TBR News July 2, 2011

Jul 02 2011

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. July 1, 2011: “We have been writing about MERS, the Federal mortgage agency, and the unpleasant truth that because of peculations, deliberate and accidental, the bulk of MERS’s 70 million American mortgages are so sliced and diced that property owners can never, ever find out who actually holds there title and therefore, can never get clear title when the mortgage is paid off.

I have obtained an official U.S. government agency investigative file on the man behind what is one of the largest swindles in history, passing even his friend and co-religionist Bernie Madoff. This man helped organize the Mozillo Countrywide mortgage scams of a few years back in which many, many false credit reports were deliberately made by Mozillo’s co workers to enable people with no credit and little income to buy houses. The falsified mortgages were then packaged, like sausage, and sold by the bigger banks overseas. The man behind this is one Alan G. Shapiro and I am going to pass along some information about Alan.

Bernie got off with 65 billion, only some of which was recovered but Alan got off with nearly 200 billion, not one cent of which can ever be recovered because, like Bernie, he put his loot into Israeli banks and lending establishments from whence it will never return.

Here is some information on Alan for you:

The Shapiro’s family are Lithuanian, Orthodox Jewish, from Wilno and originally named Speyer. His father, Chaim, a rabbi , fled Lithuania in January of 1939 and went to Stockholm. While in Sweden, Chaim married Esther Domeratsky at Viborg on February 17, 1941. The family emigrated to Israel in September of 1949

Alan was born on September 8, 1958, in Tel Aviv and emigrated to the United States, through Canada,in August of 1979. Alan was a supporter of the Israeli think tank, JINSA. the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs

Shapiro has been closely associated with the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidics, who follow the Qabala and hold very extremist and insulting views of non-Jews.

Shapiro was taught colloquial English as a child and when he was finished with his obligatory IDF service, he came to the United States to find his fortune and better serve his employers, the Israeli government and people. In due time, Alan became connected with a number of the Hebraic Illuminati in and around Washington, an area that has proven to be of rich pickings for some. At one period or another, Alan was:

·        An associate of William Kristol who published the Weekly Standard, a Rupert Murdoch-financed magazine that promotes the neocon credo a must-read in Cheney’s office.

·        Was a member of the Defense Department’s National Security Study Group, at the Pentagon

·        Worked closely with the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a Washington-based Israeli outfit which distributed articles translated from Arabic newspapers portraying Arabs in a bad light

·        Worked even more closely with top members of the Bradley Foundation, one of the largest and most influential right-wing organizations in America. It set up the PNAC led by William Kristol

·        Was heavily involved with Israeli think tank ‘The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA)’ and worked very closely with the Israeli Embassy out of 3514 International Dr NW, Washington, DC 20008, dealing with a Lev Aedelstein, later identified as a senior Mossad operative

·         At one point in his career as a more successful Jonathan Pollard, Shapiro received both Top Secret-SCI (sensitive compartmented information) and Top Secret “NATO/COSMIC” security clearances.

·        And while reaping what other had sown, Alan also worked closely with Angelo Mozilla, head of Countrywide Mortgage which specialized in falsified credit backed mortgages. Countrywide was founded in 1969 as Countrywide Credit Industries

·        Alan G. Shapiro has often been confused with another Alan who owns TAG Inc. of Orange County, CA, Threat Assessment Group designed  to prevents workplace violence. The latter Alan has nothing to do with his namesake.

Madoff founded the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC in 1960, and was its chairman until his arrest on December 11, 2008. The Madoff family gained access to Washington’s lawmakers and regulators through the industry’s top trade group.

The Madoff family had long-standing, high-level ties to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), the primary securities industry organization. Bernard Madoff sat on the Board of Directors of the Securities Industry Association, which merged with the Bond Market Association in 2006 to form SIFMA. Former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt has estimated the actual net fraud to be between $10 and $17 billion. Erin Arvedlund, who publicly questioned Madoff’s reported investment performance in 2001, stated that the actual amount of the fraud will never be known, but is likely between $40 and $70 billion.

DHS investigations, based on computer searches conducted from their Frenso, California office, indicated that money stolen by Madoff has been traced directly to: Union Bank of Israel Ltd, Bank Massad Ltd, Leumi Mortgage Bank Ltd, Total Money International Ltd. Hadar Weitzman Group.

Bernie, like Alan, stole billions but the American authorities were never able to ascertain where much of the stolen money went. The U.S. investigative agencies strongly believed that all of it was safe in Israeli banks but could never figure out how the stolen m money got there. All banking wire transactions are automatically reported and the transfer of so much money would be easy to spot. What both Bernie and Alan did was to buy gold. They bought bar gold and coins with their money because, unlike paper money, gold will keep its value. And how did they get such enormous weights of gold to Israel? On a plane? No, in the hold of Alan’s yacht. His yacht, once called ‘The Polar Queen’ is large enough to carry all the gold in Ft. Knox across the Atlantic and in great comfort for her passengers. Here we include some technical information from the company(s) who built the yacht

“Offering the highest degree of luxury, PJ World is a unique 82m Ice Class  super yacht capable of traversing the most remote regions in the most challenging conditions.

Rolls Royce Marine and Palmer Johnson Norway have introduced a revolutionary approach whereby the vessel’s design is optimized to its operational profile ensuring a multitude of benefits. Peak performance, endurance, reliability, low ownership costs and maintenance efficiency have been the prime focus throughout the design process. Furthermore, her exceptional ‘Clean Design’ offers a host of environmentally conscious features which are beneficial to both cost and performance.

PJ World’s opulent interior and exterior layout features a fully equipped gym with spa, cinema, swimming pool, a heli aft-deck and an owner’s suite on the fifth deck with a breathtaking panoramic ocean view. Redefining the exploration-style vessel, PJ World breaks all boundaries.”…

And once the Mozilla scheme collapsed and the Bank of American rushed to buy up his Countrywide Mortgage company, Alan took quiet leave of his many friends and co-religionists in Washington and sailed into the sunrise. Is he now living in Israel, untouched and untouchable? No, Alan, untouchable because of his threats to expose half of Washington for various high crimes and misdemeanors, is now living in France. He lives in a beautiful villa located at Villefranch-sur-Mer near Nice on the Mediterranean French Rivera. The harbor there is big enough to take his yacht, now registered outside the United States, and Alan is thoroughly enjoying the loot he ripped off from millions of hard-working Americans. They were looking for the American Dream but Alan found it. And like the Bank of America said to Obama’s office when the bank learned that a DoJ investigation into their mortgage frauds was being planned, Alan said that if he went down, they all would go down. Isn’t the silence something to notice?”

TSA Abuses: Seeing the Forest and the Trees

June 30, 2011

by Anthony Gregory

The Transportation Security Administration is finally getting some of the bad publicity it deserves. We read about an elderly woman forced to remove her adult diaper to go through the screening process. We learn about a mentally disabled passenger deprived of his harmless toy by a sadistic policy, if not sadistic TSA agents. We see pictures of women and little children being felt up, all the while Americans stand by, seemingly helpless to do anything about such humiliations. A whole country has been conditioned to these summary body scans and pat downs, these invasions of bodily integrity that would have unlikely been tolerated in the era before 9/11, a memory that grows dimmer by the day.

Under Obama, conservatives once again pose as advocates of liberty, increasingly expressing outrage about TSA abuses. They are right to be angry. We could ask where they were almost ten years ago when their president, George W. Bush, oversaw the creation of this national monstrosity. More to the point, we should note that their critique hardly goes far enough and is somewhat misdirected.

The conservatives complain that grandmas and helpless children are being abused, and instead the TSA should pursue a more “common sense” policy that streamlines unthreatening people through a less-invasive process. Those who obviously don’t “look like a terrorist” shouldn’t be molested. Sounds good. But what many of them mean is that we need racial profiling, and that Arabs, Muslims, and those from questionable nations should undergo extra scrutiny. Yet this too is objectionable and absurd. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of such people fly in America regularly, and only an infinitesimal fraction are any threat. Why should the government subject innocent Arabs and Muslims to indignities and unreasonable searches without due process? On the other hand, British citizen Richard Reid, the attempted “shoebomber” of December 2001, didn’t look like a “typical” terrorist. He was of European and Jamaican descent. TSA agents are simply not equipped to discern who is a threat from who is not, and they never will be. There is no way to guarantee the total security conservatives have spent a decade demanding while preserving the liberty of everyday Americans.

The liberals are even more disgraceful. They spoke up for civil liberties under Bush, decrying the No-Fly list and other such depredations. Now many of them, suspicious of the conservative TSA critics, defend this terrible agency created by Bush and made worse under Obama. They even cheer as TSA agents vote to unionize, as though better compensating these federal employees or making them even harder to fire should be on the top-ten-thousand list of priorities for any humanitarian, as the left claims to be. Even worse, many left-liberals have denied that these screening procedures are intolerably invasive. Some have said those on the No-Fly list should be barred from gun ownership. The same liberals who fret about big business’s threats to the environment and consumer safety defend the TSA full-body-scanner, insisting the health risks are a total fantasy.

In March, USA Today reported that the TSA “would retest every full-body X-ray scanner that emits ionizing radiation — 247 machines at 38 airports — after maintenance records on some of the devices showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected.” The same government that many Americans trust to protect their health didn’t even bother to accurately test within an order of magnitude the radiation levels of its equipment before irradiating many millions of Americans and foreigners. And why should anyone be subjected to this risk, no matter how small? Ah yes, for the privilege to fly.

Some will say that this is simply the price we pay for security, but that is a complete illusion. According to ABC reporting last December, TSA diagnostics to determine how many weapons could be snuck past security found that some major airports had a failure rate of 70% and at some airports, “every test gun, bomb part or knife got past screeners.” Nothing has improved since college student Nathaniel Heatwole snuck weapons onto a plane at Baltimore-Washington International Airport back in September 2003 and then emailed his story to the TSA, which took five weeks to find the contraband. A flustered top TSA official insisted, “Amateur testing of our [security] systems do not show us in any way our flaws.  We know where the vulnerabilities are and we are testing them.” Eight years later, have they addressed these vulnerabilities? A determined terrorist, needless to say, could easily infiltrate a plane with weapons.

No wonder that when terrorists are stopped in their tracks — the shoebomber of 2001 and the underwear bomber of 2009, for example — they were frustrated by the private sector, flight crew and customers, and not by TSA. This has happened without major casualties inflicted on the innocent — unlike the case of Rigoberto Alpizar who in December 2005 was shot multiple times on a Miami runway by two Air Marshalls, who claimed the man had cried out he had a bomb, something none of the passengers corroborated. Moreover, when people actually stop a terrorist incident, it has nothing to do with mass invasions of the personal privacy of millions of airline customers.

Airlines have every reason to protect their property and their customers, which means private security — not as it was before 9/11, overseen by the FAA, but truly, completely private security — is the answer. (The recent resignation of the major FAA official due to the scandalous tendency of his air traffic controllers to be caught sleeping on the job indicates just how indispensible and crucial that agency is.)

In a free market for security, some airlines might have detailed screening processes. Others might allow guns on planes — another defensive approach that has been completely neglected. Whether airlines profile or not will be up to them, but customers will demand security without violations of their dignity, and the private sector, unlike government, has all the incentives to deliver on both fronts.

The myopic focus on planes is questionable to begin with. What about other, similarly vulnerable, public locations? Will they come to mirror the authoritarian atmosphere of the airports? The TSA has already terrorized Amtrak passengers and has its eyes set on other ground transportation — is this really the direction we want this country to go? Recently the agency was even involved at securing a high school prom.

The missing fact in most of the controversy is that TSA is neither truly designed nor institutionally structured to protect us. We are not really surrendering our gels, forgoing our bottled water, or taking off our shoes for our own good. That’s all a ruse. The TSA is an agency whose function, if not intended purpose, is to condition obedience and subservience into the population. It is an arm of the federal police state and cannot be reformed into anything else. It must be abolished totally and nothing short of that will bring liberty back to air travel.

Even more fundamentally, the media and talking heads — certainly the conservative opponents of TSA — forget why we have a terrorist threat, such as it is, in the first place: Because the U.S. government is waging imperial wars abroad, slaughtering children, propping up corrupt regimes, overthrowing governments, playing geopolitical favorites, cutting people off of international trade, and generally behaving as the biggest bully in the world. The blowback terrorism that results can never be stamped out so long as the wars continue. Those who criticize the TSA but defend the wars, and those who defend the TSA but question the wars, should recognize they are two sides of the same imperial coin. The same statism behind the degradation of domestic passengers is in play in the dehumanization of foreign civilians bombed from the sky. Washington, D.C., sees itself as master of our lives and ruler of the world. So long as we accept its pretensions to control the planet, we will be treated as imperial subjects are always treated: as mere cogs in the machine, disposable and malleable human livestock, at the very best.

Anthony Gregory is a research analyst at the Independent Institute, a policy adviser for the Future of Freedom Foundation, and a columnist at LewRockwell.com. Anthony’s website is AnthonyGregory.com. Send him email

The Freak-out Follies

As we previously noted, there has been a notable increase in flash mob violence and criminality. Part of this may be a reflection of the economy, but a Chicago alderman, quoted below, says adults are organizing teens for these incidents. It is interesting, and typical of the era, to note that all of the thieves herein listed were black youths and were being egged on by postings on personal sites. “Youths” sounds so much more polite, doesn’t it? Or perhaps ‘Muslims’?

CBS News – The latest crime mob occurred on June 7, 2011 in Chicago. According to a local NBC affiliate in Chicago, as many as 15 teens stormed Chicago Transit Authority buses in two separate events. The mob attacked their victims and darted off with electronic devices, authorities said Tuesday. Five teens have been brought to justice. . . In cities like the aforementioned Chicago, as well as Venice Beach and Washington D.C. groups of young adults have been uniting in order to commit robberies. . . 20 male teens reportedly walked into the G-Star Raw store and took the designer clothes and walked out. It was caught on surveillance, on April 25, 2011 in Washington D.C. Authorities believe the group organized through text message.

CTA Tattler – Chicago police and Streeterville universities are warning residents and passers-by to be aware of traveling mobs of teenagers who use the CTA and cell phones to meet up in the Near North Side area and commit crimes ranging from assaults to shoplifting and general mayhem. Police arrested seven young men in their mid-to-late teen Saturday night on “mob action” charges after about two dozen men attacked a person parking his scooter in the 300 block of E. Chicago Avenue across from Northwestern University’s Wieboldt Hall, according to a Tribune news report. .. . A group of 70 youths storming a McDonald’s at Chicago and State and creating a disturbance that forced the restaurant to close for three hours.

Robert Klein Engler, American Thinker – In the United States, in 2009 and 2010, the city of Philadelphia experienced a wave of flash mobs that either started with the intent or led to the destruction of private property, rioting, violence, and personal injury. …

Star Tribune, MN – About 30 to 40 youths dashed into a Holiday gas station on St. Paul’s West Side Saturday night, snatched up dozens of juice bottles, candy, chips and other junk food and took off without paying. Minutes later, two men were shot less than a mile away. In September, about 20 juveniles shoplifted at a BP convenience store on Lexington Parkway as a cashier was punched in the face several times. Police used surveillance video from the store to charge several teenagers with offenses from first-degree aggravated robbery to third-degree riot to theft.

Chicago Sun Times – Alderman Brendan Reilly (42nd) described it as a “new brand of retail theft” that’s highly coordinated by adult criminals who recruit juveniles to do their dirty work. “You have large groups of kids ­ 15, 20 at a time ­ running into a store all at once. They mull around for a few minutes, find the items on their lists and, when a code word is yelled or texted to them, they head for different exits, knowing retail security can’t catch everybody,” Reilly said.

“It’s happened on the Mag Mile, at Water Tower [Place], on State Street. Pick a neighborhood with a retail corridor, it’s happening. What’s so terrible is these adults are specifically targeting young women under 18 because they can’t be prosecuted as adults. They’re stealing high-end items that can be quickly resold. The kids’ reward is some cash or one of items on the list.”

Huffington Post – Over the weekend, four assaults and violent robberies were committed — at least one in broad daylight — in downtown Chicago’s glittering shopping district, crimes that have stoked growing fears of criminal teen flash mobs.One man had a baseball bat thrown so hard at his head that his motor-scooter helmet was knocked off, before being dragged into the street and beaten by a group of 15 to 20 young males, the Chicago Tribune reports. Another was knocked off his bicycle, punched by a group of teens, and robbed of his cellphone and camera. Two others lost electronic devices in group robberies, as the Chicago Sun-Times wrote in a round-up Monday morning. The group nature of the attacks was unusual, and heightened concerns about youth criminal activity coordinated in advance by text messages and social media.

UPI – Scores of teenagers stormed a Chicago Walgreens store on North Michigan Avenue, stealing bottled drinks and sandwiches en masse, police said. An estimated 50 youngsters took over the store Tuesday afternoon, and police were only able to detain three of the accused thieves, WBBM-TV, Chicago, reported.

Editorial: Ethics, Politics and the Law

June 30, 2011
New York Times

The ethical judgments of the Supreme Court justices became an important issue in the just completed term. The court cannot maintain its legitimacy as guardian of the rule of law when justices behave like politicians. Yet, in several instances, justices acted in ways that weakened the court’s reputation for being independent and impartial.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito Jr., for example, appeared at political events. That kind of activity makes it less likely that the court’s decisions will be accepted as nonpartisan judgments. Part of the problem is that the justices are not bound by an ethics code. At the very least, the court should make itself subject to the code of conduct that applies to the rest of the federal judiciary.

Among the court’s 82 rulings this term, 16 were 5-to-4 decisions. Of those, 10 were split along ideological lines, with Justice Anthony Kennedy supplying the fifth conservative vote. These rulings reveal the court’s fundamental inclination to the right, with the conservative majority further expanding the ability of the wealthy to prevail in electoral politics and the prerogatives of businesses against the interests of consumers and workers.

¶It struck down public matching funds in Arizona’s campaign finance system, showing again a contempt for laws that provide some balance to the unlimited amounts of money flooding the political system.

¶It made it much harder for private lawsuits to succeed against mutual fund malefactors, even when they have admitted to lying and cheating.

¶It tore down the ability of citizens to hold prosecutors’ offices accountable for failing to train their lawyers, even when prosecutors hide exculpatory evidence and send innocent people to prison.

¶It issued a devastating blow to consumer rights by upholding the arbitration clause in AT&T’s customer agreement, which required the signer to waive the right to take part in a class action.

¶Finally, in the complex Wal-Mart case, the conservative majority, going beyond the particular issues in that case, made it substantially more difficult for class-action suits in all manner of cases to move forward.

These and other decisions raise the question of whether there is still a line between the court and politics, an issue since the Republican-led Rehnquist court decided Bush v. Gore in 2000, though the federal judiciary’s shift to the right has been happening since the administration of Ronald Reagan.

The framers of the Constitution envisioned law as having authority apart from politics. They gave justices life tenure so they would be free to upset the powerful and have no need to cultivate political support. Our legal system was designed to set law apart from politics precisely because they are so closely tied.

Constitutional law is political because it results from choices rooted in fundamental social concepts like liberty and property. When the court deals with social policy decisions, the law it shapes is inescapably political — which is why decisions split along ideological lines are so easily dismissed as partisan.

The justices must address doubts about the court’s legitimacy by making themselves accountable to the code of conduct. That would make their rulings more likely to be seen as separate from politics and, as a result, convincing as law.

5 Outrageous Examples of FBI Intimidation and Entrapment

In the 10 years since the Sept. 11th attacks, the FBI has expanded its powers, transforming into a massive domestic spying agency.

June 30, 2011

by Kevin Gosztola

AlterNet

In 2010, the FISA court approved all 1,506 requests by the FBI to electronically monitor suspects. They were also generous with granting “national security letters,” which allow the FBI to force credit card companies, financial institutions, and internet service providers to give confidential records about customers’ subscriber information, phone number, email addresses and the websites they’ve visited. The FBI got permission to spy on 14,000 people in this way.

Do they really think there are 14,000 terrorists living in the US?That’s just the beginning.

Now, the FBI is claiming the authority to exercise more surveillance powers, which include undocumented database searches, lie detector tests, trash searches, surveillance squads, investigations of public officials, scholars and journalists and rules that would provide more freedom for agents and informants to not disclose participation in organizations that are targets of FBI surveillance.

Here are five cases of FBI abuse that show the FBI deserves more scrutiny, not a free pass to continue fighting the so-called “war on terror.”

1. FBI’s Use of Warrantless GPS Tracking

Given the fact that Americans have a constitutional right to privacy, one might think you have to get a warrant to place a GPS device in a location that can track a suspect 24 hours a day. Yet, in many cases, law enforcement officers are attaching GPS devices without first getting a warrant.

In October 2010, 20-year old Arab-American student Yasir Afifi was concerned that he had found a pipe bomb when he noticed a “black, rectangular device” attached to his car. Upon finding the device, he posted photos to Reddit.com hoping someone could tell him what was on his vehicle. A couple days later, FBI agents showed up at his apartment to “retrieve the device.”

Turns out, the mysterious device resembling a bomb, which had understandably petrified Afifi, was a GPS device.

As a lawsuit filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) details, “after requesting counsel, the FBI agents continued to make demands of Mr. Afifif and interrogate him…They asked him whether he was a national security threat, whether he was excited about an upcoming (but undisclosed) trip abroad, whether he was having financial difficulties, whether he had been to Yemen, why he traveled overseas, and many other questions.”

Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller are being sued for violating Afifi’s constitutional rights.

Nevertheless, the Obama administration has urged the Supreme Court to allow government to attach GPS devices on “suspects’ vehicles to track their every move.” According to the Justice Department, “A person traveling on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another,” and that is why, as of April 2011, they wanted a lower court’s decision that reversed a conviction and life sentence for a drug dealer whose vehicle had a GPS attached without a warrant undone.

The ACLU of Delaware filed a brief at the end of May urging Delaware to uphold its ruling on the case of the drug dealer. The brief asserts, “The Fourth Amendment protects all persons, regardless of their location, from government searches, absent exigent circumstances, unless a court has issued a warrant upon proof of probable cause.” It adds, despite the rise in use of “sophisticated electronics,” the New York Court of Appeals, for example, does not find the public’s “socially reasonable expectation that our communications and transactions will remain to a large extent private” has diminished.

Additionally, the FBI’s use of warrantless GPS tracking is invasive, for the reason outlined by a Washington, DC, federal appeals court:

A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.

The US Supreme Court agreed on June 27 to hear the case on whether police can attach a GPS tracking devices to a suspect’s vehicle without obtaining a warrant. The court’s decision could have profound implications for US citizens because a majority carry a “tracking device” every day—a cell phone. It could define whether the FBI would be able to circumvent traditional wiretapping guidelines and just use this loophole to tap citizens through their cell phones.

2. FBI Targeting WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning Supporters

David House, co-founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network, has faced harassment since November 2010, when Department of Homeland Security agents detained him at O’Hare International Airport on his return trip from Mexico.

A press release posted by the Bradley Manning Support Network described how House had his laptop seized and was “questioned extensively” about his support for alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning. House requested a copy of his research data from the computer that was seized. His request was denied.

House faced intrusive and intimidating tactics that included copying and possibly disseminating the contents of his USB drive, camera and laptop, all because he joined a lawful group.

“The search and seizure of my laptop has had a chilling effect on the activities of the Bradley Manning Support Network, by silencing once-outspoken supporters and causing donors to retreat. Our government should not be treating lawful activists like suspects,” House said. Days later, the FBI approached House at a computer conference.

The FBI has also been at the center of attempts to intimidate WikiLeaks supporters, especially those involved in organizing with the Bradley Manning Support Network, a grassroots group.

In April of this year, House sent a message on Twitter reporting that FBI agents had gone to “interrogate a West Coast friend at his place of work.” He described how his friend, who is not involved in computers or activism, was pressured to sign a non-disclosure agreement and was held for four hours after the interrogation. His friend was released after repeated banging on the interrogation room’s door. He had taken notes during the interrogation on “a scrap of magazine paper during his four-hour detention” but was made to surrender his notes before leaving his detention.

The friend said that the FBI agents wanted to know what he knew about House, his beliefs and his lifestyle. There were no questions about Manning.

The ACLU has come to House’s defense and filed a lawsuit against the DHS. The ACLU has called for the “return or destruction of any of House’s personal data still in the custody of the government and disclosure of whether and to whom the data has been disseminated.” If not for the ACLU sending a letter to DHS, House would likely have not been able to get his seized laptop, camera and USB drive back after seven weeks.

The FBI recently subpoenaed House to appear before a federal grand jury empanelled to investigate WikiLeaks in Alexandria, Virginia. He pled the fifth and refused to answer questions on possible violations of the Espionage Act. House also has alleged that agents from various government agencies tried to bribe him for information on Boston-area hackers.

Additionally, Jacob Appelbaum, a computer security researcher who represented WikiLeaks at the 2010 Hope conference, has been detained and searched regularly for nearly a year. On July 29, 2010, he was detained for three hours at the Newark airport. His bag was searched, receipts in his bag were photocopied and his laptop was inspected. Appelbaum refused to answer questions because he did not have a lawyer present. He was not allowed to make a phone call and three mobile phones he was carrying were seized and have yet to be returned.

Days later, he was approached by two FBI agents at a Defcon conference after he made a presentation about the Tor Project.

FBI agents wanted to chat but Appelbaum said he had nothing to say. An agent claimed he was interested in hearing how his rights were being trampled because “sometimes it’s nice to have a conversation to flesh things out.” The agents said they were at the conference for official and personal reasons.

Appelbaum continues to be detained at US airports. He was detained when returning from a vacation in Iceland on January 10 at the Seattle airport, in a Houston airport when returning from Siberia on April 12 and on June 14, he was subjected to detention without charge when he arrived at the Seattle airport from Iceland.

3. FBI Spied on Children While Using ‘Roving Wiretaps,’ Intentionally Misled Courts on Freedom of Information Act Requests

The FBI Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), which is responsible for reviewing the activities of the US intelligence community, found one instance where the FBI spent a week monitoring children. According to the IOB report, a language specialist listening to the wiretap knew the FBI did not have the right target, but continued to listen in to the children for five more days.

The report was obtained by digital rights advocacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) through its FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government (FLAG) Project. The FLAG Project requested records of intelligence violations from the FBI’s use of provisions of the PATRIOT Act that were due to expire, particularly Section 215. The request contained evidence of “multiple reports of potential violations,” but the FBI managed to keep most of the revelations secret by redacting a significant portion of the documents requested. The FBI’s target is unknown and the aforementioned spying was only discovered after comparing the redacted documents to documents from a previous EFF FOIA request.

The incident involving the FBI listening to children constitutes a “roving wiretap” violation. Roving wiretaps are wiretaps that follow the surveillance target. They are typically used when it is believed a target is changing locations to deliberately avoid electronic surveillance.

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) has said that roving wiretaps are designed to allow law enforcement to track targets who evade surveillance by “frequently changing phones.” They used to only be permitted for criminal investigations but the PATRIOT Act has “insufficient checks to protect innocent Americans from unwarranted government surveillance.” Now under the PATRIOT Act the FBI does not have to know the target is present at the location being tapped.

Beyond the abuse of wiretapping, the FBI appears to be playing games with FOIA requests. It has improperly used “outside the scope” redactions to cover up misconduct.

A post by Jennifer Lynch of EFF indicates the US District Court for the Central District of California found “the FBI lied to the court about the existence of records requested” under FOIA. The FBI “materially and fundamentally misled the court” on its filings related to the case of Islamic Shura Council of S. Cal v. FBI, a case related to the FBI surveillance of the Muslim organization.

Additionally, according to EFF, the FBI argued it was “allowed to mislead the court when it believed revealing information would ‘compromise national security.’”

The Court did go along with the assertion by the FBI:

“The Government argues that there are times when the interests of national security require the Government to mislead the Court. The Court strongly disagrees. The Government’s duty of honesty to the Court can never be excused, no matter what the circumstance. The Court is charged with the humbling task of defending the Constitution and ensuring that the Government does not falsely accuse people, needlessly invade their privacy or wrongfully deprive them of their liberty. The Court simply cannot perform this important task if the Government lies to it. Deception perverts justice. Truth always promotes it.”

Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, containing the roving wiretaps provision was recently extended by Congress, despite a bipartisan alliance that attempted to challenge the extension of expiring provisions with little to no debate.

4. FBI Entrapment of Muslims

When David Williams’ younger brother, Lord McWilliams, was hospitalized with liver cancer early in 2009, Williams, 24, was devastated. He had spent the last two years, after serving a five-year prison sentence for selling drugs, being a father figure for McWilliams.

Williams knew he had to find a way to make money so his younger brother could get a liver transplant. In April 2009, an acquaintance named James Cromitie told him that someone named Maqsood could give him $250,000, luxury cars and financing for a barbershop if he helped carry out a terrorist attack in the United States. Williams became part of the scheme because Cromitie allegedly had a plan for getting the money without carrying out a terror plot.

Maqsood was a paid informant named Shahed Hussain, who had spent the last eight months working to get Cromitie to plant bombs at a local synagogue. Hussain had done previous work for the FBI and was involved in a controversial case against a pizza-parlor owner and local imam in Albany, New York.

As a report published by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice of the New York University School of Law in May and titled, “Targeted and Entrapped: Manufacturing the ‘Homegrown Threat’ in the United States,” describes, “On May 13, 2009, at the FBI’s direction, Hussain drove Cromitie, David, and two others—Laguerre Payen and Onta Williams (no relation to David)—to the Bronx to conduct surveillance on various synagogues. Next he drove them to Connecticut to look at the Stinger missile they were to use. Unbeknownst to David and the others, the weapons were fake and supplied by the FBI.”

Hussain drove Cromitie, Payen and David and Onta Williams to the Bronx on May 20th. In front of the proposed targets, the FBI placed two cars. The four led by Cromitie were to place explosives in the cars’ trunks. Hussain dropped off David Williams, drove the other three men to the first car and then Hussain turned off a recording device he had been wearing. The men were arrested soon after.

The FBI raided Williams’ younger brother’s home immediately after the arrests. Williams was locked up in White Plains, where people would slip him notes calling him a terrorist. According to David’s aunt Alicia McWilliams, at the jury selection in White Plains, snipers were placed on the roof for “show,” making it seem like Williams’ trial might lead to an attempted terror attack.

McWilliams claims that Williams was “pulled into a political game. The case was directed, produced and scripted by the FBI and all they needed were puppets.”

The CHRGJ report looks at this case and two others to show the “profound toll government policies are taking on Muslim communities and families.” It details how “counterterrorism law-enforcement policies and practices are undermining U.S. human rights obligations to guarantee the rights to nondiscrimination; a fair trial; freedom of religion expression and opinion; as well as the right to an effective remedy when rights violations take place.”

Relaxed FBI guidelines have made it possible to rely on informants like Hussain. Guidelines put into place by former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey allowed the FBI to authorize informants and other surveillance techniques without any factual predicate or nexus to suspected criminal conduct,” which meant the FBI could have informants “gather names, emails, and phone numbers of particularly devout mosque attendees, without any particular nexus to suspected criminal activity.” And, under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, guidelines were established that did not explicitly prohibit using informants to engage in entrapment.

Informants present a particular problem because they may be receiving a benefit for helping the FBI target individuals (for example, a reduction in a criminal sentence or a change in immigration status, etc). They may also be receiving payment for their service. The “dangerous incentive structure,” inevitably helps to increase the possibility of abuse of authority by the FBI. As former FBI agent Mike German says:

If the government targets somebody based on political advocacy, and can lure a few people into committing bad acts, then a successful prosecution in those cases justifies future targeting of people who are in the same position. . . Whether these cases could survive an entrapment defense is not the relevant question.  It’s whether it’s appropriate for the government to act in a way where they’re aggrandizing the nature of the threat. It’s just difficult to understand what the legitimate government interest is in these cases.”

Williams and the other men were found guilty in October 2010. In May of this year, a judge denied the defendants’ motions for dismissal “on the basis of outrageous government conduct and entrapment.” The men are currently in the process of being sentenced for their participation in this scheme and prosecutors are pushing for life sentences for three of the four men, including Williams.

5. The Criminalization of Travel by the FBI

At least 23 antiwar, labor and international solidarity activists have been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Chicago. Several of the activists from Chicago, the Twin Cities in Minnesota and other areas have had their homes raided by the FBI with documents, cell phones, storage disks, computers and children’s artwork seized.

The FBI alleges the activists have provided “material support for terrorism.” In the past months, it has been discovered the FBI used an informant named Karen Sullivan to spy on an antiwar organization for months as it made plans for the 2008 Republican National Convention. The FBI also flubbed the investigation when an agent left documents in the home of one of the subpoenaed activists.

A troubling aspect of the investigation is how it effectively criminalizes outspoken citizens who travel to other countries to meet groups that may have beliefs or agendas that are in conflict with US foreign policy. For example, Sarah Smith, a Jewish American woman and avid traveler who lives in Chicago, received a call from the FBI on December 3, 2010. The agent, Robert Parker, asked Smith to meet with him and answer some questions.

Smith asked what questions the agent had, and he said he was not at liberty to discuss the questions. This made Smith think she needed a lawyer. The agent told Smith that it was not necessary to have a lawyer because she was not in trouble. He claimed he had some routine questions about a trip and said, “I think you know which trip I’m talking about.” Realizing Parker wanted to talk to her about the trip she took to Israel and Palestine in August, just months ago, she reached out to a lawyer with the National Lawyers Guild.

“We went on an educational trip in which we met with NGOs, teachers, nonviolent protesters,” explains Smith. “We didn’t meet with anyone who is on any terrorist list. We didn’t give money to anyone that is on a terrorist list. We wanted to see what it was like for ourselves, to live in Israel with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.”

Suppressing the right of American groups to travel is not new to U.S. government policy. In 1992, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) mounted a case on behalf of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Geo-Vista Global Experiences and Veterans for Peace asserting regulations on group travel to Vietnam and Cambodia were “making it impossible to organize academic study groups, to travel with study groups, to travel with colleagues to assess humanitarian aid and to engage in group fact-finding trips.”

Secretary of State James Baker eventually lifted the regulations, making it permissible for groups to travel to the two countries.

Tom Burke is another traveler alleged to have provided “material support to terror.” Burke was at home with his wife and daughter on September 24, 2010 and began to receive phone calls from people in Chicago and Minneapolis informing them the FBI had raided their homes. Burke thought the FBI might be coming to raid his house. He decided his daughter needed to get to kindergarten before the FBI entered his home. He left with his daughter.

Burke thought he needed to write a press release, took his computer and got in his car to go find a web café. On the way he noticed that his car was being followed. He called his wife and they agreed he should drive to the parking garage at her work. As Burke reached the parking garage, the car that had been following him sped off. An SUV sped into the road right behind him and followed him into the garage. Burke was served with a subpoena to appear before a grand jury. His wife was later served with a subpoena too.

“We’ve been doing solidarity work with people in other countries who get killed for doing what they do,” Burke explains. “When I went to Colombia in 2003 with a labor union delegation, at that time three Colombian trade unionists were being killed every single week. And that was the scariest week of my life.” Burke was with the human rights director of the oil workers union. All week he had to have armed security, know who was with the group and whether they were in a safe place.

Months into targeting the activists, there is no evidence that any of these activists provided “material support for terrorism.”

Reminiscent of how animal rights and environmental activists have been targeted in recent years, the FBI is going after the activists, wrecking their lives, intimidating Americans who believe in their right to dissent. It is pressing on, widening its investigation despite a growing backlash against the investigation. And some of the activists fear indictments from the investigation may be coming soon.

Weapons linked to controversial ATF strategy found in Valley crimes

July 1, 2011

by Lori Jane Gliha

ABC News

PHOENIX – Weapons linked to a questionable government strategy are turning up in crimes in Valley neighborhoods.

For months the ABC15 Investigators have been searching through police reports and official government documents. We’ve discovered assault weapons linked to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ controversial “Fast and Furious” case strategy have turned up at crime scenes in Glendale and Phoenix communities.

THE HISTORY

Phoenix ATF agents recently testified during a Congressional hearing that they knowingly allowed weapons to slip into the hands of straw buyers who would then distribute the weapons to known criminals.

The strategy was designed to lead ATF officials to key drug players in Mexico, but some agents admitted they never fully tracked the weapons after suspicious buyers purchased them.

“It made no sense to us either, it was just what we were ordered to do, and every time we questioned that order there was punitive action,” Phoenix Special Agent John Dodson testified.

According to the testimony of three Phoenix ATF agents, including Dodson, hundreds of weapons are now on the streets in the United States and Mexico, possibly in the hands of criminals.

Dodson estimated the number could be as many as 1,800 weapons.

“…Fast and Furious was one case from one group in one field division,” he testified. He estimated agents in the Phoenix field division “facilitated the sale of” approximately 2,500 weapons to straw purchasers. A few hundred have been recovered.

THE ABC15 INVESTIGATION

Dodson guessed the majority of the missing weapons are in Mexico.

“I believe that these firearms will continue to turn up at crime scenes on both sides of the border for years to come,” testified Phoenix Special Agent Peter Forcelli.

Weapons linked to the strategy have been turning up at dangerous and deadly crime scenes near both sides of the border, including the murder scene of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, who was killed last December.

The ABC15 Investigators uncovered documents showing guns connected to at least two Glendale criminal cases and at least two Phoenix criminal cases also appear in the ATF’s Suspect Gun Database, a sort-of watch list for suspicious gun sales.

All four cases involve drug-related offenses. In one Glendale police report dated July 2010, police investigators working with DEA agents served search warrants at homes near 75th and Glendale avenues in Glendale, and 43rd and Glendale avenues in Phoenix as part of a “large scale marijuana trafficking” investigation.

Police investigators reported they “obtained information that members of the (trafficking) organization were using the homes…as stash houses used to store large amounts of marijuana temporarily.”

They reported finding hundreds of pounds of marijuana, more than $63,000 in U.S. currency and three guns inside the homes. One of the recovered weapons, a Romarm/Cugir WASR-10 rifle, appeared in an official ATF Suspect Gun Summary document in November 2009, proving agents knowingly allowed the suspicious gun sale, months before the weapon turned up at the crime scene.

In a separate Glendale Police Department case, dated November 2010, detectives discovered “bulk marijuana and weapons” inside a residence near 75th Avenue and Bethany Home Road in Glendale. Investigators recovered nearly 400 pounds of drugs and several firearms from the home.

One of the recovered weapons, another Romarm/Cugir WASR-10 rifle, appeared in an official ATF Suspect Gun Summary document in February 2010.

PHOENIX CASES

The two Phoenix cases, also connected to drugs, occurred in March and August 2010.

In the August case, Phoenix officers conducted a traffic stop near 83rd Avenue and McDowell Road in Phoenix. They discovered marijuana and an AK-47 in the driver’s trunk as well as other weapons.

One of the suspects explained he purchased the Romarm/Cugir Draco weapon for $600 on the street, but he wouldn’t reveal from whom he purchased the gun. ATF documents show the weapon had been entered into the ATF Suspect Gun Database in January 2010.

Officers recovered an FN Herstal Five-Seven weapon in the March case. During that ongoing drug investigation, near 43rd Avenue and Camelback Road in Phoenix, officers had been conducting surveillance after receiving information that a suspect was selling methamphetamine and marijuana.

CONGRESSIONAL LEADER RESPONDS

“With people like you down there in Arizona investigating this,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, (R-Iowa), “and with Congressman Issa and this Senator on the case, they know we’re not going to give up.”

Grassley has been demanding information from ATF leaders, trying to determine who had knowledge of the controversial strategy and when they knew.

His staff also sent public records requests to every sheriff’s department in Arizona and several local Valley departments, requesting information about weapons that have turned up at Valley crime scenes that may have been connected to the Fast and Furious operation.knows where they’re going to end up,” Grassley said. “There’s ample evidence – even besides your own investigation – that they’ve been used in crimes on this side of the border, but how many? I can’t give you a figure.”

ATF RESPONSE

ATF representatives denied ABC15’s open records request for documents showing other weapons connected to the Fast and Furious case that may have been involved in other crimes in the United States.

They also denied our request for an interview, saying the case is still under investigation.

Conversations with the Crow

When the CIA discovered that their former Deputy Director of Clandestine Affairs, Robert  T. Crowley, had been talking with author Gregory Douglas, they became fearful (because of what Crowley knew) and outraged (because they knew Douglas would publish eventually) and made many efforts to silence Crowley, mostly by having dozens of FBI agents call or visit him at his Washington home and try to convince him to stop talking to Douglas, whom they considered to be an evil, loose cannon.

Crowley did not listen to them (no one else ever does, either) and Douglas made through shorthand notes of each and every one of their many conversation. TBR News published most of these (some of the really vile ones were left out of the book but will be included on this site as a later addendum ) and the entire collection was later produced as an Ebook.

Now, we reliably learn, various Washington alphabet agencies are trying to find a way to block the circulation of this highly negative, entertaining and dangerous work, so to show our solidarity with our beloved leaders and protectors, and our sincere appreciation for their corrupt and coercive actions, we are going to reprint the entire work, chapter by chapter. (The complete book can be obtained by going to:

http://www.shop.conversationswiththecrow.com/Conversations-with-the-Crow-CWC-GD01.htm

Here is the eighty-fifth chapter

Conversation No. 85

Date: Friday, May 30, 1997

Commenced:  I:11 PM CST

Concluded: 1:35 PM CST

RTC: Gregory, I’m glad you called. I wanted to warn you about some picture you are supposed to have with Mueller and Harry in it. Does this ring a bell with you?
GD: Yes it does. A U.S. Signal Corps photo of Harry, Mueller, Beetle Smith and some other type in the Oval Office. Came out of the Truman Library in Missouri some time ago and landed in my mail box. Very clear shot of Mueller, standing on the left of Harry’s desk, Harry in the middle smiling up to the right while he’s looking right at Smith. No question it’s Mueller. Picture is identified, with names, on the reverse and has the Signal Corp stamps, dates and all that.

RTC: Ah, yes, that explains everything. Do not even admit having this, Gregory or you will have burglars visiting you the next time you go to the movies. They do not know what name Mueller used when he came to this country and until they do, they cannot cleanse the files of any reference to him.

GD: I beat them to that one, Robert. I had Zachery write off to the Army records center at Springfield, Missouri,and get copies, stamped copies, of the records of four general officers. One of these was Mueller. The three I tossed but I kept Heini’s file. Picture and all. That’s what the violators of deceased prostitutes are after. You told me that they didn’t know the name. What assholes. They run around bleating that I am a liar while under cover, they try to remove any proof that the head of the German Gestapo not only survived the war but lived, and worked, in Washington and even entertained the President of the United States at dinner once.

RTC: Oh, be very careful with things like that. If the left wingers or the loony Hebrews find out about that, they will wail and raise a terrible fuss. Our press people will have a good deal of extra work with that one. Naturally, they will all lie and Jim will call me up and rant for two hours. If Mr. Bender puts it into one of his books, believe me, his warehouse full of the books will have a tragic fire.

GD: I should put out the word that some vicious paranoid keeps the pictures in their home and then tip him off that bad people are going to break into his house, murder him and kill his children, or his cat, whichever.

RTC: You’ve done that sort of thing before, as I recall.

GD: I have indeed and enjoyed every minute of it. My God, Robert, these people are so stupid they couldn’t find either end of themselves in a dark room. If I had a dollar for every telephone call I got from some obscure professor of history at an academy for the chronically incontinent, telling me how much he enjoyed the Mueller book, asking me if I had any of the documents I mentioned and wondering if he and his friend Bruce can visit me and show me all of their newly discovered Mueller documents. I mean they must think I’m some kind of an idiot. Oh no, I would never let Professor Crotchrott into my house or his friend Bruce either. When you act all  pleased and start grilling the fake professor about Mueller, you find out he knows nothing at all about him. Can’t they even brief him properly? I could do a better job dead drunk. I seriously wonder what these pin heads did before they went into government service. I imagine deodorizing dead dogs or changing loaded diapers at a nursing home across the street from the tenement house they reside in, sharing a soaked mattress with two winos and a dead fat woman.

RTC: (Laughter) Gregory, you are not at all a nice person.

GD: Oh, I’ve known that for years but oddly enough, people with real character and brains like Mueller and others all seem to like me a good deal. We all have a community of interest I guess. There stand the sheep, huddled in one corner of the pens and there we stand, wondering which one of us jumps the fence first and starts munching. Leg of lamb, throat of lamb, whatever. I guess that’s why I love wolves so much. We have so much in common. I recall once when I wrote an intelligence report that took me an entire weekend to do up right, some fucking Brigadier read it and threw it into the trash because it didn’t support his feeble-minded theories. I was right, of course, and there was terrible trouble when my thesis was proven right. I was told to keep my mouth shut but I didn’t and eventually he got transferred to Manila where he could watch the natives there eat stewed monkey. Of course we know in their case it’s a clear cut case of cannibalism but what the hell…

RTC: My God, Gregory, do not speak to me of Filipinos. I had to deal with some of them once and you are dead on. I think monkeys are smarter. I know they are better looking.

GD: And their females do not have green eye shadow and purple lipstick on their flat pans. Well, enough rude racial remarks for the day. I also have Mueller’s pilot’s license, his Virginia driver’s license, his CIA pass, all expired but all with pictures.

RTC: But do not tell Kimmel about these or for a certainty, you would have a black bag job or someone would invite you to lecture in Washington and you would never be heard from again.

GD: Ah, they would take me out on a small boat, tie an old cash register to my legs, shoot me in the head and toss me into the backwaters of the Potomac. And the alert and highly intelligent local police would call it a certain suicide.

RTC: You are making cruel references to Paisley.

GD: Actually, I am. Very perceptive. Most suicides do shoot themselves in the back of the head, Robert. I understand he was a bloated rotting mess when they found him. We used to get floaters when I was doing pathology work. They stank so badly and parts kept falling off onto the floor that we would freeze them before cutting them up. Well, my name is not Smith and I will not go to Washington. They can come to see me sometime.

RTC: Would you welcome them with open arms, Gregory?

GD: No, loaded ones, Robert.

(Concluded at 1:35 PM CST)

Dramatis personae:

James Jesus Angleton: Once head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence division, later fired because of his obsessive and illegal behavior, tapping the phones of many important government officials in search of elusive Soviet spies. A good friend of Robert Crowley and a co-conspirator with him in the assassination of President Kennedy

James P. Atwood: (April 16, 1930-April 20, 1997) A CIA employee, located in Berlin, Atwood had a most interesting career. He worked for any other intelligence agency, domestic or foreign, that would pay him, was involved in selling surplus Russian atomic artillery shells to the Pakistan government and was also most successful in the manufacturing of counterfeit German dress daggers. Too talkative, Atwood eventually had a sudden, and fatal, “seizure” while lunching with CIA associates.

William Corson: A Marine Corps Colonel and President Carter’s representative to the CIA. A friend of Crowley and Kimmel, Corson was an intelligent man whose main failing was a frantic desire to be seen as an important person. This led to his making fictional or highly exaggerated claims.

John Costello: A British historian who was popular with revisionist circles. Died of AIDS on a trans-Atlantic flight to the United States.

James Critchfield: Former U.S. Army Colonel who worked for the CIA and organizaed the Cehlen Org. at Pullach, Germany. This organization was filled to the Plimsoll line with former Gestapo and SD personnel, many of whom were wanted for various purported crimes. He hired Heinrich Müller in 1948 and went on to represent the CIA in the Persian Gulf.

Robert T. Crowley: Once the deputy director of Clandestine Operations and head of the group that interacted with corporate America. A former West Point football player who was one of the founders of the original CIA. Crowley was involved at a very high level with many of the machinations of the CIA.

Gregory Douglas: A retired newspaperman, onetime friend of Heinrich Müller and latterly, of Robert Crowley. Inherited stacks of files from the former (along with many interesting works of art acquired during the war and even more papers from Robert Crowley.) Lives comfortably in a nice house overlooking the Mediterranean.

Reinhard Gehlen: A retired German general who had once been in charge of the intelligence for the German high command on Russian military activities. Fired by Hitler for incompetence, he was therefore naturally hired by first, the U.S. Army and then, as his level of incompetence rose, with the CIA. His Nazi-stuffed organizaion eventually became the current German Bundes Nachrichten Dienst.

Thomas K. Kimmel, Jr: A grandson of Admiral Husband Kimmel, Naval commander at Pearl Harbor who was scapegoated after the Japanese attack. Kimmel was a senior FBI official who knew both Gregory Douglas and Robert Crowley and made a number of attempts to discourage Crowley from talking with Douglas. He was singularly unsuccessful. Kimmel subsequently retired, lives in Florida, and works for the CIA as an “advisor.”

Willi Krichbaum: A Senior Colonel (Oberführer) in the SS, head of the wartime Secret Field Police of the German Army and Heinrich Müller’s standing deputy in the Gestapo. After the war, Krichbaum went to work for the Critchfield organization and was their chief recruiter and hired many of his former SS friends. Krichbaum put Critchfield in touch with Müller in 1948.

Heinrich Müller: A former military pilot in the Bavarian Army in WWI, Müller  became a political police officer in Munich and was later made the head of the Secret State Police or Gestapo. After the war, Müller escaped to Switzerland where he worked for Swiss intelligence as a specialist on Communist espionage and was hired by James Critchfield, head of the Gehlen Organization, in 1948. Müller subsequently was moved to Washington where he worked for the CIA until he retired.

Joseph Trento: A writer on intelligence subjects, Trento and his wife “assisted” both Crowley and Corson in writing a book on the Russian KGB. Trento believed that he would inherit all of Crowley’s extensive files but after Crowley’s death, he discovered that the files had been gutted and the most important, and sensitive, ones given to Gregory Douglas. Trento was not happy about this. Neither were his employers.

Frank Wisner: A Founding Father of the CIA who promised much to the Hungarians and then failed them. First, a raging lunatic who was removed from Langley, screaming, in a strait jacket and later, blowing off the top of his head with a shotgun.

Robert Wolfe: A retired librarian from the National Archives who worked closely with the CIA on covering up embarrassing historical material in the files of the Archives. A strong supporter of holocaust writers specializing in creative writing. Although he prefers to be called ‘Dr,’ in reality he has no PhD.

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