TBR News July 12, 2010
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C., July 12, 2010: “I have been involved with politics for many years and I have never seen anything like the current attitudes in Washington. The Republicans are openly greedy with no interest in anything but destroying our first black President and the Democrats are timid and without leadership. In fact, aside from a few people, this country is without leadership. But if I had a choice between Republican control of Congress or Democratic control, I am afraid I would have to chose the Dems. Why? Because the surviving GOP members are vicious, openly greedy and filled with hate. It is a mixture of greed and racism and as far as the rest of the country, they couldn’t care less. I once was a very active member of the GOP but I have walked away from these creeps and probably never will go back. A party run by Michelle Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh and the crazy Saran Palin is not a party I want to belong to. These are, of course, only my opinions but a great many people in both Washington and the rest of the country are in agreement with me. And I was reading a very long study by some senior FBI official about them developing the ability to keep an eye on any American citizen they want. Bank accounts, vehicle ownership, airline travel, telephone conversations, computer activity and even the USPS are part of their master plan. It’s not ready yet but they are getting there. I will go into this more later.”
Exposing the FBI’s secrets: The use of vehicles
by Germar Rudolf
Editor’s note: Mr. Rudolf, better known as an active revisionist, has had considerable knowledge, from the inside, about this subject.
Basic tactics…
Cover. Camouflage is an important component of an FBI vehicle surveillance operation.
FBI agents drive anything and everything, including sedans, coupes, utility vehicles, vans, trucks, four-wheel drive, minivans, commercial trucks, taxis, motorcycles, and even 18-wheelers.
Likewise, the FBI agents themselves come in all shapes and sizes. You’ll see many different silhouettes. (That’s spy-talk for the personal appearance of an agent.) When you’re under FBI surveillance, you can expect to see singles, couples, families, seniors, disabled, rappers, and so on. Anybody with a pulse might be part of an FBI surveillance team.
A common mistake. If you’re like most people, you might be thinking to yourself, “There’s no way they’d use a sweet little sixty-year-old grandmother.” Yeah, right. Grow up, and stop being such a patsy. The FBI loves rubes like you.
Or maybe you’re thinking, “No way they’d use a punk rapper with cranked-up music blaring from his car stereo.” Uh huh. Start packing your toothbrush, doofus. Because the goons don’t give you much time when they come a-knockin’ an hour before dawn.
The most important lesson you’ll ever learn. Any competent surveillance team – no matter which agency it’s from – will use your preconceptions, prejudices, and personal biases against you.
So stop leaping to conclusions based on peoples’ appearance.
Go back and read that last sentence again. If you want to catch surveillance teams, you need to start evaluating people based on what they do, not what they look like. To catch spooks, you need to size people up by their behavior, not their appearance.
Fundamental tactics…
The FBI utilizes a floating box to track you during a vehicle surveillance operation. The essential components of the box are the command vehicle, the backup vehicle, the left and right outrider vehicles, and the advance vehicle.
Under typical circumstances, the floating box is a powerful and versatile system of vehicle surveillance. The only occasions that cause concern to the FBI are when the target makes a turn. As you learned in the previous tutorial, a surveillance vehicle that follows a target around the corner is easy to spot
Vehicle modifications…
The FBI employs a potpourri of different vehicles in its surveillance operations. Wheel artists drive anything and everything, including sedans, coupes, stationwagons, pickup trucks, vans, minivans, sport utility vehicles, taxis, motorcycles, commercial trucks, ambulances, 18-wheelers, and others.
Many of these surveillance vehicles have been specially modified for their role. See the illustration below.
Probably the most significant modification is the addition of cutout switches and dimmer switches for many of the lights on the surveillance vehicle.
Headlamps. The driver can disable either of the front headlamps. He can also adjust the brightness of the headlamps. This provides a tremendous advantage at night – the agent can alter the way her vehicle appears to other drivers. For part of the follow the surveillance vehicle has two normal headlamps. For a while it might show only the left headlamp. And for part of the follow the vehicle might exhibit dimmed headlamps, suggestive of a faulty alternator or low battery condition. Many unwitting targets of surveillance have been completely hoodwinked by this feature
Brake lights. The FBI agent can also disable the vehicle’s brake lights. This is particularly effective when the agent has a cheating command of the target. That means the FBI agent is positioned ahead of the target. If the agent’s brake lights are not continually flashing, the target is less likely to detect that the agent is adjusting her speed in order to maintain a constant distance in front of the target. Again, many targets have been fooled by this modification.
Stall switch. Some FBI surveillance vehicles are equipped with a stall switch. This allows the wheel artist to simulate a vehicle breakdown. This deception is particularly effective in helping the FBI recover from mistakes during a follow. Stalled in front of the target vehicle, and apparently unable to get the vehicle restarted, an FBI agent is able to delay the target until the rest of the surveillance team gets back in position.
Bumpers. FBI surveillance vehicles can be equipped with reinforced ramming bumpers. These are effective when agents need to prevent a suspect from fleeing – or force a victim off the road at high speed.
Standard modifications. Because of the stress involved in constant on-road use, FBI mechanics routinely make a number of standard modifications to the Bureau’s surveillance vehicles. They often install a heavy-duty radiator and battery. A heavy-duty steering pump is also a common feature. These, along with top-quality shocks and springs, enhance the staying power of the vehicle during long follows.
The FBI uses stainless steel brake lines in many of its surveillance vehicles. This modification apparently boosts performance by overcoming certain types of condensation and heat-related problems during some weather conditions.
Driver communications…
A typical radio transmission between FBI wheel artists goes something like this.
“Gamma is flipping. Possible spark or smoke.”
In plain language, this means “The target vehicle has just made a U-turn. He may have detected us.”
By using communication codes, the FBI is able to reduce the chances of an eavesdropper figuring out what’s going on. Anyone picking up a stray signal is unlikely to realize that it’s from a surveillance team. For examples of surveillance team communication codes, return to our home page and click on Surveillance codes.
Why you never see them communicating. FBI agents are trained to conceal their voice communications. Often two agents will be riding in one vehicle. In order to disguise a radio transmission, the agent in the passenger seat will turn his/her head towards the driver while transmitting. If you’re stopped at a red light ahead of the FBI surveillance vehicle, all you’ll see in the rear view mirror is two people who appear to be talking to each other.
During a surveillance operation, FBI agents can use either their body rigs or the vehicle radio sets for transmitting. The body rig includes a standalone, internally mounted ear-piece that is virtually undetectable unless you’re looking for it. The effective range of the FBI’s standard body rig is much less than their vehicle radio sets. Both the body-rig and the vehicle set offer hands-free operation.
CASE STUDY: Hostile situation. When an FBI agent finds herself alone in a congested traffic situation with the target – and perhaps under close visual scrutiny by a suspicious target – she can still transmit critical information to the team leader. She simply clicks her tongue instead of talking. Here’s an example.
Wheel artist – numerous clicks.
Controller – “Is that you, Echo?”
Wheel artist – two clicks (Yes).
Controller – “Are you in command of the target?”
Wheel artist – two clicks (Yes).
Controller – “Has the target made contact with the other suspect yet?”
Wheel artist – silence (Possible No).
Controller – “Is the target not in contact with the suspect?”
Wheel artist – Two clicks (Yes).
And so it continues, two clicks meaning Yes, silence meaning No.
The cheating intersection. When the target is approaching a decision-point – and her direction of travel cannot be predicted by the FBI – the surveillance team leader makes certain that two FBI vehicles are in front of the target’s vehicle. This is a deadly tactic. It has meant the ruin of many suspects who thought they could beat FBI surveillance
Real-time communication…
The FBI has found that agent-to-agent communication in real-time is a vital component of a productive surveillance operation. Real-time communication gives the surveillance team a tactical advantage over the target. The illustration shown below provides a good example of this principle As the target walks back towards his parked vehicle, the various members of the vehicle surveillance team take up positions in a standard stakeout box. Note how layup vehicles Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta are facing away from the target’s vehicle, ready to pick up the follow and assume command of the target no matter which direction the target takes.
Equally important is the trigger vehicle. As shown in the illustration above, one of the ruses the FBI uses is to pull in and park ahead of the target’s parked vehicle. This is called a cheating trigger. Being in front of the target, the FBI agent is less likely to attract suspicion, but he is still in a position to cue other members of the surveillance team when the target begins to drive away. This makes for a seamless transition from the foot surveillance team to the vehicle surveillance team.
In particular, the trigger vehicle transmits the start-time, direction of travel, and speed of the target’s vehicle to the other members of the surveillance team. The appropriate layup vehicle can smoothly pick up the follow and assume command of the target because he has advance knowledge of the target’s direction, etc., thanks to the radio transmission from the FBI agent in the trigger vehicle.
The lesson is obvious. Your adversary is the entire surveillance team, not just the FBI agents you happen to spot.
10 Ways We Are Being Tracked, Traced, and Databased
July 10, 2010
Activist Post
The war on terror is a worldwide endeavor that has spurred massive investment into the global surveillance industry – which now seems to be becoming a war on “liberty and privacy.” Given all of the new monitoring technology being implemented, the uproar over warrantless wiretaps now seems moot. High-tech, first-world countries are being tracked, traced, and databased, literally around every corner. Governments, aided by private companies, are gathering a mountain of information on average citizens who so far seem willing to trade liberty for supposed security. Here are just some of the ways the matrix of data is being collected:
* GPS — Global positioning chips are now appearing in everything from U.S. passports, cell phones, to cars. More common uses include tracking employees, and for all forms of private investigation. Apple recently announced they are collecting the precise location of iPhone users via GPS for public viewing in addition to spying on users in other ways.
* Internet — Internet browsers are recording your every move forming detailed cookies on your activities. The NSA has been exposed as having cookies on their site that don’t expire until 2035. Major search engines know where you surfed last summer, and online purchases are databased, supposedly for advertising and customer service uses. IP addresses are collected and even made public. Controversial websites can be flagged internally by government sites, as well as re-routing all traffic to block sites the government wants to censor. It has now been fully admitted that social networks provide NO privacy to users while technologies advance for real-time social network monitoring is already being used. The Cybersecurity Act attempts to legalize the collection and exploitation of your personal information. Apple’s iPhone also has browsing data recorded and stored. All of this despite the overwhelming opposition to cybersurveillance by citizens.
* RFID — Forget your credit cards which are meticulously tracked, or the membership cards for things so insignificant as movie rentals which require your SSN. Everyone has Costco, CVS, grocery-chain cards, and a wallet or purse full of many more. RFID “proximity cards” take tracking to a new level in uses ranging from loyalty cards, student ID, physical access, and computer network access. Latest developments include an RFID powder developed by Hitachi, for which the multitude of uses are endless — perhaps including tracking hard currency so we can’t even keep cash undetected. (Also see microchips below).
* Traffic cameras – License plate recognition has been used to remotely automate duties of the traffic police in the United States, but have been proven to have dual use in England such as to mark activists under the Terrorism Act. Perhaps the most common use will be to raise money and shore up budget deficits via traffic violations, but uses may descend to such “Big Brother” tactics as monitors telling pedestrians not to litter as talking cameras already do in the UK.
* Computer cameras and microphones — The fact that laptops — contributed by taxpayers — spied on public school children (at home) is outrageous. Years ago Google began officially to use computer “audio fingerprinting” for advertising uses. They have admitted to working with the NSA, the premier surveillance network in the world. Private communications companies already have been exposed routing communications to the NSA. Now, keyword tools — typed and spoken — link to the global security matrix.
* Public sound surveillance — This technology has come a long way from only being able to detect gunshots in public areas, to now listening in to whispers for dangerous “keywords.” This technology has been launched in Europe to “monitor conversations” to detect “verbal aggression” in public places. Sound Intelligence is the manufacturer of technology to analyze speech, and their website touts how it can easily be integrated into other systems.
* Biometrics — The most popular biometric authentication scheme employed for the last few years has been Iris Recognition. The main applications are entry control, ATMs and Government programs. Recently, network companies and governments have utilized biometric authentication including fingerprint analysis, iris recognition, voice recognition, or combinations of these for use in National identification cards.
* DNA — Blood from babies has been taken for all people under the age of 38. In England, DNA was sent to secret databases from routine heel prick tests. Several reports have revealed covert Pentagon databases of DNA for “terrorists” and now DNA from all American citizens is databased. Digital DNA is now being used as well to combat hackers.
* Microchips — Microsoft’s HealthVault and VeriMed partnership is to create RFID implantable microchips. Microchips for tracking our precious pets is becoming commonplace and serves to condition us to accept putting them in our children in the future. The FDA has already approved this technology for humans and is marketing it as a medical miracle, again for our safety.
* Facial recognition – Anonymity in public is over. Admittedly used at Obama’s campaign events, sporting events, and most recently at the G8/G20 protests in Canada. This technology is also harvesting data from Facebook images and surely will be tied into the street “traffic” cameras.
All of this is leading to Predictive Behavior Technology — It is not enough to have logged and charted where we have been; the surveillance state wants to know where we are going through psychological profiling. It’s been marketed for such uses as blocking hackers. Things seem to have advanced to a point where a truly scientific Orwellian world is at hand. It is estimated that computers know to a 93% accuracy where you will be, before you make your first move. Nanotech is slated to play a big role in going even further as scientists are using nanoparticles to directly influence behavior and decision making.
Many of us are asking: What would someone do with all of this information to keep us tracked, traced, and databased? It seems the designers have no regard for the right to privacy and desire to become the Controllers of us all.
http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2010/07/10/10-ways-we-are-being-tracked-traced-and-databased/
Of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Blackwater
July 9, 2010
by Jeremy Scahill
The Nation
The mercenary firm Blackwater is clearly more teflon than Gen. Stanley McChrystal. While McChrystal sips Bud Light Lime, watching Talladega Nights and ponders what private sector job to scoop up, Erik Prince’s crusading private soldiers will still be running around Afghanistan and other theaters of undeclared US wars globally with the CIA. All with the blessing of the Commander in Chief. While President Obama sacked McChrystal after comments attributed to him and his inner circle were published in a now infamous Rolling Stone article, Blackwater is being rewarded with new contracts despite its track record of scores of acts of misconduct, including allegations of murdering and manslaughtering civilians, weapons charges, conspiracy and obstruction of justice to name a few.
Given McChrystal’s alleged involvement in the torture of detainees at Camp Nama in Iraq, his primary role in the cover-up of Pat Tillman’s death and other dark acts involving his time commanding the Joint Special Operations Command under the Bush-Cheney administration, McChrystal should have never been named commander in Afghanistan. When he was appointed, Obama sent a message about the kind of policy he wanted in Afghanistan–one which favored unaccountable, unattributable direct action forces accustomed to operating in secret and away from effective oversight. Indeed, in the Rolling Stone article, McChrystal appeared to admit his famous commitment to decreasing civilian deaths was a sham operation. According to Rolling Stone: “‘You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight,’ McChrystal will tell a Navy Seal he sees in the hallway at headquarters. Then he’ll add, ‘I’m going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though.'”
President Obama was right to fire McChrystal (technically he accepted his resignation)–it should have happened long ago. That McChrystal was fired for the Rolling Stone article, however, and not for the way he prosecuted the Afghan war speaks volumes about the administration’s Afghanistan position and policy vision (not to mention that Dick Cheney’s general, David Petraeus, was named as McChrystal’s successor).
Contrast Obama’s McChrystal treatment with his Blackwater treatment.
In January, two Blackwater operatives were indicted on murder charges stemming from a shooting in Afghanistan in May 2008. In March, Senator Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called on the Justice Department to investigate Blackwater’s use of a shell company, Paravant, to win training contracts in Afghanistan. On June 11, federal prosecutors filed a massive brief in their appeal of last year’s dismissal by a federal judge of manslaughter charges against the Blackwater operatives alleged to be the “shooters” at Nisour Square. Seventeen innocent Iraqis were killed in the shooting and more than 20 others wounded. In the brief, prosecutors asked that the indictment of the Blackwater men be reinstated. Then in April, five of Erik Prince’s top deputies were hit with a fifteen-count indictment by a federal grand jury on conspiracy, weapons and obstruction of justice charges. Among those indicted were Prince’s longtime number-two man, former Blackwater president Gary Jackson, former vice presidents William Matthews and Ana Bundy and Prince’s former legal counsel Andrew Howell. Former Blackwater employees have made serious allegations in sworn declarations and in Grand Jury testimony about murder, gun smuggling, prostitution, destruction of evidence and a slew of other alleged crimes.
Clearly, none of this is cause for major concern at the White House.
Over the past two weeks, Blackwater has been awarded more than $200 million in new contracts by the Obama administration. One is a $120 million arrangement with the US State Department for security services in Afghanistan, the other, worth $100 million, is for protecting CIA operations and operatives in Afghanistan and other hot zones globally. Blackwater has spent heavily this year on lobbyists—particularly Democratic ones. In the first quarter of 2010, the company spent more than $500,000 for the services of Stuart Eizenstat, a well-connected Democratic lobbyist who served in the Clinton and Carter administrations. Eizenstat heads the international practice for the powerhouse law and lobbying firm Covington and Burling.
“Blackwater has undergone some serious changes,” an unnamed U.S. official told The Washington Post. “They’ve had to prove to the government that they’re a responsible outfit. Having satisfied every legal requirement, they have the right to compete for contracts. They have people who do good work, at times in some very dangerous places. Nobody should forget that, either.”
Let’s also not forget that like McChrystal, Erik Prince was recently featured in an entertainment magazine. In January, Vanity Fair profiled Prince. In the article Prince and his associates didn’t speak disparagingly about the commander in chief or the vice president, but Prince did appear to reveal details of classified US operations and the existence of a covert CIA assassination team, trained and organized by Prince, that planned hits in various countries, including inside Germany, a key US ally.
Maybe if some reporter catches Erik Prince and his cronies engaged in drunken, profanity-laced diatribes aimed at the White House and Commander in Chief, something would really change. If they used the phrase “bite me” when speaking of the vice president or embarrassed poor little Richard Holbrooke or called the National Security Advisor a “clown,” maybe the administration would decide it was inappropriate to continue Blackwater’s “services.”
There’s no doubt, under the Uniform Code of Military Conduct, McChrystal was rightly relieved of his duties. But in the end, it was McChrystal’s words–not his actions–that sunk his ship. Blackwater’s ship of misconduct, crime and murder will apparently sail on for the foreseeable future, at least until their words, instead of their bullets, strike the wrong people.
UPDATE: I just interviewed Rep. Jan Schakowsky, the leading lawmaker opposing Blackwater. A member of the House Intelligence Committee, Schakowsky cannot confirm details of Blackwater’s work for the CIA, but regarding the report they had been hired again by the CIA, she said: “It’s just outrageous. What does Blackwater have to do to be determined an illegitimate player? While some of Blackwater’s personnel do good work, its employees have proven to be untrustworthy with weapons in combat zones. Whether they are at the center of a mission or are doing static security, we should not be using Blackwater employees. The CIA should not be doing business with this company no matter how many name changes it undergoes.” Schakowsky added: “If the reason for using Blackwater is that the government lacks capacity or can’t find any reputable firm with this capacity, then that’s a serious problem that needs to be confronted head on.”
6-Year-Old on Terrorist Watch List!
July 1, 2010
The Department of Homeland Security placed a six-year-old native of Cleveland, Ohio, on its “terrorist watch list,” reports India-West.
Doctors Santhosh and Sapna Thomas found out that their young daughter Alyssa was on the DHS’s watch list in May, when the family was making a trip from Cleveland to Minneapolis to attend a first communion.
Neither Santhosh, who specializes in sports medicine, nor Sapna, a gastroenterologist, are on the list. Nor is Alyssa’s younger sister Nicole.
The family was allowed to fly and given a set of procedures to have Alyssa’s name removed from the list, which the Thomases would find out was no easy task. Weeks after they filed an online complaint with the DHS’s Traveler Redress Inquiry Program, young Alyssa received a form letter from the department, which, of course, she couldn’t read.
The letter noted that DHS could not confirm or deny that Alyssa was on the watch list, but would determine whether “corrections” needed to be made.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, has also taken up the case on the Thomases’ behalf.
The “terrorist watch list” — different from the “no fly list” and “selectee list” — was established in 2007. The list, principally maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, has more than a million records representing 400,000 individuals, reports India-West.
EU Banking System on the Brink
July 10, 2010
by Mike Whitney
Counterpunch
The EU banking system is in big trouble. Many of the Union’s largest banks are sitting on hundreds of billions of dodgy sovereign bonds and non performing real estate loans. But writing down their losses will deplete their capital and force them to restructure their debt. So the banks are concealing their losses through accounting sleight-of-hand and by borrowing money from the European Central Bank. This has helped to hide the rot at the heart of the system.
Presently, 170 banks are having difficulty accessing the wholesale markets where they get their funding,. Financial institutions are wary of lending to each other because they’re not sure who is solvent or not. It’s a question of trust.
ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet has tried to keep the problems under wraps, but markets aren’t easily fooled. Stress gauges, like euribor, have been rising for the last two months. Investors smell a rat. They know the banks are playing hide-n-seek with downgraded assets and they know that Trichet is helping them out.
A week ago, stocks rallied on news that EU banks would repay most of the €442bn one-year emergency loan from the ECB. The news was mainly a publicity stunt designed to hide what was really going on. Yes, the banks borrowed significantly less that analysts had predicted (another €132bn), but just two days later, 78 banks borrowed another €111bn. The additional loans makes it look like Trichet cooked up the whole thing to trick investors.
EU banks were engaged in the same high-risk activities as their counterparts in the US. They were playing fast and loose on speculative trades that were ramped up with maximum leverage. Bankers raked in hundreds of billions in salaries and bonuses before the bubble burst. Now the securities and bonds they purchased have plunged in value, so they’ve turned to the ECB for a bailout. Sound familiar?
Trichet is a banking industry rep, much like Geithner and Bernanke. His job is to maintain the political and economic power of the banks and to dump the losses onto the public. Presently, the ECB provides “limitless” loans to underwater banks so they can maintain the appearance of solvency. Trichet has lowered rates to 1 percent, provided a safe haven for overnight deposits, and begun an aggressive bond purchasing program (Quantitative Easing) which keeps prices of sovereign bonds artificially high. Valuations on bank assets are supported by a central authority and do not reflect true market pricing.
The wholesale-funding market (repo) has not shut down. Banks can still exchange their sovereign bonds and real estate securities for short-term loans. It merely requires that they take a haircut on the value of their collateral, which would then have to be recorded as a loss leaving them capital impaired. This is how markets work, but the banks are not required to play by the rules.
From Bloomberg News: “European lenders had $2.29 trillion at risk in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain at the end of 2009, including loans to governments, according to the Bank for International Settlements…German banks’ writedowns on loans and securities will probably reach $314 billion by the end of 2010, with state-owned lenders and savings banks facing the bulk of the losses, the International Monetary Fund said in a report in April.”
See? The ECB is not buying Greek bonds because of a “sovereign debt crisis”. They are buying them so the banks won’t lose money. The “sovereign debt crisis” meme is all public relations hype. If it becomes too expensive to fund government operations, Greece can leave the EU and return to the drachma which would give it greater flexibility to settle its debts. That would increase demand for Greek exports and improve tourism. This is the best solution for Greece. So, where’s the crisis?
If Greece, Portugal and Spain, leave the EU and restructure their debt, banks in Germany and France will default and bondholders will lose their shirts. In other words, the investors, who took a risk, will lose money—which is how the system is supposed to work.
Bloomberg again: “The region’s banks have written down a proportionately lower percentage of their assets than their U.S. counterparts. U.S. banks will have written down 7 percent of their assets by the end of 2010 and euro-area banks 3 percent, according to the IMF. European banks still haven’t shown analysts they have completed their writedowns.” (Bloomberg)
So, the banks are underwater, but nothing has been done to fix the problem. Where are the regulators?
On Tuesday, euribor hit a 10-month high. The pressure is building despite Trichet’s emergency programs. ECB bank lending is nearly €800bn while overnight deposits are roughly €240bn. Trichet is willing to drag the EU through 10 or 15 years of subpar growth and high unemployment (like Japan) to keep a handful of bankers and bondholders from accepting their losses. If things get bad enough, Trichet might invoke the “nuclear option”, that is, allow a major bank to implode “Lehman-style” so he can extort hundreds of billions of euros from the EU member states. It’s been done before; just ask Bernanke or Paulson.
THE “STRESS TEST” FRAUD
The bank stress tests in the US were organized by the Treasury as a “confidence-building” measure. They allowed the banks to use their own internal-models to determine the value of complex securities. The same rule will apply to EU banks. The Daily Telegraph reports that some of the banks will actually test themselves. As least that removes any doubt about the results.
From Bloomberg News — “European stress tests on 91 of the region’s biggest banks drew criticism from analysts who said regulators are underestimating probable losses on Greek and Spanish government bonds. The tests are designed to assess how banks will be able to absorb losses on loans and government bonds, the Committee of European Banking Supervisors said yesterday. Regulators have told lenders the tests may assume a loss of about 17 percent on Greek government debt, 3 percent on Spanish bonds and none on German debt, said two people briefed on the talks who declined to be identified because the details are private.
Credit markets are pricing in losses of about 60 percent on Greek bonds should the government default, more than three times the level said to be assumed by CEBS. Derivatives known as recovery swaps are trading at rates that imply investors would get back about 40 percent in a Greek default or restructuring.” (Bloomberg)
The tests are a joke. The banks will continue to use accounting-rule changes and other gimmickry to obfuscate their losses. Trichet will use the tests to step up his bond purchasing program (QE) which will transfer the banks losses onto the member states. Many of the banks are insolvent and need restructuring. But they are in no real danger, because they still have a stranglehold on the process.
WIKILEAKS WEBSITE TO BE ABANDONED
10 July 2010:
Within the last few hours we have learned that WIKILEAKS (Assange) will commit no more time and effort into restoring our website http://www.wikileaks.org .
The website has been effectively down in terms of document submissions for many weeks, and as we speak there is no way for the general public or potential whistleblowers to upload documents to the site.
We have been told that WIKILEAKS will be launching a completely new site hosted in Iceland. However, Assange would not provide any time lines, or any indication of user options and facilities.
During the exchange, Assange also confirmed that no legal team had been provided to Manning, and no one from WIKILEAKS had met Manning during his detention in Kuwait. This was completely at odds with recent WIKILEAKS emails requesting $50,000 in donor funding for a legal team to fly to Kuwait.
Wikileaks Insider
wikileaks.is
Wikileaks.is is a domain controlled by four name servers at intzix.net. All four of them are on different IP networks. The primary name server is ns1.intzix.net. Incoming mail for wikileaks.is is handled by two mail servers also at intzix.net. Both are on different IP networks. Wikileaks.is has one IP number , but the reverse is host-88-80-2-32.cust.prq.se.
Wikileaks.org, www.wikileaks.org, www.wikileaks.com, sunshinepress.org, blog.wikileaks.org and at least three other hosts point to the same IP. Ip6.is, ipv6.is, intzix.eu, intzix.at, intzix.tk and at least 18 other hosts share both name servers and mail servers with this domain. Live.vu, live.mp, live.tl, buddy.vu, intzix.de and at least 21 other hosts share name servers with this domain. Kw1c.net, kw1c.org, usenet.is, intzix.es, intzix.me and at least 34 other hosts share mail servers with this domain.
More information
Wikileaks.is is hosted on a server in Sweden even though the hostname implies Iceland.
Comment: The public, or more specifically, those members of the public who have access to classified government material, who would somehow wish to reveal the contents of these documents to the public because they feel they might be important, should consider sites like ‘Wikileaks’ with the highest degree of suspicion. Setting up a “tell all” site to lure would be tattle tales to their destruction is an old, old official game. First, there is a burst of publicity in such otherwise respectable press organs as the New York Times about “daring men who defy” the government by posting secret documents. This is followed by another article actually listing the address to which secret documents could be sent and then, later, to encourage the tardy, a breathless story about some major “leak” that has allegedly caused officials anxiety. This is a parallel to the pathetic stories, appearing regularly about the fact that the FBI is considering legal action against a certain person because they allegedly have developed an “absolutely secure” telephone scrambler. Of course, they have not, and again, because the news media conveniently posts the address of the seller of said devices, anyone buying one might as well have the FBI on the line with them, so huge is the trapdoor built in. Wikilkeaks never published any real secret material,riggen national news stories to the contrary, but they now have been discredited, so another “courageous blogger” soon will emerge with a nearly identical phony message. In dealing with such people, ask them for a physical address to which you can send a computer disc with information. Of course, you will never get any kind of an address because the scam is being run out of an FBI office and you will be told that such an address is a well-kept secret to prevent Them from finding the heroic tattletale. Ed.
The Great Holocaust Funds Fraud
by Dr. Phillip L. Kushner, Head of Mathematics Dept.
University of Texas-Austin
The notorious political correctness movement, hatched from a basilisk egg by liberals, has produced one of the most distructive trends in international relations since the October Revolution in Russia.
This trend is the often-successful attempts on the part of special interest groups to extort money and favors from larger entities, such as religious organizations or national governments, on the basis of some long-distant wrongs alleged to have been done to the special interest group by the predecessors of their targets.
The most illustrative and notorious of this purely extortionate behavior was manifested in the blatant attacks of Edgar Bronfman’s World Jewish Congress (WJC) against the Swiss government and their banking system.
It was their thesis that since the Swiss had the temerity to have dealings with the evil Germans durring the course of the Third Reich that the Swiss should pay $7 billion to Bronfman’s organization in expiation of their sins.
In aid of this trans-Atlantic extortion, sympathetic members of the United States government as well as an entirely-cooperative media joined forces to pressure the Swiss into further enriching Bronfman’s extensive liquor-based coffers and to lend luster to the future careers of his attendant politicians.
Bronfman, head of the WJC until June of 2007, and the real power behind him, the Rabbi Israel Singer, the Brooklyn-born son of Jewish refugees and the secretary general of the WJC from 2001 to 2007, launched a campaign of harassment against the Swiss and the public of many nations were bombarded with official statements and mendacious press accounts of Swiss evil doings that eventually descended to a level of idociy. In the end it gave far more entertainment to the normal reader than outrage.
Although they never concocted the story that all German concentration camp guards were armed with Swiss army knives and that, naturally, the companies who manufactured these knives ought, at the very least, to contribute millions of Swiss francs to Bronfman’s Friday Night Chowder and Mrching Society, other shrill articles closely approached it.
The WJC was well aware that Swiss banking laws absolutely forbade the release of any information on any depositor, be they Jewish, CIA, KGB or even serving U.S. government officials with Cali cartel stashed away for a comfortable retirement.
Unfortunately for the WJC, the Swiss eventually modified their laws to permit them to release the names of thousands of depositors with dormant accounts, accompanied by explicit directions as to how to secure the release of the 42 million Swiss francs still in these accounts.
This move effectrively chopped the ground out from under the WJC’s feet and the Swiss later reported that the respnse to the world-wide publication of the list was underwhelming.
Instead of the uncounted, but alleged, thousands of Jews who were purported to have had their fat bank account seized by the evil Swiss, a paltry total of 1,872 unclaimed accounts were found, of which a large percentage belonged to non-Jews, including some senior officials of wartime Germany who forgot to empty their accounts before they died.
And instead of the accounts totaling $7 billion as Bronfman and his press allies claimed, the total amount was only some 42 million Swiss francs, or about fourteenths of one percent (.004) of the Bronfman/Singer claimed.
No one has ever said that Edgar Bronfman or Israel Singer and their righteous and hungry chorus were timid when it came to asserting rights and demands.
In essence, the Swiss put a large amount of money into an account and said that legitimate claimants could prersent their claims, accompanied with legitimate documentation, and the Swiss would make payment. By putting, not unreasonable limits and conditions on their funds, the Swiss effectively spiked Bronfman’s cannon.
This decisive defeat inspired Bronfman’s public relations mahine to proclaim it as a glorious victory for Edgar Bronfman in specific and world Jewry in general. It was, the claim was made, that the Bronfman/Singer power structure had compelled the evil Swiss to give way. Public memory is short and no doubt at this remove, the public vaguely believes that Bronfman and his mafia forced the powerful and wicked Swiss to their knees.
This is known in Jewish circles as chutzpah.
What was loudly attacked by the subservient media as Swiss mendacity was, in fact, nothing more that legally managed confidentiality, something fully known to the members of the echoing media at the time they were gleefully attacking the Swiss.
Once Bronfman claimed what was, in effect, a Phyrric victory, Bronfman and Singer looked around for other potential sources of extorted loot. After all, the penitent German government has donated over 200 billion German marks as “reparations” for the purported misdeeds of their fathers and, in this case, the sins of the fathers are indeed being visited upon their children…and the grandchildren and so on until either every one alive during the 12 year course of the Third Reich is dead of old age or the German treasury runs dry.
Having failed dismally with the tougher Swiss, the WJC then decided to attack their age=-old enemy, the Catholic Church and by so doing, to extort as much money as possible from them before moving on to Sweden, which did indeed have business dealings the Third Reich, as did Spain, Portugal and any other entity that the WJC could prove had money.
Thereupon followed a veritable flood of shocked articles in the American press concerning the misdeeds of the Vatican. These misdeeds were always attributed to an unnamed “high level U.S. government official” and dealt with the horrifying possibility that the entire Vatican from the Pope on down not only received daily rail shipments from Auschwitz camp of tons of gold bars, all marked with the dread SS runes and the name of the notorious death camp in which, it was well-known, millions and millions of screaming Jews were shoved into ovens..
Further, the Church was then charged with running a veritable travel agency that facilitated hundreds of thousands of evil Nazis to escape to such places as Syria and the Argentine. In actuality, a large number of senior SD and Gestapo personnel, to include Heinirich Mueller, the head of the Gestapo, were quietly put onto the payrolls of the CIA in the immediate postwar years.
It is instructive, and amusing, to note that nothing was ever said about the well-documented grab by Roosevelt and his henchmen of over $230 millions of Jewish refugee funds taken by the U.S. government from the safety of U.S. branches of Swiss banks.
Bronfman and Singer demanded that the Vatican open their archives to the WJC so that various misdeeds could be exposed and then monies transferred to the WJC coffers. When the Vatican turned them down, within a week, horror stories about pedophilic priests erupted in the pages of the American press, commencing in the Baltimore Sun, but very soon after this new attack, dreadful stories about mishandling of refugee money and even hints at embezzlement began to surface.
A comprehensive audit of the WJC’s accounts in Switzerland from 1995–2004, conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, an accounting firm, found that “over the years $3.8 million ‘disappeared’ from the bank accounts” and that there were “significant un-reconciled cash withdrawals where there is no documentation of the usage of the funds.’
Finally, Rabbi Israel Singer was dismissed after a tumultuous period for the organization when its Swiss affiliate discovered that 1.2 million USD were involved in suspicious money transfers between accounts in New York, Switzerland and London to a WJC numbered bank account at a UBS branch in Geneva. The Geneva office was not aware of the account and until “the manager, Maya Ben-Haim Rosen, received a bank statement showing that a UBS account she was unaware of had been overdrawn by $40 when Mr. Singer transferred the money” to Zvi Barak, an Israeli lawyer The WJC’s General Counsel in Geneva, Daniel Lack, called for an independent audit of the WJC’s accounts, but his requests were ignored. Although the money was eventually put back into the account it was not until much later that deeper investigations about the organizations finances were conducted, which found various irregularities as well as lavish travel and other expenses incurred by Mr. Singer.
Haaretz reported that the name of the organization “was associated with financial irregularities, corruption and endless power struggles.” And the New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer conducted a comprehensive audit of the WJC over a two-year period and on January 31, 2006 entered into an Agreement of Discontinuance with the WJC, resolving the investigation and summarizing its key findings. According to the agreement, the investigation “presented the organization as one in which corruption had spread in recent years”[7], identified financial mismanagement and breaches of fiduciary duty, but found no criminal wrongdoing and concluded that any misconduct “did not compromise the core mission” of the organization or result in “identifiable losses of charitable assets.” An article in the Haaretz points out that the Spitzer report neglected the audit of the WJC’s accounts in Switzerland from 1995–2004 and did not include the most serious charges and accusations.
Despite vigorously defending Rabbi Singer during the Attorney General’s inquiry, in March 2007 Bronfman abruptly announced the firing of Rabbi Singer. Bronfman accused Singer of stealing his money in an article published by Haaretz: “‘Singer helped himself to cash from the WJC office, my cash,’ wrote Bronfman to European Jewish Congress President Pierre Besnainou in a letter. ‘The final blow came when we discovered that he was playing games with his hotel bills in Jerusalem.’ … [Singer] boasted of his ability to put one over on presidents and prime ministers, and with the same degree of pride enumerated heads of state as his personal friends. In retrospect, it has emerged that during the same period, Singer himself behaved as though he himself were a head of state, living ostentatiously at the expense of the donors to the WJC.”[11] The Jewish Daily Forward provided more details between the “back-and-forth accusations” and denials “about which side leaked the material to the media”. According to the article, WJC Secretary General Stephen Herbits accused Singer himself of leaking this memo to the media. Subsequent press reports indicated that the memo was leaked from another organization unaffiliated with Rabbi Singer, suggesting that Mr. Herbits’ allegations were incorrect
On March 14th, 2007 Singer was dismissed by the president of the WJC Edgar M. Bronfman for embezzling funds
The New York Times wrote in May 2007, that “Edgar M. Bronfman Sr., the billionaire liquor magnate who is its largest patron, had resigned as its president” because of the turmoil. The Jewish Daily Forward pointed out, that the resignation ended “one of the most prolific and controversial tenures in American Jewish communal Leadership.
Israel Singer fired from WJC for embezzling funds
Former WJC secretary-general Singer warns Bronfman he would ‘regret having stained my allegedly good name.’
March 22, 2007
by Amiram Barkat
Haaratz
World Jewish Congress President Edgar Bronfman fired Israel Singer after becoming convinced the secretary general was embezzling funds, according to a letter publicized Wednesday.
In his first public response since his dismissal last Wednesday, Singer said Bronfman was “receiving bad advice” and warned him he would “regret having stained my good name.” Singer had held senior positions in the organization for the past three decades.
Bronfman, who until recently was considered Singer’s patron, announced the dismissal during a conference call with members of the WJC steering committee. The organization refused to issue an explanation at the time.
In a letter to European Jewish Congress President Pierre Besnainou, Bronfman said he decided to dismiss Singer after discovering he “had helped himself to cash from the WJC office, my cash. This had gone on for a very long time.”
Bronfman did not provide any proof of his allegations. The letter was published by the JTA, the Jewish news agency.
“The final blow came when we discovered that he was playing games with his hotel bills in Jerusalem,” Bronfman wrote.
Referring to his long friendship with Singer, Bronfman wrote that he went through “many weeks of crying to find out that I was so badly used by a man I used to love.”
Commenting on news of his upcoming retirement, Bronfman wrote, “I am determined to leave only when this whole mess is cleaned up.”
Singer described Bronfman’s accusations as slanderous and said he had plenty of supporters and good friends.
Singer’s prestige fell after allegations of his involvement in financial irregularities within the World Jewish Congress. The allegations were brought for investigation by New York State Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, who revealed that Singer had used some of the money for personal use
WJC in turmoil / Bronfman: Singer was fired ‘for embezzling my cash’
March 22, 2007
by Amiram Bark
World Jewish Congress President Edgar Bronfman fired Israel Singer after becoming convinced the secretary general was embezzling funds, according to a letter publicized yesterday.
In his first public response since his dismissal last Wednesday, Singer said Bronfman was “receiving bad advice” and warned him he would “regret having stained my good name.” Singer had held senior positions in the organization for the past three decades.
Bronfman, who until recently was considered Singer’s patron, announced the dismissal during a conference call with members of the WJC steering committee. The organization refused to issue an explanation at the time.
In a letter to European Jewish Congress President Pierre Besnainou, Bronfman said he decided to dismiss Singer after discovering he “had helped himself to cash from the WJC office, my cash. This had gone on for a very long time.”
The letter was published by the JTA, the Jewish news agency.
“The final blow came when we discovered that he was playing games with his hotel bills in Jerusalem,” Bronfman wrote.
Referring to his long friendship with Singer, Bronfman wrote that he went through “many weeks of crying to find out that I was so badly used by a man I used to love.”
Commenting on news of his upcoming retirement, Bronfman wrote, “I am determined to leave only when this whole mess is cleaned up.”
Singer described Bronfman’s accusations as slanderous and said he had plenty of supporters and good friends.
‘Ecological’ plan sees dead put down a toilet
July 8, 2010
From: mX
HeraldSun.com.au
- Corpse plan hailed as ‘ecological’
- Suggests flushing human remains into sewage
- Critics brand procedure ‘disturbing’
Undertakers could dissolve corpses in chemicals then flush the remains into the sewage system under plans being studied by European bureaucrats.
The controversial method has been hailed as a much more ecologically sound method of dealing with the dead.
But critics have branded the procedure, driven by a Scottish company, as “disturbing” and claim it shows no respect for the recently departed.
The process is called chemical hydrolysis and has been used in the destruction of cattle found to have mad cow disease.
The body is placed in a silk bag, itself placed within a metal cage frame. This is then loaded into a Resomator.
The machine is filled with a mixture of water and potassium hydroxide, and set to 180C.
The end result is a small quantity of green-brown liquid containing amino acids, peptides, sugars and salts.
Soft, porous white bone remains are easily crushed, and can then be returned to the next of kin.
The liquid can be recycled back to the ecosystem by being applied to a memorial garden or forest or simply put into the sewage system.
Sandy Sullivan, managing director of Resomation, said:
“(People) like the environmental benefits and the thought of going the water route, as opposed to burial or fire.”
Comment: And Dad is just where I always wanted him to be!
The Conversations with the Crow
When the CIA discovered that their former Deputy Director of Clandestine Affairs, Robert T. Crowley, had been talking with author Gregory Douglas, they became fearful (because of what Crowley knew) and outraged (because they knew Douglas would publish eventually) and made many efforts to silence Crowley, mostly by having dozens of FBI agents call or visit him at his Washington home and try to convince him to stop talking to Douglas, whom they considered to be an evil, loose cannon.
Crowley did not listen to them and Douglas made through shorthand notes of each and every one of their many conversation. TBR News published most of these (some of the really vile ones were left out of the book but will be included on this site as a later addendum ) and the entire collection was later produced as an Ebook.
Now, we reliably learn, various Washington alphabet agencies are trying to find a way to block the circulation of this highly negative, entertaining and dangerous work, so to show our solidarity with our beloved leaders and protectors, and our sincere appreciation for their corrupt and coercive actions, we are going to reprint the entire work, chapter by chapter. (The complete book can be obtained by going to:
http://www.shop.conversationswiththecrow.com/Conversations-with-the-Crow-CWC-GD01.htm🙂
Here is the second part of the eleventh chapter:
Conversation No. 11a
Date: Monday, April 29, 1996
Commenced: 9:17 AM CST
Concluded: 10:11 AM CST
GD: Good morning, Robert. Interesting news on the wire.
RTC: Good morning. What news is that, Gregory?
GD: I see that Colby [1]appears to have had a boating accident.
RTC: So I understand.
GD: I believe you mentioned this earlier.
RTC: I very possibly may have, Gregory. We live in dangerous times indeed.
GD: Apparently he went out for a midnight excursion on the Potomac and did not come back.
RTC: A terrible loss. They haven’t found him yet have they?
GD: Not yet. Depends on the temperature of the water. When gasses build up in the body, it will rise like Jesus to the surface. We used to call them floaters when I was doing pathology and believe me, they stank badly. That is unless the bottom feeders got to him first. I can foresee a closed casket and lots of air freshener, Robert.
RTC: Graphic side to a great national tragedy. When we shot Paisley in the back of the head and chucked him off his sail boat, we put weights on him so he wouldn’t come up. When divers did find him, he was rotten to the core. Had to cut off his hands to try to get fingerprints.
GD: What was his transgression?
RTC: We let it get out he was suspected of dealing with the Soviets but actually, it had to do with the Kennedy business. Now that the box has arrived here, we will discuss this historical event much further. By the way, Gregory, when I turn it on, all the birds vanish from the area like magic. I can only imagine what must be going on inside. At least it works with the birds and one other thing I noticed. Some local was walking his dog on their side of the street and the dog began to yelp and howl when he came in range. Do you think the Swiss are more sensitive than dogs? I was halfway expecting to hear screaming from over there. Well, I followed your advice and only left it on for about twenty minutes for the first time and a little longer for the second.
GD: I’m glad you’re happy, Robert.
RTC: Well, another DCI gone.
GD: And lamented?
RTC: Certainly not by me, Gregory. Nor, I should think, by many others over there. A nasty man who had a mouth problem.
GD: I hope for the sake of all of us they find him but without a bullet in the back of his head. If the body never comes up, there will be endless books and articles about his vanishing. Some drooling pinhead will swear they saw him playing golf in Madrid. When Kitchener went down with the Hampshire, years later there were claims he was alive and well in Patagonia, running a penguin farm.
RTC: Yes, there’s a lot of that. The Kennedy business has the myth makers working overtime. Have you read any of the fantasy books? Men with umbrellas? People hidden in the sewers? Hoover shooting at him from some bank building? The Hunt brothers potting away from a black helicopter? Well, we’re responsible for a lot of that. Feed silly rumors to the babblers in the nut fringe and they stir up so much mud, you can’t see the truth.
GD: Maybe it’s on the bottom with Colby.
RTC: Remind me to avoid crab cakes for a few months.
GD: Mueller was telling me about Dulles.
RTC: Which one? Allen or John?
GD: Both, actually.
RTC: What did he say about Allen?
GD: Mueller knew him before he became DCI, when?
RTC: In ’53.
GD: Yes.
RTC: Kennedy forced him out in ’61. Kennedy did not trust us and threatened to break up the CIA. Not a wise move.
GD: No, it wasn’t. And Kennedy is dead and the agency lives on.
RTC: Yes, it does. What did Mueller tell you about Allen?
GD: Oh, that he met Dulles in Switzerland during the war. Dulles had no idea who Mueller was. Heini told me Dulles was a sucker for the plant and he loaded him up with all kinds of fake information about what was going on in Germany and Dulles ate the whole horse, saddle and all.
RTC: Allen was never too bright. His brother was a dyed-in-the wool Nazi, just like another one of our DCI’s father. Prescott Bush. But Allen was not a particularly deep or thoughtful man all in all. His son got shot in the head in Korea and came back an idiot so Allan was very bad to him.
GD: Beat him up?
RTC: Worse. He ignored him. Allen was not a kind or thoughtful man. But his wife really did a number on him at the end. Allen was dying in ’69 and they had a Christmas party at his place. Wife was downstairs with the guests, having a wonderful time. Not a word about Allen except that he was not feeling well. Finally, one of the boys decided to go up and wish Allen a Merry Christmas. Guess what he found?
GD: Tell me.
RTC: Allen lying in a urine and shit soaked bed, completely out of it and mumbling to himself. She had left him up there for quite a while. Ugly. She really must have hated him. The boys picked him up, wrapped him in a clean blanket and took him to the hospital where he died about a month later. She didn’t care at all and was very upset that they used one of her good blankets.
GD: You mentioned Prescott Bush. I have an original medal presentation paper giving a high Nazi decoration to him. Signed by Hitler in 1938. I’m surprised this never got out. I also have a picture of IBM’s Watson with a higher decoration, sitting in opera box with Hitler. The IBM people have been trying to buy that from me for ten years.
RTC: You asking too much for it?
GD: No. I thought it might look good in a book. Was George a good DCI?
RTC: George was a sly, effeminate creature as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. When he was VP, they attended a state dinner in the White House and he brought his older boy with him. That one was a chronic boozer and during an intermission, he went out and pissed in one of the downstairs halls. I understand Nancy Reagan 86’ed him out of the White House. His brother is a con-man, unconvicted of ripping banks off because Daddy put on the pressure. And his wife is like something out of a Norse legend. A real dominatrix-type. You never know what goes on behind the curtains, Gregory, but I do. It’s enough to shake anyone’s belief in the honesty of our leaders, who hasn’t worked inside the Beltway long enough. Bush was only DCI for a year and I never had any use for him. Smiled a lot and as vicious and back-stabbing as anyone I ever knew. But then so many of them are.
GD: Did you know a William King Harvey?
RTC: Oh, indeed I did. What do you know about Bill?
GD: Mueller knew him and was boffing his wife. Mueller said he was an ex-FBI man whom Hoover fired for being a chronic drunk.
RTC: That’s true. Hoover was a prim and proper one.
GD: And Harvey used to carry a gun around and point it at people.
RTC: Harvey was fat and apparently hung like a stud cricket so the gun made up for what nature had forgotten.
GD: What is it that they said about the flat-chested woman? What nature has forgotten she can remedy with cotton?
RTC: I’ve heard that somewhere before.
GD: Nothing is original. Well, if and when Colby floats, will you go to his funeral?
RTC: That would be a little hypocritical, wouldn’t it Gregory?
GD: Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, Robert.
RTC: You’re a very wise person, Gregory. No wonder Bill and Tom are so upset with you.
GD: And don’t forget Wolfe.
RTC: I don’t like to go to the archives for fear he’ll slink up to me with more hate stories about you.
GD: He’s supposed to be such an expert on the Third Reich but he fakes it mostly. His great triumph was to discover an old record with an alleged speech of Himmler’s in which Reichsheini is talking about killing off all the Jews. Bob made such a fuss over his discovery. I got him to send me a tape of it because it’s in the archives and I got ahold a friend of mine who collects German newsreels. He had a 1939 ufa newsreel with a part of a speech by Himmler so he made a tape of that and I got another friend of mine to compare the speech patterns. Not the same. Either Bob’s precious record that he used to play for Jewish groups or the original newsreel was a stone fake.
RTC: I don’t think it takes a Harvard graduate to see which was which. Do you think he made it? And planted it?
GD: Not personally. His wife is German but Bob is not fluent enough to pull that one off. Probably got it from some co-religionist, planted it, discovered it and exploited it. Or, of course, they faked the Himmler speech on the newsreel. So much of these things are invented and of course the public believes it.
RTC: Tell me, Gregory, what does Wolfe think about our hiring the head of the Gestapo?
GD: Oh and many others. What? Well, he’s a torn person. He’d love to expose this but he can’t because he sucks up to officialdom and can’t have it both ways. I love to tell him about Krichbaum and others and when I do, I suppose he would like to kill me. Kill the messenger, not the message is the hallmark of the very small of mind.
RTC: True enough. And Bill and Tom are highly annoyed that we talk. I think they’re afraid of what I might say to you. Wouldn’t you agree?
GD: Yes. Another convocation of the small of mind.
RTC: But large of ego. When he was younger, we used to call Tom the Arrow Shirt Boy. Ring a bell?
GD: The clean-cut drawings?
RTC: Yes. Really handsome men and beautiful women tend to be very shallow in their social relationships. That’s because they don’t have to make any effort to attract attention. Uglier people have to rely on personality.
GD: Yes, that’s true. My first wife was really beautiful but stupid as a post and very greedy. It’s amazing how we can delude ourselves, isn’t it? She wanted me to give a lot of money to her brother to buy a gas station. He fell off his motorcycle and did damage to his head. I don’t think he could run a bicycle pump, let alone a gas station. I refused and she retaliated by moving her bloated mother in with us. Mom brought four nasty cats with her. I like animals but these loved to shit on the carpets and one loved to take dumps on the kitchen counters. Talking about this did no good so one day while Mom and her hatchling were out trying to spend my money, I took the dear pussies, stuffed them into a potato sack and tossed them into the apartment house pool. When the bubbles stopped, I dove in, fished them out and laid them in a nice, wet, row at the edge of the garden. Threw the bag away. Mom and the Other came home and she started looking for the dear felines. When I told her I had put them outside to do their nasty business, Mom waddled outside, shrieking for her lovelies. Then she really started to wail when she saw the line-up by the pool. When I was at work the next day, they both moved out and took all the furniture with them. This was not a good idea because I had rented the place furnished. I had to pay for the furniture, of course.
RTC: Did she leave the cats behind?
GD: No, they were gone. I think they had a state funeral for them. Burial at Arlington.
RTC: I take it you got a divorce?
GD: Actually, no, I did not. A friend of mine saw the Other passing out drinks in Vegas but when I called personnel at her casino, they said she’d left the place about a month before. She did surface about twenty five years later. Someone sent me a package of old books from LA and wrapped them in the local paper. By God, there was the Other playing golf out at Palm Springs. The long and short of it was, Robert, that she had married a wealthy real estate developer and had two kids by him.
RTC: No divorce?
GD: No, she was too stupid to think of that. I took this to a lawyer I knew but he was not interested until he found out that her husband, who had serious IRS problems, had put all his assets in Other’s name. Then he got very interested because, as he pointed out to me, in California, property acquired by either party in a marriage is considered community property. He was suddenly very eager to take the case on a contingency fee basis because half of what she had was mine and we were still legally married. Here we’re talking about bigamy as well. Much uproar, threats by massive legal firms in LA and in the end, they settled before we made a public filing. I lived on the rewards of my patience and misjudgment for years. And then we were divorced, very privately. Love is a wonderful thing, Robert. Do you know the difference between Herpes and love?
RTC: I can’t say that I do.
GD: Herpes is forever, Robert.
RTC: Now that’s not kind, Gregory.
GD: A very shrewd observation. If I had been a kind person, I would not have sent you those wonderful poems.
RTC: That was not meant unkindly. Let’s say a joke.
GD: Well, we can talk about Kennedy one of these days, can’t we?
RTC: As I said. I can get in touch with you later this week if you want.
GD: Let me call you. I’m sure you’ll be watching and waiting for Colby to emerge from the depths.
(Concluded at 10:11 AM CST)
Dramatis personae:
James Jesus Angleton: Once head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence division, later fired because of his obsessive and illegal behavior, tapping the phones of many important government officials in search of elusive Soviet spies. A good friend of Robert Crowley and a co-conspirator with him in the assassination of President Kennedy
James P. Atwood: (April 16, 1930-April 20, 1997) A CIA employee, located in Berlin, Atwood had a most interesting career. He worked for any other intelligence agency, domestic or foreign, that would pay him, was involved in selling surplus Russian atomic artillery shells to the Pakistan government and was also most successful in the manufacturing of counterfeit German dress daggers. Too talkative, Atwood eventually had a sudden “seizure” while lunching with CIA associates.
William Corson: A Marine Corps Colonel and President Carter’s representative to the CIA. A friend of Crowley and Kimmel, Corson was an intelligent man whose main failing was a frantic desire to be seen as an important person. This led to his making fictional or highly exaggerated claims.
John Costello: A British historian who was popular with revisionist circles. Died of AIDS on a trans-Atlantic flight
James Critchfield: Former U.S. Army Colonel who worked for the CIA and organizaed the Cehlen Org. at Pullach, Germany. This organization was filled to the Plimsoll line with former Gestapo and SD personnel, many of whom were wanted for various purported crimes. He hired Heinrich Müller in 1948 and went on to represent the CIA in the Persian Gulf.
Robert T. Crowley: Once the deputy director of Clandestine Operations and head of the group that interacted with corporate America. A former West Point football player who was one of the founders of the original CIA. Crowley was involved at a very high level with many of the machinations of the CIA.
Gregory Douglas: A retired newspaperman, onetime friend of Heinrich Müller and latterly, of Robert Crowley. Inherited stacks of files from the former (along with many interesting works of art acquired during the war and even more papers from Robert Crowley. Lives comfortably in a nice house overlooking the Mediterranean.
Reinhard Gehlen: A retired German general who had once been in charge of the intelligence for the German high command on Russian military activities. Fired by Hitler for incompetence, he was therefore naturally hired by first the U.S. Army and then, as his level of incompetence rose, with the CIA. His Nazi-stuffed organizaion eventually became the current German Bundes Nachrichten Dienst.
Thomas K. Kimmel, Jr: A grandson of Admiral Husband Kimmel, Naval commander at Pearl Harbor who was scapegoated after the Japanese attack. Kimmel was a senior FBI official who knew both Gregory Douglas and Robert Crowley and made a number of attempts to discourage Crowley from talking with Douglas. He was singularly unsuccessful. Kimmel subsequently retired and lives in retirement in Florida
Willi Krichbaum: A Senior Colonel (Oberführer) in the SS, head of the wartime Secret Field Police of the German Army and Heinrich Müller’s standing deputy in the Gestapo. After the war, Krichbaum went to work for the Critchfield organization and was their chief recruiter and hired many of his former SS friends. Krichbaum put Critchfield in touch with Müller in 1948.
Heinrich Müller: A former military pilot in the Bavarian Army in WWI, Müller became a political police officer in Munich and was later made the head of the Secret State Police or Gestapo. After the war, Müller escaped to Switzerland where he worked for Swiss intelligence as a specialist on Communist espionage and was hired by James Critchfield, head of the Gehlen Organization, in 1948. Müller subsequently was moved to Washington where he worked for the CIA until he retired.
Joseph Trento: A writer on intelligence subjects, Trento and his wife “assisted” both Crowley and Corson in writing a book on the Russian KGB. Trento believed that he would inherit all of Crowley’s extensive files but after Crowley’s death, he discovered that the files had been gutted and the most important, and sensitive, ones given to Gregory Douglas. Trento was not happy about this.
Frank Wisner: A Founding Father of the CIA who promised much to the Hungarian and then failed them. First a raging lunatic who was removed from Langley, screaming, in a strait jacket and later, blowing off the top of his head with a shotgun.
Robert Wolfe: A retired librarian from the National Archives who worked closely with the CIA on covering up embarrassing historical material in the files of the Arcnives. A strong supporter of holocaust writers.
[1] William Egan Colby -January 4, 1920 – April 27, 1996 spent a career in intelligence for the United States, culminating in holding the post of Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from September 1973, to January 1976.
During World War II Colby served with the Office of Strategic Services. After the war he joined the newly created CIA. Before and during the Vietnam War, Colby served as Chief of Station in Saigon, Chief of CIA’s Far East Division, and head of the Civil Operations and Rural Development effort; he oversaw the Phoenix Program. After Vietnam, Colby became Director of Central Intelligence and during his tenure, under intense pressure from Congress and the media, adopted a policy of relative openness about U.S. intelligence activities to the Senate Church Committee and House Pike Committee. Colby served as DCI under President Richard Nixon and President Gerald Ford and was replaced by future President George H. W. Bush on January 30, 1976.Colby, in his old age, began to talk and in talking, annoyed his former friends in the CIA so they drowned him without ceremony. The CIA has killed quite a few of its talkative members.