TBR News October 5, 2018

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8 

Washington, D.C. October 5, 2018: “The capacity of most people for self-delusion certainly is not limited to Trump and Jesus supporters but can also be found most prevelant in the various intelligence agencies that overflow Washington and its environs.

Most, if not all,of them are under the impression that their various allegedly secret communications, and projects, are safe from the eyes of those who might find them objectionable.

Though the Russians are now accused, without any evidence whatsoever,  of anything annoying, such as malfunctioning car batteries and wild bear attacks in federal forests, they are not guilty of nerve gas attacks, various earthquakes and tidal waves, fallen arches in America’s virgins or prolapsed rectums in her law givers.

On the other hand, rather than threaten to attack the United States with atomic weapons, as the lunatic John Bolton proclaims, they have developed considerable skill in penetrating her purportedly secure communication systems.

Since Trump expresses his manic and illiterate rantings on Twitter for all to see, the Russians do not bother with him but other agencies are more cogent. One of our long-time communicants who was physically involved with a senior CIA official has been entertaining us, and others, with the results of his taped pillow talk which, if true, sound even more manic than the Trump rantings.

One of the subjects heard about are several plots against the food products of nations that are not obedient to American imperial demands.

Specific comments on this can be found in the body of this article but it ought to be pointed out that food diseases are not stopped at national borders by customs agents and can, and will, boomerang against the perpetrators.”

 

The Table of Contents

• Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 41
• One Click Closer to Annihilation
• Could Trump Take Down the American Empire?
• Student loan crisis threatens a generation’s American dream
• ‘New reality’? Israel may increasingly use F-35s in Syria raids after Russia’s S-300 delivery
• Syria to get Russia’s S-300: Here’s what you need to know about the missile system
• US plan to genetically alter crops via insects feared to be biological war plan
• Questions Raised About DARPA-Funded Crop Program
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

 

Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 41

August 8, 2018

by Daniel Dale, Washington Bureau Chief

The Toronto Star, Canada

The Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. President Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why? Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected

If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not teling the truth.

Last updated: Aug 8, 2018

• Dec 1, 2017

“The Kate Steinle killer came back and back over the weakly protected Obama border, always committing crimes and being violent, and yet this info was not used in court. His exoneration is a complete travesty of justice. BUILD THE WALL!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: The man who fired the shot that killed Kate Steinle, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, had seven prior convictions — but they were all for non-violent drug offences and for illegally re-entering the country. Garcia Zarate (who was acquitted of murder and homicide) did not have any demonstrated history of violence.

• Dec 2, 2017

“Many people in our Country are asking what the ‘Justice’ Department is going to do about the fact that totally Crooked Hillary, AFTER receiving a subpoena from the United States Congress, deleted and ‘acid washed’ 33,000 Emails?”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Clinton’s team deleted emails using a program called BleachBit. They were not actually “bleached” or “acid washed,” as Trump has repeatedly claimed.

Trump has repeated this claim 5 times

• Dec 3, 2017

“Tainted (no, very dishonest?) FBI ‘agent’s role in Clinton probe under review.’ Led Clinton Email probe. @foxandfriends Clinton money going to wife of another FBI agent in charge.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: This “Clinton money” was not Clinton money at all. Here’s what happened: Jill McCabe, the wife of senior FBI official Andrew McCabe, was running for Virginia’s state Senate in 2015; her campaign received nearly $700,000 from political allies of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe. McAuliffe is a close ally of Clinton, but the money was not hers, and there is no evidence she even knew of the donations. (In addition, Andrew McCabe was not put in charge of the Clinton investigation until three months after his wife’s campaign ended.)

Trump has repeated this claim 7 times

• Dec 4, 2017

“Here, and in other affected sites, we have seen harmful and unnecessary restrictions on hunting, ranching and responsible economic development. We have seen grazing restrictions prevent ranching families from passing their businesses and beloved heritage on to the children, the children that they love. We’ve seen many rural families stopped from enjoying their outdoor activities, and the fact that they’ve done it all their lives made no difference to the bureaucrats in Washington.”

Source: Speech on changes to national monuments lands

in fact: The national monument designations prohibited some forms of economic development, like oil development, but they have not stopped “outdoor activities” including hunting. The Associated Press reported: “When President Barack Obama designated Bears Ears a year ago, for example, current uses of the land were maintained, tribal access among them. It was ‘closed to new extractive uses such as mining and oil and gas development.’ Among the activities or installations allowed: ‘traditional collection of plants and firewood, off-highway vehicle recreation, hunting and fishing, legal grazing, military training operations, and utility corridors.'”

 

“We have seen how this tragic federal overreach prevents many Native Americans from having their rightful voice over the sacred land where they practice their most important ancestral and religious traditions.”

Source: Speech on changes to national monuments lands

in fact: It is not at all clear what Trump was talking about. Native American groups were so opposed to Trump’s decision, announced in this speech, to shrink the Bears Ears national monument, that several of them sued the government to try to stop the decision. As the Associated Press pointed out: “Native rights are generally enshrined on national monument lands, not terminated. So are other public uses of the land.” Evangeline Gray, a Utah Diné Bikéyah board member, told the Washington Post: “If Mr. Trump shrinks our national monument, we will lose our culture and our traditional way of life as Native people.”

• Dec 5, 2017

“If you look at what’s happened in West Virginia and so many different places, we’re sending clean coal. We’re sending it out to different places — China. A lot of coal ordered in China right now. So a lot of things are changing, and they’re changing very rapidly.”

Source: Remarks at Taxpayer Family event

in fact: The Washington Post reported that the coal being exported to China is not “clean coal,” even by the highly contested definition of that industry-favoured term, and that this coal is not coming from West Virginia: Trump claims West Virginia is exporting ‘clean coal’ to China. But this is wrong for two reasons. One, in 2015 and 2016, West Virginia exported virtually no coal to China. Two, there is no such thing as ‘clean coal.’ Electricity-generating plants can mitigate some of the effects of burning coal by capturing carbon dioxide and burying it underground, but that doesn’t make the coal itself cleaner. And more important, the bulk of the exports of coal to China involve metallurgical coal, which is used to make steel, not generate electricity.”

Trump has repeated this claim 7 times

“And we’ll compete much better with China, where they have a 15 per cent rate, and with other countries.”

Source: Remarks at Taxpayer Family event

in fact: China has a business tax rate of 25 per cent. It offers a 15 per cent rate only to certain firms, mostly in the high-tech sector, in about 20 particular cities.

Trump has repeated this claim 13 times

“We went to China; we brought back over $300 billion worth of contracts from Asia.”

Source: Remarks at lunch with Republican senators

in fact: The U.S. didn’t sign $300 billion in actual contracts during Trump’s Asia trip. Though Trump claimed $250 billion in sales to China alone, many of these agreements were not actual sales but rather memoranda of understanding that may or may not turn into sales in the future. “The announcement, also heralded a week earlier by Chinese and U.S. officials, represents previously struck deals, tentative investments, statements of intent and extensions of business with existing Chinese customers, with some new orders,” the Associated Press reported. “For example, the initiative provides for the Chinese purchase of 300 Boeing jetliners that have a list price totaling $37 billion. That deal is known to be a mix of old and new orders and appears to fit in the normal order of business. As well, airlines get deep discounts from the list price.” The Washington Post noted: “The largest single project unveiled was China Energy Investment Corp.’s plan to invest $83.7 billion in power generation, chemical manufacturing, and underground storage of natural gas liquids and derivatives in West Virginia. But the two sides signed only a memorandum of understanding, not a formal contract.”

Trump has repeated this claim 7 times

“We have trade deficits with everybody. Virtually every country in the world we have trade deficits with.”

Source: Remarks at lunch with Republican senators

in fact: The U.S. has surpluses with more than half of all countries in merchandise trade, figures from the U.S. International Trade Commission show — and merchandise trade is a measure that doesn’t count the services trade at which the U.S. excels. Major countries with which the U.S. has a surplus in merchandise trade include Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands, Argentina, and the United Kingdom. Further, according to data from the U.S. government itself, the U.S. has a trade surplus with Canada when services trade is counted. “The U.S. goods and services trade surplus with Canada was $12.5 billion in 2016,” the website of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative says.

Trump has repeated this claim 21 times

“Last year, we lost approximately $71 billion in trade deficit; we have a trade deficit with Mexico of $71 billion. With Canada, it was about $17 billion.”

Source: Remarks at lunch with Republican senators

in fact: According to the U.S. government’s own Office of the Trade Representative, the U.S. had a trade surplus of $12.5 billion with Canada last year when services trade is included. Even counting goods trade alone, the Trade Representative says the deficit was $12.1 billion in 2016.

Trump has repeated this claim 15 times

“This group of wonderful Republican senators is here to discuss the tax bill, very important. And we’re also going to be talking about trade and NAFTA, what’s going on with the NAFTA negotiations. We have tremendous losses with Mexico and losses with Canada, and covered by NAFTA. Last year, we lost approximately $71 billion in trade deficit; we have a trade deficit with Mexico of $71 billion.”

Source: Remarks at lunch with Republican senators

in fact: The U.S. trade deficit with Mexico is not that large. Counting trade in goods alone, the deficit was $64 billion in 2016, $60 billion in 2015, $55 billion in 2014 and $54 billion in 2013, according to U.S. government data; it has not exceeded $67 billion since 2007. Further, the deficit is properly assessed counting both goods and services. When trade in services is included, the 2016 deficit was $56 billion. This year’s total deficit may be bigger — the goods deficit was already $47 billion at the end of August — but when services are included, it is still highly unlikely to approach $70 billion.

Trump has repeated this claim 34 times

 

One Click Closer to Annihilation

Last week Washington threatened Iran, Syria, China, Venezuela and Russia

October 2, 2018

by Philip Giraldi

The Unz Review

The nuclear war doomsday clock maintained on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists website has advanced to two minutes before midnight, the closest point to possible atomic apocalypse since the end of the Cold War. In 1995 the clock was at fourteen minutes to midnight, but the opportunity to set it back even further was lost as the United States and its European allies took advantage of a weakened Russia to advance NATO into Eastern Europe, setting the stage for a new cold war, which is now underway.

It is difficult to imagine how the United States might avoid a new war in the Middle East given the recent statements that have come out of Washington, and, given that the Russians are also active in the region, a rapid and massive escalation of something that starts out as a minor incident should not be ruled out.

President Donald Trump set the tone when he harangued the United Nations last Tuesday, warning that the United States would go it alone in defense of its perceived interests, with no regard for international bodies that exist to limit armed conflict and punish those who commit war crimes.

Trump’s 35-minute speech featured an anticipated long section targeting Iran. He commented that:

“Iran’s leaders sow chaos, death, and destruction. They do not respect their neighbors or borders, or the sovereign rights of nations. Instead, Iran’s leaders plunder the nation’s resources to enrich themselves and to spread mayhem across the Middle East and far beyond… We cannot allow the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism to possess the planet’s most dangerous weapons. We cannot allow a regime that chants ‘Death to America,’ and that threatens Israel with annihilation, to possess the means to deliver a nuclear warhead to any city on Earth.”

There are a number of things exaggerated or incorrect in Trump’s description of Iran as well as in the conclusions he draws. The Middle East and other adjacent Muslim countries are in chaos because the United States has destabilized the region starting with the empowering of the Islamist Mujadeddin in the war against Soviet Afghanistan in the 1980s. It then invaded Afghanistan in 2001 followed by Iraq in 2003, enabling the rise of ISIS and giving local al-Qaeda affiliates a new lease on life, before turning on Damascus with the Syria Accountability Act later in the same year and then destroying the Libyan government under Barack Obama. These were, not coincidentally, policies promoted by Israel that received, as a result, bipartisan support in Congress.

The emotional description of disrespecting “neighbors, borders and sovereign rights” fits the U.S. and Israel to a “T” rather than Iran. The U.S. has soldiers stationed illegally in Syria while Israel bombs the country on an almost daily basis, so who is doing the disrespecting? Washington and Tel Aviv are also the principal supporters of terrorists in the Middle East, not Iran, – arming them, training them, hospitalizing them when they are injured, and making sure that they continue their work in attacking Syria’s legitimate government.

And as for “most dangerous weapons,” Iran doesn’t have any and is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Israel and the U.S. have not signed. Nor would Iran have any such weapons in the future but for the fact that Trump has backed out of the agreement to monitor and inspect Iranian nuclear research and development, which will, if anything, motivate Tehran to develop weapons to protect itself.

Trump also elaborated on the following day regarding Iran’s alleged but demonstrably non-existent nuclear program when he indicated to the Security Council that Washington would go after countries that violate the rules on nuclear proliferation. He clearly meant Iran but the comment was ironic in the extreme, as Israel is the world’s leading nuclear rogue nation with an arsenal of two hundred nuclear devices, having stolen the uranium and key elements of the technology from the United States in the 1960s.

Trump’s new appraisal of the state of the Middle East is somewhat a turnaround. Five months ago he said that he wanted to “get out” of Syria  and bring the soldiers home. But in early September, the secretary of state’s special representative for Syria engagement, James Jeffrey, indicated that the U.S. would stay to counter Iranian activities.

And John Bolton has also recently had a lot to say about Iran, Syria and Russia. Last Monday he confirmed that Washington intends to keep a military presence in Syria until Iran withdraws all its forces from the country. “We’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders, and that includes Iranian proxies and militias.” On the following day, speaking at a Sheldon Adelson funded United Against Nuclear Iran Summit, he said the “murderous regime” of “mullahs in Tehran” would face serious consequences if they persist in their willingness to “lie, cheat and deceive. If you cross us, our allies, or our partners; if you harm our citizens there will indeed be hell to pay. Let my message today be clear: We are watching, and we will come after you.”

John Bolton also warned the Russians about their decision to upgrade the air defenses in Syria in the wake of the recent Israeli bombing raid that led to the shooting down of a Russian intelligence plane. He said absurdly and inaccurately “The Israelis have a legitimate right to self-defense against this Iranian aggressive behavior, and what we’re all trying to do is reduce tensions, reduce the possibility of major new hostilities. That’s why the president has spoken to this issue and why we would regard introducing the S-300 as a major mistake.”

Bolton then elaborated that “We think introducing the S-300s to the Syrian government would be a significant escalation by the Russians and something that we hope, if these press reports are accurate, they would reconsider.” And regarding who was responsible for the deaths of the Russian airmen, Bolton also has a suitable explanation “There shouldn’t be any misunderstanding here… The party responsible for the attacks in Syria and Lebanon and really the party responsible for the shooting down of the Russian plane is Iran.”

Bolton’s desire to exonerate Israel and always blame Iran is inevitably on display. He is curiously objecting to the placement of missiles that are defensive in nature, presumably because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked him to do so. The only way one can be threatened by the S-300 is if you are attacking Syria, but that might be a fine point that Bolton fails to grasp as he was a draft dodger during the Vietnam War and has since that time not placed himself personally at risk in support of any of the wars he has been promoting.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis also spoke on Monday, at the Pentagon. His spin on Iran was slightly different but his message was the same. “As part of this overarching problem, we have to address Iran. Everywhere you go in the Middle East where there’s instability you will find Iran. So in terms of getting to the end state of the Geneva [negotiations] process, Iran, too, has a role to play, which is to stop fomenting trouble.”

To complete the onslaught, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking at the same United Against Nuclear Iran Summit as Bolton, accused European nations seeking to avoid U.S. sanctions over the purchase of Iranian oil as “solidifying Iran’s ranking as the number-one state sponsor of terrorism. I imagine the corrupt ayatollahs and IGRC [Revolutionary Guards] were laughing this morning.”

Even the U.S. Congress has figured out that something is afoot. A bipartisan group of U.S. senators, who were carefully briefed on what to think by the Israeli government, warned after a trip to the Middle East that war between the United States and Iranian proxies is “imminent.”

Iran is fun to kick around but China has also been on the receiving end of late. Last Wednesday the U.N. Security Council meeting was presided over by Donald Trump, who warned that Beijing is “meddling” in U.S. elections against him personally. It is a bizarre claim, particularly as the only country up until now demonstrated as having actually interfered in American politics in any serious way is Israel. The accusation comes on top of Washington’s latest foray into the world of sanctions, directed against the Chinese government-run Equipment Development Department of the Chinese Central Military Commission and its director Li Shangfu for “engaging in significant transactions” with a Russian weapons manufacturer that is on a list of U.S. sanctioned companies.

The Chinese sanctions are serious business as they forbid conducting any transactions that go through the U.S. financial system. It is the most powerful weapon Washington has at its disposal. As most international transactions are conducted in dollars and pass through American banks that means that it will be impossible for the Chinese government to make weapons purchases from many foreign sources. If foreign banks attempt to collaborate with China to evade the restrictions, they too will be sanctioned.

So if you’re paying attention to Trump, Bolton, Mattis, Pompeo and Haley you are probably digging a new bomb shelter right now. We have told Iran that it cannot send its soldiers and “proxies” outside its own borders while Syria cannot have advanced missiles to defend its airspace, which Russia is “on notice” for providing. China also cannot buy weapons from Russia while Venezuela is also being threatened because it has what is generally believed to be a terrible government. Meanwhile, America is in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan to stay while nearly all agree a war with Iran is coming soon. Everyone is the enemy and everyone hates the United States, mostly for good reasons. If this is Making America Great Again, I think I would settle for just making America “good” so we could possibly have that doomsday clock go back a couple of minutes.

 

Could Trump Take Down the American Empire?

October 4, 2018

by Gareth Porter

AntiWar

More than any other presidency in modern history, Donald Trump’s has been a veritable sociopolitical wrecking ball, deliberately stoking conflict by playing to xenophobic and racist currents in American society and debasing its political discourse. That fact has been widely discussed. But Trump’s attacks on the system of the global U.S. military presence and commitments have gotten far less notice.

He has complained bitterly, both in public and in private meetings with aides, about the suite of permanent wars that the Pentagon has been fighting for many years across the Greater Middle East and Africa, as well as about deployments and commitments to South Korea and NATO. This has resulted in an unprecedented struggle between a sitting president and the national security state over a global US military empire that has been sacrosanct in American politics since early in the Cold War.

And now Bob Woodward’s “Fear: Trump in the White House” has provided dramatic new details about that struggle.

Trump’s Advisers Take Him Into ‘the Tank’

Trump had entered the White House with a clear commitment to ending US military interventions, based on a worldview in which fighting wars in the pursuit of military dominance has no place. In the last speech of his “victory tour” in December 2016, Trump vowed, “We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we knew nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.” Instead of investing in wars, he said, he would invest in rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure.

In a meeting with his national security team in the summer of 2017, in which Secretary of Defense James Mattis recommended new military measures against Islamic State affiliates in North Africa, Trump expressed his frustration with the unending wars. “You guys want me to send troops everywhere,” Trump said, according to a Washington Post report. “What’s the justification?”

Mattis replied, “Sir, we’re doing it to prevent a bomb from going off in Times Square,” to which Trump angrily retorted that the same argument could be made about virtually any country on the planet.

Trump had even given ambassadors the power to call a temporary halt to drone strikes, according to the Post story, causing further consternation at the Pentagon.

Trump’s national security team became so alarmed about his questioning of US military engagements and forward deployment of troops that they felt something had to be done to turn him around. Mattis proposed to take Trump away from the White House into “the Tank” at the Pentagon, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff held their meetings, hoping to drive home their arguments more effectively.

It was there, on July 20, 2017, that Mattis, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and other senior officials sought to impress on Trump the vital importance of maintaining existing US worldwide military commitments and deployments. Mattis used the standard Bush and Obama administration rhetoric of globalism, according to the meeting notes provided to Woodward. He asserted that the “rules-based, international democratic order”—the term used to describe the global structure of US military and military power—had brought security and prosperity. Tillerson, ignoring decades of US destabilizing wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, chimed in, saying, “This is what has kept the peace for 70 years.”

Trump said nothing, according to Woodward’s account, but simply shook his head in disagreement. He eventually steered the discussion to an issue that was particularly irritating to him: US military and economic relations with South Korea. “We spend $3.5 billion a year to have troops in South Korea,” Trump complained. “I don’t know why they’re there. … Let’s bring them all home!”

At that, Trump’s chief of staff at the time, Reince Priebus, recognizing that the national security team’s effort to get control of Trump’s opposition to their wars and troop deployments had been an utter failure, called a halt to the meeting.

In September 2017, even as Trump threatened in tweets to destroy North Korea, he was privately hammering aides over the US troop presence in South Korea and repeatedly expressing a determination to remove them, Woodward’s account reveals.

Those Trump complaints prompted H.R. McMaster, then the national security adviser, to call for a National Security Council meeting on the issue on Jan. 19. Trump again demanded, “What do we get by maintaining a massive military presence in the Korean peninsula?” And he linked that question to the broader issue of the United States paying for the defense of other states in Asia, the Middle East and NATO.

Mattis portrayed the troop presence in South Korea as a great security bargain. “Forward-positioned troops provide the least costly means of achieving our security objectives,” he said, “and withdrawal would lead our allies to lose all confidence in us.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, argued that South Korea was reimbursing the United States $800 million a year out of the total cost of $2 billion, thus subsidizing the United States for something it would do in its own interests anyway.

But such arguments made no impression on Trump, who saw no value in having troops abroad at a time when the United States itself was crumbling. “We have [spent] $7 trillion in the Middle East,” Trump said at the end of the meeting. “We can’t even muster $1 trillion for domestic infrastructure.”

Trump’s belief that US troops should be pulled out of South Korea was reinforced by the unexpected political-diplomatic developments in North and South Korea in early 2018. Trump responded positively to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s offer of a summit meeting and signaled his readiness to negotiate with Kim on an agreement that would both denuclearize North Korea and bring peace to the Korean peninsula.

Before the Singapore summit with Kim, Trump ordered the Pentagon to develop options for drawing down those US troops. That idea was viewed by the news media and most of the national security elite as completely unacceptable, but it has long been well known among military and intelligence specialists on Korea that US troops are not needed—either to deter North Korea or to defend against an attack across the DMZ.

Trump’s willingness to practice personal diplomacy with Kim and to envision the end or serious attenuation of the US troop deployment in South Korea was undoubtedly driven in part by his ego, but it could not have happened without his rejection of the ideology of national security that had dominated Washington elites for generations.

Fights Over Syria and Afghanistan

Trump was impatient to end all three major wars he had inherited from Barack Obama: Afghanistan and the wars against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Woodward recounts how Trump lectured McMaster, Porter, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in July 2017 on their return from a golf weekend about how tired he was of those wars. “We should just declare victory, end the wars and bring our troops home,” he told them, repeating—probably unconsciously—the same political tactic that had been urged by Vermont Sen. George Aiken in 1966 for ending the US war in Vietnam.

Even after a massively destructive U.S.-NATO bombing campaign forced Islamic State to abandon its capital in the city of Raqqa, Syria, in October 2017, Trump’s national security team insisted on keeping US troops in Syria indefinitely. In a mid-November briefing for reporters at the Pentagon, Mattis declared that preventing the return of Islamic State was a “longer-term objective” of the US military, and that US forces would remain in Syria to help establish conditions for a diplomatic solution. “We’re not going to walk away before the Geneva process has traction,” Mattis said.

But Mattis and Tillerson had not changed Trump’s mind about Syria. In early April 2018, the Pentagon gave Trump a paper that focused almost entirely on different options for remaining in Syria, treating full withdrawal as a clearly unacceptable option. In a tense meeting, Mattis and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dunford warned that complete withdrawal would allow Iran and Russia to fill the vacuum—as though Trump shared their assumption that such an outcome was unthinkable. Instead Trump told them he wanted US troops to wrap the war with Islamic State in six months, according to a CNN account from Pentagon sources. And when Mattis and other officials warned that the timeline was too short, “Trump responded by telling his team to just get it done.”

A few days later, Trump declared publicly, “We’re coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon we’re coming out.”

After John Bolton entered the White House as national security adviser in April, however, he persuaded Trump to view Syria in the context of the administration’s vendetta against Iran—at least for the time being. Bolton declared this week that US troops would not leave Syria as long as Iranian troops serve outside Iranian borders. But Mattis contradicted Bolton, saying the troops remained in Syria to defeat Islamic State and that the commitment was “not open-ended.”

Trump had been calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan for years before his election, and he felt passionate about getting out. And Woodward reveals that the NSC’s chief of staff, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, supported the idea of US withdrawal. When the National Security Council met in July 2017 to discuss Afghanistan, Trump interrupted McMaster’s initial presentation to explained why the war was “a disaster”: Nonexistent “ghost soldiers” in the Afghan army were being used to rip off the United States, as corrupt Afghan leaders milked the war and US assistance to make money. When Tillerson tried to place Afghanistan in a “regional context,” Trump responded, “But how many more deaths? How many more lost limbs? How much longer are we going to be there?”

The Pentagon and McMaster nevertheless pressed on with a plan to increase the US military presence. At a climactic meeting in mid-August on Afghanistan, according to the account in Woodward’s book, McMaster told Trump he had no choice but to step up the war by adding 4,000 troops. The reason? It was necessary to prevent al-Qaida or Islamic State from using Afghan territory to launch terror attacks on the United States or Europe.

Trump retorted angrily that the generals were “the architects of this mess” and that they have were “making it worse,” by asking him to add more troops to “something I don’t believe in.” Then Trump folded his arms and declared, “I want to get out. And you’re telling me the answer is to get deeper in.”

Mattis spelled out the argument in terms that he hoped would finally get to Trump. He warned that what had happened to Obama when he withdrew forces from Iraq prematurely would happen to Trump if he didn’t go along with the Pentagon’s proposed new strategy.

“I still think you’re wrong” [about the war], Trump said, [it] “hasn’t gotten us anything.” But he went along with Mattis and announced that he had been convinced to go against his own “instincts” by approving the 4,000-troop increase.

He was being cowed by the same fear of being accused of responsibility for possible future consequences of defeat in a war—a fear that had led Lyndon Johnson to abandon his own strong resistance to a full-scale US intervention in Vietnam in mid-1965 and Barack Obama to accept a major escalation in Afghanistan that he had argued against in White House meetings.

Trump announced a new strategy in which there would be no arbitrary timelines for withdrawal as there had been under Obama and no restrictions on commanders’ use of drones and conventional airstrikes. But since then, all accounts have agreed that the war is being lost to the Taliban, and Trump will certainly be forced to revisit the policy as the evidence of failure creates new political pressures on the administration.

Trump’s economic worldview, which some have called mercantilist, poses economic dangers to the United States. And given Trump’s multiple serious personal and political failings—including his adoption of a policy of regime change in Iran urged on him by Bolton and by Trump’s extremist Zionist campaign donor Sheldon Adelson—he may finally give up his resistance to the multiple permanent US wars.

But Trump’s unorthodox approach has already emboldened him to challenge the essential logic of the US military empire more than any previous president. And the final years of his administration will certainly bring further struggles over the issues on which he has jousted repeatedly with those in charge of the empire.

 

Student loan crisis threatens a generation’s American dream

Forget the picket fence. Rising tuitions and official policy fueled a trillion-dollar debt crisis. Could congressional action help?

October 4, 2018

by Matt Krupnick

The Guardian

With $60,000 in student debt, Cameron Vigil does not expect to marry or start a family anytime soon, or even to afford more basic living expenses.

“It’s definitely been holding me off on buying a car or getting a house,” said Vigil, 21, a Denver resident working on her master’s degree at Regis University. She expects her debt to balloon to $100,000 by the time she finishes her doctorate. “I kind of know I have to hold off on that.”

With a staggering $1.5tn in outstanding student loans, the United States faces a crisis that has rippled throughout the economy – and is getting worse. Nearly two-thirds of 2017 college graduates need to pay back student loans, according to the California-based Institute for College Access and Success, and about 9 million have defaulted .

As the most recent recession led universities to raise prices and sometimes-unsavory, for-profit colleges to take advantage of students, debt mounted at unprecedented rates. Experts worry it will be catastrophic for the economy as a generation forgoes home ownership and other benchmarks of the American dream.

Borrowers who leave college without graduating also leave saddled with debt and a lower ability to get the kind of job they need to swiftly repay it. And Republicans’ attempts to roll back protections for borrowers introduced under the Obama administration make the predicament even more dire.

The federal government’s student loan watchdog, Seth Frotman, left his post last month after abruptly announcing his resignation in late August.In a scathing letter, he accused his boss, appointed by Donald Trump, of using the agency “to serve the wishes of the most powerful financial companies in America”. As the student loan ombudsman, Frotman was responsible for reviewing borrower complaints about malpractice and aggression by lenders and debt collectors.

“People want to go to college because they want a leg up and federal grants and loans are supposed to help them get there,” said Debbie Cochrane, a vice-president at the Institute for College Access and Success. “We should all be concerned if students are left worse off after attending college.”

American student loan debt has swelled by $400bn in the past five years, according to the Federal Reserve, prompted partly by a precipitous rise of college tuitions following the 2008 financial crisis. Budgets at the nation’s public colleges and universities, as measured in per-student spending, declined by 15% from 1990 to 2015, according to the Century Foundation. But the percentage of instructional costs borne by students and federal aid – rather than by state and local governments – increased from 25% to 47%.

The average 2017 graduate who borrowed to afford college owed nearly $30,000 upon leaving college, up from less than $13,000 in 1996.

“There’s just sort of a splinter in you that you’re trying to put out of your mind,” said Reid Setzer, the government affairs director for the advocacy group Young Invincibles, which has pushed for reforms to the loan system. “But it’s hard to envision a future where you don’t have this debt.”

Minority and low-income graduates are hit the hardest: graduates from lower-income families are five times more likely than their higher-income peers to default, the institute reports, and more than one in five black graduates default within 12 years of entering college, damaging the person’s credit score and causing other financial problems. Nearly 60% of college students were from the poorest quintile in 2015, up from 46% in 1990, according to the College Board, which, on the face of it, is good news but tends to leave them more at risk of defaulting on loans later.

Borrowers who default on student loans are sometimes banned from obtaining a driver’s license or an occupational license, which makes them less likely to get jobs that would help them repay those loans.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are making it harder for borrowers to argue they were defrauded by colleges that lied about graduates’ job prospects. The current rules have helped protect students from sometimes fly-by-night private colleges: nearly all of the more than 100,000 borrowers who have applied for federal loan forgiveness attended for-profit schools, Cochrane said.

But some of the blame for the debt crisis comes down to the borrowers themselves, said Keith New, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, which administers that state’s student aid.

Financial aid counselors frequently bemoan students’ failure to explore scholarships and other aid options before turning to loans, which can have high interest rates and terms that dog borrowers for decades.

“There certainly is a financial literacy issue with young folks,” New said. “They over-borrow and don’t understand the ramifications.”

But despite small gains in education funding in many states since the recession ended, debt keeps growing.

“At some point, this is going to reach an inflection point that’s going to require congressional action,” said Setzer.

Meanwhile, Cameron Vigil is taking her graduate classes online because she and her boyfriend share a car. She works two jobs, she said, and the thought of paying back student loans for decades weighs on her.

“Honestly, it sucks sometimes knowing how long I’ll be dealing with this,” she said. “But it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

 

‘New reality’? Israel may increasingly use F-35s in Syria raids after Russia’s S-300 delivery

October 4, 2018

RT

The IAF must increasingly rely on the futuristic stealth capabilities of the troubled F-35 jet if it’s to continue its raids with impunity, after Syria’s air-defenses were boosted with S-300 systems, Israeli army radio reports.

Tel Aviv’s self-reserved right to freely strike ‘Iranian targets’ anywhere inside or outside Syria was severely undermined by Moscow’s transfer of S-300 air defense systems and accompanying hardware to Damascus. The surface-to-air interceptors delivered to the Syrian Arab Army, as well as Moscow’s resolve to jam the radar, navigation, and communications systems on any aircraft attacking targets in Syria via the Mediterranean coast might complicate missions for Israeli F-15s and F-16s. So, to avert potential threats to their fighter planes, Israel will rely more on the F-35 to carry out its missions in Syria, Galei Tzahal (Army Radio) reported.

The coming attacks won’t be the first, but they will be safer for the pilots in light of the new reality in Syria’s skies,” a source within IAF told the radio station, also emphasizing that Israel has every intention to use this “most expensive weapon in the world.”

In recent years, Tel Aviv purchased 50 F-35 units, known in Israel by their Hebrew name, the ‘Adir,’ from Lockheed Martin, at the cost of $125 million each. Eight of the planes have already been transferred to Israel, while 33 more are expected to arrive by 2021, an IAF source said.

According to the technical characteristics of the US-made jets, the active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar system should, in theory, allow the jet to operate undetected inside enemy territory and to evade advanced missile defense systems such as the S-300 by suppressing its signals. Whether or not the F-35’s ‘stealth’ capabilities will be effective in real battle conditions is yet to be seen as, in the past, the aircraft, on top of hundreds of bugs and glitches in its systems, was experiencing radar problems.

Russia’s move to secure the Syrian airspace with S-300 complexes follows the downing of the Il-20 reconnaissance plane over Syria by Damascus’ dated air defense system. Moscow pinned the blame for the death of the 15 servicemen on Tel Aviv, asserting that the tragedy occurred because four Israeli F-16 jets used the Russian plane as a cover during an air raid in the Latakia province.

Tel Aviv denied responsibility, shifting the blame on Damascus and Tehran, and stressing that it will continue to strike ‘Iranian targets’ in Syria. Israel, however, pledged to boost coordination between the IDF and the Russian militaries, to avoid any further unfortunate incidents in the Syrian skies.

 

Syria to get Russia’s S-300: Here’s what you need to know about the missile system

Septembe 24, 2018

RT

On the heels of an Israeli air raid on Syria, which saw the downing of a Russian plane, Moscow will now deliver S-300 anti-aircraft systems to Damascus. Here’s a quick guide to the sophisticated weapon and its capabilities.

The Syrian Army has long sought to procure the S-300 from Russia, but talks which began in mid-2000 were interrupted by the civil war in 2011. The current air defense systems operated by Syria’s military are mainly the old-fashioned S-125s and S-200s. The downing of a Russian patrol pane by the Syrian missiles – which Moscow said was caused by Israeli jets using the plane as ‘cover’ – has now changed the game.

So, ahead of the deployment, let’s sum up the key specs of the weapon not to be underestimated by Tel Aviv.

Long-range protection

The S-300 family was developed in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and its primary goal was to defend and control airspace against incoming bombers, fighter jets and other airborne targets.

Depending on specific variant of the missiles used (export versions are slightly less capable), the war machine has an engagement range of up to 250km (155 miles), which was the figure mentioned by the Russian Defense Ministry. If confirmed, it would mean that the variant Syria will get is the more advanced S-300VM rather than S-300PMU2, which Russia had previously planned to deliver to Syrian forces.

Either variant would allow Syria to better detect and track Israeli warplanes after taking off from their bases within Israel. Combined with the lethal capability of the missiles, this could undermine Israel’s air superiority during raids against targets in Syria.

Fully automated

The S-300 operations are fully automated and the system is able to track and engage multiple aerial targets simultaneously. It also can easily and rapidly change firing positions to avoid being targeted in an enemy retaliatory strike.

Export variants of the S-300 have compatibility with the original Russian systems curbed, but the Russian Defense Ministry said it was planning to integrate Syrian air defenses with Russian assets in Syria. This would allow friend-foe identification of Russian aircraft flying over Syria, but can potentially allow the Syrians to use data from Russian radar stations to engage enemy targets.

Better protected, less visible

To avoid being spotted by the enemy, S-300 launchers and auxiliary vehicles use various means of masking, like versatile camouflage nets. The launchers are also usually placed in trenches. Though looking like a low-tech solution, it protects the system from stray projectiles and nearby explosions.

In addition, an S-300 battery may be supplemented with a special device, which detects incoming anti-radar missiles and shuts down the S-300 radar stations while deploying decoys and jammers.

Armed with powerful missiles

The S-300 uses an array of medium-to-long-range missiles to hit airborne targets. Most variants carry 130kg (287lb) to 150kg (330lb) fragmentation warheads with semi-active homing systems. But there are also lighter variants with 24kg (53lb) warheads, with active homing and supermaneuvering capabilities.

Though not the newest of its sort, S-300 is considered a very capable surface-to-air system given its jamming-resistant electronics.

 

US plan to genetically alter crops via insects feared to be biological war plan

$27m program says it will , but some worry it’s a way to develop biological agents

October 4, 2018

by Erin Durkin

The Guardian

Government-backed researchers in America are aiming to use virus-carrying insects to genetically engineer crops – raising fears the technology could be used for biological weapons.

A new article in the journal Science explores the shadowy program funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The program aims to disperse infectious, genetically modified viruses that have been engineered to alter the chromosomes of crops – using insects to spread the viruses to the plants.

Researchers have received more than $27m in contracts to pursue the genetic engineering scheme, in a program dubbed Insect Allies.

The agency describes the research as a way to improve crop security: bugs like aphids, leafhoppers and whiteflies will be used to spread a virus to plants including corn and tomatoes, which will then impart beneficial genes making the plants resistant to disease or drought.

But in the Science article, an international team of scientists and lawyers warn that the technology could be put to more nefarious purposes, including military applications.

“It is our opinion that the knowledge to be gained from this program appears very limited in its capacity to enhance US agriculture or respond to natural emergencies,” they write. “As a result, the program may be widely perceived as an effort to develop biological agents for hostile purposes and their means of delivery.”

If true, that would violate the international Biological Weapons Convention, say the authors, who include Guy Reeves, a biologist and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, and Silja Voeneky, co-director of the Institute for Public Law at the University of Freiburg.

“It’s much easier to develop a biological weapon than to develop something that could maybe be used in agriculture,” Reeves said.

Scientists at universities including Ohio State, Penn State, the University of California, Davis and many others are working on the research.

The program is the first of its kind. Experiments have been conducted only in sealed greenhouses and labs, not in the open.

“We have viruses which can genetically modify a plant, or even a mouse,” Reeves said. “But no one’s ever proposed dispersing them into the environment. That’s the thing that makes Insect Allies unique.”

The researchers argue that the agency’s claims that the program could be useful for “routine peacetime agriculture” does not add up, since the genetic agents could be spread by spraying, the same way farmers spray pesticides.

Instead, they are using insects – meaning that in order to use the genetic agents to respond to an emergency, officials would somehow have to find a way to distribute living, infected insects to farmers around the country.

“The idea that you’re protecting American farmers seems to be more than a bit of a stretch,” Reeves said.

At the same time, the spread of virus-carrying insects could be hard to control.

“Easy simplifications … of the described work program could be used to generate a new class of biological weapons,” the authors write in the Science article.

“The program is primarily a bad idea because obvious simplifications of the work plan with already-existing technology can generate predictable and fast-acting weapons, along with their means of delivery, capable of threatening virtually any crop species.”

They warn that the mere announcement of the Insect Allies program, regardless of its true motives, could spur other countries to create similar technologies capable of being used as biological weapons. “Indeed, it may already have done so,” they write.

DARPA says there is nothing to fear from the program.

“DARPA created Insect Allies to provide new capabilities to protect the United States, specifically the ability to respond rapidly to threats to the food supply. A wide range of threats may jeopardize food security, including intentional attack by an adversary, natural pathogens and pests, as well as by environmental phenomena such as drought and flooding,” said Dr Blake Bextine, the DARPA program manager for Insect Allies.

He called spraying treatments “impractical” and said traditional selective breeding methods take years, making insects a new method worth studying. Researchers in the program are required to include three separate “kill switches” to shut down their technology, in addition to using biosecure greenhouses for the demonstrations.

“DARPA is producing neither biological weapons nor the means for their delivery. We do accept and agree with concerns about potential dual use of technology, an issue that comes up with virtually every new powerful technology,” Bextine said. “Those concerns are precisely why we structured the Insect Allies program the way we did, as a transparent, university-led, fundamental research effort that benefits from the active participation of regulators and ethicists, and proactive communication to policymakers and the public. We also have numerous, layered safeguards in place to maintain biosecurity and ensure the systems we’re developing function only as intended.”

The program has also taken “extra precautions” to identify any unintended consequences, making sure only the targeted plants and insects are affected by the viruses, he said.

DARPA says that if its program successfully develops the insect technology, it will be up to other agencies to decide whether and how it is used in the real world.

 

Questions Raised About DARPA-Funded Crop Program

October 4, 2018

by Abby Olena

The Scientist

Critics of an agricultural research initiative cite concerns about possible weaponization of the resulting technology, which would use infected insects to deliver genetically modified viruses to plants.

An ongoing basic research program from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency called Insect Allies faces criticism in an op-ed published today (October 4) in Science. The commentary’s authors express concerns about the development and possible dispersal of insect vectors to deliver genetically modified viruses to crops. Namely, they say the technology could be seized for the development of biological weapons.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an arm of the Department of Defense that funds research projects to develop new technology for defensive uses. Its Insect Allies program solicited proposals from researchers in late 2016, with the intention of funding projects that would use insects to deliver viruses carrying specific traits to modify crops during one growing season. For instance, researchers could engineer a plant virus to deliver modified genes to adult maize plants that would help them cope with drought or disease. They would use insect vectors to deliver the virus, leading to expression of the chosen protective genes in the adult plants during a single growing season.

DARPA

Wikipedia

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.

Sensor plants: DARPA “is working on a plan to use plants to gather intelligence information” through DARPA’s Advanced Plant Technologies (APT) program, which aims to control the physiology of plants in order to detect chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats. (2017 Williams, Terri (2017-12-11). “Department of Defense develops plant biotechnology program as latest surveillance tool against CBRN threats”. Homeland Preparedness News.

Ewen Callaway (2009-10-01). “Free-flying cyborg insects steered from a distance”. New Scientist. Archived from the original on 2010-04-13.

Russian Federation Wheat Production

2018 68000 (1000 million tons )

People’s Republic of China Rice production

2018 204.3 million tons,

China is the world’s largest producer of rice, and the crop makes up a little less than half of the country’s total grain output. China accounts for 30% of all world rice production.

 

The Great Rice Disease Plot

by Christian Jürs

Ever since the times of the great Malthus, it has been well recognized that since all species must eat to continue living, the existence of food sources is vital to the survival of any species, be it homo sapiens or others.

Food may, in short, be seen as a weapon as effective as a bullet or a bomb in an attack on a perceived enemy.

We therefore now consider the production of food stuffs as a weapon in a war, formal or informal.

I speak now of a growing struggle between the PRC (China) and the United States in which the PRC can clearly be seen as a challenger to the United States both in the military and economic spheres.

For example, the PRC has purchased very large financial holdings of the United States such as official U.S. Treasury bills and then also as holders of billions of American dollars worth of other financial holdings and long term investments.

These acquisitions are not intended for financial gain to the PRC but to be used as an economic and political lever when, and as, needed.The PRC has also purchased from the U.S. Treasury, billions of dollars worth of gold belonging to foreign entities.

German holdings alone totaled 53 billion dollars and other nation’s deposits greatly increased this amount.

The sale generated capital used to pay down an enormous American national debt, mostly stemming from military development and deployment worldwide.

Also, the PRC has been known to be conducting a form of economic warfare against the United States by the production of counterfeit gold items, such as coinage and, most dangerously, as faked copies of American official U.S. Treasury gold bars. This has the dual purpose of enriching the PRC with badly-needed items such as oil and raw material it cannot, by itself, possess.

It is evident that the United States intelligence organs are entirely aware of these dangerous PRC activities and have been assiduously working both to blunt the economic warfare and then to counter with other methods.

The most important of these latter methods deals with the issue of food.

It is not certainly a secret that China has a number of growing, and potentially fatal, problems with her population and the care and feeding of it.

China’s basic supply of fresh water comes from the glaciers of the Himalayan mountains but these glaciers are not only melting rapidly but renewal of them does not occur due to obvious and growing planetary climate changes. The shrinking of glacial waters also strongly effects the hydroelectric programs of China.

Another of the PRC’s growing problems is the unchecked increase in population; the shrinkage of arable food (i.e. rice) production areas, a domestic and foreign economic “bubble” that is obvious will probably cause a disastrous implosion.

This brief study of the problems of the PRC then moves on to the methodology by which the United States, the PRC’s main global economic rival, can either neutralize or destroy the capacity of the PRC to wage economic warfare and to neutralize her future endeavors.

Let us now consider the basic Achilles Heel of the PRC; food.

The United States is capable of feeding its own people, though with problems of organized production and distribution but the PRC, and most of Asia, is dependent very heavily on a single crop: rice.

Rice is the seed of the monocot plant Oryza sativa. As a cereal grain, it is the most important staple food for a large part of the world’s human population, especially in East and South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the West Indies. It is the grain with the second-highest worldwide production, after corn.

Today, the majority of all rice produced comes from China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Philippines, and Japan. These Asian farmers account for 92-percent of the world’s total rice production

The peoples of the PRC, we then are fully aware, have rice, both domestic and imported, as a basic food staple. Should this stable become seriously interdicted by, let us say, some kind of a disease that would impact not only on the PRC but other Asian areas as well, growing starvation and the attendant civil dissoloution can well be postulated.

Major rice diseases include Rice ragged stunt, Sheath Blight and tungro. Rice blast, caused by the fungus Magnaporthe grisea, is the most significant disease affecting rice cultivation. There is also an ascomycete fungus, Cochliobolus miyabeanus, that causes brown spot disease in rice.

A most serious threat to rice crops would be Rust disease, xanthomonas compesteris pv.oryzae

Xanthomonas oryzae is a species of proteobacteria. The major host of the bacteria is rice

The species contains two pathovars which are non-European: Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae and Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzicola.Host resistance gene, Xa21,from Oryza longistaminata is integrated into the genome of Oryza sativa for the board range resistance of rice blight disease caused by Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae

In the America of today, unpleasant tasks, the revelation of which might redound against the government, are generally made the province of the United States Department of Defense, the United States Department of Homeland Security, and the United States Intelligence Community, including the National Security Agency, as well as other U.S. Government civil agencies.

These agencies, in turn, look to the civil, business sector for special development and preparation of weaponry, both conventional and bio-weaponry.

One of the main institutions for this development is SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), which has been headquartered in Tysons Corner in unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia, near McLean, since September of 2009.

Their Board of Directors has included many well- known ex-government personnel including Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense in the Nixon administration; William Perry, Secretary of Defense for Bill Clinton; John M. Deutch, President Clinton’s CIA Director; Admiral Bobby Ray Inman who served in various capacities in the NSA and CIA for the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations

Here we can mention, in furtherance of this study, that In January of 1999, a SAIC consultant, one Steven Hatfill and his collaborator, SAIC vice president Joseph Soukup, commissioned William C. Patrick, who was a retired and leading figure in the previous official U.S. bio-weapons program to prepare a report on the possibilities of terrorist anthrax postal mailings in the United States. This also referred to a number of false anthrax mailings in the two years previous. Although this report was later purported to be a CIA contract, it was actually an internal memo. In actual fact, this was a report prepared specifically for the CIA’s bio-weapons division. Mr. Patrick eventually produced a 28-page report in February of 1999. This was considered by the professional community as a clear blueprint for the subsequent 2001 postal anthranx “attack.”

The report suggested the maximum amount of anthrax powder—2.5 grams—that could be put in an envelope without producing a suspicious bulge. This was just a little more than the actual amounts—2 grams each—in the letters sent to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. But the report also suggested that a terrorist might produce a spore concentration of 50 billion spores per gram. This was only one-twentieth of the actual concentration—1 trillion spores per gram—in the letters sent to the senators

The “anthrax letters” were clearly used by the Bush Administration as part of their plan to put the American people under tighter observation and control.

Here, also, it should be noted that SAIC operates NCI-Frederick, a National “Cancer Institute” research facility located at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland, which is located in conjunction with the U.S. Army’s bio-weapons research center.

This entity, we must say, has nothing to do with “cancer research” and everything to do with bio-weapons development. About half of the 3,000 employees of NCI-Frederick are hired through the SAIC-Frederick subsidiary, paid out of a competitive $320-million contract.

The initial development of the bio-warfare organization designed to develop a so-called super “rust” agent for designed for a specific attack on the Asian rice crops came from a Presidential Directive signed on February 10, 2004 by then-President George Bush. The power was given to the American Central Intelligence Agency which then contracted with SAIC.

A special, well-hidden laboratory was established in Vancouver, Canada with the express purpose to hide from possible domestic scrutiny in the United States. The sub-agency was, and is, called NOICOM which is under SAIC International Subsidiaries.

NOICOM is under the nominal direction of one Dr. Binymin I. Zeloc, an Israeli citizen employed by the American Central Intelligence Agency and many of the staff are also CIA members or associates.

There are also direct and specific connections with SAIC development centers in Noida and Bangalore, India. Scicom Technologies Noida was acquired by SAIC in September 2007.

A particularly strong strain of xanthomonas compesteris pv.oryzae has now been developed that has the ability to spread throughout the rice crops of Asia with, as the report says, ‘lightening speed’ and it is estimated that in the course of one year and interacting with the rice growth pattern, to “fully infect” most, if not all, of the Asian rice crop. Also, the developed strain of xanthomonas compesteris pv.oryzae is such that re-infestation of a following crop is almost certain.

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

October 5, 2018

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 publications.

 

Conversation No. 12  

Date: Thursday, May 2, 1996

Commenced: 8:45 AM CST

Concluded: 9:22 AM CST

GD: Good day to you, Robert. How goes the battle with you?

RTC: I think I’m slowly losing ground, Gregory, but I’m still fighting.

GD: I’ve been fighting for years so I understand the concept.

RTC: I hear the Germans are not happy over some of your writings. You are disturbing the Jewish community with your allegations that we hired the head of the Gestapo.

GD: Who cares?

RTC: You heard the old saying that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? Well, the Beltway has no fury like a Jew ignored. How dare we hire the head of the Gestapo? How could we do such a thing to them? They are the Chosen of God, after all.

GD: What did God choose them for? To stand in the shower lines in some Polish camp?

RTC: Oh, now, Gregory, show some compassion.

GD: My God, why should any of us care about all of those nonsense stories? Lampshades and cakes of soap, my ass.

RTC: We are all supposed to care about that, Gregory. And if they use it right, they can get discount airline tickets and something off on that new sofa.

GD: Stunning revelations indeed, Robert. Another group of obnoxious nuts.

RTC: Believe me, Gregory, there are far worse.

GD: Who? The Pedophile’s Protective League? The Bellowing Jesus Freaks of Bad Seepage, Ohio?

RTC: There are worse things in this world than the Society of Professional Hebrew Moaners.

GD: The Sackcloth and Ashes League? The Humpback’s Tuesday Afternoon Bridge Club?

RTC: Why don’t you try the Scientologists? Now that group is really something to contemplate.

GD: I’ve read a little about them but not much. Started by some old faker named Hubbard. L. Ron Hubbard. I used to be a science fiction nut and I remember reading one of his stories years ago. Awful writing. Sounded like it was written by a ten year old.

RTC: That’s the one. He may have been an awful writer but he was a class A conman. Those people made more Goddam trouble for us. They were running all over the Med in the ‘60s in some rusty tub called the Royal Scotsman. My God, what a ship of fools that was. We were getting requests from DoS and other people to look into them. All over the place, docking here and there, chasing frantic deserters into towns, screaming at people…my God what a circus that one was. And old Hubbard waddling around in some naval uniform, shouting at people one minute and trying to bribe some public official on shore the next.

GD: That I knew nothing about.

RTC: We did, believe me. Hubbard was as crazy as a loon and Washington was afraid he would start a war. You ever read about them?

GD: Just something here and there. Hubbard died, didn’t he?

RTC: Yes, about ten years ago. His people got rid of him because he was getting to be a flaming nut and threatened to fire all of his top people. Since their scam brought in about a million dollars a day, those at the top had no intention of allowing a fat, old psychotic liar push them out.

GD: Was that in the press?

RTC: No. Hubbard was a raging paranoid, among other failings, and was convinced that everyone was out to get him so he went into hiding. That was where he was, out in California, when they gave him the needle. Of course they got the old idiot to sign a will leaving them everything and in with the drugs. As I recall, they cremated him as fast as possible and dumped his ashes into the Pacific off the stern of a sardine boat.

GD: Sic transit Gloria mundi, Robert

RTC: Isn’t that always the truth?

GD: How did they make a million a day? Print it?

RTC: No, Barnum was right, Gregory. There is a sucker born every minute. When I took Jim’s files out of there, I got the Scientology file, too. Three large boxes of files. My son read through some of them and said it sounded like a group therapy session over at St. Elizabeth’s The money? It came from legions and more legions of suckers who flocked to the tin can boys and paid until they were broke.

GD: Tin cans?

RTC: Yes. Hubbard had a very simple device that registered electrical skin responses. Works like the polygraph but has no value. We all have these electrical impulse things and of course the little needle jumps around. They have so called experts called auditors who tell the mark that this is helping to clear up their psyche so they can go out into the real world without a bag over their head. We know, and I am sure you do too, that the world is full of failures and worse. Now, instead of hanging themselves or jumping in front of Amtrak trains, they can grab the tin cans and let someone tell them that being ugly, stupid or a failure is really not their fault. Others are to blame. Of course they will never be free of their loads of guilt until the auditor tells them they are OK and that day never comes. As long as the marks have money, the tin cans are grasped and the wallets slowly empty. When it does, the sucker is tossed out on the street and then, broke, they jump off of railroad bridges and make messes on the tracks.

GD: A million a day?

RTC: Oh yes, at least. Hubbard once said that if a man wanted to be really rich, he should found a religion.

GD: Faking it with tin cans and some worthless meter is not a religion.

RTC: Oh, they turned it into one. They have a lock on a number of frustrated fanatics, fueled by vast sums of money pouring in from the army of suckers.

GD: You mentioned a boat?

RTC: Oh yes, in the 80’s, old Hubbard got it into his head that powerful forces were after him so he bought an old boat, filled it up with nuts and off they went, cruising all over the place and creating diplomatic havoc. Later, he got tired of his admiral’s uniform so he took over some town in Florida and terrorized the normal people before moving on to California, the true home of fruits and nuts. And in the meantime, before Hebe the Yench and the Dwarf, Miscarriage, terminated him, old Hubbard had his crazy followers break into government building and steal sensitive files. Of course they got caught but Hubbard claimed ignorance. He wasn’t stupid by any means but he had Borderline Personality disorder and couldn’t tell the truth when a lie would suffice.

GD: Who are the Hebe and the Dwarf?

RTC: In house for Heber Jentsch and David Miscavage. The first one is a front and the dwarf is the one who runs the show now that his founder is floating on the surf. Oh, you should read the nonsense….Gregory, do you know what a DC 3 is?

GD: Certainly. It’s an older commercial jet.

RTC: Hubbard said, and the ninnies still believe, that certain superior aliens, the father of all of the more enlightened of us, were brought to Earth from Venus millions of years ago on DC 3s.

GD: Robert…

RTC(Laughter) No, I’m serious. We don’t need to even discuss this moronic crap but thousands of panting believers accept it as the truth. The problem is, while they have stopped running around in the boat, they now try to take over small towns and are heavy in the electronics business. And of course swindling fools out of Daddy’s trust fund.

GD: You have material on them?

RTC: Yes, I do, Gregory.

GD: Any chance I could see it?

RTC: Of course, I can dig it out and ship it to you. But a word of caution here, Gregory, never try to use it.

GD: Why not?

RTC: My God, these twits sue everyone in sight for no reason. If you wrote that all up, they would sue you, your dog, your neighbors, your dead grandmother, your school and probably the mailman. The word ‘crazy’ is too mild to use in conjunction here. But, I will send this off to you with my caveat.

GD: You know, my sister’s cat keeps crapping on her bed. Maybe I could stuff it into a tin can and read the meter.

RTC: (Laughter) Be my guest. Why not audit a cat?

GD: I used to think it was books that were audited.

RTC: Gregory, these people can’t read books.

GD: Speaking of books, Bender is going ahead with the Mueller series so I guess Wolfe will hiss at you in the Archives like Loki.

RTC: Bill and I will look forward to the new books, Gregory. And we do need to get together in person sometime, right here. It’s safe enough here.

GD: Should we invite Kimmel?

RTC: Gregory, I have enough problems from the Justice people over you without fanning the flames. I think you love to fan the flames. Have you ever considered a gracious retirement?

GD: That takes money, Robert.

RTC: Yes, that it does. Sell more books.

GD: That’s not my bailiwick. Maybe I could start a religion, Robert. Tell people I came from Venus and if they are good, and give me lots of money, I can elevate them to a huge and invisible flying saucer and take them to Pluto where the men will have huge peckers and the women get to eat a ton of chocolates a day and not gain a pound. And they will all live forever and never worry about falling hair or sagging breasts. Why? Because I will turn them all into little green toads and eventually feed them to the Great God Dagon.

RTC: Well, that way we would get rid of everyone in Los Angeles and Washington.

GD: And our magic spaceship will be a 707 and we can call it the Ship of Fools.

RTC: I will look up those files for you Gregory.

GD: Thanks. It will beat reading the obits in the paper, looking for dead enemies.

(Concluded at 9:22 AM CST)