The Slaughterhouse Informer

A Compendiium of Various Official Lies, Business Scandals, Small Murders, Frauds, and Other Gross Defects of Our Current Political, Business and Religious Moral Lepers.

Presenting a new magazine that contains material that is not found elsewhere and is very difficult to post on the Internet. The ‘Voice of the White House’ will appear in each issue containing material not found on TBR News for very obvious reasons.This publication will appear once a week, on Wednesday, every week, will be ten pages in length and is available by subscription only. The price is $5.00 a month and can be paid via PayPal or by check, sent to ‘Morris Productions, 1350 E. New Yort St. Ste A2-190, Aurora, Il 60504.’ If you don’t like it, and Bush supporters can read the Drudge Report for free, you can cancel at any time.

The Voice of the White House

                Washington, D.C., October 5, 2008: “The greatly anticipated debate was a waste of time. Palin giggled and smirked her way throughout its course, not answering questions, flippantly ignoring both Biden and the moderator and in general, displaying a lack of knowledge coupled to a raging ego. If that woman even gets into the White House, I will leave the country the next day. Among other things, Sarah is a religious lunatic, believing in talking in tongues, the fictional Rapture and other nonsense. She believes n witches, has a private life that is nothing to brag about, is greedy and very vindictive. Couple that with a total lack of knowledge of foreign and domestic problems and one has a huge problem considering her ticket as viable. I personally have no problem with a woman in the White House, or even in the Oval Office but I draw the line at a virago who is also a Jesus freak. I have had encounters with these people (my son was going out with one) and believe me, one keeps as far away from them as possible. It would be one thing if they had odd religious beliefs but these strange people are obsessed and utterly ruthless in trying to shove their demented beliefs on everyone else. My son’s girl friend had a family who wanted to meet his family and they at once launched into an obnoxious and sustained campaign of incessant yammering about their beliefs and in general, nothing they ranted about was either based on reality or sanity. I had a terrible time getting them out of the house and my son was so horrified at their verbal bombardments that he broke of the relationship the next day, to our great relief. No, we do not want Sarah Palin anywhere near the levers of power. All of these obnoxious oddities should be herded out into the wilds of Montana, or Alaska, and left for the local animals to dispose of. It wouldn’t be the wolf population because wolves don’t eat carrion.”

Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain                                 

October 4, 2008

by Frank Rich

New York Times

Sarah Palin’s post-Couric/Fey comeback at last week’s vice presidential debate was a turning point in the campaign. But if she “won,” as her indulgent partisans and press claque would have it, the loser was not Joe Biden. It was her running mate. With a month to go, the 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race — about “the future,” as Palin kept saying Thursday night — and the only person who doesn’t seem to know it is Mr. Past, poor old John McCain.

To understand the meaning of Palin’s “victory,” it must be seen in the context of two ominous developments that directly preceded it. Just hours before the debate began, the McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan. That state is ground zero for the collapsed Main Street economy and for so-called Reagan Democrats, those white working-class voters who keep being told by the right that Barack Obama is a Muslim who hung with bomb-throwing radicals during his childhood in the late 1960s.

McCain surrendered Michigan despite having outspent his opponent on television advertising and despite Obama’s twin local handicaps, an unpopular Democratic governor and a felonious, now former, black Democratic Detroit mayor. If McCain can’t make it there, can he make it anywhere in the Rust Belt?

Not without an economic message. McCain’s most persistent attempt, his self-righteous crusade against earmarks, collapsed with his poll numbers. Next to a $700 billion bailout package, his incessant promise to eliminate all Washington pork — by comparison, a puny grand total of $16.5 billion in the 2008 federal budget — doesn’t bring home the bacon. Nor can McCain reconcile his I-will-veto-government-waste mantra with his support, however tardy, of the bailout bill. That bill’s $150 billion in fresh pork includes a boondoggle inserted by the Congressman Don Young, an Alaskan Republican no less.

The second bit of predebate news, percolating under the radar, involved the still-unanswered questions about McCain’s health. Back in May, you will recall, the McCain campaign allowed a select group of 20 reporters to spend a mere three hours examining (but not photocopying) 1,173 pages of the candidate’s health records on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Conspicuously uninvited was Lawrence Altman, a doctor who covers medicine for The New York Times. Altman instead canvassed melanoma experts to evaluate the sketchy data that did emerge. They found the information too “unclear” to determine McCain’s cancer prognosis.

There was, however, at least one doctor-journalist among those 20 reporters in May, the CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta. At the time, Gupta told Katie Couric on CBS that the medical records were “pretty comprehensive” and wrote on his CNN blog that he was “pretty convinced there was no ‘smoking gun’ about the senator’s health.” (Physical health, that is; Gupta wrote there was hardly any information on McCain’s mental health.)

That was then. Now McCain is looking increasingly shaky, whether he’s repeating his “Miss Congeniality” joke twice in the same debate or speaking from notecards even when reciting a line for (literally) the 17th time (“The fundamentals of our economy are strong”) or repeatedly confusing proper nouns that begin with S (Sunni, Shia, Sudan, Somalia, Spain). McCain’s “dismaying temperament,” as George Will labeled it, only thickens the concerns. His kamikaze mission into Washington during the bailout crisis seemed crazed. His seething, hostile debate countenance — a replay of Al Gore’s sarcastic sighing in 2000 — didn’t make the deferential Obama look weak (as many Democrats feared) but elevated him into looking like the sole presidential grown-up.

Though CNN and MSNBC wouldn’t run a political ad with doctors questioning McCain’s medical status, Gupta revisited the issue in an interview published last Tuesday by The Huffington Post. While maintaining a pretty upbeat take on the candidate’s health, the doctor-journalist told the reporter Sam Stein that he couldn’t vouch “by any means” for the completeness of the records the campaign showed him four months ago. “The pages weren’t numbered,” Gupta said, “so I had no way of knowing what was missing.” At least in Watergate we knew that the gap on Rose Mary Woods’s tape ran 18 and a half minutes.

It’s against this backdrop that Palin’s public pronouncements, culminating with her debate performance, have been so striking. The standard take has it that she’s either speaking utter ignorant gibberish (as to Couric) or reciting highly polished, campaign-written sound bites that she’s memorized (as at the convention and the debate). But there’s a steady unnerving undertone to Palin’s utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. Or who is seen that way by her own camp, the hard-right G.O.P. base that never liked McCain anyway and views him as, at best, a White House place holder.

This was first apparent when Palin extolled a “small town” vice president as a hero in her convention speech — and cited not one of the many Republican vice presidents who fit that bill but, bizarrely, Harry Truman, a Democrat who succeeded a president who died in office. A few weeks later came Charlie Gibson’s question about whether she thought she was “experienced enough” and “ready” when McCain invited her to join his ticket. Palin replied that she didn’t “hesitate” and didn’t “even blink” — a response that seemed jarring for its lack of any human modesty, even false modesty.

In the last of her Couric interview installments on Thursday, Palin was asked which vice president had most impressed her, and after paying tribute to Geraldine Ferraro, she chose “George Bush Sr.” Her criterion: she most admires vice presidents “who have gone on to the presidency.” Hours later, at the debate, she offered a discordant contrast to Biden when asked by Gwen Ifill how they would each govern “if the worst happened” and the president died in office. After Biden spoke of somber continuity, Palin was weirdly flip and chipper, eager to say that as a “maverick” she’d go her own way.

But the debate’s most telling passage arrived when Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Palin’s perky response — she immediately started selling McCain as a “consummate maverick” again — was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis’s notoriously cerebral answer to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being “raped and murdered.” If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s devastating personal history.

After the debate, Republicans who had been bailing on Palin rushed back to the fold. They know her relentless ambition is the only hope for saving a ticket headed by a warrior who is out of juice and out of ideas. So what if she is preposterously unprepared to run the country in the midst of its greatest economic crisis in 70 years? She looks and sounds like a winner.

You can understand why they believe that. She has more testosterone than anyone else at the top of her party. McCain and his surrogates are forever blaming their travails on others, wailing about supposed sexist and journalistic biases around the clock. McCain even canceled an interview with Larry King, for heaven’s sake, in a fit of pique at a CNN anchor, Campbell Brown.

We are not a nation of whiners, as Phil Gramm would have it, but the G.O.P. is now the party of whiners. That rebranding became official when Republican House leaders moaned that a routine partisan speech by Nancy Pelosi had turned their members against the bailout bill. As the stock market fell nearly 778 points, Barney Frank taunted his G.O.P. peers with pitch-perfect mockery: “Somebody hurt my feelings, so I will punish the country!”

Talk about the world coming full circle. This is the same Democrat who had been slurred as “Barney Fag” in the mid-1990s by Dick Armey, a House leader of the government-bashing Gingrich revolution that helped lower us into this debacle. Now Frank was ridiculing the House G.O.P. as a bunch of sulking teenage girls. His wisecrack stung — and stuck.

Palin is an antidote to the whiny Republican image that Frank nailed. Alaska’s self-styled embodiment of Joe Sixpack is not a sulker, but a pistol-packing fighter. That’s why she draws the crowds and (as she puts it) “energy” that otherwise elude the angry McCain. But she is still the candidate for vice president, not president. Americans do not vote for vice president.

So how can a desperate G.O.P. save itself? As McCain continues to fade into incoherence and irrelevance, the last hope is that he’ll come up with some new game-changing stunt to match his initial pick of Palin or his ill-fated campaign “suspension.” Until Thursday night, more than a few Republicans were fantasizing that his final Hail Mary pass would be to ditch Palin so she can “spend more time” with her ever-growing family. But the debate reminded Republicans once again that it’s Palin, not McCain, who is their last hope for victory.

You have to wonder how long it will be before they plead with him to think of his health, get out of the way and pull the ultimate stunt of flipping the ticket. Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.

Palin treads carefully between fundamentalist beliefs and public policy

Her faith views are strong and sometimes controversial. Her aides say she seeks to share but not impose her faith; her critics say she has 'a fine-tuned sense of how far to push.'

September 28, 2008

by Stephen Braun

 Los Angeles Times

                ANCHORAGE -- Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago -- about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct -- the teacher said.

                After conducting a college band and watching Palin deliver a commencement address to a small group of home-schooled students in June 1997, Wasilla resident Philip Munger said, he asked the young mayor about her religious beliefs. Palin told him that "dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time," Munger said. When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said "she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks," recalled Munger, who teaches music at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and has regularly criticized Palin in recent years on his liberal political blog, called Progressive Alaska.

                The idea of a "young Earth" -- that God created the Earth about 6,000 years ago, and dinosaurs and humans coexisted early on -- is a popular strain of creationism.

                Though in her race for governor she called for faith-based "intelligent design" to be taught along with evolution in Alaska's schools, Gov. Palin has not sought to require it, state educators say.

                As governor and in her formative role as mayor of Wasilla, Palin has trod carefully between her evangelical faith and public policy on issues such as abortion and library books. At times she has retreated when her moves have sparked controversy or proved politically impractical.

                She has harnessed the political muscle of social conservatives and antiabortion groups, yet she did not push hard for a special legislative session on abortion, and she did not challenge a court ruling that allowed health insurance for same-sex partners of state workers.

                Palin has attended a number of prayer sessions with pastors and has quietly sought their guidance, but she is often mum on matters of faith in high-profile public forums.

                Her aides say Palin's caution at the intersection of religion and governance is a studied effort to share her beliefs without forcing them on Alaska.

                "She's obviously an intensively religious person," said Bill McAllister, Palin's chief spokesman as governor. "She understands that she's the governor and not preacher in chief. Religion informs her decisions, but she is not out to impose her views on Alaska."

                McAllister said that he never heard Palin make such remarks about dinosaurs and that Palin preferred not to discuss her views on evolution publicly.

                "I've never had a conversation like that with her or been apprised of anything like that," McAllister said. He added that "the only bigotry that's still safe is against Christians who believe in their faith."

                Palin's critics say she holds back from trying to codify her faith-based views when she senses it will cost her politically.

                "She's got a fine-tuned sense of how far to push," said John Stein, who guided Palin into her political career before she toppled him as Wasilla's mayor.

'Moral majority'

                Stein said Palin displayed only hints of her fundamentalist Assembly of God upbringing when he first backed her for a nonpartisan run for Wasilla City Council in the early 1990s. But in 1996, when Palin ousted Mayor Stein with the aid of pink-colored antiabortion mailers and busloads of Christian grass-roots activists, she grew more overt about her plans, he said.

                She combined her staff meetings with prayer sessions, Stein said, and upset the town's chief librarian by asking what the process would be for banning books. According to Stein, bans were never carried out only because "the library director was horrified and stood up to her."

                Geri McCann, who ran the town museum under Mayor Palin, counters: "Sarah brought it up because she knew there was a moral majority in Wasilla who needed their voices heard."

                During an October 2006 debate in the Alaska governor's race, Palin urged that evolution and creationist ideas be taught together in state schools. "Don't be afraid of information and let kids debate both sides," she said.

                But since taking office in December 2006, Palin has made no moves to impose the teaching of creationism or "intelligent design," the modern version of creationist thought, in Alaska schools.

"As far as teachers are concerned, we haven't seen any push," said Joan Sargent, a Fairbanks teacher who heads the Alaska Science Teachers Assn. Teachers already have the flexibility to introduce creationist views, as an addendum to the mainstream study of evolution, Sargent said.

                Palin is "still new at this game," said Democratic state Rep. Les Gara, whose colleagues also have gained leverage against Palin through a power-sharing arrangement with Palin rival Lyda Green, a Republican who is president of the state Senate.

                In the 2006 governor's race, Palin was unequivocal in her opposition to abortion. In a questionnaire from the conservative Eagle Forum, she wrote: "I am pro-life," adding that she would agree to allow abortion only in medical cases where "the mother's life would end."

                But Palin, who took office in December 2006, has not made Alaska a battleground on the issue.

                When two bills emerged in the Alaska Legislature this year to restrict abortion -- one to require parental consent and the other to outlaw dilation-and-extraction procedures, called partial-birth abortion by opponents -- Palin said she was ready to sign them into law.

                But both efforts were killed by Democrats. And when Green, who supported the measures, pressed for a special session to deal with abortion, Palin instead chose a special session to secure a natural gas pipeline project.

                Antiabortion leaders said they understood Palin's delay on the issue because of other state concerns.

                "She's a woman of integrity and we trust her," said Karen Lewis of Alaska Right to Life. "Sometimes you have to wait."

                Palin also did not challenge an Alaska Supreme Court ruling that mandated health insurance benefits for same-sex partners. Instead she signed a nonbinding referendum that asked voters their opinion on the issue.

                "She's been careful not to squander all her political capital on social conservative issues," said Allison Mendel, an attorney whose lawsuit led to the insurance ruling.

Pentecostal training

                Palin has appeared at prayer sessions and church functions across Alaska and has turned to her childhood pastor and other religious leaders for guidance.

                "She uses us as a sounding board," said the Rev. Paul Riley, who spent 30 years leading the Wasilla Assembly of God Church, where Palin worshiped until a few years ago. Riley said he and other pastors formed prayer circles around Palin in Anchorage at several "One Lord Sunday" events -- which bring together various churches -- and had offered prayers at similar events since she became governor.

                In April, Palin told 500 people at an Assembly of God conference in the Anchorage Sheraton about the  trials ahead in raising her youngest child, Trig. Born that month, he has Down syndrome.

                "The whole group stood up and prayed beside her," Riley said. The pastors also prayed that Palin's efforts to win a major natural gas pipeline project would lead to a "blessing."

                In one of her more controversial appearances in the Wasilla church, Palin told a group of ministry students in June to pray that sending troops to Iraq was part of "God's plan."

                In a speech this month at a deployment ceremony for her Iraq-bound soldier son, Palin called the conflict a "righteous cause."

                McAllister said Palin did not know that she was being taped when she made the Iraq war remarks at the church. And her practice of turning to local pastors for guidance and prayer is in line with the practices of other American political leaders, he said.

                "It's nothing out of the ordinary," McAllister said. "Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan did it."

Palin grew up steeped in Pentecostalism at the Wasilla church, where she learned "memory verses" from the Bible as a young "Missionette" -- the church's equivalent of a Girl Scout.

                Theron Horn, the church's youth pastor at the time and now a Minnesota businessman, often told Palin and her classmates that they could grow up to be anything -- including politicians. Horn said he "was just trying to get the kids to see their potential," but Riley said it was a turning point for Palin.

Worldviews

                Palin was accustomed early on to the sight of churchgoers ecstatically declaring their faith by speaking in tongues -- a practice familiar to the more than 6 million Americans who are members of Pentecostal churches.

                Neither Riley nor Tim McGraw, who took over as pastor when Riley retired in 1986, recalled seeing Palin taking part in the charismatic prayers.

But "whether she did or not doesn't matter," said McGraw, who now leads the Yosemite Christian Center in Madera, Calif. "We're not some sect on the fringe. This is a reputable denomination of Christianity."

                Although she now worships in traditional fundamentalist churches in Wasilla and Juneau, Palin's formative years in Pentecostal churches have been a target for some bloggers and Democratic opponents. They point to controversial statements from some of her pastors about converting gays and Jews and to her own comments about the Iraq war.

                "It's legitimate to ask questions about candidates who come from a fundamentalist environment with a black-and-white worldview, and want to know how it would affect their approach on all kinds of issues," said Paul S. Boyer, a retired University of Wisconsin history professor who has written about the role of religious prophecy on public policy.

                But Douglas Wead, an author and former aide to President George H.W. Bush, argues that the campaign brush fires over Palin's religious background and pastors' statements ignores or trivializes the emergence of evangelical Christianity in the American mainstream.

                "Are we saying they can't participate in public life?" Wead asked.

            steve.braun@latimes.com

Conversations with the Crow: Part 34

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!

                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, February 4, 1997

Commenced: 8:45 AM CST

Concluded: 9:30 AM CST

GD: Feeling a little better, Robert?

RTC: Much, thank you. By the way, Gregory, I dug up the information on this Landreth person you asked me about. He used to work for CBS news and his father ran our offices in Havana. Edward Landreth. Used Sterling Chemical Company as a front. I wouldn’t trust this one, if I were you.

GD: No, I didn’t like him at first sight. And he got some hack named Willwirth at Time magazine to promise to put me on the cover of their trashy rag if I cooperated.

RTC: What do they want?

GD: Anything and everything relating to Mueller’s CIA employment. Anything with his new name, that is. I have an old Virginia driver’s license, a pilot’s license, an old CIA ID card and things like that.

RTC: Don’t even show them to them and keep the new name to yourself. The first thing they will do, and the Army as well, will be to get out the burn bags and totally obliterate any trace of him. You see, Mueller came in at such a high level and so early that his name is not known. Once your book came out, there were frantic searches of the files but they ran up against the dismal fact that they could not identify his new personality. Beetle Smith knew it but he’s dead. Critchfield is foaming at the mouth over all of this but he doesn’t have the name either. Wonderful. But take my advice and don’t give out the name. They would obliterate any trace of it and then piously deny they knew anything about it. Why not try the Army records in Missouri? List five or six names plus the Mueller pseudonym and get a researcher to get the copies of the files. Don’t use your name because you are on the no-no list now. Then, you can take the real Mueller out and toss the rest.

GD: Robert, how brilliant of you. I did this a year ago but I’m glad to see you’re right up on things.

RTC: Well, I know the name, you know the name but Tom Kimmel and Bill Corson do not know the name. I assume both of them have asked you?

GD: Of course they have.

RTC: Not surprising. I like Bill but he had gone over to the other side, lock, stock and barrel so use discretion with him. And you can be polite to Kimmel but shut up around him. Anything either one of them get would go straight to Langley.

GD: And the burning would commence.

RTC: Clouds of smoke would blanket the eastern seaboard, Gregory. Help keep America pollution free and keep your mouth closed. No, that’s not what I meant. Your mouth is not a source of pollution. The smoke from the burning CIA records is what I had in mind. What kind of approaches do they use?

GD: Kindergarten level. ‘We are going to make you famous’ is the main one followed by such stupidity as ‘you can tell me because I’m your friend.’ With friends like that, who needs any enemies? I wouldn’t let any of them into my house. My grandfather would have had them use the tradesman’s entrance. They don’t do that anymore. One great homogenous melting pot of proletariat idiots, ill-educated twits, liars and chronic violators of deceased prostitutes.

RTC: (Laughter) Such an accurate portrayal, Gregory.

GD: It’s been quite an unwanted education, Robert, listening to all the foolishness coming out of these creeps.  But, good humored banter aside, I wanted to discuss the Kennedy thing with you.

RTC: Go ahead.

GD: I have been reading through all the major books on the subject and here and there I find something interesting. Mostly, only personal opinion without facts. But in looking through my notes, I am positive that your collective motives were based on what you thought was good for the country and the CIA, in opposite order.

RTC: Passing secrets to the enemy is very serious, Gregory.

GD: Yes, but Kennedy sacked your top people and was going to break the agency up. Self-preservation is a powerful motive for action.

RTC: Yes, it is. We had a similar problem with Nixon as I recall.

GD: You weren’t planning to off him, were you?
RTC: No, but we did get him out of the Oval Office.

GD: I met Nixon once and I rather liked him. You? What about Watergate?

RTC: Watergate was our method of getting him out. It wasn’t as final as the Zipper business but he played right into it.

GD: What did Nixon do to you?

RTC: Now that’s a long and involved story, Gregory.

GD: Well, since you didn’t have him killed, can you tell me?

RTC: I suppose so. Nixon was no specific threat to us, understand. We worked with him rather well. But he was getting squirrelly the second time around. And the China business was no good. China was our enemy and we had the best relations with Taipei….Formosa. The very best relations and very profitable. Nixon threw the entire thing out of balance and then the war in Vietnam was another factor. Very complex.

GD: I have plenty of time.

RTC: It was the drug business in the final analysis.

GD: There have been stories around about that.

RTC: Can’t be proven. We get curious reporters fired for even hinting at that. Anyway, it started in ’44-’45 with Jim’s Italian connections in Naples and Palermo.

GD: Angleton?

RTC: Yes, of course. Jim had lived in Italy as a child and spoke the language fluently. He knew the Mafia people in Sicily and the gangs in Naples, not to mention the Union Corse people in Corsica. I mean it was to get their assistance in intelligence matters. First against the Germans and then against the local Communists. Jim was very effective but I don’t think he realized that by asking for favors, he put himself in the position of having to give favors back again. That’s how they are, you know.

GD: I’ve known one or two. Yes, very much that way. Didn’t he realize he was making a bargain with the Devil?

RTC: No, Jim did not. The Italians he grew up with were not that way. I knew a few of those people through my father. He was involved in politics in Chicago in the old days and that means a guaranteed association with the Mob.

GD: And they called in their markers?
RTC: Oh yes, they did. And that’s how the drug connections got started. The Italian gangsters helped Angleton when he was there with the OSS and then later, they called their markers in with him. Not much at first but much more later. Opium makes morphine and refined morphine makes heroin. You must know that. Turkey has opium fields and so do a number of places in SEA. Burma for example. Once you get into that sort of thing, Gregory, you can’t get out again. And we comforted ourselves that the actual movers and shakers were doing the dirty work and, at the same time, assisting us with intelligence matters. Killing off enemies, securing sensitive areas and that sort of thing. Naples and Palermo to begin with and later Corsica. And then in Asia, Burma first. We were big supporters of Chaing and when the Commies forced him out of mainland China, he went to Taiwan and one of his top generals, Li Mi went south with his military command and got into former French Indo China and then into Burma. He had a large contingent of troops, thousands, and both us and the French supplied him with weapons and he, in turn, set up opium farms and we, but not the French, flew out the raw products to be refined in the Mediterranean. The weapons were often surplus World War Two pieces out of Sea Supply in Florida. As a note for your interest, we shipped tons of former Nazi weapons from Poland to Guatemala when we kicked out Guzman there. You have to understand that the Company was huge and compartmented so most of the people knew nothing about the drugs. Of course the various DCIs did and Colby, who later was DCI, ran the drug business out of Cambodia.

GD: The Air American thing?

RTC: Among others. We actually used official military aircraft to ship when we couldn’t use our own proprietary people. Angleton had mob connections and they used him far more than he used them but he did not dare try to back out. It got way out of hand but none of us wanted to bell that cat, believe me. And we finally flew out Li Mi with thirteen millions in gold bars. Flew him to safety in Switzerland.

GD: That stopped the drugs?

RTC: No, it all came under new management. Colby was very efficient.

GD: As a point of interest here, Robert, is that why they snuffed him?

RTC: Partially. He knew too much and no one dared to gig him too hard over the civilian killings he ran in Vietnam. There was always the danger he would break down. He was getting along in years and that’s when we have to watch these boys carefully. A heart attack here, an accidental drowning there. After we drowned Colby, we tore his summer place to bits and then ransacked his Dent Place address. Not to mention getting our friendly bankers to let us go through his safe deposit boxes. After hours, of course.

GD: Of course. You weren’t involved, were you?
RTC: In what? Removing these dangerous people? In some cases. I had nothing directly to do with the drugs. That was mostly Angleton.

GD: He muse have gotten rich.

RTC: Not really.

GD: But Nixon….was he in the drug business too?

RTC: No. Nixon was a nut, Gregory. A poor boy elevated on high and couldn’t handle the upper levels. Very smart but got to believe his own power. The second election, a landslide, convinced him that he was invulnerable. He wasn’t and he began to play games with China. By playing nice with them, he outraged Taiwan and we all do much business with those people. Drugs and other things. Never mind all that because it’s still going on. Anyway, they bitched to us, louder and louder, that Nixon would listen to Mao and dump them. If they got dumped, they would tell all and none of us could stand that so we decided to get Nixon removed. No point of doing a Kennedy on him but he had to go. After Spiro got the boot, Jerry Ford took over and we knew we would never have any problem with good old Jerry. Hell, during the Warren Commission, good old Jerry ran to Hoover every night with the latest information so we knew he was a loyal player.

GD: And now did you do it?

RTC: Get rid of Tricky Dick? He did it to himself. We supplied him with a team of our men after we convinced him that everyone was plotting against him. I told you he was getting strange. I think paranoid is a better word. Anyway, we convinced him that McGovern was getting money from Castro and he sent our people to break into the Democrat offices in the Watergate. To get the proof that didn’t exist. They went there to get caught. They taped open the door and one of our people called local security. You know the rest I am sure. Nixon did it to himself in the end. We just supplied the push. And Ford did what he was told and everyone was happy again.

GD: No wonder they call the stuff powdered happiness.

RTC: (Laughter) I haven’t heard that but it’s fitting. I remember we were afraid Nixon might call out the military so we stuck Alex Haig in there to keep him isolated. Haig was a real nut but he did his job very well. And another government change but this time there were no inconvenient questions about Oswald and Ruby types for the nut fringe to babble about. No, Nixon did it to himself.

GD: It didn’t do the country any good, this drawn out death agony.

RTC: It would not have been a good idea to shoot him, not after the fuss after Kennedy. And Formosa is happy and we are happy and the drugs are still moving around, making everyone money. Just think what we were able to do with our share of mystery cash. No Congress to badger us about our budgets at all. We got billions from them and more billions in cash from the other stuff so we were all sitting in the catbird seat. Nixon was one man and he had served his usefulness. Notice he’s had a nice retirement.

GD: And so has Ford.

RTC: Ford was a classic pawn. Washington is full of them, Gregory. And I strongly urge you to keep away from this subject if and when you decide to write about things. The Company is not as keen on killing everyone like it used to be but I don’t think you want to run up against the Mob.

GD: No, of course not.

RTC: That’s a smart fellow, Gregory. Go after dead CIA people but keep away from the Mob. Got it?

GD: Got it loud and clear.

(Concluded at 9:30 AM CST)

The Iranian Mystery Ship: Death from the Sea 

October 3, 2008

by Brian Harring

www.brianharring@yahoo.com

The MV. Iran Deyanat Photo from Maritime News Russia.

Eastern Mediterranean - Suez Canal and Israel areas

                This chronicle has to be one of the most interesting I have worked on since I left off spying for the government and took up giving them problems. First, a communicant tipped me off that there was a story about Somali pirates seizing a ship and dying like flies.

                The story had a link to the London Times. There was no such story. I then found a story about this on a blog entitled ‘The Long War Journal’ that seemed to be rather dismissive and claimed some kind of chemicals were involved. I did a deep search on Google and eventually found the London Times story that had vanished from their current site and their archives. I copied it out and armed with the date and writer, got back to the Times archives.

                 No trace of it.

                More investigation disclosed that they had taken it down. I learned that ‘The Long War Journal’ was strongly suspected of being a blog that put out official government information. The Long War Journal has connections with the Weekly Standard, the National Review and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies—which is well-known as a front for Pentagon views..

                ”The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) is a neocon think tank that claims to conduct ‘research and education on international terrorism—the most serious security threat to the United States and other free, democratic nations. FDD produces independent analyses of global terrorist threats, as well as of the historical, cultural, philosophical and ideological factors that drive terrorism, and which threaten democracies and the individual freedoms guaranteed within democratic societies.’ Their work is closely linked with that of the National Endowment for Democracy.. FDD was created two days after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon”.

                The report about the problems surrounding the “mystery illnesses” of the Somali priates that appears in the Long War Journal accurately reflects the official American view; that there is nothing to worry about, folks, and just look at the nice lion going into the day care center over there.’  Fortunately, I do not hve to depend on Pentagon-friendly sites to learn more about the MV Iran Deyanat this is what is now known about it from more accurate sources. The ship took on a large cargo of radioactive waste in China.

                 It was headed for the Suez canal when the Somalia pirates grabbed it. The manifest, now in American hands, is false but it does show that the ship was bound for a Dutch port to offload its cargo of “chemicals and machine parts.” Its route there would lead it through the eastern end of the Mediterranean towards the Cypress port of Famigusta. And the Isreli port of Haifa. This is a standard and well-used commercial shipping route and stories that the “ever-vigilant Israeli Navy” would at once interdict the ship and take control of it are utter nonsense.

                The Israeli continental limit in the Mediterranean is 12 Nautical miles and the shipping lanes are much further out and if Israeli naval units attacked international shipping lanes, they would be inviting serious problems that not even their friends in Washington could help them with. 

                The seasonal winds are always from the west during the day, ensuring that if the ship indeed was blown up and its radioactive cargo blasted into the air, the deadly clouds would for a certainty descend upon the coastal cities of Israel. And if there was any material floating on the water, the standard currents would wash it up on Israeli beachers

EXCERPT FROM AN ISRAEL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS ARTICLE ON OZONE POLLUTION IN ISRAEL:

 Atmospheric Conditions and Wind Direction

Most of central Israel, is mainly under the influence of westerly wind flows for more than 80% of the time. During the afternoon hours, when the Mediterranean sea breeze reaches the site, this tendency is even more pronounced. For about 10 to 15 percent of the time the area can be influenced by eastern winds flowing in from the desert regions.

http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Archive/Communiques/1995/OZONE%20LEVELS%20IN%20CENTRAL%20ISRAEL%20-%20May-95

                The discovery of the radioactive cargo of the MV Iran Deyanat caused panic in Israel who had been warned that some kind of a terrible attack was being planned against that country. Sources were not certain but accurate enough to have Israel demand that the United States establish a total naval blockade of Iran A bill, authored by Rep. Gary Ackerman (D - NY), was introduced on May 22 and urged the President, among other things, to initiate an international effort to inspect “all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran.” Unfortunately, the ship was then enroute to China where it loaded its deadly cargo and sailed at the end of July, bound for the Suez Canal and the coast of Israel.

                The Iran Deyanant is now guarded by American, Russian, Dutch and British naval units and from a Russian source, we have learned that the current intention is to intern the crew (and interrogate them), board the ship and secure the cargo containers full of radioactive material and move the ship to the U.S. naval base at Diego Garcia, a  British Indian Ocean Territory  located at 7 Degrees South Latitude, off the tip of India. Diego Garcia is exclusively a military reservation located on a small host country atoll in the Chagos Archipelago. What started life as communication station on a remote atoll became a major fleet and U.S. armed forces support base by the 1980s. a fully-developed, modern military facility, capable of supporting thousands of U.S. personnel

                Navy Support Facility Diego Garcia was established 1 October 1977, after six years as a Navy communications station. Known as the "Footprint of Freedom," it plays a primary role in support of U.S. military units operating in the Indian Ocean and Arabian Gulf. While Diego Garcia is a British Indian Ocean Territory. The island's only occupants are NSF personnel and tenants. Most of the approximately 3,500 people are third country nationals working under the large base operating support (BOS) contract. In addition to a regularly deployed VP squadron, major activities include a Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station, maritime prepositioning ships anchored in the lagoon, Military Sealift Command, and COMPSRON TWO (which controls the MSC ships). The Air Force and Army also maintain support elements on the island. Diego Garcia became the only US Navy base that launched offensive air operations during Operation Desert Storm and Diego Garcia remains a vital link in the US defense structure.

                Det 1, 13th Air Force, is responsible for operating and maintaining a Southwest Asia contingency base on Diego Garcia in support of CINCCENTCOM OPLANs. Provides facilities, munitions, vehicles, Aerospace Ground Equipment, supplies and aviation fuel to sustain deployed bomber and tanker sortie operations.

                Once the MV Iran Deyanat is secured, it will be searched thoroughly and its cargo removed to what is termed “a secure location,” while the ship will be then towed out into the Indian Ocean and sunk in deep water.

                The reason for the wall of silence in the American media is due to concerns that if international terrorist groups learned that a huge shipment of radioactive material, sufficient for the building of hundred of deadly dirty bombs was sitting off the coast of Somalia, attempts might be made to attack and seize it, hence the attempts to both trivialize and ignore the situation.

                While the government might do its best through the medium of “friendly” web sites, the rest of do not have to either read or believe them.

                                         Israeli Mediterranean coast

Predominant  Mediterranean currents for June.

The Economic Collapse

Settlement day approaches for derivatives

October 1 2008  

by Aline van Duyn in New York

                The $54,000bn credit derivatives market faces its biggest test this month as billions of dollars worth of contracts on now-defaulted derivatives on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual are settled.

Because of the opacity of this market, it is still not clear how many contracts have to be settled and whether payouts on the defaulted contracts, which could reach billions of dollars, are concentrated with any particular institutions.

According to dealers, insurance companies and investors such as sovereign wealth funds, which are widely believed to have written large amounts of credit protection through credit default swaps on financial institutions, could have to pay out huge amounts.

"There is a lot at stake," said an executive at one big dealer. "This is a crisis time, and if these auctions do not go well, or if the amounts investors and dealers have to pay is seen as not being fair, it could have further negative repercussions on the CDS market."

The "auction season" starts tomorrow, when the International Swaps and Derivatives Association has scheduled an auction for Tembec, a Canadian forest products company. This is followed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac auctions on October 6. Then, Lehman is settled on October 10, and Washington Mutual is scheduled for October 23.

Even though it is possible that some participants in the credit derivatives market will have to make large payouts, the flipside is there could also be big winners. For every loss in credit derivatives, there is a gain.

The amount of contracts outstanding that reference Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac alone is estimated to be up to $500bn. The default was triggered under the terms of derivatives contracts by the US government's seizure of the mortgage groups, even though the underlying debt is strong after the explicit government guarantee.

The CDS contract settlement could result in billions of dollars of losses for insurance companies and banks that offered credit insurance in recent months. The recovery value will be set by auction. Usually, the bond that is eligible for the auction that trades at the lowest price - the so-called cheapest-to-deliver - is the one that sets the overall recovery value for the credit derivatives.

In the Lehman case, numerous banks and investors have already made losses due to exposure to Lehman as a counterparty on numerous derivatives trades. The auctions next week are for credit derivatives which have Lehman as a reference entity. There are likely to be fewer contracts outstanding than for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because Lehman was not included in many of the benchmark credit derivatives. However, exposure remains unclear, which is one concern that regulators now have about the credit derivatives market.

Lehman's bonds have been trading between 15 and 19 cents on the dollar, meaning investors who wrote protection on a Lehman default will have to pay out between 81 and 85 cents on the dollar, a relatively high pay-out.

The previous biggest default in credit derivatives was for Delphi, the US car parts maker that went bankrupt in 2005 and which had about $25bn of CDS.

Pork Rules!

When the economic bailout was passed, just look what the crooks stuck onto it! Did you get that Section 503? THIS is the critical economic stuff they have been burning the midnight oil and arguing over, not about whether or not they should burden each one of us with a $7,000 debt

Sec. 101. Extension of alternative minimum tax relief for nonrefundable personal
credits.
Sec. 102. Extension of increased alternative minimum tax exemption amount.
Sec. 201. Deduction for State and local sales taxes.
Sec. 202. Deduction of qualified tuition and related expenses.
Sec. 203. Deduction for certain expenses of elementary and secondary school teachers.
Sec. 204. Additional standard deduction for real property taxes for nonitemizers.
Sec. 205. Tax-free distributions from individual retirement plans for charitable purposes.
Sec. 304. Extension of look-thru rule for related controlled foreign corporations.
Sec. 305. Extension of 15-year straight-line cost recovery for qualified leasehold improvements and qualified restaurant improvements; 15-year straight-line cost recovery for certain improvements to retail space.
Sec. 307. Basis adjustment to stock of S corporations making charitable contributions of property.
Sec. 308. Increase in limit on cover over of rum excise tax to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
Sec. 309. Extension of economic development credit for American Samoa.
Sec. 310. Extension of mine rescue team training credit.
Sec. 311. Extension of election to expense advanced mine safety equipment.
Sec. 312. Deduction allowable with respect to income attributable to domestic production activities in     Puerto Rico.
Sec. 314. Indian employment credit.
Sec. 315. Accelerated depreciation for business property on Indian reservations.
Sec. 316. Railroad track maintenance.
Sec. 317. Seven-year cost recovery period for motorsports racing track facility.
Sec. 318. Expensing of environmental remediation costs.
Sec. 319. Extension of work opportunity tax credit for Hurricane Katrina employees.
Sec. 320. Extension of increased rehabilitation credit for structures in the Gulf Opportunity Zone.
Sec. 321. Enhanced deduction for qualified computer contributions.
Sec. 322. Tax incentives for investment in the District of Columbia.
Sec. 323. Enhanced charitable deductions for contributions of food inventory.
Sec. 324. Extension of enhanced charitable deduction for contributions of book inventory.
Sec. 325. Extension and modification of duty suspension on wool products; wool research fund; wool duty refunds.
Sec. 401. Permanent authority for undercover operations. (as related to tax provisions)
Sec. 402. Permanent authority for disclosure of information relating to terrorist activities. (as related to tax provisions)
Sec. 501. $8,500 income threshold used to calculate refundable portion of child tax credit.
Sec. 502. Provisions related to film and television productions.
Sec. 503. Exemption from excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children.
Sec. 504. Income averaging for amounts received in connection with the Exxon Valdez litigation.
Sec. 505. Certain farming business machinery and equipment treated as 5-year property.
Sec. 506. Modification of penalty on understatement of taxpayer’s liability by tax return preparer.
Subtitle B—Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008
Sec. 601. Secure rural schools and community self-determination program.
Sec. 602. Transfer to abandoned mine reclamation fund.
Sec. 702. Temporary tax relief for areas damaged by 2008 Midwestern severe storms, tornados, and flooding.
Sec. 704. Temporary tax-exempt bond financing and low-income housing tax relief for areas.
Sec. 709. Waiver of certain mortgage revenue bond requirements following federally declared disasters.
Sec. 710. Special depreciation allowance for qualified disaster property.
Sec. 711. Increased expensing for qualified disaster assistance property.