TBR News August 12, 2019
The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. August 12, 2019:
“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
His latest business is to re-institute a universal draft in America.
He wants to do this to remove tens of thousands of unemployed young Americans from the streets so they won’t come together and fight him.
Commentary for August 12:”Trump has the intellect of a chicken. Epstein, an old friend and pedophile, is found dead in his cell due to Federal incompetence, and fat Donny at once blames it on the Clintons!
Actually, the Feds raided the pervert’s safe and carried off stacks of evidence that some of America’s most prominent politicians and business barons like to diddle little girls and the Clintons were not involved.
Americans with small brains rush to the computer on a daily basis to read about the latest pathological lies made up by bloggers to enhance their ragged images but for Trump to do the same thing is a different matter.
Could the New York authorities have nasty information about Trump himself?
I can just hear a top level banker explaining to the judge that the girl involved lied to him about her age, hence he is not guilty of anything. ‘She told me she was ten, your Honor and I believed her!’.”
The Table of Contents
- Jeffrey Epstein: How conspiracy theories spread after financier’s death
- Israel may ‘spark a war’ if it joins US-led flotilla in Persian Gulf, Iran’s navy chief warns
- A New Study of Modern Bigotry
- Why Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ foreign policy yields minimum results
- A Little Fraud Among Friends
- The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
- Encyclopedia of American Loons
Jeffrey Epstein: How conspiracy theories spread after financier’s death
August 11, 2019
BBC News
Just hours after the high-profile financier Jeffrey Epstein was found dead on Saturday, unsubstantiated theories about his death began to gain traction online.
Epstein, who was set to stand trial on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges, killed himself in his jail cell in New York, prison officials said. He was accused of running a “vast network” of underage girls for sex, and pleaded not guilty to the charges last month.
The 66-year-old was known to court famous friends and acquaintances. President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, and the UK’s Prince Andrew all had ties to him. Some of his powerful associates have been embroiled in the allegations against him, which has only served to fuel the conspiracy theories and misinformation.
Many rumours have centred on what politicians may have known about Epstein’s alleged crimes and whether some may have wanted him dead. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest this was the case. And yet, the hashtag #EpsteinMurder trended worldwide on Saturday.
Joke images and memes – suggesting everything from a faked suicide to an orchestrated hit-job – were shared thousands of times throughout the day. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were rife with unfounded theories about what may have happened to the financier.
This wild speculation was not confined to a fringe minority – far from it. Politicians and high-profile journalists also stoked rampant speculation at a time when little information was publicly available. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough tweeted:
Joe Scarborough
✔ @JoeNBC
A guy who had information that would have destroyed rich and powerful men’s lives ends up dead in his jail cell. How predictably…Russian.
69.2K
9:41 AM – Aug 10, 2019
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said it was “way too convenient” that Epstein could no longer incriminate others.
“What a lot of us want to know is, what did he know?” he told reporters. “How many other millionaires and billionaires were part of the illegal activities that he was engaged in?”
Questions like these alluded, without evidence, to a malevolent conspiracy and fed the feverish speculation on social media.
Further rumours centred on how a man who was found semi-conscious and with injuries to his neck just weeks earlier was able to take his own life. Initial reports said Epstein was placed on suicide watch after that incident in July, which led many people to ask how he could have died while being so closely monitored.
“What does the word watch mean in the phrase suicide watch?” tweeted President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giulani. “Who was watching?” He then said it was “inconceivable” Epstein could have taken his own life under those circumstances.
But prison officials later said Epstein had actually been taken off suicide watch prior to his death. Conspiracy theories then began to focus on why this decision was made, rather than how he was able to take his own life.
The speculation, as was the case throughout Saturday, appeared to shift and change with the few concrete details that were released.
Perhaps the most far-fetched conspiracy theories were pegged to the hashtags #ClintonBodyCount and #TrumpBodyCount, which both trended on Twitter over the weekend.
The first was primarily used by conservatives to suggest that former “first couple” Bill and Hillary Clinton were linked to Epstein’s death. The latter, perhaps predictably, was used by liberals who speculated that Mr Trump was somehow involved. Neither side had any evidence to work with.
The baseless theory of the Clinton’s involvement harks back to a long-running conspiracy that originated in the 1990s and claims the couple secretly kill their enemies. This was roundly and methodically debunked at the time by the fact-checking website Snopes.
There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest an outside person ordered Epstein’s death, and certainly no evidence whatsoever that Bill Clinton was that person,” Dylan Matthews wrote in Vox this week.
“[Mr Clinton] knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York,” his spokesman, Angel Ureña, said.
But Mr Trump was quick to pour fuel on the flames. He shared a tweet from Terrence Williams, a comedian and Trump supporter, that alleged Epstein “had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead”. There is no evidence to support this, but the tweet has since been shared more than 55,000 times.
Other theories and tidbits of misinformation have been easier to disprove.
For example, a photo that appeared to show Mr Trump kissing the head of his daughter, Ivanka, while standing next to Epstein has been exposed as a fake. “The 1993 photograph… has been manipulated to include Epstein,” the Associated Press reported last month.
Similarly, after Epstein’s arrest on 6 July, some social media users shared a false claim that prosecutors had struck a secret plea deal with the financier under the administration of President Barack Obama in order to protect his fellow Democrat Mr Clinton. That theory resurfaced on Saturday.
But the deal, which allowed Epstein to plead guilty to lesser charges, was actually finalised before Mr Obama took office under the administration of President George W, Bush. Labour Secretary Alex Acosta resigned over his role in the deal last month.
Meanwhile, some politicians and journalists have urged people to exercise caution given the sheer quantity of misinformation online.
The immediate rush to spread conspiracy theories about someone on the ‘other side’ of [the] partisan divide illustrates why our society is so vulnerable to foreign disinformation,” tweeted Republican Senator Marco Rubio.
CNN presenter Jim Sciutto, reflecting on his time working in the Middle East, said: “Remember this is about… partisan politics. When I was [there]… folks didn’t trust authorities so assumed a plot behind every event.”
Comment: In a world where wishful thinking and over-ripe imaginations are far in excess of accuracy and truthfulness, historical incidents are almost always the victim of the wishful thinker or the creative liar.
This is by no means a modern phenomenon as witness the strange and contradictory passages in the New Testament or in later histories that discussed the reality of dragons being seen in the sky, or in the water, and angels floating above battlefields.
The desperation of some people who suffer from futile lives and chronic disappointments to have some special information with which to gain self-importance presents a rich soil in which to grow fantasies and delusional material.
Investigative reporter Christopher Bollyn produced an article in August of 2002 in which he stated that an unnamed German scientist claimed a “secret plasmoid cloud” brought down the twin towers. Six months later, however, we learn from the same source that the buildings actually were blown up by charges placed in the basement.
Next, one will no doubt learn that Chinese Communist-trained pigeons equipped with mini-A-weapons were the actual culprits. The Chinese PRC, as is well known in certain circles, maintains a large military force on the border between Mexico and the United States and it was from their secret base in the Mexican desert that the deadly pigeons were launched on their fateful mission.
Mr. Bollyn subsequently fled the country when arrested for claiming the Mafia and the Mossad were peeking in his Hoffman Estates, Illinois home and plotting to kill him.
Bollyn attacked responding local police, was subdued and jailed. He has continued his fearful revelations from the Baltic area. And he was also sacked from the American Free Press for submitting “false and misleading” articles.
Israel may ‘spark a war’ if it joins US-led flotilla in Persian Gulf, Iran’s navy chief warns
August 12, 2019
RT
Tehran has advised Israel to stay clear of the Persian Gulf, where the US has been struggling to amass an anti-Iranian armada, noting that every vessel illegally present in the region increases the risk of an all-out conflict.
“Any illegitimate presence by the Zionists in the waters of the Persian Gulf could spark a war,” commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Navy, Alireza Tangsiri, warned on Sunday.
Israel reportedly volunteered to provide intelligence and assistance to the US-led coalition against Iran, as the pressure in the Persian Gulf mounts, after a series of mysterious tanker attacks and reciprocal vessel seizures by Iran and the UK. Israel warned last month that it is ready to strike Iran in the case of any “mistaken calculations,” piling on the pressure after Tehran said a US attack would mean “only half an hour will remain of Israel’s lifespan.”
The Islamic Republic has vowed to protect its sovereignty in the Strait of Hormuz and beyond, accusing the US of trying to enforce its unilateral oil sanctions through military pressure after failing to do it via political extortion. Washington insists its intentions are peaceful and that it is rallying foreign warships to the region with the noble goal of protecting shipping lanes and vessels from Tehran.
So far, the US has had trouble drumming up support for its “maritime policing” initiative among European countries, as only the UK has been eager enough to send two of its vessels into the midst of the tensions.
A New Study of Modern Bigotry
Different…but the same!
August 12, 2019
by Christian Jürs
There are strong parallels between the Evangelical Christians and the Holocaust Jewish religious/political movements.
And these parallels are most certainly there.
Both are oriented to gaining political and economic power.
Both have made extensive use of fictional writings. In the case of the Evangelical Christians, the Rapture and the Battle of Armageddon which are recent inventions (ca 1910) by a Charles Parham Fox and are not in the Bible. Parham Fox was a convicted thief and child molester.
Also, note that none of the Gospels were contemporary with the purported career of Jesus and in the ensuing centuries, have been constantly rewritten to suit current political needs. Further, the mainstay of Evangelical Christians is the so-called ‘Book of Revelations’ purported to have been written by John the Devine, Jesus’ most intimate friend. This was certainly not written by someone living at the time of Jesus’ alleged ministry but over fifty years later. The actual author was one John of Patmos who was resident at the Roman lunatic colony located on the island of Patmos. This particular work is beloved of Evangelicals because it is so muddled, obscure and bizarre that any meaning can, and is, attributed to it.
I refer the reader to “Foundations of Christianity” by Karl Kautsky (a Jewish German early Communist and secretary to Engels)
The nationalistic Zionist movement does not have a great body of historical supportive material so, like the early Christians, they have simply invented it. These fictions include, but certainly are not limited to, “The Painted Bird” by Kosinski, (later admitted by its author to be an invented fraud before his suicide, ) and “Fragments” by “Binjimin Wilkomersky” ( A Swiss Protestant named Bruno Dossecker who was born in 1944) that is mostly copied from the Kosinski book and consists of ‘recovered memory,’ and of course the highly-propagandized favorite “Anne Frank Diary” which was proven, beyond a doubt, by the German BKA(Bundes Kriminal Amt, an official German forensic agency) as a forgery, made circa 1949 (ball point ink was used on paper made after 1948 and the handwriting completely different from the original Frank girl’s school papers still extant) All of these frauds have been, and still are, considered as seminal truths by the Holocaust supporters and the discovery of fakery loudly denied by them, and questioners accused of being ‘Nazis.’ This closely parallels the same anger expressed by the Evangelicals when their stories about the Rapture or the Battle of Armageddon are questioned by anyone. Here, doubters are accused of being ‘Satanists’ and ‘Secular Humanists.’
I refer the reader to “The Holocaust Industry” by Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish academic and the son of genuine survivors of the German Concentration Camp system.
When confronted with period and very authentic evidence that the death toll among Jewish prisoners never approached even a million, or that there were no gas chambers in use at any prison camp, the standard, and badly flawed counter argument is that while the accuracy of the period German documents is not in question, as everyone knows that 6 millions of Jews perished, therefore the names are on so-called ‘secret lists.’
When asked where a researcher could view these documents (the actual German SS records, complete, are located in the Russian Central Archives in Moscow) the ludicrous response is that because these lists are secret, no one has ever seen them! This rationale does not even bear comment.
The Christians have their Passion of the Christ, which may or may not have happened, (it was in direct opposition to Roman law which governed Judea at the time,) and the Jews have their long agony of the Holocaust, which is an elaborate and fictional construction based on fragmentary facts. A Jewish supporter, Deborah Lipstadt ( a well-known academic) has said repeatedly that the word holocaust must be capitalized and can only be used to discuss the enormous suffering of the Jewish people. The huge genocidal programs practiced by the Turks against Armenian Christians in 1916 and the even larger massacres by Pol Pot in Southeast Asia may never be likened to the absolutely unique Jewish suffering, according to current Zionist-Holocaust Jewish dogma.
Both stress the suffering and death of their icons, in the former case, the leader of their cult, which initially consisted entirely of very poor Jews, and in the second, an entire people. Both sides have enormous public relations machinery in place which is used constantly to promulgate both faiths and both are hysterically opposed to any questioning or debate on any aspects of their faith.
The issues of suffering, death and prosecution are both used to fortify their positions in society and render it difficult for anyone to attack them. These issues are also used to gain political power (for the Evangelicals) and money (for the Zionist-Holocausters)
Both of these groups seek a high moral ground from which to attack any questioning of their faith and because many of the adherents to both beliefs are aware that their houses are based on sand, fight fiercely lest a storm arise, beat upon both houses and thereby cause a great fall (to be Biblical in expression.)
Why Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ foreign policy yields minimum results
The president is heading into 2020 with no major successes and looming crises – so many expect him to attempt to reverse the trend with dramatic deals
August 11, 2019
by Julian Borger in Washington
The Guardian
Donald Trump is heading into the 2020 elections with no clear-cut foreign policy successes, some dramatic failures and a string of looming crises around the world that could undermine his bid for re-election.
For that reason, many expect the president to try to reverse the trend with dramatic interventions around the globe with uncertain outcomes – which will make the next 16 months even more volatile than his presidency so far.
Trump has pulled out of nuclear agreements with Iran and Russia but the better deals he predicted seem more remote than ever, and in their absence nuclear weapons proliferation looks likely to accelerate.
An effort to oust Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela in April was a fiasco, and subsequent efforts to strangle the economy have so far showed no sign of achieving their political objective. This week, the UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, warned that the measures are likely to significantly exacerbate conditions for millions of ordinary Venezuelan.
Trump’s proudest diplomatic achievement so far, becoming the first US president to meet a North Korean leader, is looking increasingly hollow, as Kim Jong-un steadily builds up his nuclear arsenal and resumes missile testing.
Similarly, Trump’s most significant military win, completing the eradication of the Islamic State caliphate in Syria and Iraq, has been tarnished by a Pentagon inspector general report this week saying that Isis had “solidified its insurgent capabilities in Iraq and was resurging in Syria”.
In Afghanistan, the administration claims to be close to an agreement with the Taliban, clearing the way for a major withdrawal of US forces by the end of Trump’s first term, but a spike in violence, with 1,500 civilian casualties in July alone, has underlined the tenuous nature of such negotiations.
Foreign policy issues rarely play a leading role in US presidential elections, but Trump has relentlessly portrayed himself as uniquely able to strike deals with foreign leaders and bring US troops home. And some foreign crises have a direct domestic result. The absence so far of the promised deal with China, the imposition of tariffs and the prospect of a worsening trade war will directly hit consumers and producers.
“What is interesting is that in every one of these issues, Trump saw a domestic political benefit: getting tough on China, Iran, on Venezuela, with voters in Florida in mind, the spectacle of meeting Kim Jong-un,” said Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s speechwriter and foreign policy adviser. “But whatever short-term benefit there was has been more than eclipsed by the long-term mess he has created.”
Trump appears to be aware of his foreign policy deficit as he barrels towards full campaign mode, and is seeking to address it.
In the short term, that has amounted to redefining success.
In relation to North Korea, that means playing down the original claim that diplomacy with Kim would lead to nuclear disarmament. The emphasis instead has been on Pyongyang’s moratorium on nuclear and missile tests. When North Korea stepped up short range missile launches, the red line was shifted to a block on intercontinental missiles.
The “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran was intended to change the Tehran government’s behaviour in the region, ending uranium enrichment, making it pull back from involvement, directly or through proxies, in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and persuade it open new negotiations with the US, outside the multilateral 2015 deal, that Trump abandoned.
By those measures, so far the strategy is backfiring. Iran is stepping up its nuclear programme beyond the limits of the 2015 deal. It has become more aggressive in the Persian Gulf, harassing shipping, and it has rejected several overtures from intermediaries offering talks with Trump.
However, the Trump administration argues it is making gains by cutting down Tehran’s disposable cash.
“We have denied the regime tens of billions of dollars in revenue they would otherwise spend on strengthening the regime and strengthening their proxies,” said Brian Hook, the US Iran envoy, adding that consequently the Iranian defence budget in 2020 is 28% down on the previous year.
“This is the necessary foreign policy to change the paradigm of Iran’s destabilizing efforts in the Middle East. There’s no other way to accomplish this … As Cicero said, money is the sinews of war. And Iran does not have the money that it used to.”
It is unclear whether tactic of lowering the success threshold will carry Trump through to the election in November next year, as North Korea fires off ever more provocative missiles tests, and Iran breaks free of its nuclear constraints.
Trump’s other option would be retake the initiative with bold action. That could take military form, though that would be the last resort. A new conflict on the Korean peninsula or the Persian Gulf would be disastrous, electorally and otherwise. The president was “cocked and loaded” to strike Iran in June but called off the operation at the last moment, when he was warned it could cost him his second term.
His instinct is to make an eye-catching deal. He has signaled his interest in another summit with Kim – jubilantly announcing the arrival of another “very beautiful” letter from the North Korean dictator – where he could offer a partial easing of sanctions for the destruction of some of North Korea’s nuclear weapons infrastructure.
Trump’s attempt to talk directly to Iran’s leadership have thus far been rebuffed, but September’s UN general assembly offers another opportunity for a meeting with the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani. It would probably take a significant easing of economic pressure to pull that off.
Trump may just think it is worth the risk, even if entailed the departure of his ultra-hawk national security adviser, John Bolton.
A partial trade deal might also be engineered with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in which China restarts imports of US agricultural products in return perhaps for the easing of ban on dealing with the Huawei tech giant.
“I’m guessing from what the president has said in the past he’s willing to give more than other people [in his team] are willing to give, but that’s usually the case since he’s transactional and he wants a deal,” said Bonnie Glaser, the director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “So maybe there could be a prospect for some small deal that emerges in September.”
Trump could seize any such agreement and proclaim it deal of the century. The question would be whether Pyongyang, Tehran or Beijing is prepared to play along, and that depends on whether they see an interest in helping the president win a second term.
“It is remarkable how much agency these countries have,” Rhodes said. “Certainly, Iran, China and North Korea will be aware that anything they do will have an impact on the elections … They have a vote.”
Kim has good reason to assist a president who has showered recognition and praise on its leader, so could well consider concessions. Tehran would most certainly like to see him gone, and will be unwilling to help stage diplomatic photo ops. Beijing too is showing signs it would rather not face a second Trump term.
In the faces of such challenges from abroad, Trump has demonstrated a willingness to take brinksmanship ever closer to the edge of an all out trade war, or a shooting war.
“Trump will be trying to grab the headlines and portray himself as a leader,” said Julianne Smith, a former senior national security official in the Obama White House. “We will see a series of rash and reckless moves and a lot more drama in the next 18 months. So hold on to your hats.”
A Little Fraud Among Friends
International Israeli Internet Spying & Fraud in the United States
August 12, 2019
For the past ten years, there have been growing fears that somehow, outsiders have been able to penetrate into the confidential computer files of government agencies, business entities such as banks and defense contractors and individuals.
Some of this appeared to be an attempt to obtain highly classified information that could be of use to others and in other instances, attempts to get into the personal, and corporate, bank accounts of individuals and corporations.
This is a brief study of some of the salient aspects of this problem of computer theft and espionage and we will start with the discovery of massive computer penetration in Israel. We will then consider further penetrations of American business and intelligence computer systems by agents of a foreign government as opposed to confidence men and then conclude with the use of the same methods to commit frauds on the gullible in the United States and elsewhere.
Some of the first public notice of this problem surfaced first in Israel in 2004 when Israeli law enforcement cyber crime experts discovered that what is known as a Trojan Horse (illicit spyware planted on an unsuspecting computer) had been inserted into about 60 major Israeli businesses. Isreali law enforcement subsequently indicted various members of three of Israel’s largest private investigative agencies on charges of criminal fraud. These spyware plants were in various commercial areas such as : Israeli military contracting, telephone systems, cable television, finance, automobile and cigarette importing, journalism and high technology. These intrusive spyware plants were nearly identical with ones developed by the American NSA and widely used inside the United States to glean political, economic and counter-intelligence information from a huge number of American businesses and agencies. Israeli investigators believed that there was illicit cooperation between the American agency and a counterpart in Israel.
These Trojan horses that penetrated the Israeli computers came packaged inside a compact disc or were sent as an e-mail message that appeared to be from an institution or a person that the victims thought they knew very well. Once the program was installed, it functioned every time the victim’s computer system was in use, logging keystrokes or collecting sensitive documents and passwords before transmitting the information elsewhere.
This clandestine theft of valuable commercial, military and political secrets is certainly not limited to Israel and many important agencies and individuals have become increasingly concerned about what is called “phishing” in which both con men and foreign (and domestic) intelligence agencies can locate, capture and use valuable personal, political and financial information. In September of 2005, the Anti-Phishing Working Group, an ad hoc group of corporate and law enforcement groups that track identity theft and other online crimes, said it had received more than 13,000 unique reports of phishing schemes in that month alone, up from nearly 7,000 in the month of October, 2004..
In late 2005, a new form of phishing, called “spear-phishing” emerged.
.So-called spear-phishing is a highly concentrated and far more effectove version of phishing. That’s because those behind the schemes bait their hooks for specific victims instead of casting a broad, ill-defined net across cyberspace hoping to catch throngs of unknown victims.
Spear-phishing, say security specialists, is much harder to detect than phishing. Bogus e-mail messages and Web sites not only look like near perfect replicas of communiqués from e-commerce companies like eBay or its PayPal service, banks or even a victim’s employer, but are also targeted at people known to have an established relationship with the sender being mimicked. American banks such as Chase and Bank of America are among those whose names are faked and also the online auction house of Ebay and the international money transfer firm of PayPal receive considerable attention from the international conmen and credit thieves. These thieves are not necessarily gangs operating for financial gain but also include theft of trade secrets, private corporate banking and highly sensitive military and political information.
While some of these phishers are merely out to make money, others are interested in securing military secrets and political activities, all at the highest and what is hopefully considered as the most secure.
As a case in point, in June of 2005 , the National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre, a British government agency that monitors national UK computer security, took the step of publicly warning about a spear-phishing campaign of “targeted Trojan e-mail attacks” aimed at industrial and government computer networks. The warning noted that the e-mail messages appeared to come from a trusted sender, that antivirus software and firewalls was completely incapable of protecting recipients, and that, in fact, there was no way to completely protect any computer connected to the Internet from the Trojan attacks once recipients opened and downloaded a faked e-mail message containing a virus.
The report noted that: “Files used by the attackers are often publicly available on the Web or have been sent to distribution lists,” the warning said. “The attackers are able to receive, trojanise and resend a document within 120 minutes of its release, indicating a high level of sophistication.”
In December of 2005, a more traditional phishing scam infected about 30,000 individual computers worldwide, according to CipherTrust, a computer security firm. Consisting of what CipherTrust said was about 50 million e-mail messages that a German hacker deployed simultaneously, the communiqués purported to come from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and a German intelligence agency and tried to convince recipients to provide personal information and open a file containing a virus. The F.B.I. issued a warning about the scheme and a spokeswoman said that thousands of people swamped the agency with phone calls inquiring about it. Public awareness and FBI actions sharply reduced and finally obliterated this specific form of fraud but no information has been released to the public by the FBI concerning the identity or motives of many of the hackers. No bank or financial institution ever contacts their depositors and customers by email with warnings about misuse of their credit cards or errors in their personal accounts. The phishers have advanced technologically to the point where actual company logos can be snatched from Web sites to build customized databases of corporate logos. Any email message purporting to come from any bank or financial institution, most especially one that has the proper company logo and format but contains grammatical errors should ever be responded to.
Some computer security specialists suggest at least one basic approach that might allow e-mail recipients to learn right away that a communiqué appearing to come from a company like Amazon.com actually originated somewhere in the Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Russia or any of the other places that law enforcement officials say are hot spots for phishing scams According to CipherTrust, a spear-phisher can rent a server for about $300 month after paying a $100 setup fee; install spam-sending software on the server for about $1,200 a month; and get spam-sending proxies, a database of e-mail addresses, and other necessary add-ons for another $1,900 a month. How much phishers make depends on how many victims they hook, but the relatively small expense means the work can be lucrative. According to a research report issued in June by Gartner Inc., a consulting firm, about 2.4 million Americans reported losing about $929 million to phishing schemes during the previous year.
In 2018, is has been estimated by the FBI and private cyper-protection agencies that about 73 million American adults who use the Internet believed that they received an average of more than 50 phishing e-mails during the prior 12 months. And that, of course, is just what Internet users actually know might be happening.
Phishers main goal is to obtain a victim’s checking-account number and, in addition, credit card and A.T.M. card numbers, which they can copy onto bogus cards they have manufactured for the purpose of extracting money and goods from a victim’s account.
It should be noted that many American banks have serious security gaps in the software used to analyze magnetic stripe coding on the back of A.T.M. cards, and these gaps have permitted card hijackers to use bogus copies. American regulators, concerned about online vulnerabilities at the country’s banks, have sharply tightened security requirements at financial institutions.
Although Interner Provider (IP) numbers lead to Italy, the Netherlands, the Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and Russia, a secret investigation by NSA and other American domestic and foreign intelligence agencies has disclosed that almost all of the scams originate inside Israel and that while the Israeli authorities are aware of this, the fact that information considered “vital to the interests of the State of Israel” is part of the intercepts, no action has been taken against operations that are not directed against Israeli agencies or individuals. Further, one of the caveats to the continued functioning of these enormously profitable computer frauds is that any monies gleaned from them must be deposited in Israeli, and not foreign, banks.
Isreali intelligence, having formed a cooperative association with Israeli internet swindlers, has, according to an NSA report, not hesitated to spy on their American counterparts.
Among the Israeli corporations on the receiving end of stolen information were two telecommunications affiliates of Bezeq, the country’s largest telephone company. The Israeli government held a controlling interest in Bezeq until it sold most of its stake to private investors, including Los Angeles media mogul Haim Saban, shortly before the Trojan horse scandal became public. A lawyer representing Bezeq and the two affiliates, YES and Pele-Phone, declined to comment on the investigation; Mr. Wismonsky said that Bezeq itself appeared to have been a victim, not a recipient, of stolen information.
Israeli intelligence also is able to oversee almost all telephonic contacts, to include internet usage, in the United States.
This is accomplished by obtaining and analyzing data that is generated every time someone in the U.S. makes a telephone call.
Here is how the system works. Most directory assistance calls, and virtually all call records and billing inside the U.S. are done for the telephone companies by Amdocs Ltd., an Israeli-based private telecommunications company.
Amdocs has contracts with the 25 biggest telephone companies in America, and even more worldwide. The White House and other secure government phone lines are protected, but it is virtually impossible for any American to make a call on any American phone without generating an Amdocs record of it.
In recent years, the FBI and other government agencies have investigated Amdocs more than once. The firm has repeatedly and adamantly denied any security breaches or wrongdoing. In 1999, the super secret National Security Agency, headquartered in Ft. George Meade in northern Maryland, issued what is called a Top Secret Sensitive Compartmentalized Information report, TS/SCI, warning that records of calls in the United States were getting into foreign hands – in Israel, in particular.
Investigators do not believe such calls are being listened to, but the data about who is calling whom and when is extremely valuable in itself. An internal Amdocs memo to senior company executives suggests just how Amdocs generated call records could be used. “Widespread data mining techniques and algorithms…combining both the properties of the customer (e.g., credit rating) and properties of the specific ‘behavior….’” Specific behavior, such as who the targeted customers are calling is also noted.
The Amdocs memo says the system should be publicly advertised as “helping to prevent telephone fraud.” However, U.S. counterintelligence analysts say it could, and unquestionably was, also be used to spy via the records of the American telephone system. The N.S.A has held numerous classified conferences to warn the F.B.I. and C.I.A. how Amdocs records could be used.
At one classified NSA briefing, a diagram by the Argonne National Laboratory was used to show that if phone records are not completely secure, major security breaches are more than possible.
Another NSA briefing document said, “It has become increasingly apparent that systems and networks are vulnerable…Such crimes always involve unauthorized persons, or persons who exceed their authorization…citing on exploitable vulnerabilities.”
Those vulnerabilities are growing, because according to another briefing, the U.S. relies too much on foreign companies like Amdocs for high-tech equipment and software. “Many factors have led to increased dependence on code developed overseas…. We buy rather than train or develop solutions.”
U.S. intelligence does not officially believe the Israeli government is involved in a misuse of information, and Amdocs insists that its data is secure. What U.S. government officials are worried about, however, is the possibility that Amdocs data could get into the wrong hands, particularly organized crime. And that would not be the first time that such a thing has happened.
In a 1997 drug trafficking case in Los Angeles, telephone information, specifically of the type that Amdocs collects, was used to “completely compromise the communications of the FBI, the Secret Service, the DEA and the LAPD.”
There has been considerable but very quiet concern about the 60 Israelis who were detained in the anti-terror investigation, and the suspicion that some investigators have that they may have picked up information on the 9/11 attacks ahead of time and not passed it on.
There exists a classified Justice Department report stating that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, did indeed send representatives to the U.S. to warn, just before 9/11, that a major terrorist attack was imminent. How does that leave room for the lack of a warning?
What investigators have stated is that that warning from the Mossad was nonspecific and extremely vague and general, and they believe that it may have had something to do with the Israeli desire to protect what are called “sources and methods” in the intelligence community while at the same time attempting to convince American authorities that they were being cooperative and friendly. There is very substantive and documented evidence that those sources and methods were, and still are, taking place in the United States.
The question arose in the Select Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill, chaired by former CIA agent, Porter Goss. Concern was expressed concerning this Mossad spying issue but nothing came of this and the matter was very quickly, and quietly, shelved
An official listing of known Mossad agents and a much larger one listing Mossad informants in the United States is perhaps the best indicator of the degree and extent that this official Israeli organ has penetrated American security, business and military organizations. Its publication would certainly create terrible havoc and would very adversely impact on American/Israeli diplomatic and military relations.
Reports indicate that such established agencies as the Anti Defamation League, several identified national newspapers and one major television network also harbor and assist a significant number of active Mossad agents engaged in espionage activities.
The concern about telephone security extends to another company, founded in Israel, that provides the technology used by the U.S. government for electronic eavesdropping. The company is Comverse Infosys, a subsidiary of an Israeli-run private telecommunications firm, with offices throughout the U.S. It provides wiretapping equipment for law enforcement. Investigative reports also indicate that these offices have been and are being used as bases for intelligence operations directed against the United States via the Mossad agents working in this country.
Here is the method that foreign wiretapping works in the U.S.
Every time a call is made in America, it passes through the nation’s elaborate network of switchers and routers run by the phone companies. Custom computers and software, made by companies like Comverse, are tied into that network to intercept, record and store the wiretapped calls, and at the same time transmit them to investigators.
The manufacturers have continuing access to the computers so they can service them and keep them free of technical errors. This process was authorized by the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. Senior government officials have reluctantly acknowledged that while CALEA made officially authorized, and unauthorized, wiretapping much easier for Federal authorities, it has led to a system that is seriously vulnerable to compromise, and may have undermined the whole wiretapping system.
Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were both warned on October 18, 2001 in a hand-delivered letter from 15 local, state and federal law enforcement officials, who complained that “law enforcement’s current electronic surveillance capabilities are less effective today than they were at the time CALEA was enacted.”
Congress insists the equipment it permits to be installed is secure. But the complaint about this system is that the wiretap computer programs made by Comverse have, in effect, a back door through which wiretaps themselves can be intercepted by unauthorized parties.
In this case, the unauthorized parties is the Israeli Mossad and through them, the government and commercial interests of Israel itself.
Adding to the suspicions is the fact that in Israel, Comverse works closely with the Israeli government, and under special programs and gets reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its research and development costs by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade. But investigators within the DEA, INS and FBI have all privately stated that to pursue or even suggest Israeli spying through Comverse is considered career suicide because of the enormous political and political power wielded by the Israeli lobby, the extremely pro-Israeli American television and print media and many Jewish financial organizations in the United States.
And sources say that while various F.B.I. inquiries into Comverse have been conducted over the years, they have been halted before the actual equipment has ever been thoroughly tested for leaks. A 1999 F.C.C. document indicates several government agencies expressed deep concerns that too many unauthorized non-law enforcement personnel can access the wiretap system. The FBI’s own small office in Chantilly, Virginia that actually oversees the CALEA wiretapping program, is among the most agitated about the Israeli ongoing threat.
It is the FBI’s office in Quantico, Virginia, that has jurisdiction over awarding contracts and buying intercept equipment. And for years, they have awarded the majority of the business to Comverse. A handful of former U.S. law enforcement officials involved in awarding Comverse lucrative U.S. government contracts over the years now work for the Israeli-based company.
Numerous sources say some of those individuals were asked to leave government service under what knowledgeable sources call “troublesome circumstances” that still remain under administrative review within the Justice Department.
And what troubles investigators the most, particularly in New York City, in the counter terrorism investigation of the World Trade Center attack, is that in a number of cases, suspects they had sought to wiretap and survey immediately changed their telecommunications processes. This began as soon as those supposedly secret wiretaps went into place
There are growing and very serious concerns in a very significant number of top-level American intelligence and counterintelligence. Many of these agencies have begun compiling evidence, and instigating a very highly classified investigation, into the very strong probability that the Israeli government is directly involved in this matter and has been from the outset.
Speaking confidentially, top U.S. intelligence agencies indicate that “the last thing needed is another Pollard scandal.”
Following the 9/11 attacks, Federal officials have arrested or detained nearly 200 Israeli citizens suspected of belonging to an “organized intelligence-gathering operation.” The Bush administration has deported most of those arrested after Sept. 11, although some are in custody under the new anti-terrorism law. Some of these detainees are being investigated for their possible penetration of known Arab terrorist groups located in the United States, Canada and Europe and through this, having gained specific knowledge of the time and location of the September 11 attacks.
It has been established that an Israeli firm generated billing data that could be used for intelligence purpose, and a recent Justice Department report describes concerns that the federal government’s own wiretapping system may be vulnerable.
In Los Angeles, in 1997, a major local, state and federal drug investigation suddenly collapsed. The suspects: Israeli organized crime organizations, composed mostly of Russian Jews, with ongoing operations in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, Canada, Israel and Egypt.
The allegations: cocaine and ecstasy trafficking, and sophisticated white-collar credit card and computer fraud. . A DEA report under date of December 18 stated that there existed serious security breaches in DEA telecommunications by unauthorized “foreign nationals” — and cites an Israeli-owned firm with which the DEA contracted for wiretap equipment .
The problem: according to classified law enforcement documents, is that the Israeli-based gangsters had the Federal and State law enforcement beepers, cell phones, even home phones under constant surveillance. Some identified Israeli gangsters who did get caught, readily admitted to having hundreds of confidential law enforcement telephone and beeper numbers and had been using them to avoid arrest.
An official LAPD intelligence report states:
“This compromised law enforcement communications between LAPD detectives and other assigned law enforcement officers working various aspects of the case. The Israeli-based criminal organization discovered communications between organized crime intelligence division detectives, the FBI and the Secret Service.”
Shock spread from the DEA to the FBI in Washington, and then the CIA. An investigation of the problem, according to law enforcement documents, concluded, “The (criminal) organization has apparent extensive access to database systems used to identify pertinent personal and biographical information.”
When investigators tried to find out where the information might have come from, they looked at Amdocs, a publicly traded firm based in Israel. Amdocs generates billing data for virtually every call in America, and they do credit checks. The company denies any leaks, but investigators still fear that the firm’s data is getting into the wrong hands.
When investigators checked their own wiretapping system for leaks, they grew concerned about potential vulnerabilities in the computers that intercept, record and store the wiretapped calls. A main contractor is Comverse Infosys, which works closely with the Israeli government, and under a special grant program, is reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its research and development costs by Israel’s Ministry of Industry and Trade.
Asked about another sprawling investigation and the detention of 60 Israeli since Sept. 11, the Bush administration treated the questions with frightened circumspection. The reason for this is also contained in the body of several U.S. investigative and highly classified reports. The extremely competent Israeli Foreign Intelligence branch, the MOSSAD, had penetrated the groups of terrorists who planned, and eventually executed, the hijacked aircraft attack on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House. After some debate in the highest official circles in Tel Aviv, the Israeli government decided to pass the very concrete and specific information about the September 11th attack to competent authority in the United States. This was done on three specific occasions, the Department of State, the CIA and the NSC all having been given MOSSAD reports. The nature of the attacks were specified as were two different dates of attack. That the Bush Administration was informed of this planned attack by a putative ally and in specific detail and did nothing to attempt to circumvent it, came as a great surprise to Israeli officials. When it became obvious to them that their specific and timely warnings were obviously ignored, it then put Israel politicians in the position of having information which, if released to the American public, would cause terminal political damage, they decided, according to intercepted internet communication, that discretion was the better part of valor
The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
August 12, 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. 116
Date: Wednesday , December 10, 1997
Commenced: 3:05 PM CST
Concluded: 3:30 PM CST
RTC: How are you today, Gregory? Getting ready for Christmas?
GD: Just another day, Robert. A bit quieter. I’m sure the business people regret that they have to shut up on Christmas because they might make a few more dollars. Just a commercial venture these days. Did you ever hear ‘Green Christmas’ ? The song?
RTC: I can’t say that I have.
GD: A pointed satire in the manifest and bald-faced greed of the season, Robert. Thanksgiving is nothing but the Massacre of the Turkeys but Christmas is highlighted by the figurative ringing of the cash register bells and the crisp crackle of greenbacks. And many lovely and totally innocent trees are sacrificed for what was always a Roman pagan holiday.
RTC: Indeed?
GD: The Saturnalia. End of the year celebration to take up the extra days. Evergreens in abundance. Presents given and received.
RTC: No star in the sky?
GD: None that I have read about. And no three wise men from some unspecified place bearing gifts. The whole scene was lifted from the Romans and the Ascension of Christ taken directly from the cult of Isis which was very popular in Rome at the time.
RTC: Then you reject the historical accuracy of the New Testament?
GD: Entirely. After the fact fiction almost entirely and historically totally inaccurate. The Gospels came from a source document written about 45-50 AD and were constantly being cleaned up to reflect the changes of the day. None of them written closer to the events chronicled than about a hundred years. And the Revelation book was written by a lunatic confined on the island of Patmos which was a Roman nut house colony and about 96 AD. John was supposed to be living there with the Virgin Mary so you figure it out.
RTC: Aren’t there historical references to Jesus?
GD: None. The writings of Flavius Josephus, a renegade Jew of the time, had an inserted reference to Jesus but it has long been known as a gross ex post facto insertion by pious Christians in the second century. All fake, Robert, like the so-called Shroud of Turin. That dates to 1300.
RTC: How did the image get on it?
GD: Painted a naked model with egg tempera paint and pushed the cloth down over the body. That simple. Of course, the Vatican knows it’s a fake but they don’t discuss it because it is a big drawer for the pious of soul and incredulous of belief. In Vienna, in the cathedral of St. Stephan, we find the skull of that saint but at St. Polten, the skull of St. Stephan as a fifteen year old boy.
RTC: You’re putting me on.
GD: (Laughter) No, I’m not. And the sacred bones of St. Agnes turned out to be part of the spine of a goat. I wonder how Michelangelo would have depicted that one? With lots of muscle and a small penis. A wonderful artist but gay as a goose. And that brings me to yet another interesting aspect of the whole business. If you really look into the Gospels and try to discern the teachings of Jesus, you will realize that Jesus was an Essene. Now our modern theologians can discuss Jesus in detail and the Essenes in equal detail but never, ever at the same time. That’s would not be correct.
RTC: And why is that, pray tell?
GD: Well, because the Essenes were an all-male organization. They were communistic in their community activities with shared purses and so on and hated women. They bred with them and if the babies were male, all well and good but if female, both mother and child were expelled. They boys they kept.
RTC: There seem to be sinister overtones here, Gregory. Are you saying….?
GD: Yes, I am saying. Like the Spartans and Zulus, the Essenes were homosexuals.
RTC: Now, Jesus H. Christ, Gregory, by implication, by what you are saying and assuming you are accurate, was Jesus a fairy?
GD: It’s ‘gay’ now, but yes, that’s the way it appears. Don’t forget James the Beloved of Christ.
RTC: Are you certain about the facts…never mind your warped conclusions…the facts?
GD: Always. Yes, look it all up. None of it is connected but study the Essene cult. They were eventually shut down but it’s all there for you to find. But there never has been made a connection between Jesus and that group. Yet study the preachings of Jesus, or at least what the Gospels claim are the preachings, and then study the Essene dogmas and you at once see very clear and unmistakable parallels.
RTC: I could look all of this up but you seem to know your history. Of course you can’t say such things because you can never get it public. You do like to get involved in useless quests.
GD: No, but I like facts, not fictions. And I find it very, very entertaining that our evangelical Christians loathe and want to kill off any homosexual they can find. I doubt if any of them would even bother to do the research on the subject because a closed mind is a wonderful thing to behold. And as another interesting fact, the so-called ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ are Essene writings. Consider that the scholars have been pouring over these for years and yet only a few garbled passages have been released to the public. Why? Because the writings bear out what I just told you and our Jewish chums have agreed to shut up about it. I suppose they get more cluster bombs and nerve gas from Washington with which to civilize the Palestinians in return for said silence. I’m not joking about this, Robert.
RTC: Sadly, probably not. Jim was so determined to serve Tel Aviv’s interests that I’m afraid he has set this country up for future decades of Muslim hatred. Well, I doubt if I’ll see the results of this pandering in my lifetime.
GD: Yes, you’re no doubt right but the wheel always turns, Robert. And the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon their children.
RTC: More biblical exhortations, Gregory?
GD: The Devil can cite scripture, Robert, and your chums down in the Gerbil Palace consider me to be, at the least, a minor devil. Know the truth, Robert, and the truth shall set you free. More likely get you ten to twenty for having a kilo of smack in your glove compartment. Of course you never put it there but the alternative would be a dead baby suddenly being found in your suitcase at the airport. Societies or their control groups have a way with such things. The prisons are full of dissenters and more than a few have been gassed, electrocuted or hanged. Justice is depicted with a blindfold but I think she would be more appropriate wearing a gas mask to avoid the stench of the rotting bodies of the innocent dead sacrificed in her name.
(Concluded at 3:30 P.M. CST)
Encyclopedia of American Loons
Peter Wagner
One of the most elusive and frightening people afoot in the US at the moment, C. Peter Wagner is a domionionist writer often recognized as the de facto leader and founder of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). Though his writings reveal impressive levels of insanity, Wagner is hardly the most vocal of the lot (compared to, say, Cindy Jacobs or Lou Engle) but his influence, including his power over politicians such as Rick Perry, Louie Gohmert and Randy Forbes – or former Hawaii Lt. Governor James Aiona – runs deep, even though these politicians sometimes, and in glaring contradiction with the facts, try to downplay the dominionist ideology of Wagner’s movement. Officially, his current position is chancellor emeritus of Wagner Leadership Institute, which serves as a training camp for leaders to enable them to join in the NAR (here is what it takes to be an apostle, by the way). He was previously president of Global Harvest Ministries, and is the author of more than 70 books. Some background for the movement is given here.
In particular, Wagner more or less founded the modern conceptions of spiritual warfare (i.e. jihad, though Wagner would never, ever use that word), especially in Confronting the Powers: How the New Testament Church Experienced the Power of Strategic-Level Spiritual Warfare and Engaging the Enemy, where he breaks the warfare down into three levels:
– Ground Level: Person-to-person, praying for each other’s personal needs.
– Occult Level: dealing with demonic forces released through activities related to Satanism, witchcraft, astrology and similar stuff, for instance through Harry Potter, Buddha jimcrack or the preservation rather than wanton destruction of heathen native American heritage (NAR leaders have bragged online about the destruction of Native American religious artifacts, perceiving the destruction as a liberating act, promoting “reconciliation” between estranged groups of people; here are some examples from Hawaii).
– Strategic-Level or Cosmic-Level: To bind and bring down spiritual principalities and powers that rule over governments.
“Strategic-level intercession” uses “spiritual mapping” and “tearing down strongholds” to engage in spiritual warfare against “territorial spirits”. Ok, so how literal and insanely does he mean “warfare”? As literally and insanely as you could imagine (there is a useful guide here). The NAR cultists actually runs around and cleanses houses and burns heathen artifacts in bonfires, and their goal is, explicitly, to take control over all aspects of business, family, government, media, religion, and education (the “Seven Mountains”), which they believe have, quite literally, fallen under the control of demons; all sin and corruption and poverty on the Earth stem from the Earth being controlled by a hierarchy of demons under the authority of Satan. The premise of Engaging the Enemy is precisely that Satan’s territorial spirit-demons may be identified by name, and that Christians are to engage in war with them; NAR leader Alice Patterson, for instance, has claimed that the Democratic Party is a “demon structure”, his wife Doris is the author of How to Cast Out Demons, and Wagner himself seems to think that anyone who disagrees with him is demon possessed. In short, they call for revolution in favor of a religious dictatorship, which is a necessary prelude for the return of Christ to Earth (we are “mandated to do whatever is necessary” to take domionion, says Wagner), which would bring about the annihilation of mankind and eternal torment of everyone but a select few. The parallels to insane Azathoth worshippers in the writings of H.P. Lovecraft are uncanny.
In Hard-Core Idolatry: Facing the Facts, Wagner doesn’t face the fact but asserts instead that Catholic saints bring honor to the spirits of darkness, and promotes burning their statues and relics (though he talks mostly about doing that in Argentina, since doing so in the US may be less than politically savvy). Indeed, Wagner, directed his associate Cindy Jacobs – a prophet in his Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders – to go to the Argentinian city Resistencia, where “they must burn the idols, like the magicians did in Ephesus,” which they did: they literally ran around in the streets playing war with an imaginary enemy and burnt down stuff. Yes, the NAR is well-and-truly the American Taliban.
For an arbitrarily selected illustration of how Wagner thinks the world works, you may turn to his claim that the early 1990s economic downturn of the Japanese economy was due to what Wagner depicted as a Shinto ritual in which Japanese emperors have sexual intercourse with a demonic succubus. The 2011 earthquake in Japan was also a result of that country being “pagan” and the emperor having sex with demons (“There is a spirit called a Harlot, a principality, who dominates nations, who dominates territories, who dominates people groups very, very clearly to such an extent that she has fornication with kin”). When he finally got some media attention in connection with Rick Perry’s 2011 prayer rally, which the NAR helped organize, he tried rather desperately to downplay these elements of his teachings.
In 2012 Wagner was honored by the state of Delaware (requested by representative Daniel B. Short), given a commodation and the key to the city of Seaford by its mayor and even received a tribute from the city council, the state Senate, and the state House that was personally read by the local state representative for his attempts to overthrow democratic rule and institute a domionionist tyranny, though that was not an explicit part of the official reason for the tribute.
Diagnosis: Insane but shrewd, C. Peter Wagner may well be among the most dangerous people in the US – his views are more or less identical to the Taliban, and he enjoys a scary and ridiculous amount of influence. The chances that he’ll succeed in implementing any kind of dominionism is admittedly slim, but his influence runs deep enough for there to be a genuine cause for worry.