TBR News December 10, 2018

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

Washington, D.C. December 10, 2018:” Prior to the event of printed, and later television, media, it was not difficult for the world’s power elites and the governments they controlled, to see that unwelcome and potentially dangerous information never reached the masses of people under their control. Most of the general public in more distant times were completely illiterate and received their news from their local priest or from occasional gossip from travellers. The admixture of kings, princes and clergy had an iron control over what their subject could, or could not hear. During the Middle Ages and even into the more liberal Renaissance, universities were viewed with suspicion and those who taught, or otherwise expressed, concepts that were anathama to the concept of feudalism were either killed outright in public or permanently banished. Too-liberal priests were silenced by similar methods. If Papal orders for silence were not followed, priests could, and were, put to the torch as an example for others to note.

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

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

The first method was to block or prevent the release of dangerous material by claiming that such material was a matter of important state security and as such, strictly controlled. This, they said, was not only for their own protection but also the somewhat vague but frightening concept of the security of their people.

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

The mainstream American media which theoretically was a balance against governmental corruption and abuses of power, quickly became little more than a mouthpiece for the same government they were supposed to report on. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, most American newspapers were little better than Rupert Mudoch’s modern tabloids, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing but during the First World War, President Wilson used the American entry into the First World War as an excuse for setting up controls over the American public. Aside from setting up government control over food distribution, the railroads, much industry involved in war production, he also established a powerful propganda machine coupled with a national informant system that guaranteed his personal control. In 1918, citing national security, Wilson arrested and imprisoned critical news reporters and threatened to shut down their papers.

Wilson was a wartime president and set clear precidents that resonated very loudely with those who read history and understood its realities.

During the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt, another wartime leader, was not as arrogant or highhanded as Wilson (whose empire fell apart after the end of the war that supported it) but he set up informational controls that exist to the present time. And after Roosevelt, and the war, passed into history, the government in the United States created a so-called cold war with Soviet Russia, instead of Hitler’s Germany, as the chief enemy. Control of the American media then fell into the hands of the newly-formed Central Intelligence Agency who eventually possessed an enormous, all-encompassing machine that clamped down firmly on the national print, and later television media, with an iron hand in a velvet glove. Media outlets that proved to be cooperative with CIA propaganda officials were rewarded for their loyalty and cooperation with valuable, and safe, news and the implication was that enemies of the state would either be subject to scorn and derision and that supporters of the state and its policies would receive praise and adulation.”

 

 

The Table of Contents 

• Meet the Bottomless Pinocchio, a new rating for a false claim repeated over and over again
• Top Democrats say Trump may face impeachment, jail over hush money
• The Guardian view on Donald Trump: the net closes
• John Kelly is just the latest victim of Trump’s dumpster fire of calamities
• ‘Yellow vest’ protests slow French economy, piling pressure on Macron
• Are You Ready To Fight a War Over Ukraine?
• Is Israel Turning a Blind Eye as Israeli Scammers Swindle Victims in France, US, Elsewhere?
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

 Meet the Bottomless Pinocchio, a new rating for a false claim repeated over and over again

December 10, 2018

by  Glenn Kessler The Fact Checker

The Washington Post

It was President Trump’s signature campaign promise: He would build a wall along the nation’s southern border, and Mexico would pay for it.

Shortly after becoming president, Trump dropped the Mexico part, turning to Congress for the funds instead. When that, too, failed — Congress earlier this year appropriated money for border security that could not be spent on an actual wall — Trump nevertheless declared victory: “We’ve started building our wall,” he said in a speech on March 29. “I’m so proud of it.”

Despite the facts, which have been cited numerous times by fact-checkers, Trump repeated his false assertion on an imaginary wall 86 times in the seven months before the midterm elections, according to a database of false and misleading claims maintained by The Post.

Trump’s willingness to constantly repeat false claims has posed a unique challenge to fact-checkers. Most politicians quickly drop a Four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging.

Not Trump. The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation.

To accurately reflect this phenomenon, The Washington Post Fact Checker is introducing a new category — the Bottomless Pinocchio. That dubious distinction will be awarded to politicians who repeat a false claim so many times that they are, in effect, engaging in campaigns of disinformation.

The bar for the Bottomless Pinocchio is high: The claims must have received three or four Pinocchios from The Fact Checker, and they must have been repeated at least 20 times. Twenty is a sufficiently robust number that there can be no question the politician is aware that his or her facts are wrong. The list of Bottomless Pinocchios will be maintained on its own landing page.

The Fact Checker has not identified statements from any other current elected official who meets the standard other than Trump. In fact, 14 statements made by the president immediately qualify for the list.

The president’s most-repeated falsehoods fall into a handful of broad categories — claiming credit for promises he has not fulfilled; false assertions that provide a rationale for his agenda; and political weaponry against perceived enemies such as Democrats or special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Some of Trump’s regular deceptions date from the start of his administration, such as his claim that the United States has spent $7 trillion in the Middle East (36 times) or that the United States pays for most of the cost of NATO (87 times). These were both statements that he made repeatedly when he campaigned for president and continues to make, despite having access to official budget data.

Another campaign claim that has carried into his presidency is the assertion that Democrats colluded with Russia during the election (48 times). This is obviously false, as the Democrats were the target of hacking by Russian entities, according to U.S. intelligence agencies. (The assertion, also spread widely by Trump allies in the conservative media, largely rests on the fact that the firm hired by Democrats to examine Trump’s Russia ties was also working to defend a Russian company in U.S. court.)

On 30 separate occasions, Trump has also falsely accused special counsel Mueller of having conflicts of interest and the staff led by the longtime Republican of being “angry Democrats.”

A good example of how objective reality does not appear to matter to the president is how he has framed his tax cut. When the administration’s tax plan was still in the planning stages, Trump spoke to the Independent Community Bankers Association on May 1, 2017, and made this claim, to applause: “We’re proposing one of the largest tax cuts in history, even larger than that of President Ronald Reagan. Our tax cut is bigger.”

He reinforced that statement later that day, with similar wording, in an interview with Bloomberg News.

From the start, it was a falsehood, as Reagan’s 1981 tax cut amounted to 2.9 percent of the overall U.S. economy — and nothing under consideration by Trump came close to that level. Trump’s tax cut was eventually crafted to be just under 1 percent of the economy, making it the eighth-largest tax cut in the past century.

Yet Trump has been undeterred by pesky fact checks showing he is wrong. He kept making the claim — 123 times before the midterm elections — and still says it. “We got the biggest tax cuts in history,” he told Chris Wallace of Fox News in his Nov. 18 interview.

Similarly, in June, the president hit upon a new label for the U.S. economy: It was the greatest, the best or the strongest in U.S. history. He liked the phrasing so much that he repeated a version of it every 1.5 days until the midterm elections, for a total of 99 times. The president can certainly brag about the state of the economy, but he runs into trouble when he repeatedly makes a play for the history books. By just about any important measure, the economy today is not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton — not to mention Ulysses S. Grant.

Trump has 40 times asserted that a wall was needed to stem the flow of drugs across the border — a claim that is contradicted the by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which says most illicit drugs come through legal points of entry. Traffickers conceal the drugs in hidden compartments within passenger cars or hide them alongside other legal cargo in tractor trailers and drive the illicit substances right into the United States. Meanwhile, Fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid, can be easily ordered online, even directly from China.

Some of Trump’s most repeated claims verge on the edge of fantasy. Thirty-seven times, he has asserted that U.S. Steel has announced that it is building new plants in response to his decision to impose steel tariffs. Depending on his mood, the number has ranged from six to nine plants, suggesting a bounty of jobs. But U.S. Steel made no such announcement. It merely stated that it would restart two blast furnaces at the company’s Granite City Works integrated plant in Illinois, creating 800 jobs. The company in August also said it would upgrade a plant in Gary, Ind., but without creating any new jobs.

Similarly, Trump has repeatedly inflated the gains from his 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia, upping the amount from $350 billion to $450 billion when he came under fire for defending the crown prince believed to have ordered the killing of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.

Separately, he also inflates the jobs said to be created, at one point offering a fanciful figure of 1 million. The Fact Checker obtained detailed spreadsheets of both the military and commercial agreements that showed a total of $267 billion in agreements; we determined that many were simply aspirational. Many of the purported investments are in Saudi Arabia, indicating few jobs would be created for Americans.

Other claims on the list include:

— that the administration has removed thousands and thousands of MS-13 members from the streets, either through deportation or prison. (The group is estimated to have only about 10,000 members).

— that he came just one vote short of repealing Obamacare. (Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) blocked a trimmed-down version, but the full plan was soundly defeated, and there was little consensus on a compromise version.)

— that the United States has “lost” billions of dollars on trade deficits. No economist would agree with that statement, but Trump has said some version of it 131 times.

— that the United States has the worst immigration laws in terms of keeping immigrants out. That’s simply not true. In fact, the United States has among the world’s most restrictive immigration laws.

One other Four-Pinocchio claim by Trump may soon make the list. Fifteen times, the president has claimed to audiences that the Uzbekistan-born man who in 2017 allegedly killed eight people with a pickup truck in New York brought in two dozen relatives to the United States through so-called “chain migration.” But Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov is not even a U.S. citizen, so the actual number is zero.

 

Top Democrats say Trump may face impeachment, jail over hush money

December 9, 2018

by Doina Chiacu

Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump could face impeachment and jail time if hush money payments reported by his former lawyer are proven to be campaign finance violations, Democratic lawmakers said on Sunday.

Court filings on Friday in cases that stemmed from a federal probe into Russian activities during the 2016 presidential election pointed to potential problem areas for Trump, including whether he instructed six-figure payments to two women during the campaign to keep quiet about affairs.

Federal prosecutors sought prison time for longtime Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen for paying off an adult film star and a former Playboy model at Trump’s behest, evading taxes and lying to Congress about a proposed Trump Organization building in Moscow.

If the payments are proven to be felony campaign finance violations, Democratic U.S. Representative Jerrold Nadler told CNN those would be grounds for impeachment.

“Well, they would be impeachable offenses. Whether they are important enough to justify an impeachment is a different question,” said Nadler, who will lead the Judiciary Committee when Democrats take control of the House of Representatives in January.

Under U.S. law, campaign contributions, defined as things of value given to a campaign to influence an election, must be disclosed. Such payments are also limited to $2,700 per person.

The White House did not immediately return a request for comment. Press secretary Sarah Sanders said on Friday that Cohen has lied repeatedly and that the filing was insignificant.

Friday’s court filings also revealed new information about contacts between people working for Trump and Russians in the cases of Cohen, Trump’s former longtime personal lawyer, and Paul Manafort, Trump’s short-lived campaign chairman who was convicted in August on tax and bank fraud charges.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller said Manafort lied to investigators about his interactions with a Russian tied to Russian intelligence services. Mueller’s office said the lying prompted prosecutors last week to retract a plea agreement with Manafort on two separate conspiracy charges.

“I think what these indictments and filings show is that the president was at the center of a massive fraud – several massive frauds – against the American people,” Nadler told CNN.

Mueller is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Moscow to sway the election. Russia denies interfering in the 2016 election and Trump has denied any collusion occurred.

The investigation has cast a shadow over Trump’s presidency, with its implication Moscow may have had a hand in his White House victory. The Republican president repeatedly has expressed his impatience with the probe that Mueller took over in March 2017, saying it was politically motivated.

PROSPECT OF JAIL TIME

Trump said the filings did not prove any collusion with Russia and called for an end to the investigation.

“Time for the Witch Hunt to END!” Trump said in a Twitter post on Saturday.

However, the end of the Mueller probe could be the beginning of bigger problems for Trump.

“There’s a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office the Justice Department may indict him, that he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time,” Representative Adam Schiff, the Democrat who will lead the House Intelligence Committee next year, told CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Legal experts are divided over whether a sitting president can be charged with a crime, as well as on whether a violation of campaign finance law would be an impeachable offense.

Republican Senator Rand Paul warned against over-criminalizing campaign finance violations, telling NBC’s “Meet the Press” that errors in disclosures should be punished with fines, not jail.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio told CNN he was waiting for the results of the Russia investigation and related federal probes. However, he cautioned that “no one should be above the law.”

Rubio said it would be a “terrible mistake” if Trump pardoned Manafort, saying that “could trigger a debate about whether the pardon powers should be amended.”

Trump has not ruled out a pardon for Manafort, praising him as a good man. In contrast, he has said Cohen, who has cooperated with federal prosecutors, should go to jail.

Schiff said Trump may end up needing to seek a pardon for himself from the next U.S. president. House Democrats have promised an array of investigations into Trump’s activities.

“What is clear also is that the Republican Congress absolutely tried to shield the president,” Nadler said. “The new Congress will not try to shield the president.”

Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Mary Milliken and Bill Berkrot

 

The Guardian view on Donald Trump: the net closes

Contempt and indignation, however deserved, won’t end the presidency of Donald Trump. What’s needed is the operation of the law. That may be coming closer

Editorial

December 9, 2018

The Guardian

That President Trump is an almost compulsive liar, a man who is incurious about the world except to the extent that it can satisfy his crude immediate desires, has been obvious since he first appeared in public life as a real estate huckster in New York City. To some extent these were the qualities, or the defects, that won him the presidency. They made him relatable to millions of angry and bewildered Americans in his role as a reality TV star. They also made him a useful tool for more intelligent and strategically minded players, from Vladimir Putin to the Koch brothers, who have consistently used him to advance their own agendas and to weaken the American state at home and abroad.

One of the great questions arising from his success has always been whether he will pay for his lies, or whether it is only the US – and the rest of the world – which must do so. The outlines of an answer became rather clearer last week with the progress of special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and the simultaneous inquiry by New York state prosecutors into the conduct of Mr Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, the man who once said he would “take a bullet” for Mr Trump, who paid him $500,000 a year for this devotion.

As the prosecutors closed in Mr Cohen discovered that his first loyalty, after all, was to his family. Despite this enlightenment, he is facing more than four years in jail for multiple counts of tax evasion, bank fraud, and his role in coordinating with the Trump campaign two substantial payoffs to women who claim to have had affairs with the president. He also lied to Congress, as he now admits, over the negotiations Mr Trump was conducting, during his campaign, to open a Trump tower in Moscow. Mr Trump’s first campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is already in jail and faces as much as 10 years there. Now he’s accused by Mr Mueller of lying even after making a plea bargain earlier this autumn, over offences mostly concerned with the fortune he made as the recipient of lobbying payments from Ukrainian oligarchs.

In other news, the president has sacked his chief of staff, John Kelly, who will leave at the end of this month. That can’t be for lack of ideological zeal: General Kelly was an outspoken defender of the policy of separating children from their parents at the Mexican border. But he was also regarded by the outside world as a restraining adult influence, and that has never been associated with success at the president’s court. An earlier supposed grownup, Rex Tillerson, spoke out this week for the first time since he was fired as secretary of state. “So often … I would have to say to him, Mr President I understand what you want to do but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law.” Mr Trump responded by calling Mr Tillerson, the former president of Exxon Mobil, “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell”. His most recent diplomatic appointment is Heather Nauert, a former newsreader from Fox News, to be ambassador to the UN. She may know more of foreign affairs than he does.

All these aspects of his character have been on display for years. There is no more damning evidence of the president’s ignorance and dishonesty, or of his abiding faith in the stupidity of his audience, than his own public speeches and tweets. Now his inadequacies of character and intellect are beginning to damage even his own supporters in ways that cannot be explained away. His erratic and impulsive pursuit of a trade war with China has destabilised stock markets around the world. How long will his party continue to protect him? Republican appointees are a majority on the supreme court. Twenty Republican senators would have to vote against him for an impeachment in the Senate to succeed. The most chilling aspect of the present situation is that his survival may, in the last analysis, depend on politics rather than the laws that he once swore in his oath of office to uphold.

 

John Kelly is just the latest victim of Trump’s dumpster fire of calamities

The chief of staff is fired or retired or whatever. The only certainty is that another enabler has been brutally tossed aside

December 9, 2018

by Richard Wolffe

The Guardian

It has been a busy few days for Donald Trump. A new attorney general here, a new UN ambassador there. All that legal stuff about his felonies in the 2016 election and “synergy” with the Russian government.

What’s a guy to do?

Fire someone, obviously. If there’s one thing Trump knows how to do, it’s pretending like he knows how to wield power in front of the gawking media. It worked pretty well on The Apprentice, projecting the image of power onto the boss of a small-time real-estate business with multiple bankruptcies.

But at this mid-life crisis stage of a catastrophically doomed presidency, there aren’t that many people worth firing anymore.

So it came to pass that John Kelly found himself dumped on the Trump sidewalk of history, a throwaway tidbit of news in a dumpster fire of calamities. Trump’s face-palming chief of staff was just another casualty of this president’s dismal need to destroy the reputations of those who come too close.

“John Kelly will be leaving,” he told reporters on the south lawn of the White House before flying off to see the Army v Navy football game.

“I don’t know if I can say ‘retiring,” he explained, slamming the door into Kelly’s back as he shoved him out of the West Wing. He couldn’t say retiring and he couldn’t say firing. Either way he said both, in passing, and without the man present to witness his own humiliation

Trump said his non-retiring chief of staff was “a great guy” but only managed to offer up this tepid testimonial to a former four-star Marines general who was the most important staffer in his White House: “He’s been with me almost two years now.”

As staff send-offs go, this was somewhere below a farewell cupcake but one notch above being frog-marched out.

It seemed like a fitting end to a week in which Trump had finally reached the 15th time when he finally looked presidential. This week’s episode in Trump Behaving Boringly featured a silent president sitting sullenly in the pews at the funeral for President George HW Bush. His claim to greatness was that he failed to projectile vomit through the proceedings, although at times it looked like he wanted to.

Until now, the working hypothesis about Trump’s constant media craving is that he’s engaged in some sophisticated game of distraction. As Robert Mueller’s investigations close in on the many criminal conspiracies surrounding his business affairs and the 2016 election, Trump needs to flash something bright and shiny to keep our attention away from his latest epic failure.

However, Kelly’s firing underscores a different motive. Trump is increasingly impotent with each passing week, with each new legal filing, with each new revelation of another former loyalist’s betrayal. He just lost the House to his arch-enemies in a political landslide, and a new era of investigations is almost upon him. Within weeks the fickle media’s attention will shift sharply to a sprawling cast of Democrats who want to push him out of the White House

If he can’t stop the investigations, can’t pass any legislation and can’t yet run for re-election, all he can do is cling to the impression of power. Shuffling his staff is just another arrangement of deckchairs aboard an ocean liner already heading towards the sea floor.

This explains Trump’s strange morning habit of revisiting the scenes of his favorite firings and ritual humiliations. Like the home-made shrine of a serial killer, Trump’s Twitter feed relives and repeats the moments of what feel to him like his greatest domination.

On Saturday it was Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut senator, who dared to call Trump “an unindicted co-conspirator” on national television. Trump responded by calling Blumenthal “Da Nang Dick”, an apparent reference to his Vietnam service at home in the Marine corps. Never mind that both of them contrived to get five deferments from serving on the battlefield.

On Sunday it was James Comey, the former FBI chief whom Trump fired for digging around all things Russian. “Leakin’ James Comey must have set a record for who lied the most to Congress in one day,” Trump tweeted. “His Friday testimony was so untruthful! This whole deal is a Rigged Fraud headed up by dishonest people who would do anything so that I could not become President. They are now exposed!”

Self-awareness is not among the most obvious traits of Donald J Trump. His personal fixer just pleaded guilty to lying to Congress to protect Donald J Trump, while prosecutors described his criminal role in secretly paying off porn stars in terms that sound remarkably like a “Rigged Fraud”.

Unlike Blumenthal and Comey, Trump has “no plans to humiliate” his chief of staff, according to Trump officials who obviously have no recollection of the many months of Trump’s open musings about firing Kelly.

In any case, Kelly – like so many others – has already humiliated himself by enabling an incompetent and autocratic president while pretending to restrain him. The self-made myths of Kelly and his delusional clan are that they were the last defense against Trump truly damaging the US and its national security.

As if there were no damage from the deaths of thousands of Americans in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, or the forced separation of several hundred infants from their parents at the southern border, or the presidential sympathy for neo-Nazis, or the destruction of jobs in a futile trade war with China, or the weakening of alliances in pursuit of Vladimir Putin’s approval. As far as we know, Kelly personally supported several of those approaches, especially draconian restrictions on immigration.

Trump may have no current plans to humiliate Kelly but sooner or later he’ll find he just can’t help himself. He called his last secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell”. This from a president who doesn’t read, spends his time tweeting about TV and just named a former Fox News anchor to be UN ambassador.

You have been warned, John Kelly. Trump’s mojo stopped working a long time ago, but he still thinks it works on you

 

‘Yellow vest’ protests slow French economy, piling pressure on Macron

December 10, 2018

by Richard Lough

Reuters

PARIS (Reuters) – The anti-government protests convulsing France will slow growth to close to a standstill in the final quarter, the central bank said on Monday, complicating President Emmanuel Macron’s task of finding concessions to placate the “yellow vest” movement.

The Bank of France on Monday forecast the euro zone’s number two economy would eke out growth of only 0.2 percent in the quarter from the previous three months, down from 0.4 percent in a previous estimate

Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire declined to give an estimate for 2018 growth but forecast the nationwide tumult would trim 0.1 percent of a point off of national output. His deputy projected growth would round out “closer to 1.5 percent”.

The slow-down will be worrisome for Macron, who faces huge pressure on the streets to make further cuts to taxes and social security costs to bolster household spending power, while keeping France’s budget deficit below a European Union cap.

The slowdown is a “reality for our businessmen, entrepreneurs, it’s the reality for those whose shops were vandalized, looted, in the most violent way,” Le Maire told RTL. “And it’s a reality too for our foreign investors.”

Police used tear gas, water canon and horses to charge protesters hurling projectiles, torching cars and ransacking some shops, though they encountered less violence than the previous Saturday, when the capital encountered its worst violence since the 1968 student uprising.

In a sign of the perceived heightened risk of holding French debt, French government bond yields rose on Monday, pushing the French/German 10-year bond spread to its widest since May, at around 46 basis points in early trade.

On the Paris bourse, airport operator ADP (ADP.PA) fell 1.0 percent, while retailers Carrefour (CARR.PA), Casino (CASP.PA) and FNAC Darty (FNAC.PA) shed between 1-1.6 percent. Hotels company Accor (ACCP.PA) initially traded down 0.7 percent before paring losses.

MACRON EMERGES INTO OPEN

Macron will meet union leaders and employers’ groups on Monday before he addresses the nation in the evening.

The president has drawn criticism for his silence in public over the violence in Paris – opponents accuse him of turning the Elysee Palace into a bunker. Ministers hope his address will placate the yellow vests, whose revolt poses the most formidable challenge to his 18-month administration to date.

“Our country is deeply divided, between those who see that globalization has benefited them and others who can’t make ends meet, who say … globalization is not an opportunity but a threat,” Le Maire told RTL.

“It is the president’s role to unify the country.”

The protests were born out of a backlash against the squeeze on the household budgets of hard-pressed middle class and blue-collar workers. But the movement has developed into a broader anti-Macron rebellion.

Mindful of France’s deficit and not wanting to flout EU rules, Macron will have limited room to meet the yellow vests demands for a higher minimum wage, lower taxes, cheaper energy, and better retirement provisions.

The government’s latest estimates are for a budget deficit of 2.8 percent in 2019, just below the EU’s 3 percent cap – a target Macron has cast as critical to meet to cement his reformist credentials.

Le Maire reiterated his desire to accelerate tax cuts but suggested he was not in favor of reinstating a tax on wealth — known as the ‘ISF’ — that Macron narrowed when he came into office, and which earned him the tag “president of the rich”.

“Does the ISF help reduce poverty, reduce our debts, reduce public spending? No. If you want to hunt for money, go knocking on the doors of digital  tech companies,” Le Maire said.

“It is time they paid a fair level of tax,” he said.

Reporting by Richard Lough; additional reporting by Leigh Thomas, Editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Angus MacSwan

 

 

Are You Ready To Fight a War Over Ukraine?

December 10, 2018

by Sheldon Richman

Tom Dispatch

Today, the United States and Allies conducted an extraordinary flight under the Open Skies Treaty. The timing of this flight is intended to reaffirm U.S. commitment to Ukraine and other partner nations.?

The United States is resolute in our support for the security of European nations.

– Department of Defense news release, Dec. 6, 2018

Who wants to go to war against Russia in defense of Ukraine over the Kerch Strait, which lies between the Black and Azov seas and between Russia’s Taman Peninsula and Russian-annexed Crimea?

A show of hands, please.

But careful: don’t misconstrue my question. I’m not asking who wants the “United States” to go to war. I’m asking, rather: who is personally willing to fight the Russian military over the strait? Or: who is willing to see his or her sons and daughters fight, kill, and die in that cause?

Now, again, a show of hands, please. Anyone? No one? I didn’t think so.

Who could blame you? Are Americans supposed to be eager to drop everything to go wherever the US government decides they should go to kill and die in its Nineteen Eighty-Four-ish geopolitical games? And short of fighting personally, must they pay the economic price – the taxes surrendered and opportunities forgone – that is required to maintain a military establishment capable of playing those games throughout the world?

What does individual freedom amount to if Americans are subject to a regime’s orders to enlist – one way or another – in whatever crusade that may catch the polite elite’s and commentariat’s fancy? Considering that Russia, like “us,” is a nuclear power, this is not hyperbole. American and Russian rulers, should they clash, wouldn’t have to intend to go nuclear. Accidents happen. Miscalculations born of bravado, brinkmanship, or mere uncertainty could not be ruled out.

All those pundits and politicians who are egging Donald Trump on to face down Vladimir Putin in his conflict with Ukraine are playing recklessly with the lives of Americans and many others. It’s damn serious business, so they’d better stop and think about what they’re doing before it’s too late.

True, in a week or two, we noninterventionists may look as though we overreacted to the Kerch Strait “crisis.” But who knows? Why take a chance? War would be a catastrophe, maybe the biggest the world has ever seen. I’d rather overreact now than regret not having said anything later.

The US government has no businesses policing relations between Ukraine and Russia. Even if that role were appropriate for some party, the US government would not be the one because it hardly has clean hands in the matter. Since the 1990s after the peaceful fall of the Soviet Union, Democratic and Republican presidents have threatened Russia by moving the anti-Soviet NATO alliance – which at the latest, should have ended with the fall – right up to Russia’s border, contrary to late President George H. W. Bush’s assurances, by incorporating former Soviet allies and republics.

Were the Russians supposed to assume that those obviously aggressive moves were benign? Or were they bound to see them as a systematic encroachment, an affront to their long-standing and not unreasonable security concerns? (Russia was invaded from the west three times in the last century.) You didn’t have to be a wise man like George Kennan to see NATO expansion in the post-Soviet era as “crazy.”

And let’s not forget that major foreign-policy players in the United States favor even more expansion to include, yes, former Soviet republics Ukraine and Georgia, both of which have provoked Russia in recent years while assuming the US government would back them up. If Ukraine were a member of NATO, the US could be treaty-bound to defend it.

Most relevantly, the Obama administration, with John Kerry running a State Department staffed with predecessor Hillary Clinton’s appointees, supported a coup in Kiev, in which neo-Nazis had a hand, that drove a democratically elected and Russia-friendly president from office. Spooked by this threatening move, Putin annexed Crimea, which had figured in Russia’s security architecture for hundreds of years. A NATO that included Crimea would have jeopardized Russia’s longtime Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol. The annexation had the support of most of the inhabitants of Crimea. (Yes, Crimea had been part of Ukraine, but of course Ukraine had been part of the Soviet Union.)

The US foreign-policy establishment likes to portray Trump as soft on Russia, but that’s a joke in light of what he has done. NATO has continued to expand under Trump, and he – unlike Barack Obama – has sent and plans to continue sending weapons to the Ukrainian government, which contains neo-Nazis and which is repressing the separatist-minded people of eastern Ukraine. (Candidate Trump’s opposition to arming Ukraine was once Exhibit A for those contending he was Putin’s lackey. Strangely, his change of heart apparently hasn’t altered that judgment.)

Now, with the Kerch Strait incident, the illiberal, martial-law-imposing president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, has done something that looks suspiciously like a provocation intended to shore up his sinking political fortunes and to keep the West agitated about the alleged Putin threat. (See Ted Galen Carpenter’s discussion “Ukraine Doesn’t Deserve America’s Blind Support.”) Poroshenko brazenly tried to send ships through the Kerch Strait without abiding by Russia’s declared procedures. As a result, ships were seized and some sailors injured. Did Poroshenko not know how Russia would react? Or did he want such a reaction?

Regardless of the merits of Poroshenko’s claims and even assuming Putin is up to no good, we must ask why this is something Americans should have to sweat over. Russia has an economy and military far smaller than America’s. It is no threat to Americans who simply want to live their lives free of government impositions. It’s also not a threat to Europe. Putin did not try to annex eastern Ukraine when he annexed Crimea. For one thing, it would be an economic burden that Russia is in no position to handle.

But Russia, like the United States, has lots of hydrogen bombs. But that means the threat to Americans comes, not from Russia, but from the US government, which is in a position to start a world war with Putin. Therefore, Trump should tell the New McCarthyite warmongers to keep quiet.

The foreign policy appropriate to a free society is nonintervention. These days, that’s more obvious than ever.

 

Is Israel Turning a Blind Eye as Israeli Scammers Swindle Victims in France, US, Elsewhere?

November 14, 2018

by Alison Weir

The Unz Review

Investigations reveal a pattern of Israeli officials stone-walling efforts to stop the perpetrators of massive financial swindles in various countries, from Europe to the US to the Philippines… While some Israeli reporters work to expose the scams, a new one is already underway

French and Israeli media report that a group largely made up of Israelis scammed 3,000 French citizens out of approximately $20 million. Most of the stolen money is in Israel, but Israeli authorities are reportedly failing to cooperate with France in prosecuting the scammers and retrieving the money.

This is the latest of numerous examples of Israeli officials stone-walling international efforts against the perpetrators of massive financial swindles around the world, according to Israeli investigative journalists and others. These scams have brought estimated billions into the Israeli economy, propping up a regime widely condemned for human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing against indigenous Palestinians. Together, the stories paint a picture of a government that seems to be turning a blind eye to – and even protecting – scammers.

A Finance Magnates analysis reports that one of the swindles alone has brought in over a billion dollars and employs 5,000 people. And a new scam, described below, may help what is predicted to be “the next major driver of the Israeli economy.”

A former IRS expert on international crime notes that “fraudulent industries are often major economic drivers, and that can translate into political clout.”

Some Israeli journalists have been working to expose the situation in Israeli newspapers, publishing exposés like “As Israel turns blind eye to vast binary options fraud, French investigators step in” and “Are French Jewish criminals using Israel as a get-out-of-jail card?” (Short answer: yes.)

Victimizing French business owners & churches

The victims of the recent scam against French citizens included churches and the owners of small businesses – delicatessens, car repair shops, hair salons, plumbers, etc. Some lost their life savings and describe being threatened and intimidated by the scammers.The masterminds of the scam reportedly were Antoine Ilan Frau (aka Ilan Frau) and Michael Nedjar, both of whom resided in Israel at the time. French police arrested the two at the Paris airport in 2016 as they were about to return to Israel. While they and 25 others were subsequently found guilty in a French court, other alleged co-conspirators have not yet been arrested and are believed to be in Israel.

The Times of Israel (TOI) reports that most of the money was channeled to Israel and has not yet been recovered. The newspaper reports that Israeli law enforcement authorities “have been unhelpful in enabling further investigation of the scam and in recovering the stolen funds.”

TOI, which obtained the full French verdict statement, reports: “In 200 pages of matter-of-fact legal prose, the verdict paints a picture of Israeli authorities unwilling to cooperate with their French counterparts.”

Another Times of Israel article reports: “The exact number of French citizens thought to be evading authorities in Israel is unknown, but France has sent to Israel at least 70 formal requests for judicial assistance with cases involving suspected fraud by dual nationals residing in the Jewish state.”

Below are some of the other Israeli-connected scams victimizing people around the world that observers accuse the Israeli government of largely ignoring.

Gilbert Chikli, “the world’s greatest con artist”

In 2016 Ha’aretz reported on an Israeli con artist named Gilbert Chikli, who boasts of pioneering a multi-million dollar scam that also targeted people in France. The New York Post has called him “the world’s greatest con artist.”

The scam targeted banks and business, cost French companies an estimated 7.9 million euros. Approximately 52 employees of the companies taken in by him were subsequently fired.

Despite French extradition requests, Ha’aretz reported in 2016 that Chikli “mysteriously remains a free man, living in luxury in his villa in a seaside Israeli city as French authorities try to bring him to justice over a massive con for which he was previously convicted.”

Although a French court sentenced Chikli to a seven-year prison sentence, Ha’aretz reported that instead of being incarcerated, Chikli was “hanging out at his private swimming pool.” Israeli officials refused to explain why Chikli was allowed to live freely in Israel.

Far from disputing the French conviction, Chikli bragged on Israeli TV about his technique: “You get off on it. Because you’re 5,000 kilometers from Paris with a telephone and a 100-euro calling card and you can make 10 million euros” [over $11 million].

Chikli boasted that he had a good life in Israel, where he dealt in real estate (in addition, it appears, to continuing his scams). He also made an estimated several thousand euros for “consultancy services” to a director who made a film based on Chikli’s story.

The film generated unprecedented attention in France, as it depicted “an Israeli-French underworld out of reach of French authorities,” in the words of TOI, “because of the complications in extraditing suspects from Israel.”

Chikli remained free in Israel from 2009 until he traveled to the Ukraine in 2017, where he and another Israeli (also wanted by French authorities) were finally arrested, and Chikli was extradited to France. He was jailed and indicted for an additional scam perpetrated while he was at large.

A French report states that during his time in Ukrainian detention, Chikli was “filmed drinking vodka in his cell, toasting his wealth, swearing never to return to France, and abusing the French judicial system.”

A French report states that during his time in Ukrainian detention, Chikli was “filmed drinking vodka in his cell, toasting his wealth, swearing never to return to France, and abusing the French judicial system.”

Binary Options brings in billion/year to Israel

Another international scam is Israel’s notorious binary options industry, which has brought in $10 billion a year. While the Israeli legislature made it illegal to sell the fraudulent options to Israelis, the Israeli legislature only belatedly (and partially) began to crack down on sales abroad. Millions of people around the world have been victimized by the scam, some committing suicide as a result.

An investigative report on the industry was aired on the French prime-time television magazine “Envoyé Spécial” in 2016: “La ruine à portée de clic” (“Financial ruin at the click of a mouse”). According to the report, tens of thousands of French citizens had been victimized by binary options and similar frauds.

The TV report calls Israel a “safe house” for fraudsters and shows undercover video of one of the Israeli call centers. Young French speakers — many of them new immigrants to Israel — are seen calling people in France and Europe, persuading them to “invest” in the scam. As they work to dupe people, the video shows employees dancing and laughing. When a bell rings announcing that they’ve succeeded and someone has given them money, they cheer.

Deborah Abitbol, a French-Israeli lawyer who acts on behalf of French forex and binary options victims, says that Israeli police “could raid these companies tomorrow if they wanted to… They could easily locate them and confiscate their computers.”

Abitbol points out: “These are the savings of people’s entire lives that are lost, gone with a click of a mouse. When you don’t have money left, the damage is irreparable.”

While Israeli law enforcement has sometimes gone after scammers, most often it seems to have left them alone.

A 2015 Israeli position paper by the Israel Securities Authority stated: “Our position is that a platform that solicits customers solely outside of Israel, and does not allow access to customers in Israel is not subject to the law, even if it is fully or partially run from Israel.”

Numerous people in Israel and abroad called for Israel to crack down on the call centers, but for years little was done. TOI reported that a senior Israeli police superintendent said that Israeli crime kingpins were behind the binary options industry and that “organized crime in the country had been massively enriched and strengthened.”

The scam caused ruin to people throughout the world, some committing suicide after their losses.

Finally, Israeli legislation against swindling people in other countries was finally proposed when the Israeli government became sufficiently worried that the scam was hurting Israel’s image abroad.

Notes on behalf of the proposed legislation warned that Israeli binary option companies risked damaging the country’s reputation and “could foment anti-Semitism.” The Israeli Knesset member who introduced the bill said: “We worry about the BDS movement. This industry has a huge impact on how Israel is viewed throughout the world.”

The Times of Israel reported that the legislation was catalyzed by an outcry “among overseas law enforcement agencies, with the FBI at the forefront, that Israel was allowing this ‘monstrous’ fraud to flourish year after year.”

Even that law, however, was watered down and seemed to leave the door wide open for continued swindles. Some charged that it would allow scammers to simply relocate and/or move into similar scams. The concern was merited.

A 2018 TOI article reports: “In the absence of effective law enforcement, Israel’s boiler room industries have proven resilient. Many have simply changed their product before or since the Knesset banned binary options and continued with business as usual.”

In June 2018 Israeli-operated boiler rooms in Asia and Eastern Europe were raided by local police. According to TOI, it was “one of hundreds of Israeli-run boiler rooms operating worldwide in a global plague that, to the mounting dismay and incomprehension of international law enforcement bodies, is being left unchecked by Israeli law enforcement.”

TOI reports: “Israeli law enforcement has yet to indict a single operative from an industry that has stolen billions.”

In absence of Israeli action, FBI steps in

Finally, the FBI announced in September 2017 that the U.S. was going to start going after binary options scammers. FBI agents arrested an Israeli CEO when she landed at JFK airport. The woman, Lee Elbaz of Yukom Communications, currently awaits trial in the U.S. for operations that are believed to have victimized thousands of people.

The Israeli police refused to answer TOI‘s questions about where Israeli law enforcement had been during the years that these actions had been perpetrated.

A few months later the FBI pursued additional suspects in Israel. An Israeli lawyer who represents victims of binary options fraud said that the FBI raids were “a direct result of Israel’s failure to enforce the law.”

The attorney told TOI that he had been trying for years to alert Israeli law enforcement to financial frauds, with no result:

“I provided the police with the names of the Israeli companies that are behind the binary options websites, the addresses in Israel of their offices, and the names of the Israelis behind these companies. At least once, I gave the police the phone number of a former employee who was willing to give evidence, and another time I gave the police concrete information on one of the main issues that the FBI is now investigating. As far as I know, the police have done nothing with all these complaints and information.”

In January FBI agents raided at least one Israeli company and questioned the owner of some other Israeli companies that are accused of targeting Americans. No further arrests seem to have yet been made.

While the Bureau would not comment on the raids, a former senior FBI official told TOIthat transnational organized crime networks are attracted to Israel because “they identify corruption and lax law enforcement.”

Israeli “Nigerian” scams

Some of the often inaccurately termed “Nigerian” scams have also been connected to Israel.

In 2010 seven Israelis were charged with scamming tens of millions of dollars from U.S. pensioners in a so-called “Nigerian scam,” according to Ha’aretz. Eventually, 12 Israelis were charged in the scheme to swindle elderly Americans.

The Israelis were extradited to the U.S., where the prosecutor described them as “a predatory group that targeted elderly people in the U.S., conning them into believing they were lottery winners. Preying on their victims’ dreams of financial comfort, [they] bilked them out of substantial portions of their life savings.”

According to the U.S. Attorney’s office:

“The defendants operated multiple boiler rooms that used the names of various sham law firms purportedly located in New York, including law firms named ‘Abrahams Kline,’ ‘Bernstein Schwartz,’ ‘Steiner, Van Allen, and Colt,’ ‘Bloomberg and Associates,” and ‘Meyer Stevens.’ The defendants further used various aliases and call forwarding telephone numbers to mask the fact that the defendants were located in Israel. The defendants also possessed bank accounts in Israel, Cyprus, and Uganda, to which illegal proceeds were wired.”

The ringleaders, Avi Ayache and Yaron Bar, were eventually convicted, and the U.S. prosecutor announced that they would “spend a substantial portion of their lives in prison.” Ayache was sentenced in 2014 to 13 years in prison and Bar to 12. Yet, prison records indicate the two were released the next year. Other members of the ring also appear to have been released after extraordinarily little time.

If these men did serve only a tiny portion of their U.S. sentences, as public records and phone calls and emails to the Bureau of Prisons indicate, this may be due to the fact that Israelis are allowed to be imprisoned in Israel instead of in the U.S. Their sentences then are determined by Israel and, as we will see below, are often far shorter than they would be in the U.S.

Gery Shalon – hundreds of millions of dollars

In 2015 Gery Shalon and two other Israelis were charged with utilizing hacked data for 100 million people to spam them with “pump and dump” penny stocks, netting hundreds of millions of dollars.

The money was then laundered through an illegal bitcoin exchange allegedly owned by Shalon (more on bitcoin below). Shalon was considered the ringleader of what U.S. prosecutors called a “sprawling criminal enterprise.” He faced decades behind bars.

However, he was instead given a plea deal in which he escaped any prison sentence whatsoever. Worth $2 billion, Shalon was to pay a $403 million fine.

Dov Engel – 5 million swindle

Israel has a history of shielding Israelis charged with crimes against Americans from U.S. penalties. Even when fraudsters are extradited to the U.S. and convicted of major crimes, they sometimes serve little time in prison.

In 2001 a Brooklyn businessman named Dov Engel fled to Israel in the face of criminal charges for a $115 million bank swindle that carried a potential sentence of 30 years in prison.

He was eventually extradited to the U.S., where Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Alonso called Engel’s scam “one of the most thoroughly corrupt operations I’ve seen as a white-collar crime prosecutor.”

A New York court convicted Engel of the charges, but he was not imprisoned in the U.S. because Israeli citizens were allowed to serve prison terms in Israel – under Israeli sentencing guidelines. This meant that Engel would only serve five years, at most, in prison; and Alonso predicted it would most likely be about two years. (Information doesn’t appear to be available about how much time Engel ended up serving in prison in Israel, if any.)

Engel was one of the first criminals to be extradited to the U.S. from Israel.

Before that time, Israel had often refused to extradite Americans who had fled to Israel to escape diverse criminal charges, including the dismemberment slaying of an American teen. Even in recent years, Israelis are often not extradited to the U.S. and other countries. In some cases, U.S. law enforcement officials don’t even bother to pursue this option.

Most recently, the Israeli who perpetrated 2,000 bomb threat hoaxes was tried in Israel instead of in the United States – even though most of his threats were against Americans, he held U.S. dual citizenship, and the FBI had been instrumental in finding him.

In the U.S. he would have potentially faced many decades in prison. While an Israeli court found the perpetrator, Michael Kadar, guilty in June 2018, there is no record that he has yet been sentenced. Kadar’s actions are reported to have earned him millions of shekels that he kept in a secret bitcoin account.

On to (non-existent) diamonds

In January, not long after Israel’s legislation against binary options, TOI published an exposé entitled: “Diamonds are a scammer’s best friend: Undeterred by the new binary options ban, Israel’s boiler rooms are doing brisk business. An ex-employee describes how his company shifted to hawking diamonds.”

It turns out that Israeli scammers were now “selling diamonds online and over the phone with promises of a healthy profit, though the promised profits, and even the existence of the stones themselves, are often a matter of conjecture.”

The article reports that this had become “an Israeli cottage industry, mainly involving French speakers.” France’s financial markets regulator, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AA June 2018 TOI article reports that experts have been touting cryptocurrency and blockchain as “the next major driver of the Israeli economy.”

This would be a highly questionable driver. As TOI reports, “It is unclear how much of the activity in this new high-tech field is legitimate, how much is mere hype, and how much is outright fraud perpetrated by malevolent actors, including transnational criminal organizations.”

In December, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) published an article announcing: “Bitcoin Fraud Could Be the Next Big Thing for Swindlers in Israel.” The article, published in Israel’s Jerusalem Post, reprted: “According to fraud experts, Israel is shaping up to be a hub for cryptocurrency swindling.”

“Fraudsters,” JTA said, “have begun to take advantage of a cryptocurrency bonanza with a variety of nefarious schemes.”

A former IRS special agent who focused on international fraud predicts that this will mushroom and that Israeli binary options swindlers will spearhead a “massive cryptocurrency fraud.”

AMF), blacklists about 80 diamond-sales websites, and it is believed that many have links to Israel.

One former binary options employee said the company he worked for had simply removed the old logo and replaced it with one for a diamond investment: “The offices, staff, computers all stayed in place.”

Once again, Israeli law enforcement seems lax. The employee said that his manager told salespeople: “We are accustomed to the Israeli justice system, and we know how to proceed.”

As successful as the diamond racket was, there were quickly plans to branch out to an even more lucrative racket. People interviewing for jobs at the company were told that while the diamond scam would continue for awhile longer, it was on its way out. The company had begun selling a new product: bitcoin.

Bitcoin: “The Next Big thing”

An Israeli expert who helps victims of financial scams says: “More or less every binary options company we know of now has a cryptocurrency platform as well. I’m already getting calls from victims, but most people have yet to even realize they’ve been defrauded.”

An Israeli analyst on threat intelligence reports that “not a day goes by without our hearing about a new ICO [initial coin offering] scam or mining attack.” On November 8th, Ha’aretz reported: “Despite complaints to the authorities, users haven’t been warned about cybercriminals who swindle sellers of bitcoin using popular payment apps.”

According to Tel Aviv University Economics professor Neil Gandal, “It’s possible for a small number of actors to manipulate things,” TOI reports. Gandel says that Bitcoin’s first major price spike was likely caused by a single person, and a recent University of Texas paper found that Bitcoin’s more recent price spike was also caused by price manipulation.

TOI reports: “Thousands of Israeli binary options operatives have been looking for new work, and the cryptocurrency field, with its lack of regulation, potential for easy money and libertarian ethos, is a magnet for such individuals.”

According to TOI, “Experts estimate that there are more than 100 fraudulent forex, CFDs, cryptocurrency, insurance, locksmith and Green Card lottery boiler rooms in the country.”

There have been massive demonstrations in Israel against corruption at high levels of government, and two police probes have targeted Prime Minister Netanyahu. A reformer warned of “a foul tsunami rising up in an ocean of corruption that threatens to drown the state of Israel. This is organized crime; crime families and Israeli mafia who are gaining control of local government and from there gradually taking over the central government and the nerve centers of Israeli society.”

In December, the Israeli legislature proposed regulation to ban companies trading in bitcoin from operating on the Tel Aviv stock exchange, suggesting that Israeli citizens will eventually be protected from the scam, as they were from binary options swindlers.

However, It is not known when or if Israel will take action against Israeli cryptocurrency scams that target people in other countries.

For now, events create an impression that the Israeli government is tolerating, and thus perhaps even tacitly encouraging, financial swindles that originate within its borders and devastate individual savings and lives around the world.

The fact that the U.S. government gives Israel over $10 million per day, and that this is about to go even higher, doesn’t seem to protect Americans from being targeted by Israeli financial rackets.A

For how much longer?

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

December 10, 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. 78

Date:  Monday, March 31, 1997

Commenced: 9:12 AM CST

Concluded: 9:28 AM CST

 

GD: I have been trying to work up an article on the BCCI and thought, Robert, you might have some knowledge of it, seeing as Corson told me you knew about them.

RTC: Bill has a motor mouth but yes, I know about them. What are you looking for?

GD: There has been quite a bit of comment on and off in the press about this and, as I said, Bill commented on this.

RTC: Well, BCCI was, is, a Paki bank, set up by a high-rolling con man and fraud expert named Abedi. We had connections with him and some of his people and he was willing to help us fund the anti-Russian rebels in Afghanistan but off the books. Critchfield had a hand in all of this gun business as you know. These people were a farce, setting up all kinds of off shore banks and basicially, it was nothing but a Ponzi scheme but one that we got into and were able to shut up a number of trouble makers along the way. And the Abedi people had connections with the Paki ISI…

GD: Pardon?

RTC: Called the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. A Limey set it up at the time the Pakis broke off from India in the late ‘40s,. They basicially were the power behind the throne in Pakistan…ran everything, took huge bribes from us on one hand and the Russians on the other. Typical bunch of worthless raghead scum. Never turn you back on any of them,, ever, Gregory, or you get a knife in it. My, what a game that turned out to be. We had such a stake in all of that mess that we had to make sure it was kept quiet, at least until we managed to get Ivan out of Afghanistan. Oh yes, there were complaints because the BCCI people were not only outright frauds but very obvious to the legitimate bankers here. Oh, a nice conversation there and someone falling off a cliff there but these greedy crooks just got too much hubris and finally it began to unravel. You must have read about this. F. Lee Bailey was a front for them and God knows how many throughly rotten Congressmen, regulatory people and so on were on the take. I mean there was so much bribe money flowing out of those people you couldn’t wonder how high it went. They dragged old Clark Clifford into it and others. Of course Clark has a great opinion of himself and had no problem taking money for his services.

GD: And your people?

RTC: I have pounds of filched files on this. Poor Trento thinks he’s going to get them and write a Pulitizer Prise winner out of it. I ought to send them to you. Would you like that?

GD: And have Paki assassins lurking on my front porch, cunningly disguised as piles of dog droppings? Probably not…although…

RTC: Well, Trento is far too stupid to know what to do with them so if I don’t send them to you, I might burn them. Emily shouldn’t have to deal with it when I’m gone and Greg…my son, not you…wouldn’t have a clue. Yes, I can send them to you and you can do what you want with them. My God, Gregory, billions of dollars in taxpayers funds lining pockets from here to Karachi.

GD: Critchfield?

RTC: Among others…but not me. Jim made so much money from the rag heads that I’m surprised he didn’t buy the Capitol as a barn for his stupid horses.

GD: And Atwood…

RTC: Small potatoes. The roster of the anointed reads like the Washington social calendar. Senator this and Director that.

GD: Kimmel?
RTC: Oh, God, no, not Dudley Doright. And don’t mention any of this to him. He wouldn’t have the fantest idea what to do with it and if he tried, he would join brother Colby in the boneyard. I tell you, Gregory, when we started the Company in ’48, believe it or not, we were a bunch of idealists. Of course the Cold War was a fake but we were really interested in fucking up old Joe Stalin and also thwarting the liberal kikes inside the Beltway. Still, idealists at heart. The thievery started later. Gregory, put a poorish man in a room full of gold coins and a few will stick to his feet. Sometimes more than a few. I ran the CIA’s business section and believe me, it was a wonderful rerlationship with the latter-day robber barons. The slide rule Shylocks. I rather like you, Gregory and if I gave you come of the papers I collected, you would either die or become very, very rich. I think they call it blackmail.

GD: One has to be careful what that, Robert. For instance, you tell me Angleton was in with the mob…

RTC: And the kikes too, don’t forget that. I really liked and admired Jim but…

GD: Yes. That’s like having a best friend from collegs who pimps autistic children to fat old men,

RTC: Yes, more or less but Jim had terrible friends. They got more out of him than he ever got out of them, let me advise you.

GD: I got the better of a Jew once and I thought the bugger would explode. On the other hand, I would never try to get the better of a Mafioso. I’ve known a few and I get on fine with them but try to screw them? I think not. Well, most of them have a really well developed sense of honor and the Jews do not. And they hate the Jews.

RTC: But Lansky…

GD: An exception. There is always an exception. Well, I might take some of your background material on the BCCI people if you have it to hand and it isn’t too much trouble. I always thought Clark Clifford was a triple plated phoney anyway. Him and Alan Cranston.

RTC: Agreed but why stop there?

GD: I’d be on this call for three days straight, just reading off the names. Isn’t America blessed to have to many thieves that get away with it?

RTC: Well, if you steal a dollar, you are a thief but if you steal ten million, you are a financier.

RTC: Or a Republican.

 

(Concluded at 9:28 AM CST)