TBR News November 6, 2019
The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. November 6, 2019:
“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.
Commentary for November 6: “The loss of the long-time Republican state of Virginia is causing spastic colon in far-right political circles inside theBeltway. Republican Senators are huddling together like nervous sheep before a thunder storm as it is becoming more obvious that Trump is losing ground and that his descent into darkness appears more and more likely.Trump is blaming everyone but himself for his growing unpopularity but he has only himself to blame. As it becomes more and more obvious he is basicially dishonest and obviously vicious, his popularity will drop, inch by inch, state by state until hitherto eager senatorial supporters will waffle and then, after some really terrible gaffe on the part of Donald, begin to desert him in significant numbers.”
The Table of Contents
• Democrats take control of Virginia and claim win in Kentucky governor’s race
• Virginia, Kentucky Send an Ominous Message to Donald Trump
• Secret Gerrymandering Files Can Now Be Made Public, Court Rules
• Gordon Sondland was a perfect fall guy, until he decided to tell the truth
• Conspiracies’ designed to confuse
• The Republican 911 Plot
• The Role of Oil in American Foreign and Domestic Policy
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
• Encyclopedia of American Loons
Democrats take control of Virginia and claim win in Kentucky governor’s race
In blow to Trump, state house and senate in Democratic hands in Virginia, as candidate for governor in Kentucky claims victory
November 6, 2019
by Josh Wood in Louisville, Kentucky, and agencies
The Guardian
The Democrats have won control of Virginia’s state legislature for the first time in a generation, while the Democratic candidate for governor of Kentucky also claimed victory in what could be a huge double blow to Donald Trump.
The Democratic party prevailed in both the state house and senate in Virginia in Tuesday’s election as suburban voters turned against Republicans. Democratic governor Ralph Northam will now have scope to press ahead with legislation such as tighter gun control in the state.
In Kentucky, which Trump won by nearly 30 percentage points in the 2016 election, Andy Beshear – the Democratic challenger to unpopular incumbent governor Matt Bevin – declared victory as he was narrowly ahead of the Republican, who has refused to concede in a race that by Wednesday morning was too close officially to call.
Voter turnout was high in key state elections on Tuesday. The Republicans handily won the governorship of Mississippi. But in Virginia, Democrats continued a recent trend of flipping suburban districts that were once solidly GOP-friendly. Democratic pickups in Virginia occurred in the Washington and Richmond suburbs that already had moved in the party’s direction in recent years.
“I’m here to officially declare today, November 5 2019, that Virginia is officially blue,” Northam, told a crowd of supporters in Richmond.
Virginia voters surged towards moderate Democrats, especially women, in the last state election in 2017, when the Republicans kept control of the legislature by a whisker, and in the 2018 mid-term elections for the US Congress, and Tuesday’s result continued a worrying shift for Republicans at all levels in the key state.
Meanwhile Beshear declared himself the winner in Kentucky after securing 49.2% of the vote to Bevin’s 48.8%, telling voters that his performance was a message that elections were still about “right versus wrong” instead of right versus left. As of late Tuesday night, Beshear led Bevin by a margin of more than 5,000 votes.
But Bevin, who took the stage at the Republican party across town, called it a “close, close race” and said he was not conceding “by any stretch”. “We want the process to be followed, and there is a process,” he said.
Bevin was elected in 2015 and had portrayed this election as a referendum on Trump, who stumped for the governor at a rally in Kentucky on Monday night and called Beshear “too liberal, too extreme and too dangerous”.
At the rally, Trump told the crowd: “If you lose, it sends a really bad message … you can’t let that happen to me.”
In a late-night tweet after results came in, Trump appeared to concede the Republican may have lost: “@MattBevin picked up at least 15 points in last days, but perhaps not enough (Fake News will blame Trump!).”
A bullish Bevin had told the New York Times last month that he anticipated winning the election by between six and 10 points.
“I think you’re going to be shocked at how uncompetitive this actually is,” he told the paper at the time.
But while Trump won Kentucky with more than 60% of the vote in 2016 and remains popular in the state, with Republicans in other races there doing well on Tuesday, Bevin – who polls as one of America’s most unpopular governors – could not ride that popularity to victory.
Beshear, the state’s attorney general and the son of Kentucky’s last Democratic governor, made public education the cornerstone of his campaign, choosing a public high school assistant principal as his running mate and accusing Bevin of bullying schoolteachers who protested against proposed pension reforms.
Bevin, who accused protesting teachers of acting “thuggish” and said school closures as a result of their actions would lead to children suffering sexual abuse and ingesting poison, said he did not regret his words. Beshear promised he would never bully anybody as governor.
Bevin, meanwhile, fought on broader, national and cultural issues, highlighting his relationship with Trump and his support for the second amendment, while touting himself as the “most pro-life” governor in America.
While Bevin performed well in much of the state, in parts of Kentucky’s largest city, Louisville, one could drive by dozens if not hundreds of “Stop Bevin – Vote Beshear!” yard signs before passing any sign of support for the Republican.
At the Democrats’ election party at an event center in the predominantly African-American Louisville neighbourhood of Smoketown, the mood turned from nervous to jovial as returns showed Beshear taking the lead.
Kentucky’s race was one of several closely watched elections in states across the US on Tuesday. Republican Daniel Cameron made history in a resounding win in Kentucky’s election for attorney general, becoming the first African American to win the office.
The elections offered insight into Trump’s popularity among Republicans as he battles an accelerating impeachment inquiry. Democratic-aligned groups pumped huge amounts of money into the contests as a way to test-drive messaging and campaigns ahead of the 2020 cycle, particularly on gun control and clean energy.
Donald Trump rallied Republican voters on Twitter but stayed out of Virginia, which he lost in 2016.
Democrats have pledged that when they take power, they will pass an agenda that Republicans have blocked for years, including stricter gun laws, a higher minimum wage and ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Virginia, Kentucky Send an Ominous Message to Donald Trump
Democratic off-year election victories both substantial and symbolic provide troubling signs for the president and the GOP.
November 6, 2019
by Susan Milligan, Senior Politics Writer
US News and World Report
Virginia turned blue. Suburbanites voted Democratic. A ruby-red state that went for President Donald Trump by a 30-point margin in 2016 became the political canary in a coal mine for Republicans, with Kentucky making a Democrat its apparent victory in the governor’s race.
Tuesday night’s contests for state and local offices carried an ominous message for Trump and other Republicans as they hunker down for the 2020 election battle, as Democrats claimed pivotal victories in places the GOP once called home field.
In the state once home to seat of the old Confederacy, Democrats took the majorities in both the Virginia state Senate and the House of Delegates, winning more seats than they needed to control both chambers for the first time in nearly a quarter century.
Every statewide office is now held by a Democrat, and the state’s congressional delegation is majority Democratic, the result of demographic changes and an antipathy toward Trump. The results make Virginia – reliably GOP in presidential races as recently as 2004 – an even tougher climb for Trump next year.
“Do you like the color blue?” Gov. Ralph Northam shouted gleefully to a Democratic victory gathering Tuesday night. “I’m here to officially declare today, Nov. 5, 2019, Virginia is officially blue!”
The flip in control of the state legislature means it will be Democrats redrawing the lines for congressional and state legislative races after the 2020 U.S. Census. It also makes it far more likely the state – home to the embattled NRA – will enact background check laws or other gun safety initiatives Democrats made central to their campaigns.
“We absolutely believe this is a warm-up for 2020,” says Amanda Renteria, interim president of Emerge, a group that trains Democratic women to run for office.
Virginia is expected to get its first female speaker of the House of Delegates, Eileen Filler-Corn. The Democratic majorities also pave the way for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment next year and a hike in the minimum wage.
Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement that the “historic victory should send a chill down the spines of Donald Trump and every Republican.” The DNC had invested heavily in the Virginia election, running what strategists said was the national party’s biggest campaign ever for a state legislature race.
Democrats also claimed victory in the Kentucky governor’s race, where Andy Beshear appeared to defeat incumbent GOP Gov. Matt Bevin by 5,300 votes – less than half a percentage point. Bevin is refusing to concede, but the Bluegrass State does not have an automatic recount process, so Bevin would have to go to court to get one.
Republicans scored some victories, winning every other statewide race in Kentucky – including electing the state’s first African-American attorney general – and taking the Mississippi governor’s race easily. A Republican also flipped the Mississippi attorney general’s seat and will be the first woman to hold the post.
But overwhelmingly, it was the Democrats’ night. They won in unexpected places – such as flipping the mayoral seat in Wichita, Kansas, blue for the first time in decades. They had wins that carried added symbolic impact: A Democrat who lost a Virginia state Senate seat in 2017 after a coin flip broke an electoral tie won the seat easily Tuesday night. A woman who was fired from her job after giving the middle finger to Trump’s motorcade in 2017 won a seat on her Virginia county’s board of supervisors. The state elected its first Muslim. And Beshear fared unusually well for a Democrat in coal country in Kentucky.
Two worrisome themes emerged for Republicans on Tuesday night: continuing trouble with suburban voters and signs that Trump is not the king maker – or destroyer of Republican candidates he deems insufficiently loyal to him – that he once was.
Trump traveled to Kentucky the night before the election to rally supporters for Bevin, who had nationalized his own race by railing against impeachment and warning of socialist influence.
The president that night made the race a referendum on himself, telling ralliers that “you’re sending that big message to the rest of the country. It’s so important … because if you lose it sends a really bad message. And they will build it up” as a mark against him, Trump added. “You can’t let that happen to me.”
After the election results came in, the Trump camp reversed its message. Trump’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., told Fox News the gubernatorial election had “nothing to do with Trump.”
The campaign released a statement saying, “The President just about dragged Gov. Matt Bevin across the finish line, helping him run stronger than expected in what turned into a very close race at the end. A final outcome remains to be seen.”
In fact, Bevin was leading Beshear by 5 percentage points in the last poll taken before the election, and the GOP governor himself was predicting a bigger win.
GOP operatives said the race was not an indicator of the party’s strength, since Bevin was so personally unpopular – tracking by Morning Consult ranked Bevin as the second-least-popular governor in the nation – and because the GOP won the other statewide posts. But Democrats countered that Sen. Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate majority leader from Kentucky who is up for re-election next year, has similarly low approval ratings.
Requests for donations for Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot who lost a bid for a Kentucky congressional seat in 2018, ramped up on the Internet after Beshear appeared to win.
Republicans also lost in suburban areas, a major warning sign as they seek to reelect Trump, take back the House of Representatives and keep control of the Senate next year. Beshear’s lead came in large part because of his strong performance in the suburbs of Cincinnati on the northern Kentucky border. Democrats also defeated the last Northern Virginia Republican to hold a seat in the state legislature
In Pennsylvania – a state critical to Trump’s win in 2016 – Democrats scored big victories in the suburban areas of Chester County – where Democrats won a majority on the county council – and Delaware County, near Philadelphia. In Delaware County, Democrats won all five seats on the Delaware County Council for the first time since the Civil War.
“I see a lot of energetic Democrats out there. I see a lot of energetic independents, and I see a lot of concerned Republicans,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, told reporters in a conference call before the election. “The data shows that 2020 will be a good year. Pennsylvania is not Trump country.
Secret Gerrymandering Files Can Now Be Made Public, Court Rules
The decision by a North Carolina state court removes a protective shield from thousands of files belonging to veteran Republican mapmaker Thomas Hofeller.
November 5, 2019
by David Daley
The Intercept
Eight years ago, when Thomas Hofeller addressed state legislators from across the country in the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., he cautioned elected officials working on redistricting to “make sure your computer is in a private location” and warned them not to “walk away from it and leave your work exposed.”
“Remember,” one slide from his presentation reads, “A journey to legal HELL starts with but a single misstatement OR a stupid email!”
Hofeller, a veteran Republican mapmaker, failed to heed his own advice. After his death in 2018, his daughter, Stephanie, discovered backups of over 70,000 of his files. She notified Common Cause, a watchdog organization that works on voting rights, that she had the files, and Common Cause then subpoenaed her to provide them. After a handful were made public — including files that led to the removal of Trump’s citizenship question on the 2020 census — Geographic Strategies, a consulting firm co-founded by Hofeller, sued to keep more of the files from entering the public sphere.
The decision Monday by a North Carolina state court — removing a protective shield from tens of thousands of files belonging to Hofeller, likely making public details of his work on maps as well as litigation in states including Texas, Missouri, Arizona, Virginia, and North Carolina, among others — seemed inconceivable.
Hofeller, who spent parts of five decades remaking America from the shadows, always a step ahead of Democrats in understanding how redistricting, census data, and new technology could create new advantages for his side, will now stand unmasked. Many of Hofeller’s emails, his draft maps, and the algorithms that bedeviled Democrats for years appear poised to enter the public domain for the first time. Most importantly, they’ll be available to lawyers working to correct unconstitutional gerrymanders or litigating other efforts Hofeller worked on, whether from the 2010 cycle or beyond.
“Now the truth can come out about all of Hofeller’s shocking efforts to rig elections in almost every state,” said a statement from Common Cause on Monday. Still, that could take a while. The organization, which had subpoenaed the files from Hofeller’s daughter, did not indicate a timetable for the release. Lawyers will need to vet tens of thousands of documents; this means weeks or months, not days.
In his ruling, N.C. Superior Court Judge Vincent M. Rozier Jr. lifted the confidentiality order from many, but not all, of the strategist’s materials. Almost 1,000 files will still remain confidential. Litigation will continue over an additional 135,000 documents that the firm Hofeller co-founded, Geographic Strategies, claims it owns. Rozier’s decision rejected claims that Geographic Strategies owned work that Hofeller produced outside the firm, as well as the argument that the firm had the standing to protect his personal documents.
Over the last several weeks, and prior to the judge’s ruling, The Intercept, which obtained Hofeller’s files, has already begun publishing documents from the computer backups that detail how he and other Republican operatives and elected officials plotted to win control of state legislatures in 2010, then used racial and partisan data to aggressively gerrymander — often unconstitutionally — state legislative and congressional maps to all but ensure GOP control, even when Democrats win more votes.
Below is a selection of The Intercept’s revelations so far. We intend to continue publishing important stories of national interest from these documents and showing the extent of GOP efforts to manipulate maps and rig elections. Stay tuned.
In Alabama, Hofeller advised and edited the state legislature’s official guidelines for redistricting. His files included estimates of citizen voting-age population in Alabama and a detailed breakdown of minority districts and race data statewide. The state legislative maps were struck down as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander in 2015; a trial is currently underway asserting that the congressional map is also a racial gerrymander.
In Florida, Hofeller’s documents raise questions about why he failed to disclose his involvement with GOP redistricting operatives in a 2013 affidavit in which he attested he had no contact with GOP legislators or staff who drew that state’s maps. Many of those districts were also subsequently overturned as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.
In North Carolina, where the Hofeller files reveal that the mapmaker possessed startling levels of detail about race, Hofeller created maps that he predicted could yield an 11-2, or even 12-1, Republican map from this purple state. In response to a court ruling that a Hofeller map represented an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, his response was to draw an even more partisan map that could have elected an all-white delegation.
Several years of memos from inside the Republican National Committee, and others penned by Hofeller’s firm, including at least one that claimed attorney-client privilege, revealed the scope and racial animus behind the GOP’s mapmaking ambitions.
Gordon Sondland was a perfect fall guy, until he decided to tell the truth
The ambassador’s painfully humiliating new testimony reveals the real story behind the suspension of aid to Ukraine
November 6, 2019
by Richard Wolffe
The Guardian
In every good disaster movie, we get to meet the easily dispensable character: someone who mixes just enough stupidity with just enough mediocrity to be cannon fodder for the impending calamity.
In the epic shipwreck of Donald Trump’s impeachment, that man is Gordon Sondland.
Sondland first entered this feature-length catastrophe as an ironic counterpoint to the doomed buffoon who has alternately dismayed and disgusted us for the last three years.
To Trump himself, Sondland was once a Never Trumper who first globbed on to the low-energy Jeb before shifting his undying loyalty to little Marco. When neither of those Republican gods were able to confer any honor upon his wealthy shoulders, Sondland did what any principled conservative would do: he wrote a $1m check to Trump and asked for an ambassadorship.
To the rest of the world, the entirely expendable Sondland bears an uncanny resemblance to Trump himself. What kind of genius thinks you can lie to an impeachment inquiry by denying the whole quid pro quo deal with Ukraine? Who could ignore the risk that so many witnesses would spill their guts about your central role in the stitch-up of an American ally in desperate need of national security assistance?
Step forward, ambassador. It’s time for your brief moment of infamy before you depart this drama, to return only as the answer to an obscure Jeopardy question.
Flanked by several lawyers, Sondland decided to “review” his initial testimony to the impeachment investigation that there was no quidding and quoing going on. Sondland explained, in four painfully humiliating pages of new testimony, that on second thoughts there was about $400m of military aid that was entirely quid to the quo of Trump’s kooky obsession with smearing the Biden family.
“By the beginning of September 2019, and in the absence of any credible explanation for the suspension of aid, I presumed that the aid suspension had become linked to the proposed anti-corruption statement,” Sondland confessed.
This is – how to put it delicately? – somewhat at odds with Sondland’s classic text message to his fellow quid-pro-quo gangbangers just a few months ago, when he said: “The president has been crystal clear no quid pro quos of any kind.” That was shortly before he added, “I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.”
As the fans of Jilted John know all too well, Gordon is a moron. However, diehard fans of Trump may not be familiar with this masterpiece of 1970s pop music, and have spent most of the last several weeks investing great authority in Gordon’s texts.
This would normally be as humiliating as Sondland’s suddenly perfect recall when faced with possible charges of perjury and/or obstruction of Congress. But these are not normal times or normal characters: the giants of Fox News and the congressional Republican party are immune to shame. Losing credibility is a small price to pay when they lost their minds a long time ago.
There were clues that Sondland might not be on the level. The ambassador to the European Union was dabbling in the affairs of a country that is not, in fact, part of the EU. He spent lavishly on upgrading his Brussels residence but found that the locals didn’t enjoy his efforts to berate them.
He formed part of a group called “the three amigos” who displaced the actual Ukraine experts inside the Trump administration. The original Three Amigos were naturally buffoon-like frauds who strayed into a foreign country while pretending to deliver justice.
There is something poignant about Sondland, but somehow his vulnerabilities make him seem less likable. For the ambassador was desperate to win the approval of someone who truly cares for nobody but himself: one Donald Trump.
After his “crystal clear” text, Sondland felt he needed to gain even more crystal clarity about Trump’s intentions by calling up the Great Oz himself. “I know in my few previous conversations with the president, he’s not big on small talk, so I would have one shot to ask him,” Sondland explained in his newly accurate testimony. “I asked him one open-ended question: ‘What do you want from Ukraine?’”
The reply was as brief as it was contradictory. Trump said he wanted nothing. Nothing except getting the new Ukraine president to do what he wanted. “And that was the end of the conversation,” Sondland testified. “I wouldn’t say he hung up on me, but it was almost like he hung up on me.”
It sounded almost like Sondland’s heart broke a little.
Elsewhere in Europe, the foot-soldiers of anarchy are less soft and more brash. They are simple tourists visiting Salisbury cathedral, admiring the spire and the clock while armed with a little novichok nerve agent. They are quirky tea-drinkers at a central London hotel, sprinkling radioactive polonium all across Europe.
Trump’s hitmen are even less professional. There is now an overwhelming body of evidence that the quid pro quo was as real as the cover-up; that Trump corruptly used national security aid for personal gain by forcing a foreign government to interfere in an American election.
That there were strings attached to American aid is not new. As soon as those strings were tied to Trump’s election, it morphed into something worth locking up in a secure file where only a whistleblower could alert the world that maintains some sense of law and order.
“No amount of salacious media-biased headlines, which are clearly designed to influence the narrative, change the fact that the president has done nothing wrong,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement on Tuesday.
She is correct, this press secretary who refuses to brief the press. The headlines won’t change the narrative about the president’s guilt. But the testimony surely will.
• Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist
Conspiraies designed to confuse
November 6, 2019
by Christian Juers
A number of incidents attract the interest of people who become fascinated with various theories and then go to enormous trouble to attempt to construct elaborate support structures in support of them. History is replete with such alternative theories.
There is the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor that precipitated the Spanish American war. An expansionist party in America that chanted about Manifest Destiny, was eager to expand America in various areas and warmly supported a war with the decayed Spanish Empire. Insurrection in the Spanish colony of Cuba gave these jingoists an excuse to press for war. When the Maine blew up while on a show-the-flag visit to Cuba, war was a foregone conclusion. The sunken battleship was subject to extensive investigation after the war and it was discovered that the massive explosion occurred from inside the ship. In all probability it was the explosion of very volatile coal dust but it could also have been a bomb. Since the battleship was manned at the time, neither Spanish nor Cuban revolutionaries could be held accountable. The remains of the Maine were towed out into the Caribbean and sunk in a very deep area, precluding further examination.
Then there was the sinking of the Lusitania in May of 1915. The fast Cunard passenger liner was carrying a mixed cargo of explosives, military equipment, fuzed shells, a draft of Canadian volunteers and over a thousand passengers. The ship was sent, without escort, into an area where German submarines were known to be operating and one of them fired one torpedo into her bows. The first explosion very obviously ignited something in the cargo and the second explosion blew out much of her bows underwater and the ship sank in less than twenty minutes with a heavy loss of life. In the intervening years, the controversy has raged about the nature of the Lusitania’s cargo and many theories have been postulated about coal dust, ruptured steam pipes and multiple torpedo hits but the plain fact is that the Lusitania was listed in official books as an armed auxiliary cruiser, was carrying military contraband making her a legitimate military target and her sinking had been expected in London circles to draw a neutral America into the European war.
Apologists for the British in general and First British Sea Lord, Winston Churchill in specific have made extensive attempts to finesse the facts but in the final analysis, the Lusitania was sunk by a German torpedo that ignited her illegal cargo. That British authorities knowingly permitted civilians to travel on a ship full of explosive contraband was cynical at best and criminal at worst.
There is then the great Pearl Harbor controversy. One side of the issue claims that President Roosevelt had foreknowledge of the attack through American intercepts of secret coded Japanese diplomatic and military radio messages. Others have maintained that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, of Lusitania fame, informed the American President in advance of the attack and Roosevelt merely permitted it to happen. This school of thought claims that Roosevelt, eager to fight his arch-enemy Hitler, pushed the Japanese until they responded with a military attack that opened a war in the Pacific that enabled Roosevelt to have his war in the Atlantic. The government apologists have claimed that no one had any foreknowledge of the attack and that such high-minded men as Roosevelt and Churchill would never have plotted to begin a war for their own ends.
There is no doubt whatsoever that a plethora of secret Japanese messages were decoded but not a great deal of evidence that official Washington was fully aware of the pending attack. That Japan planned to attack the United States is beyond question, Roosevelt supporters to the contrary, but it is not known the degree or extent that these plans were either known, or if known, comprehended in either the White House or official Army and Navy circles. Circumstantial evidence, not direct evidence, would indicate that the attack was not a surprise to the military chiefs and the President.
No article on conspiracy would be complete without the myths and legends surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The obvious prevarications of the infamous Warren Commission were so blatant that an enormous forest of theories, suppositions and postulations flooded the bookshelves of America. These books ranged from the very serious and academic through the interesting to the ludicrous. A recent book by Gregory Douglas, “Regicide,” contains a wealth of official documentation and is probably the best and most logical explanation of the killing
This aspect of the 9/11 attack is interesting but inherently implausible. Too many have watched the original impacts and the many reruns of them to accept that what struck the WTC buildings were not commercial aircraft. Stories of mysterious blasts inside the building, of special drones used for the attack and other theories do not hold water because they presuppose an enormous conspiracy that under no circumstances could be kept quiet…unless all the many participants were silenced and then one must consider what would happen to the assassins of the dangerous witnesses.
Not even the tightly controlled American press could be counted upon to conspire to maintain utter silence in such matters so while the writer of this article has articulate views, they represent more wishful fantasy than actual fact.
The Republican 911 Plot
Karl Christian Rove became Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to President George W. Bush until his sudden resignation on August 31, 2007. He once headed the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison, and the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives..
Rove influenced dealings with Iraq and North Korea, according to Bush administration sources. For instance, when the U.S. was notified, through formal diplomatic channels, that North Korea had nuclear technology, Congress was in the midst of discussing the Iraqi war resolution. Rove counseled the president to keep that information from Congress for 12 days, until the debate was finished, so it would not affect the vote. He was also reported to be present at a war strategy meeting concerning whether to attack Syria after Iraq. Rove said the timing was not right.
Yet. having the political advisor involved in that decision is wrong. It was Rove who kept President Bush relentlessly adherent to his obsessive goal of a permanent Republican-controlled executive, making the argument that America is safe only in their hands – Rove, highly intelligent and extremely arrogant, firmly believed himself an expert in both policy and politics because he could see no distinction between the two.
This matters for a number of reasons. There is always a time during any president’s administration when what is best for the future of the country diverges from what best serves that president’s political future. It was always Rove’s firm intention to push the president in the direction of reelection rather than the country’s best interests.
What Rove always wanted to achieve, was nothing less than a major alignment in US politics, making the Republicans the sole party of government for a generation or more.
In June 2003 powerful far right wing writer, Grover Norquist wrote “In crafting its agenda for economic reform, the Bush administration has the luxury of being able to think and plan over a full eight years…This guarantee of united Republican government has allowed the Bush administration to work and think long-term….Republicans are looking at decades of dominance in the House and Senate and having the Presidency with some regularity.” According to Norquist “every time the government gets smaller there are fewer Democratic precinct workers in the world…It is a virtuous cycle.”.
It is well known that the far right wing of the Republican Party was determined to get control of the White House just as they then had control of Congress. They were well on their way to stacking the third branch of our government, the judicial. The main architect of this ambitious plan was Karl Rove. Very intelligent but totally amoral and personally vicious, Rove was a powerful influence over George Bush, converting him to a form of aggressive Evangelical Christianity and getting him elected to the Governorship of Texas. Rove was instrumental in convincing the power elite of the time to support Bush as the Republican candidate for President in 2000 and the manipulations to put the colorless Bush into the Oval Office have been covered extensively in the media and on the Internet. There were deliberate voter frauds including fixed voting machines, machines made and controlled by a strong Bush supporter. There was obvious and deliberate voter fraud in Florida, a state run by Bush’s brother and Rove had seen to it that there was a bare majority of the Supreme Court to, in effect, job Bush straight into the White House.
Now, the plotters reasoned, they had control of the executive, the legislative and the judicial. There was only one more factor to take into account in the final securing of absolute power and that was the American public.
There were so many contacts with the Saudi elements that no one could possibly keep track of them but it was obvious to most foreign agencies after the attack that its origins were never in doubt. And to further assist the plot, the Israelis were brought into the fold. Their competent foreign intelligence, the Mossad, was already at work undercover in the United States, spying on anti-Israel Moslim activists so it surprised no one when the Mossad, using Yemini Jews, infiltrated the Atta group in Hollywood, Florida. The incident would be executed by people controlled by bin Ladin but supervised by the Mossad. But it was all very well and good for a trio of highly-placed plotters to scheme inside a relatively secure White House but as the plans were developed and others brought into the execution of it, the chnce for serious leaks became greater.
Although the government quickly enlisted the aid of a legion of conspiracy people to cloak their actions with absurd rumors and distracting fictions, there were still many who questioned the attacks but as the years have passed, the subject has grown stale and so grown over by a huge jungle of lies, fictions and confusion that like the earlier Kennedy assassination, it will pass into the oblivion of history.
The attacks went off as planned, Bush played the role of savior and in the wake of the attack, fear became the order of the day and fear was constatly being cultivated by the Bush people and harvested at the polls.
But the Rove people failed in two areas and it was a failure that eventualy brought down their plans. The Saudi attack that was aborted in the fields of Pennsylvania was intended to crash into the Capitol building when Congress was in session, causing huge casualties and giving Bush the excuse to govern by decree until some vague future time when new elections to replace the dead or crippled members of that body could be held.
The Role of Oil in American Foreign and Domestic Policy
Oil in one form or another, use and possession, can be found as a serious factor in the background of all 20th and 21st Century wars, major and minor, commencing in the early 1940’s, when an isolationist America was inexorably drawn into what became World War Two when the oil-dependant Japanese were cut off from American and Dutch oil by specific order of President Franklin Roosevelt. This embargo led directly to the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The result of this attack was the destruction of the Pacific Fleet and the attendant loss of over 3,000 military personnel and civilians in Hawaii. It also provided Roosevelt an excellent causus belli to justify America’s entry into a war that was primarily aimed at the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler.
The federal government, which had been expanded into a giant bureaucracy under the radical Roosevelt, grew even more centralized under the protective guise of national security
It was certainly evident to many that this entry into the European war, which had now become a global conflict, was the result of machinations of the President and a number of his senior aides and advisors. By denying oil to Japan in mid-1941, Roosevelt, who was reading all the Japanese diplomatic traffic (and some of the Japanese military messages) guaranteed an attack on the United States.
There is now no question whatsoever that Roosevelt and a few close advisers were fully aware, in a general sense, that Imperial Japan was planning to strike at American, British and Dutch holdings in the pacific with the sole purpose of gaining economic autarky. Specific foreknowledge on the part of the ruthless and amoral Roosevelt of the attack on the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor is sparse but convincing.
An excellent coverage of this can be found in ‘A Century of War’ by F. William Engdahl.
All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing and by simply awaiting the inevitable attack, Roosevelt found an answer to his foreign policy problems
In the 1960s, the forced withdrawal by the exhausted French colonial government of their colony of Indo-China, encouraged the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), founded by Allen Dulles, head of the CIA and a significant and powerful influence on U.S. foreign policy, to launch an American effort to supplant the French in a very resource-rich area containing rubber, large potential oil deposits and magnesium.
This policy led directly to the disastrous Vietnam War.
Redolent of Pearl Harbor, in August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson claimed to a reluctant Congress that North Vietnamese naval units had attacked the US Sixth Fleet in Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin.
A pressured Congress then passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that in effect bypassed the U.S. Constitution and in essence proved to be an enabling act, permitting Johnson the unquestioned right to wage an undeclared war in Vietnam
Unlike Pearl Harbor, the so-called Vietnamese naval attacks were a deliberate fraud. To this day, no evidence whatsoever has been produced that such an attack ever took place. In July of 1984, US News & World Report (July 23, 1984) wrote of the Tonkin incident that it was “The ‘Phantom Battle’ That Led to War.”
It is doubtful if anyone can deny that Bush the Elder’s Gulf War was entirely concerned about oil. U.S. controlled oil concerns, located in Kuwait, were engaged in slant-drilling into Iraq’s southern oil fields. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, had until recently had been solidly supported and financed by the CIA, who used him as a surrogate against the fundamentalist and thoroughly anti-American Islamic government of Iran.
Hussein, cut off from official American clandestine military and economic support and heavily in debt because of the eight-year war against Iran, eventually decided to recover the lost Iraqi province of Kuwait to improve his economic base. When Hussein cautiously approached American Ambassador April Glaspie, after consultations with Washington, she advised Hussein that the US government believed that the matter of Kuwait was not of concern or interest to the United States. However, when Hussein moved his military into Kuwait, the American President, Bush the Elder, immediately raised a United Nations force against him, backed, it has been repeatedly stated, by a $4 billion fund from an apprehensive government of Saudi Arabia.
With American troops victorious in the one-sided conflict, President Bush suddenly halted the United States forces well short of the Iraqi capital. Hussein was permitted to remain in power, albeit with a depleted military force. It should also be noted that the Israeli government viewed Hussein as a very serious enemy who had launched missiles against them during the course of the brief war. Israel had also bombed an Iraqi atomic energy facility in the years previous to the Gulf War and was most eager to see the destruction of a serious enemy.
A well-organized group of conservative intellectuals with powerful allies in the Bush Administration has become a driving force pushing the United States to invade Iraq and is also orchestrating growing U.S. criticism of Saudi Arabia.
These individuals first emerged in the 1960s when a group of thinkers, many of them Jewish and all passionately anti-Communist, became disillusioned with what they saw as a dangerous radical drift within the Democratic Party to which they then belonged.
Advocating a tough policy of building up the U.S. military and confronting the Soviet Union instead of merely using nuclear deterrence to maintain a balance of power, the movement’s founders gradually shifted to the Republican Party, becoming a dominant voice in the anti-Russian foreign policy of President Ronald Reagan.
Twenty years later, with allies like Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz in the inner circle of President George W. Bush, this radical conservatism returned in a new guise.
This time, its proponents inside and outside the Administration urge an invasion of Iraq to topple President Saddam Hussein. This is coupled with a policy of unquestioning support for the State of Israel and growing criticism of non- democratic governments in the Arab World, notably Saudi Arabia.
“By liberating Iraq and establishing a decent, tolerant government in Baghdad, the United States will achieve a tremendous beneficial effects in the entire Middle East,” said Ken Adelman, who was head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under Reagan.
Among these benefits, proponents argue, would be an instant strengthening of reformist forces in Iran and a weakening of radical Islamic forces throughout the Middle East, including among the Palestinians.
“My old mentor Donald Rumsfeld taught me years ago that if a problem seems intractable, like the Israeli-Palestinian Problem does today, what you need to do is enlarge your terms of reference. By destroying Saddam Hussein, we would give peacemakers the opportunity to gain the upper hand over the suicide bombers among the Palestinians,” said Adelman.
The arch-conservative case is pushed relentlessly by conservative magazines like Commentary, and the Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, whose parents Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb helped found the arch-conservative movement.
Conservative think-tanks such as the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century, add weight to the cause.
Gary Schmidt of the Project for the New American Century cast the debate over Iraq as between “old realists” who believed in working through diplomacy using the United Nations and arch-conservatives who advocated a “Reagan Policy of military strength and moral clarity.”
“I don’t think there is any question that President Bush will come down on our side,” he said. “I firmly believe he has made up his mind to use military force to remove Saddam Hussein,” he said.
An important voice in the movement is Richard Perle, yet another former Reagan Defense Department Hawk who serves as Chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, a formerly backwater committee of foreign policy old timers that Perle has refashioned into an ,important advisory group.
The Board recently invited RAND Corporation analyst Laurent Murawiec to deliver a paper arguing that Saudi Arabia ought to be considered an adversary of the United States. The briefing was promptly leaked to the Washington Post.
Backers of an Iraqi invasion were delighted by a Washington Post opinion piece by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who throughout his long career was a staunch advocate of a “balance of power” foreign policy.
But in his densely-argued article, Kissinger seemed to be ready to support military force against Iraq under certain conditions.
This is undoubtedly the reason that Bush appointed Kissinger to head a long-delayed commission to investigate the causes of the 9/11 attack. The resultant outcry over the use of the badly tainted former Secretary of State caused Kissinger to quickly resign his assignment.
Perhaps the Bush Administration might wish to consider convicted felon John Poindexter for the job. The disgraced former Admiral has become involved in a lunatic Orwellian project to gather computerized data on all functioning bipeds resident in the United States and certainly has the character, or more honestly the lack of it, to quickly attract him to the Administration.
Analysts note that Bush’s father, former President George Bush, always pursued a cautious, realpolitik policy when he was in the White House and halted the advance of U.S. troops into Iraq at the end of the Gulf War in 1991.
Opponents believe the arch-conservative doctrine is dangerously simplistic and that an invasion of Iraq, far from boosting democratic forces in the Middle East, will only fuel anti-American rage, embolden radicals, weaken U.S. Allies and lead to more terrorism.
“The neocons have a view of the world that divides it into absolute good versus absolute evil. Their attitude towards an Iraq invasion is, if you have the ability and the desire to do it, that’s justification enough,” said James Zogby, Chairman of the Arab American Institute.
Other critics see support for Israel as central to arch-conservative thinking.
“A small but well-placed group of neoconservative officials and commentators is primarily interested in eliminating what they regard as a threat to Israel,” said Stephen Walt, a dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
“Absent their activities, the United States would be focusing on containing Iraq, which we have done successfully since the Gulf War, but we would not be trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein. We would also be pursuing a more even-handed policy in the Middle East in general,” he said. [Source: August 13, 3002, Reuters]
To address a wider spectrum of the importance of oil to the United States, let us consider a number of valid points.
From 1991 through 1997, major U.S. oil companies including Exxon-Mobil, Texaco, Unocal, BP Amoco and Shell directly invested nearly $3 billion in cash to bribe various state officials in the oil-rich former Soviet Union area of Kazakhstan. This was done in order to guarantee Western rights to the immense oil reserves in this country.
The oil companies further committed to make an immense direct investment in Kazakhstan of $35 billion. The underlying reason for the establishment of this policy was that the oil companies were no longer willing to expend high and increasing prices charged by the Russian Republic for the use of their pipeline system. [Source: Testimony before the House International Relations Committee 2/12/98]
The former Soviet Kazakhstan is the most potentially important area for American oil interests. It has reserves of approximately 17.6 billion barrels of oil, close to the U.S. total oil reserves of 22 billion barrels.
The majority of the $3 billions paid by U.S. oil interests to secure Kazakhstan oil was promptly banked in Swiss accounts by the President of the country, Nursultan Nazarbayev.
This money was not well spent because in 2001, the bulk of Kazakhstan’s oil, some 250 million barrels, was shipped to market via Russian, not American, pipelines.
On December 4, 1997 Taliban representatives were guests at the Texas headquarters of Unocal to negotiate their organization’s support for the pipeline to Pakistan and the sea.. Subsequent reports indicated that these negotiations failed, purportedly because the Taliban was extortionate in their monetary demands. [Source: The BBC, Dec. 4 1997]
In a Feb. 12, 1998, report to the House Committee on International Relations, Unocal Corp. VP for International Relations John J. Maresca, subsequently a Special Ambassador to Afghanistan, testified that the Taliban government in Afghanistan was an obstacle to Unocal’s installing the projected oil pipeline from the Caspian region. He also made it clear that “construction of the pipeline cannot begin until a recognized government is in place in Kabul that has the confidence of governments, lenders, and our company.”
U.S. oil firms then contemplated the construction of another pipeline that would go west through Russia instead of south through Afghanistan. Enron- the biggest contributor to the Bush/Cheney 2000 campaign and later a spectacular bankrupt, conducted the feasibility study for the proposed $2.5 billion Trans-Caspian gas pipeline, but this project failed to materialize due to Russian cash demands.
However, if the United States invaded and occupied Afghanistan in order to put in place the desired “internationally recognized government,” the region could certainly be considered sufficiently acceptable and pacified for the Unocal pipeline project to proceed.
If Unocal were to complete the pipeline, their projected annual revenues would approach $2 billion- sufficient to recover the cost of the project in five years [Source: Testimony before the House International Relations Committee. 2/12/98]
The August 10, 2000, the Chicago Tribune reported that Vice-President Richard Cheney “was once CEO of Dallas-based Halliburton Co., the biggest oil-services company in the world. Because of the instability in the Persian Gulf, Cheney and his fellow oilmen concentrated on the world’s other major source of oil–the Caspian Sea area whose oil and gas resources are estimated at $4 trillion by U.S. News and World Report.”
The Caspian Sea region that Cheney and the “fellow oilmen”- such as Enron, Amoco, British Petroleum, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil and Unocal-were so anxious to exploit is located immediately to the north of Afghanistan.
“The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States…But, we go where the business is… ” Cheney said in a speech given on June 23, 1988 at the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank.
Currently, approximately 40% of America’s oil needs are met by OPEC, the Middle Eastern oil cartel with whom the U.S. has, at best, a sensitive relationship due in part to rising Islamic fundamentalism in the Near East oil producing areas. Friendly control of the Caspian oil and gas reserves would reduce U.S. reliance on OPEC, and thereby enable American oil interests to reap rich profits from the development and utilization of these oil areas.
In 1996, according to a New York Times article Unocal signed an agreement with the Taliban and the Afghan Northern Alliance giving Unocal the go-ahead to build a south-bound pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea to serve the expanding Asian market.
Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times reported in 1997 articles that Unocal subsequently opened offices in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Turkmenistan in anticipation of commencing the southern pipeline. However, internal strife in Afghanistan and ensuing conflicts with the Taliban led them to withdraw from the project in 1998.
After Cheney stepped down as CEO of Halliburton, a company that sells drilling equipment to other oil companies, in order to run for Vice-President on the Republican ticket in August of 2000, he sold 100,000 shares of Halliburton stock at $50.00 a share, which netted him a profit of $5.l million. Halliburton stock subsequently plummeted to a low of $13.00 because of CEO Cheney’s bookkeeping manipulations. Another factor for the stocks’ decline could be found in pending asbestos litigation against Halliburton. [Source: New York Times, August 1, 2002]
It is quite obvious that securing the Caspian Sea reserves and building the Unocal pipeline would drive up demand for drilling equipment, thereby causing a surge in the price of Halliburton stock to the benefit of stockholders…and the now-Vice President Richard Cheney.
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Kellogg Brown & Root, a unit of Halliburton, has secured extremely lucrative contracts from various sections of the United States Government.
In September of 2001, KBR and several other firms, received a $5 billion contract to dismantle “weapons of mass destruction” in the former Soviet Union;
An open-ended support contract for American military presence in various areas in Central Asia, to include Uzbekistan, was awarded to KBR in December of 2001;
The top KBR vice president responsible for these highly lucrative governmental military contracts is retired Admiral Joe Lopez who had been a former military aide to Cheney when the latter was Secretary of Defense. (Source New York Times, July 13, 2002)
In the wake of the collapse of major portions of corporate America, due to what is politely called “aggressive bookkeeping” but is more accurately described as “cooking the books,” it has emerged that Cheney, while CEO of Halliburton, may well have been guilty of the same fiscal manipulations as the disgraced confidence man Kenneth Lay.
Lay’s Enron company had, before its spectacular but not surprising, collapse and subsequent bankruptcy, been involved in a Byzantine world of energy futures, massive bribery of government officials and highly questionable financial dealings. Perhaps because of his lavish gifts and donations to important state and Federal officials, Kenneth Lay has, as of this writing, been carefully ignored by various law enforcement agencies investigating what amounted to a massive Ponzi swindle.
In May of 1998, Time magazine warned of American oil interests’ dubious intentions for the region, reporting that the CIA had “set up a secret task force to monitor the region’s politics and gauge its wealth. Covert CIA officers, among them many well-trained petroleum engineers, traveled through southern Russia and the Caspian region to locate potential oil reserves. When the policymakers heard the agency’s report, (Secretary of State Madeline) Albright concluded that ‘working to mold the area’s future was one of the most exciting things we can do.’ ”
The combined total of reserves in the region is reliably estimated to be more than 800 billion barrels of crude petroleum and its equivalent in natural gas. By contrast, the combined total of oil reserves in the Americas and Europe is less than 160 billion barrels, most of which, energy experts say, will be exhausted in the next 25 years. In fact by 2050 the countries in the Caspian basin are expected to account for more than 80 % of America’s oil.
The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
November 6, 2019
by Dr. Peter Janney
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.
Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.
After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.
The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.
When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..
A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.
The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.
Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks. ”
Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.
Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publication.
Conversation No. 90
Date: Tuesday, July 1, 1997
Commenced: 9:10 AM CST
Concluded: 9:22 AM CST
RTC: Good day to you, Gregory. I’m happy the package arrived safely.
GD: Well, I had you send it to the alternative address so no one intercepted it and considering its contents, it is just as well that they did not or I would be calling you from jail. Jesus, what a horrible thing that is. I am very cynical, Robert, but I have a really hard time accepting all of that. Murdering a Pope and a President is one thing but killing the children of a head of state and sending him the bits and pieces in a box is really outrageous. I take it your people did not do this.
RTC: Actually, they did but I am sad to say they got the wrong children.
GD: That’s even worse.
RTC: I agree but then it was after my time. Things have gone downhill since my time, Gregory. The new breed of people in the field are scarcely human but then I am out of it entirely. Are you planning to include any of that in the Müller book?
GD: No one would believe it, Robert. And when you told me that you’re people decided not to blow up Kennedy when he was sailing because of the children, I can see that your new breed, as you call them, ought to be exterminated. Still, who will bell the cat? There was that smallish file on the Allende business as well. As I rerad it, Nixon told Kissinger to get rid of the man and Henry got your people to blow him away during a convenient civic outbreak. Can I publish the letter?
RTC: I would rather you didn’t. Henry is still around and he might get nasty. Allende was a nuisance and Allende is dead. Why not leave it at that? I thought you might enjoy seeing the activities of the mighty. I mean, the hit order came from Nixon, not some adventurous person at Langley. I admit we stirred up terrible trouble down there what with the unions, whom we bribed, and the strikes but the kill order came right from the top. Of course Tricky Dick would deny it and so would Henry and aside from the letter, where is the proof/ That’s how it’s done but mostly a private conversation somewhere. A very important person says to our DCI that the President would like….you know the drill. If it happens, why so much the better and the President has plausible deniability as Reagan loved to say. Most of the dirty work is done that way and then when the President retires, he hires someone to write a book that a few people read. It’s filled with lies and self-justifications and the New York Times raves about it. I mean, my God, we got the Times to rave and drool over the Posner book on Kennedy. It should have been called ‘Why I love the Warren Report and look what the CIA paid me!” Ah well, not on my watch, Gregoey.
GD: One of these days, Robert, the string will run out.
RTC: Surely will, lad, but by that time, I will be comfortably dead. Why I’m forgotten even before I am dead. Ah, when I think about the special limousines, the bowing and scraping, the ass kissing while I was in harness and now, the utter silence.
GD: Yes, how soon they all forget.
RTC: Well, I always have you.
GD: Ah, I recall the old song about that subject. A sheepherder heard it once and hanged himself.
RTC: And it was….?
GD: ‘They’ll never be another you.’ Of course if you spell the last word ‘ewe’…
RTC: Now, Gregory. Don’t beat a subject. I can spell, after all. And yes, I would imagine he would much rather hear a song of my time, ‘My sweet embraceable you.’
GD: God, these puns will be the death of us all, Robert. I’ll cut up my overweight niece and send the parts to you by UPS.
RTC: What will I tell Emily?
GD: A little loving from your friends at the Company?
(Concluded 9:22 AM CST)
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Conversations+with+the+Crow+by+Gregory+Douglas
Encyclopedia of American Loons
Patricia Slusher
Chronic Lyme disease is (almost certainly) a non-existent condition, but the diagnosis remains popular in woo-minded and (largely overlapping) conspiracy-minded groups. There is, accordingly, a thriving market for people who “diagnose” and “treat” chronic lyme disease, and they are often termed LLMDs, or “Lyme Literate” doctors. Some of these are spineless or deluded MDs; many are not. Patricia Slusher is not. Slusher is an “ND” – a naturopath, or not a doctor – and a “CN”, i.e. “certified nutritionist”. That certification means nothing, of course: Ben Goldacre once got his cat, which had been dead for years, registered as a certified member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants – Slusher presumably got her certification from something called the American Health Science University. She is, however, treating patients for “chronic Lyme disease”.
According to one of her patients, “[f]or the first 3 weeks my Lyme protocol consist of taking 3 supplements from Percision [sic] Herbs, LLC; LYX, Spirex and Puricell and spending 30 minutes 2X a week getting a Quad Zapper treatment.” The Quad zapper is a Hulda Clark device, no less. So, Slusher treats her patients with Hulda Clark devices and worthless supplements, as well as with homeopathy. It’s fortunate that chronic lyme is not a real disease. That, however, doesn’t clear Slusher of wrongdoing – her patients are clearly suffering, and taking their money is not likely to make things better.
Consultations with Slusher start out with “Quantum Reflex Analysis”, which is applied kinesiology with “quantum” added on (Slusher likes quantum mumbo jumbo), and an examination of the patient’s tongue, nails, and face. Then you can sign up for:
– The Zyto Biocommunication Health Evaluation, a bogus electrodermal diagnostic process using a biofeedback machine hooked up to a computer.
– Avalon Photonic Light Therapy (equally nonsensical).
– Distance Consultation and Testing: you don’t actually need to come to her office; sending a photo or handwriting sample will do.
– Saliva Hormone Testing. Yeah; no.
– “Detoxification” treatments with ionic foot baths, no less.
– Chromatherapy Light Goggles, because “God designed people to be exposed to full spectrum sunlight several hours a day”, with color pairings for various organ systems.
– Electronic acupressure
– A chi modulator.
– Meridian therapy.
Slusher, who describes herself as an energy medicine “doctor”, obtained her naturopathic “degree” from the Trinity College of Natural Health; now, accreditations by the official naturopathic college organization, the Association of Accredited Naturopathic Colleges, really shouldn’t convey any sort of authority either, but it is worth pointing out that even they don’t recognize Trinity.
Diagnosis: You probably have to be stupid or desperate to fall for any of this, but those are precisely the characteristics of the victims Slusher targets. Complete and utter bollocks.