TBR News June 28, 2010

Jun 28 2010

The Voice of the White House

 

            Washington, D.C., June 28, 2010: “Now that the American public is rapidly forgetting about the Israeli piracy and murder conducted against the unarmed Gaza aid convoy, the frantic screaming about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico seems to have dropped off the charts. The story managed to distract the public for several weeks and served its purpose and it can join all the other hype the press puts out to keep the sheep happy.

             Notice that the press never, ever, talks about where Bernie Madoff hid his stolen billions or the huge damage and high death toll when the U.S. Army’s Forward Base Falcon was blown up by Iraqi freedom fighters (or terrorists…depending on who you work for) a few years ago. In earlier times, the press never talked about the huge number of unrepentant Nazis that worked for the U.S. Army and, especially, the CIA.

            Friends, you won’t get the truth from the media, ever (unless they do a story about a tornado striking a day care center in East Jesus, Texas or go on a about a cute little kitty stuck up in a tree in Bad Seepage, Ohio. If you want the truth, go to the Internet. I give you a list of sites that will tell it all and, best of all, are virtually ad free and cost nothing.

            The New York Times

            The Washington Post

            The Los Angeles Times

            Reuters

            BBC News

            The Guardian/UK

            AFP

            RIA/Novosti

            This is just a start and later, I will post more sites and put their links up. The best way to avoid the sort of phony crap Bush put out (Oooh kids, this is an Orange day! Get that duct tape out and tie Granny to the front door!) and if you read the sites I listed, plus others coming, you will see why Sunstein and Obama want to control the Internet!”

Official Government Disinformation Methodology

by Robert Fadley

            On December 14, 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Lt. General John L. DeWitt, then head of the Western Defense Command, claiming that “50 hostile planes” had flown over the city of San Francisco and he issued the following statement: “Death and destruction are likely to come to the city at any moment. These planes were over the community for a definite period. They were enemy planes. I mean Japanese planes. They were tracked out to sea. Why bombs were not dropped, I do not know…”).

            DeWitt ordered American planes and antiaircraft defense not to fire without his order. “People called me up and asked why I didn’t start to shoot. It’s none of their damn business!” DeWitt was furious at the lack of blackout precautions and blasted city leaders the next day. “If I can’t knock it into you with words, we’ll have to turn it over to the police to knock it in with clubs. They were enemy planes and I mean Japanese planes. Put out your lights and take it! If you can’t take it, get out of San Francisco now!”[

            There were, of course, no Japanese planes and General DeWitt knew this. His statement set off a planned wave of public hysteria which, conveniently, led to a request by DeWitt in February, 1942 to a very willing listener, Franklin Roosevelt, to the effect that while no acts of sabotage by Japanese-Americans “had yet been confirmed” nevertheless this positively confirmed that  — “such action will be taken.”

            He then strongly minuted the President, who hated the Japanese, that the President must order the evacuation of all Japanese from the coastal areas of California, Oregon, and Washington state. The President, who had discussed this issue twice with DeWitt on the telephone, immediately agreed, issuing Executive Order 9066

            After this,  DeWitt then began implementing a plan for classifying, rounding up, and removal of “undesirables”.These consisted of Japanese, Germans and Italians almost all of whom were American citizens. On March 2, 1942, DeWitt issued “Military Proclamation No. 1” which designated the western parts of California, Oregon and Washington as “military area no. 1”, further divided into “prohibited zone A-1” and “restricted zone B”.

            In the first phase of the order, a provision was included directing that “any person of Japanese ancestry, now resident in Military Area No. 1, who changes his place of habitual residence must file a ‘change of residence notice’ at his local post office not more than five days nor less than one day prior to moving,”

            Days later, DeWitt announced that the Army had acquired 5,800 acres of land near Manzanar, California, for construction of a “reception center” which he said was “to be used principally as a clearing house for the more permanent resettlement elsewhere for persons excluded from military areas.” In the event, 112,000 Japanese-Americans, most of whom were American citizens, were put into official, Presidential-ordered concentration camps. In the event, there were no recorded incidents of any subversive actions on the part of any Japanese-Americans prior to or just after the outbreak of the war with Japan.

            Prior to the event of printed, and later television, media, it was not difficult for the world’s power elites and the governments they controlled, to see that unwelcome and potentially dangerous information never reached the masses of people under their control. Most of the general public in more distant times were completely illiterate and received their news from their local priest of from occasional gossip from travelers. The admixture of kings, princes and clergy had an iron control over what their subjects could, or could not, hear. During the Middle Ages, and even into the more liberal Renaissance, universities were viewed with suspicion and those who taught, or otherwise expressed, concepts that were anathema to the concept of feudalism were either killed outright or permanently banished. Too-liberal priests were silenced by similar methods. If Papal orders for silence were not followed, priests could, and were, put to the torch as an example for other to note.

             However, with the advent of the printing press and a growing literacy in the population, the question of informational control was less certain and with the growing movements in Europe and the American colonies for less restriction and more public expression, the power elites found it necessary to find the means to prevent unpleasant information from being proclaimed throughout their lands and unto all the inhabitants thereof.

            The power elites realized that if they could not entirely prevent inconvenient, and often dangerous, facts from emerging and threatening their authority and control, their best course was not censorship but to find and develop the means to control the presentation and publication of what which they wished to keep entirely secret.

            The first method was to block or otherwise prevent the release of dangerous material by claiming that such material was a matter of vital state security and as such, strictly to be controlled in the public interest. This, in short, was not only for the protection of the public but also for their continued security.

            The second method was, and has been, to put forth deliberate disinformation that so distorts and confuses actual facts as to befuddle a public they see as easily controlled, naïve and gullible.

            The mainstream American media, which theoretically once was a balance against governmental corruption and abuse of power, quickly became little more than a mouthpiece for the same government they were supposed to report on.

            In the latter part of the nineteenth century, most American newspapers were little better than Rupert Murdoch’s modern tabloids, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing, but during the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson used the American entry into the European war as an excuse for clamping iron controls upon the American public. Aside from setting up dictates over food distribution, the railroads, much industry involved in war production, he also established a powerful propaganda machine coupled with a national informant system that guaranteed his personal and abiding control, In 1918, citing national security, Wilson arrested and imprisoned critical news reporters and threatened to shut down their papers.

            Wilson, as a wartime president, set clear precedents that resonated very loudly with those who read, and understood, history and its realities.

            During the Second World Wear, another Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt, a wartime leader, who was not as arrogant or as highhanded as Wilson (whose empire quickly fell apart after the end of the war that supported it) but he also set up informational controls that exist to the present time. And after Roosevelt, and his war, passed into history, the government in the United States created a so-called ‘Cold War’ with Soviet Russia.

            Instead of Hitler’s Germany, as the identified chief enemy, Stalin’s Russia became the proclaimed enemy and in 1948, control of the American media fell into the hands of the newly-formed Central Intelligence Agency who eventually possessed an enormous, all-encompassing machine that clamped down firmly on the national print, and later, television, media, with an iron hand concealed in a velvet glove. Media outlets that proved to be cooperative with the CIA propaganda officials were rewarded for their loyalty and cooperation with valuable, and safe, news and the implication was that enemies of the state would either be subject to scorn and derision and eventually total eclipse while supporters of the state and its policies would receive praise, adulation and, more important, advertising revenue, praise and adulation.

            The methodology of a controlled media has a number of aspects, which, once clearly understood, renders its techniques and goals far less effective.

            Some of the main tactics used by the governmentally controlled mainstream media to mislead the American public are illustrated here:

            The American media, both press and television, has long been known for promoting sensationalism over accuracy on the one hand, and manifesting total subservience to the wishes of the power elite and whatever official régime they control. The CIA’s Frank Wisner set up a media control section he laughingly termed ‘The Giant Wurlitzer” after a period pipe organ and he boasted he could “play any kind of tune” he (and his superiors) wished. Wisner worked closely with Robert Crowley, the CIA’s business-world connection, and they developed very effective methodology.

            The publication of unconfirmed or fictitious source material as fact

            The media very often cite disinformation from “unnamed (but official) sources” as fact. Unnamed “experts” are cited and “confidentiality” is mentioned to avoid printing easily exposed fictional sources. The public is expected, and does, accept these lies as published fact when in fact they are only crude deceptions. For example, the CIA’s fake “Osama bin Ladin” taped messages, always released to coincide with official government policy, are trumpeted as revealed fact when in fact they are CIA creative productions. Current “bin Ladin” messages are impossibility as the purported author died in 2003!

             Deliberate and calculated omissions

             Disinformational news releases do not contain any inconvenient and difficult to justify facts. These are specifically omitted from any reporting and are never permitted to see the light of day in any officially controlled media outlet.

 

             Deliberate and calculated distracting false information

            It sometimes happens that very damaging and truthful information gets into initial news releases and when this happens, the standard method of neutralizing this is to prepare sensational and often-repeated fictions for the purpose of masking inconvenient truth with distracting fiction. A further tactic of the media is to report the false stories so often and with so much emphasis that the public accepts them as fact, disregarding the vanishing truthful but damaging facts. Ignore the truth and repeat the lie is the watchword throughout these exercises in literary mendacity.

            The rigged public debate as a tool of disinformation

            One of the favorite tactics of the controlled media is to foster an apparently free and open debate on news programs, a debate that is, in essence, pure manipulation. An inconvenient and partially visible fact is brought up in a garbled and patently absurd manner and then skillfully destroyed by another reporter. Since the creator of this system creates and presents both sides, setting up a reality for a fall is simple work. 

            The use of members of the academic profession as official mouthpieces

 

            In addition to the “anonymous” but implied important source, the disinformation directors also favor the use of various minor academics as individuals to support their allegations or, and often more important, to denigrate or smear anyone perceived as a potential opponent.         

            The CIA is well-known to have a large stable of minor members of academia on their payrolls and this in addition to retired senior military personnel, various other individuals that can, often barely, be termed as ‘scientists,” or other purported experts.  These either praise and eagerly support governmental actions and positions or attack the questioners of these actions. In general, academics are eager, vicious and willing prostitutes for either money or official praise.

            From a classified CIA appraisal of media disinformation, we present an analysis of the basic rules of the engagements:

            The reality of actual power is what one possesses but also what opponents believe one possesses. The political structure must always depict itself as omnipotent and omniscient and all opponents should be depicted as weak, disorganized and always wrong. This will convince not only the public but also the opponent that they are of no consequence in the face of an overwhelming moral and historical force.

 

            Always present your beliefs from secure and comprehensive internal knowledge and always make a strong effort to deal in areas that are unfamiliar to your opponents. One must always deal on internal lines and never permit an enemy to draw you into the unfamiliar where you are unable to firmly deal with issues. This is a weakness that the public will quickly recognize and will effectively blunt the direction and effectiveness of any message. In public debates against perceived opponents, the most effective means of destroying their credibility is to lure them into areas where they are unprepared, or unknowing, and demolish them by presenting them as unfamiliar with their subjects

             Ridicule, if properly used, is one of the most effective means of     discrediting an opponent. French philosopher Blasé Pascal once wrote that the most effective means of destroying an enemy was to make a fool of them. Ridicule is almost impossible to counter. It’s irrational. It infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage. It also works as a pressure point to force the enemy into concessions

 

            The American media, both press and television has long been known for promoting sensationalism over accuracy on the one hand and practicing subservience to the needs of both the government as such and powerful private interest and ethnic groups.. On the occasion when uncomfortable, politically unacceptable ot dangerous matters get into the public consciousness via the Internet, the usual method of neutraizing it is to see to it that the print and television media both ignore it and, as an antidote, attempt to change public focus.  This is achieved by either inventing a topic or taking one of relative unimportance and heavily over report it. An excellent example is how the American media handled the very sensitive Israeli attacks on the Gaza aid convoy. Essentially an act of piracy and murder, it was only briefly addressed in the media and then public awareness was directed at the massive oil spills then on-going in the Gulf of Mexico. When it was decided that interest in, and condemnation of, the convoy attack had sufficiently wained, the media dropped its extensive coverage of the oil spills. 

            Official Government Disinformation Methdolgy Governments, and their supporters have tremendous financial assets as well as the finest connections with the organs of propaganda. They also have very strong ties to an academic community that is dependent upon generous official cash grants and with these advantages, disinformation can be executed on a massive scale. Paid internet plants or double-agents are also known as, “paid posters” or “paid bloggers,” and are increasingly being employed by government and private business to lure viewers to a specific product or point of view. This practice has become very popular by, for example, the CIA, the FBI and the DHS.

            Here are just a handful of the most prominent tactics used by government agencies and private think tanks to guide public opinion, and establish the appearance of a unversal consensus:

            1) The Experts: Most Americans are taught that individuals known as “experts” are considered by authority to be difinitive. Therefore, it is necessary for the government to acquire a stable of persons, preferably with an academic degree or association with an institution of higher learning. The government arrainges for them to public so-called “adademic papers” which closely reflect the current opinions of officialdom. These “experts” will be brought out if and when necessary to refute, ridicule or otherwise negate any issue of concern to the government. These “experts” are generally not of any specific great importance nor, usually, of any particular competence; it is their academic credentials and obedience to command that are the most important factors.

            2) Control The Data: By controlling the source data of any investigation, be it legal or scientific, the government has the ability to engineer any truth they wish, that is, as long as the people do not care enough to ask for the source data..

            3) Skew The Statistics: This tactic is extremely evident in the Labor Department’s evaluations on unemployment, using such tricks as incorporating ambiguous birth / death ratios into their calculation in order to make it appear as though there are less unemployed people than there really are, or leaving out certain subsections of the population, like those who are unemployed and no longer seeking benefits.

            3) Guilt By False Association: In order to silence or neutralize political opponent, it is the standard practice to officially ignore the opponent but, if this is not possible, the next step is to demonize him. Through the use ot fronts and paid sources, the government will publish, or cause to have published, all manner of negative material, and an excellent example of this are the slanders propagated by Bush advisor Karl Rove during the second presidential campaign. Malicious defamation is extremely damaging to an opponents image and it is almost impossible to disprove a negative. While effective, repeated use of dafamation will eventually prove to be a liability as an excess of negativity will cause the public to reject it, and any other governmental policy, in its totality

            4) The Creation and Dissemination of Positive News: In order to offset the public effect of negative news, both domestic and foreign, political or economic, the standard technique is to release positive and often sensationalistic news. By stressing this and either ignoring or trivilaizing negative news, the public’s attention is drawn away from possibly dangerous information.  

            5) Controlled Opposition: Throughout history, officialdom has been aware of the importance of having a controlled opposition. All rulers have sections of opposition to deal with and it has been an age-old practice to establish an opposition for the purpose of attracting potential rebels and malcontents to its ranks…where they can be better observed and controlled. 

            During the 1960’s and 70’s, the FBI began a secretive program called COINTELPRO. Along with illegal spying on American citizens who were against the Vietnam conflict or in support of the civil rights movement, they also used agents and media sources to pose as supporters of the movement, then purposely created conflict and division, or took control of the direction of the movement altogether. This same tactic can now be seen on the Internet where a number of supposedly anti-government proclaim their dissatisfaction, pretend to publish “secret” documents or put up candidates for public office that are so bizarre in their appearances and views as to make the government shine by comparison.

Israel recruits ‘army of bloggers’ to combat anti-Zionist Web sites

May 24, 2010

by Paul Joseph Watson
Propaganda Matrix
 

The Israeli government announced that it would be setting up a network of bloggers to combat websites deemed “problematic” by the Zionist state following a massive online backlash to Israel’s brutal bombing of Gaza.

Israel’s goal was to flood Internet message boards in English, French, Spanish and German with their own PR agents who would attempt to manufacture a contrived consensus that the IDF’s actions were justified.

Like Israel, the U.S. military industrial complex hires armies of trolls to spew propaganda in defense of the war on terror and in support of bombing whatever broken-backed third world country is being targeted next.

CENTCOM has programs underway to infiltrate blogs and message boards to ensure people, “have the opportunity to read positive stories, ”presumably about how Iraq is a wonderful liberated democracy and the war on terror really is about protecting Americans from Al-CIAda.

In May 2008, it was revealed that the Pentagon was expanding “Information Operations” on the Internet with purposefully set up foreign news websites, designed to look like independent media sources but in reality carrying direct military propaganda.

More recently the New York Times published an exposé on how privately hired operatives were appearing on major US news networks promoting the interests and operations of the Pentagon and generating favorable news coverage of the so-called war on terror while posing as independent military analysts.

This operation was formally announced In 2006 when the Pentagon set up a unit to “better promote its message across 24-hour rolling news outlets, and particularly on the internet”.

Again, the Pentagon said the move would boost its ability to counter “inaccurate” news stories and exploit new media.

Last year, the US Air Force announced a “counter-blog” response plan aimed at fielding and reacting to material from bloggers who have “negative opinions about the US government and the Air Force.”

The plan, created by the public affairs arm of the Air Force, includes a detailed twelve-point “counter blogging” flow-chart that dictates how officers should tackle what are described as “trolls,” “ragers,” and “misguided” online writers

 

http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/may2010/052410_troll_forums.htm

 

Recession, bear markets hit the rich, too

June 25, 2010

by Joseph A. Giannone

Reuters

NEW YORK – Turns out the rich may not be so different from you and me: They, too, are falling behind on their mortgages.

The U.S. housing market crash triggered the 2008 financial crisis and fueled a wave of mortgage defaults and foreclosures over the past two years. Now, growing numbers of well heeled Americans, their portfolios hammered by depressed markets, have stopped repaying loans or even walked away from mortgages.

“The affluent are not immune to the recession. It just took a while to manifest itself,” said Jay Welker, chief executive of Wells Fargo Private Bank. “In this economy, the high net worth segment has had to de-leverage itself as well.”

The rich by definition can weather a job loss or down markets longer than the average Joe. Yet their wealth is linked to securities, properties and hard-to-sell assets such as private businesses. North America’s millionaires still have not yet fully recovered $11 trillion lost in the crisis.

“Early on in the crash, the weakness was in the lower-price tiers. In the past year, most of the biggest price declines have been in the upper tiers,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “That suggests high-end households are coming under increasing pressure.”

First American CoreLogic, which tracks U.S. real estate and mortgages, says the percentage of $1 million-plus loans more than 90 days delinquent rose to 13.3 percent in February, half again as high as the 8.6 percent overall delinquency rate.

The million-dollar delinquency rate has exceeded the overall delinquency rate since April 2008.

“The high end of the housing market has deteriorated at a worse rate than the market as a whole,” said Sam Khater, senior economist at CoreLogic. “This recession is unlike prior recessions. It hit the high end just as much as the low end.”

Last month there were 205 foreclosure filings for mortgages of $5 million or more, the third straight month such filings rose, according to RealtyTrac, which manages an online foreclosures marketplace. The 205 foreclosures totaled $813 million.

Analysts noted the recession did not start with Federal Reserve tightening, a spike in inflation or a slowdown in spending. Rather, the subprime freeze created a credit crunch that spread to every market.

“A lot of the wealthy are less wealthy. The stock market hasn’t fully recovered, taxes are on the way up, and real estate isn’t worth what it once was. That shakes people,” said Christian Magoon, an adviser to asset management companies and a former president of Claymore Securities.

After snapping back in 2009, markets have turned south again, weighed down by worries about European sovereign debt, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the uncertain outlook for the global economy. Near-zero interest rates mean investors get a lot less income from bonds and cash vehicles.

This trend could pose a problem for U.S. private banks, which help the rich manage their money, provide credit and keep deposits.

Bank of America Corp’s (BAC.N) venerable U.S. Trust unit reported a sixfold increase in its loan-loss provision in the first quarter, to $184 million from $31 million a year earlier. The increase in credit costs was a key reason the unit’s profit fell to $36 million from $106 million.

The U.S. Trust loan-loss provision “rose primarily due to higher reserve additions in the residential mortgage and commercial portfolios,” Bank of America said in an April conference call.

U.S. Trust, which ended March with $53.4 billion of total assets, declined further comment.

Northern Trust Corp (NTRS.O), a bank catering to wealthy individuals, also saw higher first-quarter credit costs. Net charge-offs rose to $31 million from $2.7 million a year earlier, though they were down from the 2009 fourth quarter.

JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), Citigroup Inc (C.N) and Wells Fargo & Co (WFC.N) do not disclose credit data for their private banks.

Foreclosure filings among the biggest properties, to be sure, are well down from their January 2009 peak of 621 and from the 489 in February this year.

Even so, Rick Sharga, head of operations and management at RealtyTrac, predicts foreclosures among the rich will continue to rise.

“This is probably the first foreclosure cycle that crept into the more affluent corner of the market,” he said. “This cycle triggered a downturn which triggered job losses and a second wave of foreclosures. I don’t think we’ve peaked yet.”

No good info on bin Laden for years: CIA’s Panetta

June 27, 2010

by Susan Cornwell

Reuters

             WASHINGTON – It has been years since the United States has had good intelligence on the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin laden, although he is thought to be in Pakistan, CIA director Leon Panetta said on Sunday.

            He also gave a sobering account of the war in Afghanistan, saying the Taliban seemed to be strengthening with a stepped-up campaign of violence, even as U.S.-led forces undermine the Islamist movement with attacks on its leadership.

             Progress is being made in the nearly nine-year-old conflict but “it’s harder, it’s slower than I think anyone anticipated,” Panetta said on ABC’s “This Week” program. He did not directly answer a question about whether the war was being won.

            A harsh spotlight was thrown on the U.S. strategy last week when President Barack Obama fired General Stanley McChrystal as his top commander in Afghanistan and replaced him with General David Petraeus.

            Now U.S. lawmakers from both parties are demanding more answers about the war’s progress. Some will be putting these questions to Petraeus at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

            Not since “the early 2000s” have U.S. officials had “the last precise information about where he (bin Laden) might be located,” Panetta said.

            “Since then, it’s been very difficult to get any intelligence on his exact location,” Panetta said. “He is, as is obvious, in very deep hiding … He’s in an area of the tribal areas of Pakistan.”

             Denying the world’s most wanted man safe haven on the lawless Afghanistan-Pakistan border has been an aim of Western policy since the September 11 attacks in 2001, when the Taliban in effect spurned a U.S. demand to hand over the al Qaeda chief.

‘MOVING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION’

            Panetta said the United States still believed it could ultimately “flush out” bin Laden, noting it had already “taken down” more than half of al Qaeda’s leadership.

            In recent months, the CIA has ramped up the pace of unmanned drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan that border Afghanistan, targeting not only high-level al Qaeda and Taliban targets but unknown foot soldiers as well.

            Taliban militants, Panetta said, “with regards to some of the directed violence, they seem to be stronger. But the fact is, we are undermining their leadership and that I think is moving in the right direction.”

            He said a Taliban leader who was dressed as a woman was killed over the weekend in a military operation.

             Violence in Afghanistan is at its worst since the war began in late 2001, with the Taliban stepping up suicide bombings and assassinations, particularly in their Kandahar heartland.

            Some 80 foreign soldiers have been killed so far in June, making it the deadliest month ever for international forces. More than 300 troops have been killed this year compared with about 520 for all of 2009.

            Panetta said the key to success was not just in U.S. and allied efforts but whether Afghan security forces will be able to take over and maintain stability.

            “This is not going to be easy,” he said. “It is going to take the Afghan army and police to be able to accept the responsibility that we pass on to them.”

            Panetta said he had not seen any firm intelligence that there was a real interest in reconciliation among al Qaeda, the Taliban or the Haqqani network, a faction of the Afghan Taliban.

(Editing by John O’Callaghan)

            Comment: It’s odd that CIA DCI Panetta should be so careless to discuss this subject. Osama bin Ladin has ben dead (of kidneyu failure in Pakistan) since 2002 and the laughable “bin Ladin tapes” are a CIA product, being produced in Texas with actors. ED.

Military psy-ops took over operation after intelligence project failed to take off

May 25, 2010

by Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
 

            Two former CIA officials have admitted to creating a fake video in which intelligence officers dressed up as Osama Bin Laden and his cronies in an effort to defame the terrorist leader throughout the middle east.

            The details are outlined in a Washington Post article by investigative reporter and former Army Intelligence case officer Jeff Stein.

            Stein’s sources told him that during planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group considered creating a fake video of Saddam Hussein engaged in sexual acts with a teenage boy, then flooding Iraq with copies of the tape.

            That idea, along with faking Iraqi news bulletins, never came to fruition according to the former CIA officials, because agreement on the projects could not be reached between the Iraq Group and CIA’s Office of Technical Services.

             However, the two sources reveal that the agency did previously concoct at least one fake Bin Laden video:

The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.

            The former officials told Stein that the project was taken over by the military after it ground to a halt:

The reality, the former officials said, was that the agency really didn’t have enough money and expertise to carry out the projects.

“The military took them over,” said one. “They had assets in psy-war down at Ft. Bragg,” at the army’s special warfare center.

            This latest revelation bolsters evidence that the intelligence agencies, and perhaps more significantly, the military have been engaged in creating fake Bin Laden videos in the past.

As we have exhaustively documented, Intelcenter, the U.S. monitoring group that routinely releases Bin Laden video and audio, much of which have been proven to be either rehashed old footage or outright fakes, is an offshoot of IDEFENSE, a web security company that monitors intelligence from the middle east.

             IDEFENSE is heavily populated by long serving ex military intelligence officials, such as senior military psy-op intelligence officer Jim Melnick, who served 16 years in the US army and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in psychological operations. Melnick has also worked directly for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

             Intelcenter notoriously released the “laughing hijackers” tape and claimed it was an Al-Qaeda video, despite the fact that the footage was obtained by a “security agency” at a 2000 Bin Laden speech.

 

             IntelCenter was also caught adding its logo to a tape at the same time as Al-Qaeda’s so-called media arm As-Sahab added its logo, proving the two organizations were one and the same.

Could the CIA group of “dark skinned actors” have been behind the infamous December 2001 Fat nosed Bin Laden video, that was magically found in a house in Jalalabad after anti-Taliban forces moved in?

            The tape featured a fat Osama laughing and joking about how he’d carried out 9/11. The video was also mistranslated in order to manipulate viewer opinion and featured “Bin Laden” praising two of the hijackers, only he got their names wrong. This Osama also used the wrong hand to write with and wore gold rings, a practice totally in opposition to the Muslim faith.

            Despite the fact that the man in the video looks nothing like Bin Laden, the CIA stood by it and declared it to be the official “9/11 confession video”.

            The latest revelations also shed light on another past Bin Laden release – a tape in which he ludicrously declared himself in league with Saddam Hussein in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq.

             The notion that the CIA project was taken over and drastically improved by the Pentagon at some point after 2003 jives with the improvement in quality of Bin Laden videos in later years. Most notably the video that was released immediately ahead of the 2004 election, and it’s digitally manipulated duplicate from 2007, in which Bin Laden appeared to have a dyed beard.

For a run down of some of the most notoriously dubious Bin Laden videos see the following article.

 

CIA defends Blackwater contract worth $100m

June 27, 2010

BBC News

The head of CIA has defended awarding a large contract to the controversial security company formerly known as Blackwater.

The director of the CIA, Leon Penatta, said the company’s bid was US $26m less than its nearest rival.

The contract, worth $100m, is to provide security at US consulates in the cities of Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif.

Blackwater guards allegedly opened fire on unarmed civilians in Baghdad in 2007 killing 17 people.

In the wake of the killings, the company rebranded itself Xe Services.

The company ended its operations in Iraq in 2009, in line with a ban by the government.

The US government said in January 2009 that it would not renew the company’s task orders

The new contract with the company initialy runs for a year but could be extended to 18 months.

In a rare television interview with ABC News on Sunday, Leon Panetta said the CIA had come to rely on such companies to provide security for forward bases.

“[Xe] provided a bid that… underbid everyone else by about US $26m. And a panel that we had said that they can do the job, that they have shaped up their act. So there really was not much choice but to accept that contract,” Mr Panetta explained.

As Blackwater the company provided the US government with bodyguards both in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It hit the headlines when four of its bodyguards were ambushed in the Iraqi city of Fallujah and their bodies left hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates River.

Earlier this month the company was put up for sale.

 

 

Truly detached from war
June 26, 2010

by Tom Engelhardt

Admittedly, before George W Bush had his fever dream, the United States had already put its first unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drone surveillance planes in the skies over Kosovo in the late 1990s. By November 2001, it had armed them with missiles and was flying them over Afghanistan.

            In November 2002, a Predator drone would loose a Hellfire missile on a car in Yemen, a country with which we weren’t at war. Six suspected al-Qaeda members, including a suspect in the bombing of the destroyer the USS Cole would be turned into twisted metal and ash – the first “targeted killings” of the American robotic era.

            Just two months earlier, in September 2002, as the Bushadministration was “introducing” its campaign to sell an invasion of Iraq to the US Congress and the American people, Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet and vice president Dick Cheney “trooped up to Capitol Hill” to brief four top senate and house leaders on a hair-raising threat to the country. A “smoking gun” had been uncovered.

             According to “new intelligence”, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had in his possession unmanned aerial vehicles advanced enough to be armed with biological and chemical weaponry. Worse yet, these were capable – so the CIA director and vice president claimed – of spraying those weapons of mass destruction over cities on the east coast of the United States. It was just the sort of evil plan you might have expected from a man regularly compared to Adolf Hitler in our media, and the news evidently made an impression in congress.

             Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, said that he voted for the administration’s resolution authorizing force in Iraq because “I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard.”

            In a speech in October 2002, Bush then offered a version of this apocalyptic nightmare to the American public. Like Saddam’s supposed ability to produce “mushroom clouds” over American cities, the Iraqi autocrat’s advanced UAVs (along with the ships needed to position them off the US coast) were a feverish fantasy of the Bush era and would soon enough be forgotten. Instead, in the years to come, it would be American pilotless drones that would repeatedly attack Iraqi urban areas with Hellfire missiles and bombs.

            In those years, our drones would also strike repeatedly in Afghanistan, and especially in the tribal borderlands of Pakistan, where in an escalating “secret” or “covert” war, which has been no secret to anyone, multiple drone attacks often occur weekly. They are now considered so much the norm that, with humdrum headlines slapped on (“US missile strike kills 12 in NW Pakistan”), they barely make it out of summary articles about war developments in the American press.

            And yet those robotic planes, with their young “pilots” (as well as the camera operators and intelligence analysts who make up a drone “crew”) sitting in front of consoles many thousands of kilometers away from where their missiles and bombs are landing, have become another kind of American fever dream. The drone is our latest wonder weapon and a bragging point in a set of wars where there has been little enough to brag about.

            CIA director Leon Panetta has, for instance, called the agency’s drones flying over Pakistan “the only game in town” when it comes to destroying al-Qaeda; a typically anonymous US official in a Washington Post report claims of drone missile attacks, “We’re talking about precision unsurpassed in the history of warfare”; or as Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command told author Peter Singer, speaking of the glories of drones: “They don’t get hungry. They are not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”

            Seven thousand of them, the vast majority surveillance varieties, are reportedly already being operated by the military, and that’s before swarms of “mini-drones” come on line. Our American world is being redefined accordingly.

            In February, Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post caught something of this process when he spent time with Colonel Eric Mathewson, perhaps the most experienced US Air Force officer in drone operations and on the verge of retirement. Mathewson, reported Jaffe, was trying to come up with an appropriately new definition of battlefield “valor” – a necessity for most combat award citations – to fit our latest corps of pilots at their video consoles. “Valor to me is not risking your life,” the colonel told the reporter. “Valor is doing what is right. Valor is about your motivations and the ends that you seek. It is doing what is right for the right reasons. That to me is valor.”

Smoking drones

 These days, CIA and administration officials troop up to Capitol Hill to offer briefings to congress on the miraculous value of pilotless drones: in disrupting al-Qaeda, destroying its leadership or driving it “deeper into hiding” and taking out key figures in the Taliban. Indeed, what started as a 24/7 assassination campaign against al-Qaeda’s top leadership has already widened considerably.

            The “target set” has by now reportedly expanded to take in ever lower-level militants in the tribal borderlands. In other words, a drone assassination campaign is morphing into the first full-scale drone war (and, as in all wars from the air, civilians are dying in unknown numbers).

            If the temperature is again rising in Washington when it comes to these weapons, this time it’s a fever of enthusiasm for the spectacular future of drones (which the air force has plotted out to the year 2047), of a time when single pilots should be able to handle multiple drones in operations in the skies over some embattled land, and of a far more distant moment when those drones should be able to handle themselves, flying, fighting, and making key decisions about just who to take out without a human being having to intervene.

            When we possess such weaponry, it turns out, there’s nothing unnerving or disturbing, apocalyptic or dystopian about it. Today, in the American homeland, not a single smoking drone is in sight.

            Now it’s the United States whose UAVs are ever-more powerfully weaponized. It’s the US which is developing a 22-ton tail-less drone 20 times larger than a Predator that can fly at Mach 7 and (theoretically) land on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier. It’s the Pentagon which is planning to increase the funding of drone development by 700% over the next decade.

             Admittedly, there is a modest counter-narrative to all this enthusiasm for our robotic prowess, “precision” and “valor.” It involves legal types like Philip Alston, the United Nations special representative on extrajudicial executions. He recently issued a 29-page report criticizing Washington’s “ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe”. Unless limits are put on such claims, and especially on the CIA’s drone war over Pakistan, he suggests, soon enough a plethora of states will follow in America’s footprints, attacking people in other lands “labeled as terrorists by one group or another”.

            Such mechanized, long-distance warfare, he also suggests, will breach what respect remains for the laws of war. “Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield,” he wrote, “and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a ‘PlayStation’ mentality to killing”. 

Similarly, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a freedom of information lawsuit against the US government, demanding that it “disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas, as well as the ground rules regarding when, where, and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and the number of civilian casualties they have caused”.

            But pay no mind to all this. The arguments may be legally compelling, but not in Washington, which has mounted a half-hearted claim of legitimate “self-defense”, but senses that it’s already well past the point where legalities matter. The die is cast, the money committed. The momentum for drone war andyet more drone war is overwhelming.

            It’s a done deal. Drone war is, and will be, us.

A pilotless military

If there are zeitgeist moments for products, movie stars and even politicians, then such moments can exist for weaponry as well. The robotic drone is the Lady Gaga of this Pentagon moment.

            It’s a moment that could be presented as an apocalyptic nightmare in the style of the Terminator movies (with the US as the soul-crushing Skynet), or as a remarkable tale of how “networking technology is expanding a homefront that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare” (as Christopher Drew recently put it in the New York Times).

            It could be described as the arrival of a dystopian fantasy world of one-way slaughter verging on entertainment, or as the coming of a generation of homegrown video warriors who work “in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk … and coffee and Red Bull help[ing] them get through the 12-hour shifts.” It could be presented as the ultimate in cowardice – the killing of people in a world you know nothing about from thousands of kilometers away – or (as Colonel Mathewson would prefer) a new form of valor.

            The drones – their use expanding exponentially, with ever newer generations on the drawing boards, and the planes even heading for “the homeland” – could certainly be considered a demon spawn of modern warfare, or (as is generally the case in the US) a remarkable example of American technological ingenuity, a problem-solver of the first order at a time when few American problems seem capable of solution.

            Thanks to our technological prowess, it’s claimed that we can now kill them, wherever they may be lurking, at absolutely no cost to ourselves, other than the odd malfunctioning drone. Not that even all CIA operatives involved in the drone wars agree with that one. Some of them understand perfectly well that there’s a price to be paid.

            As it happens, the enthusiasm for drones is as much a fever dream as the one Bush and his associates offered back in 2002, but it’s also distinctly us. In fact, drone warfare fits the America of 2010 tighter than a glove. With its consoles, chat rooms and “single shooter” death machines, it certainly fits the skills of a generation raised on the computer, Facebook and video games. That our valorous warriors, their day of battle done, can increasingly leave war behind and head home to the barbecue (or, given American life, the foreclosure) also fits an American mood of the moment.

            The US Air Force “detachments” that “manage” the drone war from places like Creech Air Force Base in Nevada are “detached” from war in a way that even an artillery unit significantly behind the battle lines or an American pilot in an F-16 over Afghanistan (who could, at least, experience engine failure) isn’t. If the drone presents the most extreme version thus far of the detachment of human beings from the battlefield (on only one side, of course) and so launches a basic redefinition of what war is all about, it also catches something important about the American way of war.

After all, while this country garrisons the world, invests its wealth in its military, and fights unending, unwinnable frontier wars and skirmishes, most Americans are remarkably detached from all this. If anything, since Vietnam when an increasingly rebellious citizens’ army proved disastrous for Washington’s global aims, such detachment has been the goal of American war-making.

            As a start, with no draft and so no citizen’s army, war and the toll it takes is now the professional business of a tiny percentage of Americans (and their families). It occurs thousands of kilometers away and, in the Bush years, also became a heavily privatized, for-profit activity. As Pratap Chatterjee reported recently, “[E]very US soldier deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq is matched by at least one civilian working for a private company. All told, about 239,451 contractors work for the Pentagon in battle zones around the world.” And a majority of those contractors aren’t even US citizens.

            If drones have entered our world as media celebrities, they have done so largely without debate among that detached populace. In a sense, our wars abroad could be thought of as the equivalent of so many drones. We send our troops off and then go home for dinner and put them out of mind. The question is: Have we redefined our detachment as a new version of citizenly valor (and covered it over by a constant drumbeat of “support for our troops”)?

            Under these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that a “pilotless” force should, in turn, develop the sort of contempt for civilians that can be seen in the recent flap over the derogatory comments of (now former) Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal and his aides about Barack Obama administration officials.

The globalization of death

Maybe what we need is the return of Bush’s fever dream from the American oblivion in which it’s now interred. He was beyond wrong, of course, when it came to Saddam and Iraqi drones, but he wasn’t completely wrong about the dystopian drone world to come.

            There are now reportedly more than 40 countries developing versions of those pilotless planes. Earlier this year, the Iranians announced that they were starting up production lines for both armed and unarmed drones. Hezbollah in Lebanon used them against Israel in the 2006 summer war, years after Israel began pioneering their use in targeted killings of Palestinians.
           
            Right now, in what still remains largely a post-Cold War arms race of one, the US is racing to produce ever-more advanced drones to fight our wars, with few competitors in sight. In the process, we’re also obliterating classic ideas of national sovereignty, and of who can be killed by whom under what circumstances. In the process, we may not just be obliterating enemies, but creating them wherever our drones buzz overhead and our missiles strike.

            We are also creating the (il)legal framework for future war on a frontier where we won’t long be flying solo. And when the first Iranian, or Russian, or Chinese missile-armed drones start knocking off their chosen sets of “terrorists,” we won’t like it one bit. When the first “suicide drones” appear, we’ll like it even less. And if drones with the ability to spray chemical or biological weapons finally do make the scene, we’ll be truly unnerved.

            In the 1990s, we were said to be in an era of “globalization” which was widely hailed as good news. Now, the US and its detached populace are pioneering a new era of killing that respects no boundaries, relies on the self-definitions of whoever owns the nearest drone, and establishes planetary free-fire zones. It’s a nasty combination, this globalization of death.

            Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books),

 

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 seventh chapter:

Conversation No. 7

Date: Tuesday, April 2, 1996

Commenced: 10:17 AM (CST)

Concluded: 10:57 AM (CST)

GD: Am I interrupting anything there? It took awhile for you to pick up.

RTC: No, everything’s fine. I was going through my files seeing if I could find anything more about your friend Mueller but I came across something interesting on H&K instead.

GD: Heckler and Koch? The German arms company?

RTC: No, Hill and Knowlton. The PR people.

GD: Public relations.

RTC: Yes. One of my jobs with the company was to keep up our connections with major business and H&K was my baby. Actually, you might be interested in all of this. We were talking about Frank Wisner’s contacts with the media and Cord Meyer’s with the publishing business so I thought this might just fit right in. We always wanted to emulate Colonel Hoover’s good PR. You know, the Hollywood and radio dramas about the wonderful G-Men. I think we established a far more effective system but then, of course I am prejudiced. Before we were finished, we had our fingers in every pot imaginable from the major media to book companies, television networks and so on.

GD: I knew Brownlow in Munich who ran Radio Liberty.

RTC: Station chief there. Yes, but that was for foreign consumption. My specialty was domestic. I guess you can call it propaganda if you like but we needed it to push our programs forward, ruin our enemies and help our friends. I think these were noble goals, Gregory, don’t you?

GD: Well, at least from your point of view.

RTC: We had to cover up failures as well. I think you can say that the Company pretty well controls the media in this country now. Take the AP for example. Every little jerkwater paper out in East Jesus, Texas, cannot have a reporter in Washington or Moscow so they rely almost entirely on the AP for anything outside their town. I mean if a cow wanders out onto the highway and wrecks a truck or the local grange burns down, sure, they have the local reporters, but for what’s going on in Washington or elsewhere, it’s the AP. Look, you get on a plane in New York bound for, say, Chicago. You read the paper and then stuff it into the seat pocket and get off. In Chicago, you pick up the Tribune and read it. Same national and international news. Fly to ‘Frisco and the same thing. The AP is a wonderful asset, believe me. Let’s say you want to put a story about that a certain foreign potentate is about to get kicked out. Or better, you want him kicked out. So, we plant a story with the New York Times, the Washington Post or other big papers and then get AP to send our special message all over the damned country. Let’s say we start in the night before. By the six o’clock news the next day, all of America knows just what we want it to know and we do this so anyone reading an article can only come to the conclusions we want.

GD: This is not a surprise, Robert. I’ve been in the newspaper game for forty years now and I know most of the games.

RTC: Well, you can see why I developed H&K as a purely captive asset, can’t you?

GD: Of course.

RTC: And we used them to plant our own agents all over the world. It is a wonderful cover. We have some of the major columnists, of course, and many editors and more than a few publishers but putting our own agents in, say, France or Ottawa, is a great advantage, believe me. And H&K had the best, the very best, connections. Bobby Gray was Ike’s press secretary and was a good friend of Nixon and Reagan and had their ear. We infiltrated our people into every level of the business, political and professional worlds and you never knew when one of your people might bring home the bacon. I can say with some pride that, let’s say, we wanted to get some legislation passed, it was a piece of cake. Sometimes we made bad calls like the time we pushed Fidel Castro into office only to have the bastard turn on us. I remember the howling the Alcoa people did when he nationalized their plants in Cuba. Or the United Fruit people demanding we get rid of Guzman[1] in Guatemala because he was expropriating their banana plantations. The man we put in after we kicked Guzman out turned on us and we had to shoot him, but in theory it was a slick deal. Sam Cummings got Nazi weapons from the Poles and we shipped them over there on a freight line we owned and for a little while, Levi and Zentner were happy. It was a question of helping our friends. I’ll tell you about Sullivan and Cromwell, some time.

GD: Not Gilbert and Sullivan?

RTC: No the New York law firm. Dulles was with them. They helped everyone out. Very pro-Hitler once, but then the Company was full of ex-Nazis; in fact our Gehlen Org was almost exclusively Nazi. Frenchy Grombach drew up a list of top Nazis wanted for war crimes after the war and Critchfield used it at his main recruiting guide. Of course if the Jews ever found this out, we would have to do some major damage control. Israel is friendly with us just as long as we keep the money and the guns coming. But then we have to kiss up to the Arabs as well because of the oil so the main thing here is to maintain a careful balance. But not only H&K but a number of other firms have been of inestimable help to us. They plans stories we want planted, they open offices in foreign countries of interest and let our men come in as employees and so on. The PR people can move mountains. Paster, who not only worked for H&K but also the Clintons, worked with Bill’s people to neutralize the Lewinski scandal, which was really not political but religious in nature. The right wing Christians, who are as crazy as shit house owls, wanted Clinton’s scalp so they could put one of their own pro-Jesus nuts in the White House. Ken Starr is as strange as they come and I am ashamed to admit he’s a lawyer from my hometown. Stands in his yard and screams for Jesus to listen to him. The neighbors made such as fuss about these nocturnal shouting sessions, they called the police.

GD: Tell me, Robert, did Jesus ever answer?

RTC: I don’t think so but Ken was warned that if he kept his yowling up at night, or even in the daytime, it was off to St. Elizabeth’s funny farm in an ambulance.

GD: Don’t talk to me about the Jesus Freaks! My God, I’ve known my share and the best place for them is a desert island populated by hungry tigers.

RTC: I think there are things even a hungry tiger wouldn’t eat.

GD: But back to the press again. Did you control or did you influence?

RTC: Both. I can give you an example. Ben Bradlee was the managing editor of the Washington Post and was our man all the way. It’s a long, involved story and if you have the time, I’ll give you the background. I know we’ve talked about this before but it’s absolutely typical of what I was telling you. Do you have the time?

GD: Yes, as the old whore said, if you have the money.

RTC: Ben’s best friend when he was a child was Dick Helms. After Ben left Harvard during the war, he joined ONI and worked in their communications center. He dealt with a flood of secret codes messages from all over the world. He had married Jean Saltonstall, the Governor’s daughter and the old man was also a spook. Not generally known, however. War was over and Ben was sent to join the ACLU as a spy. Pretty soon Ben got an inside connection with Gene Meyer, who’s family ran the Post and he got a job there covering the police beat. Eugene’s son-in-law married Katherine and poor Gene was a blossoming nut and he eventually swallowed his gun and the wife took over the paper. Graham got Ben a job with the Foggy Bottom people…

GD: What?

RTC: State Department. Anyway, Ben was off to France where he worked in the embassy in Paris where he did propaganda work and started working very closely with us. Then he went to work for Newsweek. Ben is an ambitious type and he ditched the Saltonstall woman and married Tony Pinchot. Her sister, Mary, was married to Cord Meyer, our beloved Cyclops….

GD: And a friend and co-worker with party comrade Cranston…

RTC: The same one. And joined together in the Mockingbird program we have been talking about….

GD: The Mighty Wurlitzer of Wisner?

RTC: Same idea.

GD: Graham and Wisner killed themselves and Wisner spent a lot of time in a nut house, didn’t he?

RTC: Raving mad. They had to drag him screaming out of headquarters, trussed up in a strait jacket and foaming at the mouth. Not one of my fonder moments. As I recall it, Bradlee knew Jim Angleton in France. I’ll tell you about Jim one of these days. Ben was kicked out of France because the CIA was secretly supporting the FLN…supplying them inside information about French counter-terrorist groups and give them plastique and other nice things…just as they did later with the Quebec Libré people in Canada. The French png’ed him…

GD: What?

RTC: Persona non grata. Not wanted in the country. Then he did his Newsweek work and got to know Kennedy and wrote some puff pieces for him and got on the inside track there. In the early ‘60’s Helms told Bradlee that one of his relatives wanted to sell Newsweek and Bradlee brokered the deal with the Post people. We had a firm in with the Post and now with Newsweek, a powerful opinion molder and a high-circulation national magazine. Then there was the towpath murder. Cord’s ex-wife was one of Kennedy’s women and everyone felt she had too much influence with him, not to mention her hippifying him with LSD and marijuana. We can discuss the Kennedy business some other time but Mary was threatening to talk and you know about the rest. Good old Ben and his friend Jim went to Mary’s little converted garage studio, which Ben just happened to own, and finally found her diary. They took it away and just as well they did. She had it all down in there, every bit of the drugs use, all kinds of bad things JFK told her as pillow talk and her inside knowledge of the hit. Not good.

GD: If you want to talk about the Kennedy business, Robert, I am perfectly willing to listen.

RTC: But I am not perfectly willing to talk at this point. We can get to it little by little, Gregory. Ben got to be vice president of the Post company and retired with honor and plenty of money.

GD: The diary?

RTC: Jim burned the original but made a copy. Makes interesting reading. It gives you different view of Camelot, believe me. What the American public doesn’t know, cannot hurt them, can it?

GD: No it can’t but if….do you still have your copy?

RTC: Now, now, Gregory. I don’t want a black bag job here. I’m too old to start shooting at mysterious burglars, or even being shot by them.

GD: This has been very interesting today, Robert.

RTC: An old man has little left sometimes but his memories.

GD: Do an autobiography, why not?

RTC” I don’t feel like committing suicide, Gregory, and I signed the paper keeping me from writing about any of this.

GD: But I haven’t.

RTC: No, you haven’t. Let’s call it a day for now, Gregory. I’m a little tired now. The Swiss have been working their microwave transmissions overtime.

GD: ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ Robert. I’ll be out of town for a few days so I’ll get back in touch next week.

RTC: Have a nice trip and thanks for the call.

(Concluded at 10:57 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 organized 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, and very expensive, 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 (SS-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] Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán September 14, 1913 – January 27, 1971) was a Guatemalan military officer and politician. He served as Defense Minister of Guatemala from 1944 – 1951. He served as President of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954. When he attempted to nationalize the extensive United Fruit Company’s extensive holdings, the CIA fomented a coup d’état by a military junta, headed by Colonel Carlos Castillo, a CIA employee. He died in Mexico in 1971.

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