TBR News April 30, 2011

Apr 30 2011

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C.  April 29, 2011: “I have been offline on this blog for almost a month. Our Mr/ Weber has been putting out our ‘Slaughterhouse Informer’ while I have been working on a major project outside the United States. One of my contacts in Germany proposed that I might be interested in a very important portion of Mr. Assange’s purloined cables. It seems that this enormous trove was split up at one time, for security reasons, and what my contact had control of was very explosive. The previous releases have caused great diplomatic problems, and in the case of certain Muslim countries, serious domestic upheavals that are still boiling. This particular fundus deals almost entirely with CIA operations globally. I note in passing that the unfortunate Bradley Manning had nothing to do with this issue and, from what I have learned, is a patsy and was being tormented by the military to make statements exculpating the government agencies involved in the initial leaks and putting the blame on others. What I have been reading over for the past 30 days deals with the CIA, its field operations and its political manipulations in Washington. Their connections with the American business community and their shadow deals in the drug field are legion and beyond belief. The Company washes its hands in many waters and they have killed more innocent people than the Dresden raid, toppled governments, murdered opponents. Fomented revolutions (such as the Ukraine ‘Orange Revolution’ murdered half of the Polish government in a rigged plane crash they had hoped to blame on the Russians and many, many more wholesome activities in defense of their, and their friends, pocketbooks. I cannot publish actual documents because they are highly classified but I can, and will, comment on them  as soon as the cataloging is complete. It’s going to be fun for some….but not for all!”

Julian Assange to RT: Worst WikiLeaks cables yet to come

April 29, 2011

Russia Today
The man behind WikiLeaks says his website’s revelations are just the tip of the iceberg. In an exclusive interview with RT, Julian Assange said it is only a matter of time before more damaging information becomes known. The publication of confidential cables proved deeply embarrassing for the US and other countries.

“If we look at our work over the last 12 moths, think about that. All these stories that have come out actually happened in the world, before 2010, but people didn’t know about it. So what is it that we don’t know about now? There’s an enormous hidden world out there that we don’t know about. It exists there right now.”

Assange claims the data released by WikiLeaks is not even the most important and calls on people not to believe that the information they receive from the media is all that is happening. “We only released secret, classified, confidential material. We didn’t have any top secret cables. The really embarrassing stuff, the really serious stuff wasn’t in our collection to release. But it is still out there.” Watch the full version of that interview with Julian Assange, on Monday on RT.

WikiLeaks: The Israel file

Out of the 250,000 secret U.S. documents that Haaretz has obtained, 10,000 are particularly important vis-à-vis Israel. While their contents do not constitute any serious security threat per se, they do reveal some startling attitudes – on the part of both local leaders and their interlocutors.

by Yossi Melman and Sefy Hendler

Haaretz

The flutter of a butterfly’s wings that led to the biggest storm in the history of modern diplomacy began in the deserts of Iraq. Private 1st Class Bradley Manning, a computer expert who was serving at a secret U.S. Army base about 50 kilometers from Baghdad, was responsible for the first, imperceptible movement. Out of boredom or perhaps ideological motives ‏(the desire to expose the injustices of the American occupation‏), he is alleged to have downloaded a quarter-of-a-million secret State Department documents onto two discs that also contained Lady Gaga songs and given them to Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks site.

Assange gave this mountain of documents to a few newspapers in various countries and the imperceptible breeze became a storm that is still shaking capitals and leaders. Indeed, many people attribute the fall of Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali to the publication of the American cables dealing with his and his wife’s terrible corruption.

The flutter of a butterfly’s wings that led to the biggest storm in the history of modern diplomacy began in the deserts of Iraq. Private 1st Class Bradley Manning, a computer expert who was serving at a secret U.S. Army base about 50 kilometers from Baghdad, was responsible for the first, imperceptible movement. Out of boredom or perhaps ideological motives ‏(the desire to expose the injustices of the American occupation‏), he is alleged to have downloaded a quarter-of-a-million secret State Department documents onto two discs that also contained Lady Gaga songs and given them to Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks site.

Assange gave this mountain of documents to a few newspapers in various countries and the imperceptible breeze became a storm that is still shaking capitals and leaders. Indeed, many people attribute the fall of Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali to the publication of the American cables dealing with his and his wife’s terrible corruption.

The flutter of a butterfly’s wings that led to the biggest storm in the history of modern diplomacy began in the deserts of Iraq. Private 1st Class Bradley Manning, a computer expert who was serving at a secret U.S. Army base about 50 kilometers from Baghdad, was responsible for the first, imperceptible movement. Out of boredom or perhaps ideological motives ‏(the desire to expose the injustices of the American occupation‏), he is alleged to have downloaded a quarter-of-a-million secret State Department documents onto two discs that also contained Lady Gaga songs and given them to Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks site.

Assange gave this mountain of documents to a few newspapers in various countries and the imperceptible breeze became a storm that is still shaking capitals and leaders. Indeed, many people attribute the fall of Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali to the publication of the American cables dealing with his and his wife’s terrible corruption. With the first publication of part of the cache of documents last November, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hastened to draw conclusions. The first, which was indeed supported by the documents, was that most Middle East leaders had adopted Israel’s claim that Iran is the biggest threat to stability in the region. The documents revealed that in their conversations with American ambassadors, leaders of several Arab countries supported the idea of a military attack on Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.

“In our region,” said Netanyahu proudly, “they are prisoners of a narrative of 60 years of propaganda, in which Israel is depicted as the greatest danger to the region. For the first time in history, there is agreement that Iran is the threat.”

Netanyahu’s second conclusion from the biggest information leak in history seems to have less of a basis. “Israel has not been harmed at all by the publication in WikiLeaks,” said the prime minister a few days after the publication. “Every Israeli leader over the years has known that cables are liable to leak and therefore we adapted ourselves to the reality of leaks. This influences whom I bring into meetings and what I say in meetings.”

Until now a great deal of WikiLeaks material about the Middle East has indeed been published, but little of it has dealt directly with Israel. In the months that have passed since the original publication, rumors have spread to the effect that Assange had worked hand in hand with Israel to prevent exposure of embarrassing material about it. Proponents of such a conspiracy theory held that Assange is in fact a Mossad agent, or that he met ‏(in Geneva, in November 2010‏) with Mossad people and plotted the intrigue with them.

These are baseless rumors. The reason for the small amount of information about Israel is known to anyone familiar with the media world. The media outlets with which Assange was in contact preferred to focus on documents connected to their own countries: The Guardian focused on Britain, Der Spiegel on Germany, Le Monde on France and, of course, The New York Times on America.

A few weeks ago about 250,000 of the documents WikiLeaks holds, amounting to nearly 30 million words, came into the hands of Haaretz. Yossi Melman, who has been covering intelligence affairs for decades, along with other members of the editorial staff, embarked on a search for what might be called “the Israel file.” This file includes nearly 10,000 documents. Many were sent from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, but there is also quite a bit of material originating at the State Department in Washington and at other American embassies.

The documents are sorted into three categories of secrecy: “unclassified,” covering mainly press summaries, “confidential” and “secret.” Documents classified “top secret” were not fed into the State Department system and were restricted to a very limited distribution. In retrospect, the American administration has no regrets about such a strict procedure.

The documents of the WikiLeaks Israel file do not damage Israel’s national security per se. The names of agents are not revealed in them, they do not detail plans for military actions and they contain no information liable to endanger human lives. From reading them, it emerges clearly that even in secret meetings Israel’s representatives − including Military Intelligence officers, the Shin Bet security service and the Mossad − took care not to share deep secrets with their American interlocutors.

The documents deal with situation assessments and other information from several years back. The whole defense and intelligence establishment must always act as if prepared for the worst-case scenario. If the documents are now in the hands of a number of media outlets, and hundreds of reporters and editors have access to them , it is necessary to proceed as though they have also come into the hands of antagonists and enemies.

Nevertheless, in the work of editing we have censored ourselves. We have taken care not to expose individuals who are liable to be endangered if their names are mentioned. More than the revelation of security secrets of one sort or another, what interested us was to examine whether officeholders in Israel and abroad speak differently in private than they do publicly.

From the selection of documents we have chosen to publish today, it emerges that vis-a-vis an ambassador or his envoys, an official’s tone may change. The ruler of an Arab country that does not have official relations with Israel would not dare publicly acknowledge his country has “security relations” with it; Chief of Staff Yoav Galant would never repeat publicly, or even in a closed discussion in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, things that he told the Americans about the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip.

Sometimes there is in fact a huge gap between what leaders and officials say to the people of their country, and what they say in secret to representatives of the United States. Most noteworthy of all is the head of the Yesha Council of settlements, Danny Dayan, who will have to explain to his public why there is such a large gap between the positions he takes in public and what he has said to the Americans. Histadrut labor federation chairman Ofer Eini is also seen as someone who brags confidently to the American ambassador.

The way representatives of Peace Now speak with the Americans merits examination, too, and even more so the reports of the close relationship between them and the Israeli Defense Ministry. According to the documents, at least, the tremendous official mechanism used by Israel in controlling the territories for more than 40 years now needs the assistance of an extra-governmental organization in order to know what is happening in the outposts in the West Bank.

This is strange and worrisome.

And there is Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, with the extraordinary assessments he gives to the American ambassador. And French President Nicholas Sarkozy, Netanyahu’s best friend in Europe, who is revealed as someone not prepared to closet himself alone with the Israeli prime minister, even for a short time.

What is published here today and what will be published in the coming days is but a drop in the ocean of secret information from the State Department’s files. However, as soon as these things came into our hands, we saw fit to bring this drop before the public in Israel. This is a newspaper’s basic commitment to its public of readers.

Haaretz WikiLeaks exclusive / ‘Hezbollah expected to launch 100 missiles a day at Tel Aviv’

Israel expects next war against Hezbollah to be much more painful, leaked cables reveal, with 24,000 to 36,000 rockets and missiles expected to be launched at Israel.

by Yossi Melman

Haaretz

Israel expects the next war against Hezbollah will last two months, during which 24,000 to 36,000 rockets and missiles are expected to be launched at Israel − about 6,000 of them aimed at Tel Aviv, Wikileaks documents reveal.

Telegrams sent from the U.S. Embassy summing up talks between American and Israeli officials in November 2009 cite a Mossad official as saying Hezbollah is expected to launch 400-600 missiles at Israel a day − 100 of which will be aimed at Tel Aviv, over the course of two months.

The talks were held between American and Israeli defense and intelligence officials in Israel, as part of the strategic dialogue between the countries entitled the Joint Political Military Group, which was established in 1983. The American delegation was headed by State Department official Robert Maggi and the Israeli delegation was headed by then-Defense Ministry Director General Pinhas Buchris.

This was the group’s fourth meeting. On November 18 the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv sent the first of four telegrams summarizing the talks, which spanned various issues including the Iranian nuclear program, the situation in Iraq and Gaza, Israel-Egypt relations, the peace process with the Palestinians and Israel’s future war with Hezbollah.

“The IDF and Israel Defense Intelligence argued that Hezbollah’s ultimate goal during any future conflict is to launch a massive number of missiles and rockets daily into Israeli territory, including those that can reach the Tel Aviv area,” the telegram said.

“Defense officials highlighted the continued desire by Hezbollah to avenge the assassination of its former military commander Imad Mughniyah, and pointed to failed attempts to do so in Azerbaijan and Egypt.”

The Israelis argued “smuggling [from Syria and Iran to Hezbollah] represents a strategic challenge for Israel … and is severely limiting its diplomatic options for peace.”

The Israelis said that since the Second Lebanon War Hezbollah “increased its quantity of sophisticated arms with improved range and accuracy.”

Military Intelligence officers presented estimates of Hezbollah’s arsenal in Lebanon. “Hezbollah possesses over 20,000 rockets, hundreds of 220 mm and 302 mm rockets, several hundred Fajr rockets, hundreds of simple anti-tank ‏(AT‏) launchers with rockets and missiles, and hundreds of advanced anti-tank wire guided missiles ‏(ATGM‏), dozens of SA-14, SA-7 and QW-1 anti-aircraft guns, several Ababil unmanned aerial vehicles ‏(UAVs‏), an unknown quantity of C-802 coastal missiles and up to thousands of improvised explosive devices ‏(IEDs‏).”

An Israeli officer said “Hezbollah was preparing for a long conflict with Israel in which it hopes to launch a massive number of rockets at Israel per day.”

“In the 2006 Second Lebanon War, Tel Aviv was left untouched − Hezbollah will try to change the equation during the next round and disrupt everyday life in Tel Aviv,” the officer is quoted as saying.

A Mossad official said “Hezbollah will want to ensure it can launch rockets and missiles to the very last day of the conflict … Hezbollah will try to launch 400-600 rockets and missiles at Israel per day − 100 of which will be aimed at Tel Aviv … [and] sustain such launches for at least two months.”

This means Israel expects a war that would last up to two months, during which 24,000 to 36,000 rockets and missiles would be launched into its territory, about 6,000 of them aimed at Tel Aviv.

An argument erupted between the Israeli and American officials about the American arms supplies to the Lebanese Armed Forces, also known as the Lebanese Army. The Israelis complained about it, saying they could fall into Hezbollah’s hands. The Americans said the aid to the LAF was intended to prevent it from growing closer to Hezbollah and stressed the “U.S. support of the LAF as a counterweight to Hezbollah.”

Amos Gilad, director of policy and political-military affairs at the Defense Ministry, completely disagreed with this approach. He said “the Lebanese Army will come to the defense of Hezbollah if attacked by Israel. Thus, a strengthened LAF hurts Israel.”

This was not mentioned in the discussions, but at the time foreign media reported that an Israeli spy ring had been captured in Lebanon. The Lebanese government said it had caught dozens of Lebanese nationals − some of them former senior military and intelligence officers − following cooperation between Hezbollah and Lebanese intelligence. The suspects had confessed they had spied for Israel and some of them were sentenced to death.

In Shift, Egypt Warms to Iran and Hamas, Israel’s Foes

April 28, 2011

by David D. Kirkpatrick
New York Times

CAIRO — Egypt is charting a new course in its foreign policy that has already begun shaking up the established order in the Middle East, planning to open the blockaded border with Gaza and normalizing relations with two of Israel and the West’s Islamist foes, Hamas and Iran.

Egyptian officials, emboldened by the revolution and with an eye on coming elections, say that they are moving toward policies that more accurately reflect public opinion. In the process they are seeking to reclaim the influence over the region that waned as their country became a predictable ally of Washington and the Israelis in the years since the 1979 peace treaty with Israel.

The first major display of this new tack was the deal Egypt brokered Wednesday to reconcile the secular Palestinian party Fatah with its rival Hamas. “We are opening a new page,” said Ambassador Menha Bakhoum, spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry. “Egypt is resuming its role that was once abdicated.”

Egypt’s shifts are likely to alter the balance of power in the region, allowing Iran new access to a previously implacable foe and creating distance between itself and Israel, which has been watching the changes with some alarm. “We are troubled by some of the recent actions coming out of Egypt,” said one senior Israeli official, citing a “rapprochement between Iran and Egypt” as well as “an upgrading of the relationship between Egypt and Hamas.”

“These developments could have strategic implications on Israel’s security,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the issues were still under discussion in diplomatic channels. “In the past Hamas was able to rearm when Egypt was making efforts to prevent that. How much more can they build their terrorist machine in Gaza if Egypt were to stop?”

Israel had relied on Egypt’s help to police the border with Gaza, where arms and other contraband were smuggled to Hamas through tunnels.

Balancing its new independence against its old allegiances, Egypt is keeping all its commitments, including the peace treaty with Israel, Ambassador Bakhoum emphasized, and she said that it hoped to do a better job complying with some human rights protocols it had signed.

But she said that the blockade of the border with Gaza and Egypt’s previous enforcement of it were both “shameful,” and that Egypt intended soon to open up the border “completely.”

At the same time, she said, Egypt is also in the process of normalizing its relations with Iran, a regional power that the United States considers a dangerous pariah.

“All the world has diplomatic relations with Iran with the exception of the United States and Israel,” Ambassador Bakhoum said. “We look at Iran as a neighbor in the region that we should have normal relations with. Iran is not perceived as an enemy as it was under the previous regime, and it is not perceived as a friend.”

Several former diplomats and analysts said that by staking out a more independent path, Egypt would also regain a measure of power that came with the flexibility to bestow or withhold support.

If Egypt believes Israel’s refusal to halt settlements in the West Bank is the obstacle to peace, for example, then “cooperating with the Israelis by closing the border to Gaza did not make sense, as much as one may differ with what Hamas has done,” argued Nabil Fahmy, dean of the public affairs school at the American University in Cairo and a former Egyptian ambassador to the United States.

Many Egyptian analysts, including some former officials and diplomats who served under then-President Hosni Mubarak, say they are thrilled with the shift. “This is the new feeling in Egypt, that Egypt needs to be respected as a regional power,” said Emad Gad, a foreign policy expert on relations with Israel at the official Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

Egypt is recognizing Hamas, he said, for the same reason the Egyptian prime minister recently had breakfast with his family at a public restaurant without heavily armed body guards: any official who wants to stay in government is thinking about elections. “This is a new thing in Egyptian history,” Mr. Gad said.

Mahmoud Shokry, a former Egyptian ambassador to Syria under Mr. Mubarak, said: “Mubarak was always taking sides with the U.S., but the new way of thinking is entirely different. We would like to make a model of democracy for the region, and we are ensuring that Egypt has its own influence.”

In the case of Iran, a competing regional power, Ms. Bakhoum noted that although Egypt broke off relations with the Islamist government after its 1979 revolution, the countries reopened limited relations in 1991 on the level of a chargé d’affaires, so normalizing relations was more of an elevation than a reopening.

The deal between the Palestinian factions capitalized on the forces unleashed around the region by Egypt’s revolution. In its aftermath, Hamas found its main sponsor, the Assad government of Syria, shaken by its own popular protest movement, while the Fatah government in the West Bank faced throngs of young people adapting the chants of the Egyptian uprising to the cause of Palestinian unity.

Egypt had laid out a proposal virtually identical to the current deal for both sides as early as 2009, several participants from all sides said. But the turning point came in late March, about six weeks after the revolution.

For the first time in years of talks the Hamas leaders were invited to the headquarters of the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs instead of merely meeting at a hotel or the intelligence agency — a signal that Egypt was now prepared to treat Hamas as a diplomatic partner rather than a security risk.

They also met with Egypt’s interim head of state, Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi, the leader of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and Mr. Mubarak’s longtime defense minister.

“When I was invited to the meeting in the Foreign Ministry, that was something different, and this is what the agreement grew out of,” said Taher Nounou of Hamas. “We definitely felt that there was more openness from the new Egyptian leadership.” Foreign Minister Nabil el-Araby told the Palestinians that “he doesn’t want to talk about the ‘peace process’ any more, he wants to talk about the peace,” Ambassador Bakhoum said.

She said the Egyptian government was still studying how to open the border with Gaza, to help the civilians who lived there, and to determine which goods might be permitted. But she said the government had decided to move ahead with the idea.

Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting.

Cyber-attacks soar
by Martin J Young

Asia Times

HUA HIN, Thailand – Security company Symantec has revealed disturbing statistics about malware and the prevalence of web-based threats. The company’s annual threat analysis warns of increased attacks being made via social networks and mobile phones; Twitter, Facebook and Google’s Android were all named as vulnerable.

URL shortening services such as bit.ly, which convert long web addresses into short ones for use on sites such as Twitter, have been exploited at an unprecedented rate since the user cannot determine what the destination website is when the link is in this format. Around 65% of malware links on social websites were found to be using shortened URLs. Malicious websites now occupy more cyberspace than ever before, according to Symantec; 49% of them were found through pornographic sites.

Facebook has also been hammered with rogue applications, which are more likely to be clicked if they are sent to users by their “friends”, the nature of such a network and the often obliviousness of its users just invites cyber-crime. Social engineering scams have been on the increase since they can be written to appear to be targeted to an individual, especially if they appear to originate from someone in the individual’s contacts list.

Android suffered its first trojan in 2010 and hackers appear to view the platform as “open season” for attacks; over 50 malicious apps were pulled from Android Market last month. Apple’s iPhone is also not immune, especially if it has been “jailbroken” from the clutches of its creators.

Smart-phones are golden to cyber-criminals since they are packed full of personal information and offer ever-increasing ways to connect to web services and networks.

Symantec also reported an increase in targeted attacks against specific companies, organizations, government agencies or individuals. The big daddy of these was the Stuxnet worm designed to take control of mechanical systems in an Iranian nuclear power plant (see Stuxnet raises virus stake, Asia Times Online, October 2, 2010).

Part of the catalyst to this surge in cyber attacks has been the increased availability of attack-toolkits, which are small software packages that allow people with relatively little skill to design their own malware. They can be purchased online from a few dollars to thousands for more sophisticated ones; the most popular is Phoenix, which can be programmed to exploit vulnerabilities in Java, a programming language commonly used for Internet applications.

Web-based attacks in 2010 were up 93% from 2009, with over 3 billion of them being recorded from 286 million malware variants. Software flaws were also higher than ever with 6,253 vulnerabilities reported throughout the year. All operating systems and browsers are affected, though some to a greater degree than others.

Telecoms

Despite the security vulnerabilities mentioned above, Google’s Android keeps going from strength to strength in the mobile market place. Research firm ComScore reports that between November 2010 and February 2011 Android’s US market share jumped to 33% from 26%. Most of that market share was at the expense of Research In Motion whose BlackBerry device dropped in usage from 33.5% to 28.9%.

Microsoft also lost with a 1.3% drop from 9% to 7.7% despite the launch of its new mobile operating system Windows Phone 7 last year. Apple’s growth for the three-month period has stagnated, with only a 0.2% rise to 25.2% in the US.

The key to Android’s success it likely to be tied to the fact that so many different handsets from different manufacturers are available for it. It seems like a new one hits the shelves every week from the likes of Samsung, LG, HTC, Motorola and Sony Ericsson. Rival companies that want to conquer the market with one device and very little choice are going to have a tough time competing with that lineup.

In the handset manufacturer race (for all phones, not just smart ones) for the same period, Samsung sits at the top of the pile with 24.8% of the US market claiming to own one of the company’s devices. According to ComScore LG takes second spot with 20.9% followed by Motorola at 16.1%, RIM and Apple follow up the pack with 8.6% and 7.5% respectively.

Hardware

Chipmaker Intel has already won the race to 32 nanometer manufacturing, but rival company AMD has just crossed the line and is now producing 32nm quad-core A-series chips dubbed Llano. The announcement came this week as AMD prepares to ship desktop and laptop computers with more energy-efficient multi-core processors.

The 32 nanometer manufacturing process means that more cores can be squeezed onto the chip with better energy efficiency. Intel made the jump last year and has dominated the market with their Core i3, i5 and i7 processor range. AMD, which has always been known as the underdog in the processor battle, has fought back, albeit a little later than expected, with its latest range of microchips.

AMD’s Fusion line for high-end processing has been a big hit for the innovative integration of graphics processing units into the platform. If the company can convince enough big name original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to adopt the new Llano chips, Intel will have to work a little faster to get its experimental next generation 22 nanometer line into production at a competitive price.

Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.

FBI thought Demjanjuk evidence faked

April 19, 2011

By Randy Herschaft

AP

Associated Press= BERLIN (AP) — An FBI report kept secret for 25 years said the Soviet Union “quite likely fabricated” evidence central to the prosecution of John Demjanjuk — a revelation that could help the defense as closing arguments resume Wednesday in the retired Ohio auto worker’s Nazi war crimes trial in Germany.

The newly declassified FBI field office report, obtained by The Associated Press, casts doubt on the authenticity of a Nazi ID card that is the key piece of evidence in allegations that Demjanjuk served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland.

Throughout three decades of U.S. hearings, an extradition, a death sentence followed by acquittal in Israel, a deportation and now a trial in Munich, the arguments have relied heavily on the photo ID from an SS training camp that indicates Demjanjuk was sent to Sobibor.

Claims that the card and other evidence against Demjanjuk are Soviet forgeries have repeatedly been made by Demjanjuk’s defense attorneys. However, the FBI report provides the first known confirmation that American investigators had similar doubts.

“Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law, but based on evidence and allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB,” the FBI’s Cleveland field office said in the 1985 report, four years after the Soviets had shown U.S. investigators the card.

It was the height of the Cold War at the time, and the ID card from the Nazi’s Trawniki training camp had not been as closely examined by Western experts as it has been today. Since then it has been scrutinized and validated by courts in the U.S., Israel and Germany — though experts at the current trial left room for doubt, with one conceding that a counterfeiter with the right materials could have forged the card and other documents.

The FBI agents argued that the Soviets had an interest in faking the documents as part of a campaign to smear anti-communist emigres. Those conclusions contradict the findings of another branch of the Department of Justice, the Office of Special Investigations, or OSI, which was in charge of the overall Demjanjuk probe.

A quarter-century later, Demjanjuk, now 90, is standing trial in Munich on 28,060 counts of accessory to murder, which he denies. A verdict is expected within a month.

The AP discovered the FBI report at the National Archives in College Park, Md., among case files that were declassified after the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was deported from the U.S. in May 2009 to face trial in Germany.

It had not previously been seen by defense attorneys in Demjanjuk’s trials in Germany, Israel or the United States, and German prosecutors also were unaware of the document. It is unclear whether prosecutors in the U.S. and Israel knew about it.

The FBI report was among more than 8 million pages of records by federal agencies that were transferred to the National Archives in 1998 under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. However, the field office report was excluded from public view by the OSI, which was exempted to protect ongoing investigations and prosecutions. The AP learned late last year that partially redacted Demjanjuk files had been opened up, and recently reviewed them.

Neal Sher, the director of the OSI from 1983 to 1994, called the Cleveland report “replete with errors that completely undermine its credibility.” He said in an email that “great care was taken to authenticate any documents” and not one was found to be forged.

But others involved in the U.S. case say it was a key piece of evidence about which they were previously unaware.

Russell Ezolt, the top lawyer for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Cleveland at the time, said the report could have influenced the outcome of Demjanjuk’s denaturalization trial.

“I never saw that,” he said in a telephone interview from his home outside Cleveland. “This was the key bit to the trial. … If you take away his ID card as a guard, what’s left?”

Since no known eyewitnesses can place Demjanjuk at Sobibor, the case largely revolves around Nazi-era documents captured by the Soviet Union and provided to American, Israeli and now German authorities.

The March 4, 1985, report, on FBI letterhead and marked “SECRET,” says the Cleveland office’s investigation “strongly indicated” a Soviet scheme to discredit “prominent emigre dissidents speaking out publicly and/or leading emigre groups in opposition to the Soviet leadership in the USSR.”

In dismissing the claim, former OSI director Sher said Demjanjuk was not an “outspoken dissident” but kept a low profile. He said the first U.S. judge to rule on the case, as well as an appeals court had declared they believed the ID card was authentic and reliable.

Norman J.W. Goda, one of two main historians to review the vast volumes of material from U.S. investigations of Nazi war crimes declassified over the last decade, suggested both the FBI and OSI could be correct: The Soviets could have used the evidence for its own purposes, but it could also be genuine.

“The Soviets did, in fact, use war crimes cases for propagandistic effect, but it was often the case that Moscow provided valid information as well,” said Goda of the University of Florida.

Demjanjuk’s defense attorney in Germany, Ulrich Busch, said German investigators have received 100,000 pages of Demjanjuk-related documents from the U.S. for the trial, which began in November 2009, but the FBI report was not among them. He plans to petition the court to introduce it as evidence.

“It’s completely new,” he said.

He noted as particularly important the way the FBI said the KGB presented evidence to the U.S. Department of Justice: allowing the material to be viewed only at a Soviet embassy or consulate but not examined by document experts.

“It’s very explicit, and the same thing happened here,” Busch said, noting he could view two Russian-held Nazi “transfer lists” from 1943 only at the Russian Consulate in Munich. The documents indicate a guard named Demjanjuk was sent to Flossenbuerg concentration camp and to Sobibor.

“The Russians said we could look at them but that we couldn’t do anything with them, couldn’t examine them, and then they took them away,” Busch said.

The defense has argued throughout the trial that the ID card is a clever fake, noting that Demjanjuk’s height and eye color don’t match and alleging there are indications the photograph was taken from old identity papers and glued to the card.

The lead prosecutor in the German case told the AP he also was unaware of the FBI report, but said he has no doubts about the evidence. Hans-Joachim Lutz acknowledged the ID card was only shown — not turned over — to American investigators at the time of the 1985 report, but said court experts in Israel and Germany later obtained access to the original, and testified that they believe it to be genuine.

“Now it has been determined to have been genuine, so for us 1985 is relatively uninteresting,” he said.

The OSI in the past has been accused of withholding evidence that could have cleared Demjanjuk.

Demjanjuk immigrated to the U.S. in 1952. He was extradited to Israel in 1986, after the Nazi allegations surfaced, and stood trial there on accusations that he was the notoriously brutal guard “Ivan the Terrible” at the Treblinka extermination camp.

He was convicted and sentenced to death — then freed when the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the ruling, saying the evidence showed he had been misidentified by witnesses.

In a 1993 review of the American denaturalization hearing that led to his extradition, a federal U.S. appeals panel concluded that the OSI engaged in “prosecutorial misconduct that seriously misled the court.”

It said the office failed to disclose exculpatory information — including statements of Ukrainian guards at Treblinka who “clearly identified” another man as “Ivan the Terrible.”

A Department of Justice report from 2008 made public last November said the OSI’s handling of the Demjanjuk case was “the greatest mistake it ever made.”

Demjanjuk returned to the United States after his Israeli release, and German prosecutors brought forward new charges that he served as a low-ranking guard at the Sobibor death camp — once more based mostly on Soviet-provided material received from the OSI.

In Germany, Demjanjuk has again claimed to be a victim of mistaken identity — a Ukrainian Red Army conscript who was captured in Crimea in May 1942 and held prisoner throughout most of the war.

The FBI report accuses the Soviets of anonymously feeding names of emigres to the United States as suspected Nazis. The OSI would then ask the Soviet Union for evidence from captured Nazi records, and “the KGB produces a record purporting to tie the accused with the commission of Nazi atrocities,” it said.

“In court, the KGB officer thereupon ‘shows’ the documents to the judge but does not permit the documents to be presented in evidence or to be otherwise copied,” it adds.

By the time the field report was sent to FBI headquarters in Washington, Demjanjuk had already had his citizenship revoked and was facing extradition to Israel.

It is not clear whether it was forwarded to OSI, though agency director Sher contends it was not.

Calling it “an embarrassment for the FBI,” he said in an email: “I would guess that FBI headquarters felt precisely that way when they read the memo and accordingly did not do what the Cleveland FBI office asked them to do: Call OSI about this matter.”

The FBI unit chief in Washington to whom the report was addressed, Storm Watkins, said it would have been his responsibility to pass along the information to OSI, but that he does not remember whether he did.

“I’m not aware to what extent an investigation was done,” he said, referring other questions to the FBI’s public affairs office.

Agent Scott Wilson, now assigned to the Cleveland field office of the FBI, said: “We will let the document stand on its own and would not make any further comment.”

Attorney John Gill, who represented Demjanjuk in the 1980s, said the Cleveland field report could have bolstered defense arguments against extradition — and possibly put a quick end to what ended up being another 25 years of legal wrangling.

“Obviously they hid behind the technicalities of two separate investigations,” Gill said by telephone from Cleveland. “It’s an important document in my opinion that would have showed once again that they’ve got the wrong guy.”

Herschaft reported from New York and College Park, Md

Conversations with the Crow

When the CIA discovered that their former Deputy Director of Clandestine Affairs, Robert  T. Crowley, had been talking with author Gregory Douglas, they became fearful (because of what Crowley knew) and outraged (because they knew Douglas would publish eventually) and made many efforts to silence Crowley, mostly by having dozens of FBI agents call or visit him at his Washington home and try to convince him to stop talking to Douglas, whom they considered to be an evil, loose cannon.

Crowley did not listen to them (no one else ever does, either) and Douglas made through shorthand notes of each and every one of their many conversation. TBR News published most of these (some of the really vile ones were left out of the book but will be included on this site as a later addendum ) and the entire collection was later produced as an Ebook.

Now, we reliably learn, various Washington alphabet agencies are trying to find a way to block the circulation of this highly negative, entertaining and dangerous work, so to show our solidarity with our beloved leaders and protectors, and our sincere appreciation for their corrupt and coercive actions, we are going to reprint the entire work, chapter by chapter. (The complete book can be obtained by going to:

http://www.shop.conversationswiththecrow.com/Conversations-with-the-Crow-CWC-GD01.htm

Here is the sixty-ninth  chapter

Conversation No. 69

Date:  Saturday February 22,1997

Commenced:  2:05 PM CST

Concluded: 2:40 PM CST

RTC: Good morning, Gregory…or rather good afternoon.

GD: It’s a bit later in the day. Am I interrupting anything?

RTC: Oh, no, not at all. I finished lunch two hours ago. How is the day going with you?

GD: It goes after a fashion. Did you, or have you, ever read C. Wright Mills’ book, ‘The Power Elite?’ Came out in ’54.

RTC: I have skimmed it before for certain. The groups that control?

GD: Yes. It’s a little dated as to specifics but quite good in the abstract. The abstract being that our society is controlled by certain groups of men with specific interests, mostly economic but often economic and political.

RTC: Well, that’s basically true, Gregory. I mean the concept is obvious and it is certainly not a domestic product by any means.

GD: No, no, I realize that. I mean that a town is not run by the city councils or selectmen but by, let’s say, a small group consisting of, well, a local judge, a real estate developer, a retired military officer. That sort of combination but there are other permutations of course.

RTC: But this is not a surprise to you, is it?

GD: No, of course not, Robert but let us say that Congress is like the local council. Only a front for the real power brokers.

RTC: I have had a close connection with such groups here for years. Yes, they fluctuate and change but in the end, small groups run everything. How does it go from my own experience? Well, let’s say there is a cocktail party out on the Hamptons. Many rich people there, a small orchestra, drinks served and groups of the rich and powerful chatting about their children, their boats or their horses or the last trip to Paris or Rome. Florence if they are cultured. And then a few of the guests, all men, drift off to the library where the door is locked and they sit around in comfortable chairs, drinks in hand or perhaps a very expensive cigar or two. And then after some casual comments about life in general, they get down to specifics about how things are supposed to happen. You spoke of Guatemala to me once. You said your uncle was in the business didn’t you?
GD: Yes and my father’s family was connected with Grace and United Fruit. Or Levi and Zentner. Yes.

RTC: And when Guzman wanted to nationalize the banana plantations and spend the money on the stupid peasants, why the business interests got together over cigars and brandy and worked out a plan. Then one of them brought it to one of us. And then we discovered a terrible Communist plot, directed from Moscow of course, to set up a Soviet Republic in Central America. The president was solemnly informed of this vile business and gave his OK for counter measures. In essence, we supplied the weapons and expertise and the unfriendly government was overthrown and replaced with a friendlier one.

GD: And the new head of state realized that the Guzman plan was very good and tried to implement it.

RTC: Yes, you’re right and so we shot him and put another and more pliable man in place there. And the United Fruit people gave money to the right people or perhaps hired a few Company relatives and another blow for freedom was stuck.

GD: And if the Russians did not exist, they would have to be invented. We had the evil Spanish in Cuba, the wicked Nazis who were going to invade this country and rape all the women in Peoria and then the even more evil Stalin and his gangs of liberal Jewish spies in America who also wanted to invade this country but this time planning a mass rape in New Orleans.

RTC: Cynical, Gregory, but true. Just think of how profitable such an undeclared war can be. Hundreds of millions for the CIA, unaccountable of course, and lots of very profitable contracts for military hardware that will never be used.

GD: I knew Gehlen, don’t forget, and he personally told me about his faked 1948 report about a pending Russian attack on Europe.

RTC: The opening guns of the Cold War, Gregory. And we and the military could expand and so could the economic sector. We could quietly shoot our enemies and blame it on national security while the money flowed in from patriotic taxpayers.

GD: And Mills was right.

RTC: He belabored such an obvious issue, Gregory. Of course there are power elites everywhere at all times. I’m sure there are such in every country and inside those countries, in all major businesses and domestic political machinery. Why this should surprise you astonishes me.

GD: It actually doesn’t but I wanted to use the subject to ask you who runs the show now? It’s not 1954 anymore.

RTC: And we don’t live in Kansas, either, thank God. Now? My God, it changes…is in a constant flux. At this moment, I couldn’t tell you but perhaps fifteen years ago I could have. I mean if you were to take an Uzi and snuff out a whole library of cigar smoking plotters, they would be replaced by others within a few days. You’d run out of ammunition in the end. Besides, a few clever pragmatists are easier to deal with that a Congress full of idiots and thieves. Don’t you agree?

GD: I’d say you need both.

RTC: Only at appropriations time do we need Congress to refill the empty treasure chests. The rest of the time, we depend on the power people to help out. I mean… Gregory, you could contain all the world’s really important secrets in a notebook you kept in your pocket. But we have to justify acres of offices, safes, burn centers, a vast army of experts, analysts , agents in Tasmania, code machines and the like. To get the money, we need the excuse, and the excuse is secrecy. You know, Harry Truman set us up in business because he did not trust the intelligence input from the Army. We were a small handful of experts to advise him and now we run the country the way we feel it ought to be run. The president is a nuisance to be coddled and conned. We give him the information he needs for his purposes, regardless of how silly and utterly fake it might be. It’s just a game played with spoiled children, Gregory, and nothing more.

GD: Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

RTC: Oh, no, Gregory, not nothing. Look at our budget and you won’t say nothing.

GD: And don’t forget the profit from the drugs, either.

RTC: Most uncalled for, Gregory. We are all American capitalists, and if there is a need, we fill it, even if, I must say, we have to create the need first.

GD: Money talks…

RTC: No, Gregory, in this country, as in most others, money rules and you ought not to ever forget that.

GD: I don’t. One of my grandfathers was a banker as I have told you. I can’t imagine him talking the way we do, however.

RTC: In what way is that?

GD Pragmatic cynicism.

RTC: If the shoe fits, my friend, wear it.

(Concluded at 2:40 PM CST)

Dramatis personae:

James Jesus Angleton: Once head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence division, later fired because of his obsessive and illegal behavior, tapping the phones of many important government officials in search of elusive Soviet spies. A good friend of Robert Crowley and a co-conspirator with him in the assassination of President Kennedy

James P. Atwood: (April 16, 1930-April 20, 1997) A CIA employee, located in Berlin, Atwood had a most interesting career. He worked for any other intelligence agency, domestic or foreign, that would pay him, was involved in selling surplus Russian atomic artillery shells to the Pakistan government and was also most successful in the manufacturing of counterfeit German dress daggers. Too talkative, Atwood eventually had a sudden, and fatal, “seizure” while lunching with CIA associates.

William Corson: A Marine Corps Colonel and President Carter’s representative to the CIA. A friend of Crowley and Kimmel, Corson was an intelligent man whose main failing was a frantic desire to be seen as an important person. This led to his making fictional or highly exaggerated claims.

John Costello: A British historian who was popular with revisionist circles. Died of AIDS on a trans-Atlantic flight to the United States.

James Critchfield: Former U.S. Army Colonel who worked for the CIA and organizaed the Cehlen Org. at Pullach, Germany. This organization was filled to the Plimsoll line with former Gestapo and SD personnel, many of whom were wanted for various purported crimes. He hired Heinrich Müller in 1948 and went on to represent the CIA in the Persian Gulf.

Robert T. Crowley: Once the deputy director of Clandestine Operations and head of the group that interacted with corporate America. A former West Point football player who was one of the founders of the original CIA. Crowley was involved at a very high level with many of the machinations of the CIA.

Gregory Douglas: A retired newspaperman, onetime friend of Heinrich Müller and latterly, of Robert Crowley. Inherited stacks of files from the former (along with many interesting works of art acquired during the war and even more papers from Robert Crowley.) Lives comfortably in a nice house overlooking the Mediterranean.

Reinhard Gehlen: A retired German general who had once been in charge of the intelligence for the German high command on Russian military activities. Fired by Hitler for incompetence, he was therefore naturally hired by first, the U.S. Army and then, as his level of incompetence rose, with the CIA. His Nazi-stuffed organizaion eventually became the current German Bundes Nachrichten Dienst.

Thomas K. Kimmel, Jr: A grandson of Admiral Husband Kimmel, Naval commander at Pearl Harbor who was scapegoated after the Japanese attack. Kimmel was a senior FBI official who knew both Gregory Douglas and Robert Crowley and made a number of attempts to discourage Crowley from talking with Douglas. He was singularly unsuccessful. Kimmel subsequently retired, lives in Florida, and works for the CIA as an “advisor.”

Willi Krichbaum: A Senior Colonel (Oberführer) in the SS, head of the wartime Secret Field Police of the German Army and Heinrich Müller’s standing deputy in the Gestapo. After the war, Krichbaum went to work for the Critchfield organization and was their chief recruiter and hired many of his former SS friends. Krichbaum put Critchfield in touch with Müller in 1948.

Heinrich Müller: A former military pilot in the Bavarian Army in WWI, Müller  became a political police officer in Munich and was later made the head of the Secret State Police or Gestapo. After the war, Müller escaped to Switzerland where he worked for Swiss intelligence as a specialist on Communist espionage and was hired by James Critchfield, head of the Gehlen Organization, in 1948. Müller subsequently was moved to Washington where he worked for the CIA until he retired.

Joseph Trento: A writer on intelligence subjects, Trento and his wife “assisted” both Crowley and Corson in writing a book on the Russian KGB. Trento believed that he would inherit all of Crowley’s extensive files but after Crowley’s death, he discovered that the files had been gutted and the most important, and sensitive, ones given to Gregory Douglas. Trento was not happy about this. Neither were his employers.

Frank Wisner: A Founding Father of the CIA who promised much to the Hungarian and then failed them. First, a raging lunatic who was removed from Langley, screaming, in a strait jacket and later, blowing off the top of his head with a shotgun.

Robert Wolfe: A retired librarian from the National Archives who worked closely with the CIA on covering up embarrassing historical material in the files of the Archives. A strong supporter of holocaust writers

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