The Voice of the White House

 

Washington, D.C., July 18, 2014: “Once, the far right in this country, as represented by the Republicans and their main allies, the pro-Zionists, the militant Evangelicals and the large banks, thought that they had established their own civil dictatorship in America.

Their clumsy, fascistic attempts to control, or try to control, the population, became so obvious, and so obnoxious, that they were finally ousted from power and send packing into the political wilderness.

That having been said, they are sill out there in the swamps, croaking like manic frogs and lusting to return to power. The far right shows no class and certainly no intelligence.

The fat buffoon , Limbaugh, pops his fistfuls of pills and rants that Obama is evil and nothing he does, or says, should be of any interest. The ludicrous Sarah Palin is still under the impression that she is important and AIPAIC is frantically running all over this town, hoping to stave off certain disaster.

I don’t know who are more pathetic; the religious nuts or the militant Jews. They remind me of a disorganized beehive when the queen is killed.(In this case, the queen went to live in Texas.)”

 

 

Conversations with the Crow

Editor’s note: When this series was prepared, a number of conversations were deliberately redacted because they were either very personal in nature or, more important, contained specific material which we felt might have considerable impact and present potential danger in publication. Now that all of the conversations are being readied for publication, along with illustrative specific notes, we are publishing many of the hitherto off-limits examples. Enjoy  them!

           

 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, 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 a 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 considerable number 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 our 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 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.

One of Crowley’s first major assignments within the agency was to assist in the recruitment and management of prominent World War II Nazis, especially those with advanced intelligence experience. One of the CIA’s major recruitment coups was Heinrich Mueller, once head of Hitler’s Gestapo who had fled to Switzerland after the collapse of the Third Reich and worked as an anti-Communist expert for Masson of Swiss counterintelligence. Mueller was initially hired by Colonel James Critchfield of the CIA,  who was running the Gehlen Organization out of Pullach in southern Germany. Crowley eventually came to despise Critchfield but the colonel was totally unaware of this, to his later dismay.

Crowley’s real expertise within the agency was the Soviet KGB. One of his main jobs throughout his career was acting as the agency liaison with corporations like ITT, which the CIA often used as fronts for moving large amounts of cash off their books. He was deeply involved in the efforts by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, which eventually got him into legal problems with regard to investigations of the U.S. government’s grand jury where he has perjured himself in an agency cover-up

After his retirement, Crowley began to search for someone who might be able to write a competent history of his career. His first choice fell on British author John Costello (author of Ten Days to Destiny, The Pacific War and other works) but, discovering that Costello was a very aggressive homosexual, he dropped him and tentatively turned to Joseph Trento who had assisted Crowley and William Corson in writing a book on the KGB. When Crowley discovered that Trento had an ambiguous and probably cooperative relationship with the CIA, he began to distrust him and continued his search for an author.

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 , 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 publications.

In 1998, when Crowley was slated to go into the hospital for exploratory surgery,  he had his son, Greg, ship two large foot lockers of documents to Douglas with the caveat that they were not to be opened until after Crowley’s death. These documents, totaled  an astonishing 15,000 pages of CIA classified files involving many covert operations, both foreign and domestic, during the Cold War.

After Crowley’s death and Trento’s raid on the Crowley files, huge gaps were subsequently discovered by horrified CIA officials and when Crowley’s friends mentioned Gregory Douglas, it was discovered that Crowley’s son had shipped two large boxes to Douglas. No one knew their contents but because Douglas was viewed as an uncontrollable loose cannon who had done considerable damage to the CIA’s reputation by his on-going publication of the history of Gestapo-Mueller, they bent every effort both to identify the missing files and make some effort to retrieve them before Douglas made any use of them.

All of this furor eventually came to the attention of Dr. Peter Janney, a Massachusetts clinical psychologist and son of Wistar Janney, another career senior CIA official, colleague of not only Bob Crowley but Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Jim Angleton and others. Janney was working on a book concerning the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, former wife of Cord Meyer, a high-level CIA official, and later the mistress of President John F. Kennedy.  Douglas had authored a book, ‘Regicide’ which dealt with Crowley’s part in the Kennedy assassination and he obviously had access to at least some of Crowley’s papers. Janney was very well connected inside the CIA’s higher levels and when he discovered that Douglas had indeed known, and had often spoken with, Crowley and that after Crowley’s death, the FBI had descended on Crowley’s widow and son, warning them to never speak with Douglas about anything, he contacted Douglas and finally obtained from him a number of original documents, including the originals of the transcribed conversations with Robert Crowley.

In spite of the burn bags, the top secret safes and the vigilance of the CIA to keep its own secrets, the truth has an embarrassing and often very fatal habit of emerging, albeit decades later.
While CIA drug running , money-launderings and brutal assassinations are very often strongly rumored and suspected, it has so far not been possible to actually pin them down but it is more than possible that the publication of the transcribed and detailed Crowley-Douglas conversations will do a great deal towards accomplishing this.

These many transcribed conversations are relatively short because Crowley was a man who tired easily but they make excellent reading. There is an interesting admixture of shocking revelations on the part of the retired CIA official and often rampant anti-social (and very entertaining) activities on the part of Douglas but readers of this new and on-going series are gently reminded to always look for the truth in the jest!

 

 

 

Date: Tuesday, March 4, 1997

Commenced: 2:30 PM CST

Concluded: 3:10 PM CST

 

GD: It’s a little late in the day., Robert. Am I OK on my timing?

RTC: Not a problem, Gregory. Lunch is over long ago. I did hear from Bill last night about that material on Hillary.

GD: What about it?

RTC: Oh, it’s all true but it will never get into the papers. Those things never do.

GD: Some of it, the stuff about Bob Treuhaft in Oakland, did. In the Chronicle.

RTC: A fluke. What was your source?
            GD: Military collector who was also in the California State Police office in Sacramento. He copied the file and sent it to me.

RTC: Well, they aren’t up for reelection so there’s no point in beating a dead horse. But not a surprise.

GD: I suppose with her background, when they get out of office, the pair of them, she can become the mayor of Skokie or if we have another Democrat president, the ambassador to Israel.

RTC: Sad to say but they’re everywhere you look these days. Back in the reign of Franklin I, they filled the ranks of State and stood right next to the Oval Office. Of course, they pilfered all our secrets and sent them off to Russia. That was their new homeland, after all, and Stalin loved them. Or so they thought. When Bill and I were working on our KGB book, I discovered that Joe hated them and when they managed to kill him with rat poison, was planning a super pogrom in Moscow. No, the regular Russians loathe and fear them and now that Putin is coming up, they are fleeing to Israel like fleas leaving a dead dog. The problem with this, as we know, is that the ranks of Israeli intelligence are now full of fresh blood what with the refusedniks pouring into the country and believe me, Gregory, any scrap of secret information, every secret code, that we mistakenly give to the Israeli government will end up in Moscow about ten seconds after they get it. Multiply Pollard about a hundred times and you’ll see the real picture. I told Jim dozens of times to keep away from the Hebrews but Jim never listened. He was hip deep with the mob but they weren’t trying to sell the dreaded white man down the river like the Jews do. My God, I wouldn’t let them into my department because I know what they’re like but they’ve gotten in the door elsewhere.  Polland was only the tip of a huge iceberg.

GD: None of that comes as a great surprise. They managed to start the Second World War and I agree that they pumped Stalin full of state secrets and you know my connection with the Pollard business. In any other country, they would have taken the little shit out for a very long walk on a very short pier. Well, maybe some patriotic con will get an early parole by sticking a file into his liver.

RTC: One hopes, one hopes. But in a way, I feel sorry for Russia. That was quite a game after Yeltsin got in, let me tell you. Old Boris the drunk was ours, bought and paid for. The drill was for Boris to privatize the Russian natural resources and let our people…our oil people really…get their hands on everything. How did we do it? We located a bunch of street thugs. Drug dealers, whoremongers, porn merchants and especially extortionists, set them up as businessmen, get them funded, let them buy up all  the oil, steel and aluminum former Soviet corporations and then sell the stock off to our companies. The thing is, all of these thugs and murderers, because that’s what they are, are Jewish street bandits, all of them. And they got their co-religionists in the IMF and the World Bank to help them with capital both from us and from Israel. And they did buy up everything at rigged auctions and they did make deals with the big US oil people. You fancy yourself a newspaperman , Gregory? I’ll give you an inside story but I beg you not to use me as a source….

GD: Never…

RTC: An Israeli owns the Bank of New York and they are using it to launder billions in stolen Jewish Mafia money. I mean money from Russia. Billions. And our people have been helping the Hebes set up Swiss bank accounts. Before that, they used to keep the money under the bed in bags but now they can buy expensive suits, that the tasteless shits wear with tennis shoes, and strut their stuff in international society. I can give you some inside information on this and you could expose some of it. It needs to be done but you’ll never see a word of it in the New York Times or the Post. Why not? Because these organs of truth and light are owned by Jews and Jews never go after their own kind.

GD: I could go to Carto. He would love this.

RTC: Any old port in a story, Gregory. I have names. One of my friends down there gave them to me.

GD: I have good connections with the Swiss. If I could get the names, perhaps I could get the account information.  The Bank of New York?
            RTC: Yes. One of the oldest banks in this country. Hamilton founded it. The Jews have it now and more money goes in and out of it than the US Treasury. Kimmel knows about this so do not ever tell him about this conversation or that you are working on this. I can send you my entire file on all of this and you can take it from there. And if you have friends in Switzerland, be sure to look for the black accounts, not the white ones. These greaseballs  always have a white account with a few thousand in it and a black one with billions. That way, if an official request is made, say be us, the Swiss can put up a show of resistance and then break down and give us the smaller one. The black accounts.

GD: Sounds good.

RTC: And I can give you the name of at least two Russian intelligence people here who are disguised as newspaper men and you can contact either or both and pass on the information. They would love you, Gregory, and it might lead you to make more friends. You certainly wouldn’t have any in the Jewish camp.

That moron Bronfman, the booze king, has delusions of grandeur, and thinks he is going to push the Swiss around so you can kick him in his flabby ass for me. My God, I hate to deal with these swine, believe me. The biggest pack of thieves, murderers and back stabbers I have ever run into and believe me, I have seen them all. And there’re a lot more bits and pieces I can pull together for you but again, mention none of this to Kimmel and if he ever starts to talk about this, say nothing. Understood?

GD: Is the FBI involved?

RTC: Not that I know but they all suck on the same tit so be careful.

GD: What do you see as the end result of outing them?
RTC: Hopefully, enough publicity to slow them down in this country. They own the press and the banks and dig in like maggots in a side of beef so if the public gets wind of the enormity of their thefts, they can watch them. Ah, but in Russia, the Putin people will love you. Putin, as I understand it, wants to stop this drain on Russian oil and kick the Jews out of power. And, of course, like a good KGB officer that he is, kick the US in the nuts. But, I think uprooting the Hebrews and outing them outweighs a boot in the testes.

GD: Collateral damage.

RTC: How astute, Gregory. Let me tell you, my boy, the whole world would be far better off if some rag head set off an atomic bomb in downtown Tel Aviv during Passover. I know that sounds terrible but from my years of experience, that game would well be worth the candle. I tell you, if we don’t put a stop to their burrowing,  treachery and high treason, those filthy Yids will drag us into a nasty war with the Arabs. I mean it. None of them care a fig about this country. Everything for that miserable habitat of warped trolls and nothing for anyone else. No wonder they have been hated and persecuted for thousands of years. The Romans had a wonderful chance to advance civilization by killing them all off but they missed their opportunity.

GD: The tsars should have chased them all into Siberia and we would have been spared Bolshevism.

RTC: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And now they want to kill off all the Arabs in the Near East and move into their homes. And they would expect us to help them. I tell you that if we don’t get our nose out of Israel’s hairy ass, the Arabs will come after us as well. America has no business over there and Israel is not our friend. America is full of white Christians and Jews hate all Christians and do their best to rape, loot and pillage us, all in the name of greater Israel. Well, not in my lifetime but maybe in yours, Gregory, in yours.

GD: If you send me the papers, I will do my best.

RTC: Expose and derail. They have already looted England and Poland and now they’re raping Russia and we’re next on the menu.  And their creepy Mossad agents are crawling all over this country as well. The FBI knows about this so that’s one of the reasons to keep quiet around Kimmel. You tell him anything hot and juicy and Tom will burn the line to the headquarters. Once they have it, the Jews will have their hands on it in seconds and they can either put a few pounds of cocaine in your car or shoot your crippled mother as a warning. Say nothing and publish.

GD: Good advice. I recall an conversation I once had with a Pole. He said they Poles hated the Germans but one good thing was that Hitler cleaned the Jews out of Poland. Did you know that after the war when the Jewish refugees went back to Poland, the locals used to chase them into barns, lock them in and barbecue them? Last major pogrom in Europe was in Poland in ’46. In fact, Stalin…I mean in ’39 when Hitler went into Poland, about three hundred thousand Polish Jews fled eastwards to find security in the friendly bosom of Mother Russia. Stalin did not want any more Jews so he ordered the border guards, the NKVD, to shoot anyone trying to cross the border. They wiped out the lot of them. And now, of course, the Germans get the blame.

RTC: The older ones still love Stalin. Well, isn’t truth relative, Gregory?

GD: Depends on who wins, doesn’t it?

RTC:Well,  I’ll dig out some of the papers on this business and send them off to you. Probably after the next weekend. I can’t get to the post office but I can get my son to do it. I hate to drag him into this but I have no choice here.

GD: Well, if it’s too much trouble to…

RTC: No, not a problem. The is not a damned thing I can do about these assholes but perhaps you can.

GD: I might get it in Carto’s paper but I doubt if anyone else will touch it.

RTC: You will shake up the FBI if you publish but does this bother you?
            GD: Why should it?

RTC: DC is so incestuous, Gregory, so involved. Everyone is so self-important.

GD: My impression has been that they want to be important but never will be anything but pointy headed hacks and wannabees. I am sure there are smart people in DC but I have yet to encounter one.

RTC: I know a few but you have a point. Here, we have spent this entire conversation trashing the Jews. God help both of us if someone is tapping our phones.

RTC: You’re retired and I am no one so I don’t worry about myself. I suppose what with the collapse of the Soviet Union, all your people are happy.

RTC: Well, James Joyce said that: In moments of happiness, don’t despair, tragedy lurks around the next corner.

GD: Always. Tragedy would be the Jews tricking or forcing us into a war somewhere to help them out. A lot of dead young men, slaughtered Arabs and Tel Aviv rubbing its hands in glee. Or they can do it on their own and invade some place without soldiers around to shoot back and kill fifty children in a Syrian school. Of course these dead toddlers would be proclaimed in the New York Times as a training camp for Arab militants. Of course, our public wouldn’t really care about this. I wonder what would happen if the Arabs blew up one of our day care centers? My God, what a howl that would bring out. Of course we both know that they did it to teach us a lesson for our support of a rogue state. Ah, the Skokie crowd cheers us onwards, over the edge. If that happens they will all run to Toronto which a friend tells me is crawling with them. They even have special lamp posts there.

RTC: The better to hang them on, Gregory.

GD: It might come to that yet, Robert. But enough amusing talk. When you were talking about the take-over of Russian gas and oil and so on, were they successful? I mean your people?

RTC: Oh, yes, they achieved their initial goal. But then the Jews got too greedy and too public with their wealth and I think now, Putin will pull them all down, one by one. And I also think there will eventually be serious problems with America’s banking system. It’s totally corrupt, Gregory, and, like the oil barons of Russia, getting too arrogant. If we were to try to restructure America, we would have to start by reforming the banks and then reestablish the press as independent entities. But to accomplish this, we have to take into consideration that the banks, the media and, to a lesser degree, our intelligence agencies, are firmly in the hands of Jewish interests. These people are not operating for the good of the public but for their own little cliques and more seriously, solely for the interests of Israel. Mark you, Gregory, that miserable dwarf country will drag this powerful country into ruin unless someone puts a stop to it. But, I suppose, it’s the old question of who will bell the cat.

GD: Why not let nature, or time, take its course, Robert? None of what you talk about is new, at least not from a historical point of view. Happened before and will happen again. Watch and wait is what I say.

 

(Concluded at 3:10 CST)

 

Why was MH17 flying through a war zone where 10 aircraft have been shot down?

 

July 18, 2014

by Tony Gosling

RT

 

Put yourself in the position of a certain passenger boarding the Malaysian Airlines flight at Amsterdam for the twelve hour trip to Kuala Lumpur on Thursday morning.

Given a previous Malaysian flight’s mysterious disappearance it’s likely he was not the only boarding passenger who was a little nervous when he joked on social media, “If we disappear, this is what the plane looks like.”

Settling down on the flight then watching the moving map display on the seat in front, you might perhaps see the word ‘Ukraine’ edge its way across from the right of the screen. Would you not be a little uneasy in the knowledge that quite a lot of planes have been blown out of the skies there recently? That there’s a war on?

            Check out David Cenciotti’s ‘Aviationist’ blog and you’ll see that 10 aircraft have been shot down in eastern Ukraine in recent weeks. Five MI-24 Hind and two MI-8 Hip helicopters, as well as military transport planes, one AN-2 and an AN-30. On July 8, the latest transporter, an Il-76 was shot down at Lugansk when the State Aviation Administration of Ukraine closed their airspace indefinitely to civilian aircraft. But why did the air traffic control regulators keep directing planes over eastern Ukrainian territory at higher altitudes?

             Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but on any of hundreds of flights over Ukraine in the past month I might even have been tempted to tug the sleeve of one of the cabin staff. Asking them brusquely to get reassurance from the captain straight away that we would not be passing through the very airspace where so many planes had so recently been brought down.

            So what was the plane doing there?

 

Malaysian Airlines was quick to point out that the Ukraine war zone had been declared ‘safe’ for them to fly over by the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Was this the same authority that was party to closing Europe and the North Atlantic for almost a week for Eyjafjallajökull’s ‘volcanic ash cloud’ drifting out of Iceland? Canceling the flights of around 10 million passengers? Yet they fail to close a war zone where they know ground-to-air missiles are flying around?

I do hope ICAO regional director Luis Fonseca de Almeida will apologize in person to all the victims’ families before he resigns and hands himself in for questioning. Of course, this is not the only arm of the UN and other parts of global governance to be failing, crippled, and where the people appointed to run it seem to be pliable stooges rather than independent-minded enough to be up to the job? Let’s hope too that the Malaysian authorities will heed the voices in their professions warning against relying too much on help from international bodies which may be used against them.

As for who’s responsible, it’s unlikely the shooting down was a random ‘pot shot’ by Ukrainian separatists who would have nothing to gain and only further isolate themselves by such an act. There are also doubts as to whether they have access to this sort of weapon system, more advanced than any that appears to have been used so far. Which is presumably why ICAO and Malaysian Airlines thought 30,000-foot high airliners were safe from shoulder-launched missiles.

Appearing on BBC TV’s Newsnight, weapon systems expert Doug Richardson said the relatively high altitude airliners fly at offers “no protection” from what he believes was probably a former Soviet ‘Buk’ missile, developed in the 1970s, that did the dirty deed.

 

Shot across bows of Russian presidential jet?

 

Then there is the proximity of the MH17 shoot-down to Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, who happened to be flying home, west to east, from Brazil. Russia’s equivalent to Air Force One, the Ilyushin-96 ‘Board One’ was roughly half-an-hour’s flying time, about 200 miles (320km), behind the Malaysian plane as it passed near Warsaw just before the doomed jet entered Ukrainian airspace, which the presidential jet avoided.

As the Western powers’ anti-Russian sanctions are failing to bite and the Kiev government they back is losing on the ground, this may indicate a NATO motive for the attack. If so this sort of audacious act may also be an early test of loyalties by the West’s power elite of Britain’s new Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond and Defense Secretary Michael Fallon. The message being, “Watch that you don’t get any troublesome ideas of making your own minds up on the matter.”

The timing of the attack is intriguing too, being the day after a historic agreement Putin signed, along with Chinese president Xi Jinping, in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza to create a BRICS World Development Bank. Quite possibly the greatest challenge since Bretton Woods in 1944, to the dubious monopoly of the World Bank, was indeed signed on Wednesday by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

For those that muse on the obsessive nature of those that spend their lives pursuing ever more money until the day they die, there is a shocking recent history of nations and their leaders coming to a sticky end that dare to oppose the global monopoly of the petrodollar, and that of the enforcers at the World Bank and IMF.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein didn’t know what fate lay ahead when he announced in November 2000 that he was taking the first steps toward setting up a bourse, or oil exchange, which traded in euro rather than dollars. Two-and-a-half years later, weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist had been ‘found’ in his country and the bombs were raining down, Saddam and his fellow countrymen was illegally invaded under orders from Messrs. Bush and Blair and the nation plunged into the sort of chaotic hell which is now spreading like a plague around the Middle East and from which one wonders if it will ever emerge.

Similarly when debt-free Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi and his shuttle diplomacy had secured agreement from enough African leaders to announce the creation of an African reserve currency, the African gold dinar, he found his country up in front of the United Nations Security Council on a fabricated charge of ‘bombing his own people’. On May 1, 2011, the weekend of William & Kate’s royal wedding in London, one of Gaddafi’s sons and three of his grandsons were blown to pieces in an airstrike and NATO began to bomb the country – blessed with the lowest infant mortality rate on the African continent – back to the Stone Age.

Although no ground troops were allowed by the UN, mercenaries were sent in, and on October 21, Gaddafi was finally executed with a bayonet up his backside. National governments in the West these days really do seem to have become an irrelevant side show when the power of the military dances to the tune of the unrestrained mega-resourced muscle of the IMF and its friends.

 

Why Malaysian Airlines?

 

To lose one plane may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.’ Though it might seem trite to borrow from Oscar Wilde’s ‘Importance of Being Earnest’, is it really pure coincidence that both this and the March ‘disappearance’ of MH370 have been with unfortunate Malaysian jets? Neither appears to have been an ‘accident’, so could both be acts of aggression, acts of war against Malaysia? If so why, and by whom?

Malaysia is a genuinely independent nation torn between East and West. Like Ukraine and so many other medium-sized independent countries, Malaysia is finding it very difficult to stay independent. As the world inches towards what many believe may become an enormous world war, brought on by the collapse of capitalism, it is becoming increasingly impossible for small and medium-sized nations to remain independent. So yes, there is likely to be pressure on the Malaysian leadership to make alliances and this, perhaps, could simply be an attempt to intimidate, to force their hand.

It’s comforting to repeat that nobody wants an economic collapse and nobody wants a world war, but it wouldn’t be the first time that ruling elites have deployed these two chestnuts as a ‘double whammy’. Making a fortune out of a crash is easy when you can see it coming and, as well as being an archaic ‘human sacrifice’ to the old gods, war is the best way to distract everybody who might be thinking of locking you up. For anyone who dares to look, the evidence is there that the US decided to step up the projection of their already ruinous military power at the time of the 9/11 attacks, probably as a reaction to the waning power of the dollar.

As Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey, part of Iraq Veterans Against the War and of the US chapter of Veterans For Peace, said when interviewed for Venezuelan State Television, “There are no rules, this is World War III. The rule book went out the window on September 11th.[2001].”

As a regular attendee at US Marine Corps intelligence briefings Jimmy was in a position to know rather more than the West’s public, media or politicians do about how far down the mission line covert policies of the White House and Pentagon have crept.

European and North American countries have realized too late in the day that only by keeping stiff exchange controls can they stay sovereign nations. Without them international finance capital will move in with infinite resources to destroy everything that stands in its way, from media to parliaments, nothing can withstand them. Even the courts now are finally about to be co-opted into the service of the tax evading transnational corporations should the secretly-negotiated Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) be signed later this year.

The courts will then be theirs to overturn any parliamentary decision the corporations don’t like, and they have been saving up lots and lots of cash to pay the very best lawyers in the world, to make sure they win.

 

No shortage of people who’ll shoot down an airliner for you

 

With the privatization of war in the West, points out UK charity War On Want, “repeated human rights abuses” are being “perpetrated by mercenaries, including the indiscriminate killing of civilians and torture. Unaccountable and unregulated, these companies are complicit in human rights abuses across the world, putting profit before people and fanning the flames of war.”

So if you want somebody to fight a nuclear war, conduct a massacre, or shoot down an airliner for you nowadays you can buy those services on the free market. The proliferation of private military companies since 9/11 suits the military industrial complex very nicely, thank you.

But how has the world come to the point where such companies have state protection and business is, quite literally, booming?

The problem again, is the global banking giants who have been shown in court, time and time again, to be hand in glove with the intelligence services and international drug cartels. Whether it’s Iran Contra with drugs flying one way and guns the other, or HSBC’s piffling $2 billion fine in 2012 for money laundering, they are not just criminals who are above the law, they are now shaping it in their own private interest.

It is not just the Asian, Pacific and South American power blocs they seek to control who will be watching them, but their own people, those they depend on to survive. With every evil act they think they’ve got away with, they are painting themselves into a corner as the Trans-Atlantic edifice they are trying to control crumbles beneath them.

 

Malaysia MH17 crash: 10 questions Russia wants Ukraine to answer

 

RT

            1. Immediately after the tragedy, the Ukrainian authorities, naturally, blamed it on the self-defense forces. What are these accusations based on?

            2. Can Kiev explain in detail how it uses Buk missile launchers in the conflict zone? And why were these systems deployed there in the first place, seeing as the self-defense forces don’t have any planes?

            3. Why are the Ukrainian authorities not doing anything to set up an international commission? When will such a commission begin its work?

             4. Would the Ukrainian Armed Forces be willing to let international investigators see the inventory of their air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles, including those used in SAM launchers?

            5. Will the international commission have access to tracking data from reliable sources regarding the movements of Ukrainian warplanes on the day of the tragedy?

            6. Why did Ukrainian air traffic controllers allow the plane to deviate from the regular route to the north, towards “the anti-terrorist operation zone”?

            7. Why was airspace over the warzone not closed for civilian flights, especially since the area was not entirely covered by radar navigation systems?

            8. How can official Kiev comment on reports in the social media, allegedly by a Spanish air traffic controller who works in Ukraine, that there were two Ukrainian military planes flying alongside the Boeing 777 over Ukrainian territory?

            9. Why did Ukraine’s Security Service start working with the recordings of communications between Ukrainian air traffic controllers and the Boeing crew and with the data storage systems from Ukrainian radars without waiting for international investigators?

            10. What lessons has Ukraine learned from a similar incident in 2001, when a Russian Tu-154 crashed into the Black Sea? Back then, the Ukrainian authorities denied any involvement on the part of Ukraine’s Armed Forces until irrefutable evidence proved official Kiev to be guilty.

 

 

Hunting American Spooks: Germany Prepares Further Spying Clampdown

The latest revelations of US spying on Germany have unleashed unprecedented levels of distrust in Berlin. The government has already expelled the CIA’s chief here and may soon be planning additional measures as it seeks answers from Washington.

 

July 14, 2014

Spiegel

 

It was an unusual invitation that took four members of a German parliamentary control committee to London early last week. For the ninth time, lawmakers in the so-called “Five Eyes” countries tasked with supervising their respective intelligence services were meeting in the British capital. They had faced serious accusations of spying within the last year. This time, the British, Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders had invited their somewhat disgruntled German counterparts to join the group.

A casual reception was being held at the British Foreign Office to herald the beginning of the conference. On Monday evening, a limousine appeared at St. James’s Hotel near Hyde Park to pick up the German delegation. But due to an error on the driver’s part, the German parliamentarians were taken to the wrong destination. Realizing that they would be late by then, the lawmakers decided to skip the reception.

The unexplained absence of the Berlin guests was the source of some anxiety among the Five Eyes delegates. Had they boycotted the reception because of the latest unpleasant surveillance scandal?

Three days and yet another spy affair later, the German government offered an unambiguous response. Last Thursday, it took the unprecedented step of asking the senior CIA representative in Berlin, known as the chief of station, to leave Germany. Some 13 months after the beginning of the NSA scandal, it was the Germans’ brusquest response yet to the Americans’ blatant spying activities in their country. In taking this step, Chancellor Angela Merkel was sending the message that her views on the matter are now more in line with those of German President Joachim Gauck: She is fed up.

At the same time, the government hoped that its diplomatic bombshell could improve its position in a scandal that doesn’t seem to want to end. Derision of Germany’s coalition government, which pairs Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats with the center-left Social Democrats — for being underhanded and overly compliant with US President Barack Obama’s wishes has expanded beyond the ranks of the opposition. The ritual outrage coming from the chancellor and cabinet members after each new affront by the NSA, the CIA and others had long been exhausted. At least the expulsion of the CIA official suggests some gumption on Berlin’s part.

 

Will Moves in Berlin Sway US Government?

 

It remains an open question whether the step will be enough and if it will make a lasting impression on the Americans. Further curiosities from the mysterious world of espionage have already come to light, with new rumors circulating almost daily in Berlin’s government district. But just because some of it sounds more like a John le Carré novel than fact, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily made up. Moreover, all the details of the two presumed cases of espionage have yet to emerge, and there is speculation that there could be a shocking connection between the two.

The man who set the spy scandal in motion has two names. At the Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Karlsruhe, he is known by his real name, Markus R. But at the BND, Germany’s Federal Intelligence, he used his working name, Markus L.

He is short and stocky, has a moustache and wears glasses. His coworkers in the Areas of Operations/Foreign Relations department had to be patient when they spoke with him, because the presumed CIA mole has a speech impediment. The man, who is from a town near Chemnitz in the eastern state of Saxony, never finished high school or attended a university. In addition, he has been handicapped since childhood as a result of vaccination damage.

The extent of this impairment is what his attorney, Klaus Schroth, now wants to have examined in a psychiatric opinion. He says his 31-year-old client strikes him as “not having the qualities and personality structure one normally associates with espionage activities.” However, the man who would later become a spy completed the BND’s standard “seven-point security review” with flying colors. Apparently it did him little good.

On May 28, Markus R. sent an email to the Russian Consulate in Munich. In it, he offered his services as an informant, and included three internal, BND documents as a sample. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) intercepted the email, and then the BND’s Internal Security department pursued the case, with the involvement of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office and the Federal Criminal Police Office.

 

Secret Meetings in Austria

 

Finally, police arrested Markus R. on Wednesday of the week before last. In his nine-hour interrogation, he apparently told the astonished investigators he had already been working for an American intelligence agency for two years. That relationship had also begun with an email, which he had sent to the US Embassy in Berlin, he explained. R. talked about clandestine meetings in Austria, at which he had allegedly been paid a total of €25,000 ($34,000).

In his testimony, R. incriminated two US contacts he claimed to have met. He said that they had introduced themselves by their first names, and that their conversations were informal. The men were presumably using code names. Based on R.’s descriptions of the two men, along with clues and telephone numbers he provided, the federal prosecutor’s office is now trying to identify the US agents, but has been unsuccessful so far.

According to information SPIEGEL has obtained, the operation against the BND was not managed from the US Embassy in Berlin. Apparently the CIA was running its German informant from the US Embassy in Austria. In addition to diplomats, CIA employees work at the picturesque building on Boltzmanngasse 16 in Vienna, and they were apparently the ones who secretly met the BND mole in Salzburg and paid him for classified documents.

Managing sensitive sources from a neighboring country is an old trick in intelligence circles, designed to minimize the risk of the agent himself being exposed. But in this case the modus operandi is also potentially harmful for the CIA officials. If German prosecutors investigating the case succeed in identifying the officers who managed the BND mole, they will lose their diplomatic immunity in Germany. If that happened, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office could request a warrant for the Americans’ arrest.

Markus R. is suspected of having handed over five files of material to the Americans. As the person in charge of filing and cryptography in his department, he had access to highly classified documents. It is believed that Markus R. smuggled hard copies of at least 218 documents out of his office, scanned them at home and edited them to conceal the source.

The documents are believed to have included descriptions of sensitive activities, such as instructions to the BND issued by the Federal Chancellery, as well as the minutes of meetings between BND President Gerhard Schindler and his foreign counterparts. According to insiders, the cache encompasses “a wide range of documents, from incredibly boring to highly sensitive.”

 

Are Spying Cases Connected?

 

The latter category includes a document that could explain why yet another case of spying rocked Berlin only a few days after the BND mole was exposed. It was an inquiry the Federal Criminal Police Office sent to the BND in the spring of 2014, requesting information about an official in the German Defense Ministry named Leonid K. — a second German now suspected of spying for the United States. When investigators discovered this letter in the possession of the BND official they had already taken into custody the week before last, they must have realized that someone could have warned Leonid K.

On the morning of July 9, officers raided the office of the presumed second US informant in Berlin’s Bendlerblock complex, as well as his apartment in the nearby city of Potsdam. Suddenly the spy scandal had expanded from the intelligence community to an important ministry within the German government.

Even as investigators searched the 37-year-old’s office at the Defense Ministry and seized his work computer, senior ministry officials and military officers in Berlin were receiving little yellow notes with the alarming message that a spy had been discovered within their ranks.

German counterintelligence had in fact had Leonid K. under observation for some time. In 2010, while he was working as a political adviser to the German commander of the Kosovo Force (KFOR), an anonymous tipster accused him of being an informant for the Russians. When the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BFV), which is responsible for counterintelligence in Germany, and the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) turned their attention to the senior lieutenant in the reserves, they came across another suspicious contact of the German adviser.

He had apparently had a good relationship with an American in Kosovo who was working for the US government in the Balkans to help build the local intelligence service. Because of his assignment, the investigators assumed he was a member of US intelligence and suspected he could be K.’s key contact.

There were indications to support this theory over the years, but never any hard evidence. Nevertheless, K.’s resumé alone must have made him seem like the perfect source for foreign intelligence agencies. After studying in Berlin, the eastern German city of Frankfurt an der Oder and at the University of Oxford, he worked repeatedly as a political adviser abroad, with access to military officials in various countries. He spent several years in Kosovo, working at various times for both European Union and NATO officials there.

 

Suspect Denies all Allegations

 

The outgoing native of Germany’s southwestern Swabia region, whose aristocratic demeanor prompted some to liken him to former Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, was known to boast to Defense Ministry officials about his international contacts, his experiences far away from Germany and his command of five foreign languages. He preferred traveling with political delegations to places like Uzbekistan over his mundane tasks at home, where he worked as an adviser compiling country profiles for senior ministry officials.

Over the years, he stayed in touch with his old contact in Kosovo. In fact, K. flew to Istanbul several times to meet with the American. These spontaneous trips attracted the attention of German counterintelligence, where it was known that the young political scientist was plagued with money problems. The investigators decided to tap K.’s phone.

Not everything was going well for him professionally. After his stints in Kosovo, K. began looking for a new job. He applied for a position as a consultant to the German parliament, the Bundestag, and had an unsuccessful interview with the German Society for International Cooperation, before landing a job at the Defense Ministry in June 2013. When his American friend suddenly transferred €2,000 to his account in the same year, it raised yet another red flag with German counterintelligence. Nevertheless, German agents still lack solid evidence that K. revealed classified secrets to foreign agents.

When he was questioned last week, he expressed complete surprise and vehemently denied all allegations. He claimed that the American colleague had been a close friend over the years, and that he had merely borrowed the €2,000 from his friend for a wedding, a debt he insisted he had already repaid.

Oddly enough, all contact between K. and his American friend abruptly ended in February 2014. Whether American intelligence services, alarmed by the activities of the BND mole, warned K. and he was therefore able to destroy evidence is one of the questions the Federal Prosecutor’s Office must now address. It is quite possible that the somewhat cold trail leading to Leonid K. was only revived recently by the BND case. At any rate, K. still remains at large, as federal prosecutors have no strong suspicions that he has committed a crime.

After the second suspected case of espionage in one week, many in Berlin have tried to downplay the damage. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), characterized as “laughable” the information the Americans obtained through the informant. “At the moment, we can only see this as a minor disaster,” say intelligence officials, noting that it is anything but certain that there is more to the Defense Ministry case than an unusual friendship between two men.

Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said, drastically, that the Americans’ actions were “so idiotic” than he could almost break out in tears over the news. Nevertheless, he sounded like a grandfather who had caught his grandson stealing erasers — an unfortunate matter, but not particularly dramatic.

But the scope of the damage the Americans have inflicted so far is still only vaguely recognizable. Their initial response to the revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden in the summer of 2013 was that the Germans should get over themselves — after all, they insisted, everything the NSA does takes place in the interest of freedom and strictly in accordance with law and order. But then came the revelations of the tapping of Merkel’s mobile phone. It was an embarrassing incident for US President Barack Obama, who quickly gave Merkel his personal assurance that US intelligence would refrain from tapping her phone in the future. The inference was that it would be less likely to do so in other cases.

The case of the CIA informant at the BND shows that Washington apparently still doesn’t consider the massive technical efforts it undertakes to spy on the entire globe to be sufficient. It helps to explain why the numerous US intelligence agencies still manage human sources, just as they did in the bad old days, even in the nerve centers of Washington’s close allies.

The Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Karlsruhe, Germany’s top investigative agency, is now pursuing three cases of suspected espionage relating to the United States, supposedly Germany’s closest ally. Even the biggest appeasers in Berlin must realize by now that the Americans are dead serious when it comes to their desire to know “everything,” to quote an NSA document.

There is a palpable sense of insecurity in Berlin’s government district these days. Even lawmakers with many years of experience have become suspicious of the US Embassy, as well as the embassies of France, Great Britain and Russia. They are all merely a stone’s throw from the offices and conference rooms where German politicians sometimes meet. Some now view the highly secured foreign embassies as little more than surveillance antennas surrounded by buildings.

Many lawmakers involved with the intelligence services and their supervision have stopped discussing sensitive information on the phone or sending unencrypted emails, and they have taken to meeting in person, in public places, for confidential conversations. If they even take their mobile phones along, they sometimes use them to play loud lounge music, hoping to confuse unwelcome listeners.

A number of parliamentarians also now plan to obtain so-called crypto phones, which, though expensive and impractical, are practically bug-proof. Patrick Sensburg (CDU), the chairman of the NSA investigative committee, has already had crypto phones purchased for his fellow committee members.

The week before last, before the BND spy case became widely known, Sensburg invited the committee representatives to attend an extraordinary meeting. In it, he allegedly highlighted the risk that all members of the committee, formed to investigate the NSA scandal, are in fact being spied on themselves.

 

‘Domino Effect’

 

In fact, Sensburg believes that the current cases of espionage will not be the last. “I fear that there will be a domino effect,” says Sensburg, a lawyer by profession. “I am convinced that even more will be revealed in the coming weeks and months, and that America will not be the only country involved.”

The chairman has announced that he intends to make his committee’s technical infrastructure as spy-proof as possible. “It would also be advisable for all of us to have the Federal Office for Information Security check our mobile phones.”

Is this paranoia? It depends on one’s point of view. Last week Roderich Kiesewetter, a retired colonel who represents the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, in the NSA committee, said that he had had his mobile phone tested some time ago. And, lo and behold, technicians had determined that third parties had indeed tapped his phone.

As it appears, Kiesewetter isn’t the only German lawmaker whose communications are of great interest to unknown parties. Steffen Bockhahn, a member of the intelligence committee for the Left Party in the last legislative period, was also apparently targeted in surveillance activities.

On July 30, 2013, Bockhahn’s closest associate was on the phone in her house in the northern city of Rostock when the conversation was suddenly interrupted. She was alarmed when she glanced at her display. The phone, a Windows Phone 8X, seemingly operated by an invisible hand, had searched through her texting communications with Bockhahn. Then the device’s email program was opened without the phone’s owner being able to stop it. According to her account, emails specifically related to the parliament control panel appeared on her display. She insisted that a hacker was browsing through the documents. It may be a coincidence, but at the time the committee had been briefed about the NSA scandal almost weekly in closed-door meetings — and Bockhahn was one of the most vocal German critics of the global espionage operation.

When the lawmaker heard about the mysterious cyber attack, he called the then state secretary in the Interior Ministry, Klaus-Dieter Fritsche, who notified the authorities. The Federal Criminal Police Office and police in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, with the help of cybercrime specialists, launched an investigation on Aug. 7, 2013 into suspected computer sabotage and efforts to secure state secrets. But they have been unable to solve the mystery to date.

According to Bockhahn, however, senior government officials told him that he should “assume that this was an intelligence operation,” especially as his own mobile phone was also doing strange things during the time in question. For instance, says Bockhahn, he received several empty text messages from anonymous senders. “At some point you come to the realization that you have no way of defending yourself,” says the Left Party politician. “It’s not what I would call a free society.”

 

Feverish Search for Appropriate Response

 

It still isn’t clear whether intelligence services are actually behind such incidents. And if they are, which ones are they? In any event, it has slowly dawned on the German government in recent weeks that it must give a stronger reaction to American spying activities than just making polite inquiries in Washington.

Merkel’s team spent last week feverishly searching for an appropriate reaction to the latest revelations. The fact that the Americans responded to the storm brewing over Berlin with their characteristic silence or platitudes did little to mollify members of Merkel’s coalition with the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Once again, the Americans had underestimated the scope of the political damage. Washington was still reticent about the scandal days after the BND mole had been exposed, most likely because the CIA operation apparently had not been coordinated with the White House, at least not in detail.

Nevertheless, Republican US Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner says that if the Obama administration had wanted to deal with it, there would been ways to do so, such as the president putting in a call to the chancellor. He is critical of the president for not having called Merkel. Sensenbrenner is the first influential US politician to call for an end to spying on allies. Historically, the United States only maintained a no-spy agreement within the context of the “Five Eyes” club. Sensenbrenner argues that the club should be expanded and that Germany would be at the top of his list for new members. The latest incidents have done immeasurable damage, he adds, and now something has to be done to repair it.

 

Sending a Message that Hurts

 

So far, the Obama administration seems to disagree. Although CIA Director John Brennan requested a face-to-face meeting with German intelligence services coordinator Klaus-Dieter Fritsche, in it he said nothing about clearing up the allegations. Much to the indignation of officials in Berlin, Brennan didn’t even admit to something that seems abundantly clear, based on the facts of the case to date: that his agents were managing the BND mole.

After US Ambassador to Germany John Emerson had sidestepped the issue in a conversation with Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German government knew that it had to send a political message that would trigger more than amused smiles in Washington. It had to be a message that “hurt.” This time the response was the expulsion of the CIA’s top intelligence official in Germany.

The CIA agent, who was asked to leave the country, is not an unknown entity to German authorities. Since G. assumed his position in the summer of 2013, he painstakingly worked his way back up the Agency’s list of Berlin contacts, which had cooled as a result of the NSA scandal. He attended meetings once a month, sometimes even more frequently, at the Interior Ministry, the Chancellery, the BND and the BFV, where he was respected for his networking abilities and affable manner.

It is not without irony that G. is the one being expelled. The German government knows that he had little or nothing to do with managing the informant. Instead, he had to go “because Germany needed a sacrifice as a political symbol,” as a senior official puts it. This was probably why BFV head Hans-Georg Maassen delivered the order to leave Germany to the CIA agent in person on Thursday.

 

Berlin Wants Answers

 

Government representatives later called it a “sign of self-confidence,” noting: “Now it’s their turn.” They want the Americans to finally provide some answers, at least to the most pressing questions surrounding the spying scandal, which were posed a year ago and have since been ignored in Washington.

If Obama refuses to back down, the German government could take further steps. However, Merkel already imposed narrow limits on herself from the very beginning. She doesn’t want to jeopardize intelligence cooperation, because she believes that the risk of attacks in Germany is too great to simply dispense with US intelligence information.

But in light of the most recent events, even the most pro-American faction in the government is now increasingly willing to “realign” the intelligence services. What this means, most of all, is that the BFV will probably broaden its focus to include the United States in its counterespionage efforts in the future. In addition, the government is having experts in all government ministries search for weaknesses in communication technology, along with signs of American spying activity.

The hunt for additional moles has also begun at the BND. An investigative team will search data systems in all departments for unauthorized access, over a period of several years.

If the Americans remain obstinate, Berlin officials are even thinking about suspending or even paring back treaties with the United States.

In this context, the so-called Safe Harbor Program could prove to be an effective tool to apply pressure to Washington. The 2000 agreement allows US companies to store and process billions of pieces of data on European citizens, but only if they pledge to abide by European data privacy rules — with US authorities monitoring compliance. More than 3,000 companies, including giants like Google, Facebook and Microsoft, have already agreed to the rules of the program.

“If we suspend this cooperative program, it will be both an economic and political blow to the Americans,” says Jan Philipp Albrecht, a Green Party member of the European Parliament. His fellow party member Renate Künast, chair of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection in the Bundestag, says: “Under the Safe Harbor Agreement, our data are not secure when transmitted to the United States, but instead are exposed to uncertainty.”

The German government is still hesitating before putting the screws on Washington. But at this point no one would bet that further cases will not turn up. “The Americans are furnishing their opponents with free arguments,” says a government official.

 

By Nikolaus Blome, Florian Gathmann, Matthias Gebauer, Hubert Gude, Horand Knaup, Gordon Repinski, Jörg Schindler, Fidelius Schmid, Gregor Peter Schmitz and Holger Stark

 

 Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan