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.

Civil insurrection in America and government countermeasures: The official papers

By Bradley Moscrip

An in-depth study of official American plans to construct FEMA detention centers in America and specific recent U.S. Army domestic counterinsurgency plans. Here is a sampling of the ebook contents:

Gun Control by Confiscation

As the American general population is known to be the most heavily armed in the world, immediately upon the declaration of Martial Law and the execution by the military of counterinsurgency programs, it has been determined that the BATF, will begin the process of rounding up all rifles, pistols and so-called assault weaponry from the civil population. Lists of gun collectors obtained from firearms dealers, gun magazine subscription lists and other sources will be the basis for these mass confiscations. Gun owners will be supplied documentation by the BATF showing which pieces have been confiscated so that in the future, they will be told, they can recover their weapons when the state of emergency has passed. In actuality, weapons that do not have a high value or are not suitable for arming loyalist police forces, will be destroyed by order

This study is available from tbrnews at $5.00 by PayPal  

            Washington, D.C., November 10, 2008: “No sooner was Barrack Obama declared President-elect than the bloggers began their senseless attacks on him and on any of those who were speculated to be members of his new government.

These are the same unhinged idiots who would cheerfully attack Jesus Christ if He won the election and who can be counted on to spend the next four years, yapping in the public ear like a Pomeranian dog on speed. Many simplistic bloggers think they alone brought down George Bush with their pointless yappings but I have news for them: George Bush brought himself down by his stupidity and arrogance, not some tin horn living in Wetumka, Georgia with an old  computer and a mindless itch to be important. 

Thanks to the corporate-friendly Bush people, we are now in a serious recession that bids fair to turn into a major depression.  Much of this economic collapse is due to the deliberate removal of market controls but the rest is basically psychological. Just as mass psychology drove the market up, so mass psychology will drive the market down.

 Franklin Roosevelt was a well-educated man but not very competent economist. He was, however, a great propagandist and for the first one hundred days of his presidency, he basically saved us all from a total economic collapse.

Given our present economic seismic problems, might it not be more useful to at least refrain from yapping and snarling, mindless behavior that only serves to further distract and frighten an already terrified public?

There are indeed times when silence is golden. In short, put a sock in it, dude.”

The keys to the country
November 9, 2008

by Pepe Escobar

Asia Times

                KEY WEST, Florida - The state of Florida was a case study of how the 2008 United States presidential election was won. Talk about will to power. Implanted in the Barack Obama campaign mindset, articulated by the "two Davids" - former Obama chief strategist Axelrod and campaign manager Plouffe - an uncontroversial Florida win would not only erase the nightmarish hanging chad film noir of eight years ago but achieve burning bright redemption by routing the Republicans with an overwhelming ground game, part of the most sophisticated field operation in the history of American politics.

                From the point of view of Obamaland, the alluring, swinging Sunshine State became an obsession - even more than Ohio

Money was no object. The campaign deployed 250,000 volunteers clustered around 100 field offices getting out the vote with phone banks and knocking door-to-door, canvassing cops and cars and manicured boulevards, derelict wastelands and bastions of privilege, outspending the McCain campaign on the airwaves three to one.

                It boiled down to the - vital - matter of selling a polished black intellectual from Chicago who was virtually unknown in Florida only five months ago. Bill Clinton and Al Gore, superstars in their own right, hit the stage in Florida in the last week of campaigning only after Obama had proved he could win the Sunshine State by himself.

                In the end, Obama got almost 71% of new registered voters in Florida. Boosted by swing voters, independents, African Americans, the bulk of the vote from Central and South Americans, and young Cuban Americans, he beat McCain 51% to 48%, paving the road to that moment in time the Reverend Martin Luther King dreamed of. Joe the Plumber in Ohio may have not, but Jose el Plomero in Florida voted Obama.

The long and winding road
               

Time waits for no president-elect. But it will take time for the symbolism of November 4 to sink in - that cool, calm, collected one man melting pot smile imprinted on the face of the planet, as if every corner of Earth was allowed to dream in American again and sing, as One, Obambopaloobop Obambamboom.

                It's been a long time comin'. Obama is post-everything, and not only ethnically. A former colleague at the University of Chicago law faculty describes him as a "visionary minimalist". A dreamer, yes - but within realistic boundaries.

                The world, still ecstatic, will soon notice that Obama is also all about post-ethnic civic nationalism. Make no mistake: in his own way, he also wants a New American century. His speeches tell the story. He truly believes in American exceptionalism and in the US manifest destiny.

                But he is not an ideologue. He does not position himself as a liberal or a centrist. He is above all a pragmatist. His speeches also stress that it's not about left and right. It's not about big government or small government. It's about a government that works.

                How will it work? Americans at this historical juncture are not allowed to be "crackpot realists" - as C Wright Mills would put it. Everyone has to become a critical intellectual. As Obama himself said in his acceptance speech,

‘The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But America, I have never been more hopeful that I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you, we as a people, we'll get there. ‘

The keys to the highway

                Obama has to bridge the gulf not only between black and white but red and blue and rich and poor. The Bush era meant eight years of non-stop redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top, and the crystallization of the US as the most socially unequal among all industrialized economies. But Americans have had enough. A recent Gallup poll reveals 58% - and 84% of Democratic voters - believe money and wealth should be more evenly distributed in the US.

                Obama has to - literally - climb to the mountain top and challenge the $700 billion taxpayer bailout of Wall Street. Will he dare to re-regulate Wall Street in the public interest?

                He has to come clean about a health plan that won't be run and controlled by hardcore corporate insurance companies, ultra-conservative hospital associations and the Big Pharma industry. Why not a universal single payer health program?

                He has to come clean on his relationship with Big Agrobusiness. He has to explain how fiscal austerity will be compatible with creating jobs. How bailing out Wall Street is compatible with productive investment. And how the cracked up framework of the "war on terror" is compatible with a domestic recovery.

                The Pentagon celebrated Obama's election by bombing a wedding party in Kandahar province in Afghanistan - 48 dead, mostly women and children, and scores of wounded.

                Obama wants a surge in Afghanistan. Obama wants to expand the framework of the "war on terror" inside the Pakistani tribal areas. Obama wants redeployment in Iraq - not withdrawal. He does not have a clearly defined deadline to leave Iraq because the Pentagon lodged in Iraq is directly tied to access to oil in the Middle East and a non-stop war of attrition with Iran, Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Obama has not renounced unconditional support to Israel's neo-colonial war on Palestine and relentless expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank - one of the root causes of virtually all the grief in the Middle East.

                And then there's that "other" America.

                Will Obama understand the reach and transformative power of profound social movements in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, all over Latin America? Will he understand that the Monroe Doctrine is dead - and Latin America as a whole is more than willing for a mature relationship with the US?

                Sunsets are fabulous in Key West. Cuba is just 144 kilometers away.

                Will Obama have the courage to end a failed, painful and criminal embargo - he's already been called on it by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and President Luiz Inacio Lula in Brazil - an embargo that banishes the purchase of spare parts for diagnostic equipment used in cancer detection, delays the delivery of millions of syringes for vaccinations against communicable diseases, and blocks access to imported seeds, fertilizers and spare parts for farm machinery? The US embargo is an embargo against ordinary Cubans.

                Geographically, the United States of America ends here at the tip of Florida. Politically, the long Bush night of the soul also ends here - in slightly over 70 days. Historically, led by a cool black man with a weapon of mass seduction - his unlimited soft power - this passage of time has the potential to be the prelude to a new day dawning. It's up to engaged, tirelessly mobilized US civil society - and for the whole world for that matter - to turn hope into reality, and help this man "change America, and change the world".

                Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Obama, McCain campaigns' computers hacked for policy data

November 6, 2008

CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Computers at the headquarters of the Barack Obama and John McCain campaigns were hacked during the campaign by a foreign entity looking for future policy information, a source with knowledge of the incidents confirms to CNN.

Workers at Barack Obama's headquarters first thought there was a computer virus.

The source said the computers were hacked mid-summer by either a foreign government or organization.

Another source, a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation, says federal investigators approached both campaigns with information the U.S. government had about the hacking, and the campaigns then hired private companies to mitigate the problem.

U.S. authorities, according to one of the sources, believe they know who the foreign entity responsible for the hacking is, but refused to identify it in any way, including what country.

The source, confirming the attacks that were first reported by Newsweek, said the sophisticated intrusions appeared aimed at gaining information about the evolution of policy positions in order to gain leverage in future dealings with whomever was elected.

The FBI is investigating, one of the sources confirmed to CNN. The FBI and Secret Service refused comment on the incidents.

The sources refused to speak on the record due to the ongoing investigation and also because it is a sensitive matter involving presidential politics.

As described by a Newsweek reporter with special access while working on a post-campaign special, workers in Obama's headquarters first detected what they thought was a computer virus that was trying to obtain users' personal information.

The next day, agents from the FBI and Secret Service came to the office and said, "You have a problem way bigger than what you understand ... you have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system."

One of the sources told CNN the hacking into the McCain campaign computers occurred around the same time as the breach into those of Obama's campaign.

Representatives of the campaigns could not be reached for comment on the matter.

                Comment: Though not published, the country that hacked the computers has been identified as Israel. Had it been Russia, the story would have been on the wire within seconds.  BH

Obama Weighs Quick Undoing of Bush Policy

November 10, 2008

by Jeff Zeleny

New York Times

CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama is poised to move swiftly to reverse actions that President Bush took using executive authority, and his transition team is reviewing limits on stem cell research and the expansion of oil and gas drilling, among other issues, members of the team said Sunday.

As Mr. Obama prepared to make his first post-election visit to the White House on Monday, his advisers were compiling a list of policies that could be reversed by the executive powers of the new president. The assessment is under way, aides said, but a full list of policies to be overturned will not be announced by Mr. Obama until he confers with new members of his cabinet.

“There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for Congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that,” John D. Podesta, a top transition leader, said Sunday. “He feels like he has a real mandate for change. We need to get off the course that the Bush administration has set.”

Throughout his presidency, Mr. Bush has made liberal use of his executive authority, using it to put his stamp on a range of hot-button policy issues.

In January 2001, on his first full day in office, Mr. Bush reinstated the so-called global gag rule, initiated during the Reagan administration and overturned by President Bill Clinton, which prohibited taxpayer dollars from being given to international family planning groups that perform abortions and provide abortion counseling. After Mr. Obama’s victory last week, the Center for Reproductive Rights delivered a 23-page memorandum to his transition team, calling for “bold policy change,” including a repeal of the gag rule.

On Sunday, in a sign that the presidential campaign had definitively ended and that the fast-forming administration had become the focal point, the faces of Mr. Obama’s new team appeared across the spectrum of Sunday talk shows, a changing of the guard more than two months before he officially assumes power.

Mr. Obama’s new chief of staff, Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, said the federal government should provide aid to the automobile industry to help the major automakers and their suppliers survive the financial crisis. General Motors, the largest American automaker, said last week that it had been losing more than $2 billion a month recently from its cash cushion and could face bankruptcy.

Mr. Emanuel told the CBS News program “Face the Nation” that the industry was “an essential part of the economy,” echoing remarks that Mr. Obama made at his first post-election news conference last week.

Restating Mr. Obama’s points, Mr. Emanuel said the Bush administration should accelerate $25 billion in federal loans provided by a recent law to help automakers and suppliers retool to build more energy-efficient vehicles. He said that the Bush administration had the power to do more and that Mr. Obama’s economic team, once chosen, would devise options for helping the industry in ways that had the added benefit of being “part of an energy policy, going forward, where America is less dependent on foreign oil.”

The idea of turning the auto industry’s crisis into a chance to enact changes with energy and environmental benefits is one that Mr. Emanuel has promoted in Congress. But he said that Mr. Obama had yet to settle on his proposals or whether he would announce them before he was sworn in.

“Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” Mr. Emanuel said in an interview on Sunday. “They are opportunities to do big things.”

Mr. Podesta, who for months has been preparing for the transition, said in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday” that Mr. Obama was considering Democrats, Republicans and independents for key cabinet positions. While previous presidents have not announced such appointments until December, Mr. Podesta suggested that officials with responsibility for the economy, national security, health care and energy portfolios could be named sooner.

“I think he intends to move very quickly,” Mr. Podesta said. “And you know, he’s beaten a lot of records during the course of the campaign.”

Mr. Obama does not intend to name any cabinet officials this week, aides said Sunday, but could announce additional White House decisions on senior staff members as early as Tuesday as he begins building his administration, from the Oval Office to other positions in the West Wing and other parts of the government.

Mr. Emanuel said Congress needed to extend unemployment insurance benefits and offer states a lift in paying for health care bills. When the new Democratic Congress convenes in January, he said, it should tackle a wider economic stimulus package that includes the middle-class tax cut that was a centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign.

“You cannot have a strong and resilient economy that does not have a strong and resilient middle class,” Mr. Emanuel said on “This Week” on ABC. “They have been squeezed over the last number of years, and it is essential to have an economic strategy that strengthens them going forward.”

Mr. Emanuel said an economic stimulus package in Congress should not be linked to a free-trade agreement with Colombia, as some Republicans have sought to do. Democrats have resisted those efforts, saying it does not provide enough labor protection.

The executive orders of the Bush administration are among the many items being reviewed by the new Obama team. The transition operation that was set up in August, even before Mr. Obama was formally nominated at the Democratic convention, included a plan to scrutinize the policies that could be reversed through executive orders.

The Bureau of Land Management is poised to open about 360,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas drilling, a plan that the Bush administration has argued would not harm the land. Environmentalists have opposed the idea, a sentiment echoed by Mr. Podesta on Sunday.

“I think across the board, on stem cell research, on a number of areas,” Mr. Podesta said on “Fox News Sunday,” “you see the Bush administration even today moving aggressively to do things that I think are probably not in the interest of the country. They want to have oil and gas drilling in some of the most sensitive, fragile lands in Utah that they’re going to try to do right as they are walking out the door. I think that’s a mistake.”

Mr. Bush used his first prime-time address, on Aug. 9, 2001, to announce his decision (technically a policy pronouncement and not an executive order) to permit federal financing for human embryonic stem cell research, albeit with strict limitations. Scientists and patient advocates have spent years pressing him to loosen the restrictions; Mr. Bush has twice vetoed legislation that would have done so.

“It will have been eight years that we have been operating in a limited funding environment,” said Larry Soler, a board member of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, an umbrella group representing 100 organizations. “I think everyone in the scientific community and the patient community is geared up and expecting this and excited to make this happen. It’s been a long struggle.”

Responding to questions about how Michelle Obama intends to shape her time as first lady, Valerie Jarrett, a close adviser to Mr. Obama and a longtime family friend, said Mrs. Obama would first concentrate on getting her daughters, ages 7 and 10, adjusted to a new city and a new school. She said Mrs. Obama would forge her own style, dismissing a question about whether she would be more like Hillary Rodham Clinton or Laura Bush.

“Her model will be Michelle Obama,” Ms. Jarrett said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “She’s going to be her own first lady. There’ll be nothing like it. Having a seat at the table and being a co-president is not something that she’s interested in doing.”

Jackie Calmes and Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Washington.

Internet Attacks Grow More Potent

November 10, 2008

by John Markoff

New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Attackers bent on shutting down large Web sites — even the operators that run the backbone of the Internet — are arming themselves with what are effectively vast digital fire hoses capable of overwhelming the world’s largest networks, according to a new report on online security.

In these attacks, computer networks are hijacked to form so-called botnets that spray random packets of data in huge streams over the Internet. The deluge of data is meant to bring down Web sites and entire corporate networks. Known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks, such cyberweapons are now routinely used during political and military conflicts, as in Estonia in 2007 during a political fight with Russia, and in the Georgian-Russian war last summer. Such attacks are also being used in blackmail schemes and political conflicts, as well as for general malicious mischief.

A survey of 70 of the largest Internet operators in North America, South America, Europe and Asia found that malicious attacks were rising sharply and that the individual attacks were growing more powerful and sophisticated, according to the Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report. This report is produced annually by Arbor Networks, a company in Lexington, Mass., that provides tools for monitoring the performance of networks.

The report, which will be released Tuesday, shows that the largest attacks have grown steadily in size to over 40 gigabits, from less than half a megabit, over the last seven years. The largest network connections generally available today carry 10 gigabits of data, meaning that they can be overwhelmed by the most powerful attackers.

The Arbor Networks researchers said a 40-gigabit attack took place this year when two rival criminal cybergangs began quarreling over control of an online Ponzi scheme. “This was, initially, criminal-on-criminal crime though obviously the greatest damage was inflicted on the infrastructure used by the criminals,” the network operator wrote in a note on the attack.

The attack employed a method called reflective amplification, which allowed a relatively small number of attack computers to generate a huge stream of data toward a victim. The technique has been in use since 2006.

“We’re definitely seeing more targeted attacks toward e-commerce sites,” said Danny McPherson, chief security officer for Arbor Networks. “Most enterprises are connected to the Internet with a one-gigabit connection or less. Even a two-gigabit D.D.O.S. attack will take them offline.”

Large network operators that run the backbone of the Internet have tried to avoid the problem by building excess capacity into their networks, said Edward G. Amoroso, the chief security officer of AT&T. He likened the approach to a large shock absorber, but said he still worried about the growing scale of the attacks.

“We have a big shock absorber,” he said. “It works, but it’s not going to work if there’s some Pearl Harbor event.”

                Over all, the operators reported they were growing more able to respond to D.D.O.S. attacks because of improved collaboration among service providers.

According to the Arbor Networks report, the network operators said the largest botnets — which in some cases encompass millions of “zombie” computers — continue to “outpace containment efforts and infrastructure investment.”

Despite a drastic increase in the number of attacks, the percentage referred to law enforcement authorities declined. The report said 58 percent of the Internet service providers had referred no instances to law enforcement in the last 12 months. When asked why there were so few referrals, 29 percent said law enforcement had limited capabilities, 26 percent said they expected their customers to report illegal activities and 17 percent said there was “little or no utility” in reporting attacks.

Hezballah goes anti-tank missile shopping in Moscow
November 2, 2008

DEBKA

                A Hizballah mission, which arrived in Moscow Tuesday, Oct. 28, placed orders for 3,000 Russian missiles of different types after being shown around Russian state of the art anti-tank missile factories and treated to a live fire demonstration.

                Tehran is footing the bill.

                Our sources disclose that the hardware inspected by the Hizballah officers included 9M133 (Nato-coded Spriggan AT-14) which can be launched by helicopter and Kliver, which is an upgraded Kornet-E mounted on vehicles. The Lebanese Shiite terrorist shoppers also placed a large order for RPG-2 rocket-propelled grenades made by Bazalt. In the 2006 Lebanon war, the older RPG-29 used by Hizballah was responsible for most of the hits suffered by Israeli tanks.

                Last month, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert traveled to Moscow to ask Russian leaders to refrain from selling arms to Syria and Iran, countries at war with Israel. Moscow only promised to reconsider weapons sales capable of upsetting the balance of strength in “sensitive regions” and then went right ahead to sign big arms deals with Damascus and Tehran – and now Hizballah.

The Crowley Papers: The Vietnam War- 1945-1978

Edited by Dr. Peter Janney

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.

                Among Robert Crowley’s papers was a complete manuscript he prepared for in-house circulation dealing with the political, military and intelligence backgrounds of the long war in Vietnam. As a CIA employee, Crowley had signed an agreement that he would never publish anything based on his CIA service without first submitting the complete manuscript to the Agency for its vetting. In this case, Crowley never submitted the manuscript and is now dead. His only son is also dead and his wife is in a nursing facility so this fascinating view of a troubled period in America is now seeing the light of day for the first time.

The Vietnam War 1945-1978

by Robert Trumbull Crowley

Origins and Background

The beginnings of the Cold War in Southeast Asia

          Alliances traditionally rarely outlast a war that brought them together and this was certainly the case in the American-British alliance with Communist Russia under Josef Stalin. Soviet manipulations in eastern Europe, fomenting unrest in other areas and an obvious attempt on the part of Stalin to grab by stealth and disruption what the militarily depleted Soviet Union could not accomplish led to rapidly worsening relations with the United States. The pro-Stalin Roosevelt had been replaced by the anti-Stalin Truman and in 1947, the Soviet advances in Iran led to the so-called Truman Doctrine. This was a firm doctrine of containment and initially, it took the form of American aid to Turkey and Greece as well as successful counter-measures against Communist activity in Iran.  Czechoslovakia passed to Stalinst control in 1948 and his blockade of Berlin marked one part of  the Cold War beginnings. The other was a faked document by German General Reinhard  Gehlen, then an asset of the U.S. Army, in which the General, a specialist in Russian military organization, alleged that Stalin was about to launch 135 of his armored divisions into the West. That these divisions existed on paper only was known not only to Gehlen but also to senior Pentagon officials was never mentioned. The so-called Gehlen Report was judiciously leaked to both Congress and President Truman with predictable results. Both the US military and elements of American industry were given a great boost and in 1949, NATO was organized as another overt threat to Stalinist Russia.

                In the Asian theater, once the Marshall mission to China failed and the Chinese Communists defeated Chiang Kai- Shek’s KMT forces and forced them to flee to the island of Taiwan.. In 1949, the Communist leader, MaoTse-tsung proclaimed the People’s Republic of China at Peking. In 1950, Mao signed a 30 year friendship treaty with Stalin’s Russia and this in defiance of the 1945 treaty between Russia and Chiang. Coupled with the apparent belligerence of our former ally, Stalin, and what then appeared to be his on-going successes in the diplomatic world, the west quite naturally became highly agitated and the militant anti-Communists then very active in governance circles in America, used all of this to further bolster their police of re-armament and clandestine opposition. It would take many years before it was understood in the West that Ho Chi Minh, like Mao, was not part of a great and monolithic Communist edifice but was their own master and not Moscow’s puppet.

                The war that broke out on the Korean peninsula  in June of 1950 had a profound effect on the US intelligence and domestic political community in that it came so soon after the conclusion of the long and bloody Second World War and its inconclusive ending in July of 1953 was difficult for the American public to grasp. The involvement of China in this war reinforced the growing feeling that Communist China was a looming danger and that insofar as Vietnam was concerned, perceived as a major threat to be countered by any means possible.

Continued…..

November 9, 2008

by Tim Shipman

The Telegraph/UK

The Republican vice presidential candidate attracted criticism for accusing Mr Obama of "palling around with terrorists", citing his association with the sixties radical William Ayers.

The attacks provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling "terrorist" and "kill him" until the McCain campaign ordered her to tone down the rhetoric.

But it has now emerged that her demagogic tone may have unintentionally encouraged white supremacists to go even further.

The Secret Service warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin's attacks.

Michelle Obama, the future First Lady, was so upset that she turned to her friend and campaign adviser Valerie Jarrett and said: "Why would they try to make people hate us?"

The revelations, contained in a Newsweek history of the campaign, are likely to further damage Mrs Palin's credentials as a future presidential candidate. She is already a frontrunner, with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, to take on Mr Obama in four years time.

Details of the spike in threats to Mr Obama come as a report last week by security and intelligence analysts Stratfor, warned that he is a high risk target for racist gunmen. It concluded: "Two plots to assassinate Obama were broken up during the campaign season, and several more remain under investigation. We would expect federal authorities to uncover many more plots to attack the president that have been hatched by white supremacist ideologues."

Irate John McCain aides, who blame Mrs Palin for losing the election, claim Mrs Palin took it upon herself to question Mr Obama's patriotism, before the line of attack had been cleared by Mr McCain.

That claim is part of a campaign of targeted leaks designed to torpedo her ambitions, with claims that she did not know that Africawas a continent rather than a country.

The advisers have branded her a "diva" and a "whack job" and claimed that she did not know which other countries are in the North American Free Trade Area, (Canada and Mexico). They say she spent more than $150,000 on designer clothes, including $40,000 on her husband Todd and that she refused to prepare for the disastrous series of interviews with CBS's Katie Couric.

In a bid to salvage her reputation Mrs Palin came out firing in an interview with CNN, dismissing the anonymous leakers in unpresidential language as "jerks" who had taken "questions or comments I made in debate prep out of context."

She said: "I consider it cowardly. It's not true. That's cruel, it's mean-spirited, it's immature, it's unprofessional and those guys are jerks if they came away taking things out of context and then tried to spread something on national news that's not fair and not right."

She was not asked about her incendiary rhetoric against Mr Obama. But she did deny the spending spree claims, saying the clothes in question had been returned to the Republican National Committee. "Those are the RNC's clothes, they're not my clothes. I asked for anything more than maybe a diet Dr Pepper once in a while. These are false allegations."

Speaking as she returned to her native Alaska, Mrs Palin claimed to be baffled by what she claims was sexism on the national stage. "Here in Alaska that double standard isn't applied because these guys know that Alaskan women are pretty tough, on a par with the men in terms of being outdoors, working hard," she said.

"They're commercial fishermen, they're pilots, they're working up on the North slopein the oil fields. You see equality in Alaska. I think that was a bit of as surprise on the national level."

                Comment: Poor Sarah, so close to Russia, so far from decency. There she was, giggling, smirking and behaving like tralierpark trash on a binge, buying over $200,000 worth of fancy clothes at the taxpayer’s expense and just loving her redneck audiences. And now Sarah has intentions of becoming the new Voice of the Repubicans in the total absence of any leadership of that bedraggled and disintigrating aggregations of lunatic Christians and ideological throwbacks. Will she indeed become the Voice of the GOP? If she does, maybe the Neocons will love her and William Kristol will laud her but the rest of the glove will equate Sarah with her SNL roastings. BH

JFK’s Exhibitionism: from the official record

                It has long been alleged that sexually explicit photos were taken of John F. Kennedy with various sex partners, groups, men and women, and brought by a Secret Service agent to a Washington gallery for framing. The gallery owner, Sidney Mickelson, stated that the participants included a naked Kennedy and assorted lady friends wearing masks. Here, from the official archives, is a period FBI report on the subject. There are no pictures attached and while a writer we know has some, this is a family website.

Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda in Many Countries

November 10, 2008

by Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti

New York Times

WASHINGTON — The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials.

These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States.

In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission — captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft — in real time in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.

Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the C.I.A., according to senior American officials, who said that in others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos acted in support of C.I.A.-directed operations.

But as many as a dozen additional operations have been canceled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said. They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence.

More than a half-dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, described details of the 2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature. Spokesmen for the White House, the Defense Department and the military declined to comment.

Apart from the 2006 raid into Pakistan, the American officials refused to describe in detail what they said had been nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks, except to say they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries. They made clear that there had been no raids into Iran using that authority, but they suggested that American forces had carried out reconnaissance missions in Iran using other classified directives.

According to a senior administration official, the new authority was spelled out in a classified document called “Al Qaeda Network Exord,” or execute order, that streamlined the approval process for the military to act outside officially declared war zones. Where in the past the Pentagon needed to get approval for missions on a case-by-case basis, which could take days when there were only hours to act, the new order specified a way for Pentagon planners to get the green light for a mission far more quickly, the official said.

It also allowed senior officials to think through how the United States would respond if a mission went badly. “If that helicopter goes down in Syria en route to a target,” a former senior military official said, “the American response would not have to be worked out on the fly.”

The 2004 order was a step in the evolution of how the American government sought to kill or capture Qaeda terrorists around the world. It was issued after the Bush administration had already granted America’s intelligence agencies sweeping power to secretly detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in overseas prisons and to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and electronic communications.

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush issued a classified order authorizing the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda militants around the globe. By 2003, American intelligence agencies and the military had developed a much deeper understanding of Al Qaeda’s extensive global network, and Mr. Rumsfeld pressed hard to unleash the military’s vast firepower against militants outside the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 2004 order identifies 15 to 20 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several other Persian Gulf states, where Qaeda militants were believed to be operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said.

Even with the order, each specific mission requires high-level government approval. Targets in Somalia, for instance, need at least the approval of the defense secretary, the administration official said, while targets in a handful of countries, including Pakistan and Syria, require presidential approval.

The Pentagon has exercised its authority frequently, dispatching commandos to countries including Pakistan and Somalia. Details of a few of these strikes have previously been reported.

For example, shortly after Ethiopian troops crossed into Somalia in late 2006 to dislodge an Islamist regime in Mogadishu, the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command quietly sent operatives and AC-130 gunships to an airstrip near the Ethiopian town of Dire Dawa. From there, members of a classified unit called Task Force 88 crossed repeatedly into Somalia to hunt senior members of a Qaeda cell believed to be responsible for the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

At the time, American officials said Special Operations troops were operating under a classified directive authorizing the military to kill or capture Qaeda operatives if failure to act quickly would mean the United States had lost a “fleeting opportunity” to neutralize the enemy.

Occasionally, the officials said, Special Operations troops would land in Somalia to assess the strikes’ results. On Jan. 7, 2007, an AC-130 struck an isolated fishing village near the Kenyan border, and within hours, American commandos and Ethiopian troops were examining the rubble to determine whether any Qaeda operatives had been killed.

But even with the new authority, proposed Pentagon missions were sometimes scrubbed because of bad intelligence or bureaucratic entanglements, senior administration officials said.

The details of one of those aborted operations, in early 2005, were reported by The New York Times last June. In that case, an operation to send a team of the Navy Seals and the Army Rangers into Pakistan to capture Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, was aborted at the last minute.

Mr. Zawahri was believed by intelligence officials to be attending a meeting in Bajaur, in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command hastily put together a plan to capture him. There were strong disagreements inside the Pentagon and the C.I.A. about the quality of the intelligence, however, and some in the military expressed concern that the mission was unnecessarily risky.

Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director at the time, urged the military to carry out the mission, and some in the C.I.A. even wanted to execute it without informing Ryan C. Crocker, then the American ambassador to Pakistan. Mr. Rumsfeld ultimately refused to authorize the mission.

Former military and intelligence officials said that Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who recently completed his tour as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, had pressed for years to win approval for commando missions into Pakistan. But the missions were frequently rejected because officials in Washington determined that the risks to American troops and the alliance with Pakistan were too great.

Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for General McChrystal, who is now director of the military’s Joint Staff, declined to comment.

The recent raid into Syria was not the first time that Special Operations forces had operated in that country, according to a senior military official and an outside adviser to the Pentagon.

Since the Iraq war began, the official and the outside adviser said, Special Operations forces have several times made cross-border raids aimed at militants and infrastructure aiding the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq.

The raid in late October, however, was much more noticeable than the previous raids, military officials said, which helps explain why it drew a sharp protest from the Syrian government.

Negotiations to hammer out the 2004 order took place over nearly a year and involved wrangling between the Pentagon and the C.I.A. and the State Department about the military’s proper role around the world, several administration officials said.

American officials said there had been debate over whether to include Iran in the 2004 order, but ultimately Iran was set aside, possibly to be dealt with under a separate authorization.

Senior officials of the State Department and the C.I.A. voiced fears that military commandos would encroach on their turf, conducting operations that historically the C.I.A. had carried out, and running missions without an ambassador’s knowledge or approval.

Mr. Rumsfeld had pushed in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks to expand the mission of Special Operations troops to include intelligence gathering and counterterrorism operations in countries where American commandos had not operated before.

Bush administration officials have shown a determination to operate under an expansive definition of self-defense that provides a legal rationale for strikes on militant targets in sovereign nations without those countries’ consent.

Several officials said the negotiations over the 2004 order resulted in closer coordination among the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A., and set a very high standard for the quality of intelligence necessary to gain approval for an attack.

The 2004 order also provided a foundation for the orders that Mr. Bush approved in July allowing the military to conduct raids into the Pakistani tribal areas, including the Sept. 3 operation by Special Operations forces that killed about 20 militants, American officials said.

Administration officials said that Mr. Bush’s approval had paved the way for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to sign an order — separate from the 2004 order — that specifically directed the military to plan a series of operations, in cooperation with the C.I.A., on the Qaeda network and other militant groups linked to it in Pakistan.

Unlike the 2004 order, in which Special Operations commanders nominated targets for approval by senior government officials, the order in July was more of a top-down approach, directing the military to work with the C.I.A. to find targets in the tribal areas, administration officials said. They said each target still needed to be approved by the group of Mr. Bush’s top national security and foreign policy advisers, called the Principals Committee.