TBR News May 25, 2017

The Voice of the White House

        Washington, D.C. May 25, 2017: “In the media, we see a picture of President Trump, sporting a black beanie, standing pensively in front of what is known as the ‘Wailing Wall.’

This old retaining wall is currently believed to have been originally erected as part of the expansion of the Second Jewish Temple by Herod the Great.

This is not correct.

The wall, and the pavement in front of its base, were put up by the Arabs in 600 AD.

The second temple had been destroyed by the Romans when they expelled the Jews from Judea in 66−70 AD as the result of their revolt, and subsequent internal civil war.

It is interesting to note that while the Jewish defenders of the city were besieged by three Roman legions, they spent more time fighting, and killing, each other rather than the Romans.

The original Jewish, Semitic, occupants of Judea are the Sephardi Jews and the current Israelis are about 95% Ashkenazim Jews.

These are not Semitic but Turkish in origin and their ancestors were converted to Judaism in 900 CE.

In short, they have no ancestral claims to origins in Judea. So while they weep and pray in front of the stone walls, they are weeping and praying to an Arab structure.”

Table of contents

• Excerpt from “Military Intelligence Blunders”
• Photographs of Manchester bomb parts published after leak
• Why Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel
• Hunger Striking for Palestinian Rights
• New Cracks in Russia-gate ‘Assessment’
• Trump no longer considering Joe Lieberman as FBI director
• Down the Memory Hole
• OPEC agrees to extend oil production cut for nine months

• List of CIA front organizations, domestic and foreign

 Excerpt from “Military Intelligence Blunders”

by Colonel John Hughes–Wilson

“(Professor C. Northcote) Parkinson sadly observed, only human nature and corporate organizations are but human nature writ large.

Bureaucratic Washington was no exception. Although the capability to provide intelligence had increased a hundredfold since Pearl Harbor, one unforseen side-effect was to increase the value of the prizes for the Washington bureaucrats to squabble over. New and powerful intelligence agencies attracted new and powerful budgets. The consequence was that by the 1960s the competition for power between the US intelligence agencies had become the new US intelligence problem.

The problems of having too little intelligence scattered around became the problem of having too much intelligence from competing organizations and the struggle for its control. Each agency clung jealously to its own particular monopoly and kept it tightly compartmentalized, with the CIA trying, unsuccessfully, to become the overall master of US intelligence. A kind of competitive market economy had begun to dominate American’s secret world. Ideally, in intelligence matters, a strong executive would direct such matters without argument.

However, the US Constitution is specifically designed to make central control of just about anything very difficult to achieve. Add to this the irresistible lure of defense contractor’s dollars, the lobbying of elected politicians, regional demands for a share of the pork barrel of taxpayers’ money, together with the competing demands of the armed services, and the internal battles over US intelligence becomes just another sad reflection of how Washington does business.”

Photographs of Manchester bomb parts published after leak

New York Times publishes series of images showing remains of bomb, detonator and what appears to be rucksack

May 24. 2017

by Ewen MacAskill in London and Julian Borger in Washington

The Guardian

Extraordinary details about the bomb used in the Manchester atrocity have been published in the New York Times, almost all of it forensic evidence gathered by the British police at the scene.

A series of photographs of the remains of the bomb, the detonator and what appeared to be a rucksack were leaked. The preliminary investigation by the police is extremely detailed, down to the belief that the killer, Salman Abedi, held the small detonator in his left hand.

Suspicion on who leaked it to the US-based reporter rested on US officials, who have been feeding a series of details about the Manchester bombing to American journalists.

Leaking such inside information from the investigation will add to tensions between the US and UK over the extent to which much of the investigation is being leaked by authorities in America.

The latest revelations came hours after the home secretary, Amber Rudd, expressed irritation with the US and expressed hope that the leaks would stop.

“The British police have been very clear that they want to control the flow of information in order to protect operational integrity, the element of surprise. So it is irritating if it gets released from other sources and I have been very clear with our friends that should not happen again,” the home secretary said.

Although her language was mild, it is rare for a UK politician to issue such a rebuke to the Americans.

The photographs suggest the bomb was relatively sophisticated, requiring a degree of expertise. It contained a powerful explosive in a lightweight metal container. The pictures indicate it was carried in a blue rucksack made by the Karrimor outdoor company.

Such was the power of the blast that nuts and screws packed round the bomb penetrated doors and walls. Abedi stood in the middle of a crowd. The upper part of his body was thrown towards the entrance to the arena.

It was not a crudely-made bomb, as among the evidence recovered was a Yuasa a 12-volt, 2.1 amp lead-acid battery, which is much more expensive than normal ones. The detonator appeared to have a small circuit board soldered inside one end.

There seemed to have been several options for detonating it, such as a simple manual switch or possibly remotely by a radio signal.

The latest disclosures come on top of a series of leaks from US officials about the British investigation, including the naming of the killer.

The leak of the British information, as well as demonstrating a lack of respect for a US ally at an emotional time, will have hindered the investigation, where it is deemed essential to control the release of details.

UK counter-terrorism specialists say they needed to keep secret the name of a perpetrator or suspect for at least 36 hours to ensure there was an element of surprise in approaching relatives, friends and others.

The home secretary reflected the frustration and dismay of the UK security services in a series of interviews on Wednesday morning.

Adding to the sense of anger in the UK were further leaks from an NBC reporter who quoted US intelligence officials providing other details about the killer.

The reporter Richard Engel of NBC tweeted details not released by the UK. Engel said US intelligence officers told him family members of the the killer, Salman Abedi, had warned UK security officials about him and had described him as dangerous.

The intelligence community has long been uncomfortable about revelations from its recent past made in books and articles, but the release of details of a live investigation on the scale of those by the US and France is a relatively new phenomenon.

It comes on top of Donald Trump’s release of intelligence to Russia that had been passed on by Israel, which had obtained it from an Arab country.

American officials in Washington briefed US journalists early on Tuesday about the number of dead, confirming that it was a suicide bombing and – hours later – the name of the killer. The UK had not been planning to release the name on Tuesday.

The UK’s reluctance to identify the assailant was evident because it took hours after his name was circulating in the US media before Greater Manchester police confirmed it.

One of the basic tenets of intelligence sharing is that other agencies do not disclose it. The problem is that those intelligence agencies, whether American or French, pass it up to their presidents, prime ministers and departmental ministers. In the past, that secrecy was respected.

After the leaks, it could be tempting for UK police and intelligence services to stop sharing sensitive information, although Britain relies heavily on the US sharing its intelligence and benefits from intelligence, especially on counter-terrorism, from European colleagues such as France and Germany.

Adding to the impression of western security services as uncoordinated and amateurish, the French interior minister, Gérard Collomb, then told French television on Wednesday that Abedi had been in Libya and possibly Syria, information UK police had not disclosed.

The top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Adam Schiff, said he did not know the source but insisted it was not from Congress, as members and their staffs had not been briefed.

Schiff, who is a driving force behind the congressional investigation into the Trump campaign’s links with Russia, said: “We should have been very careful and respectful of the British investigation and the timing which the British felt was in their investigative interests in releasing that. That should have been their discretion not ours. If that is something we did, I think that’s a real problem.”

Why Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel

No country in the world recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, with the exception of Russia.

May 24, 2017

aljazeera

On this day, Israel is celebrating what it calls “Jerusalem Day”, when it occupied East Jerusalem at the end of the 1967 war with Syria, Egypt and Jordan.

The annual celebration is a day when right-wing, mostly young Israelis rampage around East Jerusalem’s Old City, carrying Israeli flags and shouting anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist slogans.

Some of the chants include calls for the death, destruction, and complete elimination of Palestinians in Jerusalem, such as “Death to the Arabs”. Large groups often parade through the Muslim Quarter of the old city and provoke residents by banging on Palestinian stores and homes.

Israel – which captured the western half of Jerusalem in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war – frames the day as the “reunification” of the east and west of its capital.

Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem effectively put the entire city under de-facto Israeli control. The state’s jurisdiction and ownership of Jerusalem, however, is not recognized by the international community, including the United States.

The status of Jerusalem remains one of the main sticking points in efforts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

International community position

Under the 1947 UN Partition Plan to divide historic Palestine between Jewish and Arab states, Jerusalem was granted special status and was meant to be placed under international sovereignty and control. The special status was based on Jerusalem’s religious importance to the three Abrahamic religions.

In the 1948 war, following the UN’s recommendation to divide Palestine, Zionist forces took control of the western half of the city and declared the territory part of its state.

During the 1967 war, Israel captured the eastern half of Jerusalem, which was under Jordanian control at the time, and proceeded to effectively annex it by extending Israeli law, bringing it directly under its jurisdiction, in breach of international law.

In 1980, Israel passed the “Jerusalem Law”, stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”, thereby formalizing its annexation of East Jerusalem.

In response, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 478 in 1980 declaring the law “null and void”.

The international community, including the US, officially regards East Jerusalem as occupied territory. Additionally, no country in the world recognizes any part of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, with the exception of Russia, which announced its recognition of West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel earlier this year.

As of now, all foreign embassies are based in Tel Aviv.

The illegal Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem violates several principles under international law, which outlines that an occupying power does not have sovereignty in the territory it occupies.

Palestinians in Jerusalem

Despite Israel’s de-facto annexation of East Jerusalem, Palestinians who live there were not granted Israeli citizenship.

Today, some 420,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem have “permanent residency” ID cards. They also carry temporary Jordanian passports without a national identification number. This means that they are not full Jordanian citizens – they need a work permit to work in Jordan and do not have access to governmental services and benefits, such as reduced education fees.

Palestinian Jerusalemites are essentially stateless, stuck in legal limbo – they are not citizens of Israel, nor are they citizens of Jordan, or Palestine.

Israel treats Palestinians in East Jerusalem as foreign immigrants who live there as a favour by the state, and not by right, despite having been born there. They are required to fulfill a certain set of requirements to maintain their residency status and live in constant fear of having their residency revoked.

Any Palestinian who has lived outside the boundaries of Jerusalem for a certain period of time, whether in a foreign country, or even in the West Bank, is at risk of losing their right to live there.

Those who cannot prove that the “centre of their life” is in Jerusalem and that they have lived there continuously, lose their right to live in their city of birth. They must submit dozens of documents including title deeds, rent contracts and salary slips. Obtaining citizenship from another country also leads to the revocation of their status.

All the while, any Jew around the world enjoys the right to live in Israel and to obtain Israeli citizenship under Israel’s Law of Return.

Since 1967, Israel has revoked the status of 14,000 Palestinians, according to Israeli rights group B’Tselem.

Settlements

Israel’s settlement project in East Jerusalem, which is aimed at the consolidation of Israel’s control over the city, is also considered illegal under international law.

The UN has affirmed in several resolutions that the settlement project is in direct contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying country from transferring its population into the areas it occupies.

The reasons behind this are several: to ensure that the occupation is temporary and to prevent the occupying state from establishing a long-term presence through military rule; to protect the occupied civilians from theft of resources; to prevent apartheid and changes in the demographic makeup of the territory.

Yet, since 1967, Israel has built more than a dozen housing complexes for Jewish Israelis, known as settlements, some in the midst of Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem.

About 200,000 Israeli citizens live in East Jerusalem under army and police protection, with the largest single settlement complex housing 44,000 Israelis.

Such fortified settlements, often scattered between Palestinians’ homes, infringe on the freedom of movement, privacy and security of Palestinians.

Though Israel claims Jerusalem as its undivided capital, the realities for those who live there cannot be more different.

While Palestinians live under apartheid-like conditions, Israelis enjoy a sense of normality, guaranteed for them by their state.

Hunger Striking for Palestinian Rights

Take the Salt Water Challenge

May 23, 2017

by Philip Giraldi

The Unz Review

Marwan Barghouti has stopped drinking water. He started his hunger strike thirty-six days ago, together with 1,500 other Palestinians who are being held in Israeli prisons. Each day the strikers have been drinking water mixed with salt, the salt needed to keep their electrolytes functioning to stay alive, but their health has reached a critical phase in which they are experiencing vomiting, fainting and loss of vision. Barghouti, who has been in Israeli prisons for 15 years, is wagering with his own life in a bid to obtain better conditions for the 6,500 Palestinians in Israeli detention, most of whom have been imprisoned on faux terrorism related charges by military tribunals that have a 90% conviction rate. Nearly 500 children are among the prisoners, some of whom are only 12 years old, and there are also an estimated 500 Palestinians held in administrative detention, which permits the Israeli authorities to confine them indefinitely without any charges or any trial.

The Israeli authorities describe the hunger strike as a “violation of prison rules.” In the past, they have responded to such protests by bringing in doctors to help restrain and supervise force feeding of the strikers, but the practice proved very controversial among members of the medical profession and has been suspended, though there have been suggestions that “foreign” doctors might be brought in to do the dirty work. So it is to be presumed that the strike will continue until the protesters either win, begin to die or choose to cease and desist.

I have had the pleasure of speaking recently with Marwan’s youngest son Aarab, a graduate of St. Mary’s College of California with a master’s degree in financial analysis, who has begun a campaign to publicize his father’s resistance against the Israeli prison authorities. He has been asking supporters to themselves drink salt water as a sign of solidarity with the hunger strikers. Many prominent Palestinians have done so publicly and the practice has become widespread both in Gaza and on the West Bank as well as among activists in Europe and the United States. It is also gaining strength on the social media, most particularly on Facebook, with videos of supporters of the Salt Water Challenge Salt Water Challenge inviting their friends to join the movement. Hunger striking is the ultimate personal statement, a peaceful form of protest that can only be effective if it helps to mobilize other forces to bring about change. With that in mind, the account of the suffering of Marwan Barghouti and his comrades in prison deserves the widest possible dissemination worldwide.

Marwan Barghouti is, not surprisingly, a controversial figure. His resistance to the Israeli occupation of his homeland began early at age 15 when he joined Fatah and eventually went on to co-found the organization’s youth movement. He later assumed leadership of its paramilitary wing Tanzim, though he eventually distanced himself from Fatah due to its corruption and for a short time headed his own reform party. He subsequently rejoined Fatah in 2006 and is now a member of the Palestinian Parliament. He is widely regarded as the most popular of Palestinian leaders even though he is in prison, or perhaps in part because of that.

Barghouti’s biography reads like a work of fiction. One of seven children, his father was a migrant worker. He completed high school while in an Israeli prison, where he learned Hebrew, and then went on to complete a BA in history and political science followed by an MA in international relations, both at the Palestinian Birzeit University. It required 15 years to complete his degrees because he was exiled to Jordan by the Israelis from 1987 to 1994 for his involvement in the First Intifada after being charged with “incitement,” a favorite catch-all phrase frequently used by Israel to indict anyone who is perceived as an opponent or critic when no actual charges can be plausibly supported by evidence.

Marwan Barghouti was indeed prominent in both the First and Second Intifadas due to his undoubtedly correct belief that a powerful Israel had no interest in any peaceful accommodation with the beleaguered Palestinians. He supported sometimes violent resistance and provocations directed at Israeli soldiers and settlers on the West Bank, though he did not consider Israeli citizens inside Israel legitimate targets. In 2002, he was arrested in Ramallah by the Israelis during the Second Intifada and eventually convicted of five counts of murder plus additional charges. He was given the maximum sentence of five cumulative life sentences for the alleged murders plus forty additional years for attempted murder and membership in an illegal organization.

In his trial Barghouti denied everything but refused to defend himself, claiming that the court had no jurisdiction and that he was legitimately resisting the Israeli occupation of his home. No one was able to demonstrate that he had actually killed anyone but the prosecution insisted that he had given the orders to do so. It should be noted that it was a political rather than a criminal event and completely illegal as he was a Palestinian living in Ramallah who was being tried in an Israeli court and sentenced to prison in Israel. The Inter-Parliamentary union subsequently reviewed the case and found that it had violated the accused’s rights and that numerous international legal agreements and norms were contravened.

Since 2002, there have been growing demands for Marwan Barghouti’s release, including from some Israeli politicians and peace groups, based on his relative moderation and desire to see a peaceful transition into a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. He has sometimes been likened to Nelson Mandela as someone who could potentially bring order and justice to an apparently intractable situation. Barghouti is undeniably more popular than either Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah or Ismail Haniya of Hamas. If he were free and an election were held today, he would undoubtedly be elected Palestinian president

It is important to understand the context of the plight of the Palestinian prisoners to appreciate where Barghouti’s struggle for Palestinian rights derives from. Israel shoots to kill Arab demonstrators, including children, who throw stones. It engages in illegal mass, arbitrary arrests of Palestinians who do not reside in Israel but are nevertheless subject to control by the Israeli military authorities who have a relatively free hand on the West Bank. Once convicted by a military court, which is almost always the case, the prisoners are then held in Israel, a violation of international law, while their homes back in the Palestinian territories are frequently demolished to collectively punish the families. The trip through Israeli security barriers from the West Bank to the prisons requires 20 hours travel each way, leading to a 45 minute visit with a barrier in between so no one can actually see anyone else. A one visit per year limit for anyone over 16 is part of a process intended to further punish the families. Prisoners are routinely tortured by Israel, including the “Palestinian Chair”, an excruciating procedure which was developed by the Israel Defense Force’s interrogators and later taught to Americans and used at Abu Ghraib. Hundreds of Arabs have also been killed while in custody and reports of organ harvesting have surfaced in the international media.

Over the past fifty years, an estimated 800,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned by Israel at one time or another, fully 40% of the adult male population. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers run amok on the West Bank, protected by the police and army as they attack Palestinians at random and systematically destroy their livelihoods. They are rarely arrested and, if they are, they are tried in Israeli civil courts where they are nearly always acquitted. It is a situation that would be unimaginable nearly anywhere else in the world but Israel gets away with it due to a sympathetic Jewish dominated media in the U.S. and lickspittle politicians worldwide who can easily be bought or coerced.

Numerous international laws and the Geneva Conventions have been violated in the horrific treatment of the Palestinians but Israel continues to act with impunity. Israel’s colonial occupation and theft of Palestinian land are illegal and have been frequently condemned by world bodies like the United Nations. The United States agrees that the settlements are illegal, though it avoids the word, but it balks at calling out the brutal Israeli military occupation for what it is. The U.S. has also served as Israel’s protector in the U.N. and elsewhere, meaning that there is no pushback against Israeli actions that is in any way commensurate to the crimes that its government commits.

The current American Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley is a virtual echo chamber for Israel’s Foreign Ministry. She sells out U.S. interests to pander to the powerful domestic Israel Lobby which uses its money and political access to corrupt American politicians as well as judicial processes worldwide, as Alison Weir has recently demonstrated with her brilliant analysis of how any criticism of Israel is now being conflated with anti-Semitism and increasingly regarded as a universal “hate crime.”

Israeli apologists like to frame the Palestinian “problem” as a group of unredeemable terrorists who have to be dealt with harshly, a narrative that portrays all Arabs as a threat. But the reality is that Israel has overwhelming power and exercises brutal control over the Palestinian population, which is treated as if it were subhuman. Indeed, many Israelis believe that Arabs are subhuman and deserve to be “ethnically cleansed.” But a people under occupation, even if relatively powerless, has a right to resist under international law, to include the use of violence, which is what the two Intifadas were all about.

One has to hope that Marwan Barghouti succeeds in his resistance and that his son Aarab will be able to reach the widest possible audience to publicize what exactly is going on in Israel’s prisons and by extension in its cruel occupation and settlement of what remains of Palestine. And we should not forget other prisoners of conscience like Israeli nuclear whistleblower Moredechai Vanunu, who has yet again had his liberty restricted by the country’s Supreme Court. Israel is an essentially racist police state in spite of its frequent boasts about its alleged democracy but the important message for us Americans is that we have unfortunately served as Benjamin Netanyahu’s enablers. The Palestinians deserve a state of their own and the time has come for the United States to demand that Israel free all political prisoners like Marwan Barghouti and allow that to happen.

 

New Cracks in Russia-gate ‘Assessment’

President Obama’s ex-intelligence chiefs admit they limited input into the Russia-gate “assessment,” which was handled by “hand-picked” analysts, raising the specter of politicized intelligence

May 23, 2017

by Robert Parry

Consortium News

At the center of the Russia-gate scandal is a curious U.S. intelligence “assessment” that was pulled together in less than a month and excluded many of the agencies that would normally weigh in on such an important topic as whether Russia tried to influence the outcome of a U.S. presidential election.

The Jan. 6 report and its allegation that Russia “hacked” Democratic emails and publicized them through WikiLeaks have been treated as gospel by the mainstream U.S. media and many politicians of both parties, but two senior Obama administration intelligence officials have provided new information that raises fresh doubts about the findings.

On Tuesday, former CIA Director John Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee that only four of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies took part in the assessment, relying on analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the oversight of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Brennan said the report “followed the general model of how you want to do something like this with some notable exceptions. It only involved the FBI, NSA and CIA as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It wasn’t a full inter-agency community assessment that was coordinated among the 17 agencies, and for good reason because of the nature and the sensitivity of the information trying, once again, to keep that tightly compartmented.”

But Brennan’s excuse about “tightly compartmented” information was somewhat disingenuous because other intelligence agencies, such as the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), could have been consulted in a limited fashion, based on their areas of expertise. For instance, INR could have weighed in on whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would have taken the risk of trying to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign, knowing that – if she won as expected and learned of the operation – she might have sought revenge against him and his country.

The Jan. 6 report argued one side of the case – that Putin had a motive for undermining Clinton because he objected to her work as Secretary of State when she encouraged anti-Putin protests inside Russia – but the report ignored the counter-argument that the usually cautious Putin might well have feared infuriating the incoming U.S. President if the anti-Clinton ploy failed to block her election.

A balanced intelligence assessment would have included not just arguments for believing that the Russians did supply the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks but the reasons to doubt that they did.

Pre-Cooked Intelligence

However, the restricted nature of the Jan. 6 report – limiting it to analysts from CIA, NSA and FBI – blocked the kind of expertise that the State Department, the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies might have provided. In other words, the Jan. 6 report has the look of pre-cooked intelligence.

That impression was further strengthened by the admission of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on May 8 that “the two dozen or so analysts for this task were hand-picked, seasoned experts from each of the contributing agencies.”

Yet, as any intelligence expert will tell you, if you “hand-pick” the analysts, you are really hand-picking the conclusion. For instance, if the analysts were known to be hard-liners on Russia or supporters of Hillary Clinton, they could be expected to deliver the one-sided report that they did.

In the history of U.S. intelligence, we have seen how this approach has worked, such as the determination of the Reagan administration to pin the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II and other acts of terror on the Soviet Union.

CIA Director William Casey and Deputy Director Robert Gates shepherded the desired findings through the process by putting the assessment under the control of pliable analysts and sidelining those who objected to this politicization of intelligence.

The point of enlisting the broader intelligence community – and incorporating dissents into a final report – is to guard against such “stove-piping” of intelligence that delivers the politically desired result but ultimately distorts reality.

Another painful example of politicized intelligence was President George W. Bush’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD that removed INR’s and other dissents from the declassified version that was given to the public.

Lacking Evidence

The Jan. 6 report – technically called an Intelligence Community Assessment (or ICA) – avoided the need to remove any dissents by excluding the intelligence agencies that might have dissented and by hand-picking the analysts who compiled the report.

However, like the declassified version of the Iraq NIE, the Russia-gate ICA lacked any solid evidence to support the conclusions. The ICA basically demanded that the American public “trust us” and got away with that bluff because much of the mainstream U.S. news media wanted to believe anything negative about then-President-elect Trump.

Because of that, the American people were repeatedly – and falsely – informed that the findings about Russian “hacking” reflected the collective judgment of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, making anyone who dared question the conclusion seem like a crackpot or a “Russian apologist.”

Yet, based on the testimonies of Clapper and Brennan, we now know that the ICA represented only a hand-picked selection of the intelligence community – four, not 17, agencies.

There were other biases reflected in the ICA, such as a bizarre appendix that excoriated RT, the Russian television network, for supposedly undermining Americans’ confidence in their democratic process.

This seven-page appendix, dating from 2012, accused RT of portraying “the US electoral process as undemocratic” and offered such “proof” as RT’s staging of a debate among third-party presidential candidates who had been excluded from the Republican-Democratic debates between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

“RT broadcast, hosted and advertised third-party candidate debates,” the report said, as if allowing political figures in the United States who were not part of the two-party system to express their views, was somehow anti-democratic, when you might think that letting Americans hear alternatives was the essence of democracy.

“The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a ‘sham,’” the report continued. Yet, polls have shown that large numbers of Americans would prefer more choices than the usual two candidates and, indeed, most Western democracies have multiple parties, So, the implicit RT criticism of the U.S. political process is certainly not out of the ordinary.

The report also took RT to task for covering the Occupy Wall Street movement and for reporting on the environmental dangers from “fracking,” topics cited as further proof that the Russian government was using RT to weaken U.S. public support for Washington’s policies (although, again, these are topics of genuine public interest).

Assessing or Guessing

But at least the appendix offered up some “evidence” – as silly as those examples might have been. The main body of the report amounted to one “assessment” after another with no verifiable evidence included, at least in the unclassified version that the American people were allowed to see.

The report also contained a warning about how unreliable these “assessments” could be: “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents.”

In other words, “assessing” in intelligence terms often equates with “guessing” – and if the guessers are hand-picked by political appointees – it shouldn’t be surprising that they would come up with an “assessment” that would please their bosses, in this case, President Obama and his appointees at CIA, NSA, FBI and ODNI.

The timing and speed of the Jan. 6 report also drew some attention at Tuesday’s House Intelligence Committee hearing, where Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-New York, noted that President Obama requested the ICA on Dec. 9 and the last entry was dated Dec. 29.

“This report was produced in just 20 days in December,” Stefanik said, adding: “It’s of concern to me that there was a two-month lag” between when Obama’s intelligence agencies first alleged Russian “hacking” of Democratic emails and when Obama ordered the ICA.

Of course, the ICA’s flaws do not mean that Russia is innocent or that WikiLeaks is telling the truth when it asserts that the two batches of Democratic emails – one from the Democratic National Committee and the other from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta – did not come from the Russians.

But the Jan. 6 report has served as the foundation for a series of investigations that have hobbled the Trump administration and could lead to the negation of a U.S. presidential election via the impeachment or forced resignation of President Trump.

The seriousness of that possibility would seem to demand the most thorough examination and the fullest vetting of the evidence. Even just the appearance that the ICA might be one more case of politicized intelligence would do more to destroy Americans’ faith in their democratic system than anything that Putin might dream up.

Trump no longer considering Joe Lieberman as FBI director

May 24, 2017

by Adam Edelman

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

President Trump is no longer considering former senator Joe Lieberman as his next FBI director, CNN reported Wednesday.

Trump, who had said as recently as last week that Lieberman was his top choice, will in fact “hit the restart button” on the search for a new FBI chief, the network reported.

Trump, who fired James Comey earlier this month from the position as his agency moved forward with a comprehensive investigation into whether members of the President’s campaign and transition team has coordinated with Russian efforts to meddle in the election, had said last Thursday that he was “very close to an FBI Director.”

He also replied, “yes,” when asked whether Lieberman, a former Democratic senator from Connecticut who was the party’s 2000 vice presidential nominee before being forced out of the party by a primary challenger over his support for the Iraq War, was among the finalists.

But Lieberman’s name sparked concerns due to his years-long employment at a law firm that has long represented Trump — Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman.

Lieberman failed to state that publicly as he vouched for a pair of top Trump nominees, speaking at confirmation hearings on behalf of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who was Trump’s longtime attorney and Lieberman’s co-worker.

In addition, Lieberman has no prior experience in the FBI or as a judge or prosecutor, which was thought to take away from any support behind his prospective selection.

He is only the latest candidate to fall out of consideration.

Candidates that had previously been under consideration for the post included federal Judge Merrick Garland, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.).

All three have taken themselves out of the running.

Down the Memory Hole

Living in Trump’s United States of Amnesia

by Rebecca Gordon

Tom Dispatch

The Trump administration seems intent on tossing recent history down the memory hole. Admittedly, Americans have never been known for their strong grasp of facts about their past. Still, as we struggle to keep up with the constantly shifting explanations and pronouncements of the new administration, it becomes ever harder to remember the events of yesterday, let alone last week, or last month.

The Credibility Swamp

Trump and his spokespeople routinely substitute “alternative facts” for what a friend of mine calls consensus reality, the world that most of us recognize. Whose inaugural crowd was bigger, Barack Obama’s or Donald Trump’s? It doesn’t matter what you remember, or even what’s in the written accounts or photographic record. What matters is what the administration now says happened then. In other words, for Trump and his people, history in any normal sense simply doesn’t exist, and that’s a danger for the rest of us. Think of the Trumpian past as a website that can be constantly updated to fit the needs of the present. You may believe you still remember something that used to be there, but it’s not there now. As it becomes increasingly harder to find, can you really trust your own memory?

In recent months, revisions of that past have sometimes come so blindingly fast that the present has simply been overrun, as was true with the firing of FBI Director James Comey. First, the president ordered up some brand new supporting documents from Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein. These were designed to underpin his line that Comey was fired on their recommendation — for being “unfair” to Hillary Clinton. Then, even as his surrogates were out peddling that very story, Trump told NBC’s Lester Holt that, “regardless of [Sessions’ and Rosenstein’s] recommendation, I was going to fire Comey.” And he explained why:

“And in fact when I decided to just do it I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.’”

Which rationale for Comey’s departure is true? Both? Neither? What is “truth” after all?

When the need to ask such questions occurs once in a while, it’s anomalous enough that we notice. We have time to remark that someone or various people in this story — Sessions, Rosenstein, the surrogates, Trump himself — are mistaken or even lying. Fortunately, in the case of Comey’s firing, journalists are still reporting the lies, but what happens if the rewrites of our recent history begin to come so fast that we stop keeping up?

During the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson was famously said to have a “credibility gap.” People, including journalists, had stopped believing everything his administration said about one very important topic: the war. Trump doesn’t have a credibility gap; he’s tossed us into a credibility swamp. We’re all there together swimming in a mire of truth and lies, with the occasional firecracker thrown in just to see if we’re still paying attention.

If the age of Trump doesn’t end relatively soon, the daily effort to sort out what happened from what didn’t may eventually become too much for many of us. Memory fatigue may set in, and the whole project of keeping the past in focus shelved. In that case, we might very well start to give up the concept of citizenship altogether and decide instead to just get on with our own private uninsured, underpaid, and overworked lives.

Sometimes it’s easier to simply adjust to an ever-changing official version of reality than to keep up a constant, unrewarding struggle to remember. This was the phenomenon George Orwell described so unforgettably in his dystopian novel 1984. His hero, Winston Smith, becomes aware that the sole party that runs his country incessantly rewrites the past to its own liking and advantage. In fact, he realizes that “the past not only changed, but changed continuously.”

Like most inhabitants of the mega-state of Oceania, it wasn’t that Smith couldn’t accept such a reality.  He could. What he couldn’t shake was a nightmarish sense “that he had never clearly understood why” the Party needed to do it. “The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious” to him. That “ultimate motive,” he eventually realizes, is to so destroy people’s hold on memory that they come to believe that truth genuinely is whatever the Party says it is.

”In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable?”

Does President Trump know what he’s doing? Does he know that, in a more chaotic fashion than Orwell’s “Big Brother,” he’s grinding away at American memories, threatening to turn them into so much rubble? It’s hard to say; he appears to be incapable of either self-reflection or planning, indeed of acting in any way except on impulse. He does, however, seem to know in an intuitive way what works for him, what gets him things he wants, as he has his whole professional life. He’s called his method “truthful hyperbole.” And regardless of what he himself understands, there are certainly people around him who do grasp all too well the usefulness of that “ultimate motive,” of convincing the public that facts are not all that stubborn after all.

The Memory Hole

Supplying alternative facts is one way of destroying memory. Erasing real facts is another.

In Orwell’s 1984, there was a slot in the wall at the Ministry of Truth where Winston Smith worked, a memory hole, into which inconvenient documents could be fed to be consumed forever by a huge basement furnace. There are, it seems, plenty of memory holes in Washington these days.

Since January, the Trump administration has been systematically removing from federal websites inconvenient information on subjects as diverse as climate change and occupational health and safety, and replacing it with anodyne messages. Take, for instance, this one, which you get when you search the Environmental Protection Agency’s website for the term “climate change” and click on links that search turns up:

“This page is being updated. for your interest in this topic. We are currently updating our website to reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator [Scott] Pruitt. If you’re looking for an archived version of this page, you can find it on the January 19 snapshot.”

If you do click on the link for that January 19, 2017, “snapshot,” you can still (for now) see what the old climate change portal of the Obama era looked like. At the top of the “snapshot,” however, is a bright red notice announcing:

“This is not the current EPA website. To navigate to the current EPA website, please go to www.epa.gov. This website is historical material reflecting the EPA website as it existed on January 19, 2017. This website is no longer updated and links to external websites and some internal pages may not work.”

The government has now entered full-scale climate change denial mode. Information of just about any sort on global warming has been or is being memory-holed in a wholesale fashion at other agency websites as well. The Guardian, for instance, reports that, in the part of the Department of Energy’s site addressed to children, “sentences that point out the harmful health consequences of burning coal and other impacts of fossil fuels have gone.” At the State Department, references to President Obama’s Climate Action Plan and a recent U.N. meeting on climate change have similarly been expunged.

However, it’s not just government pronouncements on issues like climate change that are being sanitized. Actual data is disappearing from government websites. The federal government collects vast amounts of data, much of it the results of studies it has funded. Some agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency, are required by law to retain data they collect, but they are not required to post it. This means basic information and the results of scientific research, once available online, are now only available through a Freedom of Information Act request. Of course, you have to know that the information exists in the first place in order to request it.

One result of hiding such data is that scientists citing U.S. government webpages as sources in their own work are now finding that the references they’ve pointed to have disappeared. Arctic researcher Victoria Herrmann describes watching her citations dissolve into thin air:

“At first, the distress flare of lost data came as a surge of defunct links on 21 January. The U.S. National Strategy for the Arctic, the Implementation Plan for the Strategy, and the report on our progress all gone within a matter of minutes. As I watched more and more links turned red, I frantically combed the Internet for archived versions of our country’s most important polar policies.”

Herrmann was able to find some of her missing articles using the Wayback Machine, an internet archiving project. But as Herrmann points out, “Each defunct page is an effort by the Trump administration to deliberately undermine our ability to make good policy decisions by limiting access to scientific evidence.”

It’s not just environmental information that’s been tossed down the memory hole.  Concerned about the health and safety of workers or animals? The Washington Post reports some things you won’t find anymore on federal sites:

“The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for instance, has dramatically scaled back on publicizing its fines against firms. And the Agriculture Department has taken offline animal-welfare enforcement records, including abuses in dog breeding operations and horse farms that alter the gait of horses through the controversial practice of ‘soring’ the animals’ legs.”

Sometimes information only hangs around for a brief moment, before sliding down the memory hole. That’s what happened to an advertisement for Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, which was masquerading as an entry on Share America, which the State Department calls its “platform for sharing compelling stories and images that spark discussion and debate on important topics like democracy, freedom of expression, innovation, entrepreneurship, education, and the role of civil society.” The page appeared on the website of the U.S. embassy in London.

Someone must have realized that using the State Department to advertise the President’s private club was not a great idea. Conflict of interest? No problem. It’s down the memory hole.

Nor is it just government websites that are being reworked in a distinctly Orwellian fashion. Recently, the Trump 2020 reelection campaign (yes, it already exists) quietly removed many 2016 campaign documents from its website. The Washington Post’s Avi Selk describes some of the missing press releases, among them the one that reproduced Trump’s full interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in which he so infamously insulted Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father who spoke out against him at the Democratic Party convention, and his wife, Ghazala.

Similarly, links to Trump’s “New Deal for Black America,” released a week before the 2016 election, now bring up a dreaded “404 – Page not found” message on the Trump-Pence website. Whatever that “deal” was, it’s evidently no longer on offer, nor is it even to remain in the historical record.

The same memory hole has also evidently devoured a December 2015 press release announcing that “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Fortunately, versions of that particular statement were repeated often enough in enough places that lawyers have been able to continue to use it to argue against the president’s executive orders banning the entry of people from seven (now six) majority-Muslim countries.

The Trump administration’s memory holes have swallowed up more than documents and data. People have also disappeared — if not from the world, at least from their government positions. We still remember former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former FBI Director James Comey, but who remembers Ponisseril Somasundaran or Courtney Flint? They are among the scientists recently dismissed from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Board of Scientific Counselors. Among their duties was to give advice on environmental regulation. They are to be replaced, according to agency spokesperson J.P. Freire, by people “who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community” — that is, representatives of polluting industries.

The United States of Amnesia

Gore Vidal coined the expression “the United States of Amnesia” in a 2004 book about George W. Bush’s America. The particular instance of amnesia Vidal highlighted with that phrase was the failure of those then waging the “war on drugs” to remember the disasters of the prohibition of alcohol sales in the 1930s, and the ensuing corruption, gangsters, and smuggling rings that came with it.

His larger point, however, was that, in general, American historical memory is short. Thirteen years after Vidal’s book appeared, and with a new Republican administration ascendant, it seems that this country is in danger of sinking ever deeper into a state of amnesia. And can there be any question that, in a distinctly Orwellian fashion, the new administration is doing everything in its power to hasten that process? As the Trump administration prepares for a new “surge” on the perpetual battlefield that is Afghanistan, we’ve conveniently forgotten how little the last one achieved. We’ve forgotten how deregulation led to the Great Recession, as the federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission concluded in 2011. “The greatest tragedy,” that panel wrote, “would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen this coming and thus nothing could have been done. If we accept this notion, it will happen again.” Yet the Republicans in Congress can’t wait to repeal Dodd-Frank, the law that restored a semblance of regulation to the world of commercial banking.

The fifth-century African bishop St. Augustine was probably the first western thinker to pay attention to human memory. In his Confessions, Augustine observes that it is memory — the ability to bring into present awareness past experiences and the ability to recognize the difference between past, present, and future — that makes us self-aware beings. He described the “vast hall of my memory,” where “I meet myself and recall what I am, what I have done, and when and where and how I was affected when I did it.” It is on the basis of memory, he added, that “I reason about future actions and events and hopes, and again think of all these things in the present. ‘I shall do this and that,’ I say to myself within that vast recess of my mind which is full of many rich images, and this act or that follows.”

If Augustine was right and memory gives us our selves, allowing us to “reason about future actions and events and hopes,” then a political regime that seeks to destroy its people’s memory is an existential threat.

In that case, the first act of resistance is to remember who we are.

OPEC agrees to extend oil production cut for nine months

In an attempt to keep the price of oil above $50 a barrel, OPEC has extended the production cut for another nine months. The decision came at a meeting between officials of oil exporting countries in Vienna

May 25, 2017

DW

OPEC has committed to an extension of the limit in crude oil production to 1.8 barrels a day until March 2018 in the hope of achieving sustained price recovery.

Since mid-2014, when oil hit a high of over $100 a barrel, its value has plummeted to $47 as recently as early May. However, despite the 50% drop in three years, the measure to limit production has stabilized the market, temporarily at least.

Russia and Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s de facto leader, had made the commitment last week to extend the cut in production, making a pledge to do “whatever it takes” to boost prices.

The price rise this year has spurred growth in the US shale industry, which is not participating in the output deal, thus slowing the market’s rebalancing.

US shale revival

Some believe the impact of Thursday’s OPEC agreement could be short-lived, as American shale production could be revived. The higher oil prices climb and the more shale operators that accelerate production, the more OPEC has to cut.

More than 400 oil rigs are now working US shale fields – an increase of more than 120 percent compared with a year ago – and US producers are poised to expand further, even if prices only edge moderately upwards as a result of the OPEC cuts.

Their output is already partially offsetting the cuts. The upshot is that the price of oil – and derived products like fuel – is unlikely to increase much in coming months, analysts say.

That will be welcome news to consumers and energy-hungry businesses worldwide but could continue to strain the budgets of some of the more economically-troubled oil-producing nations, like Venezuela and Brazil.

Markets underwhelmed

Although the nine-month extension was widely expected, the initial reaction in the markets was of disappointment that OPEC didn’t cut deeper or introduce a 12-month extension.

Unlike in December 2016, when prices surged on the landmark OPEC decision to restrict production, Brent crude oil dropped as much as $1.24 a barrel to a low of $52.72 on Thursday, before regaining some ground to trade 80 cents lower at $53.16. US light crude was 90 cents lower at $50.46.

“It is a disappointment that OPEC hasn’t done more to balance the markets,” said Olivier Jakob, energy markets analyst at Swiss consultancy Petromatrix. “A nine-month extension of the output cuts is already baked into prices. This shows there’s not much more OPEC can do.”

“Nine months was priced,” said Amrita Sen, analyst at consultancy Energy Aspects. “We thought the market would sell off if it was just (an extension of) nine months.”

List of CIA front organizations, domestic and foreign

• AALC, see Afro-American Labor Center
• A.P.I. Distributors, Inc.
• Actus Technology
• ADEP, see Popular Democratic Action
• Advertising Center, Inc.
• Aero Associates
• Aero Service Corp. of Philadelphia
• Aero Systems, Inc
• Aero Systems Pvt. Ltd
• AFME, see American Friends of the Middle East)
• African-American Institute
• Agencia Orbe Latinoamericano
• Agribusiness Development, Inc.
• AID (Agency for International Development – shared facilities with NIA)
• Air America
• Air Asia
• Air Proprietary Company
• All Ceylon Youth Council Movement
• Alliance for Anti-totalitarian Education
• American Committee for Liberation (of Cuba)
• American Committee on a United Europe
• America Fore Insurance Group
• American Association of the Middle East
• American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, Inc.
• American Committee for the Liberation of the People of Russia
• American Committee for the International Commission of Jurists
• American Council of Churches
• American Economic Foundation
• American Federation for Fundemental Research
• American Federation of Labor/Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL/CIO)
• American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)
• American Foundation for the Middle East
• American Friends of the Middle East
• American Friends of the Russian Freedom
• American Friends Service Committee
• American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees
• American Fund For Free Jurists
• American Geographic Society
• American Historical Society
• American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD)
• American Institute of Cairo
• American Machine & Foundry
• American Mutual Insurance Company
• American Newspaper Guild
• American Newspaper Publishers
• American Political Science Association
• American Research Center in Egypt, Inc.
• Anderson Security Associates (Virginia)
• American Society of African Culture
• American University – Special Operations Research Office
• Ames Research Center
• M.D. Anderson Foundation
• ANSA (Italian Wire Service)
• Antell, Wright & Nagel
• Anti-Communist Christian Front
• Anti-Communist Liberation Movement
• Anti-Totalitarian Board of Solidarity with the People of Vietnam
• Anti-Totalitarian Youth movement
• Appalachian Fund
• Armairco
• Area Tourist Association
• Arbian-American Oil Company
• Arnim Proprietary, Ltd
• Arrow Air
• Ashland Oil and Refining Company
• Asia Foundation
• Association American Oriental Society
• Association of Former Intelligence Officers
• Association of American Geographers
• Association of Computing Machinery
• Association of Friends of Venezuela
• Association of Preparatory Students
• Atomics, Physics & Science Fund, Inc.
• Atwater Research Program in North Africa
• Audio Intelligence Devices, Inc.
• Australian Association for Cultural Freedom
• Assoziation ungarischer Studenten in Nordamerika

 

 

• B.R. Fox Laboratories (B.R. Fox Company)
• Bahamas Commonwealth Bank
• Bank of Lisle
• Ball, Janik, and Novack
• Bankers Trust Company
• Basic Resources
• Battelle Memorial Institute
• Beacon Fund (West)
• Berliner Verein (West)
• Berliner Verein zur Forderung der Bildungshilfe in Entwicklungslandern (West)
• Berliner Verein zur Forderung der Publizistik in Entwicklungslandern
• Bird Air
• Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham and Wong
• Blythe & Company, Inc
• Boni, Watkins, Jason & Company
• Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action (IBAD)
• BRS Holding Company
• Broad and High Foundation
• J. Frederick Brown Foundation
• Bruce Campbell and Company
• Burndy Corporation
• Burgerkomitee fur Au Benpolitik (SS)
• Butte Pipe Line Company

 

 

• Cahill, Gordon, Reindel & Ohl
• Cahill & Wilinski
• Caramar (Caribbean Marine Aero Corp)
• California Shipbuilding Corporation
• Caribban Marine Area Corporation
• Caspian Pipeline Consortium
• Castle Bank and Trust
• Catherwood Foundation
• (CRESS) Center for Strategic Studies
• (CEAS) CEOSL, see Ecuadorean Confederation of Free Trade Union Organizations
• Center for Strategic and International Studies
• Center of Studies and Social Action
• Central Investigative Agency
• Century Special (controled by ICC)
• Chalk№s International Airlines
• Chesapeake Foundation
• Church League of America
• Civil Air Transport
• Civilian Irregular Defense Group(s
• Civilian Military Assistance
• Clothing and Textiles Workers Union COG, see Guayana Workers Confederation
• CMI Investments
• Coastal Products
• Coastal Trade Unions Cross, Murphy and Smith
• Cocke and Phillips International
• Columbian Financial Development Company
• Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Company
• Committee for Free Albania
• Committee for the Defense of National Interests
• Committee for Liberty of Peoples
• Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Communist China to the United Nations
• Communications Workers of America (CWA)
• Community Congress for Cultural Freedom
• Combat Military Ordinances Ltd.
• Computerized Thermal Imaging, Inc.
• Confederation for an Independent Poland
• Conference of the Atlantic
• Continental Press
• Continental Shelf Explorations, Inc.
• Cooperative League of America
• Coordinating Committee of Free Trade Unionists of Ecuador
• Coordinating Secretariat of National Unions of Students (cosec), see International
• Student Conference (ISC)
• Corporate Air Services
• Cosden Petroleum Corporation
• COSECOIN (Corporate Security Consultants International
• Council on Economic and Cultural Affairs, Inc
• Council of Foreign Relations
• Cox, Langford, Stoddard & Cutler
• CRC, see Cuban Revolutionary Council
• Crest Detective Agency (Santa Monica)
• CROCLE, see Regional Confederation of Ecuadoreas
• Crossroads of Africa
• Crusade for Freedom
• Cryogenics, Inc.
• CSU, see Urugayan Labor Conference
• CTM, see Mexican Worker Confederation
• Cuban Portland Cement Company
• Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC, Cuban Exile)
• Cummings and Seller
• Curtis Publishing Company
• CUT, see Uruguayan Confederation of Workers

 

 

• Daddario & Burns
• Dane Aviation Supply
• Debevoise, Plimpton, Lyons & Gates (West)
• Defense Services, Inc
• Defense Systems, International
• Dektor Counterinteligence (Virginia)
• Deutscher Kunstlerbund
• Dominion Rubber Company
• Double-Check Corporation
• DRE, see Revolutionary Student Directorate in Exile

 

 

• Eagle Aviation Technology and Services
• Eagleton Institute of Politics – Princeton University East Asian Institute
• East-West Center
• EATSCO (the Egyptian American Transport and Service Company)
• EC (see also EC varients, PGES, Granville Road Company, Idaho Power Systems, Coastal Products, Fouch Electric, Linnco Electric, and law firm of Ball, Janik, and Novak)
• EC Company
• EC Distributing
• EC Engineering
• EC Pulp and Paper
• EC Technical Services
• EC Voice and Data
• Ecuadorean Anti-Communist Action
• Ecuadorean Anti-Communist Front
• Ecuadorean Confederation of Free Trade Union Organizations (CEOSL)
• Ecuadorean Federation of Telecommunications Workers (FENETEL)
• Editors Press Service
• Edsel Fund
• Electrical Construction
• Electrical Contractors
• Electrical Contractors of Oregon
• Electric Storage Battery Company
• El Gheden Mining Corporation
• Encounter Magazine
• End Kadhmir Dispute Committee
• Energy Resources
• Ensayos
• ERC International, Inc.
• ESI Electronic Specialties, Inc.
• Enstnischer Nationalrat
• Enstnischer Weltzentralrat
• Estrella Company
• Europe Assembly of Captive Nations
• Evergreen International Air
• Exeter Banking Company

 

• Fairfield Aviation
• Farfield Foundation, Inc.
• Federal League for Ruralist Action (Ruralistas)
• Federation for a Democratic Germany in Free Europe
• Fed. Inte. des Journalistes de Tourisme
• FENETEL, see Ecuadorean Federation of Telecommunications Workers
• Fidelity Reporting Service
• Fiduciary Trust
• First Florida Resource Corporation
• Food, Drink and Plantation Workers Union
• Ford Foundation
• Foreign Broadcast Information
• Foreign News Service
• Foreign Press Association B.C
• Forest Products, Ltd.
• “Forum” (Wein)
• Fouch Electric
• Foundation for International and Social Behavior
• Foundation for Student Affairs
• Franklin Broadcasting Company
• Free Africa Organization of Colored People
• Free Europe Committee, Inc
• Free Europe Exile Relations
• Free Europe Press Division
• Freie Universitat (FU)
• Frente Departmental de Compensinos de Puno
• Fund For Peace
• Fund for International, Social and Economic Development

 

 

 

• Gambia National Youth Council
• GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company)
• Geneva’s Exchange and Investment Bank
• Geological Society of America
• George L. Barnes & Associates (Los Angeles)
• Georgia Council on Human Relations
• Gibralter Steamship Corp
• Global Financial
• Global International Airways
• Glore, Forgan & Company
• Golden West Airlines
• Goldstein, Judd & Gurfein
• Gotham Foundation
• Government Affairs Institute
• Grace Capital
• W.R. Grace and Company
• Grandville Road Company
• Gray and Company
• Granary Fund
• Great American Banks
• Grey Advertising Agency
• Gulf Stream, Ltd.
• Gulf Oil Corporation
• Guyana Workers Confederation (COG)

 

 

• Andrew Hamilton Fund
• Heights Fund
• Joshua Hendy Iron Works
• Hercules Research Corporation
• Hierax
• Hill & Knowlton
• Himalayan Convention
• Histadrut – The Federation of Labor in Israel
• Hiwar
• Hoblitzelle Foundation
• Hodson Corporation
• Hogan & Hartson, legal firm (Edward Bennett Williams firm)
• Hoover Institute on War, Revolution and Peace
• Howard Hughes Medical Institute
• Hutchins Advertising Company of Canada
• Huyck Corporation

 

• IBAD, see Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action
• IBM (International Business Machines)
• ICC (International Controls Corp
• Idaho Power Systems
• Impossible Electronic Techniques (Russiaville, In.)
• Independence Foundation
• Independent Research Service
• Industrial Research Service
• Information Security International Inc.
• Institut zur Erforschung der USSR e.V.
• Institute Battelle Memorial
• Institute of Historical Review
• Institute of International Education
• Institute of International Labor Research Education
• Institute of Political Education
• Institute of Public Administration
• Inter-American Capital
• Intermountain Aviation
• Inter-Probe, Inc.
• Interarmco (International Armament Corp.)
• Intercontinental Industries
• Intercontinental Finance Corporation
• Intercontinental Research Corporation
• Intermountain Aviation
• International-American Center of Economic and Social Studies
• International-American Federation of Journalists
• International-American Federation of Working Newspapermen (IFWN)
• International-American Labor College
• International-American Police Academy, see International Police Academy
• International-American Regional Labor Organization (ORIT)
• International Armament Corporation (INTERARMCO) International Air Tours of Nigeria
• International Bancorp, Ltd
• International Business Communications
• International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (IFCTU)
• International Commission of Jurists (ICJ)
• International Cooperation Administration (ICA)
• International Credit Bank of Switzerland
• International Development Foundation, Inc.
• International Fact Finding Institute
• International Federation of Christian Trade Unions IFCTU, see World Confederation of Labor
• International Federation of Journalists
• International Federation of Petroleum and Chemical Workers (IFPCW)
• International Federation of Plantation, Agriculture and Allied Workers (IFPAAW)
• International Federation of Women Lawyers (IFWL)
• International Geographical Union
• International Investigators, Inc.
• International Journalists Conference
• International Labor Research Institute
• International Press Institute
• International Rescue Committee
• International Police Services (INPOLSE)
• International Secretatiate of the Pax Romana
• International Student Conference (ISC)
• International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT)
• International Trade Services
• International Trade Secretariats
• International Trading and Investment Guaranty Corp., Ltd.,
• International Transport Workers Federation (ITF)
• International Union Officials Trade Organizations
• International Union of Young Christian Democrats
• International Youth Center
• Internationale Federation der Mittel- und Osteuropas
• Internationale Organization zur Erforschung kommunistischer Nethoden
• Internationaler Bund freier Journalisten
• Internationales Hilfskomitee
• Intertel (International Intelligence Incorporated)
• IOS (Investor№s Overseas Services)
• ITT (International Telephone and Telegraph)

 

 

• Japan Cultural Forum
• John P. Muldoon Detective Agency
• Joseph Z. Taylor & Associates Kenyon Electronics

 

• KAMI
• Kaplan Fund, Inc.
• Kennedy & Sinclaire, Inc.
• Kentfield Fund J.M.
• Kenya Federation of Labour
• Khmer Airlines
• Kilmory Investments, Ltd
• Kimberly-Clark Corporation
• Komittee fur internationale Beziehungen
• Komittee fur Selbstbestimmung
• Komittee fur die Unabhangigkeit des Kaukasus
• Korean C.I.A.
• Korean Freedom and Cultural Foundation, Inc.

 

 

 

• Labor Committee for Democratic Action
• Lake Resources
• Law Enforcement Assistance Administration
• Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit
• Lawyer’s Constitutional Defense Committee
• League for Industrial Democracy
• League for International Social and Cooperative Development
• Ligue de la Liberte
• Linking Progressive Corp., S.A.
• Linnco Electric
• Litton Industrial Company
• London American

 

• Management Safeguards, Inc.
• Manhattan Coffee Company
• Maritime Support Unit
• Marconi Telegraph-Cable Company
• Marshall Foundation, Center for International Studies (MIT-CIS)
• Martin Marietta Company
• Mathieson Chemical Corporation
• McCann-Erikson, Inc.
• Megadyne Electronics
• Mercantile Bank and Trust Company
• Merex
• Meridian Arms
• Charles E. Merrill Trust
• Mexican Workers Confederation (CTM)
• Military Armaments Corp.
• Miner & Associates
• Mineral Carriers, Ltd.
• MITRE Corporation
• Mobil Oil Company
• Molden-Verlag
• Monroe Fund
• Moore-McCormack Lines, Inc.
• Moral Majority Moral Rearmament Movement
• Mount Pleasant Trust
• Movement for Integrated University Action
• Robert Mullen Company
• Narodno Trudouoj Sojus (NTS)
• National Academy of Sciences
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
• National Board for Defense of Sovereignty and Continental Solidarity
• National Catholic Action Board
• National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse
• National Council of Churches
• National Defense Front
• National Educational Films, Inc.
• National Education Association
• National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty
• National Federation of Petroleum and Chemical Workers of Ecuador
• National Feminist Movement for the Defense of Uruguay
• National Intelligence Academy,
• National Railways Security Bureau, Inc
• National Research Council
• National Student Association
• National Student Press Council of India
• National Union of Journalists of Ecuador
• Newsweek
• New York Times
• Norman Fund
• Norman Jaspan Associates
• North American Rockwell Corporation
• North American Uranium, Inc
• Norwich Pharmaceutical Company
• Nugan Fruit Group
• Nugan Hand Bank

 

 

• Oceanic Cargo
• Oil Workers International Union
• Omni Spectra, Inc. (Tempe, Az.)
• Operations and Policy Research, Inc.
• Orange Spot
• Organix. Ukrainischer Nationalisten (OUN)
• ORIT, see International-American Regional Labor Organization
• Overseas New Agency
• Overseas Southeast Asia Supply Company

 

• Pacific Corporation
• Pacific Life Insurance
• Paderewski Foundation
• PAMCO (Pacific Aircraft Maintenance Company
• Pan-American Foundation
• Pan Aviation
• Pappss Charitable Trust
• Parvus
• Jere Patterson & Associates
• Pax Romana
• Peace and Freedom
• Penobscot Land & Investment Company
• Phoenix Financial
• Plant Protection, Inc.
• Plenary of Democratic Civil Organizations of Uruguay
• Pope & Ballard
• Popular Democratic Action (ADEP)
• Press Institute of India
• Price Fund
• Project Democracy
• Property Resources, Ltd.
• Public Service International (PSI)
• Publisher’s Council

 

• Rabb Charitable Foundation
• Radio Americas
• Radio Free Europe
• Radio Free Asia
• Radio Liberty
• Radio Liberty Committee, Inc.
• Radio Liberation
• Radio Swan
• Rand Corporation
• Rapid-American Corp.
• Red Pearl Bay, S.A.
• Regional Confederation of Ecuadorean Coastal Trade Unions (CROCLE)
• Research Foundation for Foreign Affairs
• Resorts International (Parent of Intertel)
• Retail Clerk’s International Association
• Revolutionary Democratic Front (RFD, Cuban exile)
• Reynolds Metal Company
• Robert A. Maheu Associates
• Robert R. Mullen Company
• Rubicon Foundation
• Rumanisches Nationalkomitee
• Russian and East European Institute
• Russian Institute
• Russian Research Center

 

 

• Safir
• Saman
• San Jacinto Foundation
• San Miguel Fund
• SBONR
• SECOIN (Security Consultants International)
• Sentinels of Liberty
• Sheffield Edwards & Associates (Virginia) :
• Shenandoah Airleasing
• SIONICS
• Southern Air Transport Spectre Security Products (Orange, Ca)
• Sith & Company
• Social Christian Movement of Ecuador
• Sociedade Anomima de Radio Retransmissao (RARETSA)
• Society for Defense of Freedom in Asia
• SODECO (Sakhalin Oil Development Cooperation Co)
• SODIMAC Southern Air Transport
• St. Lucia Airways
• Standard Commerz Bank of Switzerland
• Standard Electronics, Inc.
• Standish Ayer & McKay, Inc.
• Stanford Technology Trading Group International (STTGI)
• Strauss Fund
• Sterling Chemical Co.
• Streamlight, Inc. (King of Prussia, Pa.)
• Student Movement for Democratic Action
• Sur International
• Sullivan & Cromwell
• Summit Aviation
• Sylvania Electric Products, Inc.
• Synod of Bishops of the Russian Church Outside of Russia
• Systems Development Corporation

 

 

• Tarantel Press
• Tetra Tech International
• Thai-Pacific Services Company
• The Aquatic Club
• The Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar and Restaurant
• The Broyhill Building (Arlington, VA)
• The Law Association for Asia and the Western Pacific
• The Second National Bank of Homstead (Florida)
• The Texas Tavern
• The Washington Monthly
• The World Finance Corporation
• Tibet Convention
• Time Magazine
• Tower Fund
• Tractron (Vienna, Va.)
• Trade Winds Motel
• Transmaritania
• Trident Bank
• Twentieth Century Fund

 

 

• Udall Corp.
• Unabhangiger Forschugsdienst
• Ungarischer Nationalrat
• United Fruit Company
• United States Youth Council
• United Ukrainian American Relief Committee
• Universal Service Corporation
• Untersuchungsausschub freiheitlicher Juristen (UfJ)
• Uruguayan Committee for Free Detention of Peoples
• Uruguayan Confederation of Workers (CUT)
• Uruguayan Labor Confederation (CSU)
• USAID (Agency for International Development – shared facilities with NIA)
• USIA (United States Information Agency
• USIA Weapon Sales
• U.S. News and World Report
• U.S.-Russian Commercial Energy Working Group

 

 

• Vanguard Service Corporation
• Varicon, Inc
• Vector, Ltd.
• Venture Fund

 

 

• Wackenhut
• Wainwright and Matthews Joseph Walter & Sons
• Warden Trust
• Erwim Wasey, Ruthrauff & Ryan, Inc.
• Washington Post
• Wexton Advertising Agency
• Western International Ground Maintenance Organization (WIGMO)
• Whitten Trust
• Wikipedia
• Williford-Telford Corporation
• World Assembly of Youth (WAY)
• World Confederation of Labour
• World Marine, Inc.
• Wynnewood Fund

 

 

• York Research Corporation

 

• Zapato Off-Shore Oil Company
• Zapato Petroleum Corp
• Zenith Technical Enterprizes
• Zen Nihon Gakusei Jichikai Sorengo
• Zentrale for Studien und Dokumentation
• Zweites deutschen fernsehen (ZDF)