TBR News October 10, 2018

Oct 10 2018

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

Washington, D.C. October 10, 2018:” Fascinating to follow the results of the rapidly melting Greenland and Antarctica glaciers.

Some years ago, it was believed that in 4000 years, the seas would rise about .01 cm but now the scientific world is in a state of manic frenzy on the subject.

Because of the enormous financial damage rising sea levels will cause, many governments are not willing to spend either the time or money addressing the issue and take refuge in rigged conclusions by whorish scientists.

A friend in Boston, and another one is Miami, would disagree that there is no sea level problem but the media, ever obedient to its master’s wishes, either dodges the issue or keeps up the myth that none of this will happen for five hundred years.

It is happening now, dudes, and property values all along the east coast of the United States have plunged downward. Perhaps the optimistic government-paid scientists could try to convince prospective buyers to purchase valuable coastside property that now is unsalable.

 

The Table of Contents

  • Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 46
  • Nikki Haley: the latest Trump enabler to ruin her shot at redemption
  • Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s global enabler, was no moderate
  • Nikki Haley’s departure reflects the chaos of Trump’s foreign policy
  • Brett Kavanaugh’s ugly confirmation fight may reverberate for years inside Supreme Court
  • A recent poll shows Trump approval surging ahead with minorities
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
  • From Gestapo Chief to senior CIA official.

 

Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 46

August 8, 2018

by Daniel Dale, Washington Bureau Chief

The Toronto Star, Canada

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

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

Last updated: Aug 8, 2018

  • Dec 29, 2017

“I just wanted to thank you. The job you did in Florida, and especially the job you did in Texas — 16,000 people. It’s unheard of.”

Source: Remarks to Coast Guard members at Trump International Golf Club in Florida

in fact: The Coast Guard told the Star that they rescued 11,022 people during their response to Hurricane Harvey. This was the eighth time Trump claimed the number was 16,000.

Trump has repeated this claim 8 times

  • Dec 30, 2017

“Phony and non-existent ‘sources’ are being used more often than ever. Many stories & reports a pure fiction!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: There is no evidence the U.S. media are making up fake sources for their stories.

Trump has repeated this claim 12 times

  • Jan 2, 2018

“The Failing New York Times has a new publisher, A.G. Sulzberger. Congratulations!…treat the President of the United States FAIRLY, so that the next time I (and the people) win, you won’t have to write an apology to your readers for a job poorly done!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Trump suggested, though did not explicitly say, that the New York Times issued an apology to its readers after his victory in 2016. This is not true. Trump was referring to a post-election sales pitch in which Times leaders thanked readers and said they planned to “rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism.”

Trump has repeated this claim 9 times

“The Failing New York Times has a new publisher, A.G. Sulzberger. Congratulations!…Get impartial journalists of a much higher standard, lose all of your phony and non-existent ‘sources,'”

Source: Twitter

in fact: There is no evidence the New York Times has invented sources for its Trump stories.

Trump has repeated this claim 12 times

“Since taking office I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation. Good news – it was just reported that there were Zero deaths in 2017, the best and safest year on record!”

Source: Twitter

in fact: Trump strongly suggested, though did not explicitly say, that the no-death year for commercial aviation was attributable to his own actions. Aviation experts universally say that is not true. For one, the no-fatality streak long predates his presidency: been zero flight deaths for U.S. passenger airlines in any year since 2009, the first year of the eight-year Obama presidency, according to Federal Aviation Administration data. Second, aviation experts say Trump has done nothing to be “strict” on the industry. “I’m unaware that the president has had any impact on aviation oversight policy or practice,” Bob Mann, president of aviation consultancy R.W. Mann & Co, told Bloomberg. “In fact, his stated preferences — less ‘red tape,’ fewer regulations — would suggest a preference for less oversight, not strictness.”

  • Jan 4, 2018

“Many mostly Democrat States refused to hand over data from the 2016 Election to the Commission On Voter Fraud. They fought hard that the Commission not see their records or methods because they know that many people are voting illegally. System is rigged, must go to Voter I.D.”

Source: Twitter

in fact: There is no evidence that many people are voting illegally: Democratic-controlled and Republican-controlled states alike, in addition to academic experts, say there is no evidence of the widespread voter fraud Trump insists there is, much less a “rigged” voting system. (Many Democrats believe that strict voter ID rules are unfair to minorities and the poor, but this is not what Trump is talking about.) Further, fear of exposing widespread voter fraud is not why state officials refused to give the commission the detailed information on voters it was seeking, such as the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers.Some of them, such as California’s Democratic leaders, said the commission was illegitimate and biased; others, like Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, said they did not want federal interference in their election system; South Carolina said that the “release of voter data to anyone who is not a registered South Carolina voter is not permitted by state law.”

  • Jan 6, 2018

“Remember this the lottery — it’s just common sense: they’re not sending us their finest, okay? When somebody gets picked in the lottery, we’re not getting their best people.”

Source: Press conference at Camp David

in fact: This is, as always, an inaccurate description of the Diversity Visa Lottery program. Contrary to Trump’s regular claim, foreign governments do not “send” their bad apples into the lottery to try to dump them on the United States: would-be immigrants sign up on their own, as individuals, of their own free will.

Trump has repeated this claim 21 times

“Now, there has been collusion between Hillary Clinton, the DNC and the Russians…the only collusion is between Hillary and the Russians and the DNC and the Russians.”

Source: Press conference at Camp David

in fact: The word “collusion” — in common language, a “secret agreement or co-operation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose” — simply does not apply to the Russia-related activities of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. This accusation is based on the fact that the British ex-spy who produced a research dossier on the Trump campaign’s alleged links to Russia, which was funded in part by Clinton’s campaign, used Russian sources in compiling his information. This does not come close to meeting the definition of “collusion.”

Trump has repeated this claim 22 times

“I guess the collusion, now, is dead. Because everyone found, after a year of study, there’s been absolutely no collusion.”

Source: Press conference at Camp David

in fact: It has not been proven, nor is it commonly accepted, that there was no collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Special counsel Robert Mueller continues to investigate, as do congressional committees.

Trump has repeated this claim 18 times

“I don’t know this man (author Michael Wolff). I guess Sloppy Steve (Bannon) brought him into the White House quite a bit.”

Source: Press conference at Camp David

in fact: Trump is inaccurately describing his relationship with Wolff. We’d let it go if he claimed he did not know the author “well,” but it is inaccurate to say that he does not know him at all. Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Sanders, said Trump spoke to Wolff for “five to seven minutes” at one point during Trump’s presidency about something unrelated to Wolff’s book; Wolff, conversely, said he “spent about three hours with the president over the course of the campaign and in the White House.” Further, Trump has long been familiar with Wolff’s work, which has focused on elite figures in New York City. “Trump has known Michael Wolff for years!” tweeted Washington Post political reporter Josh Dawsey.

“Well, now that collusion with Russia is proving to be a total hoax and the only collusion is with Hillary Clinton and the FBI/Russia…”

Source: Twitter

in fact: The accusation that Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 election has not been proven to be a “total hoax,” but we’ll give Trump leeway to claim it “is proving” to be a hoax. The claim that Clinton colluded with Russia, however, is simply incorrect. It is based on the fact that the British ex-spy who produced a research dossier on the Trump campaign’s alleged links to Russia, which was funded in part by Clinton’s campaign, used Russian sources in compiling his information. This does not come close to meeting the definition of “collusion,” which is a “secret agreement or co-operation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose.”

Trump has repeated this claim 22 times

  • Jan 8, 2018

“African American unemployment is the lowest ever recorded in our country. The Hispanic unemployment rate dropped a full point in the last year and is close to the lowest in recorded history. Dems did nothing for you but get your vote! #NeverForget”

Source: Twitter

in fact: If Trump believes Republicans such as himself deserve credit for the one-point drop in Black unemployment between the beginning and end of 2017, from 7.8 per cent to 6.8 per cent, and the one-point drop in Hispanic unemployment, from 5.9 per cent to 4.9 per cent, it is wildly misleading to suggest that this proves Democrats did not help them: there were bigger declines in both rates during Obama’s tenure. The Black unemployment rate dropped five points, from 12.7 per cent to 7.8 per cent, under Obama. Similarly, the Hispanic unemployment rate dropped from 10.1 per cent to 5.9 per cent under Obama.

Trump has repeated this claim 7 times

“And from now on, most family farms and small-business owners will be spared — and you’re going to be spared, and it really is the word punishment of the deeply unfair estate tax, known as the death tax — so you can keep your farms in the family…And what’s been happening is, you know, you have a farm and it does well, but its value is more than the income really would justify. And what happens is families were forced to take these farms and sell them at a fire-sale price.”

Source: Speech to the American Farm Bureau

in fact: Even before Trump’s tax law passed, almost all family farms and small-business owners were already spared from the estate tax. The tax only applied to very large inheritances of more than $5.5 million for an individual. According to the Tax Policy Center, a mere 80 farms and small businesses were among the 5,460 estates likely to pay the estate tax in 2017 under the law that existed prior to Trump’s changes. The Center writes on its website: “The Tax Policy Center estimates that small farms and businesses will pay $30 million in estate tax in 2017, fifteen hundredths of 1 percent of the total estate tax revenue.”

Trump has repeated this claim 13 times

“And we have just signed into law the most significant tax cuts and reforms in American history. It’s a total of $5.5 trillion in tax cuts…”

Source: Speech to the American Farm Bureau

in fact: We’ll let Trump get away with calling his tax cuts the most significant ever, though many ceonomists and historians disagree, but we won’t let him get away with claiming they amount to $5.5 trillion. Economic analysts say the correct number is $1.5 trillion, the bill’s net result. Trump appeared to arrive at “$5.5 trillion” by misleadingly excluding all of the revenue increases included in the same package of tax changes — provisions that will take money from people to offset some of the revenue losses of the rest of the bill. Puzzled by Trump’s claim, Richard Rubin, a top U.S. tax reporter for the Wall Street Journal, wrote on Twitter: “Is there a ‘deep sigh’ emoji?”

 

Nikki Haley: the latest Trump enabler to ruin her shot at redemption

Perhaps Trump’s former officials were somehow suckered into salivating over him – but these fantasies are becoming ever distant

October 9, 2018

by Richard Wolffe

The Guardian

Nikki Haley wants you to know that she’s not quitting her awesome, once-in-a-lifetime job to spend more time with her family.

This is a rare thing among those permanently rising stars in the Republican party who just happen to announce their departures ahead of the expected train wreck of the midterm elections next month.

Paul Ryan, the outgoing House speaker, is leaving his awesome job because he honestly, truly wants to hang out with his own teenagers.

But Haley is different. “My family is very supportive,” the departing US ambassador to the UN said in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “So no, there’s no personal reasons. I think that it’s just very important for government officials to understand when it’s time to step aside. And I have given everything I’ve got these last eight years. And I do think that sometimes it’s good to rotate in other people who can put that same energy and power into it.”

The crop rotation theory of government is a fascinating one, but it’s usually cited by the person doing the firing rather than the person doing the quitting. On the Kavanaugh scale of unbelievably cheap lies, Haley’s selfless self-sacrifice is right down there with his claim that he vomited because of the spicy food.

As she was indulging in her moment of munificence, a painfully tense Donald Trump looked like he was perched on a chair of nails beside her. If he was worried about all the speculation about Haley running for president, he didn’t need to bother.

“No, I’m not running for 2020,” she declared, unprompted. “I can promise you what I’ll be doing is campaigning for this one. So I look forward to supporting the president in the next election.”

“That’s so good,” oozed Trump. “Thank you, Nikki.”

For some bizarre reason, the 45th president (“this one”) didn’t take offense at the notion that a former cabinet official might need to quash the rumors about challenging him for his own job.

A president who wasn’t clinging on to power by his fingernails might be offended by the preposterous statement. The mere mention would have been unthinkable around any of his predecessors.

But Trump is a beached whale of a boss, taking his last gasps of power before the House subpoenas start flying, and the Mueller investigation lays out its evidence of conspiracies and corruption like so much captured contraband.

Why was Trump so ready to keep Haley happy? Perhaps there was a clue in her effusive praise for the boss’s bestest children ever. “I can’t say enough good things about Jared and Ivanka,” she claimed. “Jared is such a hidden genius that no one understands.”

How true, ambassador. Nobody really understands how well he’s hiding his genius.

I mean, to redo the Nafta deal the way he did,” she helpfully explained. “What I’ve done working with him on the Middle East peace plan – it is so unbelievably well done.

By “well done” she was referring to how thoroughly cooked this slab of meat looks. The whole Middle East is so tired of Jared Kushner’s winning, there’s only one obvious place left for him to go: the United Nations, as Haley’s replacement.

The reality distortion field around Trump is so intense that you expect those emerging from the Twilight Zone to declare what is so stunningly obvious to the rest of the world: the president is a racist and sexist bozo who is a clear and present danger to world peace.

Perhaps at some point Trump’s former officials will seek redemption by claiming they were suckered by a strange temporary sickness into salivating all over his disastrous leadership.

But these fantasies are getting more and more distant with each gushing statement of admiration in the Oval Office, and each victory lap in the East Room.

Perhaps these formerly sane officials realize it’s premature to dump on Trump, or perhaps they know the party will never forgive them. The truth is there’s no constituency for Haley to primary against Trump. And there’s no credibility in her making any claim that she was secretly moderating his many worst impulses.

No doubt the rest of the UN ambassadors viewed Haley as their channel to understanding the hermit kingdom of Trump’s brain, much as they all treat the North Korean ambassador as a channel to Kim Jong-un.

But Haley’s effect on Trump’s foreign policy is, as Republican senators like to say, uncorroborated and therefore completely refuted.

She said she was “taking names” of the countries voting against Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. This was as bizarre and bullying as everything else that spills out of Trump’s Twitter feed. It’s not that hard to identify America’s allies who oppose an end-run around an Israeli-Palestinian peace process: that would be all of them, with the exception of the Netanyahu government.

She happily endorsed Trump’s massive cuts to the US contribution to the UN budget, which she claimed had made the UN so much better. “We’ve made it stronger,” she said on Tuesday. “We’ve made it more efficient.”

If you remove a kidney from someone, you might make the remaining one work twice as hard. But describing it as stronger and more efficient doesn’t exactly capture the health of the patient.

Yes, Haley condemned Trump as she traveled the campaign trail with Marco Rubio more than two years ago, when dinosaurs still walked the planet.

But in the Trumpassic era those ancient words have been erased by her inane comments that the UN general assembly was laughing at her boss because “they loved how honest he is”. As opposed to them laughing at him because he’s so ludicrous when he claims to be the most successful president in history.

On the plus side, Haley did promise sanctions against Russia for its support for Syria’s chemical weapons program – a promise that ran into public opposition from her own White House. She helped deliver tough new UN sanctions against North Korea, which seemed like a united front until her own boss fell in love with Kim. And she insisted on denouncing the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, marking a sharp contrast with her boss who preferred to say they were “very fine people”.

This is sadly how distorted life is around Donald Trump. It’s tempting to say that Nikki Haley was a moderate because she condemned neo-Nazis. But that’s just as credible as her quitting to give someone else a chance at the UN.

Like Trump himself, his cabinet officials can lie to all of the people some of the time, and to some of the people all of the time. But they can’t ever reclaim their reputation.

 

Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s global enabler, was no moderate

Nikki Haley’s departure from the UN is being framed as the Trump administration losing one of its few moderate Republicans and voices of reason. Her record disproves that narrative, however

October 10, 2018

by Michael Knigge.

DW

At this point it is almost moot to decry this White House’s ongoing revolving door mentality. It is still unclear whether the amicable-seeming announcement of Nikki Haley’s departure was long-planned, or if, notwithstanding her unprompted rejection, she might be plotting to run against Donald Trump for the United States presidency in 2020.

Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s global enabler, was no moderate

Ultimately, the speculation adds little to evaluating how the US has conducted itself on the world stage. Let’s instead focus on what we do know, and that is Haley’s record as US ambassador at the United Nations.

Put bluntly, her record is bleak. Sure, during her two-year tenure in New York she has given vocal support to certain human rights issues and was one of the more outspoken administration figures criticizing Russia.

Exit from UN bodies

But this is not what she will be remembered for. Haley, one of the earliest and most high-profile female members of Trump’s Cabinet, will be remembered for what happened during her tenure: With her support, the US pulled out of the UN-backed international climate deal, the UN Security Council-backed Iran nuclear deal, the UN cultural organization UNESCO and the UN Human Rights Council.

She will be remembered for threatening other UN members via Twitter that the US “will be taking names” of nations that supported a purely symbolic resolution denouncing Washington’s decision to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

She will be remembered for advancing a new and dangerous principle whereby the US only gives aid to nations it deems friendly, meaning that they have conducted themselves, and voted at the UN, in line with the Trump administration’s positions.

And she probably won’t be, but should be remembered for the fact that during her tenure Washington ended its funding for the UN Population Fund, the body’s reproductive health agency, and reinstated the so-called Global Gag Rule that prohibits the US government from funding international health groups that also advocate for abortions.

Enabler of ‘America First’ on the global stage

Taken together, Haley has been an ardent supporter of Trump’s “America First” policy, which openly advocates a winner-take-all approach that is fundamentally at odds with the core principles of the UN. Her personal style may have helped to cloak and blunt her full-throated support for Trump’s hostile attitude to multilateralism — nevertheless, it was there.

In her defense, some might say that she was trying her level best to prevent Trump from doing even more damage, and they may warn that her replacement could be even worse — but that ship sailed a long time ago. At this point in the Trump administration’s tenure, and considering all the damage that has already been done on numerous fronts, we simply cannot allow the argument that “it could be worse” to stand and serve as a benchmark.

By any traditional party standard, Haley cannot be described as a moderate or mainstream Republican. She has been the leading advocate for and enabler of Trump’s politics on the global stage. There is no reason the world need shed a tear about her impending departure.

 

Nikki Haley’s departure reflects the chaos of Trump’s foreign policy

Not unlike in an autocracy, US foreign policy is hostage to the erratic whims of the president, directed by Trump tweets and what he sees on Fox News

October 10, 2018

by Michael H Fuchs

The Guardian

Another one bites the dust.

That’s the story of Donald Trump’s foreign policy team. In his 22nd month in office, the president is on his third national security adviser and second secretary of state. Now, Trump has to fill yet another national security position: a new US ambassador to the United Nations.

The resignation of US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley came as a surprise to everyone, including apparently the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and White House staff. While many senior officials leave after two years, the resignation announcement of a cabinet member immediately before midterm elections is rare. The speculation is already rampant: was Haley fed up with the chaos of the Trump administration? Was one of Trump’s daily affronts to basic decency and democratic norms finally too much? Is she planning to run against Trump in the 2020 Republican presidential primary, despite claims to the contrary?

As we learn more in the coming days and months, one thing is clear: the Trump administration’s foreign policy is in chaos, and there’s no one minding the store.

Not unlike in an autocracy, US foreign policy is hostage to the erratic whims of the president, directed by Trump tweets and what he sees on Fox News.

Some argue that Trump has a foreign policy. Perhaps it is driven by classic realpolitik – America doesn’t have friends, only interests – which might explain his affection for dictators and disdain for US allies. Perhaps it is isolationism, driving Trump to tear up international agreements and reduce immigration. Or perhaps he just views foreign policy as a mano-a-mano showdown with each and every government – friends, allies, adversaries – over anything that smells of victory, from trade deficits to extorting allies for more money.

Regardless of the impulses driving specific policy decisions, US foreign policy under Trump on any given day appears to be propelled by whether or not the president is on a Twitter rampage.

In this environment, no US official is anything more than a supplicant at the court of Trump. Former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and former national security adviser HR McMaster chafed at this approach and couldn’t last. Current secretary of state Pompeo, on the other hand, has nestled himself into a nice perch in the court, and proven himself capable of morphing into whatever role the president desires.

In her time at the UN, Haley mostly played the part of the good soldier: attack the integrity of the UN by taking steps to undermine it, like pulling the US out of the UN human rights council; claim to stand up for Israel by cutting off funding to the Palestinians; condemn Iran regularly as often as possible. But sometimes, Haley’s actions at the UN – such as her harsh words for Russia over its role in Syria – made it seem as if Haley was conducting her own, more traditionally conservative, foreign policy at Turtle Bay.

And that’s illustrative of the anarchy that is the Trump foreign policy. While the national security adviser, John Bolton, attempts to undermine diplomacy with North Korea, Pompeo plays desk officer for Trump’s outreach to North Korea, and the secretary of defense, James Mattis, tries to protect the US-South Korea alliance. It certainly shows that Bolton reportedly doesn’t like holding national Security Council meetings of the “principals” (cabinet officials).

The disorganization is exacerbated by the astonishingly high number of unfilled senior positions. While the turnover of cabinet-level officials on the national security team is unheard of at this point in a presidential term, so, too, is the number of empty senior positions throughout the bureaucracy. For instance, according to one analysis, only 45% of the state department’s Senate-confirmed positions are in place. The lack of confirmed assistant secretaries of state, deputy assistant secretaries of state and ambassador spots around the world cripples US foreign policy on a daily basis. Whether the issue is a trade war or nuclear diplomacy with Iran or North Korea, foreign governments are perplexed about US foreign policy and who speaks for the US. Almost two years into Trump’s term, one recent poll of 25 countries revealed that 70% of people have “no confidence” in Trump, despite Haley’s boasts of unprecedented respect for the US.

Which brings us back to Nikki Haley’s departure. Whatever the reasons for her departure, it is unlikely to have a significant impact on US foreign policy. Donald Trump is the only official who truly speaks for US foreign policy, and everyone else is just playing a part.

To date, the administration’s foreign policy chaos has inflicted lasting damage on the US and the world. And the scary part – yes, it could get much scarier – is that the Trump team has not even been tested with a genuine international crisis, such as a terrorist attack in the US. Nikki Haley or no Nikki Haley, help us all if Trump is presented with a real national security crisis.

 

Brett Kavanaugh’s ugly confirmation fight may reverberate for years inside Supreme Court

Law scholars warn the Supreme Court could face years of bitter dispute over Kavanaugh’s unresolved sexual assault allegations and his highly partisan testimony

October 10, 2018

by Ed Pilkington

The Guardian

Leading law scholars are warning that the US Supreme Court faces months or even years of bitter dispute over whether its new recruit, Brett Kavanaugh, should recuse himself from cases involving sexual violence and party-political partisanship.

Kavanaugh finally took his seat on the country’s highest court on Tuesday with sexual assault allegations unresolved and his highly contentious testimony before the US Senate still reverberating. During his historically ugly confirmation process, he was accused by three women of sexual misconduct.

None of the allegations were proven. But nor were they – as Donald Trump falsely claimed during the swearing in ceremony on Monday – disproven.

How the initial allegations will play out is now a matter of urgent legal debate, as is the accusations of partisanship he leveled at Democratic senators when he claimed they had orchestrated a left-wing conspiracy against him. The most direct questions raised are likely to relate to cases coming before the new court on sexual violence or discrimination.

Already percolating their way up the judicial chain and heading for the supreme court are suits demanding that gay and lesbian people be entitled to the same constitutional protections against workplace discrimination as are afforded employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin and religion.

Other cases that might come before the 53-year-old Kavanaugh – who holds his seat on the court for life – include cases on sexual assault on campuses, family law cases and suits involving the right of those accused of domestic violence to buy guns.

Julie Goldscheld, professor of law specializing in gender issues at CUNY School of Law in New York, said that she was concerned about Kavanaugh’s ability to sit impartially in judgment over such matters. “His testimony compounded my concerns both about his temperament and potential bias around issues relating to gender violence, employment discrimination, or any contexts in which sexual assault comes up,” she said.

Goldscheld was one of 2,600 law professors – about a quarter of all full-time law scholars in the country – who signed a joint letter opposing Kavanaugh’s confirmation. One of its organizers, Bernard Harcourt, professor of law and political science at Columbia University, told the Guardian that another major area of concern relates to cases with a party-political bearing, given Kavanaugh’s highly partisan performance in front of the Senate judiciary committee.

In a fraught hearing of the committee following testimony from his main accuser, Dr Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh aggressively defended himself in party-political terms. He accused Democratic senators on the panel of waging a “calculated and orchestrated political hit” against him, “fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election … revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside leftwing opposition groups”.

Later, he admitted in the Wall Street Journal that he had “said a few things I should not have said”, without specifying the actual comments.

Supreme Court justices in the past have displayed partisan behavior, such as the late Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas who provoked criticism when they attended a 2010 strategy summit hosted by the far rightwing Koch brothers. But never before have justices revealed their own party-political allegiances so viscerally in public.

Harcourt said that the “hidden face of Brett Kavanaugh was exposed. We saw his true bitter partisanship.”

Such a display would have ramifications for any case coming before the court that had clear partisan lines, Harcourt said. “Anything that effects partisan politics is now tainted – as is most apparent with voting rights issues such as redistricting and cases on gerrymandering.”

The Supreme Court has often been asked to adjudicate over changes to electoral law in which Republican-controlled states have been accused of seeking an unfair advantage by redrawing constituency lines or suppressing the turnout of Democratic-leaning minority voters. The most recent was a case involving Ohio’s purge of thousands of voters from its rolls.

In the outcome, the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 in favor of Ohio Republicans, with Anthony Kennedy wielding his swing vote. Now that Kennedy has been replaced with Kavanaugh, a justice with glaring partisan tendencies, such a narrow majority ruling could be considered improper by large numbers of Americans.

The most partisan issue of all would be impeachment. If the Democrats took back the House of Representatives in the midterm elections next month, they would be in a position to press charges against Trump in the wake of the Robert Mueller investigation on Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“Any kind of issue closely related to impeachment or investigations of possible corruption or tax fraud – any of those issues would fall squarely in the bailiwick of deeply partisan politics,” Harcourt said. “That would in turn trigger doubts about Kavanaugh’s conspiratorial thinking that was evident during his confirmation.”

In all such cases, a central dispute is likely to be whether Kavanaugh should recuse himself. The US Supreme Court is unique among federal courts in that the justices effectively police themselves – a practice that has been widely criticized.

The nine justices can and do recuse themselves, frequently without explanation. Litigants, if they dare, can also file a motion calling on individual justices to step aside for reasons of conflict, but the decision is left to the justice in question with no right to challenge the outcome.

The pattern has been seen with Clarence Thomas who was accused during his 1991 confirmation process of sexually harassing Anita Hill. Thomas has gone on to sit on several cases relating to sexual harassment in the workplace, without recusing himself.

Judith Resnik, Arthur Liman professor of law at Yale Law School, said Kavanaugh’s presence, given what happened during the confirmation, had “put a pall over the supreme court. The Senate hearings were shocking, and have left a terrible aftertaste.”

She added: “Kavanaugh has so aligned himself with the Republican party it casts a shadow: will he be able to judge cases which would expressly benefit the Republicans?”

 

A recent poll shows Trump approval surging ahead with minorities

October 10, 2018

Alviso University

A poll taken by the Alviso, California, University Public Perceptions department shows President Donald Trump surging well above the Democrats with many minority groups.

In the black communities, Trump has gained almost 92% approval

In Latin American communities, Trump has gained a 83% approval

In Muslim communities, Trump has gained a total of 79% approval

Another poll taken on October 1 shows over 97% of Americans approve of Trumps proposal to shut down Social Security and use their money for further funding for the Department of Defense and 82% of those polled believe that all gays should be treated as Satanic witches and burned at the stake.

A movement, now popular in American right-wing religious circles, that the Ten Commandments and large pictures of Jesus must be displayed in all public school classrooms is gaining strength, mostly in Southern states and now stands at a general 87% in Alabama, 92% in Mississippi and 98% in Georgia.

Overall, new Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh is given a 92% rating as a highly moral person, a teetotaler and of great importance on a Supreme Court to counter any left- of-center Justices in the Trump plan to ban abortions and gay marriages

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

October 9, 2018

by Dr. Peter Janney

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.

Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks,”: Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas  in 1993  when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publications.

Conversation No. 30

Date:  Tuesday, August 6, 1996

Commenced: 11:10 AM CST

Concluded: 11:47 AM CST

GD: Ah, good morning to you, Robert. How is life treating you today?

RTC: Good morning, Gregory. There are good days and bad days. I’m not sure about today.

GD: Certainty is illusion, Robert. I was talking to an old friend of mine last night. He’s down at Norfolk. Was Navy but retired. I went to school with him. King’s Point and then the NSG.

RTC: King’s Point is Merchant Marine.

GD: I know. They have a reserve commission and they can activate it if they want to. He did. Nuclear vessels surface and then the NSG. He was the Naval Attaché in the Dominican Republic. Worked on the Trujillo assassination. But that’s not the issue now. We got to talking about AIDS and since he had quite a bit of sherry, he told me quite a story about how that originated. I thought you might have some input on that. Want me to go on?

RTC: Why not?

GD: Well, according to him, the Navy had an experimental medical station down in Haiti. They were down there because there was a huge pool of very poor locals they could use as subjects in tests. He said that they were developing something that would lower a person’s resistance to the point where a common cold would put them out of action for weeks.

RTC: Go on. What then?

GD: Well, they hit on a virus that does this, experimented with the locals and when they were sure it actually worked, somehow they got this into local whores whom the Cuban government then shipped over to Angola to service their volunteers fighting there.

RTC: I’ve heard stories about that.

GD: But somehow, the virus mutated into something far more serious. The HIV thing. And they didn’t care if all the Cubans died, or the whores either, but it seems that some the younger Haitians got this and when American gays made excursions down there for some cheap black cock, they got it, too, and you can see where that went. Then, my friend said, after they found out what had gone wrong, the Navy shut down its facility, disposed of their volunteer locals by taking them out on boats and dumping them into the water. Anyway, that’s what he said, and I believe him. That’s what I wanted to ask you about.

RTC: There is something to that. Your friend had best be very quiet or he’ll end up taking a one-way boat trip. And I would be careful not to put any of that into one of your books. If you take my drift.

GD: No, it wouldn’t fit in with the Mueller material. It is true, then?

RTC: Basically it is. Take note that it didn’t start out to kill off all the homos, although the Christians thought it was a wonderful thing, but your friend was right when he said it mutated. I was never in that part of the agency but one hears things or talks to colleagues. I mean there was only the intention to interfere with the combat capabilities of enemy troops, not liquidate social outcasts. When we learned about this, the burn bags were used overtime at Langley.

GD: Were your people part of it?

RTC: In a sense. The Navy supplied the tactical, and we supplied the strategic. They produced the weapon and we, the targets. We were planning to use this on the Russians.

GD: Well, I know something about that aspect. You know about General Ishi? [1]

RTC: Oh yes, I do indeed.

GD: His Japanese military units had a BW lab up in Manchuria and they used to develop the plague and God knows what else. Poisoned thousands of Chinese, wanted to loose the plague against their Russian neighbors and used Allied POW’s as lab specimens. Most of them died of plague and other nasty things.

RTC: Ah, the redoubtable Dr. Ishi.1 After we took over Japan, he was caught along with his staff and they were planning to try him for very ugly war crimes but MacArthur, acting on specific orders from the Pentagon, rescued him, set him with a big lab in Tokyo and back they went to developing the bubonic plague. I guess they were going to use it on the Russians if all else failed.

GD: That I know all about. Not the Japanese but using the plague against the Russians. There was a German Army doctor, a Dr. Walter Schreiber, who was a specialist in communicable diseases. He developed a form of the plague and the military used it to clean out the overcrowded Russian POW cages. Cost too much to feed and guard them. The rationale was that they never used them in the West. Roosevelt, as you might know, was planning to use mustard gas against the Germans in Russia until the Bari raid blew up a boat-full of mustard gas, and when Hitler learned of this, he threatened to let nerve gas loose on London and Washington. Amazing how quickly FDR backed off.

RTC: You do your homework, don’t you?

GD: Oh yes. Schreiber came over to us in Berlin after the war and we vetted him and sent him to San Antonio to set up a lab there to cultivate the plague. Again, we planned to use it against the Russians. I don’t what the Russians did to infuriate our sacred leaders, but I don’t think they would have deserved that. Schreiber got outed and had to be shipped back to Germany.

RTC: Drew Pearson was the man who did that.

GD: Whatever. Well, the Brits practiced BW when they gave the Indians smallpox-laced blankets back in the eighteenth century, but Mueller and I were discussing Schreiber’s project. Mueller was very angry when he heard this and rounded Schreiber up. Had to let him go. Orders from on high. Mueller said that there were no Customs agents at the borders to stop the spread of such filthiness right back from whence it came. But he told me about a CIA plan to ruin the Asian rice crop. That failed but only barely. It would have spread and ruined everyone’s rice crop. He said that creatures that dabbled in such things should be shot out of hand or they would destroy everyone, good or bad. I suppose the definition of good or bad depends on your politics, but the whole thing should be forbidden by law.

RTC: I believe it is, but only in theory.

GD: But they put the story out that AIDS came from monkeys in Africa and other funny stories.

RTC: Well, now it’s raging in Africa and they estimate that in ten years, everyone there will be infected. Of course, there is something to be said about depopulating Africa. They’re a bunch of incompetents who are sitting on very valuable natural resources, such as gold and uranium and when they all die, the treasures are there for the finding.

GD: That’s a bit cynical but true. But what about the American homosexuals?

RTC: The Christians and the far right would be in favor of exterminating them all. However, that having been said, we would lose so many really valuable public servants, not to mention all the florists and interior decorators.

GD: Thank God I’m not a Christian. They’re such filthy bigots. If they ever get into power here, I’ll move to some cleaner place.

RTC: I don’t see that happening, Gregory.

GD: I have no problems with the mainline faiths but the extremists are flat-out nuts and we don’t need that rampant and fanatical bigotry.

RTC: But it could be useful.

GD: But you can’t really control it. I’ve known a few Jesus freaks and, believe me, they are as nutty as they come. Most of them try to hide it from us sane ones but once in a while, it leaks out. It would be entertaining if the head of the Navy’s medical branch caught AIDS from his cousin or how about the DCI?

RTC: Now, now, Gregory, you must realize that accidents happen. Try not to be too judgmental about such things.

GD: It’s bloody difficult not to.

RTC: Look, Africa is full of people who are only a generation or two out of the jungle. They ran out the white people, who set up the business structure, and now they are running around with spears, eating each other. Why be concerned if they pass away and give the civilized part of the world access to their unused natural resources? After all, that’s why we killed off the head of the UN. He was interfering with the uranium business in the Congo so we had a little aircraft accident. We basically shot him out of the air. And that put an end to his meddling in important matters. Uranium, I don’t need to remind you, is vital for our weapons programs. Balance that against one meddling Swede and I don’t think there’s much of a problem.

GD: Well, for him…

RTC: Against the common good? You need to consider the practical priorities, Gregory. Believe me, we had no intention of causing AIDS. Our goal was to render a battlefield enemy incapable of combat, that’s all. These things sometimes happen and there is no reason at all to dwell on unexpected and certainly not planned consequences.

GD: Ah, remember that Lenin once said you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Of course, it didn’t originate with him and I know it won’t end there but you take the point because you articulate it. But I have to agree with Mueller when he tore into such projects. And if you know the Bible, remember that he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword. Wars once were conducted by gentlemen with a certain amount of civility but those days are gone. Democracy, not kings, now rules and civility is dead.

RTC: You sound like a monarchist, Gregory.

GD: In many ways I am, Robert. I recall my German grandfather saying that democracy was government of the mentally misfit by the mentally mediocre and tempered by the saving grace of snobbery. Grandfather was usually right I remember once at one of his formal family dinners when one of my idiot aunts was going on about her constant attendance at the local Methodist church and her choir practices. My grandfather turned to me and told me, so the whole table could hear, that I ought to take a lesson in piety from my aunt. I recall saying, and I am not being funny here, that it seemed to me that there was considerable madness in aunt’s Methodism.

RTC: Did you actually say that, Gregory?

GD: Yes, and I was only ten, Robert.

RTC: Your family must have loved you.

GD: I don’t actually think so. When Grandfather said at some other occasion that my aunt and uncle were going to Lower Asbury Avenue, I said that they certainly would if they lived there long enough.

RTC: (Laughter) You must have been a most unpleasant child, Gregory.

GD: I do not suffer fools gladly, Robert. Lincoln has been misquoted. He said, or is supposed to have said, that God must love the common people because he made so many of them. What he actually said was that God must love fools because he had made so many of them.

RTC: Now you can see why our organization is so necessary. Imagine leaving state policy in the hands of idiots.

GD: Point of view here, Robert. Whose ox is gored? Destroying the Asian rice crop? Thousands or millions dead of starvation?

GTC: But consider the common good. These are Communists, Gregory, and they want to destroy our system.

GD: Another point of view once more, Robert. Yes, abstract Communism is utopian nonsense, just like abstract Christianity is. No one wants to work to help others, but they will help themselves. But that still does not justify slaughtering millions, does it?

RTC: But that is a very extreme and certainly tainted view, Gregory.

GD: Again, it’s the gored ox. But civilized people can disagree with each other and still remain civilized, Robert. Right?

RTC: I assume so but let’s try to be a bit more objective. You need to view the larger picture.

GD: Mueller said it so well to me once, just before one of my nice French dinners. He said that morals and ethics were excellent norms but hardly effective techniques.

RTC: Those sentiments I can agree with.

GD: A difference without much a distinction. Well, enough moralizing here. I’m glad to see that my naval friend was not just engaging in drunken babble.

RTC: I would strongly urge you not to take this issue any further. I would be concerned about your safety if you did.

GD: A point well taken. As a cross between a social Darwinist and a monarchist, even I can see the perils of contemplating moral issues from a neutral point of view.

RTC: And if you felt like giving me your talkative friend’s name and address, it might be appreciated. He ought to be spoken to.

GD: I doubt that I would want to do that, Robert. After all, I have never discussed our conversations with anyone else.

RTC: Point taken.

 

(Concluded 11:47 AM CST)

 

From Gestapo Chief to senior CIA official.

October 10, 2018

by Christian Jürs

 

On May 22, 1945, a German Wehrmacht General, Reinhard Gehlen, the former head of the German Army High Command’s Foreign Armies East, surrendered along with his key staff members to the United States military at Fischhausen in southern Germany.

Gehlen’s unit was responsible for gathering and analyzing military intelligence on the Soviet Union,. His staff accomplished this by interrogating prisoners in army POW camps—captured Soviet military personnel and, in their headquarters—Soviet defectors. They also studied battlefield intelligence from captured Soviet documents, maps and code books. Further material was obtained by signals intelligence which listened to Soviet non-coded, low-level combat unit radio traffic. These methods of gathering combat intelligence are standard procedures still used by all armies.

During the war, Gehlen did not have intelligence agents in the Soviet Union. The General was not accustomed to gathering and analyzing Soviet political data. Unlike ‘Gestapo’ Müller, whose radio playback section had direct contact with very high-level Soviet intelligence agents inside Russia, Gehlen dealt strictly with combat intelligence.

On August 26, 1945, Gehlen and four of his closest assistants were flown to Washington for substantive talks with U.S. authorities. Gehlen was the subject of an inter-agency struggle when Allen Dulles of the OSS, once their station chief in Switzerland during the war, and General William Donovan, commander of the agency, attempted to secure Gehlen and his files for themselves. Dulles eventually won and his assistant Frank Wisner was appointed to oversee the former head of Foreign Armies East.

The Gehlen team was based at Fort Hunt, near Washington. Gehlen began his new career by preparing a series of reports which were well received. In July of 1946, Gehlen returned to Germany, and set up shop at Pullach, a former housing project for elite Nazi officials such as Martin Bormann. Gehlen was instructed to build an intelligence agency capable of conducting the highest level surveillance of the Soviets. His microfilmed files were sold to U.S. intelligence for $5 million.

Considering that these files only contained material on Soviet military units that had long been disbanded or were no longer combat ready, Gehlen was very well paid for very cold coffee.

Since Gehlen had no experience with internal Soviet intelligence or with their foreign intelligence, he was hard-pressed to use his former army staff officers to supply the United Stateswith relevant material. In 1946, Gehlen hired Willi Krichbaum, formerly the deputy chief of the Gestapo, as his senior agent recruiter.

While Gehlen had no experience with Soviet spies, the Gestapo certainly did, and Krichbaum immediately sought out to hire many of his old associates.

At the same time, Krichbaum contacted his former chief, Heinrich Müller, formerly head of the Gestapo who was now a resident in Switzerland, and a respected and wealthy citizen.

Müller was, by no means, inactive in his enforced retirement and was in contact with Krichbaum almost from the beginning of his exile. Lengthy handwritten reports from Krichbaum to Müller spanning nearly three years exist and, while Müller’s correspondence to Krichbaum is not in his files, the Krichbaum correspondence indicates without a doubt, that “Gestapo” Müller was supplying his former deputy with reams of information on prospective employees for the new Gehlen organization, as well as a flood of concise directives on the structure necessary to implement the needs of the US intelligence.

In 1946, Gehlen began the construction of his new agency, while the Soviet military machine in the East Zone of Germany was in the process of downsizing. The Second World War had proven to be a terrible economic disaster to Stalin. His troops were in the process of dismantling German factories which were still intact, ripping up the railroad system, and sending their spoils back to Russia.

The American armed forces were also being sharply reduced, since the war in the Pacific had ended in 1945. Military units were disbanded and their soldiers returned to civilian life as quickly as possible. On the economic front, businesses that had enjoyed lucrative government military contracts found themselves with empty assembly lines and tens of thousands of laid off workers.

It has been said that there never was a good war nor a bad peace. While the latter was certainly beneficial to the Soviets and permitted them to rebuild their economy, it certainly was not beneficial for either the rapidly-shrinking military or business communities in the United States.

This situation permitted the development of the Gehlen organization and secured its position as a vital American political resource. The U.S. had virtually no military intelligence knowledge of the Soviet Union. But the Germans, who had fought against them for four years, had. Gehlen and his military staff only had knowledge of wartime Soviet military units which were either reduced to cadre or entirely disbanded. However, this was of no interest to the senior officials of U.S. intelligence. Gehlen was to become a brilliant intelligence specialist with an incredible grasp of Soviet abilities and intentions. This preeminence was almost entirely fictional. It was designed to elevate Gehlen in the eyes of American politicians including President Truman and members of Congress, and to lend well-orchestrated weight to the former General’s interpretation of his employer’s needs.

In 1948, Stalin sent troops into Czechoslovakia after a minority but efficient communist coup that overthrew the Western-oriented government. This act, in February of 1948, combined with the blockade of West Berlin, then occupied by the British, French and Americans in June of the same year, gave a group of senior American military leaders a heaven-sent opportunity to identify a new and dangerous military enemy—an enemy which could and would attack Western Europe and the United States in the immediate future.

To facilitate the acceptance of this theory, Gehlen was requested to produce intelligence material that would bolster it in as authoritative a manner as possible. This Gehlen did and to set the parameters of this report, Gehlen, General Stephen Chamberlain, Chief of Intelligence of the U.S. Army General Staff, and General Lucius D. Clay, U.S. commander in occupied Germany met in Berlin in February of 1948, immediately after the Czech occupation but before the blockade.

After this meeting, Gehlen drew up a lengthy and detailed intelligence report categorically stating that 135 fully-equipped Soviet divisions, many armored, were poised to attack. General Clay forwarded this alarming example of creative writing to Washington and followed up with frantic messages indicating his fear that the Soviets were about to launch an all-out land war on the United States.

Although the sequence of events might indicate that Clay was involved in an attempt to mislead U.S’ leaders, in actuality, he was misled by Chamberlain and Gehlen. They managed to thoroughly frighten General Clay and used him as a conduit to Washington. He was not the last to fall victim to the machinations of the war party.

The Gehlen papers were deliberately leaked to Congress and the President. This resulted in the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. This was not a historical first by any means.

Elements in England at the beginning of the 20th century, alarmed at the growing economic threat of a united Germany, commenced a long public campaign designed to frighten the British public and their leaders into adopting a bellicose re-armament program based on a fictional German military threat.

Gehlen and his organization were considered vital to U.S. interests. As long as the General was able to feed the re-armament frenzy in Washington with supportive, inflammatory secret reports, then his success was assured.

The only drawback to this deadly farce was that the General did not have knowledge of current Soviet situations in the military or political fields. He could only bluff his way for a short time. To enhance his military staffs, Gehlen developed the use of former SS Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and Gestapo people, brought to him by Krichbaum, his chief recruiter.

At the same time, Krichbaum contacted his former chief, Heinrich Müller, former head of the Gestapo, who was now a resident in Switzerland, and a respected and wealthy citizen. Müller was, by no means, inactive in his enforced retirement and was in contact with Krichbaum almost from the beginning of his exile.

Lengthy handwritten reports from Krichbaum to Müller spanning nearly three years exist and, while Müller’s correspondence to Krichbaum is not in his files, the Krichbaum correspondence indicates without a doubt, that “Gestapo” Müller was supplying his former deputy with reams of information on prospective employees for the new Gehlen organization, as well as a flood of concise directives on the structure necessary to implement the needs of the US intelligence.

At the same time, a joint British-American project called “Operation Applepie” was launched with the sole purpose of locating and employing as many of the former Gestapo and SD types now being employed by Gehlen.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all

In 1973, West German authorities issued a warrant for the arrest of Heinrich Müller, formerly head of the Gestapo, having good reason to believe that he did not die in Berlin in 1945.

That Heinrich Müller was hired by the CIA as an expert on Soviet intelligence is obviously not a subject the CIA wishes to have made public, their clumsy attempts to silence public comment on this is understandable.

Correspondence, in U.S. files, between German legal agencies and their U.S. counterparts indicates unhappiness, frustration and growing displeasure on the part of the Germans and classic stonewalling on the part of the Americans.

Portions of Müller’s U.S. CIC files now in Ft. Meade, Md, have been censored. None of the documents once refused to researchers deal with immediate postwar searches for Müller but cover a much later period. The reasons given for continued classification is that their release would adversely affect U.S. national security.

The extensive files of Heinrich Müller represent a treasure trove of historical material. The natural repository for such a collection should rightfully be an archive or institution where the entire body of documentation would be available to anyone wishing to conduct research. They are also a source of intense embarrassment for the CIA .

But the Müller papers and CIA secret documents, in private hands, are now being prepared for general publication and will be available to all and sundry, and the general attitude of senior archivists and CIA and BND officials is now one of dismay and fury.

 

[1]  Shirō Ishii June 25, 1892 – October 9, 1959 was a Japanese microbiologist and the lieutenant general of Unit 731, a biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War and accused War Criminal. Ishii experimented on Allied prisoners of war, killing large numbers of them, in an attempt to perfect a form of bubonic plague to be used on the Russians. After the war, Ishii was employed by General MacArthur, who held stock in Ishii’s Tokyo laboratory, operating the same program he had for the Kempei Tai (or Secret Police) but the U.S. decided against using the plague against either the Communist Chinese or Russians. Ishiii, however, lectured American officials at one point in time and died a rich, and never prosecuted, man.

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