Frank Church and the Abyss of Warrantless Wiretapping

[Octafish]

Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and John Tower (D-Texas) examine a weapon developed for a CIA assassination program.

Frank Church and the Abyss of Warrantless Wiretapping

John Nichols
The Nation
BLOG | Posted 04/26/2006 @ 12:00am

Thirty years ago, on April 26, 1976, the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, delivered its final report detailing the lawlessness of U.S. intelligence agencies and the need for Congress to reassert the Constitutional system of checks and balances to order to rein in the cloak-and-dagger excesses of the executive branch of the federal government.

The committee, mercifully referred to by the last name of its chair, U.S. Senator Frank Church, D-Idaho, produced fourteen reports on the formation of U.S. intelligence agencies, the manner in which they had and were continuing to operate, and the abuses of law and of power -- up to and including murder -- committed by these agencies in Chile, the Congo, Cuba, Vietnam and other nations that experienced the attention of U.S. authorities in the Cold War era.

The committee also made 96 recommendations for how to do that. Some of those recommendations, such as the committee's call for creation of a permanent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and for a ban on assassinations of foreign leaders, were implemented. But, as the current controversy over President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program illustrates, the potential abuses about which the Church Committee warned were not entirely -- nor even adequately -- thwarted.

It was not for lack of trying by Senator Church, one of the most courageous legislators in American history, and his colleagues on the committee. As Senator Church said when the committee completed its work: "The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are important, as ends. Crisis makes it tempting to ignore the wise restraints that make men free. But each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength which makes us free, is lessened."

SNIP...

Three decades after the Church Committee submitted its final report, President Bush admits to ordering the NSA to spy on the telephone conversations of Americans on American soil without obtaining warrants.

Most of Congress stands idly by.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=79968

Here's a most prescient quotation of the late Sen. Church, on the subject of using America's spying technology on the American people -- specifically outlawed in the legislation that established the CIA:

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

An "abyss." It must be an open secret, for it is plain that is precisely where our nation has fallen.

[G_j]

1. the last quotes

remarkable

[Octafish]

2. Sums up our situation nicely.

There's no way Pelosi can impeach. Smirk and Sneer know what she's saying, to whom she is saying it, and where, when and how she plans on bringing up just about anything.

Here's decent background on what ECHELON can do:

Part 1: Massive Domestic Spying via NSA ECHELON

EXCERPT...

Mini-recap:

o The NSA can listen in on all American citizens' border-crossing
communications of any sort without a warrant or any other court
procedure, and effectively distribute that information to any and
all local law-enforcement agencies. And foreign governments.

Loss of Fourth Amendment rights.

Not even discussed with the American public.

Not even debated by our elected representatives.

o Domestic law enforcement agencies can request, receive, and widely
disseminate this information without any laws interfering. A major
blurring of the lines between Military and civilian control.

o Requests for political reasons are acceptable. (last paragraph)

o The NSA uses a huge number of computers to listen for "key words"
on "watch lists" for ALL border crossing traffic, including voice
conversations. That means in 1975 they could convert voice to text,
then do keyword searches against it. It's 1997 now.

Just how did United States citizens lose these Fourth Amendment rights,
granted by the Constitution? And why is the Military monitoring the
communications of Americans on U.S. soil and working with domestic law
enforcement?

Well, one day President Truman issued a secret order creating the NSA.

As testified by Library of Congress members on C-SPAN, the names of these
presidential findings change with administrations. They are called variously
Presidential Decision Directives, National Security Council Decision
Directives, Executive Orders, etc.

One might think these special override-the-constitution presidential
directives (which came out of nowhere) would be used for short-term
emergencies.

Wrong: the NSA is now a HUGE intelligence organization, eating billions
and billions and billions and billions of dollars in budgets each year,
and monitoring billions of messages a day.

* "Spying Budget Is Made Public By Mistake", By Tim Weiner
* The New York Times, November 5 1994
*
* By mistake, a Congressional subcommittee has published an unusually
* detailed breakdown of the highly classified "black budget" for United
* States intelligence agencies.
*
* In previously defeating a bill that would have made this information
* public, the White House, CIA and Pentagon argued that revealing the
* secret budget would cause GRAVE DAMAGE to the NATIONAL SECURITY of
* the United States.
*
* $3.1 billion for the CIA
* $10.4 billion for the Army, Navy, Air Force
* and Marines special-operations units
* $13.2 billion for the NSA/NRO/DIA
*
* The only damage done so far is to the
* credibility of those who opposed the measure.

There is no constitutional basis for this
massive loss of Fourth Amendment rights.

It sounds like some wild conspiracy theory, doesn't it?

Yet it exists.

CONTINUED...

http://www.mega.nu/cm/cm1.html

They don't need internment camps. They know what we're writing, saying, thinking and with whom we communicate, read and do business. Thank you, IBM.

[malaise]

3. Prescient n/t

[Swamp Rat]

4. We crossed the bridge long ago.

genie's out of the bottle.

[EFerrari]

8. I called Wexler's office and reminded them that letting people skate

is why the Bush administration was full of Iran Contra criminals like Poindexter.

[Octafish]

17. Heard Mr. Wexler on Bill Press Show this morning...

...They call the Representative from Florida a "Fire-Breathing Liberal." I like that and love him. If we had anything better than our cursed Press Corpse, America would love him, too.



Perhaps, one day, he could serve as our nation's chief law enforcement officer as Attorney General. That day can't get here soon enough.

[EFerrari]

23. Did you watch him handling the mess in MI and FL?

He was spectacular. :hi:

[Octafish]

13. We had a chance, back in '75. Then, CIA Chief Bush Suppressed the News

CIA Chief Bush Suppresses the News

By Robert Gardner
FAIR Exclusive
May/June 1999

Documents obtained by FAIR, released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), show that George Bush, as head of the CIA in 1976, tried to bottle up a news story that exposed the apparent duplicity of another former CIA chief, Richard Helms.

The story, broken on Oct. 1, 1976, by David Martin (now CBS Pentagon correspondent, then with Associated Press), revealed that Helms had given misleading testimony to the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of John Kennedy. Helms testified that the CIA had not "even contemplated" making contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin. Through the FOIA, Martin obtained CIA memos showing that in 1960 the agency "showed intelligence interest" in Oswald and "discussed...the laying on of interviews" with him.

When Bush saw the AP story in the Washington Star, he asked for an internal CIA review to see if the story was true (it was) and if it would "cause problems for Helms." (Helms had lied to a Senate committee about the CIA's role in subverting Chilean democracy and would later be convicted of contempt of Congress.)

After investigating, Bush assistant Seymour Bolten reported back that the exposure of Helms' false testimony to the Warren Commission would probably cause Helms "some anxious moments," though not "any additional legal problems." But Bush was assured that a "slightly better" story had resulted from an Agency phone call to AP protesting that Martin's story was "sloppy." Additionally, Bush was told that an unnamed journalist had "advised his editors . . . not to run the AP story."

Bolten complained to Bush: "This is another example where material provided to the press and public in response to an FOIA request is exploited mischievously and in distorted form to make the headlines." One might more accurately describe it as an occasion where George Bush's CIA pressured one news outlet to back away from an accurate story while using an asset in the press corps to suppress it in another.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1491

Why we didn't take up on it is easy to see in retrospect. Even then, the game was rigged.

[Torn_Scorned_Ignored]

5. .

:kick:

[Octafish]

14. ‘Secrets’: How America Lost Its Way

Angus Mackenzie would have been one of today's greatest journalists. Unfortunately for America and freedom, he passed too young.



Mods: Mr. Parry has given DU permission to run his articles in full. Thank-a-you.

‘Secrets’: How America Lost Its Way

by Robert Parry
The Consortium magazine, November / December 1998

Tyranny, like cowardice, often comes in small pieces, compromises that seemed reasonable at the time, the best we could get, but in totality can doom a noble ideal. That is the worthwhile truth that Angus Mackenzie recalls to our attention in his posthumously published book, Secrets: The CIA’s War at Home.

The book is very much Mackenzie’s story as he charts the course of his short life -- from legends that he heard during boyhood days about American Minute Men who stood their ground at Compo Hill in his native Westport, Conn., in 1777, to a different reality two centuries later when the CIA rode roughshod over politicians and supposed protectors of U.S. civil liberties.

Secrets also is the story of a democratic ideal smothered by a government that came to see an informed electorate as an obstacle to the prosecution of a long Cold War. Yet, this was a slow strangulation, a garotte closing around the victim’s neck so no single twist would be recognized as life-threatening.

Mackenzie’s personal conflict with this national security state came from his practice of what he thought were enshrined constitutional rights: freedom of the press and the right to dissent. To his amazement, his Vietnam-era underground newspaper, The People’s Dreadnaught, made him a target of his own government.

“One of the fundamental lessons passed on from generation to generation is that Americans have the greatest of all freedoms, the freedom to express ourselves in open and public debate,” Mackenzie wrote. “Imagine my surprise ... when I found myself in trouble with the law for publishing a newspaper.”

Mackenzie then challenged the secrecy-holders through lawsuits brought under the Freedom of Information Act. Over time, he broke through some -- but not all -- of the stone walls. Mackenzie kept up that struggle until May 13, 1994, when he died of brain cancer at the age of 43.

For the next two-and-a-half years, his family pulled together the final pieces of his manuscript. The resulting work is an important road map for Americans who wonder how their country lost its way, from the era of Thomas Paine and the Minute Men, to an era when the citizens are denied an honest accounting of the last 50 years, even after the end of the Cold War threat that supposedly justified the secrets in the first place.

Anti-War Disillusions

Mackenzie’s People’s Dreadnaught was one of hundreds of independent publications that sprang up in the 1960s and early 1970s as young Americans grew bitterly disillusioned by U.S. policies in Vietnam. Mackenzie’s first encounter with angry law enforcement came with local authorities who arrested him on obscenity charges for selling an issue that contained an account of the My Lai massacre.

But Mackenzie and his friends also found themselves approached by long-haired strangers who encouraged the commission of crimes, from drug sales to vandalism. Only years later, as a result of his lawsuits, did Mackenzie discover that those approaches were entrapments set by undercover police and were part of a nationwide pattern.

“I learned that editors at scores of other underground newspapers had experienced similar treatment at the hands of local and state authorities,” Mackenzie wrote. “I learned that local cops who proved themselves effective tormentors of underground editors were rewarded by federal authorities. ...

“I learned that was specifically assigned to target the dissident anti-war press and furthermore that the IRS was connected to two larger surreptitious operations, one run out of the Central Intelligence Agency (code-named MHCHAOS)and the other out of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (code-named COINTELPRO).”

Mackenzie’s initial suit earned a jury award of only $2,500 but he added: “Our lawsuit was most valuable for what I learned about the cynical contempt in which some agents of the government hold the First Amendment.” His investigation then pressed onward into other areas of secrecy, that of censorship and the punishment of government officials who broke the code of silence.

The book’s narrative starts with the doubts that some members of Congress had about the proposed National Security Act of 1947. Rep. Clare E. Hoffman, a conservative Michigan Republican, had agreed to introduce the bill but later was stunned at the open-ended language. The CIA would get the authority to perform “functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.”

Hoffman and others feared that the CIA might evolve into an American Gestapo, which “could secretly manipulate elections or could undermine political opponents,” Mackenzie wrote. “The greatest danger was that, once created, the CIA would be hard to contain.”
The Truman administration agreed to add some language barring the CIA from domestic police and national security functions, but little notice was taken of a simple phrase granting the CIA director powers “for protecting sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure.”

After some modest compromise, nearly all congressional opposition faded away, but Hoffman rued his initial support for the CIA. He concluded that the agency would become a threat to American democracy. Over the next five decades, some of Hoffman’s fears would become reality.

But as the CIA’s powers grew, so too did intermittent challenges by American citizens who experienced the agency’s abuses. One of the most significant abuses began with the CIA’s demand in 1966 for a “run down” on Ramparts magazine which was preparing a story about the CIA’s penetration of U.S. universities and student organizations. The order led to dossiers on 22 of Ramparts writers and editors.

An important line had been crossed. The war against the underground press was underway.

Finding Enemies

The chief of that CIA operation, Richard Ober, soon was collecting IRS records on the magazine and its publisher. The justification for the investigation was the supposed suspicion that foreign communist agents were inspiring the articles. Stories suggesting those ties were planted in U.S. newspapers, although the CIA knew from its investigation that the money was coming from a wealthy American philanthropist.

The Ramparts case also led the CIA to tighten government-wide procedures for preventing future leaks and to undertake a much broader domestic spying operation, known as MHCHAOS. Soon, the CIA was sneaking informants and troublemakers inside underground newspapers and other antiwar activities. One informant, Salvatore John Ferrara, proved doubly effective because his pose as an underground journalist let him glean defense strategies on criminal cases, including the notorious Chicago Seven trial.
Despite the crackdowns, a devastating leak of government secrets still occurred in 1971 with Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers. The documents detailed the deceptions that had led the nation into the Vietnam War. Furious at the leak, President Nixon struck back with creation of his illegal Plumbers operation.

But even more significant was the imposition of ever-stricter regulations on government employees who had access to secrets. By 1972, the CIA had gotten into the business of censoring books, including one by former senior CIA officer Victor Marchetti. CIA officials insisted that Marchetti’s account of CIA misconduct would jeopardize national security and violate his secrecy agreements.

Through the courts, the CIA won important new victories, making Marchetti’s book the first ever in America to be published with deletions from government-imposed censorship. The case also convinced the CIA to compel more and more government officials to sign secrecy pledges that would forever prevent them from telling the American people the truth.

The CIA also challenged a book by Alfred W. McCoy, an academic who had studied the CIA’s tolerance of heroin trafficking in Indochina. This time, the CIA exploited personal contacts in McCoy’s publishing house, Harper and Row, to block or water down the book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. When the CIA’s ploy was exposed, however, Harper and Row proceeded with the book.

The mid-1970s saw the CIA’s bid for wider secrecy suffer other setbacks. Published disclosures of CIA abuses and congressional investigations into the secret agency pulled back the curtain, again and again. For the first time with hard facts, Americans were alerted to the danger of clandestine CIA missions at home.

Bush to the Rescue

In 1976, however, a new director, George Bush, rode to the CIA’s rescue. With his own impressive array of contacts and his noblesse-oblige style, Bush spearheaded a clever counter-offensive that falsely pinned the murder of the CIA’s Athens station chief, Richard Welch, on anti-CIA disclosures in a magazine called CounterSpy. Internally, the CIA concluded that Welch’s identity already was blown and that the magazine was not at fault. But Bush and other CIA defenders pushed hard for new laws criminalizing national security disclosures.

These initiatives continued to gain ground under President Jimmy Carter and reached a fever pitch during the early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Reagan signed anew presidential order demanding that information be classified if officials believed its release might endanger national security. Before, the government was required to identify an actual threat and even weigh the benefits of secrecy against the public’s right to know.
Though the Soviet Union was in demonstrable decline, the White House ratcheted up the secrecy throughout the 1980s. Mackenzie’s book details how the Reagan administration succeeded in maneuvering secrecy critics into a series of crippling compromises that expanded secrecy laws.

Some of the sacrifices were promoted by “bipartisan” Democrats, such as Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana. Others were tolerated by ACLU officials, such as Morton Halperin. The rationale often was that the compromise was better than what the Reagan administration might do otherwise. But the Executive Branch gained crucial ground in its demand to punish officials who divulged secrets.

Ex-CIA officer Ralph McGehee was shocked when he read Reagan’s new secrecy order. “People in government who become disillusioned and quit at an earlier age than me will virtually lose their freedom of expression,” he said. “The people most able to give informed views will be unable to comment.”

With the CIA again on the rise, director William J. Casey began bullying even mainstream news organizations into withholding stories on national security grounds. “Casey’s threats of prosecution against the Post and other major periodicals also demonstrated the increase in the CIA’s power since 1966, when the agency had ‘run down’ the left-wing Ramparts,” Mackenzie observed.

By the mid-1980s, Vice President Bush was promoting terrorism as the new rationale for domestic security. Some of these “terrorists” were Americans critical of U.S. policies in Central America. Bush also sought curtailment of the Freedom of Information Act because “terrorists groups may have used” it to gain information about FBI surveillance.
Throughout the 1980s, the Reagan administration also mounted aggressive “public diplomacy” campaigns against reporters who disclosed government secrets. Then at The Associated Press, I was told that the administration maintained a list of so-called “treasonous reporters” and that I was on it. During the Iran-contra scandal, documents surfaced revealing that this domestic media operation was run by a veteran CIA propagandist named Walter Raymond Jr. who sent detailed reports to CIA director Casey. (For details on this operation, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.)

Post-Cold War

Ironically, the end of the Cold War did not appreciably lessen the government’s hunger for secrecy. After his election in 1992, President Clinton vowed that a new era of candor was at hand. But Clinton failed to follow through.

As Mackenzie observed, “at the beginning of his presidency, Clinton did not boldly challenge the bureaucracy and relied on others -- often the bureaucrats themselves --to carry out reforms. In the case of the CIA, he relied on Woolsey, a Yale lawyer whose background and sensibilities were similar to those of many career officers under him.” Mackenzie concluded his account by remembering those Minute Men from 1777. “The issue,” he wrote “is freedom, as it was for the Minute Men at Compo Hill. ... Until the citizens of this land aggressively defend their First Amendment rights of free speech, there is little hope that the march to censorship will be reversed. The survival of the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights is at stake.”

http://www.consortiumnews.com/

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Democracy/Secret_DomesSurveillanceUS.html

Most importantly: Thanks for giving a damn, Sees Clearly.

[Wilms]

6. K&R n/t

[Octafish]

15. Sen. John Tower (R-Tex)

I am sooo dumb. To make up for it, a bit on the gun...

 Angus Mackenzie: "Secrets: The CIA's War at Home"

EXCERPT...

A month later someone at the CIA leaked the news of MHCHAOS to Sy Hersh at the New York Times. The story, while sparse, made public the fact that the agency was spying on its citizens. Gerald Ford, in office for less than five months, directed William Colby to issue a report on MHCHAOS to Henry Kissinger. As Mackenzie writes, evidently Ford was not informed that Kissinger was well aware of the operation. He adds:

Because of MHCHAOS and Watergate, Congress began to investigate the CIA. On September 16, 1975 Senators Frank Church and John Tower called Colby to testify at a hearing about CIA assassinations. Colby showed up carrying a CIA poison dart gun, and Church waved the gun before the televison cameras. It looked like an automatic pistol with a telescopic sight mounted on the barrel. Producers of the evening news recognized this as sensational footage, and just as surely Colby recognized his days as director were numbered. He had not guarded the CIA secrets well enough.

Colby was fired on November 2, 1975. His successor was George Herbert Walker Bush.....

Mackenzie's account of Bush's rise and and his fall when Carter assumed office is brief, but intriguing. There is much, much more in Secrets about CIA efforts throughout the years in guarding their work from the public in this under-recognized work. The epilogue is entitled "The Cold War Ends and Secrecy Spreads." Mackenzie closes by writing:

Only recently in the history of the world's oldest republic has secrecy functioned principally to keep the American people in the dark about the nefarious activities of their government. The United States is no longer the nation its citizens once thought: a place, unlike most others in the world, free from censorship and thought police, where people can say what they want, when they want to, about their government. Almost a decade after the end of the cold war, espionage is not the issue, if it ever really was. The issue is freedom... Until the citizens of this land aggressively defend their First Amendment rights of free speech, there is little hope that this march to censorship will be reversed. The survival of the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights is at stake.

Succumbing to brain cancer before he turned fifty, Mackenzie sadly did not live to see the meteoric rise of the internet, nor did he live to see 9/11 and the current Bush Administration and their obsessive devotion to secrecy.

This work has relevance to the current situation regarding the agency's efforts to keep George Joannides' records secret.

SOURCE: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=10617

Most importantly: Thank you for giving a damn, Wims.

[Supersedeas]

7. meanwhile the GoP Media Establishment is consumed with poll numbers and hypothetical terrorist

attacks and what impact those hypothetical attacks MIGHT have on the election.

This is how off-the-cuff speculation (with no homework required) replaces REAL news.

[Octafish]

19. The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD

According to the late Sherman H. Skolnick, Capitalism's Invisible Army works the presses, an ink-stained, oil-drenched and spy-riddled monopoly.

The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD

by Alex Constantine

Who Controls the Media?

Soulless corporations do, of course. Corporations with grinning, double-breasted executives, interlocking directorates, labor squabbles and flying capital. Dow. General Electric. Coca-Cola. Disney. Newspapers should have mastheads that mirror the world: The Westinghouse Evening Scimitar, The Atlantic-Richfield Intelligentser . It is beginning to dawn on a growing number of armchair ombudsmen that the public print reports news from a parallel universe - one that has never heard of politically-motivated assassinations, CIA-Mafia banking thefts, mind control, death squads or even federal agencies with secret budgets fattened by cocaine sales - a place overrun by lone gunmen, where the CIA and Mafia are usually on their best behavior. In this idyllic land, the most serious infraction an official can commit is the employment of a domestic servant with (shudder) no residency status.

This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of MOCKINGBIRD.

It was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid period of the cold war, when the CIA began a systematic infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets.

In this period, the American intelligence services competed with communist activists abroad to influence European labor unions. With or without the cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner, an undercover State Department official assigned to the Foreign Service, rounded up students abroad to enter the cold war underground of covert operations on behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination. Philip Graham, a graduate of the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg, PA, then publisher of the Washington Post., was taken under Wisner's wing to direct the program code-named Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

"By the early 1950s," writes former Village Voice reporter Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great, "Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA analyst." The network was overseen by Allen Dulles, a templar for German and American corporations who wanted their points of view represented in the public print. Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25 newspapers and wire agencies consenting to act as organs of CIA propaganda. Many of these were already run by men with reactionary views, among them William Paley (CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry Luce (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).

CONTINUED...

http://afgen.com/media_control.html

Back when I was a reporter, I was amazed to see who was getting the promotions -- often people with little, if any, understanding of history. One bright young person, very capable in terms of doing the things expected of a city editor, once was overwhelmed by all the articles coming over the wire slugged "TET." "'Tet.' 'Tet.' What's all this with 'Tet'?" she asked. It was the 25th anniversary of the North Vietnamese New Year's offensive that many consider the turning point of America's involvment in the Vietnam War.

Thank you for giving a damn, Supersedeas.

[MinM]

22. "Shoot Him Down": NBC, the CIA and Jim Garrison

"Shoot Him Down": NBC, the CIA and Jim Garrison

On June 19th, 1967 NBC aired an hour long "analysis" of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's investigation titled, The JFK Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison. While unnecessary to rehash Garrison's case here, in summary Garrison's investigation focused on three individuals: A former Eastern Airlines pilot and probable CIA asset, David Ferrie; ex-FBI man and private detective Guy Banister; and Managing Director of the International Trade Mart, Clay Shaw. Garrison believed all three were connected to American intelligence and had, at a minimum, conspired to set up Oswald as a potential patsy in the JFK assassination. Barely three months into his investigation, Garrison's main suspect, the forty-nine year old David Ferrie, died apparently of natural causes. Banister had also passed away in 1964 as a result of a heart attack. On March 1st, 1967 Garrison arrested the surviving member of this trio, the CIA connected Clay Shaw. By mid-March both the Grand Jury and a three-judge panel had ordered Shaw to trial.

Garrison's case was big news and predictably the news media swung into attack mode. None was more vicious or had more resources at their disposal than NBC.

For the job as lead investigative reporter, NBC assigned Walter Sheridan. Shortly after Shaw's arrest Sheridan arrived in New Orleans and began questioning witnesses --- perhaps bribing and intimidating would be a better choice of words. Sheridan questioned a former electronics expert and CIA asset Gordon Novel and immediately put him on a $500 a day retainer. (Novel had briefly consulted with Garrison's team). Sheridan then urged Novel to skip town to avoid being indicted and paid him an additional $750 while Novel was in Columbus Ohio. Attorney Dean Andrews, who received the call from a "Clay Bertrand" to represent Oswald, was promised a recording studio if he cooperated with Sheridan. Andrews was overheard bragging, "I can get the equipment here. All I have to do is make a phone call, I'll have open credit, I can pay off on any terms. Look, Bobby Sarnoff promised me those facilities. He'd better pay off, baby." Bobby Sarnoff was, of course, Robert Sarnoff, NBC president and later chairman of the board of its parent company RCA...
http://www.ctka.net/nbc_cia.html

Johnny Carson and the Kennedy assassination

http://itwasjohnson.impiousdigest.com/cia_document.htm

http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/03/11/far03002.html

[Octafish]

25. If one wants to work at NBC, one has to believe in ''The Single Bullet Theory.''

Ask Keith O and Gerald Posner.

Excellent work, yours, MinM. Thank you very, very much.

[seemslikeadream]

9. THE TIME IS NOW

NO MORE SILLY SEASONS

[Octafish]

21. It's way past due. Here's what Frank Church's committee found the CIA doing...

CIA powers and 1975 Church Committee

Report by Paul Wolf
Published here: 22/09/01

The cry for expanded CIA assassination powers is being supported by a lot of inaccurate references to the 1975 Church Committee investigation. “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans,” as their final report was called, was the most in-depth investigation into the American intelligence establishment ever made.

Reporters are claiming that the Church Committee tied the hands of the CIA, and now it’s time to restore their power to use whatever ruthless and inhumane means may be necessary to implement our foreign policies. In fact, although the Church Committee exposed a closet full of nightmarish operations carried out against American citizens, and some of the CIA’s activities in Chile, it was by no means an accounting of CIA atrocities around the world, and had no legal implications whatsoever. Its function was simply to inform the public of the widespread abuses that were being committed in their midst.

Among other things, the Church Committee revealed that:

• a CIA program to open mail to or from selected American citizens generated 1.5 million names stored in the Agency’s computer bank.
• intelligence units within the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) created files on over one million Americans.
• the FBI carried out five hundred thousand investigations of so-called subversives from 1960 to 1974, without a single court conviction.
• computers in the National Security Agency (NSA) monitored every cable sent overseas, or received, by Americans from 1947 to 1975.
• Army intelligence units conducted investigations against one hundred thousand American citizens during the Vietnam War era.
• the CIA engaged in drug experiments (the MK/ULTRA Project) against unsuspecting subjects (two of whom died from side effects).
• at least two foreign leaders were the direct targets of CIA assassination plots (none successful).
• letters written anonymously by FBI agents were designed to incite violence among blacks.
• the FBI COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) targeted civil rights activists and Vietnam War dissidents.
• the FBI attempted to blackmail civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and encouraged him to commit suicide.
• the CIA manipulated elections in democratic regimes (Chile was but one of several).
• the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) allowed tax information to be misused by intelligence agencies for political purposes.
• intelligence agencies carried out burglaries in the homes and offices of suspected “subversives”.
• the CIA infiltrated religious, media, and academic organizations.
• (Source: America’s Secret War: The CIA in a Democratic Society, by Loch K. Johnson, Oxford University Press,1989)

CONTINUED...

http://www.labournet.net/world/0109/us15.html

Thanks to you, 'Dreamy, a world full of people have been alerted to the problem these traitors present.

[slipslidingaway]

10. K&R for now, thanks n/t

[HCE SuiGeneris]

11. "The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy.

Means are important, as ends. Crisis makes it tempting to ignore the wise restraints that make men free. But each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength which makes us free, is lessened."

[Psyop Samurai]

12. "the abyss from which there is no return”...

We seem to have arrived at an unnatural sort of stasis, where no meaningful change can take place, though there's much "going through the motions". It's like history already ended, but it was well camouflaged, so nobody noticed.

People find it perplexing and disheartening, but do not question what's behind the curtain (which is invisible), no matter how counter-intuitive circumstances appear.

This "reality splitting" that has occurred under the national security state, I've likened to dual operating systems on a computer, where the old one can be transplanted and continue to operate, totally unaware of the superior system. Meanwhile, the superior system is capable of observing the old one, and allocating resources accordingly.

It seems like we need to come up with new metaphors to describe our circumstances to help people see the invisible. That's my imperfect one.

Thanks for the timely post.

[robertpaulsen]

16. The BFEE 21st century machinations make the Huston Plan look tame.

Where is our 21st century Frank Church?



Volume 2: Huston Plan


In June of 1970, during the wave of domestic protest centered around the war in Vietnam, President Nixon approved a set of recommendations known as the Huston Plan. This plan called for various agencies of government, including the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence agencies, to conduct wide-ranging intelligence-gathering activities targeted toward dissident groups and individuals. Most of these activities violated basic civil liberties. The President revoked the plan 5 days later, though some of its recommendations continued to be carried out. Volume 2 consists of hearings followed by a lengthy set of document exhibits. Witnesses included Tom Charles Huston, the author of the plan, former CIA counterintelligence head James Angleton, and former Assistant Director of the FBI Charles Brennan.

http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports_vol2.htm

[seemslikeadream]

18. Final Solution

[eridani]

20. So, how come Idaho can't elect someone like Church again?

Was he that much of an anomaly?

[G_j]

24. kick !