TBR News September 2, 2019

Sep 02 2019

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. September 2, 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.

His latest business is to re-institute a universal draft in America.

He wants to do this to remove tens of thousands of unemployed young Americans from the streets so they won’t come together and fight him.

Commentary for September 2:”When any empire slips into decline, trust it, their secret police bugeon throughout the land. We can see this now in America where various government agencies spy regularly on all the citizens, to include small children. Pets have not yet been included in the matrix but no one can drive a car, shop in stores, talk to friends or relatives on the telephone, send an email or a letter without someone watching, and recording everything. This is not a secret and eventually, the public will have had enough and there will be trouble ala that in Hong Kong.”

 

The Table of Contents

  • Germany: Berlin reacts to far-right surge in eastern elections
  • The Armenian Holocaust
  • The American Gestapo
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
  • Encyclopedia of American Loons

 

Germany: Berlin reacts to far-right surge in eastern elections

The far-right AfD may have come second in regional elections in Saxony and Brandenburg, but Germany’s governing parties had been fearing even worse. Now, Berlin is searching for a strategy to deal with the new reality.

September 2, 2019

by Wesley Rahn and Ben Knight

DW

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) just about managed to come out on top in regional elections in Saxony and Brandenburg respectively.

But both parties, who form the governing coalition at national level, still took an electoral hit. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) came second in both states, a massive gain on results four years ago, but with a similar share of the vote as in the last national election in 2017.

Some polls had the far-right party in the lead in both states a few weeks ago, and political observers thought the result, while certainly not great for Angela Merkel’s grand coalition, was still good enough to ensure that her administration was not about to collapse immediately.

The key was the SPD’s very mixed results. While the Social Democrats slumped to just 7.7%, or fifth place, in Saxony, they still won the election in Brandenburg, all but assuring they could continue to govern there. A defeat to the AfD would have increased tension in the party, and potentially pushed it closer to walking out on Merkel’s coalition and perhaps ending her 14-year tenure as chancellor.

On Monday, one of the SPD’s interim leaders, Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel, seemed relieved. “Unlike many people predicted before the election in the East, the grand coalition won’t collapse into chaos,” he told the Rheinische Post newspaper,

But his was not the only SPD voice. To complicate the political situation, the SPD is currently in the middle of a leadership battle, with candidates from the party’s various political wings in the running. One of the more left-wing candidates, Gesine Schwan, said on Monday morning that the national parties of both the CDU and the SPD had been no help in the regional elections.

“The successes came from the strength of the state parties,” Schwan told the Rheinische Post. “The federal parties in the grand coalition are not creating any strong tail-wind, their profile is less clear than that of the state heads.”

What now for the CDU and SPD?

CDU party leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said that results were “difficult” for the party. But she emphasized that Saxony State Premier Michael Kretschmer “managed to make clear that there is — as opposed to the right-wing populists — a friendly, open, forward-looking face of Saxony.”

Kretschmer himself was optimistic. “What is important is that the Saxony parliament is made up of a large majority of positive forces who are capable of forming a government that will move this state forward,” he told DW. He said that his party had “succeeded in generating trust again.”

That reaction reflected the general line in Germany’s center-right: that while the government was still stable enough for now, it could not simply maintain its business as usual. “Of course we can’t go back to our daily agenda now, the AfD’s result is much too high,” said Markus Söder, leader of the CDU’s Bavarian sister-party, the CSU. “That’s why we appeal to the SPD, despite their internal-party clarification processes, it’s time to work constructively on climate and budget policy.”

Indeed, the immediate reaction from the grand coalition was to forge ahead with new initiatives: the leaders of the CDU, CSU, and SPD are meeting Monday evening to discuss their new climate protection policies, ahead of a special “climate cabinet” meeting on September 20.

At the same time, the SPD is pressing on with its plans to introduce an unconditional “basic pension,” one of its key initiatives in the current government, but which has so far been blocked by the CDU. “We will apply pressure now,” the party’s General Secretary Lars Klingbeil announced on Monday. “Nothing helps people more than concrete political decisions.”

AfD: you need to talk to us now

For its part, the AfD claimed that its new successes meant that it was now an unavoidable presence in the east, and that, sooner or later, there would be cracks in the CDU’s resolve not to form a coalition with it.

On Monday morning, AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland admitted that the grand coalition would probably stay together for now, “because for the two big parties it would be difficult to endure a national election.” But he insisted that a coalition with the CDU was possible. “Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer is trying desperately to deny the validity of the middle-class majority,” he told DW. He added that a coalition with the CDU “depends on the CDU, but there’s no question of rushing.”

Sitting alongside him at the morning’s press conference was Andreas Kalbitz, the party’s lead candidate in Brandenburg, whose close connection to neo-Nazi groupswas exposed shortly before the election.

Kalbitz compared the AfD to Italy’s far-right Lega party, which joined the Italian government in 2018, and whose leader Matteo Salvini is still interior minister. “That’s the direction we’re going in,” said Kalbitz.

Kramp-Karrenbauer, however, was adamant that allying with the AfD would not be necessary. Asked whether her party could stick to its line on ruling out an alliance with the AfD, she said, “Yes, we can.”

SPD interim co-leader Manuela Schwesig also dismissed any suggestion that the AfD might now be considered fit for government. She said that while its voters weren’t far-right extremists, there were extremists among their officials.

Green party leader Robert Habeck said that he is expecting the CDU to approach the party for talks about forming a governing coalition in Saxony.

For talks to produce results, Habeck said that the CDU would have to learn some lessons from the election in Saxony.

Habeck also said that the CDU did not have “its own power” in Saxony and that voters only chose them to avoid voting for the AfD.

In a DW interview, Green party parliamentarian Franziska Brantner said that other parties are obliged to show AfD voters that “democracy can and will work for them.” Brantner added that the election results are a sign that new governing coalitions can be formed “beyond the AfD.”

Dietmar Bartsch, the joint leader of the Left parliamentary party said earning little more than 10% of the vote in Saxony and Brandenburg was a “disaster.”

Bartsch said it was “obvious” that the Left was no longer regarded as the party of choice to represent the interests of people in former East Germany.

The Armenian Holocaust

Before World War I the Ottoman Empire came under the Young Turks government. At first some Armenian political organizations supported the Young Turks in hopes that there would be a real change from Abdul Hamid’s policies towards the Armenian population. There were Armenians elected to the Ottoman Parliament, where some remained throughout the ensuing world war. However they were later to be disappointed. Other parliamentarians such as Muradyan and Garo would go on to lead Armenian rebels in ethnic cleansing campaigns against Muslim and Jewish Ottoman villagers. The Young Turks feared the Armenian community, which they had believed was more sympathetic to allied powers (specifically Russia) than to the Ottoman Empire.

In 1914 Ottomans passed a new law that required all adult males up to age 45, to either be recruited in the Ottoman army or pay special fees in order to be excluded from service. Most of the Armenian recruits were later turned into road laborers and the executed. Those who escaped joined the Russians on the east.

In early 1915, simultaneously with a disastrous Ottoman defeat at the hands of Russia at Sarikamish, with the loss of over 80% of a huge military force, battalions of Russian Armenians organized the recruiting of Turkish Armenians from behind the Turkish lines. In response the Young Turk government executed 300 Armenian nationalist intellectuals, although a partisan source as Peter Balakian’s “The Burning Tigris” tells us most were imprisoned and there were even survivors. The fact that most Armenian men were also butchered in the army and many influential figures arrested and killed, places a question mark over certain arguments that Armenians organized revolts and that there was a civil war, given that Armenians were outnumbered, outmanned and outgunned. On the other hand, there were articles in the New York Times as early as November 7, 1914, days after Russia had declared war, attesting to Armenian uprisings (“ARMENIANS FIGHTING TURKS — Besieging Van—Others operating in Turkish Army’s Rear”), and accounts from Armenians themselves, such as Boghos Nubar’s 1919 letter in the Times of London stressing Armenian belligerence. In addition, there is evidence of Russian financial support, testimony from even those such as Ambassador Henry Morgenthau to the effect of “…In the early part of 1915… every Turkish city contained thousands of Armenians who had been trained as soldiers and who were supplied with rifles, pistols, and other weapons of defense,” and even accounts from Armenian newspapers hailing the rebellion. Chronology here is important and not incontestably established.

After the recruitment of most men and the arrests of certain intellectuals, widespread massacres were taking place throughout Ottoman Empire. In desperate attempts at survival, upon hearing of massacres of nearby villages, Armenians in Musa Dagh and Van organized their self defense. In Van, they handed over control of the city to advancing Russians. After waves of massacres and countermassacres, the Ottoman government ordered the deportation of over 1 million Armenians living in Anatolia to Syria and Mesopotamia though this figure has not been conclusively established. Indeed, there is another consensus this number did not exceed 700,000, and Arnold Toynbee reported in his Wellington House (British propaganda division) report of “The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire” that 500,000 were alive in 1916. Although the word deportation seems pretty innocent (some would prefer the word “relocation,” as the former means banishment outside a country’s borders; Japanese-Americans, for example, were not “deported” during WWII), things were not, because the deportations themselves were a silent method of mass execution that led to the death of many of the Armenian population, by forcing them to march endlessly through desert, without food or water or enough protection from local Kurdish or Turkish bandits.

In the process several hundred thousand died in the resulting death marches from starvation, dehydration, disease or exhaustion. Several hundred thousands more were massacred by Kurdish militia and Ottoman gendarmes (while other gendarmes gave up their lives defending the Armenians), giving an estimated total under certain counts of 1,500,000 Armenians dead. Then again, the Armenians contend one million survived, and even the Patriarch Ormanian provided a pre-war population figure of 1,579,000

 

The American Gestapo

September 2, 2019

by Christian Jürs

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the few surviving members of Hitler’s Gestapo, or Secret State Police, should be gratified that their counterpart, the Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, has copied, in detail, the so-called Vertrauns-Leute or V-Leute, program and is now developing it into a very powerful, and relatively unknown, internal surveillance force in the United States. Unlike the Gestapo, who had Communists as their chief enemy to observe, infiltrate and destroy, the FBI program is aimed solely at American citizens who are considered as present, and future, threats to the state.

Before we analyze the FBI program with its nearly sixty thousand reporting members, let us briefly look at its father, the Gestapo’s V program, because in comparing Hitler’s secret internal surveillance program with its huge network of volunteer informers with the FBI program, the parallels will at once become painfully obvious.

The Gestapo, or Geheime-Staats Polizei (Secret State Police) was initially constructed from the political section of Berlin’s civil police force in April of 1933. Given the intensive Communist espionage in the lax Weimar Republic, a number of German law enforcement agencies, such as the Berlin and Bavarian police, had set up sections to deal with this menace.

In Berlin, under the government of Prussia, Hermann Goering, its Prime Minister, set up the Gestapo by enlarging the previous Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt. In 1934, the SS, under Heinrich Himmler and his top intelligence chief, Reinhard Heydrich (Head of the Sicherheitsdienst or SD) assumed control over the Prussian, and later, Bavarian, police. The small Gestapo was put under the control of one Heinrich Müller, a top operative in the political police of Munich. Although Müller had been a devoted enemy of the National Socialists, he was considered by Heydrich as an extremely competent expert in detecting and dealing with the Commniists and other dissident groups. Müller, a member of the Catholic right-wing BVP, organized the small Berlin intelligence agency into a highly competent and efficient arm of detection and repression. With the outbreak of the war in September, 1939, all German police and political police agencies were put under the umbrella of the RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt…State security main office) and the Gestapo, still under Müller, constituted Amt IV (Bureau IV) of that agency. Although nominally under the control of both Himmler and Heydrich, Müller, a decorated WWI military pilot, was essentially independent and was in complete control of his organization.

At its height, the Gestapo had offices in all the major, and some of the minor, German cities but never had more than thirty-two thousand personnel, to include office workers and field agents, but the effectiveness of the Gestapo lay not only in Müller’s institution of an in-depth national card file on most German citizens but in an enormous network of volunteer informers called ‘V-Leute’ or Vertrauens-Männer (Leute) or trustworthy sources. Politically trustworthy supporters of the Nazi movement were recruited as voluntary, unpaid, reporting sources and could be found in all walks of German civilian and, to a lesser degree, government and military, sectors. These ‘V-Leute’ were given special identity cards, assisted if possible by the Gestapo in the event of civil or criminal legal problems and made privy to various impressive but unimportant Gestapo information. The value of this army of over 75,000 known domestic informers was, without doubt, one of the reasons for the Gestapo’s successes against internal dissident groups. Setting aside malicious denunciations, the V-Leute kept the Gestapo field offices and from them, the central headquarters on the Prinz Albrecht Strasse in Berlin, with an enormous input of often very valuable information.. One of the positive aspects of the activities of this army of domestic voluntary informers was the feeling among the German public that the Gestapo was everywhere, even present, ever observant and this fright quotient was often more than sufficient to quell any anti government sentiments in most of the German population and created  a `self-policing’ society operating within a `consensus dictatorship’

Here is a very brief outline of the structure of the Gestapo that dealt with the input of information from the unpaid but very effective ‘V-Leute’:

 

Amt IV

Gegnerforschung und                               (Also known as the Geheime Staatspolizei)

Gegnerbekämpfung                                 Under SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller

(Investigation and combatting

of Opposition)

 

IV A 3

Gesellschaftsspionage                              Combating of espionage in society.

Fahrlässiger Landesverrat                        Treason through negligence,careless      talk,etc.

Spionage                                                Combating of political espionage.

IV A 6

Karteien und Fahndung                            (Card Indexes & Wanted Persons)

IV A 6 a

Kartei und Personalakten                         Card Index, Personal Files

Auskunft

Heinrich Müller, the father of the informant program and the head of the Gestapo almost since its inception, escaped from Germany in 1945 and ended up in Switzerland where he worked as an expert on Communist espionage until 1948 when he was recruited by the CIA’s James Critchfield to work for the CIA, also as an expert in Communist espionage.  In studying the current FBI program, it is very obvious that Müller brought more to Washington than his hat and if the old adage that it is lawful to be taught by an enemy is correct, our own form of the Gestapo, the FBI, certainly and clearly benefited from Müller’s organizational skills.

In 1996, the FBI set up an organization they called the Infragard, which very closely followed the German Gestapo’s ‘V-Leute’ program:

, ….” the protection of our nation’s infrastructure cannot be accomplished by the federal government alone. It requires coordinated action from numerous stakeholders – including government, the private sector, law enforcement and concerned citizens.” And that: “Each InfraGard chapter is geographically linked with an FBI Field Office, providing all stakeholders immediate access to experts from law enforcement, industry, academic institutions and other federal, state and local government agencies”.

One of the publicly stated aims of this project is that:  “(b)y utilizing the talents and expertise of the InfraGard network, information is shared to mitigate threats to our nation’s critical infrastructures.” This is nearly identical in wording to Müller’s own description of his national informers program and what follows here was lifted, almost verbatim, from his own period analysis: “An InfraGard member is a private-sector volunteer with an inherent concern for national security. Driven to protect their own industry and further motivated to share their professional and personal knowledge to safeguard the country, InfraGard members connect to a national network of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) communicate with federal law enforcement and government agencies through their local InfraGard chapters, and contribute to the security and protection of our national infrastructure from threats and attacks.”

“Critical infrastructures are physical and cyber-based systems that are essential to the minimum operations of the economy and the government (as defined in Presidential Decision Directive/NSC 63, May 1998) Key resources are individual targets whose destruction would not endanger security on a national scales, but would create local disaster or profoundly damage national morale (as defined in Homeland Security Presidential Directive-7, December 2003) Together, critical infrastructures and key resources are so vital that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on the defense, economic security, public health or national confidence of the United States.

“InfraGard has SMEs around the country in each of the following 17 categories of critical infrastructures and key resources, as recognized by the National Infrastructure Protection Plan:”

“Critical Infrastructures:

  • Agriculture and Food
  • Banking and Finance
  • Chemical
  • Defense Industrial Base
  • Drinking Water and Wastewater Treatment Systems
  • Emergency Services
  • Energy
  • Information Technology
  • National Monuments and Icons
  • Postal and Shipping
  • Public Health and Healthcare
  • Telecommunications
  • Transportation Systems”

In additional similarity to the earlier Gestapo program of unpaid informers, we learn that the current FBI imitation provides its informers the following benefits:

“The benefits of joining InfraGard include:

> Network with other companies that help maintain our national infrastructure.

> Quick Fact: 350 of our nation’s Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard.

> Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards and much more.

> Learn time-sensitive, infrastructure related security information from government sources such as DHS and the FBI.

> Get invitations and discounts to important training seminars and conferences.

> Best of all, there is no cost to join InfraGard

Our 45000+ membership is voluntary yet exclusive and is comprised of individuals from both the public and private sector. The main goal of the Washington, DC Nations Capital Chapter of InfraGard is to promote ongoing dialogue, education, community outreach and timely communication between public and private members. Furthermore, to achieve and sustain risk-based target levels of capability to prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from all hazards or events, and to minimize their impact on lives, property, and the economy.

InfraGard members gain access to vital information and education that enables them to in turn provide assistance to prevent and address terrorism and other transnational crimes. InfraGard members are provided threat advisories, alerts and warnings and access to a robust secure web-VPN site and e-mail. InfraGard also helps promote an effective liaison with local, state and federal agencies, to include the Department of Homeland Security.

The FBI retained InfraGard as an FBI sponsored program, and will work closely with DHS in support of the CIP mission. The FBI will further facilitate InfraGard’s continuing role in CIP activities and further develop InfraGard’s ability to support the FBI’s investigative mission, especially as it pertains to counterterrorism and cyber crimes. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security Office of Infrastructure Protection are currently executing an InfraGard Partnership Program Plan under a Memorandum of Understanding signed in December 2007.

Current Washington Field Office (WFO) cleared InfraGard members are encouraged to register on the Cybercop ExtraNet Portal to validate your affiliation with this chapter.”

There are, of course, suggestions and support concepts available to the informant organization as per this statement: “The interests of InfraGard must be protected whenever presented to non-InfraGard members. Independent of the type of presentation, (interview, brief, or published documentation) the InfraGard leadership and the local FBI representative should be made aware of the upcoming presentation. The InfraGard member and the FBI representative should agree on the theme of the presentation. The identity of InfraGard members should be protected at all times.”

As of January 1, 2010, there are over 45,000 InfraGard informants organized in 86 chapters in each of the 50 states, operating under the supervision and control of local FBI agents Secretly, and not reported, are branches in foreign countries, to include Britain, France, Italy and Switzerland..

Given the proliferation of anti-government internet sites and the even larger proliferation of conspiracy stories (many the result of government disinfomation) a reader of the above material might well be expected to dismissed most of it as mere self-serving  bombast on the part of persons with a desperate need to be recognized. In response to these entirely legitimate observations, perhaps it should be noted that the italicized quotations above were taken directly from official sources and can be easily seen at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfraGard. This lengthy article, an official overview on a site well-known to be very friendly to governmental needs, is confirmation, not only of the existence of this informant organization but, to a historian, a terrifying parallel with the earlier, and very effective, Gestapo program.

Who are the volunteer informers spying on their co-workers, friends and neighbors? If a volunteer is approved by the FBI, they can join InfraGard but the FBI has put special emphasis on persons connected with the communications sector (to include computers and manufacturers and developers of computer-oriented software and equipment) which contains the major, and often minor, telecommunications firms, national, and international, credit reporting bureaus, the major American members of the national, and international, banking systems, the American credit card companies, American automobile manufacturers (who install GPS, or on-board vehicle tracking systems, in their products) Internet providers, (Internet II is owned and operated by the FBI) a significant number of American Evangelical religious organizations who are often over-eager in their efforts to inform on Unbelieving neighbors, friends and co-workers, the hotel and motel industry, the airlines (whose information base of Americans traveling is considered highly important) and even companies who sell boats and private aircraft. Also, and far more alarming, are a number of teachers, recruited into the service because of the often unsophisticated parental remarks small children can be provoked into repeating to the informant. But not all of these sources of information are the sole purview of the FBI. The question arises as to whether the FBI is alone in its intensive spying on the American public and the response unfortunately is that they are only part of the picture of growing, invasive domestic spying.  There has grown up in the United States, an enormous infrastructure of agencies designed solely to spy on the American public and a discussion of some of these might now be in order.

First, and foremost, there is the National Security Agency (NSA) Created by President Truman in 1952, during the Korean War, the NSA is charged with protecting the United States from foreign security threats. The agency was considered so secret that for years the government refused to even confirm its existence. Government insiders used to joke that NSA stood for “No Such Agency

Since early 1996, the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data voluntarily provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth,. The NSA also down-loads any and all information gleaned from its control, or penetration, of global communications satellites. In a word, the NSA can, and does, automatically record all overseas telephone conversations for all sources. It is the goal of the NSA to “create a database of every call ever made” by or to any American resident. To achieve this end, and it should be noted that Müller’s Gestapo had identical systems in place during the life of the Third Reich. This also includes bank transfer data, diplomatic traffic and other interesting information. The Bush administration used the NSA to spy on U.N. diplomats in New York before the invasion of Iraq..President Bush and other top officials in his administration used the National Security Agency to secretly wiretap the home and office telephones and monitor private email accounts of members of the United Nations Security Council in early 2003. As well as the diplomatically-secure UN, the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies — including the CIA and DIA — and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices.

AT&T , once the sole national provider of telephone service, merged with SBC and kept the AT&T name. Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T are the nation’s three biggest telecommunications companies; between them they provide local and wireless phone service to more than 200 million customers.

The three carriers control vast networks with the latest communications technologies. They provide an array of services: local and long-distance calling, wireless and high-speed broadband, including video. Their direct access to millions of homes and businesses has them uniquely positioned to help the government keep tabs on the calling habits of Americans.

Although under Section 222 of the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, telephone companies are prohibited from giving out information regarding their customers’ calling habits: violations of Federal law are quite acceptable, if carried out by official stool pigeons and with grateful acceptance. Also, all incoming calls, as well as wireless calls, are subject to being covered.

The financial penalties for violating Section 222, one of many privacy reinforcements that have been added to the law over the years, can be stiff. The Federal Communications Commission, the nation’s top telecommunications regulatory agency, can levy fines of up to $130,000 per day per violation, with a cap of $1.325 million per violation. The FCC has no hard definition of “violation.” In practice, that means a single “violation” could cover one customer or 1 million and the NSA has made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA. So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg.have proven to be gold mines of intimate secrets for the FBI. Although several lawsuits have been filed against these cooperating communication giants, they have all been quickly dismissed by cooperative Federal judged before they could get to the potentially dangerous discovery process whereby unwelcome information could become public

The Office of Terrorism Analysis[ supports the National Counterterrorism Center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.. Previously, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) oversaw the Intelligence Community, serving as the president’s principal intelligence advisor, additionally serving as head of the CIA. The DCI’s title now is “Director of the Central Intelligence Agency” (DCIA), serving as head of the CIA.

At the present time, the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence. Prior to the establishment of the DNI, the CIA reported to the President, with informational briefings to congressional committees. The National Security Advisor is a permanent member of the National Security Council, responsible for briefing the President with pertinent information collected by all US intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration, etc. All sixteen acknowledged Intelligence Community agencies (and five more whose names and activities are considered to be too secret to divulge) are under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence.

The National Clandestine Service (NCS) (formerly known as the Directorate of Operations) is the main United States intelligence agency for coordinating human intelligence (HUMINT) services. The organization absorbed the entirety of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s Directorate of Operations, and also coordinates HUMINT between the CIA and other agencies, including, but not limited to, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Diplomatic Security Service, Defense Intelligence Agency, Air Intelligence Agency, Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, and Office of Naval Intelligence. The current Director of the NCS is Michael Sulick. The Director of the NCS reports to the CIA Director.

The creation of the NCS was officially announced in a press release on 13 October 2005. The NCS was created by a bill from US Senator Pat Roberts in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The investigation by the 9/11 Commission reported that HUMINT had been severely degraded in the past two decades, principally because of the end of the Cold War and because of startling revelations about CIA operations uncovered by the investigations of the Church Committee of the US Senate.

The NCS has analogues in the National Security Agency (signals intelligence), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The National Security Service (NSS) within the Federal Bureau of Investigation was created June 29, 2005, by President George W. Bush through the Executive Order (EO) entitled “Blocking Property of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferators and Their Supporters.”

Gary M. Bald, Director

Philip Mudd, Deputy Director

The basis for the creation of a National Security Service is documented in the FBI paper “National Security: FBI or MI-5?” from the “Report of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Chapter 10: Intelligence at Home: The FBI, Justice, and Homeland Security, pp. 466-67, March 31, 2005.” The National Security Service “pulls together the Counterintelligence Division, the Counterterrorism Division, and the Directorate of Intelligence, enabling it to act together to develop intelligence and then to act on that intelligence, in consultation with not only Department of Justice but also the Director of National Intelligence (DNI).” June 29, 2005, DoJ Briefing Paper.

Also see: Memorandum: “Strengthening the Ability of the Department of Justice to Meet Challenges to the Security of the Nation,” White House, June 29, 2005.

TALON is the acronym for Threat and Local Observation Notice. “To track alleged ‘domestic terrorist threats against the military,’ the Pentagon is created a new database that contained raw, non-validated’ reports of anomalous activities within the United States Talon was intended to provide a means to gather and disseminate reports from volunteer ‘concerned citizens’

In 2002, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz “designated it as the DoD “standard for reporting suspicious activity.” The Department of Homeland Security, ever eager to enlarge it own domestic citizenry files, declared that; “ TALON as a template within the emerging Protect America homeland defense information sharing system.”

“Talon reports grew out of a program called Eagle Eyes, an anti-terrorist program established by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations that ‘enlists the eyes and ears of Air Force members and citizens in the war on terror,’ according to the program’s Web site. A Pentagon spokesman recently described Eagle Eyes as a ‘neighborhood watch’ program for military bases. The Air Force inspector general newsletter in 2003 said program informants include ‘Air Force family members, contractors, off-base merchants, community organizations and neighborhoods’,” Walter Pincus reported in the December 11, 2005, Washington Post.

In April 2007, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence requested that the Secretary of Defense terminate the TALON program because the results of the last year do not merit continuing the program as currently constituted, particularly in light of its image in the Congress and the media.

Operation TIPS, Terrorism Information and Prevention System, was a program designed at the specific order of  President George W. Bush to have United States citizens report suspicious activity on the part of their co-workers, neighbors and family members. US workers who had access to private citizens’ homes, such as cable installers and telephone repair workers, would be reporting on what was in people’s homes if it were deemed suspicious to them. A packet of what was deemed suspicious was to be supplied to each informer. (A copy of this is in the author’s possession and borders on the idiotic) The United States Postal Service, after at first supportive of the program, later resisted its personnel being included in this program, reasoning that if mail carriers became perceived as law enforcement personnel that they would be placed in danger at a level for which they could not reasonably be expected to be prepared, and that the downside of the program hence vastly outweighed any good that it could accomplish. The National Association of Letter Carriers, a postal labor union, was especially outspoken in its opposition. Although the TIPS program was officially cancelled in 2002, on June 30, 2008, the Denver Post reported that 181 individuals, including police officers, paramedics, firefighters, utility workers, and railroad employees had been trained as Terrorism Liaison Officers to report suspicious information which could be signs of terrorist activity and that while Congress had specifically forbidden its implementation, it was still very much active. The article also stated that TLOs were already active in six other states and the District of Columbia.

The final version of the anti-terrorism legislation, the ‘Uniting and Strengthening America By Providing Appropriate Tools Required To Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism’ (H.R. 3162, the “USA PATRIOT Act”) puts the Central Intelligence Agency back in the business of spying on Americans. It permits a vast array of information gathering on U.S. citizens from school records, financial transactions, Internet activity, telephone conversations, information gleaned from grand jury proceedings and criminal investigations to be shared with the CIA (and other non-law enforcement officials) even if it pertains to Americans. The information would be shared without a court order. The bill also gives the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, acting in his capacity as head of the Intelligence Community, enormous power to manage the collection and dissemination of intelligence information gathered in the U.S. This new authority supercedes existing guidelines issued to protect Americans from unwarranted surveillance by U.S. agencies such as the FBI.

Comment: A file containing the names, code names and addresses of over 75,000 current and past FBI informants in the United Dtates and Canada has somehow found its way out of the locked files of the FBI and is now circulating in various systems.

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

September 2, 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. 24

Date: Wednesday, July 17, 1996

Commenced: 9:20 AM CST

Concluded: !0:11 AM CST

RTC: Good day, Gregory.

GD: And a good day to you, too. How are you doing?

RTC: A decent day today. And you?

GD: Busy with the new Mueller book.

RTC: Anything of interest to me?

GD: No, probably not at this point. I am working on the real origins of the Second World War at this point. Not the he-said or they-said fictional crap and pap  but the real meat. Taylor 1  covered much of this in his book on the subject but there is more. I discuss the threat of Poland in 1932 to physically invade Germany if Hitler were not silenced. They moved troops to the borders but the threats gradually subsided. Hitler, on the other hand, did not forget this. And Beck, their foreign minister, was an idiot and could easily have diverted the German threat of aggression. But I look more into the economic aspect of the war. Germany lost all her gold reserves after the war because she had to pay everyone in sight for a war she did not start. Then the western states kept the corrupt Weimar government afloat with short-term and high-interest loans. Weimar was corrupt and degenerate but Germany was a great producer of saleable goods so she was encouraged to work more. All of this post-Wilsonian manipulation was directly responsible for the conditions that allowed Hitler to assume power. There were two things he did that assured eventual war with England and the United States. One, he instituted the barter system whereby Germany would trade, let us say, new locomotives to the Argentine in exchange for their beef and wheat. Normally, Germany would have gone to the London banking houses for a loan, high interest of course. Or the Argentine people would have done the same. The barter system completely bypassed them and they stood to lose billions of pounds thereby. And, do not forget, that the British bankers were almost all Jewish and there was on-gong anti-Semitism in Germany. It wasn’t Hitler’s aim, postwar bullshit pseudo-historians to the contrary, to kill off all the Jews. He only wanted to root them out of German society and force them to emigrate.

RTC: But to where? No one wanted any of them. Jews are not liked, you know.

GD: Nor trusted. Müller set up training schools so that Jews could learn farming and go to Palestine. Wonderful! The Arabs howled and so did the British. They did not want Jews there at all. Diplomatic representations were made and Ribbentrop ran to Hitler so the useful project was stopped. Then, Mueller told me he chartered the SS. St. Louis to take 900 Jews to Havana. Everything OK except that when Roosevelt found out about this, he forced the Cubans to cancel their landing permits. Isn’t that wonderful of him? And Roosevelt and Breckenridge Long did everything they could to keep Jewish Germans out of the country. Even little children. And parenthetically, note that in 1941, Roosevelt seized over two hundred million dollars in Jewish assets in this country and kept them. Never gave a penny back either. His son got some of it. Oh, all in the archives but believe me, Robert, not a word then, now or ever in our press. Can’t do that. It was all the evil Hitler, not Roosevelt.

RTC: You say that if Hitler were not such an anti-Semite, there might not have been a war?

GD: Hitler was institutionally anti-Semitic, Robert. You see, the Germans had always gotten along with their Jews who had been in the country for a long time. No, after Pilsudski, the same one who threatened to invade Germany in ’32, came to power in Poland, he forced out huge numbers of Polish Jews, most of whom fled either to Germany or the United States. The German Jews were Sephardic, Semitic and cultured but the Polish Jews were Khazars, Mongoloid Turks, brutal, nasty and detested by both the Polish and the Imperial Russians. I have met a few in situ and believe me, they are all vicious swine. So, they flooded into a prostrate Germany in the early ‘20s and stole everything they could. By the way, these so called eastern Jews were detested by the German ones. But these were the Jews that enraged their German hosts and brought down the active persecutions and expulsions.  Interesting to note that after the war when many of the Polish Jews were released from the detention camps, they tried to go back to Poland where they were promptly subjected to pogroms and wholesale death. No, they then went to Israel where they make up most of the population and now practice their filthiness on the defenseless Arabs. But that’s off the topic here. It was Hitler’s attitude towards the Jews coupled with the potentially lethal barter system that spelled his doom. The Jewish bankers both in Britain and here got together and started a huge propaganda campaign against the Germans and egged both Roosevelt and Churchill into making trouble.

RTC: But Churchill was not in power in the late ‘30s.

GD: I know but he had influence and wrote for the press. These bankers hired Winnie to front for them and whore that he was, he went right along with them.  You can find some of this in Fuller and the rest in other unnoticed publications but it’s all there. Marx was right when he discussed the economic backgrounds to major wars. Yes, Robert, make room for General Fuller in your library and you will have a much clearer view. Of course none of this will ever get into the American press because guess who owns it?

RTC: I well know, Gregory. But they work with us and I see no Don Quixote-like necessity to cut my own throat or that of the Company. The Jews have a great power in this country now and one does not attack them; one works with them if you take my drift.

GD: Oh, I understand fully. Do you like them, Robert?

RTC: Evil little rats, Gregory, treacherous, envious and dangerous in the extreme. I know this sounds terrible but even though I am well aware that Hitler never gassed them, he should have. All of them and then there would be peace. There will never be peace in the Middle East unless and until Israel grabs up all the useful Arab lands and expels them from the area the way they were expelled from Poland and Germany. Remember, Gregory, that the abused child becomes the abusing parent.  Send me the references on Fuller and I will send you a stack of papers on this subject. And if you choose to use them, for the Lord God’s sake, keep me out of it. The Jews would make my life miserable here.

GD: I know. They would insert a newly discovered chapter into the fake Ann Frank diaries all about you visiting Holland during the war and shoving plump Jewish babies into bonfires. By the way, all seriousness aside, I have discovered rare documents that at least partially supports the silly Holocaust stories. Would I bore you?

RTC: No, certainly not.

GD: In April of 1943, all the Jews of Europe were transported to Berlin and when there, were jammed into the Alexander Platz in Berlin. At the stroke of noon on April 20th, his birthday, Hitler came out onto his balcony and addressed an immense crowd of German Girl Scouts and school children. A cannon was fired and this huge army of girls, all armed with weenie forks, charged into the Alexander Platz and butchered at least thirty million screaming Jews. My God, the Swedish Ambassador wrote that huge raging rivers of blood roared down the Berlin streets, swamping cars and drowning thousands of Berliners before running into the Spee and Havel rivers. Ah, Robert, the truth is worse than the fictions. And the SS and Postal Employees barbecued the remains, after removing interesting tattoos for the lampshade makers, and Berlin feasted for weeks afterwards.

RTC: (Loud and prolonged laughter) Gregory, you are really a terrible person. You will kill me with these stories. No, I know it isn’t true. I mean I knew that when you mentioned the Postal employees.  If you ever told that story to a Jew, he would either beat you to death with his purse or literally explode with anger. Do tell that to Tom Kimmel, why don’t you? I would love to hear him when he rang me up, babbling about how psychotic you are. Or, better still, why not tell it to Wolfe?

GD: Oh, I think not. Bob is very old and getting senile and he might just melt down like the Wicked Witch of the West, leaving only a pair of sodden dignity pants and a beanie behind. No, I just thought you would like to hear what that nut Irving calls the Real Truth for once.

RTC: Well, such a nice history, lesson Gregory. The Hebrews should be happy you have a limited audience or they might get agitated.

GD: Pascal once said that to destroy a man, make a fool out of him. Humor is a great weapon and as I have said before when I tell my little stories, always look for the truth in the jest!

 

(Concluded at 10 :11 AM CST)

 

1    A.J.P. Taylor   March 25 1906 – September 7, 1990 was a renowned English historian of the 20th century. Taylor’s work, ‘The Origins of the Second World War’  conflicted with the official American and British scenarios but is considered by reliable historians as a landmark work on the subject.

 

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

Gene Shafer

Gene Shafer is a Buddhist and a massage therapist with “an extensive background in and understanding of holistic healing”. His specialty is something called Spiritually Guided Surgery, which is supposed to be an alternative kind of surgery without all the blood and sharp scalpels. How does it work? Well, Shafer’s answer to that question isn’t really an answer, but here we go: “Spiritually Guided Surgery is a holistic form of healing that works on bringing the body into balance,” whatever that might mean (Shafer doesn’t say much about what it means or what you should be looking for to determine whether a body is “in balance”), and is “best be summed up as: Healing from Spirit, through Spirit, to Spirit.” That claim requires an idiosyncratic interpretation of “best”, but OK: “Unlike other modalities of healing, where energy is generally transferred through the practitioner to the client, Spiritually Guided Surgery involves surgery in the 5th auric level, which is commonly called the Etheric Template. The Etheric Template then becomes the Etheric Aura, which in turn becomes the physical body.” Saying that X involvesY isn’t explaining what X is, but the purported explanation has greater problems than merely failing to really explain anything. Perhaps we are just struggling to tell the auric levels apart?

Apparently Shafer began his healing work after reading the book “Jin Shin Do The Acupressure Way to Health” and quickly ascended to becoming a Reiki practitioner at level two and ultimately a Reiki Master. In 1989 he also apparently became a Certified Massage Therapist in the USA. Who wouldn’t want a massage therapist who has read a self-help book on woo perform surgery on you (even if it’s on your aura)? Well, if you have concerns, Shafer can reassure you he doesn’t work alone, but that the spirits will help him out: The “Spirit entities” are “beings that are very interested in helping the human race at this time. Many are seeking to be able to help their Host humans as well as other humans through the Spiritually Guided Surgery Practitioner.” You can learn more about “who the Spirit Surgeons are” by paying for a “Spiritually Guided Surgery Workshop,” but he reveals some details to the rest of us for free: “The Spirit Surgeons appear to me as people.” (That, if true, should not exactly be trust-inducing.) “They work at the 5th level of the aura which is about 450 millimeters from your body. It is called the Etheric Template. A template is used to ‘help shape something accurately’ (Collins Concise Dictionary). The Surgeons create the template of what your body can become in order for you to be in balance. The Template then becomes the Etheric Aura. The Etheric Aura is that which is closest to your body. Which then becomes you. With the Spiritual Surgeons/Healers they work on your entire body.” He admits that he doesn’t completely understand what they are doing, however, but knows that “[t]he Spiritually Guided Surgeons themselves are continually learning how to improve their techniques.” And they can do almost anything: “The Spirit Surgeons can perform actual operations as would normally be performed in a hospital. With Spirit Surgeons doing the surgery there is: No Pain, No blood loss, No recovery time, most often instant results,” and they do so by “helping to bring organs, bones, joints to equilibrium. For instance a person with any of the following ailments, Thyroid problems, Cancers, Arthritis Aching joints, Migraines, low back pain, Knee pain can all get some to total relief.”

Also, if it doesn’t work, it is really because you didn’t try hard enough in the right way (as defined by Shafer based on whether the treatment worked or not).

Diagnosis: If you fall for this, there was probably little that exposure to critical thinking could have done for you in the first place. Probably harmless.

Rand Paul

He probably needs no introduction, but Rand Paul is in any case the junior United States Senator from Kentucky, serving since 2011. Son of Ron, Rand Paul’s main qualification for an entry here is the fact that he is one of DC’s most prominent antivaccine apologists (after Congressman Bill Posey). NowPaul is in fact arguably an MD (ophthalmologist), but he is also a member of the deranged crank organization the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which sort of negates any credentials he might (perhaps) have on paper.

With regard to vaccines, Paul has bought heavily into the antivaccine propaganda, claiming in 2011 that “I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.” There is, of course, no link between vaccines and “profound mental disorders”. In fact, Paul clarified his comment a few days later, saying that “I did not say vaccines caused disorders, just that they were temporally related … I support vaccines, I receive them myself and I had all of my children vaccinated.” Indeed, for all we know, Paul may, in fact, not believe that vaccines cause “profound mental disorders” (though the evidence is at best inconclusive and may have made the first comment just to appease the conspiracy theorists that tend to flock his events; it doesn’t matter – the mere willingness to cater to the antivaccine crowd in this manner makes you a serious loon. (In fact, the “temporal relation” claim is dubious, too.) In any case, Paul subsequently tried to frame his point, in typical antivaccine fashion, as a “health freedom” issue – what he opposes is really state- og government-mandated vaccines: “I think the parent should have some input. The state doesn’t own the children. Parents own the children.” Parents do not own their children. More recently, Paul has come out in support of conspiracy theorist and antivaxxer Michael Snyder’s run for Congress

An opponent of rights to health care, Paul has stated that a right to health care equals slavery for health care workers, since you would in that case “have a right to come to my house and conscript me” and “have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you.” This is not how having a right to something works, but the description may be instructive when it comes to understanding how Paul conceives of e.g. constitutionally enshrined rights. He seems to have some serious difficulties with ownership-slavery relations, to the extent that normal people should be a bit concerned about putting him in any position of power.

As you’d expect Paul has also voiced support for a number of crank wingnut conspiracy theories related to the North American Union, such as the NAFTA Superhighway and the Amero. He has also toyed with religiously motivated historical revisionism, including claiming that the US is a Christian nation whose laws must be based on the Bible; in fact, we wouldn’t need laws if everyone were Christian, said Paul, which is demonstrably idiotic unless intended – we suspect it is – as a no-true-Scotsman gambit. Like David Barton’s books, Paul’s books are riddled with fake “quotes” by the founding fathers to support his agenda.

On climate change, Paul’s position is that “while I do think that man may have a role in our climate, I think nature also has a role,” which is such a feeble attempt at waffling that it justifies chalking him up as a denialist. In 2011, Paul chastised President Obama – not BP – for BP’s handling of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill; apparently Obama’s criticism was “anti-business” and “un-American”. Then he thought that people should stop playing the blame game because shit just happens.

Diagnosis: Conspiracy theorist and, more significantly, conspiracy theorist enabler. And Paul has a significant following (even though he seems to lack his father’s charisma) and as such quite a bit of power to realize the deranged aims of such conspiracy theorists. Extremely dangerous.

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