TBR News April 4, 2019

Apr 04 2019

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8

Washington, D.C. April  4, 2019: The highly politicized concept of dominionism is based on the Bible’s text in Genesis 1:26:

‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’ (King James Version).

‘Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” (New International Version).

The vast majority of Christians read this text and conclude that God has appointed them stewards and caretakers of Earth. As Sara Diamond explains, however, some Christian read the text and believe, ‘that Christians alone are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns.’

That, in a nutshell, is the idea of “dominionism.”

Just because some critics of the Christian Right have stretched the term dominionism past its breaking point does not mean we should abandon the term. And while it is true that few participants in the Christian Right Culture War want a theocracy as proposed by the Christian Reconstructionists, many of their battlefield Earth commanders are leading them in that direction. A number of these leaders have been influenced by Christian Reconstructionism, which is a variant of theocracy called ‘theonomy.’

The theocratic right seeks to establish dominion, or control over society in the name of God. The late D. James Kennedy, former pastor of Coral Ridge Ministries, called on his followers to exercise “godly dominion … over every aspect … of human society.” At a “Reclaiming America for Christ” conference in February, 2005, Kennedy said:

‘Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost. As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors — in short, over every aspect and institution of human society.’

Twenty-five years ago, dominionists targeted the Republican Party as the vehicle through which they could advance their agenda. At the same time, a small group of Republican strategists targeted fundamentalist, Pentecostal and charismatic churches to expand the base of the Republican Party. This web site is not about traditional Republicans or conservative Christians. It is about the manipulation of people of a certain faith for political power. It is about the rise of dominionists in the U.S. federal government.”

The Table of Contents

  • Why did Trump say his dad was German? He lies so much he doesn’t know the truth
  • Specter of Far-Right Violence Haunts Crisis Talks Over Brexit
  • US Democrats officially request Donald Trump’s tax returns from IRS
  • The Making of a Monster
  • This US Supreme Court ruling on how a man must die is a study in cruelty
  • Encyclopedia of American Loons
  •      Wayne Madsen
  •      Jim Humble
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

 Why did Trump say his dad was German? He lies so much he doesn’t know the truth

It is a particularly Trumpian move to deny your father’s Bronx birth while also denying your predecessor’s Hawaiian birth

April 4, 2019

by Richard Wolffe

The Guardian

The world can be a confusing place for Donald Trump.

There are so many countries, some of them of the shithole variety, some less so. It can be fiendishly hard to keep track of all the comings and goings, of all the people who just show up at the door of your golf club or your border, claiming to have a good reason to enter.

This is, after all, a president who struggles to locate his own father’s place of birth: the Bronx, New York City. On Tuesday, Trump declared in the presence of the Nato secretary general that this was just one more alternative fact in a universe of unknowable infinities.

“My father is German,” he said in the Oval Office. “Right? Was German. And born in a very wonderful place in Germany, and so I have a great feeling for Germany.”

It is a particularly Trumpian move to deny your father’s Bronx birth while also denying your predecessor’s Hawaiian birth. Origin stories seem to be a particular challenge for Donald Trump, not least because they sound like orange stories.

“No collusion. No obstruction,” Trump said about Russia, where his mother was no doubt tsarina in some cloudy corner of his delusions. “I hope they now go take a look at the oranges, the oranges of the investigations. The beginnings of that investigation.”

Never mind the thought bubble over the Nato secretary general’s head. Pity the poor White House stenographer who sought approval for the historic transcript that eventually spelled the word as “oringes”. Oranges are not the only fruit, even if they are the only shade of spray tan available at Mar-a-Lago.

Now there are many Manhattan residents who consider the Bronx a shithole, at least when it comes to fine dining. The poet Ogden Nash famously quipped “No Thonx” to the Bronx although he admitted in later life that he regretted what he called “the sins of my smart-alec youth”.

But dummkopf dotage is no excuse for Trump’s confusion. More likely, the president has lied so often and so easily about so many things that he no longer knows where reality lies. In The Art of the Deal, Trump said his family hailed from Sweden, probably because in his father’s time it was not especially popular, never mind populist, to be German, given the odd world war or two.

In actual fact, Trump’s German grandfather was an economic migrant, no different from some of the Central Americans currently rushing to America’s southern border out of fear that Trump will close the whole thing down.

For this president, their biggest challenge may be that they can’t pretend they are of the appropriate Nordic race so beloved of the very fine people who marched in Charlottesville, to Trump’s great appreciation.

Trump thinks that the asylum seekers escaping horrific violence from Central America are making up their family stories. “It’s a big fat con job,” he told a rally of supporters in Michigan last week. As it happens, he is something of an expert in big fat con jobs.

It is curious how many big fat con jobs find their way to Trump’s front door. He claimed that his supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was the victim of a big fat con job about sexual assault. And he said that Stormy Daniels, the porn star he illegally paid off before the 2016 election, was peddling “a total con job”. Of course, his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who actually paid out the hush money, testified that Trump himself was “a con man”.

So it seemed only natural that a Chinese visitor should show up at Mar-a-Lago, the gold-plated presidential retreat, with what sounds suspiciously like a phony cover story. Carrying nothing more sinister than four cell phones, a laptop and a thumb drive full of malware, Yujing Zhang said she wanted to go to the swimming pool. Later she said she was there for a non-existent event supposedly staged by a group called the United Nations Chinese American Association.

According to the Miami Herald, Zhang might have been trying to attend an event advertised on social media by Li Yang, the massage parlor entrepreneur, whose new business involves selling access to Donald Trump.

To review the bidding: that would make Zhang a con artist guest attending an event hosted by a con artist entrepreneur selling access to a con artist president. Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a convention of confidence tricksters.

There was a time when such plainly corrupt conduct would have raised more than an eyebrow or two. Back in the distant past when Crooked Hillary was first lady, her husband had barely won his re-election when the Republicans became obsessed about the Chinese trying to buy their way to some White House influence.

The so-called 1996 campaign finance scandal led to all sorts of Republican demands for an independent counsel, only to be denied by Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno. There are just too many published examples of leading conservatives decrying Clinton’s corruption, Reno’s cover-up and the end of law-and-order as we know it. As they watch the whole Mueller report fiasco, the irony gods just can’t stomach this kind of feast.

That supposed Chinese scandal was of course the context for the fateful decision to hire one Ken Starr to investigate Lewinsky et al, to put an end to a president defiling the temple of justice.

To that end, one Brett Kavanaugh leaked all the juicy bits of the grand jury deliberations and the Starr investigation to the media, and Lindsay Graham argued in a Senate impeachment trial that the nation should cleanse the office of the presidency by firing the president. Graham now plays golf with Donald Trump and Kavanaugh sits on the highest court in the land. The irony gods escaped to the vomitorium some time ago.

The tale of the Chinese connection to Trump might just be the most obvious con of them all, hiding in plain sight. What could be better cover for corruption – or leverage – than a massive trade war accompanied by so much presidential blah-a-lago?

There’s only one type of person who could pull at this fine silk thread: a new special counsel, approved by the new attorney general.

Enough of the big fat con jobs, Bill Barr. Long live the big fat con jobs.

Comment

The current American President is directly descended from the German Trumpf family. His relative in the direct line was Johannes Trump(f), a native of the village of Kallstadt.

The same Trumpf family also produced one Arnold Wilhelm August Trumpf.

Arnold Trumpf was Vorstand Reichsverband Deutscher Landwirtschaftlicher Genossenschaften-Raiffensene.V and Hauptabteilungsleiter III of the Reichsnahrstand, Allegemeine SS since 1934.

Trumpf was a director of the Reichsbank.

SS background of Arnold Trumpf:

SS-Oberführer / Leutnant d.R. a.D.

Born: 27. Oct. 1892 in Gifhorn

Died: 7. January 1985 in Garmish-Partenkirchen

NSDAP-Nr.: 389 920 from 1, December 1930

SS-Nr.: 187 119

Promotions:

SS-Oberfuhrer: 30. Jan. 1939

Career:

Bei dem RuS-Hauptamt: (9. Nov. 1944)

Decorations & Awards:

1914 Eisernes Kreuz II. Klasse

Kriegsverdienstkreuz II. Klasse ohne Schwerter

Verwundetenabzeichen, 1918 in Schwarz

Ehrenkreuz fur Frontkampfer

 Ehrendegen des RF SS

Totenkopfring der SS

The RuSHA was founded in 1931 by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler

Among their duties were:

  • Kidnapping of children suitable for Germanization
  • Population transfers
  • The persecution and liquidation of Jews

The RuSHA also employed Josef Mengele from November 1940 to early 1941, in Department II of its Family Office, where he was responsible for “care of genetic health” and “genetic health tests”

References

  • http://de.metapedia.org/wiki/Trumpf,_Arnold
  • Das Deutsche Führerlexikon, Otto Stollberg G.m.b.H., Berlin 1934
  • Dienstaltersliste der Schutzstaffel der NSDAP 9, November 1944

 

Specter of Far-Right Violence Haunts Crisis Talks Over Brexit

April 4, 2019

by Robert Mackey

The Intercept

Tensions over Brexit, and warnings of a backlash from nationalists if it does not happen soon, have rekindled fears of political violence in Britain. The threat seemed acute on Wednesday, as video of British soldiers using a photograph of opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn for target practice appeared on Snapchat, and the trial of a neo-Nazi who planned to assassinate a pro-European member of Parliament ended.

Corbyn said that he was “shocked” by the video, which was shared on Twitter by current and former members of the British armed forces, after he emerged from talks with Prime Minister Theresa May aimed at finding a way to allow the stalled British exit from the European Union to proceed

In the House of Commons, Rosie Cooper, a member of Parliament for Corbyn’s Labour party, described a neo-Nazi plot to kill her as part of a trend in which MPs have been subjected to threats based on their views about Brexit. “I was to be murdered to send a message to the state, to send a message to this place,” Cooper said. “Members of this House are regularly abused and attacked. Our freedoms, our way of life, our democracy is under threat.”

Jack Renshaw, the young neo-Nazi who confessed to plotting Cooper’s murder, was a member of a banned group that had celebrated the assassination of Jo Cox, another pro-European Labour MP, just before the 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union.

The end of Renshaw’s trial permitted the activist group Hope Not Hate to reveal its role in exposing the plot, through the undercover work of a former member of the banned group.

Cooper, who voted for the U.K. to remain in the E.U. in the 2016 referendum but represents a region that voted to leave, was one of the few Labour MPs to support Theresa May’s Brexit deal when it was rejected by Parliament last week. “My position on Brexit has been consistent and remains unchanged,” she explained. “Quite simply the will of the people and the outcome of the referendum should be respected. In West Lancashire a majority of people, 55% voted to Leave the EU.”

After she supported the Brexit deal in Parliament, Cooper’s name was added to a list of “Brexit Quislings” by a pro-European Twitter activist.

A spokesman for the British defense ministry told Sky News that the video of the soldiers firing at Corbyn’s image, which was recorded at a base in Afghanistan, “shows totally unacceptable behavior” and “a full investigation” into the actions of the paratroopers would be conducted.

Concerns about the apparent spread of far-right politics inside the military previously surfaced in October, when a group of soldiers was filmed cheering for Tommy Robinson, the anti-Muslim founder of the English Defence League.

Robinson, who is now an adviser to the pro-Brexit party UKIP, addressed an angry “Brexit Betrayal” protest outside Parliament last week, in which MPs were denounced as “traitors” and the threat of violence was never far below the surface.

Robinson was invited to join UKIP by the party’s new leader, Gerard Batten, who said last week that Brexit had been delayed through “the connivance of the traitors, quislings and collaborators in the British parliament.”

Corbyn is reportedly viewed with extreme skepticism by some senior members of the British armed forces, due to his long record of opposition to its nuclear weapons and his support for dissidents in Northern Ireland, including former members of the IRA.

The video of paratroopers firing at Corbyn’s photo was roundly condemned by members of his party, who called it incitement, and by the defense minister.

Owen Jones, a Guardian columnist, wrote that the clip was “absolutely horrific, and speaks of a growing dangerous radicalisation on the right against Corbyn in particular and the left in general.”

“The Tory Party and much of the British media portray Jeremy Corbyn and the left in general as terrorist-supporting Britain-haters,” Jones added. “This video is one of the consequences.”

Pro-Brexit Conservative MPs, outraged by the prime minister’s decision to look for compromise with Corbyn, continued to denounce him in such terms even after the video emerged on Wednesday. Iain Duncan Smith, a former Conservative leader, told the BBC that Corbyn’s “sole purpose in life is to do real damage to the country.”

In a letter resigning from May’s cabinet over her talks with Corbyn, another Conservative MP, Nigel Adams, denounced the prime minister for seeking a deal “cooked up with a Marxist who has never once in his political life put Britain’s interests first.”

Tracy Brabin, the Labour MP who now holds Jo Cox’s seat, condemned Priti Patel, a former minister in May’s cabinet, for even more extreme comments about Corbyn.

As Brabin noted, Darren Osborne, a white supremacist terrorist who drove into a crowd of Muslims outside a mosque in London in 2017, killing one man, said in court that he had hoped to kill Corbyn, figuring “it would be one less terrorist [on] our streets.”

Osborne’s partner later testified that he had been “brainwashed” by obsessively watching Tommy Robinson videos online.

The video of the soldiers pretending to assassinate Corbyn was, predictably, defended by a trans-Atlantic alliance of far-right trolls. James Delingpole, a Breitbart columnist, asked, “How is it wrong for the Army to train against terrorist-supporting, Jew-hating, Commie revolutionaries?” Jonathan Schanzer, a vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative think tank, wrote that it was “reassuring that British soldiers find him repugnant.” (Accusations that Labour has been slow to discipline or expel party members for making anti-Semitic remarks have been distorted by Corbyn’s political enemies into supposed proof that his criticism of Israeli rights abuses is motivated by anti-Semitism.)

One of the the former soldiers who approvingly shared the clip on Twitter, an Iraq war veteran from Belfast named Trevor Coult, dismissed it as “a bit of tomfoolery.” (A screenshot of a tweet Coult later deleted shows that the copy of the video he shared was uploaded to Twitter by a Petty Officer who is currently serving in the Royal Navy.)

Last month, Coult suggested that British Army veterans were showing restraint by not killing Corbyn for his prior criticism of myth-making around the British role in the First World War.

Coult, a former sergeant, also tried to defend the soldiers, who were all members of the Parachute Regiment, by claiming that their hatred for the left-wing leader was to be “expected when you consider that Corbyn supports the very men who thrived on killing Paratroopers!” Coult was referring to Corbyn’s support for former IRA members who fought with soldiers from the British Parachute Regiment in Northern Ireland.

The Parachute Regiment is notorious in Ulster for carrying out the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972, killing 13 unarmed civil rights marchers in the city of Derry. Last month, prosecutors in Northern Ireland reopened that case and decided to charge one of the former paratroopers with two counts of murder and four of attempted murder.

Coult, whose father was deployed to Northern Ireland as a soldier in 1969, has been an outspoken critic of the prosecution of the former paratrooper, known only as Soldier F.

The primary stumbling block over Brexit has been concern that it could reignite violence in Northern Ireland by effectively repartitioning Ireland with customs and immigration checks along the British-imposed border that divides the island in two.

Coult has also campaigned for a new fringe political party that recently threatened to “delete” every member of the British Parliament.

 

US Democrats officially request Donald Trump’s tax returns from IRS

In an unprecedented move, Democrats have formally asked the IRS to release the past six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns. The decision is likely to spark a legal battle that could take years to resolve

April 4, 2019

DW

Democrats upped the pressure on US President Donald Trump on Wednesday, after officially requesting his tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the country’s tax authority.

A committee in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives asked for Trump’s personal tax returns as well as the returns for some of his businesses from 2013 through 2018.

It’s the first time in 45 years that such a demand has been made for a sitting president’s tax information.

“We have completed the necessary groundwork for a request of this magnitude, and I am certain we are within our legitimate legislative, legal and oversight rights,” Richard Neal, the Democrat who heads the House committee, said in a statement.

The move is part of an effort by Democrats to look into Trump’s business dealings as well as possible conflicts of interest.

Trump ‘not inclined’ to release returns

When asked about the Democrat’s request, Trump told reporters that he “would not be inclined” to provide his returns to the committee, saying that he cannot do so as he is currently being audited.

The IRS has said that people who are being audited are still free to release their tax returns.

Trump broke with decades of tradition when he did not release his income tax returns as a candidate during his 2016 presidential campaign.

Beginning of legal battles

Wednesday’s move is likely to launch a multi-year legal battle between Democrats in the House of Representatives and the White House.

Although Democrats argue that requesting the president’s tax returns is allowed under their congressional duties, Republicans have raised privacy concerns and dubbed the move a witch hunt.

“Weaponizing our nation’s tax code by targeting political foes sets a dangerous precedent and weakens Americans’ privacy rights,” said Kevin Brady, the senior Republican on the House committee.

As the IRS is part of the Treasury Department, it is unclear whether Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will release the tax documents to the House panel.

In March, Mnuchin told Congress that he would “protect the president as we would protect any taxpayer” when it comes to privacy.

The decision on Wednesday also comes on the heels of the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, which found that the Trump campaign did not collude with Moscow.

 

The Making of a Monster

April 4, 2019

by John W. Whitehead

“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around – they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.” – Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The U.S. government, in its pursuit of so-called monsters, has itself become a monster.

This is not a new development, nor is it a revelation.

This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world – including its own citizenry – in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

Mind you, there is no greater good when the government is involved. There is only greater greed for money and power.

Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle coming out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the US government.

These horrors are being meted out against humans and animals alike.

It’s heartbreaking enough when you hear about police shooting family dogs that pose no threat – beloved pets that are “guilty” of little more than barking, or wagging a tag, or racing towards them in greeting – at an alarming rate somewhere in the vicinity of 500 dogs a day.

What I’m about to share goes beyond heartbreaking to horrifying.

For instance, did you know that the US government has been buying hundreds of dogs and cats from “Asian meat markets” as part of a gruesome experiment into food-borne illnesses? The cannibalistic experiments involve killing cats and dogs purchased from Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, China and Ethiopia, and then feeding the dead remains to laboratory kittens, bred in government laboratories for the express purpose of being infected with a disease and then killed.

It gets more gruesome.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been removing parts of dogs’ brains to see how it affects their breathing; applying electrodes to dogs’ spinal cords (before and after severing them) to see how it impacts their cough reflexes; and implanting pacemakers in dogs’ hearts and then inducing them to have heart attacks (before draining their blood). All of the laboratory dogs are killed during the course of these experiments.

It’s not just animals that are being treated like lab rats by government agencies.

“We the people” have also become the police state’s guinea pigs: to be caged, branded, experimented upon without our knowledge or consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the aftereffects.

Back in 2017, FEMA “inadvertently” exposed nearly 10,000 firefighters, paramedics and other responders to a deadly form of ricin during simulated bioterrorism response sessions. In 2015, it was discovered that an Army lab had been “mistakenly” shipping deadly anthrax to labs and defense contractors for a decade.

While these particular incidents have been dismissed as “accidents,” you don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace – citizens and noncitizens alike – making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins.

At the time, the government reasoned that it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society such as prisoners, mental patients, and poor blacks.

In Alabama, for example, 600 black men with syphilis were allowed to suffer without proper medical treatment in order to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis. In California, older prisoners had testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts implanted in them to test their virility. In Connecticut, mental patients were injected with hepatitis.

In Maryland, sleeping prisoners had a pandemic flu virus sprayed up their noses. In Georgia, two dozen “volunteering” prison inmates had gonorrhea bacteria pumped directly into their urinary tracts through the penis. In Michigan, male patients at an insane asylum were exposed to the flu after first being injected with an experimental flu vaccine. In Minnesota, 11 public service employee “volunteers” were injected with malaria, then starved for five days.

In New York, dying patients had cancer cells introduced into their systems. In Ohio, over 100 inmates were injected with live cancer cells. Also in New York, prisoners at a reformatory prison were also split into two groups to determine how a deadly stomach virus was spread: the first group was made to swallow an unfiltered stool suspension, while the second group merely breathed in germs sprayed into the air. And in Staten Island, children with mental retardation were given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured.

As the Associated Press reports, “The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the US pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs … because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.”

Moreover, “Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the ’60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.”

Media blackouts, propaganda, spin. Sound familiar?

How many government incursions into our freedoms have been blacked out, buried under “entertainment” news headlines, or spun in such a way as to suggest that anyone voicing a word of caution is paranoid or conspiratorial?

Unfortunately, these incidents are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the atrocities the government has inflicted on an unsuspecting populace in the name of secret experimentation.

For instance, there was the US military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. As NPR reports, “All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret and weren’t recorded on the subjects’ official military records. Most do not have proof of what they went through. They received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. And they were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment for their injuries, because they couldn’t tell doctors what happened to them.”

And then there was the CIA’s MKULTRA program in which hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel were dosed with LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants. As Time reports, “before the documentation and other facts of the program were made public, those who talked of it were frequently dismissed as being psychotic.”

Now one might argue that this is all ancient history and that the government today is different from the government of yesteryear, but has the US government really changed?

Has the government become any more humane, any more respectful of the rights of the citizenry?

Has it become any more transparent or willing to abide by the rule of law? Has it become any more truthful about its activities? Has it become any more cognizant of its appointed role as a guardian of our rights?

Or has the government simply hunkered down and hidden its nefarious acts and dastardly experiments under layers of secrecy, legalism and obfuscations? Has it not become wilier, more slippery, more difficult to pin down?

Having mastered the Orwellian art of Doublespeak and followed the Huxleyan blueprint for distraction and diversion, are we not dealing with a government that is simply craftier and more conniving that it used to be?

Consider this: after revelations about the government’s experiments spanning the 20th century spawned outrage, the government began looking for human guinea pigs in other countries, where “clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules.”

In Guatemala, prisoners and patients at a mental hospital were infected with syphilis, “apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease.” In Uganda, U.S.-funded doctors “failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study… even though it would have protected their newborns.” Meanwhile, in Nigeria, children with meningitis were used to test an antibiotic named Trovan. Eleven children died and many others were left disabled.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Case in point: back in 2016, it was announced that scientists working for the Department of Homeland Security would begin releasing various gases and particles on crowded subway platforms as part of an experiment aimed at testing bioterror airflow in New York subways.

The government insisted that the gases released into the subways by the DHS were nontoxic and did not pose a health risk. It’s in our best interests, they said, to understand how quickly a chemical or biological terrorist attack might spread. And look how cool the technology is – said the government cheerleaders – that scientists can use something called DNATrax to track the movement of microscopic substances in air and food. (Imagine the kinds of surveillance that could be carried out by the government using trackable airborne microscopic substances you breathe in or ingest.)

Mind you, this is the same government that in 1949 sprayed bacteria into the Pentagon’s air handling system, then the world’s largest office building. In 1950, special ops forces sprayed bacteria from Navy ships off the coast of Norfolk and San Francisco, in the latter case exposing all of the city’s 800,000 residents.

In 1953, government operatives staged “mock” anthrax attacks on St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg using generators placed on top of cars. Local governments were reportedly told that “‘invisible smokescreen[s]’ were being deployed to mask the city on enemy radar.” Later experiments covered territory as wide-ranging as Ohio to Texas and Michigan to Kansas.

In 1965, the government’s experiments in bioterror took aim at Washington’s National Airport, followed by a 1966 experiment in which army scientists exposed a million subway NYC passengers to airborne bacteria that causes food poisoning.

And this is the same government that has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests – GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc. – and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

So, no, I don’t think the government’s ethics have changed much over the years. It’s just taken its nefarious programs undercover.

The question remains: why is the government doing this? The answer is always the same: money, power and total domination.

It’s the same answer no matter which totalitarian regime is in power.

The mindset driving these programs has, appropriately, been likened to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews. As the Holocaust Museum recounts, Nazi physicians “conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners without their consent.”

The Nazi’s unethical experiments ran the gamut from freezing experiments using prisoners to find an effective treatment for hypothermia, tests to determine the maximum altitude for parachuting out of a plane, injecting prisoners with malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and infectious hepatitis, exposing prisoners to phosgene and mustard gas, and mass sterilization experiments.

The horrors being meted out against the American people can be traced back, in a direct line, to the horrors meted out in Nazi laboratories. In fact, following the second World War, the US government recruited many of Hitler’s employees, adopted his protocols, embraced his mindset about law and order and experimentation, and implemented his tactics in incremental steps.

Sounds far-fetched, you say? Read on. It’s all documented.

As historian Robert Gellately recounts, the Nazi police state was initially so admired for its efficiency and order by the world powers of the day that J. Edgar Hoover, then-head of the FBI, actually sent one of his right-hand men, Edmund Patrick Coffey, to Berlin in January 1938 at the invitation of Germany’s secret police, the Gestapo.

The FBI was so impressed with the Nazi regime that, according to the New York Times, in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen.

All told, thousands of Nazi collaborators – including the head of a Nazi concentration camp, among others – were given secret visas and brought to America by way of Project Paperclip. Subsequently, they were hired on as spies, informants and scientific advisers, and then camouflaged to ensure that their true identities and ties to Hitler’s holocaust machine would remain unknown. All the while, thousands of Jewish refugees were refused entry visas to the US on the grounds that it could threaten national security.

Adding further insult to injury, American taxpayers have been paying to keep these ex-Nazis on the US government’s payroll ever since. And in true Gestapo fashion, anyone who has dared to blow the whistle on the FBI’s illicit Nazi ties has found himself spied upon, intimidated, harassed and labeled a threat to national security.

As if the government’s covert, taxpayer-funded employment of Nazis after World War II wasn’t bad enough, US government agencies – the FBI, CIA and the military – have since fully embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics, and have used them repeatedly against American citizens.

It’s certainly easy to denounce the full-frontal horrors carried out by the scientific and medical community within a despotic regime such as Nazi Germany, but what do you do when it’s your own government that claims to be a champion of human rights all the while allowing its agents to engage in the foulest, bases and most despicable acts of torture, abuse and experimentation?

When all is said and done, this is not a government that has our best interests at heart.

This is not a government that values us.

Perhaps the answer lies in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s influential 1949 film starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. In the film, set in a post-WW II Vienna, rogue war profiteer Harry Lime has come to view human carnage with a callous indifference, unconcerned that the diluted penicillin he’s been trafficking underground has resulted in the tortured deaths of young children.

Challenged by his old friend Holly Martins to consider the consequences of his actions, Lime responds, “In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we?”

“Have you ever seen any of your victims?” asks Martins.

“Victims?” responds Limes, as he looks down from the top of a Ferris wheel onto a populace reduced to mere dots on the ground. “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is how the US government sees us, too, when it looks down upon us from its lofty perch.

To the powers-that-be, the rest of us are insignificant specks, faceless dots on the ground.

To the architects of the American police state, we are not worthy or vested with inherent rights. This is how the government can justify treating us like economic units to be bought and sold and traded, or caged rats to be experimented upon and discarded when we’ve outgrown our usefulness.

To those who call the shots in the halls of government, “we the people” are merely the means to an end.

“We the people” – who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all – have become obsolete, undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that, in the words of Rod Serling, “has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom.”

In this sense, we are all Romney Wordsworth, the condemned man in Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man.”

“The Obsolete Man” speaks to the dangers of a government that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State. Yet – and here’s the kicker – this is where the government through its monstrous inhumanity also becomes obsolete. As Serling noted in his original script for “The Obsolete Man,” “Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man…that state is obsolete.”

How do you defeat a monster? You start by recognizing the monster for what it is

 

This US Supreme Court ruling on how a man must die is a study in cruelty

April 4, 2019

by Maya Foa

The Guardian

All over the nation, opinion is turning against the death penalty and in favour of dismantling the machinery of death

When does the execution of a prisoner cross a line and become “cruel and unusual”? In the strange world of the US death penalty, that is an all-important legal question. The US constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual” punishments, but condemned prisoners seeking relief have to prove their executions meet this definition, as opposed to just being “painful”.

This week the US Supreme Court handed down a ruling that sought to clarify what manner of execution would meet constitutional standards of cruelty and unusualness. The court’s answer? Disembowelling.

Not only disembowelling: the conservative justices in the majority conceded that public dissection and burning alive would also be too much. In doing so, they cited the definition of cruelty given in Dr Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language – specifically its fourth edition, published in 1773.

The court’s ruling came in response to an appeal filed by a condemned prisoner, Russell Bucklew, who has a rare medical condition that causes blood-filled tumours to grow in his head. Doctors had told him lethal injection would cause those tumours to burst and lead him to suffocate on his own blood, so he sought to be executed using nitrogen gas instead.

The court denied Bucklew’s request, finding that he had not been specific enough about whether his executioners should use “a gas chamber, a tent, a hood, a mask, or some other delivery device”.

The court’s ruling confirms a legal standard established in a 2015 case, under which prisoners seeking to challenge a torturous lethal injection must present a suitable alternative way for the state to execute them. Incidentally, no judge has yet ruled it cruel or unusual to force prisoners into choosing their own method of execution.

It also recalls one of the most quoted statements in the body’s history: the 1994 pledge by Justice Harry Blackmun that “from this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death”.

This kind of tinkering is the court’s current preoccupation. How else might we characterise a ruling that carefully considers the relative benefits of disembowelling, dissection, gassing and hanging – the latter a method that new justice Neil Gorsuch suggested might not be unconstitutional on the basis that it was never intended to cause pain?

Monday’s ruling was delivered by the Supreme Court’s new conservative majority: the majority opinion was written by Gorsuch, and endorsed by Brett Kavanaugh.

But while it may tell us a lot about the current court, it does not reflect the reality of capital punishment in the US today. While the justices’ deliberations might suggest a resurgence in US executions, in fact the opposite is true.

The latest annual report by the Death Penalty Information Center found death sentences and executions in the United States to be “near generational lows”, with most death sentences coming from just four states: Texas, Florida, Ohio and California.

Even in these states, the death penalty is dying. Last month, the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, announced a moratorium on executions: “Our death penalty system has been – by any measure – a failure,” he said.

Rejecting the perverse misuse of medicines in lethal injections, pharmaceutical companies across the board refuse to sell their drugs for capital punishment, making publicly clear their products are made to save and improve lives, not to end them in torturous executions.

Politicians of all persuasions have also turned against capital punishment. This year, New Hampshire’s House of Representatives passed a death penalty repeal bill with a majority large enough to override a veto threatened by the state’s governor. Elsewhere, bills to abolish or restrict the death penalty have advanced under conservative stewardship in states including Wyoming and Kentucky.

In this respect, the image that defines the US death penalty in 2019 may not be nine robed justices weighing up execution methods. A more powerful picture, and one of greater consequence, is the dismantling of the execution chamber at California’s San Quentin state prison – a sight evoking 737 executions of people currently on the state’s death row that, for now, will not be carried out.

The life or death of capital punishment will not be determined solely in the chamber of the Supreme Court. Voters, politicians and businesses also have a say. And, from California to New Hampshire, voices are rising against further tinkering with the machinery of death.

 

Encyclopedia of American Loons

  • Wayne Madsen

Wayne Madsen is a deranged conspiracy theorist whose work is published on the blog Wayne Madsen Report and occasionally picked up by major media outlets out to make fools of themselves – most famously, perhaps, the Observer in 2013 (discussed here) – and even more often by disreputable outlets that don’t really care. Madsen is also a frequent contributor to the Alex Jones show.

Trutherism

More than anything, Madsen is associated with 9/11 conspiracy theories, and he has even self-published a book according to which the attacks were planned and carried out as a joint Israel–Saudi Arabia venture, with the blessing of the US, as a “false flag” operation. In particular, according to Madsen, the 9/11 attacks were “an operation carried out by Mossad, Saudi intelligence, … and elements of the CIA.” The book was the culmination of a decade’s worth of deranged ruminations: Madsen first made some waves with truther nonsense in 2003, when claiming to have uncovered information in a classified congressional report that he said contained information linking the September 11 attacks to the government of Saudi Arabia and the Bush administration through. Even the Saudi Foreign Minister eventually got annoyed with him.

Cynthia McKinney appears to be a fan of Madsen’s work on 9/11, despite the fact that Madsen has pushed conspiracy theories involving her, too.

Israel and Mossad

Conspiracies involving Israel and Mossad are staples in Madsen’s writing. In addition to causing 9/11, Mossad was responsible for assassinating hundreds of Iraqi scientists after the invasion in 2003 (published in The Palestine Telegraph), and in 2005, Madsen claimed that “an unidentified former CIA agent” had informed him that the USS Cole was hit by a Popeye cruise missile launched from an Israeli Dolphin-class submarine, making that, too, a false flag operation (unidentified former CIA agents are common sources of information among deranged people writing in CAPSLOCK on the Internet). Unnamed sources also informed him, in 2010, that Blackwater was conducting false-flag operations in Pakistan, blaming it on the Taliban (in an article published in Pakistan Daily). Moreover, “Israel reportedly has plans to relocate thousands of Kurdish Jews from Israel, including expatriates from Kurdish Iran, to the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Nineveh under the guise of religious pilgrimages to ancient Jewish religious shrines,” says Madsen, the operative word being “reportedly”. That one was picked up by a number of Middle Eastern junk conspiracy magazines newspapers, too.

In 2008 Madsen suggested, in an ArabNews article, that Mossad was behind the criminal prosecution of governor Eliot Spitzer. In particular, Madsen claimed that the prostitution firm that entangled Spitzer in a call girl ring, was as a Mossad front, and that Spitzer was actually outed by Russian-Israeli gangsters angry at Spitzer’s crack down on Wall Street malfeasance. And just to make sure, Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik was an Israeli agent who murdered 77 people on behalf of Tel Aviv.

In general, Mossad (and AIPAC) control the CNN, and – more generally – that “the Israeli lobby owns the Congress, media, Hollywood, Wall Street, both political parties and the White House.”

Obama

Madsen is a birther. In 2008, Madsen reported that unnamed “GOP dirty tricks operatives” had found a Kenyan birth certificate registering the birth of Barack Obama, Jr. on August 4, 1961. Madsen’s claims were duly picked up by the WND.

But not only is Obama a Kenyan – he is also gay. Indeed, claims about Obama’s visits to the bath house and how Obama used basketball pickup games to pick up men, popular on wingnut sites during Obama’s presidency, often originated with Madsen. According to Madsen, Obama has long worn “clear nail polish” and frequented Chicago bathhouses, and during his presidency “White House S&M ring order[ed] special videos from Abu Ghraib;” the White House would also, on Obama’s order, ensure that President Bush’s “feces and urine are classified top secret” and “captured” from special toilets and “flown back from Europe,” which tells you much more about what fantasies run through Madsen’s mind than it does about Obama. Apparently, Obama had homosexual trysts in particular with Representative Artur Davis, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Senate majority leader Bill Frist.

And not only was Obama a Kenyan and gay; he was also a Saudi mole – Madsen was one of the main promoters of that idea, widely popular in certain circles and endorsed, for instance, by Trump’s advisor Roger Stone, who calls Madsen his “friend”.

In 2012, Madsen self-published a book, Manufacturing a President, arguing that Obama was a creation of the CIA, even though he is a Saudi mole and the CIA is controlled by Mossad. The world is a strange place.

A few other claims

Madsen has promoted a dizzying array of conspiracies and wild claims also beyond those mentioned above. A couple of examples:

  • In 2002, The Guardian picked up Madsen’s claim that the US Navy had aided in an attempted overthrow of Hugo Chavez, his sources being the usual one. The claims actually made it to the US Senate, making a fool of Sen. Christopher Dodd.
  • In 2005, Madsen asserted that the US was secretly running the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (in a hearing in DRC). Local newspapers (conspiracy rags, mostly) ran with the story, with New African claiming that Madsen’s testimony “was so revealing that the mainstream Western media … have refused to print it,” which is even more evidence for there being a conspiracy. So it goes.
  • And in 2009, Madsen claimed that unidentified Mexican and Indonesian journalists had been told by unidentified UN World Health Organization officials and scientists that the 2009 H1N1 strain of swine flu virus appeared to be the product of U.S. military sponsored gene splicing (it doesn’t appear that way, not even remotely). Madsen knows a remarkable number of unidentified people who just happen to overhear or be told extremely secret information. The story was picked up by several questionable media outlets, including Russia Today.

Diagnosis: Utterly deranged nutter with a mind unclouded by facts, evidence or reason, who at least lets his bigotry shine through rather clearly in his ravings about world politics. The scary thing is that Madsen appears also to have a lot of influence among those whose agendas would be well served if Madsen’s conspiracy theories were true, which is apparently a substantial number of people, media outlets and politicians

Jim Humble

Miracle Mineral Supplement (MMS) a solution of 28% sodium chlorite (NaClO2), a toxic industrial chemical known to cause fatal renal failure, in distilled water and prepared in a citric acid solution (thus forming chlorine dioxide, an oxidising agent used in water treatment and bleaching), named and promoted by former scientologist Jim Humble – especially in his 2006 self-published book The Miracle Mineral Solution of the 21st Century. MMS is promoted as a cure for HIV, malaria, viral hepatitis, the H1N1 flu virus, ebola, colds, acne, cancer and lots of other stuff (though on e.g. eBay it is generally sold as a water purifier to circumvent certain restrictions on pushing dangerous substances as medicine; at least one importer has been convicted in the UK). Of course, any remedy that is claimed to be effective against a wide range of unrelated diseases is bullshit (except to the extent that it might cause death, which sort of brings any other illness you might suffer from to an end and which MMS can, in fact, bring about), and Humble’s evidence is strictly limited to anecdotes, which are not supported by (and don’t support) anything. Even whale.to is skeptical, which is something to think about.

The treatment was first advertised to poor families in Haiti and the Dominican Republic as a low-cost solution to their medical needs, and though much of the marketing is targeted at religious cults or people in really desperate situations, MMS has recently been promoted as a “cure” for autistic children. Subjecting a child’s gastrointestinal system to industrial bleaching agents is child abuse, but MMS has nevertheless been promoted at the anti-vaccination movement’s annual quackfest Autism One, and seems to have gained some popularity due to credulous testimonials bandied around by people who don’t know how evidence and reason work. How it is supposed to work seems to be somewhat debated (on closed forums; report here) but apparently it is supposed to clear the body of mystery parasites known as “rope worms” and other pathogens that delusional users apparently believe cause autism (horror stories here; the most horrible part being, of course, how MMS fans, like the religious fanatics they are, take any (negative) effect of the treatment on the patient to be a good sign). The idea is, needless to say, one step up from autism-is-caused-by-evil-spirits and one notch below autism-is-caused-by-imbalance-of-the-humors, and has nothing to do with anything resembling science or minimal knowledge of how the body works. (And of course: the parasites are caused by vaccines – adopting one crazy delusion doesn’t mean that you have to give up the others; they all fit together in a grand unified system of depraved nonsense).

As a matter of fact, authorities have – for once – tended to take MMS seriously as the insanity it is both in Europe and the US (see here for a good summary, and here for fair and balanced coverage). Because of reports including nausea, vomiting, and dangerously low blood pressure as a result of dehydration following instructed use of Humble’s bleach product, the FDA has advised consumers to dispose of the product immediately, and (e.g.) Irish parents who have used MMS on their children are facing criminal investigations. In the US, Kerri Rivera – the main promoter of MMS as an autism cure – was subpoenaed in the wake of her presentation at the 2015 Autism One conference, and after proving (of course) to be unable to present anything resembling evidence for the benefit of MMS she was forced to sign an agreement barring her from further promoting it or appearing at conferences in the state of Illinois. There have been legal backfires as well. In 2015 Louis Daniel Smith was found guilty of selling industrial bleach as a miracle cure for various diseases including cancer, AIDS, malaria, hepatitis, lyme disease, asthma and colds (three of his alleged co-conspirators, Chris Olson, Tammy Olson and Karis DeLong, pleaded guilty to introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce before the trial). Rivera claims MMS is most most effective when doses are timed to cycles of the moon: “full moon because the parasites go into the gut during the full moon and the new moon and they mate,” says Rivera.

Jim Humble himself is the self-styled archbishop of The Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, and tends to present himself as some sort of messiah; a report from a secret meeting of his church is here. MMS is described as a “sacrament”, though that is probably mostly for legal purposes. Humble lists an impressive CV (hard to back up, of course), including having cured malaria (though of course the Red Cross is desperately trying to cover up the remarkable results for unclear reasons but a tendency toward conspiracy). As for evidence, well, he’s got some testimonials – e.g. from Lindsay “Bionic woman” Wagner –  and seems not to understand why anyone would ask for anything else. Among the more interesting details of his background is his claim to have been sent to earth from a “Planet of the Gods” in the Andromeda galaxy on a mining mission, which is also how he discovered the miracle cure. He also has plenty of stories of how he has been pushing his dangerous nonsense to poor areas of Africa as a cure for malaria, which is not funny. Humble seems to have had a particular success with cults (the CBC recently covered the trend among certain religious groups using MMS for healing purposes, for instance) – though I suppose most of his groups of fans may come close to fit that description in any case – where Humble can really emphasize the magic properties of his bleach product to audiences receptive to that kind of crazy. Humble’s “archbishop” Mark Grenon says that if you get breast cancer you brought it on yourself, and that women should rely on MMS, not mammograms, surgery, and chemotherapy.

Diagnosis: The mind boggles at the insanity of it all – and it attracts otherwise ordinary-looking people in a manner reminiscent of standard horror movie tropes about dark cults. Humble himself is either a very cynical liar or a complete idiot. Those are not mutually exclusive attributes.

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

April 4, 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. 47

Date: Wednesday, November 20, 1996

Commenced: 1:50 PM CST

Concluded: 2:22 PM CST

 

GD: Good afternoon, Robert. Am I being inconvenient?

RTC: No, Gregory. I’ve finished lunch, done a bit with the Switzers, read the papers and the rest of the day is free. How are you doing? Getting ready for Thanksgiving?

GD: Oh yes. I was reading a Sheldon ‘Furry Freaks’ cartoon that showed a bunch of hippies at Thanksgiving. One of them was making a terrible face and he said to the girlfriend, who had obviously cooked the bird, ‘This stuffing is really terrible. What is it?’ And she replied that it came already stuffed from the organic foods shop. It obviously had not been emptied of its innards and I was wondering how much of it they ate.

RTC: Typical long-hair stupidity. I take it your turkey is not from an organic turkey farm?

GD: Free range turkeys? No, they stuff them in little pens, fatten them and then into the eye with the icepick and into the defeathering machine. As Cromwell was supposed to have said about Charles I, ‘Cruel necessity.’ But it tastes fine if you aren’t socially conscious.

RTC: It smacks of the concentration camp soap stories.

GD: And don’t forget the shrunken heads and the lampshades while you’re at it, Robert. We mustn’t be callous and forget the crime of the century. Of course, it’s interesting that the Turkish murders of a million unarmed Armenians some years ago seems to be strangely forgotten.

RTC: Well, the Israelis are friends with Turkey and since they run the media here, they have an understanding about that. There can’t be stories that would eclipse their very own big money maker and which at the same time would offend one of their only allies.

GD: Oh, the bitter realities of realpolitik. You recall talking about the Pedophile Academy you people run?

RTC: I do. You aren’t interested in joining, are you?

GD: No, actually, I lust after sheep. Just think of it as Farrah Fawcett in a fur coat and all will come out in the end.

RTC: A pun is the lowest form of humor, Gregory.

GD: I know and I am so ashamed. but they do look so cute in lacy panties.

RTC: I am certain you’re joking, Gregory. Do you have lamb at Easter?

GD: Sir, think you I am so callous? Months of true love to be followed by sordid death and the roasting pan? Terrible, Robert, terrible. Oh well, I suppose there in our imperial city things are really pure and noble.

RTC: Hardly. You mentioned the kiddie’s club. There’s a lot worse than that in our fair city, believe me.

GD: Oh, I am sure of that. Prominent Evangelical leaders meeting in a basement dungeon while someone like Pat Robertson, dressed in mesh stockings and a feather boa, whipping teen-aged acolytes with a cat of nine tails. I’ve heard Washington is famous for things like that.

RTC: Actually, yes it is. For example, one of the less appetizing aspects of our little Company has been the fairy club.

GD: You mean you hire all those nasty florist types?

RTC: No, I mean we have an entire subsection devoted to the care and feeding of queers. Its under the Science and Technology people and consists of raging homos whose job it is to infiltrate groups of prominent Beltway queers, get the information on them so we can blackmail them into doing what we want. We’ve set up male whorehouses around here, all equipped with special mikes and cameras so we can get the evidence on the creeps and then twist their arms. They staff these places with young military personnel…mostly Marines but quite a few Army people, and naturally sailors. We have a lot of Congressmen in the basket and one hell of a lot of senior military people around to do what we want, not to forget foreign diplomats, important business people and, as you say, some impressive religious leaders. It’s mostly the military that we bag and a large number of the far right and the very fanatical religious types.

GD: That’s not surprising. Most of those people are drawn to strength and a well-muscled Marine with a leather belt is a pretty good illustration of what they consider strength. Far right types like leather boots and domination. I suppose the marks pay for sex?

RTC: Oh, yes, and pay very well. First they pay cash and then they pay later in services. You would be astounded the number of fairies in high places here and most of them are in our little bags. And they do perform for us. A proper vote on yearly cash allotments, no questions asked, shutting off people who don’t like us, promoting or assisting those who are known to be on our good list. We have one Supreme Court justice, at least five appellate court judges, God knows how many senior FBI people, quite a few NSA personnel and, who would be shocked, enough State Department queers to stock a good hotel. I, personally, have nothing to do with this, but my friend Ed is involved in the administration of this and he has mentioned governors, senior senators and so on that he can jerk around at leisure. Of course, we set up the male whorehouses, but never, never have any of our people on the premises. We have surveillance monitors all over the neighborhood and perhaps next door listening to the tapes and turning on the TV cameras but we don’t want one of our straight people bagged if the local cops raid a place. The DC cops are stupid and corrupt beyond belief, but one never knows if they’ll get a wild hair up their ass and pull a raid. If they did, of course, we could quiet it down in the court system here, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. It does pay off, Gregory, and I can assure you that I, personally, have nothing to do with it.

GD: I don’t question that, Robert. Anyone I might know about?

RTC: Oh, God, it would be wonderful if you put all of this into your books, but if you did, don’t talk about it in front or you would have many problems. Faggotry is a fact of life, Gregory, but none of these assholes want to be exposed. Nixon had his times with Bebe Rebozo, too, but of course never in one of our DC peg houses. That never went anywhere, but I know it’s true. There are tapes. We bug all kinds of rendezvous places like certain motels, beach houses and so on. For example, we couldn’t bug Nixon’s place in Florida, but we certainly could bug Rebozo. It’s quite an area of exploitation, Gregory. Once we nailed a very senior Israeli diplomat who liked to be whipped by muscular young blacks and when we wanted some information, Jim just casually showed him some stills from a surveillance tape and you would be amazed how much instant cooperation we got on a certain Arab matter. And speaking of diplomatics, the Saudis are absolutely the worst. They’ll fuck anything in sight if it’s warm, and my, they do have lots of money.

GD: I recall an old Persian poem I once read out loud in Lit class that goes, ’Across the river there is a boy with an ass like a peach, but alas, I cannot swim.’ I had to go home for two days for that but the class had quite a laugh.

RTC: You must indeed have been quite a scholar.

GD: No, I was quite a trouble-maker. One of my teachers once told me, in front of the class, that I was an idiot’s delight. I told her right back that I was pleased to make her so happy. This time, I went on leave for a week.

RTC: Well, she had it coming.

GD: Oh yes, she did. They never liked me in high school, Robert, and the feeling was mutual. Once, I entered a national patriotic essay contest and, by God, I won a big prize. I wrote about the joys of being a patriot and the usual drivel. Anyway, I got the letter at home and I assume the school was told at the same time. Wonderful responses from them. They had planned for a special assembly to honor the gifted one, but no way would they do this for me. Do you know, they actually called me in and suggested, very firmly, that I step aside and let little Robbie the Pig get the prize? This was the son of the local Methodist minister and a real toad. Chubby, whining, self-righteous and a born stool pigeon. Learned the art from dad, no doubt. Anyway, I flatly refused to yield. Then they called my mother and went to work on her. Of course she didn’t need any leaning and for two weeks, I got nothing but stereophonic yammering from both parents. I just wasn’t a good advertisement for the school and a real gentleman would let them have a grand ceremony for Robbie the Pig. I still wouldn’t budge so they sent the award and the check to me at home and I had a hell of a time getting the check away from my father, who tried to keep it. Lovely.

RTC: Not very civilized behavior, Gregory. I think you did the right thing then.

GD: Oh yes, Robert, and I certainly did the right thing about two weeks later.

RTC: I am almost afraid to ask. No more detergent in the school soup pot?

GD: No, this came before that. I felt I had been dishonored, and as Mueller once said to me, I have a fine fourteenth century mind. One cannot permit that sort of thing. My revenge was fairly simple and direct. Of course, no one suspected me, which is a little of a letdown, but the uproar was worth it. In the main hall of the school, right by the front office, was a large, bronze medallion with a depiction of the school symbol on it. It was set into the floor right in front of another bronze piece that listed all the former students of the high school who died in the Second World War. On both sides were flags, and during school hours, two members of the Honor Patrol stood on both sides of the sacred lares and panares to prevent careless or evil students from trampling on the school crest or not saluting, hand on chest, the plaque. My, my, what an inviting and sacred target. I broke into the school one Saturday night, very easy considering the very pickable locks and the better reality that there was no watchman. Now, I suppose, they would have surveillance cameras every ten feet but we were not so advanced then. I got into the chemistry lab, stole two bottles of concentrated nitric acid and a pair of acid-proof lab gloves, went down the hall and poured one bottle all over the floor relic. Much hissing and bubbling and clouds of stinking smoke. The second bottle I uncorked and poured the contents all down the wall piece. Much hissing, smoking and so on. Then, I tossed the bottles into a convenient trash bin and left by the front door. Outside they had the imperial flag pole in the courtyard. Every morning, the royal honor guard attended the morning flag-raising while someone played some raucous piece, off key of course, on a bugle. As a sort of afterthought, I took out my Swiss Army knife and cut the halyards on the pole and pulled down the lines. The pole was about sixty feet tall and set in concrete so replacing the lines would be a major task. My, my, and I felt so good all the way home.

RTC: Your honor had been avenged?

GD: Yes, and the next day, it was even more pleasurable. I had so little to really enjoy in those days, I treasured every moment, believe me. Came into the school and saw no one. Halls empty. For a hopeful moment, I thought that there was no school but it was not to be. Walking around, I came to the main hall which was packed with very emotional fellow students. Weeping girls and outraged boys. I managed to work my up towards the front of the mourners and saw my handiwork, full in the face as it were. It looked like the sacred relics had been made of brown sugar and melted in great gullies. I didn’t obliterate them but you could only see a few letters on the wall plaque and the mess on the floor looked like it had been at the bottom of the sea for a thousand years. Police all over the place, taking pictures, very angry honor students, people in a state of anger and grief. And all over a few crummy pieces of bronze. Oh, yes, and a scene outside where a fat janitor was risking his life on a ladder that kept slipping, to replace the flagpole ropes. They had to get a local fire truck out later on to do the job. Oh, my, and the police, who made Mongoloid idiots look like Harvard graduates, running all over the place with note books, interviewing everyone that would hold still. Massive grief and anger. A special assembly, mandatory attendance, in which the principal and other lesser lights offered a small reward to any snitches listening. You’d have thought someone took the Shroud of Turin and used it for toilet paper. Ah well, these rare and beautiful moments are ones to be treasured.

RTC: Simple but effective, Gregory.

GD: Always smile at a man when you kick him in the balls, Robert. Oh, that thing played out for about a month and then we were all asked to contribute to a replacement venture. When the collection cup came around in my math class, I spit into it. Another moment of perverse happiness. The soaping of the stock pot was a real, transcendent joy for me, but the curtain raiser was almost as much fun. The thought, and the sight, of most of the student body soiling their clothes, and the floors, was good enough to keep me warm for months but the wailing and cursing of my fellow stoats at the scene of the great sacrilege in the upper hall was not to be denigrated.

RTC: Did you ever tell your friend Heinrich Mueller about this?

GD: No. I don’t think he would have approved of it and I admired him. Listen, do you think you might get a list of your limp-wristed victims? Of course, I assure you that I will publish it, know that in front.

RTC: Not while I’m alive, but yes, I think I can accommodate you. Too bad I wouldn’t be around to read about all the suicides or flights from Congress.

 

 

(Concluded at 2:22 PM CST)

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

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