and presented to our readers for their interest and entertainment. Our first chronicle was an exposé of the once desirable bronzes by Auguste Rodin and the second stud was about the fake ‘art-as-investment’ scam and included  a warning about new IRS investigations. The present study concerns a new process for forging oil works of art     Ed.

The Computer as Art Forger

August 6, 2008

by Claude du Plessis

                The computer has changed our lives, sometimes for the better, or , if one reads the bloggers on the Internet, for the worse. The same computer that can keep your spread sheets, is also capable of producing virtually undetectable faked oil paintings.

                 `These are not produced and sold as high priced copies for dentist’s waiting rooms but for the international art market. The basic thesis was developed in the Ukraine by a man named Yevgeny Berutko and is a complicated system whereby an original painting, say a Monet, (the Russians looted hundreds of these in 1945), scan it for texture and color and once this has been done, a suitable canvas is then mechanically painted in oils, using the collected data.

                The paint is baked until it is authentically hard, the finished product varnished with varnished guaranteed to turn yellow, and then the canvas is affixed to old stretchers and put into an authentic frame.

                 It is known that the Ukrainian gang has produced paintings by: Monet, Manet, Renoir, Whistler, Van Gough, Pissaro, Klimt, Cézanne and Degas.

                 These fakes are then sent to European and American markets where they are sold as original for huge sums of money. We understand that the forgers have produced over twenty Jackson Pollacks. 

                The real watchword of major art outlets is not, “Is it genuine?” but “Will it sell?” And these computer-generated fakes indeed sell very, very well, usually for millions of dollars to the sucker market. One should note that we are not dealing with enhanced prints but real oil paintings, meticulously recreated thanks to the computer.

                Perhaps the forgers will descend the scale of good taste and take to making works by Picasso, Chagall and Matisse and more awful Pollacks.  Then indeed, the old joke: “Myron, Myron,  buy the Picasso.!!! It matches the drapes!” will become a reality.