TBR News October 10, 2019

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. October 10, 2019:

“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.

When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.

I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.

He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.

He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.

It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.

Commentary for October 10: “The Asian banking communities of Taiwan, Singapore and Tokyo are privately expressing their concerns over the possibility that strong rumors of the “dumping” of American dollars by major European and Russian banking houses could create economic havoc with the world currency market.

The perceived recklessness of the American Trump Administration’s willingness to launch military attacks against their perceived enemies has caused deep anxiety in both European and Asian economic institutions. It is felt, most especially in Europe but now even in Asia, that the United States has embarked on a reckless course aimed at world economic domination.

Instead of diplomacy, the Trump administration has resorted to threats of naked aggression against any nation that thwarts its designs on this forceful domination.

Afraid of unbridled American “cannon diplomacy,” first European and now Asian economic and political institutions have been engaged in frantic attempts to neutralize what is seen as naked U.S. military aggression.

Unable to match American military might, a number of nations which include France, Germany, Switzerland, the Russian Republic, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, The People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Malaysia and North Korea have been exploring the possibility of the development of stronger ties, both political and economic.

In a series of meetings now being held in Geneva, Switzerland under conditions of the strictest security, concerned parties have been very seriously considering the options available for the blunting of the current American military and economic plans for world domination

The Table of Contents

• The Actual Laws Trump Has Broken, Just With the Ukraine and China Affairs, Could Land Him 10 Years in Prison
• Running the roadblock: House Democrats seeking way around White House on impeachment
• Turkey opens ground assault on Syria’s Kurds; U.S. Republicans turn on Trump
• An informative top level Nato conversation report
• Bringing Company Culture to the Underprivileged
• The Spy Mania in America Today
• Trump has no plan — and is panicked and paranoi
• Trump and the Russians: Facts, not Fictions
• The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
• Encyclopedia of American Loons

 

The Actual Laws Trump Has Broken, Just With the Ukraine and China Affairs, Could Land Him 10 Years in Prison

October 10, 2019

by Ryan Grim

The Intercept

In the face of an overwhelming pile of evidence suggesting that President Donald Trump pressured a foreign country to damage a political rival, most Republicans have chosen either to remain silent or to deny outright that anything out of the ordinary occurred. Others have taken a more sophisticated route: Concede his wrongdoing, but argue that it’s not impeachable.

“Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent, Joe Biden. Some Republicans are trying, but there’s no way to spin this as a good idea,” wrote Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel recently in The Daily Caller. But, they add importantly, that doesn’t mean his error rises to the level of an impeachable offense.

They are, however, indictable. A variety of felony criminal statutes plainly implicate Trump’s behavior, and come with lengthy prison sentences — the types of sentences doled out for high crimes, to say nothing of misdemeanors. Indeed, many of them are straightforward. Altogether, if the impeachment inquiry is limited simply to Trump’s pressure on Ukraine, the charges could amount to more than 10 years in prison.

Take 18 U.S. Code § 872: “Extortion by officers or employees of the United States.” It’s not hard to grasp:

“Whoever, being an officer, or employee of the United States or any department or agency thereof, or representing himself to be or assuming to act as such, under color or pretense of office or employment commits or attempts an act of extortion, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

The only question, here, is the definition of extortion. The law describes it as “the extraction of anything of value from another person by threatening or placing that person in fear of injury to any person or kidnapping of any person.” Was the Ukrainian president, or any other person, put in “fear of injury” by Trump’s move? As Trump’s envoys made clear in their since-disclosed text messages, Ukraine’s cooperation in the investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden was driven by the promise of a White House visit for President Volodymyr Zelensky and the threat of withholding military aid. That’s not just wrong, as Carlson and Patel rightly acknowledge, it’s also a felony, as the president and other Ukrainians no doubt had “fear of injury.”

Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice has declined to press charges against Trump, though the House of Representatives is pushing forward with its impeachment inquiry. In the meantime, Trump has said that he will refuse to cooperate with lawful subpoenas — itself a prima facie violation of 2 U.S. Code § 192, “Refusal of witness to testify or produce papers,” punishable by a year in prison.

Coercing his deputies into joining in the conspiracy would also runs afoul of the law.“As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Bill Taylor, the top American diplomat in Ukraine, reiterated in a text message to Trump official Gordon Sondland, strongly suggesting he was pursuing the strategy against his own wishes.

If Taylor felt coerced into helping with “a political campaign,” that implicates 18 U.S. Code § 610, which covers that crime rather clearly under the title: “Coercion of political activity.”

The law reads: “It shall be unlawful for any person to intimidate, threaten, command, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, command, or coerce, any employee of the Federal Government … to engage in … any political activity.” The sentence caps at three years.

It’s also illegal, according to 18 U.S. Code § 595, when a government official, “in connection with any activity which is financed in whole or in part by loans or grants made by the United States, or any department or agency thereof, uses his official authority for the purpose of interfering with, or affecting, the nomination or the election of any candidate for the office of President.” That statute could add another year to the sentence.

Prosecutors, in trying to pressure defendants into a plea bargain, often engage in what’s known as “stacking,” where they find every conceivable charge and stack them to the ceiling, threatening decades in prison if the defendant contests all the charges. A prosecutor who wanted to stack charges against Trump could ding him for 18 U.S. Code § 607, “Place of solicitation,” and 52 U.S. Code § 30121, “Contributions and donations by foreign nationals.” Essentially, it’s illegal to solicit contributions to your presidential campaign from the Oval Office and illegal to solicit from foreign nationals no matter where you do it from: “It shall be unlawful for an individual who is an officer or employee of the Federal Government, including the President … to solicit or receive a donation of money or other thing of value in connection with a Federal, State, or local election, while in any room or building occupied in the discharge of official duties by an officer or employee of the United States, from any person.”

That’s another three years.

 

Running the roadblock: House Democrats seeking way around White House on impeachment

October 10, 2019

by David Morgan and Patricia Zengerle

Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Facing a White House vowing to block the U.S. House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry, Democratic congressional leaders on Thursday were plotting the next moves in their probe of President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

Two days after the administration abruptly blocked the U.S. ambassador to the European Union from testifying to three House committees, lawmakers were negotiating how to secure testimony from the U.S. intelligence officer whose whistleblower report on Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president sparked the furor.

Talks on the intelligence agent were focused on how to prevent that person’s identity from being made public, possibly by having the officer testify by telephone from remote location and using voice-obscuring technology to hide the officer’s voice and appearance, according to sources close to the negotiations.

Congressional sources also acknowledged some concern that a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, whom Trump removed from that post last May before her term was up, could be blocked from testifying. The State Department on Tuesday called off testimony by Gordon Sondland, the ambassador to the EU, after he had flown in from Brussels to do so.

The investigation is focused on whether Trump used almost $400 million in congressionally approved aid to Ukraine as leverage to pressure the Ukrainian president to launch an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden, one of Trump’s main Democratic rivals as he seeks re-election in 2020.

Trump has denied wrongdoing and has described the probe as a partisan smear.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is expected to discuss the impeachment inquiry in a Friday afternoon conference call, according to a Democratic leadership aide.

House Democrats spearheading the inquiry are said to be mulling a possible counterattack against White House efforts to block the investigation, which one aide said could be unfurled early next week, when lawmakers return to Capitol Hill from a two-week recess.

Two Ukrainian businessmen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, whose testimony the House had sought, are no longer expected to speak, U.S. media reported. A lawyer for the men has said that neither will appear for depositions.

The House on Tuesday subpoenaed Sondland to appear on Oct. 16.

BIDEN LASHES OUT

The impeachment fight played out on the campaign trail on Wednesday, when Biden for the first time called for Trump’s impeachment. One of the most moderate of the Democrats seeking the 2020 nomination, Biden waited longer than many of his rivals to make that call.

“With his words and his actions, President Trump has indicted himself. By obstructing justice, refusing to reply with a congressional inquiry, he’s already convicted himself,” Biden said. “In full view of the world and the American people, Donald Trump has violated his oath of office, betrayed this nation and committed impeachable acts.”

Trump, true to form, fired back immediately on Twitter: “So pathetic to see Sleepy Joe Biden, who with his son, Hunter, and to the detriment of the American Taxpayer, has ripped off at least two countries for millions of dollars, calling for my impeachment – and I did nothing wrong.”

Trump has repeatedly and without evidence accused Biden and his son of benefiting from a corrupt deal in Ukraine. Biden has denied wrongdoing.

Reporting by David Morgan and Patricia Zengerle; Writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Peter Cooney

 

Turkey opens ground assault on Syria’s Kurds; U.S. Republicans turn on Trump

October 8, 2019

by Mert Ozkan

Reuters

AKCAKALE, Turkey (Reuters) – Turkish troops and their Syrian rebel allies attacked Kurdish militia in northeast Syria on Wednesday, pounding them with air strikes and artillery before starting a cross-border ground operation that could transform an eight-year-old war.

The assault began days after U.S. President Donald Trump pulled American troops out of the way, prompting denunciations from senior members of his own Republican Party who say he abandoned the Syrian Kurds, loyal allies of Washington.

“The Turkish Armed Forces and the Syrian National Army have launched the land operation into the east of the Euphrates river as part of the Operation Peace Spring,” the Turkish defense ministry tweeted after nightfall, following a day of pounding the area from the air.

Turkish media reported troops entering Syria at four points, two of them close to the Syrian town of Tel Abyad and two close to Ras al Ain further east.

Turkey told the United Nations Security Council in a letter seen by Reuters that its military operation would be “proportionate, measured and responsible.” The 15-member body will meet on Thursday to discuss Syria at the request of the five European members, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium and Poland.

Thousands of people fled Ras al Ain toward Hasaka province, held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The Turkish air strikes killed at least five civilians and three fighters from the SDF and wounded dozens of civilians, the SDF said.

Reuters journalists at Akcakale on the Turkish side of the frontier watched as explosions struck Tel Abyad. After dark, the red flare of rockets could be seen fired across the border into Tel Abyad, and flames burned near the town. Explosions from Tel Abyad could be heard eight hours into the bombardment. A witness reached by telephone said civilians were fleeing en masse.

SDF fighters repelled a ground attack by Turkish troops in Tel Abyad, SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali said on Twitter.

The assault on the Kurds – for years Washington’s main allies on the ground in Syria – is potentially one of the biggest shifts in years in the Syrian war that has drawn in global and regional powers. The Kurds played a leading role in capturing territory from Islamic State, and now hold the largest swathe of Syria outside of the hands of President Bashar al-Assad.

Russia, Assad’s strongest foreign ally, urged dialogue between Damascus and Syria’s Kurds.

Trump’s decision to pull forces out of the way was denounced by some Kurds as a “stab in the back”.

‘BAD IDEA’

Trump called the Turkish assault a “bad idea” and said he did not endorse it. He expected Turkey to protect civilians and religious minorities and prevent a humanitarian crisis, he said.

But one of Trump’s closest fellow Republican allies, Senator Lindsey Graham, said failing to support the Kurds would be “the biggest mistake of his presidency”.

Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican hawk, said: “The U.S. is abandoning our ally the Kurds, who fought ISIS (Islamic State) on the ground and helped protect the U.S. homeland. This decision aids America’s adversaries, Russia, Iran, and Turkey, and paves the way for a resurgence of ISIS.”

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, announcing the start of the action, said the aim was to eliminate what he called a “terror corridor” on Turkey’s southern border.

European and Arab countries called on Ankara to halt.

Turkey had been poised to enter northeast Syria since the U.S. troops who had been fighting alongside Kurdish-led forces against Islamic State started to leave.

A Turkish security source told Reuters the military offensive, dubbed “Operation Peace Spring”, opened with air strikes. Turkish howitzer fire then hit bases and ammunition depots of the Kurdish YPG militia. Turkey says the YPG, the main component of the U.S.-backed SDF, is a terrorist group linked to Kurdish insurgents that have fought in Turkey for years.

The artillery strikes, which also targeted YPG gun and sniper positions, were aimed at sites far from residential areas, the Turkish source said.

The Turkish army has hit a total of 181 militant targets with air strikes and howitzers since the start of the operation, the defense ministry said on Wednesday.

Explosions also rocked the Syrian border town of Ras al Ain, according to a reporter for CNN Turk. The sound of warplanes could be heard above and smoke rose from buildings in the town, the CNN reporter said.

Turkish media said several mortar shells had landed on the Turkish side of the border but there were no casualties.

WORSE TURMOIL

World powers fear the Turkish action could open a new chapter in Syria’s war and worsen regional turmoil. Ankara has said it intends to create a “safe zone” in order to return millions of refugees to Syrian soil.

In the build-up to the offensive, Syria had said it was determined to confront any Turkish aggression.

The SDF controls much of the territory that once was held by Islamic State and holds thousands of Islamic State fighters and tens of thousands of their relatives in detention.

It halted operations against Islamic State because of the Turkish offensive, two U.S. officials and a Kurdish source said.

One of the prisons where ISIS detainees are held was struck by a Turkish air strike, the SDF said on Twitter.

The Kurdish-led authority in northern Syria declared a state of “general mobilization” before calling on its people to head toward the border “to fulfill their moral duty and show resistance in these sensitive, historic moments”.

Erdogan’s communications director Fahrettin Altun said Turkey had no ambition in northeastern Syria except to neutralize the threat against Turkish citizens and to liberate the local people from what he called “the yoke of armed thugs”.

Turkey was taking over leadership of the fight against Islamic State in Syria, he said.

Reporting by Mert Ozkan in AKCAKALE, Turkey; Additional reporting by Orhan Coksun, Tuvan Gumrukcu and Ece Toksabay in Ankara, Dominic Evans and Daren Butler in Istanbul, Tom Perry and Ellen Francis in Beirut, Phil Stewart in Washington, Maria Kiselyova in Moscow; Writing by Peter Graff and Alistair Bell; Editing by Janet Lawrence, Sonya Hepinstall and Grant McCool

 

An informative top level Nato conversation report

A CTS report from NHQC35 concerning Turkish/American relations under date of 2/October 2019 is concerned with the apparent movement by Turkey into the Russian orbit.

On Monday, 30. September a telephone conversation was held between American President Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President of Turkey dealt with worsening Turkish/American relations. Mr. Trump was concerned about the Turkish purchase of Russia’s advanced S-400 air defence system for $2.5bn and that Turkey had sent members of its armed forces to Russia for training.

During the conversation, which lasted 23 minutes, President Trump was initially negative in his approach but President Erdoğan became even more negative.

He informed President Trump that he should be aware that Mr. Trump’s real estate holdings in Turkey, viz Trump Towers Kuştepe, Mecidiyeköy Yolu Cd. No:12, 34381 Şişli/İstanbul could, and would, be seized by the Turkish government for housing known anti-government rebels.

This had an effect on President Trump and he agreed to modify his views towards Turkey.

The final agreement was that the US government, upon the President’s personal orders, would withdraw American troops from Syria and allow Turkey to negate the activites of Kurdish terrorists.

Further, the American government would take into custody one Muhammed Fethullah Gülen, a dangerous anti-Turkish government rebel now resident in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania and return him to Turkish custody.

In return for these two acts, President Erdoğan agreed to remain in Nato, lessen his dealings with Russia and assist the United States in securing specified area of the Middle East that were oil-producing.

 

Bringing Company Culture to the Underprivileged

1003/a 90-107 dmb- NOFORN

On September 25, 2019, two teams of agents from the Turkish Ministry of the Interior, acting on information received from a foreign intelligence agency, conducted a heavily armed raid on a house in Balikesir.

In addition to the reports of the existence of this house, the Ministry also had growing reports from local citizens about loud screams issuing from the building for “many weeks previously.”

Ministry officials were able to capture six American citizens, all of whom claimed to be members of the USIA, a known branch of the CIA. Taken as evidence were many papers and documents that showed with great clarity that this house had been used as a CIA torture and murder house.

Quantities of blood taken from drains are shown to have belonged to over thirty people. In a small furnace found in one of the rooms were found the remains of at least seven people, one of which was a 14 year old girl.

Also found in the house were eleven Turkish children from ages three to ten, six girls and five boys. All had been drugged and police reports indicated all the children had been sexually abused for some time.

Arrested were: Kenneth A, Myron G, Timothy MC, Robert A, Jacob Z, Arthur C and three Israeli citizens identified as Aaron R, Efram T and Yitzak Y.

The Americans claimed diplomatic immunity and admitted only to being USIA officials. The Israelis were also stated to be of the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency..

The Ministry ascertained that none of the men had diplomatic immunity and although the U.S. Embassy protested, the Foreign Ministry declared all persons as persona non grata and ordered out of Turkey within a 24 hour period.

All confiscated documents remained with the Ministry for further  investigation Evidence found in the murder house included many torture devices, whips, cattle prodding electric devices and many ropes, shackles and other restraining devices. Also found in the murder house were a number of cameras and many films of naked children being sexually assaulted and, in one case, killed with a garrote.

Subsequent investigation by Turkish authorities disclosed that the passports of the Americans were all fakes and that the persons were later proved to be:

 

• Kenneth A was actually  Keith Leslie Urkhardt of 4400 East West Highway, Bethesda, Md. 20814
• Myron G was actually Istvan Prouty of 3400 North Venice St., Arlington, VA 22207
• Timothy MC was actually Thomas McAuliffe Porterman of 415 Russell Ave., Gaitherburg, MD  20877
• Robert A was actually Russell Allan Gordon of 1595 North Atlantic Ave, Cocoa Beach, FL 32931
• Jacob Z was actually George Berman of 10570 Main St., Fairfax, VA 22030
• Arthur C was actually Ervin Melrose of 3014 Brinkley Rd., Temple Hills, MD 20748

 

The Spy Mania in America Today

October 10, 2019

by Christian Jürs

 

Millions of Americans, and other nationalities, are spied on daily and vast amounts of personal data acquired and stored.

The cover story is that this is designed to “locate and neutralize” Muslim terrorists, both inside and outside of the United States, but in fact, according to a U.S. Army document, the actual purposes of the mass surveillance is to build significant data bases on any person likely to present a domestic threat to established authority.

This fear has its roots in massive popular rejection of the Vietnam war with its attendant mass meetings, defiance of the government and the development of ad hoc student groups firmly, and often very vocally, opposed to the war.

There was a great deal of civic unrest on college campuses throughout the 1960s as students became increasingly involved in a number of social and political movements ranging from the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement, and, of course, the Anti-War Movement. Over 30,000 people left the country and went to Canada, Sweden, and Mexico to avoid the draft.

The bureaucracy then found itself under siege and has stated subsequently that this must not happen again and that any kind of meaningful civil disobedience is to get negative mention in the media and members of such groups subject to arrest and detention.

The Obama administration punished any government whistle-blower with such severity as to discourage others from revealing negative official information.

FEMA has a network of so-called “detention camps” throughout the United States, most only sites, to be used in the event of noteworthy civil disturbance.

The current programs of mass surveillance are known and approved at the highest levels in the government, to include the President

Government, faux government, and government-subsidized private organizations.

The high technology consists of such subjects as surveillance cameras in public places, drones, satellites, interceptions of telephone, computer and mail communications.

There are as of this instance, no less than five million names on the officlal government Terrorist Identies Datamart Environment list and nearly sixty thousand names on the TSA no-fly list.

Nearly five thousand died domestically in the 9/11 attacks and only thirty-seven subsequently but the death toll outside the United States, due to Muslim radical actions has exceeded over ten thousand with a death toll of ninty eight thousand in the Syrian civil war and an estimated one million in the sectarian wars in Iraq following the American invasion and occupation

This vast program of politically-motivated illegal domestic surveillance, ordered by Bush, is only part of an ambitious program brought forward in the first year of the Bush administration by Karl Rove. Rove is the architect of the ‘GOP Rules’ program, the basic premise of which was to secure a permanent control, by the Republican Party, of both branches of Congress, the White House and the leadership of all the agencies of control such as the CIA, later the DHS, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and, most important, the U.S. Army.

Rove, an accomplished student of history, had carefully studied the circumstances that permitted Adolf Hitler to rise to power in 1933. His was not a solid electoral victory but he was only a participant in a coalition government. What brought him to the beginning of absolute power was the Reichstag fire. It was long preached that this incendiary act was the result of Goering’s activities to facilitate an atmosphere of public panic but Fritz Tobias has effectively demolished this shibboleth and in fact, the fire was set by a lunatic young Dutch communist without any assistance from either the Nazis or the Communists.

Nevertheless, in its wake, the fire did create such an atmosphere of national fear that Hitler was able to tighten his control over the legislators and push through the Enabling Act that gave him the power to establish the control he badly needed. And a year later, the old Prussian Secret State Police, the Gestapo, was put into the hands of Heinrich Mueller who eventually set up a national card index with information on every German citizen.

Given the weak origins of Bush’s presidency, Rove contemplated his own Reichstag Fire and when the Israeli Mossad reported to the top Bush administration officials that they had penetrated a group of Saudi terrorists working in Hollywood, Florida and that this group was planning an aerial attack on important American business and government targets, Rove had found his Reichstag Fire.

Bush was informed by the Israeli government at every stage of the pending attack but advised the Israelis that he did not want to interfere with it “until the last possible moment so as to be able to arrest the entire group.”

As the plot progressed and Washington learned that the major targets would be the World Trade Centers in New York, and the Pentagon and the Capitol building in Washington, someone high up in the administration, currently unknown, wanted the Israelis to convince the Saudis to attack the side of the Pentagon that was currently unoccupied due to reconstruction. There was no point, the plotters decided, to kill the useful Secretary of Defense who was a member of their team.

The attack on the Capitol would, they reasoned, fall when Congress was in session ( In 2001, the first session of the 107th Congress was from January 3, 2001  through December 20, 2001 and the House and Senate planned to begin their 10 day Thanksgiving recess, between November 17 and November 27 of that year) and this meant that if a large commercial aircraft, loaded with aviation fuel, slammed at high speed  into either wing of the immense building while Congress was in session, it could reasonably be expected that a siginficant number of Federal legislatiors would be killed or incapacitated.

This, coupled with the attacks on the Pentagon and the WTC, would give the Bush people the very acceptable excuse for the President to step up, (after he returned from a safe and distant vacation,) and assume ‘special powers” to “protect this nation from new attacks” until Congress could be “satisfactorily reformed” via somewhat distant “special elections” to fill the vacancies created by the Saudi attackers.

Then, it would be quite acceptable, and even demanded, that the Army would establish “law and order” in the country and that other agencies would step forward to “guard this nation against” possible “ongoing terrorist attacks.” ‘Speak not of the morrow for thou knowest not what it might bring forth’ is a Biblical admonition that apparently Bush, Rove and Cheney never considered.

The aircraft designated to slam into the Capitol building and immolate both sides of the aisle, crashed as the very fortunate result of its passenger’s actions and that part of the plan had to be shelved. But not so the formulation of the machinery designed solely to clamp down on any possible dissident voices in the country and ensure a very long term Republican policical control.

The Saudi terrorist attacks went forward as planned, minus the one on the members of Congress and Bush indeed rose to the occasion and promised to protect the American public. A Department of Homeland Security was set up under the incompetent Governor Ridge but as for the rest of the plan for Republic permanence, it began to disintegrate bit by bit, due entirely to the gross incompetence of its leaders. The Bush-Rove-Cheney plan consisted, in the main, of the following:

1. Federal control of all domestic media, the internet, all computerized records, through overview of all domestic fax, mail and telephone conversations,

2 .A national ID card, universal SS cards being mandatory,

3. Seizure and forced deportation of all illegal aliens, including millions of Mexicans and Central Americans, intensive observation and penetration of Asian groups, especially Indonesian and Chinese,
4. A reinstitution of a universal draft (mandatory service at 18 years for all male American youths…based on the German Arbeitsdienst.
5. Closer coordination of administration views and domestic policies with various approved and régime supportive religious groups,
6. An enlargement of the planned “no travel” lists drawn up in the Justice Department that would prevents “subversive” elemetst from flying, (this list to include “peaceniks” and most categories of Muslims)
7. The automatic death penalty for any proven acts of sedition,
8. The forbidding of abortion, any use of medical marijuana,
9. Any public approval of homosexual or lesbian behavior to include magazines, websites, political action groups and soon to be forbidden and punishable.

As the popularity of drones for domestic surveillance grows in the United States, so do privacy concerns for citizens just going about their daily business. Designer Adam Harvey has come up with a line of anti-drone clothing that is much more stylish than an aluminum foil hat.

The anti-drone clothes include a hoodie, a scarf, and a burqa. They are made with a metalized fabric designed to thwart thermal imaging. They work by reflecting heat and masking the person underneath from the thermal eye of a drone. The designs may hide you from certain drone activities, but they would definitely make you noticeable to people out on the street.

The scarf and burqa are both inspired by traditional Muslim clothing designs. Harvey explains the choice, saying, “Conceptually, these garments align themselves with the rationale behind the traditional hijab and burqa: to act as ‘the veil which separates man or the world from God,’ replacing God with drone.”

The anti-drone garments are part of a larger line of clothing called Stealth Wear. These are called  “New Designs for Countersurveillance.” The manufacturer states: “Collectively, Stealth Wear is a vision for fashion that addresses the rise of surveillance, the power of those who surveil, and the growing need to exert control over what we are slowly losing, our privacy.”

If drones get to be more commonplace in our communities, it’s not too much of a stretch to see this sort of fashion becoming more mainstream, much like RFID-blocking wallets and passport holders.

INTERNET

The government intelligence agencies and their allied private contractors now regularly accesses all emails, chats, searches, events, locations, videos, photos, log-ins and any information people post online with a warrant, which the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court always  grants secretly and without being ever made public.

And the revelation of Prism, a secret government program for mining major Internet companies, states that the government now has direct access to Internet companies’ data without a warrant.

Every company impacted – Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype, PalTalk and AOL – publically deny knowing about the program or giving any direct access to their servers. These denials are intented to bolster public confidence in their services because in reality, all of these entities cooperate fully with requests for customer information.

Google is the supplier of the customized core search technology for Intellipedia, a highly-secure online system where 37,000 U.S. domestic and foreign area spies and related personnel share information and collaborate on investigative missions.

And there is absolutely nothing one can commit to the Internet that is private in any sense of the word

In addition, Google is linked to the U.S. spy and military systems through its Google Earth software venture. The technology behind this software was originally developed by Keyhole Inc., a company funded by Q-Tel http://www.iqt.org/ , a venture capital firm which is in turn openly funded and operated on behalf of the CIA.

Google acquired Keyhole Inc. in 2004. The same base technology is currently employed by U.S. military and intelligence systems in their quest, in their own words, for “full-spectrum dominance” of the American, and foreign, political, social and economic spheres.

However, Internet Service Providers and the entertainment industry are now taking Internet monitoring to a whole new level….

If someone download copyrighted software, videos or music, all Internet service providers (ISP)  have the ability to detect this downloading.

The vast majority of computer surveillance involves the monitoring of data and traffic on the Internet. In the United States for example, under the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act, all phone calls and broadband Internet traffic (emails, web traffic, instant messaging, etc.) are required to be available for unimpeded real-time monitoring by Federal law enforcement agencies., to include the FBI, NSA, the CIA and the DHS.

There is far too much data on the Internet for human investigators to manually search through all of it and so automated Internet surveillance computers sift through the vast amount of intercepted Internet traffic and identify and report to human investigators traffic considered interesting by using certain “trigger” words or phrases, visiting certain types of web sites, or communicating via email or chat with suspicious individuals or groups. Billions of dollars per year are spent, by agencies such as the Information Awareness Office, NSA, and the FBI, to develop, purchase, implement, and operate systems such as Carnivore, NarusInsight, and ECHELON to intercept and analyze all of this data, and extract only the information which is useful to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. One flaw with NSA claims that the government needs to be able to suck up Internet data from services such as Skype and Gmail to fight terrorists: Studies show that would-be terrorists don’t use those services. The NSA has to collect the metadata from all of our phone calls because terrorists, right? And the spy agency absolutely must intercept Skypes you conduct with folks out-of-state, or else terrorism. It must sift through your iCloud data and Facebook status updates too, because Al Qaeda.Terrorists are everywhere, they are legion, they are dangerous, and, unfortunately, they don’t really do any of the stuff described above.

Even though the still-growing surveillance state that sprung up in the wake of 9/11 was enacted almost entirely to “fight terrorism,” reports show that the modes of communication that agencies like the NSA are targeting are scarcely used by terrorists at all.

Computers can be a surveillance target because of the personal data stored on them. If someone is able to install software, such as the FBI’s Magic Lantern and CIPAV, on a computer system, they can easily gain unauthorized access to this data. Such software can be, and is   installed physically or remotely. Another form of computer surveillance, known as van Eck phreaking, involves reading electromagnetic emanations from computing devices in order to extract data from them at distances of hundreds of meters. The NSA runs a database known as “Pinwale”, which stores and indexes large numbers of emails of both American citizens and foreigners.

EMAIL

The government agencies have been fully capable to look at any and all emails.

A warrant can easily grant access to email sent within 180 days. Older emails are available with an easier-to-get subpoena and prior notice.

Government officials also are fully capable of reading all the ingoing and outgoing emails on an account in real time with a specific type of wiretap warrant, which is granted with probable cause for specific crimes such as terrorism.

Google received 122,503 user data requests involving 2,375,434 users from the U.S. government in 2016. It granted about 98 percent of those requests.

Microsoft, with its Outlook/Hotmail email service, received 61,538 requests involving 52,291 users, at least partially granting 92  percent of those requests.

Note also that the DIA interdicts all emails sent outside the United States and files their contents.

USPS Mail

Presently, the FBI requires that all US Post Offices scan every piece of mail, packages included and that these scans are then sent to the FBI offices and stored for future use. One way to avoid trouble here is to use fictional return addresses.

PHONES

With the advent of smartphones and SIM cards, cellphones are no longer strictly for storage of digits and 180-character short messages.

Cellphones assist in navigating for car trips, to enable making Internet purchases and to watch events on television stations.   It is possible to deposit checks with a bank app and a camera, locate businesses of interest and also to use transportation by using a QR-code. Phones hold our coupons, our favorite cat videos and functions as a credit card when we forget ours at home.

The NSA collects subscriber information from major cell phone carriers. This information is primarily based on metadata, such as location and duration of calls, along with numbers dialed, all in search of links to suspected terrorists.

In 2013, to date, law enforcement agencies made 2.3 million requests for subscriber information.

These government requests for surveillance information from the NSA, are limited to metadata. That doesn’t mean that the content of conversations is off-limits. To listen in, the government just needs a warrant, one that’s granted through the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The court approves almost every request, fully denying just nine out of 133,900 government applications for surveillance over its 33-year existence, according to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reports submitted to Congress.

Although this is not new technology, law enforcement authorities are using our own cell phones to spy on us more extensively than ever before as a recent Wired article described….

Mobile carriers responded to a staggering 1.3 million law enforcement requests last year for subscriber information, including text messages and phone location data, according to data provided to Congress.

A single “request” can involve information about hundreds of customers. So ultimately the number of Americans affected by this could reach into “the tens of millions” each year.

The number of Americans affected each year by the growing use of mobile phone data by law enforcement could reach into the tens of millions, as a single request could ensnare dozens or even hundreds of people. Law enforcement has been asking for so-called “cell tower dumps” in which carriers disclose all phone numbers that connected to a given tower during a certain period of time.

So, for instance, if police wanted to try to find a person who broke a store window at an Occupy protest, it could get the phone numbers and identifying data of all protestors with mobile phones in the vicinity at the time — and use that data for other purposes.

Perhaps you should not be using your cell phone so much anyway. After all, there are more than 500 studies that claim to show that cell phone radiation is harmful to humans.

The official and unofficial tapping of telephone lines is widespread. In the United States for instance, the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) requires that all telephone and VoIP communications be available for real-time wiretapping by Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Two major telecommunications companies in the U.S.—AT&T Inc. and Verizon—have contracts with the FBI, requiring them to keep their phone call records easily searchable and accessible for Federal agencies, in return for $1.8 million dollars per year. Between 2003 and 2005, the FBI sent out more than 140,000 “National Security Letters” ordering phone companies to hand over information about their customers’ calling and Internet histories. About half of these letters requested information on U.S. citizens.

Human agents are not required to monitor most calls. Speech-to-text software creates machine-readable text from intercepted audio, which is then processed by automated call-analysis programs, such as those developed by agencies such as the Information Awareness Office, or companies such as Verint, and Narus, which search for certain words or phrases, to decide whether to dedicate a human agent to the call.

Law enforcement and intelligence services in the United Kingdom and the United States possess technology to remotely activate the microphones in cell phones, by accessing phones’ diagnostic or maintenance features in order to listen to conversations that take place near the person who holds the phone.

Mobile phones are also commonly used to collect location data. The geographical location of a mobile phone (and thus the person carrying it) can be determined easily even when the phone is not being used, using a technique known multilateration to calculate the differences in time for a signal to travel from the cell phone to each of several cell towers near the owner of the phone. The legality of such techniques has been questioned in the United States, in particular whether a court warrant is required. Records for one carrier alone (Sprint), showed that in a given year federal law enforcement agencies requested customer location data 8 million times.

CREDIT CARDS

Think Uncle Sam knows where you buy your coffee? He might be able to tell you the exact cafe.

It all starts with that stripe on the back of your credit card, which gets swiped through thousands of readers every year.

That solid black bar is made up of millions of iron-based magnetic particles, each one 20-millionths of an inch wide. Each credit-card owner has a personalized strip full of intimate data sitting right inside his or her pocket. Any purchase can be traced directly back to your wallet.

Although the scope of credit-card tracking efforts are unknown, the Journal reported that the NSA has established relationships with credit card companies akin to those that they had established with phone carriers, which provide them with data under warrant, subpoena or court order. These former officials didn’t know if the efforts were ongoing.

What could they find? Based on the technology of the mag stripe, quite a bit.

Even with just the metadata – digitally contained bits of information – on a credit card, they could most likely see when and where a purchase was made, and how much it cost.

SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS

Whether they’re walking to work, withdrawing money from an ATM or walking into their favorite local grocer, Americans could be within sight of one of the United States’ estimated 30 million surveillance cameras.

Police use them to monitor streets, subways and public spaces. Homeowners put them on their houses. Businesses mount them in stores and on buildings.

In Boston, for example, the FBI used still photos and video pulled from cameras to identify suspects after the Boston Marathon bombing. The images showed the suspects making calls from their cellphones, carrying what the police say were bombs, and leaving the scene.

New high-tech, high-definition security camera manufacturers give police departments the options of thermal imaging, 360-degree fields of view and powerful zoom capabilities for identifying people. Advances in camera technology enable new ways to monitor American citizens.

Surveillance cameras are video cameras used for the purpose of observing an area. They are often connected to a recording device or IP network, and may be watched by a security guard or law enforcement officer. Cameras and recording equipment used to be relatively expensive and required human personnel to monitor camera footage, but analysis of footage has been made easier by automated software that organizes digital video footage into a searchable database, and by video analysis software (such as VIRAT and HumanID). The amount of footage is also drastically reduced by motion sensors which only record when motion is detected. With cheaper production techniques, surveillance cameras are simple and inexpensive enough to be used in home security systems, and for everyday surveillance.

In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security awards billions of dollars per year in Homeland Security grants for local, state, and federal agencies to install modern video surveillance equipment. For example, the city of Chicago, Illinois, recently used a $5.1 million Homeland Security grant to install an additional 250 surveillance cameras, and connect them to a centralized monitoring center, along with its preexisting network of over 2000 cameras, in a program known as Operation Virtual Shield. Speaking in 2009, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley announced that Chicago would have a surveillance camera on every street corner by the year 2016.

As part of China’s Golden Shield Project, several U.S. corporations, including IBM, General Electric, and Honeywell, have been working closely with the Chinese government to install millions of surveillance cameras throughout China, along with advanced video analytics and facial recognition software, which will identify and track individuals everywhere they go. They will be connected to a centralized database and monitoring station, which will, upon completion of the project, contain a picture of the face of every person in China: over 1.3 billion people Lin Jiang Huai, the head of China’s “Information Security Technology” office (which is in charge of the project), credits the surveillance systems in the United States and the U.K. as the inspiration for what he is doing with the Golden Shield Project.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a research project called Combat Zones That See that will link up cameras across a city to a centralized monitoring station, identify and track individuals and vehicles as they move through the city, and report “suspicious” activity (such as waving arms, looking side-to-side, standing in a group, etc.).

Governments often initially claim that cameras are meant to be used for traffic control, but many of them end up using them for general surveillance. For example, Washington, D.C. had 5,000 “traffic” cameras installed under this premise, and then after they were all in place, networked them all together and then granted access to the Metropolitan Police Department, so they could perform “day-to-day monitoring”.

The development of centralized networks of CCTV cameras watching public areas – linked to computer databases of people’s pictures and identity (biometric data), able to track people’s movements throughout the city, and identify whom they have been with – has been argued by some to present a risk to civil liberties. Trapwire is an example of such a network.

FEDERAL HIGHWAY SURVEILLANCE 

A joint Pentagon/Department of Transportation plan to conduct a permanent surveillance of all motor vehicles using the Federal Highway System is code named ARGUS. It was initially a part of an overall public surveillance program instituted and organized by Admiral Poindexter, who was convicted of various criminal acts as the result of the Iran-Contra affair and then brought back to government service by the Bush Administration. Following public disclosure of Poindexter’s manic attempts to pry into all aspects of American life and his subsequent public departure from government service (he is still so employed but as a “private consultant” and not subject to public scrutiny) many of his plans were officially scrapped. ARGUS, however, is still valid has been fully developed and now is in experimental use on twelve Federal highways across the country..

This surveillance consists of having unmanned video cameras, soon to be installed over all Federal highways and toll roads with Presidential approval. These cameras work 24/7 to video all passing vehicles, trucks, private cars and busses. The information is passed to a central data bank and entered therein. This data can readily viewed at the request of any authorized law enforcement agency to include: private investigative and credit agencies licensed to work with Federal law enforcement information on any user of the road systems under surveillance. Provision will be made, according to the operating plans, to notify local law enforcement immediately if any driver attempts to obscure their license plate number and instructs them to at once to “apprehend and identify” the vehicle or vehicles involved. Federally-funded high-tech street lights now being installed in American cities are not only set to aid the DHS in making “security announcements” and acting as talking surveillance cameras, they are also capable of “recording conversations,” bringing the potential privacy threat posed by ‘Intellistreets’ to a whole new level.

The program has cost to date over $5 billion over a three year period.

This program can easily be installed and running on a nationwide basis within two years from its commencement.

It also is now a Federal crime to attempt to damage or in any way interfere with these surveillance devices.

Some states such as Colorado are using cameras as an alternative method of charging motorists toll fares. As a motorist drives through the toll lanes, motion-activated cameras capture an image of the license plate and the driver is billed.

Cameras are watching if you speed or run a red light, too.

Also, police departments in several metro areas began employing cameras to deter traffic infractions and raise revenue.

Libertarians and electronic privacy advocates oppose these methods, citing a lack of transparency in the use of the cameras and the retention of the data they collect.

DRONES

As many as 30,000 domestic drones will travel the skies above U.S. soil within 20 years, according to a report for Congress by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Congress has called on the FAA to integrate unmanned aircraft into the national air system by 2017.

Already, the FAA has approved domestic drone use by 81 agencies, including schools, police departments and the Department of Homeland Security.

Among the applicants approved: the Arlington Police Department in Texas; California State University in Fresno; Canyon County Sheriff’s Office in Idaho; the city of Herington, Kan.; the Georgia Tech Research Institute; Kansas State University; the Miami-Dade Police Department in Florida; the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources; the Seattle Police Department; and the Universities of Alaska at Fairbanks, California-Davis and Florida.

Although these drones range in size, most are able to hover tens of thousands of feet in the sky, collecting images of people on the ground below.

Based on current trends – technology development, law enforcement interest, political and industry pressure, and the lack of legal safeguards – it is clear that drones pose a looming threat to Americans’ privacy.

Law enforcement agencies all over the United States are starting to use unmanned drones to spy on us, and the Department of Homeland Security is aggressively seeking to expand the use of such drones by local authorities….

The Department of Homeland Security has launched a program to “facilitate and accelerate the adoption” of small, unmanned drones by police and other public safety agencies, an effort that an agency official admitted faces “a very big hurdle having to do with privacy.”

The $4 million Air-based Technologies Program, which will test and evaluate small, unmanned aircraft systems, is designed to be a “middleman” between drone manufacturers and first-responder agencies.

The EPA is already using drones to spy on cattle ranchers in Nebraska and Iowa. Will we eventually get to a point where we all just consider it to be “normal” to have surveillance drones flying above our heads constantly?

The FBI uses aerial surveillance drones over US soil, and has agreed that further political debate and legislation to govern their domestic use may be necessary.

The bureau’s director admitted it used drones to aid its investigations.

However, the potential for growing drone use either in the US, or involving US citizens abroad, is an increasingly charged issue in Congress, and the FBI acknowledged there may need to be legal restrictions placed on their use to protect privacy.

It is known that drones are used by border control officials and have been used by some local law enforcement authorities and Department of Homeland Security in criminal cases.

Part 1.

Trump has no plan — and is panicked and paranoid

Without a plan or strategy, Trump ordered US troops to withdraw from Syria — a move that has antagonized members within his own party. No matter, though, as his eyes are set firmly on re-election,

October 9, 2019

by Oliver Sallet

DW

Not only is it rare for Democrats and Republicans to agree, but the situation in Washington has a decidedly revolutionary touch, with politicians from both parties sharply condemning President Donald Trump’s rash withdrawal from Syria — a novelty in a time of political trench warfare over an impeachment process.

And that’s exactly what it’s all about: Trump is in panic mode, and apparently even willing to scare off his own party in a desperate attempt at populist foreign policy. The majority of Americans are tired of war — and they are the ones Trump has in mind with his decision.

Trump made himself vulnerable

Trump has for years shrugged off criticism and considers himself invincible — even openly admitting it at one point when he said: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” But Republicans’ reactions over the Syria withdrawal show that Trump has made himself vulnerable.

Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s most staunch supporters against impeachment proceedings, made clear that he stands against the move.

Election campaign maneuver

Even Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who until recently had doubts as to whether he would allow impeachment proceedings against Trump at all, was suddenly openly critical.

But Trump isn’t fazed by this. Under massive pressure, the commander in chief urgently needs success, and, above all, he needs issues that distract people from the looming impeachment proceedings. His approval ratings are down, so the withdrawal of troops from Syria seems is coming at the right time.

Trump looks no further than the 2020 election

Quite frankly, that’s not surprising. As early as 2018, he decided to go against his advisors and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis by withdrawing troops from Syria. Mattis resigned in protest.

Trump simply doesn’t care about the regional and geopolitical consequences of the withdrawal and the emerging power vacuum that Turkey, Russia and Iran are happy to fill. The re-election he hopes for is still about a year off, and that’s as far as Trump’s horizon goes. The withdrawal of troops was, and is, a key election campaign promise — no matter the cost.

 

Trump and the Russians: Facts, not Fictions

October 10, 2019

by A.V. Korochev

• President Trump was jobbed into his office with the full cooperation of Russian intelligence.
• They own Wikileaks entirely and released the damning, and authentic, “Podesta papers” concurrent with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This did damage to her campaign and was a major contributory factor to her narrow defeat and Trump’s election.
• Trump is not an honest man by any stretch of imagination.
• Trump has constantly engaged in bribing and manipulations and does this through second parties such as Cohen his former lawyer or Manafort, his campaign manager during the election.
• Trump and his entourage have made a number of trips to Russia (I have a listing of all of these along with Russian personages he was in contact with), seeking financing and permission to build luxury hotels in that country
• Trump’s actions, as President, are deliberate efforts to alienate both the putative allies of the US such as Germany, France, Canada and, to a lesser degree, Mexico.
• Trump has deliberately launched pointless, and destructive, attacks against Mexican and Muslim immigrants, as well as Canadian and German imports. All this has done is to create a highly negative image of his persona primarily and secondarily, the global image of the United States.
• Trump’s tariffs, and threats of tariffs, have engendered counter-tariffs that will, when implemented, create serious economic problems for American businessmen and, eventually, the public.
• Trump’s foolish support of the Israeli far right has done, and is doing, serious damage to the US image in the Middle East. It should be noted that Russian influence in the Shiite areas of the Middle East, is growing. Also note that Iran, and parts of Iraq, both Shiite, have extensive oil reserves and that Saudi Arabia, a Sunni state, once America’s primary source of badly-need oil, is running dry.
• Ergo, the Middle East areas where Russia is having growing influence have oil and if Russia sets itself up as major oil merchandizing source, this will give them tremendous economic leverage vis a vis the United States which is the world’s largest consumer of oil and its by products.
• By alienating America’s allies and disrupting that country’s social structure, Trump benefits only Russia and its interests.
• The concept of Trump taking bribes from the Russians (or the PRC) is completely understandable if one applies the concept of Occam’s Razor to the tumult and disruption he is deliberately causing both domestically and in foreign areas.
• If he is caught at this, and I understand the FBI was deeply interested in his Russian connections long before he ran for President, either we will have to deal with another Dallas or Trump will suffer a fatal heart attack.Vice-President Pence, a Christian fanatic, would then have to be told to mind his manners or suffer similar terminal problems.
• Trump is aware of the FBI investigation, aware of what they can find, and probably have already uncovered, so he fired the head of the FBI and even now, according to a very reliable source, is determined to replace the FBI with the cooperative CIA (their former head, Pompeo, is now Secretary of State) as the sole foreign and domestic intelligence agency. He, and his handlers, want to nip any FBI revelations in the bud so that Trump can continue on his course of castrating the United States as a global power.
• It is quite evident that Trump is unbalanced to a dangerous degree and that even his senior staff view him as both dangerous and totally unpredictable. The problem that arises from the strong and growing opposition to Trump is the polarization of the voter base in the United States and if it becomes a wide-spread belief that the president of the US is an agent of a foreign power, it would be the worst scandal in American history

 

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

October 10, 2019

by Dr. Peter Janney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks. ”

Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

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

 

 

Conversation No. 105

Date: Monday, September 15, 1997

Commenced: 1:38 PM CST

Concluded: 1:55 PM CST

RTC: Good morning, Gregory. Did you, by any chance, get the packet I sent you?

GD: The one on weird conspiracy crap?

RTC: Yes, the same.

GD: I did and I am still laughing. My God, when Reagan closed the nut houses in California, these things really took off. Actually, to be fair, that sort of lunacy has been around for years. But how the CIA could get tied up with some of them boggles the imagination.

RTC: Well, there were indeed very strange people in our ranks, I’ll grant you that. We had Gottleib, Cameron and other odd ones. The Swann person was another one. You know, the Remote Viewing insanity.

GD: Oh yes, indeed. I lived near SRI in Menlo Park and I heard hysterically funny stories about this at the time. Leaving the astral body to float around in space and then down to old Mother Russia to slip into the KGB headquarters to spy on the workings. Or float off to China to see what Mao was doing. The thought that taxpayer’s money went into such things is really not very funny. Tell me, although I only saw a brief mention of it, were you tied up with the Scientology nutties? The planet Xenu? The bringing of the Thetan master race to Montana by DC3s? Jesus, I know Hubbard spent some time in a ‘Frisco nut house but how, or I mean why, do sane people believe such shit?

RTC: From a poor, very bad science fiction writer to cult leader is quite a step but L. Ron made it.

GD: My God, I know about him and I met some of his drooling acolytes once. And had to listen to hours of psycho-babble about being clear or their fake emeters. All they do is rope in rich fools and skin them to the bone. But please tell me the CIA wasn’t tied up with these nutties.

RTC: No, Hubbard hated us. We were asked by DoS to investigate him when he was running all over the Med, getting the police of various countries after him. We concluded that all of them were crazy as hell and that Hubbard was either an inspired paranoid idiot or a total fraud. I rather suspect he was both. I hear he got so crazy out in California that his people killed him.

GD: I have heard the same. And cremated him and dumped the ashes into the ocean off the stern of an old sardine boat. Well, now Lafayette is up on Xenu, running the pay toilets in the Imperial Palace there. God, I thought that once we got rid of the Christian Scientists, the fake churches were done for.

RTC: Well, Gottleib was crazy and Cameron was crazier what with their experiments but at least Hubbard had a run for everyone’s money and enjoyed lots of teen-aged pussy before they offed him. Gottleib fucked goats and we had to off Cameron for everyone’s welfare. No, we had nothing to do with the Hubbard business.

GD: Ah, but you did get into the Remote Viewing business. Did you do crystals too?

RTC: What?

GD: No, just some New Age nonsense. I know if I had an out of body experience, I would want to visit the girl’s gym shower room at a local high school. Not too young and before the bodies turn to rubber and the tits topple. High school girls were OK for Hubbard to play stink finger with but they really aren’t too smart. Some of them are nice to look at, though. Go to any beach, Robert, and look at the flab and sag. Oh and men too. Must be democratic here. Guys get sagging tits and jelly bellies as well. But in the old days, young people kept their shapes longer but now, they bag, sag and drag at ten or eleven.

RTC: (Laughter) We all get there, Gregory.

GD: Yes, we do but I would rather look at the cat box than the blubber guts strutting their stuff. Ah, well, so much for Remote Viewing.

RTC: Mr. Swann conned some of our less intelligent people out of millions.

GD: Maybe they can start their own church, Robert. Like Hubbard, the ebox king. Former Xenu Imperial Chancellor. Oh, and don’t forget the Illuminati. Robert, they rule the world now. Tens of thousands of them wearing soiled underwear, sitting in their own dung at their underground headquarters in Des Moines and controlling the world. And the New World Order! Robert, we are both getting old so maybe the Order will give birth after we are gone. Isn’t it amazing, the hysterically funny fictions that bipeds actually believe? The Easter Bunny now has become legend. I look for a Book of the Bunny any day now and frantic worshippers holding Bunny Meets on high school football fields, buck naked and jumping up and down. My God, what a disgusting image. And the Remote Viewing people can all gather in the stands and soil themselves in sexual frenzies while caressing their crystals and smoking pot. Malthus had the right idea but why do we have to wait? How about starting a plague somewhere and getting rid of the nutties in the process?

RTC: Utterly futile, Gregory. When the human race regenerated, the types would emerge again.

GD: Yes, along with piles and chronic skin diseases. I had to listen to more unadulterated  crap back in the ’70s that you can imagine an the Remote Viewing and Scientology shit fits right in with bong dreams.

RTC: Bong?

GD: A water pipe for smoking hash. But most of these lunatics don’t need drugs to hallucinate. Imagine Thetans or superior people and by that, I mean those who have read the really terrible Hubbard sci-fi stories, Thetans are flown to this planet on DC3s. Of course space is a vacuum so no plane could fly between here and Xenu. And where, pray tell, is Xenu? Somewhere in the Cornflakes galaxy, right near the planet Vulva. And if you pay the Scientologists enough money, they’ll suddenly discover you are a Thetan and get to the head of the contributing class. Oh well, just because the CIA went for the out of body nonsense is no reason to link it with the Hubbard freaks. I shouldn’t have even brought it up. Dealing with fatties and space cases are so debilitating. And then we can contemplate getting it on with an epileptic whore. Just as enlightening and thrilling.

RTC: Well, I sent you what I had on all of that.

GD: And I thank you but if I tried to get any of it published, they’d lock me up in a rubber room. You know it’s true and I believe it’s true but I doubt if normal people would believe a word of it. Listen, let’s send Corson to Xenu! Great! He could tell them he was an American field marshal and take over the Xenuvian army and invade Mars next month. Bill would have a wonderful time out at the L. Ron Hubbard Theme Park where all the Thetans love to visit. Enough, enough. I ought to get back to throwing roofing nails out on the freeway and watching the accidents.

 

(Concluded 1:55 PM CST)

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Conversations+with+the+Crow+by+Gregory+Douglas

 

Encyclopedia of American Loons

   Jim Meehan

Jim Meehan is a dangerous crank and conspiracy theorist – he has been caught promulgating the craziest fake news – heavily involved in the anti-vaccine movement. Now, Meehan is an MD. That, of course, doesn’t mean that he knows anything about research or rational or scientific assessment of evidence (Meehan demonstrably does not), but the distinction between MD and medical researcher is one not generally recognized by conspiracy theorists, who’ll take anything whatsoever that looks like it can be promoted as an “expert” or authority supporting their side of things. Meehan has no background or expertise in vaccination or immunology – he is actually an ophthalmologist by training – but he is into functional medicine, which is as ridiculous as quackery comes. Currently Meehan operates a “wellness” center in Oklahoma.

He also doesn’t have the faintest idea how the VAERS database works. Meehan has tried to argue that the HPV vaccine is confirmed to have caused 144 deaths (by 2013), because there are 144 reports of death associated with the HPV vaccine in the VAERS database. This is not how the database works (indeed). “It absolutely is evidence,” says Meehan. It isn’t evidence

But he does know how to parrot standard anti-vaccine claims, and his rants have been relatively widely distributed on social media by people who do not know anything about vaccines or actually bother with the evidence either; most of them is a combination of the claim that infectious diseases aren’t dangerous, toxins gambits – admittedly effective on the chemically illiterate – and conspiracy mongering: the science behind vaccines is untrustworthy because scientists are uniformly corrupt and bought by Big Pharma, who would actually benefit vastly more from hospitalizations due to vaccine-preventable diseases than from vaccines, but like all good conspiracy theories this one requires that you don’t look too closely. There is a thorough takedown of his claims here. Meehan has also been caught supporting the debunked idea that physical trauma and child abuse are “vaccine injury”.

Diagnosis: Aggressive lunatic and unhinged conspiracy theorist. Stay far away.

 Michael Medved

Michael Medved is a right-wing radio host (the fundie Christian Salem Radio Network), movie critic (some of his earlier writings on film are actually pretty decent: Medved also helped launch the popularity of Plan Nine from Outer Space) and senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, a creationist think tank that occasionally tries to pretend to be thinking about science but usually forgets that they’re supposed to, such as when they hired Medved, who doesn’t have any background remotely related to science. Medved claims to be a “moderate” and is, indeed, moderate on a number of issues, having even critized the extremists on the far right; but he is also a supporter of the Tea Party, as well as various fringe conspiracy theories and a broad range of denialist positions, including global warming denialism (“a complete scam”) and creationism. His recent work includes such claptrap as Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values.

Creationism

Medved is a firm supporter of Intelligent Design Creationism (it is worth noting that Medved’s father, David Medved, who was a physicist and emphatically not a biologist, was a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s laughable petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism). It has therefore been natural for Medved to invite non-scientist ID-creationists like Stephen Meyer on his show to discuss their pseudoscience without having to engage with the damning criticisms of that pseudoscience. After being appointed Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute Medved promptly spilled the beans and admitted, somewhat inadvertently, that Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory but a fundie PR campaign against the scientific theory of evolution. Medved is otherwise apparently familiar with some of the more ridiculous PRATTs creationists use to fuel their Gish gallops, but doesn’t even begin to grasp the basics of biology and science.

In 2018 we should apparently be looking forward to his Great Minds, an audio and video podcast that will feature interviews with various “key scholars” at the Discovery Institute, bringing their ideas to a wider audience – in line with the institute’s mandate, which was never about doing science anyways, but about promotion of silly ideas.

Medved is apparently also a firm believer in the Bigfoot myth.

According to Medved, God has intervened in human history on several occasions. In his book The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic, Medved argues precisely that “there is intelligent design in America’s history”, stating for instance that God hid all the gold in California until “the very moment” that the territory became the property of the United States – as Medved tells the story, the gold was discovered on the very same day the treaty was signed, so the best explanation is that God actually put it there on that very day. In the real world gold was discovered before the treaty was signed, but when the facts don’t fit the premises and Medved needs to infer divine intervention, the facts must go.

Racialism and Civil Rights Issues

Medved has also adopted some notably cranky views on civil rights issues, and has even promoted racialism. In his own words (a 2008 Townhall article, one of the most idiotic in the history of idiotic articles): “The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide – between the progeny of every immigrant nationality that chose to come here, and the one significant group that exercised no choice in making their journey to the U.S. Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, or any sort of self-selection based on personality traits.” At least Medved doesn’t have the faintest clue how genes work. In any case, Medved goes from these observations to conclude that Obama’s policies were doomed to fail, since they go against the risk-taker genes (Republican ideas are apparently now hardcoded in our DNA). Also, talking about the trans-Atlantic slave trade: “Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean.” This is not the most horrifying aspect of these voyages. He has also argued that an American Indian Holocaust was just political correctness gone mad, since the US government never deliberately killed Native Americans. This is incorrect as well.

Zeh gays

As you’d expect, Medved is no fan of the LGBT movement, and used to argue against the repeal of DADT applied to gays but not to lesbians, since gay sex is an act of “aggression” and lesbian sex, by contrast, an act of “affection”. The most interesting detail here is that Medved has apparently thought long and hard about this (but, given that he’s stupid, failed to come up with anything intelligent). Gay marriage, meanwhile, is an existential threat, and “one man and one woman” is “essential for the survival of our civilization”. According to Medved states have never banned gay marriage, though – “that’s a liberal lie”; he’s apparently trying out his own, particularly dishonest, version of a favorite argument among opponents of interracial marriage.

And taking a page from the belligerent lunatic ravings of Scott Lively, Medved has also stated, against all facts, that most Nazi leaders, including Hitler, were gay. This is false.

Donning his movie critic (tinfoil) hat (he once praised the inane conspiracy pseudodocumentary Expelled, too), Medved criticized the movie “Happy Feet” for apparently featuring a subtle pro-gay message, at the same time implying that some gays can make themselves straight when they have “turned their lives around”.

Miscellaneous politics

Medved was not pleased when mainstream media labeled the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooter a “right-wing extremist”, calling such labeling an attack on conservatives, which, if Medved were correct, would not really portray conservatives in a particularly favorable light. There is little chance Medved is right about stuff like this, though.

In 2012 he published The Odds Against Obama: Why History and Logic Make the President a Likely Loser, arguing that Obama was bound to lose according to the “iron rules of history and logic”, which he pushed rather loudly even after it was painfully obvious that Obama would win. (The book is garbage in most other ways, too.) Here is Medved trying to argue why Americans shouldn’t ever vote for an atheist president. Here is Medved claiming that God votes conservative (because Medved does and God always agrees with Medved on politics). And here is Medved complaining about how liberals are given a free pass to talk about their faith, and that conservatives never do.

In 2003, Medved launched his campaign (later picked up by others) against the fictional character Captain America, whom Medved said was being depicted as sympathetic to terrorism because Captain America questioned official U.S. policy with regards to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Diagnosis: Denialist and emphatically as far from scientifically literate as you get, even though the Discovery Institute seems to think otherwise (of course, they wouldn’t have the faintest clue about what the difference between a scientist and a pseudoscientist might be). He is a bit of a C-level celebrity, though, and there are apparently some people who listen to him.