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 20, 2008: “The tangled web of deceit woven by Bush and his advisors now has a huge hole in it but almost no one is aware of it. We have been reliably informed that there is an immense ongoing  intrusion into, and spying o,n internet usage. The company involved in this is called Websense.

10240 Sorrento Valley Road
San Diego, CA 92121
Phone 858.320.8000
Fax 858.458.2957

                Websense is a San Diego, California-based company which produces Web security gateway software, including Web filtering, also known as Internet content-control software of the same name, email security, and data loss prevention technology.

                 Websense allows system administrators to block access to web sites (and other protocols) based on categories. These categories contain lists of sites that can be blocked. Separate categories can be blocked at all times or only during certain times of the day.  Founded in 1994, by Phil Trubey and went public in 2000.  Websense, Inc. (NASDAQ: WBSN) http://www.websense.com/global/en/ is a leader of web filtering and a premier provider of web and desktop security software

.               At present, Websense monitors more than 42 million individual employees at more than 50,000 organizations such as government agencies which includes the email systems for both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

                Imagine if this software is in use in government offices such as the House and Senate - the users probably do not realize all their internet usage is being monitored and recorded. Imagine the potential for blackmailing someone like Senator Larry Craig if he has been using office computers to access boy porn sites, or any married politician accessing female escort services.

                They also service many public libraries and schools (as mandated hy the Department of Homeland Security), and  many American and foreign businesses  .On  May 25th, 2005, the DHS chose Websense to manage employee web access,  The US Department of Homeland Security  contracted with Websense to block  spywareon its computer networks., as well as to establish a comprehensive program for the obsrvation of the use of any computer its system covers.The vendor is Websense, which will be provides protection spyware, viruses, and malicious mobile code. http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/WBSN/0x0x155645/5478d22e-f9fe-4915-bcf4-021084957241/WBSN_News_2005_5_23_General.pdf

                Websense software is designed to prevent any government and private sector employees from wasting time at work, by limiting the time they can spend shopping online and booking their vacations, as well as keeping them off of game and pornography sites. Their systems also allow prevention of viewing of any material deemed to be offensive such as any anti-government  internet postings and most especially any material deemed to be blatantly anti-Semitic or hostile to the state of Israel.

                In December 2006 the company acquired the Israeli data security company PortAuthority for $90 million. Announcing the take-over, WebSENSE said that it was "committed to maintaining the company's research and development presence in Israel." In addition, Websense’s PreciseID uses technology initially developed for the Israeli military to track the whereabouts and distribution of data

In November 2007 web-users began reporting that Webense was blocking within the US and the UK their access to the blog site of Noam Chomsky and to the website of Norman Finkelstein, prominent academics known for their criticism of the state of Israel.

                Websense monitorint of American libraries and schools, had brought it to the attention of civil liberties groups  on the grounds that it restricts the free flow of speech..

                 Some anti-censorship groups and human rights organizations claim that Websense is censoring free speech in countries with limited civil liberties. Websense is seen by some as discriminatory for blocking categories such as education, religion, health and non-pornographic homosexual content.

Websense is used by internet service providers in Yemen as part of the government enforced censorship program. It is also used in China forl swimilar programs.

                In a 2005 report, the ACLU calls Websense a deeply flawed technology. It also mentions the 2001 Peacefire's report on the inaccuracy of the software, and notes that the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) was struck down on 2002 by a federal court in a decision that was partly based on similar reports.It further notes that, although the blocking technology has improved over the years since 2002 it still remains a "blunt instrument" and that, on public libraries using Websense, people of all ages "are still denied access to a wide range of legitimate material".

                Here we have a large American technical company that works with the Israeli government and the American DHS, that has the unrestricted opportunity of blocking the internet downloading of information deemed by it and its employers as “iomproper” and to watch any individual who uses a computer connected with their systems and services.

                It is very interesting to note that Websense has been blocking information on the Iranian MV Iran Deyanat from reaching the computers used by its subsribers. The reasons for this can be found in an excellent article by Brian Harring.” (See below, Ed.This article also reveals how Bush is about to sell Israel out to the Iranians.)

The Iranian Mystery Ship: Death from the Sea `Part 2 , Bush Betrays Israel

October 20, 2008

by Brian Harring

www.brianharring@yahoo.com

“October 10, 2008 Armed Somalia pirates on Friday released three Indians and 26 other members of the crew on board a hijacked cargo ship after keeping them in captivity for more than one and half months. ….The ship MV Iran Deyanat, carrying 40,000 tonnes of iron ore en route from China to Netherlands, was hijacked on the Red Sea by Somali pirates on August 22.” 80 nautical miles off the coast of Yemen.

.           The MV Iran Deyanat set sail from Nanjing, China, at the end of July and, according to its manifest, planned to travel to Rotterdam, where it would unload “42,500 tons of iron ore “and "industrial products" purchased by a German client. Its arrived in the Gulf of Aden, on August 20 and was scheduled to reach the Suez Canal on August 27

                Steaming past the Horn of Africa, 82 nautical miles southeast of al-Makalla in Yemen, i, the MV Iran Deyanat, was entering the Gulf of Aden, on its way to the Suex Canal, when it was surrounded by Somali pirates in fast, small speedboats and boarded.  About 22,000 ships a year pass through the Gulf of Aden and its northern terminus, the Suez Canal, Because armed pirated from Somali bases have been raiding commercial shipping, the region is patrolled by the multinational Combined Taskforce 150, which includes ships from the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet. An American-based website, http://www.longwarjournal.org/  strongly pro-U.S. Department of Defense initially discussed this on September 22 but, like the DoD, has had nothing to say about it since, and this in spite of an enormous flood of commentary on the internet that never somehow seemed to filter its way downward to any aspect of the American media. After her capture and removal to a Somali port, the Deyanat’s cargo containers were broken into by the pirates in search of loot.

                 The result? Sixteen of them died of extreme radiation poisoning. Once this bizarre and frightening information emerged, a blackout was imposed inside the United States and from the date of capture until today, not one word of this has ever been seen in or on the American media. No news about the growing rumors, ever reached the ears of anyone by the usual old-fashioned way but the internet was flooded with many articles and theories.

                The ship was released by Somali pirates on October 10, after a $250,000 cash bribe was paid by the U.S. Navy for her release. The MV Iran Denyant was taken into immediate custody of a joint naval taskforce present, to include Russian and French ships. Crew members had all been interrogated and all of them, deemed “uninformed of the ship’s course or cargo” were duly released to their diplomatic representatives. The ship was boarded, occupied and thoroughly searched by U.S. Navy specialists but a subsequent report on the suspicious cargo containers has been heavily classified.(‘Top Secret- Galactic’)

                Russian sources indicate that the ship was carrying a “highly radioactive” cargo in specially built” containers and that this cargo was falsely listed in the ship’s manifest. Also, there were many falsities in the manifest, to include a false listing of the cargo, “chemicals,” “rocks,” “oil,” or “iron ore” and other fictions, and the destination of it. A subsequent investigation into the alleged German firm to whom the ‘chemicals and ‘machine parts’ were to be delivered proved that there was no such German firm involved. At the request of American authorities, the Russians have refused to release any further information.

                I have a correct copy of the ship's real manifest that a U.S. Navy source faxed me about two hours ago. There was no rocket fuel on board. Her cargo contained "a significant quantity" of radioactive waste from China, in lead-lined and secured cargo containers. The ship was never boarded by anyone from the time she left Nanjing in China until the Somali pirates grabbed her. Sixteen pirates died within two weeks, of heavy radiation poisoning,  and three more are expected to die. An international force consisting of American, Russian, French and Dutch ships were involved in blockading the ship and preventing her from leaving Somalian waters. A "ransom" of $250,000 was eventually paid by the U.S., the ship boarded by the Navy, her cargo secured and the crew interrogated and eventually released and the ship was moved, under her own power and with an American crew, to the Muscat port where the U.S. Navy has docking rights.  Her manifest was entirely false. The ship was not going to Rotterdam and there was no “German businessman” to take charge of the fictional cargo.

                The entire matter has been shut up and you will never see any mention of it in any mainstream media. The matter is now considered closed. There still remain a number of questions that need to be answered.  Both Israel, and at her behest, from Washington, there has been a great outpouring of animosity directed at Tehran, and many threats; for economic sanctions by the United States and overt attacks by Israel. In light of this past behavior, the most important question is why this incident, with its horrifying implications, has been studiously ignored, even shut down, by both countries.

                 Perhaps the reason might lie in the fact that Bush is planning to announce his intention to open a ‘US Interest Section’ in Tehran just after the presidential elections on November 4^th. This would follow a period of almost 30 years when diplomatic relations between the two countries were broken off.  The movers behind this effort are U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice and a number of high-level officials in the Department of State, the CIA and more recently by Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

                What it comes down to is that in the last months of his régime, George Bush is going to do to Israel what he did to Georgia: Betray them.

                Georgia was our true friend, a wonderful new democracy that was opposed to the evil empire of Vladimir Putin. She also became a U.S. and Israeli military base and American soldiers, some 2,000 plus of them, trained the Georgian army and equipped them with hundreds of millions of dollars of American equipment. When the volatile and unstable Georgian president decided to attack two breakaway provinces of his new country, the American government was well aware of this and did nothing to stop him. The attacks, which caused considerable damage to civilian targets and resulted in a number of deaths, brought in massive Russian armored units, caused the rout and collapse of the newly-fledged Georgian army and, most important, the immediate flight of all American and Israeli military advisors from the country.

                The equipment and an enormous amount of intelligence material was left for the Russians. Bush’s rapid desertion of a “firm ally” was duly noted by many countries. As well as discrediting Bush, the swift and forceful Russian reaction showed that the ferocious NATO whom Bush had been threatening Putin with over the years turned out to be a paper tiger, another blot on the US escutcheon.

The military, and diplomatic, reason for this demarche is that the American military is currently totally incapable of engaging Iran in any kind of a land war, as is Israel, and that in this case, as in Georgia and as it may well soon be in the Ukraine, discretion is the better part of valor. And we must not forget the Iranian oil which America can now buy from a country that hitherto was unavailable for commerce in this vital natural resource,

                Ergo, Iran will not be taxed for her failed attempt to obliterate Israel, and a number of other countries, and the story about the huge floating bomb will never see official light of day.

                The reaction of the Neocons in specific and the American Jewish community in general when they discover their only ally’s defection to the enemy can only be imagined. Whether candidate McCain is aware of this volte face is not known but since the Bush people view McCain as a nut, it is very possible that no one told him about this. Poor Bush. He wants a legacy and if he can’t get the love of his subjects, he can at least try to command their respect for a president who made global peace and got more oil for the United States. (and after eight long years of trying to make global war!)

.

The Collapse of America’s Banking and Credit

America's wealthy feel bite of financial crisis

October 16, 2008

by Kristina Cooke

Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - For the past two weeks, Kathryn Morrison and her husband have been shaken awake at night by visions of crashing stock markets and evaporating retirement plans.

Harvey Goldberg liquidated his account when the Dow Jones industrial average was at 12,300, but his financial advisor persuaded him to reinvest. Since then, the Dow has fallen about 20 percent.

Wealthy Americans like Morrison and Goldberg were relatively insulated from the global financial crisis until just a few months ago. Now, falling stock markets are slashing their investments, and some are even starting to panic.

"I'm a little angry that I didn't trust my own gut, my own instinct to stay on the sidelines and wait," said Goldberg, 57, an executive coach who lives in Washington. "I'm angry at myself."

Of course, reaction to the financial crisis differs from person to person and even from husband to wife.

"My husband's approach has been 'Oh my God, I've got to sell, we're mature people and there goes our retirement'," said Morrison, 59. Morrison, who lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and runs a PR firm, has about $2 million in investable assets.

"I can't quarrel with his reaction -- he needs to sell for his comfort." She said it doesn't matter if he loses money if he's late in getting back into the market. "So what, if it helps him sleep now?"

She, on the other hand, is taking the market drubbing as an opportunity to look for bargains in the wreckage.

"I'm thinking, 'Oh my gosh, it's the sale of the century'," she said.

For those of a steely disposition, there are no doubt some bargains. After eight days of losses, Wall Street roared back with an 11 percent gain on Monday, October 13, after governments pledged to pour in cash to stabilize struggling banks.

Investors who bought at the lows on the Friday would have made a substantial sum. But stocks were down sharply again on Wednesday and the dangers of volatility are all too apparent.

"Chances of being able to time this right is minimal," said wealth manager Dan Genter of RNC Genter Capital Management in Los Angeles, whose clients range from celebrities to business owners.

Genter said he manages his accounts conservatively, using large-cap equity and high-dividend strategies. But he has become even more careful recently.

"You do have to make sure you are plugging up the leaks in the boat. If you have fixed income obligations that have run into trouble, if you have weak financials, then you have to get rid of them."

Lenox Advisors in New York has been fielding panicked calls from its clients.

"We are doing a lot of handholding right now and acting as a financial psychologist for our clients," said vice president Rob Burger.

"When things are going really well, people tend to look at their statements, be happy, and go to sleep at night," Burger said. Lenox has been telling clients to sit tight and "take your statements and stick them in your drawer."

Wealthy people are buying gold, cash and government bonds -- at the expense of the modern art, private planes and yachts which were more in vogue during the boom years, private bankers and asset managers said at the Reuters Wealth Management Summit this week.

Goldberg said he was keeping his money in the stock market. "I don't think there is anything I can do but wait for the market to come back," he said. "I'm not scared, I've lost quite a bit of money, but I would never bet against the American economy."

But he concedes that his high net worth was a cushion without which he'd be more worried.

Goldberg, who has holdings of about $2 million, said that when the market recovers, he plans to change his financial adviser and perhaps even manage his money himself.

Others share his frustration. According to a recent Prince & Associates survey, 81 percent of investors with $1 million or more in investable assets plan to dump their current financial adviser, with 86 percent planning to tell other investors to avoid the advisor.

Some want to sue their brokers. Jake Zamansky, founder of New York-based Zamansky & Associates one of the leading law firms specializing in securities fraud and financial services arbitration, said he has seen a large spike in calls in the past several weeks from high net worth individuals across the United States who are worried about losses in their retirement and savings accounts.

"They're mad as hell, they want to sue their brokers and they want to change firms. I've seen a whole pattern of that recently," Zamansky said.

Many are complaining that brokers pushed them into preferred and common shares of financial stocks, which have declined sharply in value, Zamansky said.

"We are bringing arbitration cases against the firms for unsuitable recommendations. We are hearing people complaining about Fannie, Freddie, Lehman, Wachovia and that there is an overconcentration of bank stocks in their portfolios," he said.

"I view this as similar to when brokers were pushing excessive amounts of high tech stocks in the dotcom era."

BelAir Investment Advisors' chairman Todd Morgan, who manages the money of some of Los Angeles' wealthiest people, said he had more calls last week than at any other time he can remember in his 38 years in the business, with anxious clients calling at night and on weekends.

"They are very worried that this environment is so unprecedented that they could lose a lot more money than they have so far," Morgan said.

"They're worried it will change their lifestyle."

(Reporting by Kristina Cooke; Editing by Eddie Evans)

Wall Street banks in $70bn staff payout

Pay and bonus deals equivalent to 10% of US government bail-out package

October 18 2008

by Simon Bowers

The Guardian

Financial workers at Wall Street's top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year - despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.

Staff at six banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are in line to pick up the payouts despite being the beneficiaries of a $700bn bail-out from the US government that has already prompted criticism. The government's cash has been poured in on the condition that excessive executive pay would be curbed.

Pay plans for bankers have been disclosed in recent corporate statements. Pressure on the US firms to review preparations for annual bonuses increased yesterday when Germany's Deutsche Bank said many of its leading traders would join Josef Ackermann, its chief executive, in waiving millions of euros in annual payouts.

The sums that continue to be spent by Wall Street firms on payroll, payoffs and, most controversially, bonuses appear to bear no relation to the losses incurred by investors in the banks. Shares in Citigroup and Goldman Sachs have declined by more than 45% since the start of the year. Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley have fallen by more than 60%. JP MorganChase fell 6.4% and Lehman Brothers has collapsed.

At one point last week the Morgan Stanley $10.7bn pay pot for the year to date was greater than the entire stock market value of the business. In effect, staff, on receiving their remuneration, could club together and buy the bank.

In the first nine months of the year Citigroup, which employs thousands of staff in the UK, accrued $25.9bn for salaries and bonuses, an increase on the previous year of 4%. Earlier this week the bank accepted a $25bn investment by the US government as part of its bail-out plan.

At Goldman Sachs the figure was $11.4bn, Morgan Stanley $10.73bn, JP Morgan $6.53bn and Merrill Lynch $11.7bn. At Merrill, which was on the point of going bust last month before being taken over by Bank of America, the total accrued in the last quarter grew 76% to $3.49bn. At Morgan Stanley, the amount put aside for staff compensation also grew in the last quarter to the end of August by 3% to $3.7bn.

Days before it collapsed into bankruptcy protection a month ago Lehman Brothers revealed $6.12bn of staff pay plans in its corporate filings. These payouts, the bank insisted, were justified despite net revenue collapsing from $14.9bn to a net outgoing of $64m.

None of the banks the Guardian contacted wished to comment on the record about their pay plans. But behind the scenes, one source said: "For a normal person the salaries are very high and the bonuses seem even higher. But in this world you get a top bonus for top performance, a medium bonus for mediocre performance and a much smaller bonus if you don't do so well."

Many critics of investment banks have questioned why firms continue to siphon off billions of dollars of bank earnings into bonus pools rather than using the funds to shore up the capital position of the crisis-stricken institutions. One source said: "That's a fair question - and it may well be that by the end of the year the banks start review the situation."

Much of the anger about investment banking bonuses has focused on boardroom executives such as former Lehman boss Dick Fuld, who was paid $485m in salary, bonuses and options between 2000 and 2007.

Last year Merrill Lynch's chairman Stan O'Neal retired after announcing losses of $8bn, taking a final pay deal worth $161m. Citigroup boss Chuck Prince left last year with a $38m in bonuses, shares and options after multibillion-dollar write-downs. In Britain, Bob Diamond, Barclays president, is one of the few investment bankers whose pay is public. Last year he received a salary of £250,000, but his total pay, including bonuses, reached £36m.

The Great Reagan Pyramid Scheme Comes Crashing Down

October 15, 2008

by Juan Cole

History News Network

                The Republican Party that Nixon invented melded the moneyed classes of the Northeast with the white evangelicals of the South. This odd couple went on to simultaneously steal from and oppress the rest of us. The moneyed classes were happy to let the New Puritans impose their stringent morality, since they could always just buy any licentiousness they wanted, regardless of the law.

                And the New Puritans were so consumed with cultural issues such as homosexuality, abortion, school prayer and (yes) fighting school desegregation that they were happy to let the northeastern Money Men waltz off with a lion's share of the country's resources, consigning most Americans to stagnant wages and increasing debt. The Reagan revolution consolidated this alliance and brought some conservative Catholic workers into it.

                These domestic policies at home were complemented by wars and belligerence abroad, which further took the eye of the public off the epochal bank robbery being conducted by the American neo-Medicis, and which were a useful way of throwing billions in government tax revenue to the military-industrial complex, which in turn funded the think tanks and reelection campaigns of the right wing politicians.

                The Reagan fascination with private armies and funding anti-communist death squads contributed mightily to the creation of al-Qaeda, blowback from which fuelled even bigger Pentagon budgets, spiralling upward and feeding on itself. Terrorism is much better than Communism as a bogey man, since you can just intimate that there are a handful of dangerous people out there somewhere, and force the public to pay over $1 trillion to combat them.

                In fact, of course, less US interventionism abroad would create less blowback, and genuine threats are better addressed through good police work by multilingual FBI agents than by a $700 billion Pentagon budget.

                As a result of the Second Gilded Age and its serf-like subservience to big capital, most corporations in the US don't pay any income taxes, despite doing $2.5 trillion annually in business.

                The Reagan Revolution included the stupid idea that you can cut taxes, starve government, abolish regulation of securities, banks, & etc., and still grow the economy. The irony is that capitalist markets need to be regulated to avoid periodically becoming chaotic (as in 'chaos theory,') but the people who most benefit from regulation are most zealous in attempting to abolish or blunt it.

                What those policies did was create the preconditions for a long-term bubble or set of bubbles that benefited (for a while) the wealthiest 3 million Americans and harmed everyone else.

                The average wage of the average worker is lower now than in 1973 and has been lower or flat for the past 35 years. That's the condition of the 300 million or so Americans.

                In the meantime, the top 1 percent has multiplied its wealth many times over and now takes home 20% of the national income, owning some 45 percent of the privately held wealth in the US.

                The Right keeps promising us growth, but it turns out that "growth" is mainly for them, i.e. for the 3 million (and indeed mainly for about 100,000 within the 3 million).

                Those 3 million are a new aristocracy, lords of the economy, who reward each other with tens of millions in bonuses for ceremonial reasons that have nothing to do with the jobs they actually perform. Bush has been trying to make them a hereditary aristocracy by getting rid of the estate tax.

                That is why banks are refusing the government bailout if it restricts the salaries of the top officers-- you don't mess with the feudal lord's prerogatives.

                The enormous wealth of a thin sliver or people at the top of US society allows them to buy members of congress and to write the legislation that regulates their industries.

                Congress capitulates to this 'regulatory capture' because its members have to buy hugely expensive television ads to remain competitive in elections. So they fundraise from the rich, and the rich have expectations (as Keating did of McCain).

                These problems could be fixed with a graduated income tax and a closing of tax loopholes ( after we get out of the recession or crash or whatever this is); by legislation criminalizing regulatory capture; by requiring mass media to run political ads for free as a public service (the public owns the airwaves); and by much shortening the election season (please).

                A lot of America's fiscal and educational problems were caused by congressionally mandated fixed sentences imposed on judges with regard to marijuana possession, as a sop to the New Puritans that make up 1/3 of the Republican Party. You have a lot of people serving 5 years in jail for having small amounts of pot. The states had to build new prisons to hold them all. They took the money out of the budget for higher education, abolishing the whole idea of state universities and causing tuitions to rise.

                So you've got more ignorant people (because people can't afford even "state" college), and fewer high-tech firms are founded; and you're feeding and housing large numbers of harmless potheads with your tax dollars instead. The US maintains a vast gulag of nearly 2 million prisoners, putting us in the same league as Putin's Russia. No country in Western Europe incarcerates a similar proportion of its population.

                Mexico's president wants to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and heroin for personal use, though an arrest on possession charges would require entry into a program to kick addiction.

                Decriminalizing possession of small amounts of drugs; decriminalizing marijuana altogether (and taxing the resulting industry); removing mandatory federal sentencing requirements; and letting states go back to educating their children instead of putting millions in jail; would solve another big batch of America's problems.

                So there you have it. Abolish puritanism in government policy; go back to using the government to regulate industries and finance and provide services; and fight terrorism with better public diplomacy and better police work instead of with militarization-- and you might get out of this thing intact.

Conversations with the Crow: Part 37

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: Wednesday, February 12, 1997

Commenced:   11:15 AM CST

Concluded:   11:45 AM CST

RTC: That has to be you, Gregory. Such timing. Corson was speaking with me a few minutes ago about you. Are your ears still ringing?

GD: No.

RTC: Ah, you are so popular. Bill was warning me that we had both best cut you loose because the wrath of God might descend. Bill has a paper asshole.

GD: Who is it this time? The Pope?

RTC: No the Kimmel people. He regularly turns his Justice people loose on both of us. I think they need a new record. The current one gets stuck. Is it true you killed Abraham Lincoln, Gregory? I mean it’s pretty well set that you are the illegitimate son of Adolf Hitler, or is it Josef Stalin? I can’t seem to remember, its all so mixed up. Anyway, you are pure evil and have to be kept away from. And do let’s keep the Pope out of this. I had enough trouble with that one.

GD: Which Pope?

RTC: John Paul I. We also went after John Paul II but that one didn’t work and we didn’t want to try it again.

GD: Why, in God’s name, did you want to kill the Pope? And out of curiosity, how did you pull it off?

RFC: The first one was going to put a terrible crimp in our drug business out of Italy and we tried to do the second one to blame the Russians. It was a sort of a game with us. Always try to do a bad bit and make it look like the Russians did it.

GD: The drug business? What did the Pope have to do with drugs?

RTC: He didn’t. It was the bank there that did. He had nothing to do with it but it was the Vatican bank.

GD: The Vatican bank was involved with drugs?

RTC: No, we used it to launder money. Who, I ask you, who would ever question the Vatican bank? It was the Mafia who had the inside bank contacts and believe me, there was a lot of money moving around. Let’s see, the Pope was elected in, I think, August of ’79. He replaced Montini. Former Vatican Secretary of State….he was Paul VI. Anyway, we had a fine working arrangement with the Italian Mafia about the movement of money as I said.

GD: I met Montini once, I think in ’51.

RTC: The new one had been in Venice….Luciani….

GD: There was another one from Venice….

RTC: I know but not the same one. That was back in the ‘60s. But the new Pope posed quite a problem. He had been told that there were certain irregularities in the IOR…that’s the Vatican bank. And the new Pope was inclined to be honest and was demanding a full review of the books and so on. If this had happened, a good deal would have been uncovered so the Pope had to go. It was that simple, Gregory. Politics had nothing to do with it, nothing at all.

GD: Couldn’t someone have cooked the books? Was murder necessary?

RTC: You don’t understand the whole picture, Gregory. The Mafia was involved in this up to their eyebrows and if any of it had come out, someone would have talked and pointed to us. We couldn’t have that. We had to get rid of Dag Hammarskjold because he was interfering with the uranium people in the Congo. It was nothing personal at all.

GD: How did you do it?

RTC: Our Station Chief in Rome ran the show. Contacts in the Vatican and especially with Buzonetti, the Pope’s doctor. My God, old Renata cost us plenty. On our payroll since God knows when. And our Political Psychological Division worked on this to put the blame on the KGB. And the P-2 Lodge was also involved and they were ours.

GD: The what?

RTC: The P-2 Lodge was an Italian Masonic group and early in 1970, we got our hands on it. It was designed to attract right wing Italian bankers and businessmen to combat the very active Italian Communist party.  No, if the Pope had started something, it would have wrecked years of hard work on our part and ruined some of our more important assets. In the end, it was money, not Renaissance-style politics that did Luciani in.

GD: Does the Vatican know now?

RTC: Suspects but would rather not know anything. After the Pope assumed room temperature, we consolidated and revamped the system. There was quite a bit of mopping-up to do. We had to kill off a number of Italian players who had been pushed out of the picture and were longing to get back into the money. One hanged himself from a bridge in England. Obviously killed himself out of remorse.

GD: Stalin said once that it was not difficult to execute a murder but much more difficult to arrange a suicide.

RTC: Josef was a clever man.

GD: And, he said, No man, no problem.

RTC: That one I know. A friend and co-worker had that up over his desk. I am not joking.

GD: Oh, I believe it, Robert. It is lawful to be taught by your enemies.

RTC: I detect a critical attitude here, Gregory. You have to realize that the amount of money we were, and are, making from our drug partnerships is nothing to walk away from. Vast sums of money, Gregory, and enormous political power therefrom.

GD: I can see that but one day they will go too far.

RTC: The Kennedy business is a classic example why nothing will ever come of this sort of thing. If you publish the ZIPPER material you already have and what I am going to give you, you will only excite the conspiracy buffs, all of whom will gather together and hiss at you and heap coals of fire on your head. Let us say that you write a newspaper article on what I just told you. It would never get published and within minutes of your submitting it to an editor, we would be notified.

GD: And then you’d shoot me?
RTC: No, trash you. Laugh at you. Get our little broken down academics to piss on you. The press would ignore you completely and eventually, you would find something else to do. Now, on the other hand, if you had been one of us and had inside knowledge and worse, proof, you would perish very quickly. The faulty brakes while driving on dangerous mountain roads, an overdose of some kind of popular drug and dead in an overheated apartment. Things like that. But as an outsider, just laughter and silence. Of course, there are those who would believe you and if you wrote about this business with the Pope and mentioned some Italian names, you might get different treatment. The bomb under the front seat of your car or something crude like that. But we wouldn’t have done it and I would recommend against stirring those people up. We would look into your tax records and turn the IRS loose on you or let your wife know you were boffing a nice waitress at a cheap local motel. Or one of your nice children would be introduced to dangerous drugs. That’s more effective than a bomb in the car or someone shooting you dead in a parking garage. The Italians tend to be very emotional and we do not.

GD: The Italians once said that he who went softly went safely and he who went safely went far.

RTC: It would be less messy if they actually practiced that sentiment.

GD: By the way, Robert, why did you go after the other Pope? I assume that’s the one that got shot by the Arab in front of the Vatican.

RTC: Yes, but not an Arab, a Turk. They do not like to be equated with Arabs. That one? Actually, we thought that if we had him done in right in front of everybody, it would draw a lot of attention and we could really blame it on the KGB. It was a perfect set up. He was a Polack who was agitating the Solidarity people against Russia so who would be the most logical suspect? And we had been financing the Turkish Grey Wolves for some time. They got the hit man for us. Of course he didn’t know anything so no one shot him in the courtroom.

GD: Que bono! But for no other reason?

RTC: Isn’t that enough? Turn all the world’s Catholics against the Russians in a hurry.

GD: Let’s see here. One Pope for sure, another shot at, a dead UN chief, a dead American president, assorted deceased South American leaders, a Pakistani or two, at least one high level Indian and so on. I would hope not all for such trivial motives.

RTC: Turning huge number of people against Russia is not a trivial motive at all.

GD: The wheel does turn, Robert, it does. And what is now at the bottom comes to the top. Out of curiosity, have you killed any Israelis?

RTC: No, they know just how far to go and we work very closely with them. They do a lot of our dirty work for us. They blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon and of course we blamed it on the Arabs. It goes on, Gregory, and if you had sat in my chair and walked in my shoes, you would be a bit more understanding.

GD: This is not aimed at you, of course.

RTC: If it were, I wouldn’t be defending you to the monkeys when they jabber about you. They aren’t worth much. I think your problem is that you never were in a position of command and at a high level. If you had been, you would be less judgmental.

GD: I am just an amateur, Robert, just a dilettante. Thank God.

(Concluded at 11:45 CST)

An Email that Might Have Come from a Nigerian George Bush

Subject: FW: IMMEDIATE ATTENTION NEEDED: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

URGENT ASSISTANCE - FROM USA

IMMEDIATE ATTENTION NEEDED : HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

FROM: GEORGE WALKER BUSH
202.456.1414 / 202.456.1111
FAX: 202.456.2461

Dear Sir / Madam,

I am GEORGE WALKER BUSH, son of the former president of the United States of America George Herbert Walker Bush, and currently serving as President of the United States of America. This letter might surprise you because we have not met, neither in person nor by correspondence. I came to know of you in my search for a reliable and reputable person to handle a very confidential business transaction, which involves the transfer of a huge sum of money to an account requiring maximum confidence.

I am writing you in absolute confidence primarily to seek your assistance in acquiring oil funds that are presently trapped in the republic of Iraq. My partners and I solicit your assistance in completing a transaction begun by my father, who has long been actively engaged in the extraction of petroleum in the United States of America, and bravely served his country as director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.

In the decade of the nineteen-eighties, my father, then vice-president of the United States of America, sought to work with the good offices of the President of the Republic of Iraq to regain lost oil revenue sources in the neighboring Islamic republic of Iran. This unsuccessful venture was soon followed by a falling-out with his Iraqi partner, who sought to acquire additional oil revenue sources in the neighboring emirate of Kuwait, a wholly-owned U.S.-British subsidiary.

My father re-secured the petroleum assets of Kuwait in 1991 at a cost of sixty-one billion u.s. dollars ($61,000,000,000). Out of that cost, thirty-six billion dollars ($36,000,000,000) were supplied by his partners in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other persian gulf monarchies, and sixteen billion dollars ($16,000,000,000) by German and Japanese partners. But my father's former Iraqi business partner remained in control of the republic of Iraq and its petroleum reserves.

My family is calling for your urgent assistance in funding the removal of the President of the Republic of Iraq and acquiring the petroleum assets of his country, as compensation for the costs of removing him from power. unfortunately, our partners from 1991 are not willing to shoulder the burden of this new venture, which in its upcoming phase may cost the sum of 100 billion to 200 billion dollars ($100,000,000,000 - $200,000,000,000), both in the initial acquisition and in long-term management.

Without the funds from our 1991 partners, we would not be able to acquire the oil revenue trapped within Iraq. That is why my family and our colleagues are urgently seeking your gracious assistance. Our distinguished colleagues in this business transaction include the sitting vice-president of the United States of America, Richard Cheney, who is an original partner in the Iraq venture and former head of the Halliburton oil company, and Condoleeza Rice, whose professional dedication to the venture was demonstrated in the naming of a Chevron oil tanker after her.

I would beseech you to transfer a sum equaling ten to twenty-five percent (10-25 %) of your yearly income to our account to aid in this important venture. The internal revenue service of the United States of America will function as our trusted intermediary. I propose that you make this transfer before the fifteenth (15th) of the month of April.

I know that a transaction of this magnitude would make anyone apprehensive and worried. But I am assuring you that all will be well at the end of the day. A bold step taken shall not be regretted, I assure you. Please do be informed that this business transaction is 100% legal. If you do not wish to co-operate in this transaction, please contact our intermediary representatives to further discuss the matter.

I pray that you understand our plight. My family and our colleagues will be forever grateful. Please reply in strict confidence to the contact numbers below.

Sincerely with warm regards,

George Walker Bush

Switchboard: 202.456.1414
Comments: 202.456.1111
Fax: 202.456.2461
Email: president@whitehouse