FBI Entrapment Created 'Illusion' of Terrorist Plots: Report

[Octafish]

A close look at government counter-terrorism tactics reveals that many people convicted would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts.

by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer
Common Dreams, July 21, 2014

Federal officials and law enforcement agents are treating American Muslims like "terrorists-in-waiting," according to a new report released Monday by Human Rights Watch and Columbia Law School's Human Rights Institute.

The FBI, under pressure to appear effective and worthy of its $8.4-billion budget, has "targeted American Muslims in abusive counterterrorism 'sting operations' based on religious and ethnic identity"; sent informants to mosques to "troll for leads"; and in some cases encouraged or even paid individuals to undertake terrorist acts, the report (pdf) reveals.

“Americans have been told that their government is keeping them safe by preventing and prosecuting terrorism inside the US,” said Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch and one of the authors of the report. “But take a closer look and you realize that many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts.”

The study, entitled Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in U.S. Terrorism Prosecutions, examines 27 federal terrorism cases (of more than 500 since September 11, 2001) from initiation of the investigations to sentencing and post-conviction conditions of confinement, finding infractions at every turn.

SNIP...

In fact, Illusions of Justice details how such practices are counterproductive, sowing seeds of mistrust within the American Muslim community:

The law enforcement practices described in this report have alienated the very communities the government relies on most to report possible terrorist threats and diverted resources from other, more effective ways, of responding to the threat of terrorism. Its proclaimed success in convicting alleged terrorist conspirators has come with serious and unnecessary costs to the rights of many of those prosecuted and convicted, to their families and communities, to the public, and to the rule of law.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/07/21-6

Gee. It's bad enough worrying about terrorists all day long, without having to worry about the government chipping in.

[arcane1]

1. You can't have a security-based economy without some insecurity.

Ca-ching! $$$

[Enthusiast]

6. +1

A whole bunch.

[Octafish]

10. Mix in Secret Government and Spherical Snooping and its MONEY for those in the know.

The rest of us? Well, for 99-percent: We're not in the clear.

Behind the Curtain: Booz Allen Hamilton and its Owner, The Carlyle Group

Written by Bob Adelmann
The New American; June 13, 2013

According to writers Thomas Heath and Marjorie Censer at the Washington Post, The Carlyle Group and its errant child, Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), have a public relations problem, thanks to NSA leaker and former BAH employee Edward Snowden. By the time top management at BAH learned that one of their top level agents had gone rogue, and terminated his employment, it was too late.

For years Carlyle had, according to the Post, “nurtured a reputation as a financially sophisticated asset manager that buys and sells everything from railroads to oil refineries”; but now the light from the Snowden revelations has revealed nothing more than two companies, parent and child, “bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits.”

And have they ever. When The Carlyle Group bought BAH back in 2008, it was totally dependent upon government contracts in the fields of information technology (IT) and systems engineering for its bread and butter. But there wasn't much butter: After two years the company’s gross revenues were $5.1 billion but net profits were a minuscule $25 million, close to a rounding error on the company’s financial statement. In 2012, however, BAH grossed $5.8 billion and showed earnings of $219 million, nearly a nine-fold increase in net revenues and a nice gain in value for Carlyle.

Unwittingly, the Post authors exposed the real reason for the jump in profitability: close ties and interconnected relationships between top people at Carlyle and BAH, and the agencies with which they are working. The authors quoted George Price, an equity analyst at BB&T Capital: " got a great brand, they've focused over time on hiring top people, including bringing on people who have a lot of senior government experience." (Emphasis added.)

For instance, James Clapper had a stint at BAH before becoming the current Director of National Intelligence; George Little consulted with BAH before taking a position at the Central Intelligence Agency; John McConnell, now vice chairman at BAH, was director of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the ‘90s before moving up to director of national intelligence in 2007; Todd Park began his career with BAH and now serves as the country's chief technology officer; James Woolsey, currently a senior vice president at BAH, served in the past as director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and so on.

BAH has had more than a little problem with self-dealing and conflicts of interest over the years. For instance in 2006 the European Commission asked the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Privacy International (PI) to investigate BAH’s involvement with President George Bush’s SWIFT surveillance program, which was viewed by that administration as “just another tool” in its so-called “War on Terror.” The only problem is that it was illegal, as it violated U.S., Belgian, and European privacy laws. BAH was right in the middle of it. According to the ACLU/PI report,

Though Booz Allen’s role is to verify that the access to the SWIFT data is not abused, its relationship with the U.S. Government calls its objectivity significantly into question. (Emphasis added.)

Among Booz Allen’s senior consulting staff are several former members of the intelligence community, including a former Director of the CIA and a former director of the NSA.

As noted by Barry Steinhardt, an ACLU director, “It’s bad enough that the administration is trying to hold out a private company as a substitute for genuine checks and balances on its surveillance activities. But of all companies to perform audits on a secret surveillance program, it would be difficult to find one less objective and more intertwined with the U.S. government security establishment.” (Emphasis added.)

CONTINUED w Links n Privatized INTEL...

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15696-behind-the-curtain-booz-allen-hamilton-and-its-owner-the-carlyle-group

Apart from picking up the tab, that i$.

[Ed Suspicious]

37. So on-point. +1

[renegade000]

2. i believe it

seemed like every foiled "plot" involved some fbi agent prodding someone to do something. it's a testament to the shoddy state of journalism in this country that it took this long for it to be brought up.

[DirkGently]

3. It's been brought up. More a testament to our weak political will

that nothing was done about it. It has been a while, though, since the last ballyhooed case of,

"Hoorah and hooray. We have person X on tape, agreeing to theoretically blow up Y on the basis that an FBI informant approached them, suggested they do that, and offered to supply all the equipment and logistics to pull it off. Now we will put X in prison for 3,000 years, making America that much safer from theoretical whatevers." though.

[gratuitous]

5. And in at least one case

Darn the luck, but their recording equipment wasn't working on that crucial phone call where the defendant brought up the idea, all by himself with no coaching or encouragement whatsoever, of blowing up something. If you can't trust the FBI in a court of law, who can you trust?

[Octafish]

11. The Informants: Terrorists for the FBI

The FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another domestic attack. But are they busting terrorist plots—or leading them?

—By Trevor Aaronson
Mother Jones

EXCERPT...

Over the past year, Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley have examined prosecutions of 508 defendants in terrorism-related cases, as defined by the Department of Justice. Our investigation found:

■Nearly half the prosecutions involved the use of informants, many of them incentivized by money (operatives can be paid as much as $100,000 per assignment) or the need to work off criminal or immigration violations. (For more on the details of those 508 cases, see our charts page and searchable database.)
■Sting operations resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants. Of that total, 49 defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur—an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.
■With three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings. (The exceptions are Najibullah Zazi, who came close to bombing the New York City subway system in September 2009; Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, an Egyptian who opened fire on the El-Al ticket counter at the Los Angeles airport; and failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.)
■In many sting cases, key encounters between the informant and the target were not recorded—making it hard for defendants claiming entrapment to prove their case.
■Terrorism-related charges are so difficult to beat in court, even when the evidence is thin, that defendants often don't risk a trial.

"The problem with the cases we're talking about is that defendants would not have done anything if not kicked in the ass by government agents," says Martin Stolar, a lawyer who represented a man caught in a 2004 sting involving New York's Herald Square subway station. "They're creating crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the war on terror." In the FBI's defense, supporters argue that the bureau will only pursue a case when the target clearly is willing to participate in violent action. "If you're doing a sting right, you're offering the target multiple chances to back out," says Peter Ahearn, a retired FBI special agent who directed the Western New York Joint Terrorism Task Force and oversaw the investigation of the Lackawanna Six, an alleged terror cell near Buffalo, New York. "Real people don't say, 'Yeah, let's go bomb that place.' Real people call the cops."

CONTINUED...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-informants

What country is this, again?

[Enthusiast]

27. Kicked and recommended!

A whole bunch.

[JaneyVee]

4. Just watched the Newburgh Sting on HBO

Fascinating.

[Octafish]

12. Thank you for the heads-up, JaneyVee! Will viddy.

From HBO:

On May 20, 2009, four men from the impoverished and largely African-American city of Newburgh, NY, were apprehended for an alleged terror plot. They had no history of violence or terrorist ties, but had been drawn by a Pakistani FBI informant into a carefully orchestrated scheme to bomb Jewish synagogues in a wealthy New York City suburb and fire Stinger missiles at U.S. military supply planes. Their dramatic arrest, complete with armored cars, a SWAT team and FBI aircraft, played out under the gaze of major TV outlets, ultimately resulting in 25-year prison sentences for the “Newburgh Four.”

Amidst the media frenzy surrounding the case, political figures extolled the outcome as a victory in the “war on terror” and a “textbook example of how a major investigation should be conducted,” though others believed the four men were victims of FBI entrapment. THE NEWBURGH STING delves deeply into this case – one of many cases across the country where people have been allegedly drawn into a plot with extreme consequences.

CONTINUED...

[JaneyVee]

18. It was really good. The whole thing was a

Dog and pony show to make themselves look good and keep us in fear.

[Octafish]

20. Trained by Hoover

Things have descended so far that all they give two-cents about are shining up to the wealthy. In office, they use their official positions to protect the interests of the wealthy. Out of office, they use their official record to cash in their chits in a job.

Remember Carol Lam? She connected the rotting dots from the Military Industrial Complex straight though Congress and on down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Bush White House. Instead of following the trail, she got the ziggy from her government job as a US Attorney for Southern District of California. Thankfully, by some strange circumstance, she did find employment at a mill per.

As for Hoover, what a rotter:

* DICK GREGORY: In 1968, the activist/comedian publicly denounced the Mafia for importing heroin into the inner city. Did the FBI welcome the anti-drug, anti-mob message? No. Head G-man J. Edgar Hoover responded by proposing that the Bureau try to provoke the mob to retaliate against Gregory as part of an FBI "counter intelligence operation" to "neutralize" the comedian. Hoover wrote: "Alert La Cosa Nostra (LCN) to Gregory's attack on LCN."

Remarkable reSOURCE: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media/FBIAbuse_WMOZ.html

The fact Hoover never heard of the Mafia was no coincidence. Neither was his disinvestigation of the assassination of President Kennedy.

[Enthusiast]

26. +1!

[Enthusiast]

7. Kicked and recommended!

[Octafish]

13. How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing 'Terrorists' - and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook

By Rick Perlstein
Rolling Stone, May 15, 2012

This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, "suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks" and "scarves or towels around their heads" were heard grumbling at the protesters' unwillingness to act violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as "Cyco," explained to his anarchist colleagues how "you can make plastic explosives with bleach," and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought they’d have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for a big bridge – "Gotta slow the traffic that's going to make them money" – and won. He then led them to a connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450. Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.

Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies. The authorities couldn’t have more effectively made the Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if they had scripted it. Maybe that's because, more or less, they did.

The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens, complained to his sister of feeling "very pressured" by the guy who turned out to be an informant and was recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: "We're in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just don't cut it," he said. "And it's actually harder to be non-violent than it is to do stuff like that." Though when Cleveland's NEWS Channel 5 broadcast that footage, they headlined it "Accused Bomb Plot Suspect Caught on Camera Talking Violence."

In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage. ("They teach you how to make all this stuff out of simple household items," one of the kids says on a recording quoted in the FBI affidavit about a book he has just discovered, The Anarchist Cookbook. Someone asks him how much it says explosives cost. "I'm not sure," he responds, "I just downloaded it last night.&quot It’s a perfect example of how post-9/11 fear made law enforcement tactics seem acceptable that were previously beyond the pale. Previously, however, the targets have been Muslims; now they’re white kids from Ohio. And maybe you could argue that this is acceptable, if the feds were actually acting out of a good-faith assessment of what threats are imminent and which are not. But that's not what they're doing at all. Instead, they are arrogating to themselves a downright Orwellian power – the power to deploy the might of the State to shape a fundamental narrative about which ideas Americans must be most scared of, and which ones they should not fear much at all, independent of the relative objective dangerousness of the people who hold those ideas.

SNIP...

Not everything is the same since the 1970s, of course. The media has changed: Newsday editorialized in 1972 of the Camden case, "We have come to expect such tactics from totalitarian nations that have no respect for individual rights permitting dissent. They have no place in American and those who advocate them have no place in this government." You don’t see that sort of language much any more. Indeed, Newsday appears not to have covered the arrest and trial of Hemant Lakhami at all. "Such tactics" are just not a very big deal any more.

CONTINUED w/links...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/how-fbi-entrapment-is-inventing-terrorists-and-letting-bad-guys-off-the-hook-20120515

Are we having Police State yet?

[Enthusiast]

23. This is a clear abuse of power.

They have been engaged in this sort of thing since the Vietnam War. These FBI agents are worse than the supposed "terrorists" they create.

[Octafish]

25. Management seems to especially reward those who go along.

"The FBI had so infiltrated the ranks of (Communist Party USA) that agents and informants could actually make party policy." -- Spying on America: The FBI's Domestic Counter-Intelligence Program

http://tinyurl.com/o5cgey8

Those who don't? Well, they get shipped to Detroit.

[Enthusiast]

28. Hoover.....a great American.

[Octafish]

31. Not all apples are rotten.

Agent Donald Adams realized just what kind of rotter he'd been working for when he realized the FBI failed to investigate one Joseph Adams Milteer.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2341515

Agent Adams recently passed, I read. All FBI agents should have his integrity.

[Enthusiast]

32. Thanks. Geez.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

55. "Agent Donald Adams"

[Octafish]

62. Ironic. While very conservative, the FBI Agent Donald Adams was quite a compelling person.

..."officially Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots..." gets repeated a lot officially, too.

[Warren DeMontague]

43. I'm more worried about the Feds arresting cancer grannies for growing pot

than I am about them catching people who are more than happy to commit violent acts on innocent people.

Personally.

[Aerows]

8. Well I'm shocked.

Said nobody ever.

[Octafish]

16. That's the idea, Citizen.

GLADIO: THE SECRET U.S. WAR TO SUBVERT ITALIAN DEMOCRACY

by Arthur E. Rowse
Covert Action Quarterly, Dec. 1994

EXCERPT...

THE STRATEGY OF TENSION

Despite the failure of Plan Solo, the CIA and the Italian right had largely succeeded in creating the clandestine structures envisioned in Operation Demagnetize. Now the plotters turned their attention to a renewed offensive against the left.

To win intellectual support, the secret services set up a conference in Rome at the luxurious Parco dei Principi hotel in May 1965, for a "study" of "revolutionary war." The choice of words was inadvertently revealing, since the conveners and invited participants were planning a real revolution, not just warning of an imaginary communist takeover. The meeting was essentially a reunion of fascists, right-wing journalists, and military personnel. ``The strategy of tension'' that emerged was designed to disrupt normality with terror attacks in order to create chaos and provoke a frightened public into accepting still more authoritarian government. 20

Several "graduates" of this exercise had long records of anticommunist actions and would later be implicated in some of Italy's worst massacres. One was journalist and secret agent Guido Giannettini. Four years earlier, he had conducted a seminar at the U.S. Naval Academy on "The Techniques and Prospects of a Coup d'Etat in Europe." Another was notorious fascist Stefano Delle Chiaie, who had reportedly been recruited as a secret agent in 1960. He had organized his own armed band known as Avanguardia Nationale (AN), whose members had begun training in terror tactics in preparation for Plan Solo. 21

General De Lorenzo, whose SIFAR had now become SID, soon enlisted these and other confidants in a new Gladio project. They planned to create a secret parallel force alongside sensitive government offices to neutralize subversive elements not yet ``purified.'' Known as the Parallel SID, its tentacles reached into nearly every key institution of the Italian state. Gen.Vito Miceli, who later headed SID, said he set up the separate structure "at the request of the Americans and NATO." 22

SNIP...

THE BOLOGNA TRAIN STATION BOMBING

A huge explosion at the Bologna train station two years after Moro's death may have whitened the hair of many Italians - not just for the grisly toll of 85 killed and more than 200 injured - but for the official inaction that followed. Although the investigating magistrates suspected neofascists, they were unable to issue credible arrest warrants for more than two years because of false data from the secret services. By that time, all but one of the five chief suspects, two of whom had ties to SID, had skipped the country. 74 The T4 explosive found at the scene matched the Gladio material used in Brescia, Peteano and other bombings, according to expert testimony before Judge Mastelloni. 75

In the trial, the judges cited the "strategy of tension and its ties to 'foreign powers.'" They also found the secret military and civilian structure tied into neofascist groups, P-2, and the secret services. 76 In short, they found the CIA and Gladio.

But their efforts to exact justice for the Bologna bombing came to nothing when, in 1990, the court of appeals acquitted all the alleged "brains." P-2 head Gelli went free, as did two secret service chiefs whose perjury convictions were overturned. Four gladiators convicted of participating in an armed group also won appeals. That left Peteano as the only major bombing case with a conviction of the actual bomber, thanks to Vinciguerra's confession.

The sorry judicial record in these monstrous crimes showed how completely the Gladio network enveloped the army, police, secret services and the top courts. Thanks to P-2, with its 963 well-placed brothers, 77 the collusion also extended into the top levels of media and business.

CONTINUED...

http://www.mega.nu/ampp/gladio.html

My how things have changed.

[Enthusiast]

24. That is so fucking ugly.

[Aerows]

48. You always post the most

dense and informative posts, Octafish. Thank you so much for all that you do to keep us informed! I didn't know about that.

[johnnyreb]

9. This is reported once or twice a year the last few years

isn't it? It should be common knowledge now. But oh yeah, Big Media.

1 hour police-state music mix
http://popdefectradio.blogspot.com/2012/06/policestate-2012.html

[Octafish]

19. Church Committee in 1976 reported CIA manipulated US Press...

...stating a number, 500 journalists, but not naming names. Thankfully, Carl Bernstein filled in the blanks:

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up

BY CARL BERNSTEIN
(originally in Rolling Stone way back when)

In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.

Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.

The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception for the following principal reasons:

■ The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence‑gathering employed by the CIA. Although the Agency has cut back sharply on the use of reporters since 1973 primarily as a result of pressure from the media), some journalist‑operatives are still posted abroad.

■ Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950s and 1960s with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.

The CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than Agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed sessions with members of Congress. The general outlines of what happened are indisputable; the specifics are harder to come by. CIA sources hint that a particular journalist was trafficking all over Eastern Europe for the Agency; the journalist says no, he just had lunch with the station chief. CIA sources say flatly that a well‑known ABC correspondent worked for the Agency through 1973; they refuse to identify him. A high‑level CIA official with a prodigious memory says that the New York Times provided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966; he does not know who they were, or who in the newspaper’s management made the arrangements.

CONTINUED...

http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php

That all was like 1976. Today, thanks to technology that tracks every keystroke and GOOGLE search, they know what you know.

And people wonder why the rich get richer. It's the plan, people.

[MinM]

33. Jimmy Hoffa and the Church Committee

A little off topic here but it was interesting last night that PBS' History Detectives investigation concluded that Hoffa was killed to prevent him from testifying to the Church Committee.

Ostensibly to keep him from spilling the beans any further about Russell Bufalino's (Philly/NY mob boss) ties to the CIA. Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli were silenced in the Summer of 75 too (apparently for the same reason).

[Octafish]

35. Like DCI William Colby said re Sam Giancana: ''We had nothing to do with that.''

Which would be another question to ask somebody about were it not for the fact that Colby, too, is dead. A boating accident. Accidents happened to a lot of people the Church Committee wanted to talk to about in regards to assassinations and other things.

It is alleged Sam Giancana boasted of being the operational mastermind of Dallas.

Re the death of Giancana: The guy was in the federal witness protection program at the time. A federal agent was in the house (usin' da bathroom). The Chicago police were parked outside his house. Yet, somebody managed to sneak up on MoMo and put seven rounds from a silenced .22 automatic into his head and around his mouth. The authorities say they have no idea who did it, so forget about it.

Thank you for the information and the heads-up on the PBS program. I will viddy in the coming days and report.

[MinM]

40. @SpyTalker: William E. #Colby: The Gray Man

The Gray Man:
‘Shadow Warrior,’ by Randall B. Woods

By EVAN THOMAS
Published: May 3, 2013

William E. Colby, right, with another former director of central intelligence, George H. W. Bush, in 1978.

During the Vietnam War, Bill Colby of the Central Intelligence Agency ran the Phoenix program, which set out to “neutralize” the Viet Cong by capturing or killing them. In 1972, when Colby came home to a nation that had turned against the war, his face began appearing around Washington on “Wanted” posters. He was jeered on the street and peppered with death threats. Every day at 5 a.m., he was awakened at home by the same crank caller, accosting him as a murderer and a war criminal. Colby did not bother to get his home number changed. Instead, he began to use the predawn call as an alarm clock...

In “Shadow Warrior,” we get the occasional glimpse of emotion. When one of his young sons began arguing with him about the morality of the Vietnam War, Colby became “red-faced,” the son recalled, and “shouted that war was brutal — it brutalized everyone who came into contact with it — but sometimes there was no alternative. He himself, he admitted, had killed men in war, even with his bare hands.” But such moments of self-­revelation are fleeting. Mostly Colby presented himself as Galahad in a fallen world, a modest knight to be sure, but bent on finding the grail amid sin and corruption. “He was a man who could distinguish between illusion and reality,” Woods, a professor of history at the University of Arkansas, writes. “Or so he convinced himself.”

In 1954, President Eisenhower commissioned Gen. James Doolittle to write a secret report on the state of American intelligence. Faced with an “implacable enemy,” the report found, the West would have, in effect, to fight fire with fire. Fair play was out: dirty tricks were in.

The realpolitik of the cold war raised an ancient philosophical question: If you adopt the underhanded tactics of the enemy, if you stoop to his level, do you become like him? Colby does not seem to have been troubled by the problem. He did not become a drunk or turn half-mad like so many spies and spy chasers of that tortured time, most notably James Jesus Angleton, the head of counterintelligence, who was Colby’s antagonist at the C.I.A. Colby was always rather a Boy Scout (indeed, he led a Boy Scout troop when he was at home on the weekends, and worshiped at the Church of the Little Flower). ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/books/review/shadow-warrior-by-randall-b-woods.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101662579

Another interesting side note is that the late Michael Hastings makes a passing reference to the Phoenix Program in his posthumously published novel The Last Magazine.

William Colby stipulated to "foreign assassination plots"

[Octafish]

60. Philippines is how we got this way.

Obama's Expanding Surveillance Universe

Posted by Alfred McCoy
TomDispatch, July 14, 2013

EXCERPT...

In 1898, Washington occupied the Philippines and in the years that followed pacified its rebellious people, in part by fashioning the world’s first full-scale “surveillance state” in a colonial land.  The illiberal lessons learned there then migrated homeward, providing the basis for constructing America’s earliest internal security and surveillance apparatus during World War I.  A half-century later, as protests mounted during the Vietnam War, the FBI, building on the foundations of that old security structure, launched large-scale illegal counterintelligence operations to harass antiwar activists, while President Richard Nixon’s White House created its own surveillance apparatus to target its domestic enemies.

In the aftermath of those wars, however, reformers pushed back against secret surveillance.  Republican privacy advocates abolished much of President Woodrow Wilson’s security apparatus during the 1920s, and Democratic liberals in Congress created the FISA courts in the 1970s in an attempt to prevent any recurrence of President Nixon’s illegal domestic wiretapping.

Today, as Washington withdraws troops from the Greater Middle East, a sophisticated intelligence apparatus built for the pacification of Afghanistan and Iraq has come home to help create a twenty-first century surveillance state of unprecedented scope. But the past pattern that once checked the rise of a U.S. surveillance state seems to be breaking down.  Despite talk about ending the war on terror one day, President Obama has left the historic pattern of partisan reforms far behind. In what has become a permanent state of “wartime” at home, the Obama administration is building upon the surveillance systems created in the Bush years to maintain U.S. global dominion in peace or war through a strategic, ever-widening edge in information control.  The White House shows no sign -- nor does Congress -- of cutting back on construction of a powerful, global Panopticon that can surveil domestic dissidents, track terrorists, manipulate allied nations, monitor rival powers, counter hostile cyber strikes, launch preemptive cyberattacks, and protect domestic communications.

Writing for TomDispatch four years ago during Obama’s first months in office, I suggested that the War on Terror has “proven remarkably effective in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state -- with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft patrolling ‘the homeland.’"

CONTINUED...

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175724/tomgram%3A_alfred_w._mccoy,_obama's_expanding_surveillance_universe/

Ha ha. As if. Couldn't happen here...

[MinM]

56. Nixon talks about getting kickbacks from the Teamsters

in the piece too. Of course Reagan ended up getting support from the Teamsters also.

Wonder what kind of quid pro quo that could have been?

BTW were you aware of any other Nixon Mob ties?

***
Ronald Reagan wasn't qualified to be governor, let alone president. James Garner

[Octafish]

59. Wealth and Crime often are co-dependent...

FBI Files Reveal Steinbrenner Was A Snitch

Told probers of unreported cash donations to pols

The Smoking Gun

DECEMBER 23--George Steinbrenner was a snitch.

That is the major revelation found in investigative files on the late New York Yankess owner that were released today by the FBI.

The 420 pages, made public in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, primarily cover the federal investigation that ended with Steinbrenner’s August 1974 felony conviction for making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign.

While Watergate Special Prosecution Force documents (previously published here) indicated that Steinbrenner’s lawyer dangled the businessman’s cooperation as part of a possible plea deal, the FBI files disclose who The Boss subsequently fingered.

In a May 5, 1975 memo to FBI Director Clarence Kelley, a Department of Justice official reported that Steinbrenner had admitted making “substantial cash contributions” to a pair of Ohio congressmen during the 1970 and 1972 election cycles. The prosecutor noted that a review of disclosure reports files by the Republican representatives, Wiliam Minshall and Charles Mosher, “indicates that no contributions were reported received from George M. Steinbrenner, III.”

The cash contributions totaled about $15,000, with most of the money being delivered by a Steinbrenner intermediary to the Ohio district offices of Minshall and Mosher. However, Steinbrenner told investigators that he “personally delivered approximately $1000” to a Minshall aide at a Cleveland restaurant.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/sports/fbi-files-reveal-steinbrenner-was-snitch

[MinM]

65. Bebe Rebozo and his Pan American Airways Peeps

Interesting piece here ..

Excerpt from The Breaking of a President 1974 - The Nixon Connection
Marvin Miller, Compiler (Therapy Productions, Inc.©1975); LCCCN

BEBE THE BAGMAN

Secret Manipulations of President's Crony Still Pose Question Mark

To those of an inquiring turn of mind, it may seem odd that these two men from such radically different milieus—the earnest young Quaker lawyer and politician from rural Southern California [Richard M. Nixon], and the self‑made Cuban‑American businessman on Florida's Gold Coast [Charles G. Rebozo]—should have become friends in the first place, and soon become so close. Just who is Bebe Rebozo and what is his background? ...

http://quixoticjoust.blogspot.com/2014/07/bebe-rebozo-and-his-pan-american.html

BTW a little bit of entertainment trivia .. the short-lived television series Pan Am dealt with using airline employees as intelligence assets.

[MinM]

67. Wired: Pan Am & the CIA

...“About five years ago it struck me that there were so few stories of young women who traveled together and became really good friends,” Ganis, one of the show’s executive producers, told Wired.com ahead of the show’s Sunday premiere. “My biggest frustration in our business is how uninformed people are about the world. I thought this would be a good vehicle for people to see our common humanity.”

So Ganis, a Pan American World Airways stewardess from 1968 to 1976, spent hours upon hours meticulously researching her former employer and getting jet-age stories from other past employees.

She ended up with tales of not only young women on far-flung journeys, but also of Pan Am’s involvement in State Department operations, behind-the-scenes missions prior to the Six-Day War and dangerous liaisons in Africa — all stories she hopes to work into future episodes...

http://www.wired.com/2011/09/tv-fact-checker-pan-am/

[MinM]

66. Joseph & Stewart Alsop

Alsop is an interesting case that Bernstein brings up. In an otherwise excellent piece from NPR's On the Media that was posted previously, Alsop's brother Stewart is given a free pass for dubious reporting ..

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Journalism has been called the first draft of history, but what if that first draft is never corrected or if the mistakes persist, despite many subsequent drafts? President Bush harkened back to the peril we faced during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962 and how we were saved by the uncompromising resolve of an earlier leader, in order to justify our need to take preemptive action in Iraq. He was drawing on the first draft of history, the one that said John F. Kennedy went eyeball to eyeball with Nikita Khrushchev over Russian missiles in Cuba and that Khrushchev blinked and withdrew. [CLIP]:

[font color=darkred]JOHN F. KENNEDY:[/font] We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the course of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth. But neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced. [END CLIP]

[font color=green]BOB GARFIELD:[/font] Major players in the Cuban Missile Crisis, including then presidential speech writer Ted Sorensen and former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, have tried in recent years to correct the record of those events, but the national myth seems pretty much unshakable. Fred Kaplan, Slate columnist and, incidentally, Brooke’s husband, has examined all the declassified material related to that crisis as it’s emerged over the years. We asked him to take us through the various drafts of the Cuba showdown.

[font color=blue]FRED KAPLAN:[/font] The basic scenario came from an article published shortly after the crisis by Stewart Alsop who was a very establishment columnist of the day who got the information from aides to Kennedy in the White House who were authorized by Kennedy to give him this account. Eyeball to eyeball with the Russians, crazy generals, on one hand, wanting us to bomb the missiles right away, lunatic doves like Stevenson, on the other, wanting to negotiate their way out of it from the beginning and, you know, smart guys like Kennedy and McNamara and Bundy navigating a, a cool and calm course through the thickets and ending us up safe to shore.

[font color=green]BOB GARFIELD:[/font] That's a heroic and reassuring recounting of the events, and it's certainly not the first nor the last time that a journalist has run with leaked information, but do you think Alsop had any way to know that the story he was writing did not, in fact, reflect the events as we now know them?

[font color=blue]FRED KAPLAN:[/font] No, I don't think he had any way of knowing that. This is what people told him and he certainly wasn't privy to any of the inside stuff going on. And, in fact, this was confirmed in the second draft of history, the memoirs written by two of what could be called the palace historians, Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorensen, Sorensen being Kennedy's speechwriter at the time who was present at all of the — what they called the ex-con meetings, the meetings of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council which got together for the 13 Days and deliberated what to do. And this basically told the same story, though with more detail...

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/132896-missile-crisis-memories/transcript/

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021414805#post12

http://spartacus-educational.com/NDstewart_alsop.htm

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKalsop.htm

[MinM]

68. Alsop's Fables .. "I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral"

...Evan Thomas, the author of The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA (1995), argues that the Alsop brothers worked very closely with Frank Wisner, the first director of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the CIA. He points out that he "considered his friends Joe and Stewart Alsop to be reliable purveyors of the company line in their columns". In 1953 the brothers helped out Edward Lansdale and the CIA in the Philippines: "Wisner actively courted the Alsops, along with a few other newsmen he regarded as suitable outlets. When Lansdale was manipulating electoral politics in the Philippines in 1953, Wisner asked Joe Alsop to write some columns warning the Filipinos not to steal the election from Magsaysay. Alsop was happy to comply, though he doubted his columns would have much impact on the Huks. After the West German counterintelligence chief, Otto John, defected to the Soviet Union in 1954, Wisner fed Alsop a story that the West German spymaster had been kidnapped by the KGB. Alsop dutifully printed the story, which may or may not have been true." ...

At the end of 1966, Desmond FitzGerald, Directorate for Plans, discovered that Ramparts, a left-wing publication, were planning to publish an article that the International Organizations Division had been secretly funding the National Student Association. FitzGerald ordered Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against the magazine. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for his book, The Very Best Men: "I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off." This dirty tricks campaign failed to stop the magazine publishing this story in March, 1967. The article, written by Sol Stern, was entitled NSA and the CIA. As well as reporting CIA funding of the National Student Association it exposed the whole system of anti-Communist front organizations in Europe, Asia, and South America.

Stewart Alsop, who was now working for the Saturday Evening Post, asked Thomas Braden, the former head of the International Organizations Division (IOD) to write an article for the Saturday Evening Post in response to what Stern had written. The article, entitled, [font color=darkred]I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral[/font] , appeared on 20th May 1967. Braden defended the activities of the IOD unit of the CIA. Braden admitted that for more than 10 years, the CIA had subsidized Encounter through the Congress for Cultural Freedom - which it also funded - and that one of its staff was a CIA agent.

Hugh Wilford, the author of The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008) has argued: "It was a well-worn technique of the CIA to blow the cover of covert operations when they were no longer considered desirable or viable, and there were a number of reasons why, by April 1967, the Agency might have tired of its alliance with the non-communist left. For one, the NCL had become a far less reliable instrument of U.S. foreign policy than it had been a decade earlier. With their propensity for criticizing the war in Vietnam. ADA-style left-liberals such as the Reuther brothers were increasingly perceived in Washington as a hindrance rather a help in the prosecution of the Cold War." ...

http://spartacus-educational.com/NDstewart_alsop.htm

[Octafish]

70. Frank Wisner, Jr. today is a player...

Nepotism.

Frank Wisner in Cairo

The Empire's Bagman

By VIJAY PRASHAD
CounterPunch
February 2, 2011

From inside the bowels of Washington's power elite, Frank Wisner emerges, briefcase in hand. He has met the President, but he is not his envoy. He represents the United States, but is not the Ambassador. What is in his briefcase is his experience: it includes his long career as bagman of Empire, and as bucket-boy for Capital. Pulling himself away from the Georgetown cocktail parties and the Langley Power-point briefings, Wisner finds his way to the Heliopolis cocktail parties and to the hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya. Mubarak (age 82) greets Wisner (age 72), as these elders confer on the way forward for a country whose majority is under thirty.

SNIP...

Wisner has a long lineage in the CIA family. His father, Frank Sr., helped overthrow Arbenz of Guatemala (1954) and Mossadeq of Iran (1953), before he was undone in mysterious circumstances in 1965. Frank Jr. is well known around Langley, with a career in the Defense and State Departments along with ambassadorial service in Egypt, the Philippines, and then India. In each of these places Wisner insinuated himself into the social and military branches of the power elite. He became their spokesperson. Wisner and Mubarak became close friends when he was in country (1986-1991), and many credit this friendship (and military aid) with Egypt's support of the US in the 1991 Gulf War. Not once did the US provide a criticism of Egypt's human rights record. As Human Rights Watch put it, the George H. W. Bush regime "refrained from any public expression of concern about human rights violations in Egypt." Instead, military aid increased, and the torture system continued. The moral turpitude (bad guys, aka the Muslim Brotherhood and democracy advocates need to be tortured) and the torture apparatus set up the system for the regime followed by Bush's son, George W. after 911, with the extraordinary rendition programs to these very Egyptian prisons. Wisner might be considered the architect of the framework for this policy.

Wisner remained loyal to Mubarak. In 2005, he celebrated the Egyptian (s)election (Mubarak "won" with 88.6% of the vote). It was a "historic day" he said, and went further, "There were no instances of repression; there wasn't heavy police presence on the streets. The atmosphere was not one of police intimidation." This is quite the opposite of what came out from election observers, human rights organizations and bloggers such as Karee Suleiman and Hossam el-Hamalawy. The Democratic and Republican ghouls came together in the James Baker Institute's working group on the Middle East. Wisner joined the Baker Institute's head Edward Djerejian and others to produce a report in 2003 that offers us a tasty statement, "Achieving security and stability in the Middle East will be made more difficult by the fact that short-term necessities will seem to contradict long-term goals." If the long-term goal is Democracy, then that is all very well because it has to be sacrificed to the short-term, namely support for the kind of Pharonic State embodied by Mubarak. Nothing more is on offer. No wonder that a "Washington Middle East hand" told The Cable, " the exact wrong person to send. He is an apologist for Mubarak." But this is a wrong view. Wisner is just the exact person to send to protect the short-term, and so only-term, interests of Washington. The long-term has been set aside.

I first wrote about Wisner in 1997 when he joined the board of directors of Enron Corporation. Where Wisner had been, to Manila and New Delhi, Enron followed. As one of his staffers said, "if anybody asked the CIA to help promote US business in India, it was probably Frank." Without the CIA and the muscle of the US government, it is unlikely that the Subic Bay power station deal or the Dabhol deal would have gone to Enron. Here Wisner followed James Baker, who was hired by Enron to help it gain access to the Shuaiba power plant in Kuwait. Nor is he different from Holbrooke, who was in the upper circle of Credit Suisse First Boston, Lehman Brothers, Perseus and the American International Group. They used the full power of the US state to push the private interests of their firms, and then made money for themselves. This is the close nexus of Capital and Empire, and Wisner is the hinge between them.

CONTINUED...

http://counterpunch.org/prashad02022011.html

Handy when it comes to perpetuating the message that some are born to rule and others to, ah, sheer.

Thank you for grokking what vaulting propaganda does to the democracy angle, MinM. Wish you were my managing editor.

[MinM]

77. Frank Lowenstein

might represent a good legacy player ..

@jaketapper · special Envoy Frank Lowenstein is the son of the late Rep. Allard Lowenstein, D-NY

@GregMitch: @jaketapper I knew Allard some, back to McCarthy and Congress days and then during his JFK/RFK assassination obsessions, death very sad

@jaketapper: @GregMitch all 3 of his kids in public service. Sounds like an incredible guy. V sad

U.S. Rep. Allard Lowenstein (D-NY)

[Octafish]

78. Absolutely, MinM.

Lots of good guys and gals in the soup.

Unfortunately, management...

Psycho Assassins and Witnesses?

Are These People Crazy or What?

Billy Kelly
June 25, 2014

It didn’t take long for someone to claim that Lt. Commander Terri Pike is an unreliable source because she was a mental case – when in fact, the two JFK Assassination Records she calls our attention to – the ONI Defector File and Oswald’s 119 Reports, stand alone and do not change whether or not Terri Pike padded her expense account, traveled without authorization and was a total mental case.

I think a close look at the Terri Pike Affair clearly shows that the charges she was brought up on – unauthorized travel, was a trumped up charge and she was railroaded by the military brass who didn’t want her to complete the job she was tasked and dedicated to – locating the government records related to the Assassination of President Kennedy.

When given the chore – over a year after the head of ONI merely replied to the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) request for ONI documents related to the assassination, that they didn’t have any, Pike located significant clearly related records, some of which she said she found “by accident” because they were “misfiled.”

She was given very high marks by the Review Board staff for her work ethic and cooperation, and was made the task leader, along with a number of other US Navy Reserve (USNR) Lt. Commanders, neither of whom were charged or dissaplined for the same infractions, or psychologically evaluated and discharged.
Instead, the officer she traveled with – LTCM Doolittle, was brought into the regular Navy and given another assignment while the other LTCM B., a legal aide – ala – was described by ARRB staff as being a “pit bull” and uncooperative, signed off on the ONI statement that all relevant documents had been turned over to the ARRB for inclusion in the JFK Act, under penalty of perjury. He too should be called as a witness before the Congressional hearing on JFK Assassination Records, whenever they decide to exercise their oversight responsibilities.

ARE ALL OF THESE PEOPLE CRAZY, OR WHAT?

In light of the false public allegations that LTCM Terri Pike - the ONI records officer assigned to identify JFK assassination records is a mental case – and therefore a bad source for the clearly relevant and now believed significant ONI Defector File and still missing 119 Reports, I think it worthwhile to revisit a number of other “mental cases” that could be significantly relevant –

1) US Army General Edwin Walker, relieved of command after distributing right wing literature to his troops, psychologically evaluated at Springfield medical facility and released from the service. A doctor at Springfield (MO.) also prepared a report on mental patients there who threatened the president, a Warren Commission document.

2) DINKIN, EUGENE. Official at U.S. mission, Berlin. Involved in Richard Case Nagell’s release from East Germany in 1968. Eugene B. Dinkin studied psychology at the University of Illinois and enlisted in US Army in 1961, trained at Fort Gordon, Georgia, and assigned to National Security Agency counterpart Army Security Agency (ASA) as a ‘crypto operator” with a crypto level clearance, one of the highest. On September 24, 1963 Dinkin was given a psychiatric evaluation and transferred to other duties, his security clearance revoked after he gave a speech on stockpiling nuclear weapons during a troop information class on the subject of “Duty, Honor, Country.” Dinkin also said a few months before the assassination that “a conspiracy was in the making by the military of the United States, perhaps combined with an ultra-right economic group…” On October 22, 1963 Dinkin wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy warning about an assassination attempt on President Kennedy in November that would be blamed on Communists, a conspiracy engineered by elements of the military and a military coup might ensue. On October 25 Dinkin tried to contact ambassadors to Luxemborg, “in hopes that his message would filer through the intelligence networks back to the United States.” (ala Dick Russesll, TMWKTM, p. 554) On November 2, 1963 Dinkin got leave and then went AWOL, attempting to contact the editor of a Geneva publication. After the assassination (May 1964), Richard Helms of the CIA called attention to Dinkin, who was hospitalized at Landstuhl General Hospital psychiatric ward immediately after the assassination, when he was interviewed by the Secret Service. Dinkin was transferred to Walter Reed in December 1963. Dink said he was able to draw his conclusions about the Kennedy assassination from images in news photographs. I think the news photo Dinkin saw was one of the Venezuelan Arms Cache. Dinkins filed a lawsuit against the government in 1975, and may still be alive.

3) G. Garrett Underhill, a high level think tank analyst for government and government defense contractors, Underhill warned friends of a secret government cabal that was going to take over the government, and committed suicide or was murdered, possibly because of his special knowledge acquired from sources inside the government or military.

4) Richard Case Nagel – primary subject of Dick Russell’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, (TMWKTM) who walked into El Paso, Texas bank and fired a pistol into the air in order to get arrested by federal authorities and be in prison when the assassination occurred.

5) Lee Harvey Oswald – accused assassin of President Kennedy, who had no motive to kill him other than an operational one, but is still falsely branded a deranged loner and psychopath, who also took a shot a Gen. Walker (Case Study #1) and killed Dallas policeman J.D. Tippit for no apparent reasons, so he must have been crazy.

6) George deMohrenschildt – best friend of Oswald (Case Study #5) who saw the rifle, joked about shooting Walker and received a Backyard Photo of Oswald holding rifle alleged to have killed JFK and pistol alleged to have killed Tippit, signed on the back “Hunter of Fascists, ha, ha.” DeMohrenschildt had contact with important CIA and military intelligence officers, was in Haiti at the time of the assassination, and wrote an important manuscript “I’m a Patsy!” before receiving electro shock treatments and allegedly committing suicide after being contacted by a House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigator.

7) Now LTCM Terri Pike is being classified a mental case unfit after classifying the ONI Defector File a JFK Assassination document and being asked to locate the still missing 119 Reports on the official military investigations of Oswald after his defection and the assassination. She certainly was crazy for thinking she should follow the law – and she wrote the law number - 44 U.S.C. 2107 on the side of the ONI Defector boxes – so it would be so classified, and not reclassified as “NBR” – Not Believed Relevant - as the ONI brass wants it. She was crazy for doing such a good job, and finding relevant records “by accident” that were misfiled and for taking on the task of locating the 119 Reports, which was her last assignment before being brought up on false charges of unauthorized travel.

http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2014/06/psycho-assassins-and-witnesses.html

Not much loyalty for the employees anymore.

[malaise]

14. Some DUers pointed that out from day one

but fear fear fear is the meme so keep 'em coming.

[Octafish]

30. 40 Years for Justice: Did the FBI Cover for the Birmingham Bombers?

Why did it take 40 years to bring the perpetrators of the Birmingham church bombing to justice? Was is it because the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover stood in the way? Historian Gary May looks back to the horrific attack 50 years ago and presents the evidence.

Gary May
Daily Beast, 9.15.13

On Wednesday, September 11th, the nation paused to remember the worst terrorist attack the country ever sustained. But the week also brings another anniversary, that of the worst crime in the history of the Civil Rights Movement whose aftermath was equally disturbing. While it took the United States a decade to execute Osama Bin-Laden, it took almost forty years to convict those responsible for this crime of domestic terrorism. Who was responsible for that long delay? The answer may be J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, fifty years ago, a massive explosion tore through the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Killed instantly were four African American girls—Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins all fourteen, along with Denise McNair, who was eleven. Addie Mae’s sister, thirteen year old Sarah, blinded and bleeding from her wounds managed to free herself from the wreckage that had once been the women’s lounge, where the girls were dressing for the Sunday service. Sarah would spend months in the hospital; the doctors saved her life but had to remove her right eye. Sixteen others—parishioners and people just walking past the church—were injured. “In church! My, God, we’re not even safe in church,” said one anguished woman

An angry crowd quickly gathered. They threw rocks and pieces of glass at the police and sheriff’s deputies. They responded by firing shotguns over the rioters’ heads, forcing them into nearby streets and alleys.

Two other lives were lost that day. Birmingham police shot a black teenager in the back of the head, claiming that he ran after throwing rocks at them. In a Birmingham suburb, Larry Joe Sims and Michael Lee Farley, two sixteen-year-old Eagle scouts, were riding a red motor scooter covered with Confederate stickers when they came upon two black boys on bikes. Sims shot at them, killing one, thirteen-year-old Virgil Ware. Sims and Farley were later arrested and found guilty of second-degree manslaughter but the Judge, who considered the shooting merely “a lapse” in judgment, suspended their sentences and placed the boys on two years probation. In all, the bombing and its aftermath caused six fatalities, none older that sixteen.

The FBI responded immediately. Over the next few months, more than 200 agents came to Birmingham, part of the largest investigation, it was said, since the FBI tracked down John Dillinger. The Bureau named the case BAPBOMB.

SNIP...

Why did it take so long to imprison the men responsible for this terrible crime? Agents found several eyewitnesses who could place Chambliss and the others at the church at around 2:00 a.m., eight hours before the bomb exploded, and two members of Chambliss’ own family—his niece and sister-in-law who heard him make incriminating statements—were willing to testify at trial. Twice in 1965 Birmingham’s FBI field office asked Director J. Edgar Hoover for permission to consult with the U.S. Attorney and the local prosecutor, neither of whom knew the identities of alleged perpetrators, or the nature of the evidence against them, because Hoover refused to share information. And twice, Hoover turned them down. “From an evaluation of the evidence received thus far,” Hoover wrote the Special Agent in Charge on May 19, 1965, “the chance of successful prosecution in State or Federal Court is very remote.” Although Hoover constantly reminded the Birmingham Field office “that the reputation of the FBI depends upon your ability to solve [the bombing],” he would not act unless the case was rock solid. Hoover did not bother to seek the counsel of the Attorney General or other Justice Department divisions (like Civil Rights) before reaching these conclusions. Ignoring his field agents who “believed the climate of opinion…is very favorable toward…prosecution…,” Hoover believed strongly that no Alabama jury would convict white men, even for the murder of black children.

Other factors may also have influenced Hoover’s decision. Some evidence was tainted by illegal taps on Klansmens’ telephones and the installation of microphones in their homes through unlawful entry. The 1200 pages of transcripts obtained were useless in court. (When the Justice Department asked to see them anyway, Hoover refused their request.)

It is also possible that Hoover did not act because a public trial might reveal that the FBI had recruited a number of Birmingham’s citizens, including known Klansmen, as FBI informants and this revelation would have badly damaged the Bureau’s reputation.

The FBI’s most important informant inside the Alabama Ku Klux Klan was a nightclub bouncer, brawler, and self-proclaimed "hell raiser," named Gary Thomas Rowe. Rowe was recruited by the FBI in March 1960 and encouraged to join the Eastview Klavern of the Alabama Klan. Although his FBI handler warned him that he was not an FBI agent and must avoid violent activities, Rowe considered himself an "undercover man," a redneck James Bond. He soon discovered that in order to protect his "cover" (and because he enjoyed a good fight), he needed to take a leading role in the Klan's attacks on civil rights workers.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/15/40-years-for-justice-did-the-fbi-cover-for-the-birmingham-bombers.html

Job security for Evil.

[joshcryer]

15. It worked so well with the Green Scare.

That they decided to make a business of it.

[LeftyMom]

22. Exactly.

[Aerows]

49. Finally we agree on something. n/t

[indepat]

17. How else can the establishment (TPTB) justify its humongous anti-terraist budget and its

evisceration of so many constitutional protections other than for an ever-present clear and present terraist danger at a cost mucho extra trillions of dollars concomitant with a squeeze on all non-defense-related budget items? May some day the full story of this multi-trillion dollar heist be told.

[Octafish]

39. That really is the heart of the matter...

...from Vietnam to the present day, indepat.

Background for those new to the subject:

JFK Conference: James DiEugenio made clear how Foreign Policy changed after November 22, 1963

As a Democrat, a DUer and as a citizen of the United States, I was proud to attend the Passing the Torch: An International Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy at Duquesne University. One of the many important things discussed there was what author, historian and teacher, James DiEugenio reported on the important change in foreign policy JFK represented from his predecessor and his successors, immediate and otherwise.



DiEugenio said President John F. Kennedy did not undergo a change of heart from Cold War hawk to liberal dove Democrat only after the hair-raising nuclear crises he experienced in office. "John F. Kennedy was never a Cold Warrior," DiEugenio said. Throughout his 16-year career in the House and Senate, President Kennedy sided with the People, Justice and Democracy -- across the United States and around the world. This is a world view radically different from Eisenhower, and his foreign policy makers, principally the Dulles Brothers and their allies, including young Dick Nixon.

The JFK Administration may have represented a break in the action, H20 Man's Father explained to him and I agree. It was a special interlude, indeed. In only 1,037 days, we launched the nation toward the moon, creating a new type of economy; maintained the peace when several times the heads of the military and the secret organs of the national security state counseled all-out war; and started the nation on a path where all men are equal under the law, no matter race, color, or creed, and justice extended to economics and health, as under FDR and the New Deal.

DiEugenio’s research shows President Kennedy was working to defend the interests of democracy over those of colonialism, not only in Europe, as evinced in divided Berlin, but in Africa, Asia, South America and around the world. During less than three years in office, Kennedy turned official U.S. support from that of Eisenhower and the Dulles Brothers for supporting US commercial and colonial interests over democracy, such as in Guatemala and Iran, to respect for the nations and their democratically elected leaders, like Lumumba and Sukarno. In matters of war and peace, JFK always sided with peace, making overtures to North Vietnam. The Dulles Brothers and Nixon sided with France and the colonial powers, even drawing up plans to nuke the North Vietnamese Army at Dien Bien Phu, Operation VULTURE.

The record shows JFK's Foreign Policy of democracy over colonialism was immediately reversed by Lyndon B. Johnson, who reversed course in Vietnam and supported the pro-colonialist forces in Congo, Vietnam, Brazil, Dominican Republic and elsewhere around the world. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and most who followed continued the Business-As-Usual, advancing the interests of Big Money, Big Oil and Big Wars for Profit.

...Vietnam and elsewhere. Traced the attacks back to Sullivan & Cromwell, the Wall Street law firm that helped "create" Panama by carving it out of Columbia in 1897. From their ranks, the CIA -- as in "Corporate Interests of America" -- would later come into being. DiEugenio described how in 1964 Warren Commission member John McCloy, whose law firm represented the interests of M. A. Hanna Mining Company, also served the secret U.S. government to secretly negotiate with João Goulart, the leader of Brazil and warn him if he continued his policies to redistribute wealth by nationalizing the nation's resopurces, he would be removed from power. Goulart said, "No," and he was soon gone.

One of the things I am most proud of is how Democratic Underground covered many of these salient points on its boards, from DU1 through the present day. At the Duquesne conference, I was listening and nodding, knowing that many times we had discussed this on DU. In looking back to one particularly important post through GOOGLE, I found we sourced this information back to DiEugenio. That's what the Internet can do: Spread Truth.

Why it matters.

Democracy depends on Truth. The Republic depends on Justice. That is, the reality that ours is a nation under law.

Once a criminal is, or criminals are, allowed to go free, Justice has been denied. We find ourselves operating under a falsehood, we are living a Big Lie.

We as a Nation have been on the criminal path since November 22, 1963.

DUers know you don’t need to read a history book or watch a tee vee special to know: It shows. Since 1964 and the Gulf of Tonkin, it’s been a series of wars without end for profit. "Money trumps peace." And in the process, the rich became super-rich -- the richest and most powerful people in history.

OP: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023964436#post182

[Uncle Joe]

21. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Octafish.

[Octafish]

58. The Fear Factory

The FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism

How the FBI has transformed from a reactive law enforcement agency to a proactive counterterrorism organization that traps hapless individuals in order to justify the $3 billion it spends every year fighting terrorists.

By Trevor Aaronson
Utne Reader, March 2013

EXCERPT...

Reynolds was a man on the margins, bouncing around from place to place, job to job. In 2005, outraged by the war in Iraq and living in his mother’s house in Pennsylvania, Reyn olds logged in to a Yahoo forum called OBLCrew—OBL for Osama bin Laden—and shared his dream of bombing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. He needed assistance, he told the forum members. No one responded. Reynolds followed up the next day. “Still awaiting someone serious about contact. Would be a pity to lose this idea,” he wrote.

The following day, a person claiming to be an Al Qaeda operative responded and offered $40,000 to fund the attack, which evolved into a plan to fill trucks with explosives and bomb oil refineries in New Jersey and Wyoming, as well as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. They arranged to meet at a rest stop on Interstate 15 in Idaho, where Reynolds believed that he’d collect the $40,000 and move forward with his ambi tious plan. But Reynolds didn’t know that his supposed Al Qaeda contact with money to burn was an FBI informant. On December 5, 2005, Reynolds arrived at the rest stop only to be greeted by FBI agents. At the time of his arrest, Reyn olds had less than twenty-five dollars to his name. Eventually, he was tried and convicted of providing material support to Al Qaeda and received thirty years in prison. “Because of the astute work of the FBI, the diabolical plans of a would-be Al Qaeda sympathizer were uncovered,” Pennsylvania U.S. Attorney Thomas A. Marino said in a statement following Reynolds’s conviction. “Individuals such as Reynolds repre sent a threat to our safety. I commend the FBI and everyone involved in the prosecution of this case for bringing him to justice.”

Despite his conviction, was Reynolds a dangerous ter rorist? The answer is no—he was a troubled man unlikely to escape the fringes of society. He talked big and had a history of doing stupid things. He was unemployed, broke, and living with his mother at middle age, a caricature of the all-Ameri can loser. But an informant posing as an Al Qaeda operative offered him more money than he had ever seen at one time in his entire life and overnight he became a “threat to our safety.”

For years, as an investigative reporter with newspapers, I couldn’t help but notice how the U.S. government was put­ting forward to the public people who seemed to have become terrorists only as a result of the prodding and inducements of FBI informants and undercover agents. In most of these cases, the defendants appeared to be sad sacks like Michael Curtis Reynolds—individuals with no capacity to do any sig nificant harm if left to their own devices—and it was FBI informants who provided the ideas, the means, and the op portunities for horrific plots involving the bombings of gov­ernment buildings and office towers, synagogues, and public transit systems. Curious, I began pulling court records about these cases and documenting which ones involved defendants who, like Reynolds, had no actual contacts with terrorist or ganizations and were lured into their plots by FBI informants. A provocative question underpinned my research: How many so-called terrorists prosecuted in U.S. courts since 9/11 were real terrorists? I wanted to do a systematic analysis of all ter rorism cases since September 11, 2001, to answer this ques tion, but I hit an early roadblock: While the U.S. Department of Justice tracked terrorism prosecutions internally, this data was not made public. I needed to know exactly which cases the Justice Department considered terrorism-related, and so I needed this internal data—which was impossible to obtain without someone leaking it from the inside.

CONTINUED...

http://www.utne.com/politics/war-on-terrorism-ze0z1303zgar.aspx#axzz36vOWaeYz

PS: You are most welcome, Uncle Joe! Thank you for caring about the Constitution.

[Uncle Joe]

61. Thank you for your many good works, Octafish.

Peace to you.

[Lee-Lee]

29. I don't really buy the premise

No matter how much money somebody offered me, or how much pressure or enticement to kill somebody, help blow something up, or anything else I wouldn't do it.

Not would I tolerate someone trying to get me to do it, I would turn anyone soliciting me to do such things in.

You can't force anyone to do these things- to accept money for it means you were willing to do it for the right price. Having a price just means you want profit along with yor murder, that person was still inclined to harm others given the right circumstance.

[sabrina 1]

38. Conversely, I can't imagine myself offering someone money to blow up people

just in CASE they might actually do it. We've learned from many of these revelations of entrapment, that the 'targets' are carefully chosen, many young, others with low levels of intelligence. We DON'T hear about all those who refused, of course. It is thoroughly reprehensible for anyone to instigate another human being who was not thinking of committing a crime, to do so. Especially when they are so careful to choose people of a particular ethnic background, and those who appear to be easily influenced for one reason or another.

I would like a report on how many have refused.

[WillyT]

34. Huge K & R !!!

[blkmusclmachine]

36. Bad

[JEB]

41. They railroaded a kid here in Oregon.

From Wikipedia:
Early analysis questioned whether entrapment by FBI operatives was involved,[21][22] an Oregonian columnist asking "how far would Mohamud have traveled down that road without the help of those very operatives?"[21] Noting "astonishing similarities" to a simultaneous case near Baltimore, Maryland, The Oregonian quoted a New York University expert that such cases were "a strategy the FBI set upon years ago."[23] Presumably aware of legal defenses based on issues of entrapment, FBI agents reportedly offered Mohamud multiple alternatives to a bombing with mass casualties, including prayer. Mohamud reportedly insisted he wanted to play an "operational" role, and even wanted to pick the target for the bombing.[13] He had also been told several times that his planned bomb could kill women and children, and was given multiple opportunities to back out, but he told agents: "Since I was 15 I thought about all this... It's gonna be a fireworks show... a spectacular show."[18] Christopher Dickey of Newsweek said the FBI "took no chances with the court of public opinion" to make sure that Mohamud did not appear to be a victim of entrapment.[24] Noting that key evidence from an alleged July 30 meeting may already be missing, a court ordered the FBI to preserve remaining media and recording equipment.[6] Noting past behavior by the FBI in similar cases, New York lawyer Martin Stolar asserted the absence of such recordings was intentional. "Once somebody's been induced, and they agree to do the crime, that's when the recording starts.... He's already been induced to commit the crime, so everything on the tape is shit."[25]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Portland_car_bomb_plot

[Warren DeMontague]

42. You mean the creep who WILLINGLY pressed a button convinced he was going to blow up a crowd

full of families, people with baby strollers?

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2010/11/fbi_thwarts_terrorist_bombing.html

Sorry. No fucking sale. Fuck that guy.

[JEB]

44. The confused inept kid would have had no button to push without the FBI.

The FBI recruited him, egged him on.

[Warren DeMontague]

45. Mohamud: "I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave either dead or injured"

"You know what I like to see? Is when I see the enemy of Allah then, you know, their bodies are torn everywhere";

"It's gonna be a fireworks show ... a spectacular show ... New York Times will give it two thumbs up"

"Do you remember when 9/11 happened when those people were jumping from skyscrapers ... I thought that was awesome."

http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2033372,00.html




And the child molesters they catch on those predator shows were flirting with cops, not kids.

Still, fuck 'em. Too bad. They demonstrated a clear willingness to commit the crime, and unlike the 99.9% of the population that isn't morally defunct, dangerous sociopaths, they wouldn't have participated if they wouldn't have done the actual, horrible thing.

[JEB]

46. Bad thoughts, indeed.

The FBI helped him act on those bad thoughts. Too bad they couldn't help him with his thinking.

[Warren DeMontague]

47. He'll have plenty of time to work on his own head, now.

And it wasn't just "bad thoughts". It was actively choosing to press a button, repeatedly, that he completely believed was going to leave a crowd full of people "torn, dead and injured". A crowd that could have very easily included my own wife and kids.

So fuck him, and I apologize (no, actually I don't) if I don't get all weepy over his being "railroaded". He had tons of opportunities to back out. This isn't like the cases where poor people with few prospects were offered mass sums of money to do bad shit; that, I understand, implies some profoundly questionable Law Enforcement practices.

Not this case. This kid wanted to do something horrible, he positively reveled in the thought that he was about to do something horrible, right up until the moment the bomb didn't go off.... and he must have realized he was fucked.

[JEB]

50. The FBI successfully thwarts its own Terrorist plot

Article in salon.
http://www.salon.com/2010/11/28/fbi_8/

[Warren DeMontague]

51. And apparently a jury of 12 people didn't agree with Glenn Greenwald, who is one.

Out here in reality, if the FBI had been able to run a similar sting on Adam Lanza and prevent those 20 6 year olds from being brutally gunned down in their elementary school... similar outrage? why I never harumph harumph this poor young man railroaded harumph

give me a break.

And then Greenwald in his own words, spends half of his asinine salon article patiently explaining to us stupid Merkins that the people who would blow up families with strollers at a tree lighting ceremony... well, see, they have reasons that they think justify these actions! They have a rationale for why they want to blow innocent families up!

Finally, there is, as usual, no discussion whatsoever in media accounts of motive. There are several statements attributed to Mohamud by the Affidavit that should be repellent to any decent person, including complete apathy — even delight — at the prospect that this bomb would kill innocent people, including children. What would drive a 19-year-old American citizen — living in the U.S. since the age of 3 — to that level of sociopathic indifference? He explained it himself in several passages quoted by the FBI, and — if it weren’t for the virtual media blackout of this issue — this line of reasoning would be extremely familiar to Americans by now (para. 45):

Undercover FBI Agent: You know there’s gonna be a lot of children there?

Mohamud: Yeah, I know, that’s what I’m looking for.

Undercover FBI Agent: For kids?

Mohamud: No, just for, in general a huge mass that will, like for them you know to be attacked in their own element with their families celebrating the holidays. And then for later to be saying, this was them for you to refrain from killing our children, women . . . . so when they hear all these families were killed in such a city, they’ll say you know what your actions, you know they will stop, you know. And it’s not fair that they should do that to people and not feeling it.

How can you arrest them, persecute them, heaven forfend put them in prison, when they have a well-thought out and crafted bullshit series of justifications for wanting to blow your sorry ass up, you silly stroller-pushing 'merkin, you? I mean, it's not like they're just making this stuff up as they go along!

We hear the same exact thing over and over and over from accused Terrorists — that they are attempting to carry out plots in retaliation for past and ongoing American violence against Muslim civilians and to deter such future acts. Here we find one of the great mysteries in American political culture: that the U.S. Government dispatches its military all over the world — invading, occupying, and bombing multiple Muslim countries — torturing them, imprisoning them without charges, shooting them up at checkpoints, sending remote-controlled drones to explode their homes, imposing sanctions that starve hundreds of thousands of children to death — and Americans are then baffled when some Muslims — an amazingly small percentage — harbor anger and vengeance toward them and want to return the violence.

Not only did we never think of that, herp derp, but that totally makes it okay.



But Greenwald - who I sometimes agree with, BTW - can't have it both ways. He can't argue that Mohamud was some innocent kid, some hapless dupe who had no idea what he was doing until the FBI tricked him into setting off a fake bomb, and then also argue that his brilliant rationale for wanting to kill all these innocent kids - you know, the ones he didn't "actually" want to kill, right? - deserves a better and fair hearing.

[JEB]

52. Well, if wanting to kill someone is a crime

many many of us would be in jail. I'm glad the FBI is not targeting all 19 year olds.

[Warren DeMontague]

53. I wouldn't. But this guy did considerably more than that. And I have to believe you grasp that fact.

He willingly acted. Not just thought. And he had plenty of opportunities to back out. He didn't.

I can sleep perfectly soundly with the idea that the FBI is looking at any 19 year old who thinks it's a good idea to blow up a crowd full of people.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

54. This explains how a guy could lock himself out of his car.

[Octafish]

57. Really? Maybe this will help: King Rats

King Rats

Criminal informants are the real winners in the DEA’s drug war

by Michael Levine, from Prison Life
Utne Readers, May-June 1996

EXCERPT...

Class One was the Drug Enforcement Administration’s top rating for drug dealers. You had to be the head of a criminal organization and dealing with tens of millions of dollars in drugs each month to qualify as a Class One. Pablo Escobar and the fabled Roberto Suarez were Class One.

“You can prove your guy’s a parking lot attendant?” I asked.

“I’ll Fed Ex you his time sheets. Better yet, I’ll send you everything—undercover videotapes and the DEA’s own reports. You tell me if the guy’s a Class One.”

“Why me?”

“DEA couldn’t get any dope from Miguel [not his true name]—not even a sample. So they charge the poor bastard with a no-dope conspiracy. Did you ever hear of anything like that? A parking lot attendant on a no-dope conspiracy? Then they bring in a DEA expert from Washington to testify that a true Class One doper doesn’t give samples. You and I both know that's bullshit.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.utne.com/politics/king-rats-criminal-informants-judicial-folly.aspx#axzz345ykzQ4g

[Spitfire of ATJ]

63. Back in the 80s a major drug bust went haywire as it turned out ALL of the players were cops....

Some were local authority and some were FBI and some were DEA. They almost shot each other.

That actual event was made into an episode of "Miami Vice".

[Octafish]

71. Hoover's FBI infilitrated CPUSA...

...to such an extent that in some cells, the only members were paid FBI informers. As they didn't know the others were also FBI informers, about all they did was watch one another and send in reports to their handlers.

What Hoover missed or was told to miss was the commie infiltration of CIA, via the NAZIs escaping justice via the Ratlines:

Know your BFEE: Nazis couldn’t win WWII, so they backed Bushes.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

72. I know we had former SS working for us during the Cold War...

....but so did Moscow.

[Octafish]

74. Ours were infiltrated by Moscow...

...starting with the NAZI spymaster Gehlen, whose organization had been infiltrated by Orlov during the war. Afterward, we brought him stateside, thinking he was "just" a "good NAZI" who'd help us beat the Reds. Turns out he and his fellow Gehlen types helped fan the flames of Cold War, helping drive the economies of the USSR and USA into welfare for the warmonger states.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

75. Yeah,....that's what happens when Right Wingers get together....

They are ALWAYS surprised when they betray each other.

[Wolf Frankula]

64. All This Is Why I Think Police Stings Should Be Banned.

They are crimes. It is just as illegal to recruit for terrorism as it is to be a terrorist, just as illegal to offer a bribe, attempt to purchase stolen goods, attempt to purchase illegal items, as it is to accept a bribe, sell stolen goods, sell illegal items.

There's enough crime without the cops committing more.

Wolf

[Trillo]

69. Pretty much off topic,

but it seems that if the FBI, "paid individuals to undertake terrorist acts" and "these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement ... paying them to commit terrorist acts", then does this explain government (essentially law enforcement + law creation) paying CEOs and the super wealthy so much money via a complex system to commit "terrorism" in the mass of citizens lives?

[JackRiddler]

73. And how many times does it have to be exposed?

Rolling Stone, 2008, on the subject of FBI and JTTFs constructing "terrorist" plots by infiltrating Muslim groups with informants (usually felons under pressure) who bring the plots, recruit the patsies among hte most naive, work hard to persuade any wavering patsies, and supply the weapons:

http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/75959:guy-lawson--the-fear-factory

Another one from 2008 no longer online at RS, about all the bogus "terror alerts" pimped out by DHS in the years prior, so here's an archive I found:

http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/2008/01/gathering-of-damning-evidence-and-still.html

[Adam051188]

76. entrapment laws are a lot like vacation laws, maternity leave laws, sick pay laws

and a whole host of other things when you really get in to it

they don't exist in third world countries.


[link:

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[Jefferson23]

79. Look at that, we found a new low.

Shameful.

K&R