TBR News April 24, 2019

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. April 24, 2019: “Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.

When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.

I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.

He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.

He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.

His latest business is to re-institute a universal draft in America.

He wants to do this to remove tens of thousands of unemployed young Americans from the streets so they won’t come together and fight him.

Commentary for April 24: The Imperial Gas Bag has forbidden White House staff from going to the annual correspondents’ dinner because they have insulted him. I intend to go and if fatty doesn’t like it, he can kiss my ass. There are some rabid right wing and Jesus Freaks on the staff who like him but the rest of us view him as a lying sack of excretia and we have more respect for a wino covered with open running sores. I have predicted, to laughter, that soon we will be seeing Trump icons on every desk showing the King of America in a jock strap. You could clearly see this if it weren’t for the huge food bag than hangs down to his knees.”

 

The Table of Contents

• Trump says aides need not testify to Congress amid growing power struggle
• S. federal judge to block Trump’s new abortion rule: media, activists
• Boy Scouts’ sealed ‘perversion files’ name 7,800+ suspected pedophiles – victims’ lawyer
• The Bloody History of Border Militias Runs Deep — And Law Enforcement Is Part of It
• Encyclopedia of American Loons

          Coleman Rogers

         Roger Patterson

• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
• Whistleblower detection methodology

Trump says aides need not testify to Congress amid growing power struggle

President’s remarks to Washington Post come as White House battles subpoenas and treasury misses deadline to provide tax returns

April 23, 2019

by David Smith in Washington

The Guardian

Donald Trump has said he is opposed to current and former White House aides testifying to congressional committees about special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference, the Washington Post reported.

In an interview with the newspaper, the US president claimed his administration cooperated with Mueller’s investigation and did not need to comply with congressional committees examining possible obstruction of justice on his part.

“There is no reason to go any further, and especially in Congress where it’s very partisan – obviously very partisan,” Trump told the Post. “I don’t want people testifying to a party, because that is what they’re doing if they do this.”

The remarks pointed to a deepening power struggle between the White House and Congress as shockwaves from the Mueller report continue to reverberate in Washington.

The House oversight committee has been investigating security clearances issued to senior officials, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former White House aide Rob Porter.

The committee subpoenaed Carl Kline, a former White House personnel security director, following testimony from a whistleblower that dozens of people in the administration were granted security clearances despite “disqualifying issues” in their backgrounds. But on Tuesday Kline, following White House instructions, did not turn up for a scheduled deposition.

Congressman Elijah Cummings, chairman of the committee, said the administration has adopted the “untenable” position that it can ignore requests from Democrats, who assumed the majority in January.

“It appears that the president believes that the Constitution does not apply to his White House, that he may order officials at will to violate their legal obligations, and that he may obstruct attempts by Congress to conduct oversight,” Cummings said in a statement.

Cummings is consulting with other members and staff about scheduling a vote to hold Kline in contempt of Congress. He told the MSNBC channel: “We will hold a vote of our committee shortly to hold him in contempt and then we will check with House counsel … to see where we go from there.”

The White House has blocked the oversight panel in various investigations. On Monday, Trump and his business organisation sued Cummings to prevent a subpoena that seeks years of the president’s financial records, arguing that it “has no legitimate legislative purpose”.

Cummings said the White House “has refused to produce a single piece of paper or a single witness” in any of the committee’s investigations this year.

A spokesman for the top Republican on the oversight panel, Jim Jordan, said Cummings was choosing confrontation over cooperation. “Chairman Cummings rushed to a subpoena in his insatiable quest to sully the White House,” Russell Dye told the Associated Press.

Officials also said the administration plans to fight a subpoena issued by the House judiciary committee chairman Jerry Nadler for ex-White House counsel Donald McGahn by asserting executive privilege over his testimony, according to the Post. The Mueller report chronicles how McGahn ignored many of Trump’s directions to obstruct justice and fire Mueller.

Hogan Gidley, the White House deputy press secretary, told Fox News’s America’s Newsroom: “What I am concerned about … is that Democrats like Jerry Nadler continue to try to attack this president and attack members of this administration repeatedly.

“He’s not going to learn anything else about Don McGahn or this administration that Bob Mueller didn’t find in two years of wasted time and energy. The only thing he is going to gain quite frankly, are maybe some political allies at the far left who are conspiracy theorists and think somehow it was a sham.”

On yet another front, the White House defied a demand from the ways and means committee chairman, Richard Neal, to turn over six years of Trump’s tax returns by the close of business. In a letter to Neal, the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, asked for more time and said he would give the panel a final decision by 6 May.

Mnuchin is consulting with the justice department “due to the serious constitutional questions raised by this request and the serious consequences that a resolution of those questions could have for taxpayer privacy”, he wrote.

The White House and Congress could be digging in for a long battle all the way to the courts. Speaking at the Time 100 Summit in New York, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: “Now we see the administration engaging in stonewalling of the facts coming to the American people.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report

 

U.S. federal judge to block Trump’s new abortion rule: media, activists

April 24, 2019

(Reuters) – A federal judge in the U.S. state of Oregon will block a move by the Trump administration to cut off federal money to family planning clinics that offer abortion or refer women to abortion providers, activists and media reports said late on Tuesday.

Critics say the plan is aimed at fulfilling Trump’s campaign pledge to defund Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides abortions and other health services for women.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the American Medical Association, along with several other parties, sued in federal court in Oregon to halt the new rule.

U.S. District Judge Michael McShane said late on Tuesday that he will grant a preliminary injunction against the new federal restrictions, the Oregonian newspaper reported.

It was unclear when the ruling would be made formal and how wide-sweeping it would be.

The plaintiffs had sought a national injunction, but Judge McShane said he is reluctant to set national health care policy, the newspaper reported.

The U.S. Justice Department, which opposed the injunction in court, asked that it only apply to the plaintiffs in this case, the Oregonian said.

McShane said from the bench that the so-called “gag rule” would prevent doctors from doing their jobs, media reports said.

The U.S. Justice Department was not available for comment on Wednesday.

Congress provided $286 million in Title X grants in 2017 to Planned Parenthood and other health centers to provide birth control, screening for diseases and cancer, and other reproductive counseling to low-income women.

The funding cannot be used for abortions, but abortion opponents have long complained that the money subsidizes Planned Parenthood itself.

The American Medical Association applauded the proposed injunction.

“Judge McShane got it exactly right when he called the new Title X rule a ‘ham-fisted’ approach to health care,” AMA President Barbara McAneny said in a statement.

“The judge repeatedly asked how the new gag rule would improve health outcomes. The government was unable to answer,” she added.

Leana Wen, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, called it a victory for patients and doctors.

But she added in a statement “this relief is preliminary and we will continue to fight the Trump-Pence administration in court and in Congress to ensure our patients’ health.”

Similar legal challenges are pending in other federal courts, including one brought by California, according to media reports.

Reporting by Rich McKay; editing by Darren Schuettler

 

Boy Scouts’ sealed ‘perversion files’ name 7,800+ suspected pedophiles – victims’ lawyer

April 24, 2019

RT

Confidential “perversion files” held by the Boy Scouts of America contain the names of 7,819 suspected pedophiles, a lawyer for abused former scouts has discovered – and the names of 12,254 of their victims.

“The alarming thing about this is not just the number but the fact is that the Boy Scouts of America has never actually released these names in any form that can be known to the public,” Jeff Anderson, a lawyer for ex-scouts who have been abused, told a press conference in New York.

Anderson is releasing 180 of those names – 130 men from New York and 50 from New Jersey. The list is incomplete, he says, but “we had to sound the alarm.” The Boy Scouts had been compiling these files since the 1940s, never sharing the names with authorities or the public, he said, denouncing the organization for what he called a “system of denial and coverups.”

“Those ‘perversion files’ that they’ve had reflect that they have removed thousands of offenders of childhood sexual abuse over the years and they’ve kept that in files secretly,” Anderson said. Even now, the sheer quantity of victims and alleged offenders has only become public with the testimony of a child abuse expert hired by the Boy Scouts. The BSA was ordered to release over 20,000 pages of records in 2012, but those files only covered the years 1965 to 1985.

“We care deeply about all victims of child abuse and sincerely apologize to anyone who was harmed during their time in Scouting,” the organization said in a statement on Tuesday. “At no time have we ever knowingly allowed a perpetrator to work with youth, and we mandate that all leaders, volunteers and staff members nationwide immediately report any abuse allegation to law enforcement.

 

The Bloody History of Border Militias Runs Deep — And Law Enforcement Is Part of It

April 23, 2019

by Ryan Devereaux

The Intercept

Last week, American vigilantes captured hundreds of migrants — including women and small children — along a darkened stretch of the border in New Mexico. The group, calling itself the United Constitutional Patriots, or UCP, uploaded video of its score to Facebook. Illuminated by the fluorescent glow of flashlights, the shaky footage showed weary mothers, fathers, and toddlers kneeling in the dirt, heads bowed, as the armed men circled around them.

The migrants’ captors summoned the Border Patrol. The agents, once they arrived, offered no sign of concern at the masked men carrying AR-15s decorated with Punisher skulls. For others, however, the footage shot in Sunland Park was a chilling reflection of America in 2019. “We cannot allow racist and armed vigilantes to kidnap and detain people seeking asylum,” American Civil Liberties Union attorneys María Martínez Sánchez and Kristen Greer Love said in a letter. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham called the vigilante operations “unacceptable” and Democratic Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich said the UCP’s operations “cannot be tolerated.”

Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol, provided The Intercept and several other news organizations with the same statement when asked about the militia’s operations:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection does not endorse private groups or organizations taking enforcement matters into their own hands. Interference by civilians in law enforcement matters could have public safety and legal consequences for all parties involved. Border Security operations are complex and require highly trained professionals with adequate resources to protect the country. Border Patrol welcomes assistance from the community and encourages anyone who witnesses or suspects illegal activity to call 911, or the U.S. Border Patrol tip line.

While the government might not “endorse” the activities of border militias, it’s no secret that the “assistance” the Border Patrol “welcomes” has long included those groups. That’s perhaps due to the fact that the very creation of the border, and the genesis of American border policing, is rooted in a deep and bloody tradition of vigilantism.

A History of Frontier Violence

In the summer of 1986, approximately 20 heavily armed men in military fatigues stepped into the darkness of the Arizona desert. It was July Fourth weekend outside the remote border town of Lochiel and the gunmen were on the hunt. They were the Arizona branch of Civilian Materiel Assistance, or CMA, a racist and anti-communist paramilitary outfit that provided mercenary services to the U.S. government and the death squads it backed in Central America. Carrying M-16s and AK-47s, with Israeli night-vision goggles strapped to their heads, the vigilantes soon found what they were looking for: two carloads of Mexican nationals.

J.R. Hagen, the crucifix-wearing Vietnam veteran who led the operation, would later say that the vehicles came to a stop on their own. Other members of his team disagreed, telling reporters that they boobytrapped the road, tearing the tires of one of the vehicles to shreds before opening fire. It was the latest in a series of escalating CMA actions, which had also included clandestine forays into Mexico. The militia members held 16 men, women, and children at gunpoint for an hour and a half before Border Patrol agents arrived to take them away.

At the time, the nation was in one of its periodic bouts of heightened immigration and border security obsession. The Reagan administration’s dirty wars in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador were driving hundreds of thousands of refugees north. Arriving at the border, those refugees’ asylum claims were systematically — and illegally — denied by U.S. immigration officials. In response, a network of religious leaders in Tucson, the same town where Hagen and his CMA cronies were based, began smuggling asylum-seekers into the county by the hundreds and moving them to houses of worship. They called it the Sanctuary Movement and they provoked a far more aggressive response from U.S. law enforcement than the gun-toting extremists ever would.

More than 30 years later, the country is again divided on the question of how to respond to those seeking refuge, and amid a new influx of Central American asylum-seekers, border militias have once more entered the national discussion.

But there were border militias long before the CMA or UCP stalked the deserts of the Southwest. In a line that undersells the extraordinary levels of racist violence that have followed these groups, a 2006 Congressional Research Service, or CRS, report noted that “civilian patrols along the international border have existed in a wide variety of forms for at least 150 years.” The history of the West, and particularly the Southwest, is full of stories of white Americans taking the law into their own hands to beat back nonwhite populations. Those efforts have been routinely accompanied by tacit or active law enforcement support. The fabled Texas Rangers are one example.

“The Texas Rangers shaped and protected Anglo-America settlement,” historian Kelly Lytle Hernández wrote in her 2010 book, “Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol.” “They battled indigenous groups for dominance in the region, chased down runaway slaves who struck for freedom deep within Mexico, and settled scores with anyone who challenged the Anglo-American project in Texas. The Rangers proved particularly useful in helping Anglo-American landholders win favorable settlements of land and labor disputes with Texas Mexicans. Whatever the task, however, raw physical violence was the Rangers’ principal strategy.”

While the Texas Rangers, at their birth, operated under the color of law, they did so in concert with a broader Anglo-American effort to win the West that was rich with vigilante violence. The early years of the 20th century, from 1910 to 1920, were particularly bloody, with hundreds of Mexicans murdered and lynched in the Texas borderlands. “The dead included women and men, the aged and the young, long-time residents and recent arrivals,” says the Refusing to Forget project, an initiative started by a collective of border-based historians and researchers. “They were killed by strangers, by neighbors, by vigilantes and at the hands of local law enforcement officers and the Texas Rangers. Some were summarily executed after being taken captive, or shot under the flimsy pretext of trying to escape. Some were left in the open to rot, others desecrated by being burnt, decapitated, or tortured by means such as having beer bottles rammed into their mouths.”

Monica Muñoz Martinez, a historian at Brown University, author of “The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas” and co-founder of Refusing to Forget, told The Intercept that a “culture of impunity” allowed extralegal violence to flourish in South Texas. “Regardless of whether you’re a vigilante acting outside of the law, or you’re a state police officer or a local law enforcement officer practicing extralegal violence, people were not prosecuted,” she explained. “A culture of impunity allowed state police officers and local law enforcement in many instances to collaborate with vigilantes, but they wouldn’t have called them vigilantes. They would have said they were pulling together a posse.”

In 1924, a coalition of nativists and white power activists succeeded in getting the government to severely limit the number of immigrants admitted into the country. They failed, however, in getting the government to impose quotas on Mexico. Big agribusiness won that fight. Cheap and exploitable Mexican labor was too valuable to lose. Still, there was a bright side for the racist right. The Border Patrol was created that same year, marking the beginning of an agency that would evolve into one of the most technologically advanced and well-armed border security forces in human history. The first generation of agents were drawn from communities responsible for the previous decade of racist border violence. Many were recruited from the Texas Rangers and the Indian Wars rolling through the region at the time.

The work of those early generations formed the basis of a nostalgia that persists among agents to this day. “I often heard romanticized stories of ‘the old patrol,’ a lament for the days when agents had free rein across the borderlands, lighting abandoned cars on fire and ‘tuning up’ smugglers and migrants at will,” Francisco Cantú, a Border Patrol agent turned author, wrote recently. “As young trainees, my colleagues and I were taken to storied places in the desert — a remote pass where earlier generations of agents were rumored to have pushed migrants from clifftops and hidden their corpses, a stretch of road where an agent had run over a Native American lying drunk and asleep on the road, an isolated patch of scrubland where agents had force-fed smugglers fistfuls of marijuana and turned them loose to walk through the wilderness barefoot and stripped to their underwear.”

Despite all of this, no amount of state violence and border policing has ever been sufficient to satisfy all Americans, especially the racist ones.

A Tradition of Impunity

In the late 1970s, Louis Beam, a devout white power activist who boasted of killing communists as an Army helicopter pilot in Vietnam, built a paramilitary training camp on 50 acres of Texas swampland. Among Beam’s core projects was the Klan Border Watch, a new spin on the country’s oldest domestic terrorism organization that used military special operations tactics and training to target undocumented immigrants. “The patrols functioned both as a publicity stunt and as a way to inculcate real anti-immigrant hostility and encourage acts of violence,” Kathleen Belew, a historian at the University of Chicago, wrote in her 2018 book, “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.” Beam, whose camp trained hundreds of white power foot soldiers across multiple years, told reporters that his teams captured migrants in South Texas.

“When our government officials refuse to enforce the laws of the country, we will enforce them ourselves,” he said, articulating a justification that is still common among border militia members today.

In an interview on Monday with The Intercept, Belew said the history of vigilantism on the border is intimately entangled in the birth of U.S. border policing. “The blurry line between state and vigilante enforcement of the border goes back as long as there is a border,” she said. “In some ways, groups like the Border Patrol and the Texas Rangers come out of this tradition.” As for the militias’ oft-repeated claim that they are simply stepping in to help law enforcement do its job, Belew said those arguments ring hollow.

“Even as they are saying they are supporting the state, they are outfitting as paramilitary armies, carrying out violence against different kinds of people and doing a whole bunch of revolutionary actions that is fundamentally opposed to state sovereignty,” she explained. “That is not just neutrally carrying out the work of the state, even when they claim to be doing that.”

Though Beam’s Texas training camp was eventually shut down, paramilitary border militia operations continued to expand through the end of the 20th century. CMA took its operations even further. Not only did the organization’s Arizona chapter cross into Mexico, CMA mercenaries led by former Marine Tom Posey traveled to Nicaragua to provide weapons and support to the Contra forces waging war on the Sandinista government. “In Nicaragua, CMA acted covertly on behalf of the U.S. government — it was funded by the CIA and supplied by the U.S. military,” Belew noted. In 1984, a helicopter carrying CMA mercenaries was shot down over Nicaragua; two died, four escaped. “The helicopter crash was a precipitating event in the public’s discovery of the Iran-Contra scandal,” Belew wrote, exposing a scheme overseen by the Reagan administration and the CIA to circumvent Congress and the law by supplying the Contras with weapons and support, allowing the counterrevolutionaries to continue killing, torturing, and disappearing Nicaraguan men, women, and children by the thousands.

A decade after the scandal, the Border Patrol, under President Bill Clinton, embarked on a new strategy to secure the international divide with Mexico. Prevention Through Deterrence, as it was known, concentrated security infrastructure and personnel around key border cities, funneling migration flows into the Sonoran Desert. Virtually overnight, the number of migrants dying in the desert exploded. While the vast majority were killed by the elements, a handful of others died at the hands of border vigilantes and private citizens. “There’s a climate of violence that’s being created by the presence of armed agents, infrared sensors, helicopters with night-vision scopes and guns — a real sense from the U.S. government that there’s actually a war being waged,” Sasha Khokha of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, told the Los Angeles Times in 2000, following the killing of Eusebio de Haro, a Mexican migrant, who was gunned down by Texas rancher Sam Blackwood after asking for water. Blackwood was later convicted of a misdemeanor and ordered to pay a $4,000 fine.

According to CRS researchers who investigated border militias, the migration patterns created by Prevention Through Deterrence influenced the geographic dispersion of vigilante groups. Their report noted that the groups ranged from ranchers patrolling their property with armed volunteers to more organized paramilitary units. In 2005, the efforts of one of the groups, the so-called Minuteman Project, exploded into the national press. With nearly 1,000 volunteers, the Minuteman Project coincided with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the spiraling of an illegal war in Iraq, and a plummeting in public support for the Bush administration’s “global war on terrorism.” This, says New York University historian Greg Grandin, marked a critical turning point in the story of the border and the vigilantes who shaped it.

In his new book, “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America,” Grandin argues that the notion of a limitless frontier into which the nation could forever channel its aspirations and unload its demons has met its demise. Vigilantism was “central” to that historical arc, Grandin told me. “The Mexican-American War was basically the beginning of a kind of institutionalization of vigilantism against Mexicans and then what became Mexican Americans, and there was very little distinction between fighting that war then what later becomes settlement of the West, and then what later becomes vigilantism,” he said. “It’s a very fine line that separates all of this.”

Grandin contends that the mid-2000s explosion in border militia activity was a reflection of the Bush administration’s failed effort to continue outward expansion of the frontier. What followed in the wake of that failure was a rebirth in nativism and white power activism, visible from the Minutemen to their tea party successors, that helps to explain how the current occupants of the White House came to power. Following his 2004 re-election, Grandin writes, Bush borrowed a move from the Reagan playbook, putting “forth legislation that would further militarize the border but also allow, for those undocumented residents who qualified, a one-time path to citizenship.”

“The opposition to George W. Bush’s immigration reform started with all of these militia extremists and nativists extremists,” Grandin explained, revitalizing what he describes as the “old nativist caucus that was always latent within the Republican Party.” Bonded in opposition, this was the anti-immigrant wave that President Donald Trump would later ride in on. As Grandin put it, “the nativists took over the Republican Party,” and much of it was thanks to the politics of the militias wandering the border with their guns.

Dangerous Kooks

Over the weekend, New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas announced the arrest of Larry Mitchell Hopkins, the 69-year-old leader of the United Constitutional Patriots. “This is a dangerous felon who should not have weapons around children and families,” Balderas said in a statement. “Today’s arrest by the FBI indicates clearly that the rule of law should be in the hands of trained law enforcement officials, not vigilantes.” Court documents unsealed on Monday revealed that Hopkins had been on law enforcement’s radar since at least 2017, when the FBI learned that his group was “training to assassinate George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama because of these individuals’ support of Antifa.”

According to the complaint against Hopkins, a pair of FBI agents following up on a tip paid a visit to the Lakeside Ranch trailer park in Flora Vista, New Mexico, in October 2017. There they met with Hopkins, who also goes by the alias “Johnny Horton Jr.” and calls himself the “commander” of the UCP. Hopkins invited the agents into his “office” (a room in a trailer), where they observed “approximately 10 firearms leaning against the wall in a closet in plain view.” Hopkins reportedly said that the weapons belonged to his “common law wife.” Agents later discovered that the militia commander allegedly planning the murder of several prominent public figures had previously been twice convicted of illegally possessing a firearm, as well as impersonating a peace officer. The complaint offered no indication of a deeper investigation into Hopkins or the UCP following these revelations.

Hopkins’s lawyer, Kelly O’Connell, disputed the allegations in the complaint Monday, asking why, if his client was such a threat to the public, he wasn’t arrested sooner. It was a fair question.

While Hopkins’s arrest was welcome news to many, he was not arrested for being a vigilante, kidnapping migrants, or plotting assassinations. Like J.R. Hagen, the man who led CMA’s Arizona chapter in the 1980s, Hopkins was taken into custody on weapons charges. This is common in the history of the white power movement, Belew said. She cites two reasons for the lack of prosecutions targeting extremist militia members for their actual contributions to the cause. First, she said, there’s been a persistent problem of local law enforcement or prosecutors feeling sympathetic to the motivations of the accused. Second, she said, is the fact that “because this occurs on the border, the people that they are attacking are uniquely vulnerable.”

“We’re talking about a mass kidnapping and holding of people at gunpoint, hundreds of people,” Belew explained. “This is a shocking event that should be very easy to prosecute, but over and over again, you see these events prosecuted through things like firearms charges because there are not protections for the people who should be able to find justice.”

On top of all that, there’s the historic problem of the cases the state does choose to pour resources into — and the ones it does not. In the mid-1980s, federal authorities in southern Arizona launched a sprawling undercover investigation. The target was not the armed vigilantes accosting migrants in the desert, but rather the priests, nuns, and parishioners involved in the Sanctuary Movement. Informants were dispatched into houses of worship. Hundreds of hours of tape involving private conversations and sermons were secretly recorded. Sixteen members of the movement were charged with 71 counts of conspiracy related to their smuggling operations, which the movement had been public about since day one. Eight members of the movement were found guilty, though, amid an enormous public outcry, their sentences were largely probationary.

When footage of the UCP’s operations went viral last week, reporters and immigrant rights advocates were once again quick to question how federal law enforcement was using its resources on the border. Since coming into office, the Trump administration has aggressively prosecuted border-based humanitarian aid volunteers. Scott Warren, a volunteer with the faith-based organization No More Deaths, is currently facing 20 years in prison for providing food, water, and shelter to two undocumented men over three days in 2018. In January, four other No More Deaths volunteers were convicted of federal misdemeanors for leaving jugs of water for migrants crossing a remote federal wildlife refuge. While authorities have cracked down on humanitarian aid providers in Arizona, an Intercept investigation in February revealed a sprawling Department of Homeland Security intelligence-gathering operation in the San Diego-Tijuana area targeting journalists, immigration attorneys, and advocates working in close proximity to the migrant caravans that have drawn Trump’s outrage.

“Surveillance resources have always been disproportionately targeted at the left,” Belew said. While groups on both the political right and left have been targeted with undercover investigations, she added, “there are way more agents per capita on the left than the right, way more money, way more prosecutions, and way more surveillance that ends in violence.”

Mentioning militias to veteran border journalists or immigration advocates in places like southern Arizona often elicits an eye roll. While it might be a tantalizing story for an out-of-town reporter, prominent militia activists and groups are typically viewed as self-aggrandizing kooks who rely on the press to inflate their mystique and influence. It’s a generally understandable and often reasonable approach. At the same time, however, the bloody legacy of border vigilantism cannot be dismissed nor can the very real threat they pose today.

It was not that long ago — May 2009 — that Shawna Forde, Jason Eugene Bush, and Albert Robert Gaxiola entered a trailer in Arivaca, Arizona, in search of drugs and money to fund their “Minutemen American Defense” militia. Instead of drugs, the vigilantes found a family. Raul Flores Jr., 29, and his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia Ylianna Flores, were shot dead. Gina Gonzalez, Raul’s wife and Brisenia’s mother, was wounded but survived the attack. The impact of the killings reached deep into the tiny border community and lingers to this day. More recently still was the case of J.T. Ready, a former Marine and neo-Nazi leader of the “U.S. Border Guards,” who once boasted that his Arizona-based group was the “Minuteman Project on steroids,” armed with “assault weapons” and ready to “use lawful, deadly force when appropriate.” In May 2012, Ready killed himself, but not before murdering his girlfriend, her daughter, her 15-month-old granddaughter, and another man. Inside Ready’s home, investigators found two handguns, a shotgun, and six grenades. Following the murder-suicide, the FBI revealed that Ready was the subject of an ongoing domestic terrorism investigation, though no action had been taken against him.

Downplaying the dangers militias pose carries significant risk, Belew said — risk that will be borne by vulnerable migrants in remote places in the desert. “Since the 1990s, the prevailing understanding of militias is that they are somehow more neutral than a group like the Klan or neo-Nazis or even the Minutemen,” she explained. “That’s maybe partly because they look like police or they look like they are helping law enforcement in various moments, but militias are actually part of this very, very extremist social movement that includes a whole bunch of people who are not neutral.”

 

Encyclopedia of American Loons

Coleman Rogers

We are not even going to begin to try to explain the details (see this) of this grand unified conspiracy theory, meme and wingnut delusion, but it did at least emerge from a series of incoherent posts on 4chan in 2017 by someone calling themselves QAnon or Q. Through conspiratorial bullshit, paranoia and deep state fearmongering, Q’s cryptic messages have led to the creation of a remarkable, complex structure of nonsense that still enjoys a (relatively small) group of thoroughly insane followers – or more precisely: the conspiracy works by Q leaving a couple of vague, nonsensical “crumbs” (“[m]any sound like they were written by Deepak Chopra channeling Alex Jones”) that commenters freely use to build whatever insane web of delusions they wish to build. Now, who exactly is behind the conspiracy theory (schema) is unclear, but a couple of promoters (in additional to an unknown number of Russian bots) have been identified, such as Coleman Rogers, known as Pamphlet Anon on his youtube videos and InfoWars appearance.

Rogers’s career took off after Reddit shut down the QAnon Reddit board in April 2018 due to “encouraging or inciting violence and posting personal and confidential information”. Rogers and his wife Christina Urso subsequently launched a plan to replace mainstream media (often a target of Q’s posts) with a continuously streaming YouTube network made up of self-described “researchers” putting together Q’s clues, called the Patriots’ Soapbox. The channel is more or less a continuous broadcast of a Discord chatroom with audio commentary from various volunteers and moderators, including calls for donations. It is, of course, utterly ludicrous; you can search it out yourself; we’re not providing any links.

Rogers has a background as zealous participant in an internet “meme war” where he would claim e.g. that liberals murder children and worship Satan, notions that are currently central to the QAnon mythology. Now, Rogers denies knowledge of who Q is, or that he himself might be Q. Suspicions that he has more insider information than he let on to abound, however. Meanwhile, other wingnut conspiracy theorists have accused him of being part of a deep state conspiracy. So it goes.

Diagnosis: It remains very much unclear whether Rogers believes any of the QAnon stuff or not (or whether he cares). He is nevertheless a serious loon, and one who has actually managed to gain some influence over mostly angry, older and less internet-savvy tinfoil hatters.

Roger Patterson

Roger Patterson is one of the creation “scientists” affiliated with Answers in Genesis. Patterson has no background in science, of course – otherwise he would not have had that job – but he knows how to swamp his writings with Bible quotes, and that is what matters.

Indeed, it is, for Patterson and the AiG, explicitlyall that matters. It is instructive to look at how Patterson and the AiG think critical thinking works. As he states in his writeup of how to do critical thinking, AiG-style: “To really determine what is true and what is false requires that you test everything in light of the only source of ultimate truth – God’s Word.” Indeed, “[w]hen we look to God’s Word as the standard for understanding truth, we have a solid foundtion from which to begin applying critical thinking to claims we hear. Further, God does not leave us alone in this endeavor. He has given us the Holy Spirit to guide us and other believers to support us. Working together with the body of Christ from a biblical framework and empowered by the Holy Spirit, you can discern truth from lies, even in areas where you may not be an expert, by asking the right critical thinking questions.” The questions are:

–      What is this person’s Authority to make such a claim?

–      From what Starting point is this person looking at the world?

–      How do they Know what they claim to know?

And the answer to the questions should be Scripture, of course. To determine whether someone has the relevant authority, look at whether they have a Biblical worldview. And the starting pointshould be the Word of God (“Ultimately, these are the only two options –  you either trust God or you trust man. Although humanistic philosophy must borrow ideas from a Christian worldview in order to make logical arguments, it is very dangerous to make human reasoning the absolute standard.”) As for the how do they know, “the knowledge claim must be compared to the truth of God’s Word. If the truth claim disagrees with a clear meaning of Scripture, it must be rejected.” In short, critical thinking AiG style involves neither criticalnor thinking. But it is probably in this light you should understand creationists’ argument that creationism should be taught in science class alongside evolution to promote critical thinking.

Here is Patterson discussing creationist debate tactics and how you should try to subvert a discussion of science to give you an opportunity to talk about God, essentially by pointing out that science doesn’t yield absolute certainty but God’s word does. With evolution and the origin of the universe, you see, we have no eyewitness testimony, and to Patterson it is incomprehensible how we can know anything without someone observing it directly. In short, he fully and completely reject using scientific methods to figure stuff out and seem unaware of the idea – science – of testing hypotheses about the unobserved by its observable consequences. It’s telling.

Nevertheless, Patterson wrote a Chapter on “What is Science?” for his AiG’s online creationist resource Evolution Exposed – Biology. It is, needless to say, a thoroughly confused document. To write The Evolution Exposed series, Patterson “got copies of the three major biology textbooks used in most public school systems across America,” then “carefully went through each of them and noted every place where there’s a reference to millions of years and evolution, […] researched the evolutionary claims [using AiG-approved resources, presumably], and then read hundreds of articles and contacted experts in their fields [remember, from above, Patterson’s point about authority] to ensure he’d write the best rebuttals possible.” The series is marketed as “your evolution answer-book for the classroom;” that is, the point is that students using any of the most popular textbooks can now go online and get AiG’s responses to the most unbiblical passages. Here is a summary of Chapter 2 on the Big Bang.

Together with one Joseph Paturi, Patterson is also the author of AiG’s guide to World Religions and Cults Volume 2, What Is Hinduism and Hare Krishna?(“they are ultimately pursuing salvation through vain means – denying Jesus as the Savior and only source of salvation for fallen men” – Patterson has a curious fondness for the word “ultimately”), which is typical of their guides to World Religions.

Here is Patterson demonstrating that Earth is approximately 6000 years old, and not billions of years. The point is that using science to get billions of years is hard; using the Bible to get 6000 is easy. Therefore 6000 is correct. Moreover, scientific calculations depend on “assumptions [that are] unreliable and totally disagrees with the Bible. We are talking about thousands versus billions – that’s more than a rounding error.” Indeed it is.

The Roger Patterson in question is presumably not identical to (apparently long deceased) Roger Patterson, one of the originators of the modern Bigfoot myth.

Diagnosis: A very typical example of his ilk, really, and a fine illustration of the standard creationist combo – completely failing to understand the basics of science makes science look to them like a form of witchcraft, which they promptly fear and hate.

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

April 24, 2019

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, on 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 the 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 out 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 its 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.

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 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 publication.

Conversation No. 62

Date: Tuesday, February 4, 1997

Commenced:  8:45 AM CST

Concluded:  9:30 AM CST

 

GD: Feeling a little better, Robert?

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

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

RTC: What do they want?

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

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

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

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

GD: Of course they have.

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

GD: And the burning would commence.

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

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

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

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

RTC: Go ahead.

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

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

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

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

GD: You weren’t planning to off him, were you?

RTC: No, but we did get him out of the Oval Office.

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

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

GD: What did Nixon do to you?

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

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

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

GD: I have plenty of time.

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

GD: There have been stories around about that.

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

GD: Angleton?

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

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

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

GD: And they called in their markers?

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

GD: The Air American thing?

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

GD: That stopped the drugs?

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

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

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

GD: Of course. You weren’t involved, were you?

RTC: In what? Removing these dangerous people? In some cases. I had nothing directly to do with the drugs. That was mostly Angleton.

GD: He muse have gotten rich.

RTC: Not really.

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

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

GD: And now did you do it?

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

GD: No wonder they call the stuff powdered happiness.

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

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

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

GD: And so has Ford.

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

GD: No, of course not.

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

GD: Got it loud and clear.

 

(Concluded at 9:30 AM CST)

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Conversations+with+the+Crow+by+Gregory+Douglas

Whistleblower detection methodology

Note: Because of the high degree of top-level leaks of important initelligence information, the following bulletin was circulated on March 22, 2019, to all agencies dealing in domestic and foreign intgelligence matters

Reporting of Counterintelligence and Security Indicators by Supervisors and Coworkers

COUNTERINTELLIGENCE REPORTING ESSENTIALS (CORE)

A Practical Guide for Reporting Counterintelligence and Security Indicators

Defense Personnel Security Research Center (PERSEREC).B-4

INTRODUCTION

Supervisors and coworkers are the first line of defense against espionage. The government relies on you to protect national security by reporting any behavior that you observe that may be related to a potential compromise of classified information. You are encouraged, sometimes obliged, by Executive Order,

Presidential Decision Directive and U.S. Code, as well as by DoD Directives,

Regulations, Instructions, to report such behaviors. However, judgment calls are often required by the potential reporter, and this often leads to indecision or choosing not to report anything.

Therefore, presented below is a focused list of serious counterintelligence- and security-related behaviors that, if observed or learned about, should be reported immediately to appropriate counterintelligence or security authorities. All these behaviors are serious and require little or no speculation.

Upon receiving your report, a security professional will follow up with appropriate verification. If you are at all uncertain, it is better to err on the side of reporting than not. The counterintelligence and security people will know how to handle your report.

The list of behaviors is not intended to be exhaustive. You should report any additional observed behaviors that may parallel or exceed the concerns listed in this brochure.

The brochure can be used by supervisors, coworkers, and security professionals in initial and refresher briefings and in counterintelligence briefings. By concentrating on direct counterintelligence- and security- related behavior, personnel in the field are likely to develop a better understanding of exactly what to report and a greater commitment to reporting it.

BACKGROUND

The Defense Personnel Security Research Center (PERSEREC) conducted research on how employees with clearance access understand the requirements to report suspicious behavior that they observe.

Finding: Supervisors and coworkers are willing to report on behaviors that have a clear connection to security, such as transmitting classified documents to unauthorized personnel, but they are unwilling to report on colleagues’ personal problems, such as alcohol abuse. Because it was difficult to discern which reporting requirements were clearly related to security, there was very little reporting.

Outcome: PERSEREC, in collaboration with counterintelligence professionals, developed a clear, succinct list of “Coworker Reporting Essentials” (CORE) behaviors that could pose a possible threat to national security and thus should be reported if observed. The draft CORE was reviewed and edited by counterintelligence professionals at the Counterintelligence Field Activity

(CIFA), and was coordinated by the DoD Investigative Working Group

(IWG).

PERSEREC also coordinated with the DoD Counterintelligence Directorate in the Office of the Under Secretary for Defense (Intelligence), who included the PERSEREC CORE list in DoD Instruction 5240.6, Counterintelligence

Awareness, Briefing, and Reporting Programs.

*Wood, S., & Marshall-Mies, J.C. (2003). Improving supervisor and coworker reporting of minformation of security concern. Monterey, CA: Defense Personnel Security Research Center..B-6

RECRUITMENT

Foreign intelligence entities are on the lookout for people who can be solicited to commit espionage against the U.S. At the same time, willing would-be spies often approach foreign intelligence operatives on their own initiative, thus volunteering for recruitment. It is a major task of counterintelligence tointercept these relationships. The recruitment cycle requires, first, that contact be established between the foreign intelligence agency and the potential spy, whether by direct recruitment or by volunteering. While the recruitment relationship almost always involves contacts with foreigners, an already-committed

U.S. spy may approach you or a colleague on the job for recruitment into espionage.

Reportable Behaviors

• . . you become aware of a colleague having contact with an individual who is known to be, or is suspected of being, associated with a foreign intelligence, security, or terrorist organization.
• . . you discover that a colleague has not reported an offer of financial assistance by a foreign national other than close family.
• . . you find out that a colleague has failed to report a request for classified or unclassified information outside official channels to a foreign national or anyone without authorization or need to know.
• . . you become aware of a colleague engaging in illegal activity or if a colleague asks you to engage in any illegal activity.

COUNTERINTELLIGENCE

REPORTING ESSENTIALS (CORE)

If you become aware of any of the following behaviors or activities, you should report them to your security officer or supervisor. These behaviors are derived from the DoD Instruction 5240.6 Counterintelligence Awareness, Briefing, and

Reporting Programs..B-7

INFORMATION COLLECTION

Before classified or other kinds of sensitive materials can be passed to a foreign intelligence agency, they must be collected. They can simply be stolen

(e.g., paper placed in a briefcase and taken out of the office), photographed, collected via computers, or obtained through eavesdropping or other surveillance devices. The computer age, with its e-mail and database capabilities, has offered new opportunities to potential spies for collecting data.

While technical countermeasures can control some situations, it is up to coworkers to watch for and, if possible, identify breaches in the system that allow classified and sensitive information to be collected for espionage purposes.

Reportable Behaviors

• . . a colleague asks you to obtain classified or other protected information in any format to which the person does not have authorized access.
• . . a colleague asks you to witness signatures for destruction of classified information when you did not observe the destruction.
• . . you observe a colleague operating unauthorized cameras, recording ,devices, computers, or modems in areas where classified data are stored, discussed, or processed.
• . . you become aware of the existence of any listening or surveillance devices in sensitive or secure areas.
• . . you find out that a colleagues has been keeping classified material at home

or any other unauthorized place.

• . . you discover a colleague acquiring access to classified or unclassified automated information systems without authorization. • . . you observe a colleague seeking to obtain access to sensitive ,information inconsistent with present duty requirements..B-8

INFORMATION TRANSMITTAL

In former days the transmittal of classified or sensitive information took the form o stealing documents and physically handing them to the foreign intelligence agent. In addition, spies could photocopy paper materials, smuggle materials out in briefcases, even illicitly take photographs in the workplace. Nowadays, there are many more opportunities to transmit information. With the advent of e-mail, faxes, and other technological capabilities, it is possible to transmit large quantities of information without being immediately caught. Coworkers must be aware of this problem and, if an illicit transmission is detected, report it directly and immediately to the designated cognizant counterintelligence or security authorities.

Once a relationship with a foreign intelligence agent is established and information begins to flow, illicit trips abroad by the recruited spy usually follow (meetings are easier to arrange abroad than in the U.S.). These journeys are often concealed by the person and the foreign contact is not reported. If you learn of such journeys or contacts, you should report.

Reportable Behaviors

• . . you see someone removing classified material from the work area without appropriate authorization, either by physically taking it home or on travel, or by e-mailing or faxing it out of the office. The same rule applies for mother protected materials, such as export-controlled or proprietary items.
• . . you observe a colleague using unclassified FAX or computer to transmit classified material.
• . . you observe a person improperly removing the classification markings from documents.
• . . you hear a colleague discussing classified information on a nonsecure telephone.
• . . you become aware that people with TS/SCI or contractors with a reporting requirement have attempted to conceal any work-related foreign travel and any personal foreign travel..B-9

SUSPICIOUS BEHAVIORS

The new DoD Instruction 5240.6, Counterintelligence (CI) Awareness,

Briefing, and Reporting Programs (August 7, 2004) lists an additional series of eight items that, while not exactly clear-cut violations, have been traditionally considered behaviors that may well be connected to counterintelligence and security problems. These behaviors do require some degree of judgment before reporting. Often you might not know about them directly but only by hearsay.

Often they may easily carry plausible alternative explanations. They are included here with the caveat that they do require a judgment call before reporting. If you are at all uncertain, it is better to report the behavior than to make no report at all.

• Attempts to expand access to classified information by repeatedly volunteering for assignments or duties beyond the normal scope of responsibilities.
• Extensive use of copy, facsimile, or computer equipment to reproduce or transmit classified material that may exceed job requirements.
• Repeated or un-required work outside of normal duty hours, especially unaccompanied.
• Unexplained or undue affluence, including sudden purchases of high value items (e.g., real estate, stocks, vehicles, or vacations) where no logical income source exists. Attempt to explain wealth by reference to inheritance, luck in gambling, or some successful business venture.
• Sudden reversal of financial situation or sudden repayment of large debts or loans.
• Attempts to entice DoD personnel into situations that could place them in a compromising position.
• Attempts to place DoD personnel under obligation through special treatment, favors, gifts, money, or other means.
• Short trips to foreign countries or travel within the United States to cities with foreign diplomatic activities for reasons that appear unusual or inconsistent with a person’s interests or financial means.

 

CIA brochure, “Why We Care: A Guide for Understanding Suitability and CI

Indicators” (FOUO)

• DIA brochure, “Plenty of Excuses But No Good Reasons”
• DIA brochure, “Countering Espionage”
• DISA Newcomers’ Briefing
• DSS’s “Suspicious Indicators and Security Countermeasures for Foreign

Collection Activities Directed against the U.S. Defense Industry”

• DOE brochure, “Counterintelligence in our Changing World”
• DOE brochure, “Clues to Spotting a Spy”
• FBI “Security Handbook”
• Navy “Security Awareness Chronicle”
• NCIS list, “Indicators of Espionage”
• NIMA “MSSR,” unclassified video briefing on espionage, recruitment, security, reporting requirements, etc.
• NSA booklet, “Foreign Intelligence Recruitment Approaches”
• State Department’s booklet, “Counterintelligence for the 1990s and Beyond”

Each agency mentioned above had its own perspective on the subject of CI awareness programs, producing guides, learning tools, manuals, studies, handbooks, brochures and booklets that contain all the indicators and behaviors that agencies have considered to be of CI concern. Review of the above documents provided background and a pool of information from which PERSEREC researchers could draw as they prepared the draft CORE list. Researchers were able to cull items from the above publications and re-arrange them in a more systematic way that would make sense to employees in the field.