Iran-Contra

The biggest scandal in world history; WANTAGATE, Leo Wanta, the post-Soviet trillions and lots of tangled disinfo from shady operatives (or not)

Draft conspiracy post note - this rough draft story lacks links but I want to get it up anyways... Have fun everyone!

UPDATE: Hi to everyone from http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Leo_Wanta/ - keep it up :)

   

This guy, Leo Wanta / Lee Wanta / Ambassador Leo Wanta, could be the key to the biggest financial conspiracy of all time. Or maybe it's a huge thing of hot air.

It seems we can all agree Wanta was a buddy of Ronald Reagan, and a financial intelligence operative who performed some maneuvers which helped bring about the financial collapse of the Soviet Union. I think everyone agrees on this. Wanta was written about some years back in Claire Sterling's "Thieves' World: The Threat of the New Global Network of Organized Crime (1994)."

Wanta got incarcerated in Wisconsin on the premise of some bizarre tax thing for a while, and apparently he got sympathetic help from a UK finance/conspiracy journalist, Christopher Story (WorldReports.org), who loaned him some skrilla to post bail, which Wanta then welched on.

Things get murkier from here. The storyline is that Wanta somehow controls the 'winnings' of bringing down the Soviet Union thru currency operations. The idea is that Wanta is the trustee or custodian of trillions of dollars leftover from 'winning the Cold War'. This pile of cash, which really ought to go to the US Treasury methinks, has attracted the Usual Suspects into stealing and otherwise manipulating the money. The Clintons and the Bushes, and associated operatives, all want to make off with the money, or use it as collateral to get other financial instruments going.

Also, Wanta, as an Office of Naval Intelligence operative, was apparently friends with Michael Delmart Vreeland, an ONI operative who most infamously was arrested in Canada before 9/11 and tipped off his captors that Pentagon & World Trade Center attacks were on the way. [Let one happen, stop the rest..] Vreeland's bizarre story, which involved allegations that the Russians and Saddam Hussein were involved somehow, became the basis for a few chapters in Michael Ruppert's Crossing The Rubicon. (Vreeland seems very much like Richard Case Nagell, the "Man Who Knew Too Much" in the JFK assassination, and put himself under custody just prior to that shady staged event. The Vreeland stuff is a tangent right now tho :)

So we come to a strange idea of WANTAGATE that is not widely reported: the resolution of huge sums of money behind the scenes. Christopher Story claims, roughly, that a financial arrangement known as 'the settlements' would bring this huge amount of money back onto the balance sheets of the US Treasury, but sneeky dudes like Geithner, Bushes, Clintons, etc., want to try to keep the shadow money moving and use it to rebuild the great fraudulent derivatives scheme.

At this point, Story claims that somehow (how the media, even US underground media, doesn't catch onto this, I don't get at all) that the US Treasury is under a lien, the World Court and these INTERPOL forces are basically cleaning house, which was why INTERPOL got its privileges boosted from Obama's Executive Order in December.

A whole galaxy of confusing actors and disinfo agents are around this. It gets right around to some low profile characters going back to the Clinton years and Iran-Contra/BCCI. Story introduces the idea that 'DVD' is a secret Nazi black intelligence agency in Germany, the descendant of the CIA-sponsored Gehlen Organization after WWII. WIkipedia: "He also claims that former British Prime Minister Edward Heath was "recruited by the Nazis before the war" and was an agent of the "the secret Nazi strategic continuum since exposed as Deutsche Verteidigungs Dienst (DVD), Dachau."

Story says that Kissinger and HW Bush are part of the secret German agenda (as well as Wanta), and if we look back to more old-skewl Nazi links, the role of Skull and Bones as a Germanic order that illustrates how closely intertwined Eastern families are with the Nazis... Nazis of course just being a right-dialectic wing of the Illuminati agenda...

Story used to be cool with Wanta but is now against him. Story posted the texts of documents indicating that Thomas Heneghan acted as Wanta's financial agent.

Thomas Heneghan is a self proclaimed intelligence expert, who actually at one point jacked my Sibel Edmonds image off the site, blogs on Myspace in a fairly odd way. Heneghan seems to be allied with Tom Flocco and Stew Webb, who was something of a whistleblower on BCCI/Iran-Contra and other weird Clinton banking scam things. Pretty sure it was Webb who did the most awesome flowchart of Clinton/Bush mega-conspiracy. He also writes on FBI creeps (Tim White, Jeff Fisher seem uber creepy members of the mythical FBI Division Five). Somehow satellites become involved with votefraud... Heneghan is really a weird one, part of a certain knot in the fabric.

Eva Teleki. Story says she is part of the evil German operation. She is like some minion sent around by the Bush family to open accounts or something. Best name in the scheme.

CASPER: Casper (pseudonym) seems to be a sort of stock market huckster with intelligence connections. Story talks a ton of smack about Casper and Casper kind of is like 'you don't know whats up over here and also this particular odd loan was not a CIA ponzi scheme.' Casper is part of an ongoing mess posted at the oft-updated FourWinds website.

Sorcha Faal: While seeming to be a woman, Sorcha Faal seems to actually be a Catholic intelligence guy in Virginia. Faal seems to post something around provocative/subversive tone but this would seem to be CIA gatekeeping of the fringe. Or not. But Faal seems to have annoyed people widely.http://whatdoesitmean.com/.

Story wrote:
In this connection we need to reiterate that anonymous, unprovenanced reports by a fictitious source calling itself Sorcha Faal and purporting to be derived from the Kremlin, is actually a diversionary disinformation operation perpetrated by an Irishman, S. L. O’Huallachain and by Commander J. Forrest Sharpe, of Light in the Darkness Publications, Vienna, VA, located, as we recently pointed out, deep in US intelligence communitysville, according to our sources.

RumorMillNews.com - (Check this post) likes to post around sides of this issue but also seems to attract flowz of the big disinfo. Hard to say what the role is but has been around for a long time. Story is pissed with them (he doesn't seem to like conspiracy sites and thinks a lot of them are carrying 'diversionary claptrap.' Fair enough.) http://rumormillnews.com/

Mysterious Wanta items

Anything within about 2 hops of Leo Wanta turns into a lot of smudgy faxes and strange narrative chunks. These could be red herrings but they reflect the texture of what's going around - these faxes are one 'stillpoint' version. Story claimed stillpoint was a plan to crash America, but the other guys said it was nothing of the sort. And this appeared thru Heneghan...

http://d.yimg.com/kq/groups/9721343/1575128449/name/SecCode_STILLPOINT_Part

The Arctic Beacon: some people regarded as a first-generation CIA disinfo website, or used for limited hangouts, and there quite is a lot of Wanta stuff that's come thru there. This may be an unfair characterization of Greg Syzmanski who is involved with GCN Radio Network (Genesis Communications Network - The Alex Jones & other quirky stuff radio net). See http://www.google.com/search?q=arctic+beacon+leo+wanta for hits. Related Syzmanski describes his version of the Wanta story, which makes Bush2 out to be the bad guy: http://www.articlecity.com/articles/politics_and_government/article_420.shtml

Four Winds: big arguments about it all posted a lot here http://www.fourwinds10.com/

I thought this Wanta article was super funny, by Marilyn Barnewall, http://newswithviews.com/Barnewall/marilyn125.htm

GodlikeProductions is a chill forum, they hashed over Sorcha Faal vs Story http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message728540/pg1

By far the best discussion thread (at least the longest) about what in the hell this adds up to was @ The Unhived Mind, which appears to be mainly about anti-DeepCatholicism (i.e. Templars, the weird Legatius group, Vatican ops, etc) . http://z10.invisionfree.com/The_Unhived_Mind_II/index.php?showtopic=2134...

that's one heckuva thread.

Anyway this is only a rough roundup of some major factors, but should lead the way to where the discussions and axes of new exposures and arguments might be around Leo Wanta, the multi trillion dollar incarcerated German/Reagan financial operative, who ended up with the money that "won" the Cold War. Before he got thrown in jail in Wisconsin. :-/

Controlling 9/11 "crippled epistemology" via fake 'CIA' Internet Conspiracy Theories, COINTELPRO & "cognitive infiltration of extremist groups": Huge jackass/Obama Info Czar Cass Sunstein favors infiltrating conspiracy groups, planting disinfo, diversions

140110top2.jpg"....we will suggest below that if the hard core arises for certain identifiable reasons, it can be broken up or at least muted by government action." .... "We suggest a role for government efforts, and agents, in introducing such diversity.  Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action."

SSRN-Conspiracy Theories by Cass Sunstein, Adrian Vermeule

This is one hell of a chestnut. It seems obvious, in retrospect, the best way to conceal the truth of establishment shady business and institutionalized crime is to mix in a ton of bullshit in order to turn all the skeptics and inquirers against each other. Only now it's Obama's dang 'information czar' pitching the strategy!

Interestingly, the more I broaden my sources, the more I appreciate the broad spectrum of people that have cancelled their subscriptions to Establishment Bollox and the Lies of the Mighty Wurlitzer. It's amazing how so many features of Establishment Reality are so widely loathed from within so many different worldviews.

This important fact is what people like Cass Sunstein don't understand. Like faux Establishment 'Centrists', they believe that ontological truth, or even the 'optimal' policy outcome, is like @ the 50% mark between where the dialectical left & right goalposts are placed.

It's like Howard Fineman - accurately dubbed the Weathervane because you only have to look which way he's pointing to determine what reassuring centrist reality is today's hot item. Howard Fineman is the precise opposite of a 'conspiracy theorist' in Sunstein's world.

The Establishment's Hegelian social control techniques are obvious: just set the left and right goalposts, stir and repeat. Problem-reaction-solution. If one can influence both the left and right goalposts in the great false dichotomy, it makes the product of "centrists" far more acceptable. Everything floating around outside this parlor game is the prima materia of 'conspiracy' that the State should attack professionally, Sunstein says!

Sunstein's tidy worldview brushes over the complex role of deceptive bullshit operatives around there, laying the groundwork for stupid establishment narratives. For example, what are we to make of the ever-shady Gerald Posner, spoonfed the FBI goodies on China? Or Adam Ciralski, helping Blackwater's Erik Prince perpetrate some classic exposure-threatening graymail about U.S. covert ops. Are these merely products of rotten epistomology? [PD Scott with a solid takedown of Posner - Scott's the real deal with The War Conspiracy and more here.]

*****

Anyhow Cass Sunstein was appointed by President Obama as some kind of info czar. Interestingly he wrote a paper about how to manipulate conspiracy theorists by attempting to throw their groups off the Hegelian deep end, thus opening an opportunity for defamatory information warfare. Fascinating stuff, and it's got Alex Jones incensed!!

More links, then some snippets: Obama Information Czar Calls For Banning Free Speech, Sunstein’s Paper Provides More Evidence COLINTELPRO Still Operational, etc.

This whole thing reminds me of how the JFK conspiracy scene is managed as "A Story/B Story" wherein there are two alternate, mutually irreconcilable narratives. Dribs and drabs of facts supporting A and B (roughly, CIA/Mafia and Lone Gunman, usually) can be offered and safely paddle around on the History Channel.

Let us share a few choice links about how the CIA type control system AKA the Intelligence Power controls the World of Conspiracy. This is good stuff -- this is exactly how Mama Cass wants the world of conspiracies organized.

For The Win: Fintan Dunne called the Sunstein approach years ago!

My favorite all-in-one shotgun approach comes from Fintan Dunne of BreakForNews.com: BreakForNews.com : The CIA's Internet Fakes


The CIA Fakes is a catchphrase term to describe a group which includes:

-- Covert Operatives of the CIA, NSA and DIA; of the U.S. Corporate/Military Industrial Complex; of the intelligence services of U.K. Spain, France Holland, Germany, and Russia.
-- Political Agents working within the Democratic Party, Republican Party, Democratic Black Caucus, Green Party, and Patriot Movement.
--
Politicians in the U.S., U.K. Spain, France, Germany and Russia --who pose as 9/11 skeptics.
-- Media, including
Mainstream, Alternative Media and Internet broadcasting media who either front for, cooperate with, or are directly employed by intelligence services mentioned above.

The primary objectives of the CIA FAKES are:

-- To leverage the Fakes into position as the leadership/spokespersons
    for the 9/11 skeptics movement.
-- To splinter and divide that movement.
-- To promote lame, tame and/or booby-trapped questions about 9/11.
-- To be sufficiently over-the-top as to prevent the 9/11 issue getting
    any traction in the media or left-wing.
-- To ensure that the movement would not have a politically-active
    leadership capable of turning it into an effective political lobby campaign.

The questions about 9/11 were bound to be asked, the important
aspect for the perpetrators was and is ...by whom?

Bravo, Mr. Dunne, Bravo. You scored big on this one... A general roundup to be found @ The Next Level :: View topic - Uncovered: The Rat's Nest of 9/11 of effective gatekeepers -- and its true that his set of people, in aggregate, has the 9/11 conspiracy topic cornered and setup a certain way.
More along these lines: 9/11, 7/7 & the War on Freedom :: View topic - The Planned Demolition of Alex Jones, The COUP had foreknowledge of 9-11 (YES!), the criticism about Sibel Edmonds, Scheuer, Ray McGovern, etc: WagNews: Our Good Friends in the CIA - NOT !, (i.e "The alternative media is ridden with ex-FBI, ex-CIA, ex-NSA, ex-MI5 people who are on "our side". It's all total BS.") WagNews: Alex Jones, Hopsicker & the 9/11 CIA Fakes -Audio.

This one is suddenly salient: WagNews: Ellsberg, Sibel Edmonds & The Secret Team:

WHAT FLAVOR CONSPIRACY YOU WANT?

One big corner of that overall 9/11 picture is formed by four disparate-seeming individuals: a veteran whistleblower, an attractive novice whistleblower, a campaigning journalist and a reputed lingerie model; jigsaw peices called Ellsberg, Edmonds, Hopsicker and Keller. Ellsberg supports Edmonds, confirmed by Hopsicker --backed by eyewitness accounts from Keller. But they're all telling different flavors of the same story.

To specify which story that is, let's take a look at the popular tales of 9/11. The notorious main division is between LIHOP and MIHOP. But it's much more detailed than that. Explanations come in a full range of flavors --starting with the official story:

A. Official story:
CIA/FBI were incompetent; Bush and/or Clinton were complacent.
B. Official Lame Conspiracy:
CIA/FBI were incompetent; Bush/Cheney maybe let it happen; Israelis Knew.
C. Official LIHOP Conspiracy:
CIA/FBI were compromised; Bush/Cheney did let it happen; Israelis Helped.
D. Official LIHOP Wild Conspiracy:
CIA/FBI compromised; Bush/Cheney/Neocons let it happen; Israelis Did It.
E. Official LIHOP Tinfoil Conspiracy:
Israelis/Neocons/Bush/Cheney Did It; CIA/FBI looked the other way.
F. Official MIHOP 'Serious' Conspiracy:
Israelis/Neocons/CIA/FBI/Bush/Cheney/Military-Industrial-Complex Did It.
G. Official Loony Conspiracies:
Rothschilds and/or Rockefellers and/or CFR and/or Bildebergers did it.
Globalists who want to run everything in a World Government did it.
Jews and Jewish bankers -who already run everything- did it.
Satanists, Opus Dei or Reptilians did it.
It's a terrific variety of theories.
It plays out something like this:
  • The mainstream media push version A; hint at B; sneer at G.
  • The controlled right/intellectual media pushes version B.
  • The controlled left/intellectual media pushes version C.
  • The 'moderate' Fake internet sites push versions C and D.
  • The 'softcore' Fake internet sites push versions D and E.
  • The 'independent' Fake internet sites push version F.
  • The 'loony' Fake interent sites push variations of version G.
But every single one, from A to G are OFFICIAL versions, sanctioned and promoted by the 9/11 intelligence coverup operation and their CIA Fakes network. They have a flavor for every market.

The creation of this multiplicity of explanations is a core element of the coverup. Left to their own devices, people on the Internet might have figured out the truth themselves. But with this circus in action, there is always plenty of distraction and lots of division in opinion.

The intelligence coverup is not trying to stop 9/11 conspiracy theories on the internet. It's creating them. Then playing off supporters of the different theories against each other. That's a classic Cointelpro-style tactic.

***********More from good Ol L Fletcher Prouty on CIA / Ellsberg limited hangout type conspiracy control!
Let's get to the brand-new material from the White House info czar, it's wild!!...... Conspiracy Theories by Cass Sunstein & Adrian Vermeule:

Our main though far from exclusive focus – our running example – involves

conspiracy theories relating to terrorism, especially theories that arise from and post-date

the 9/11 attacks. These theories exist within the United States and, even more virulently,

in foreign countries, especially Muslim countries. The existence of both domestic and

foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the

government’s antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be. Terrorism-related

theories are thus a crucial testing ground for the significance, causes, and policy

implications of widespread conspiracy theorizing. As we shall see, an understanding of

conspiracy theories has broad implications for the spread of information and beliefs;

many erroneous judgments are a product of the same forces that produce conspiracy

theories, and if we are able to see how to counteract such theories, we will have some

clues about how to correct widespread errors more generally.

Part I explores some definitional issues and lays out some of the mechanisms that

produce conspiracy theories and theorists. We begin by discussing different

understandings of the nature of conspiracy theories and different accounts of the kinds of

errors made by those who hold them. Our primary claim is that conspiracy theories

typically stem not from irrationality or mental illness of any kind but from a “crippled

epistemology,” in the form of a sharply limited number of (relevant) informational

sources. Those who hold conspiracy theories do so because of what they read and hear. In

that sense, acceptance of such theories is not irrational from the standpoint of those who

adhere to them. There is a close connection, we suggest, between our claim on this count

and the empirical association between terrorist behavior and an absence of civil rights

and civil liberties.10 When civil rights and civil liberties are absent, people lack multiple

information sources, and they are more likely to accept conspiracy theories.

Part II discusses government responses and legal issues, in light of the discussion

in Part I. We address several dilemmas of governmental response to conspiracy theories,

such as the question whether it is better to rebut such theories, at the risk of legitimating

them, or to ignore them, at the risk of leaving them unrebutted. Conspiracy theories turn

out to be especially hard to undermine or dislodge; they have a self-sealing quality,

rendering them particularly immune to challenge. We suggest several policy responses

that can dampen the supply of conspiracy theorizing, in part by introducing diverse

viewpoints and new factual assumptions into the hard-core groups that produce such

theories. Our principal claim here involves the potential value of cognitive infiltration of

extremist groups, designed to introduce informational diversity into such groups and to

expose indefensible conspiracy theories as such.

Tell me this, Sunstein: how does all that drug money get through the Federal Reserve System? Everyone has been so eager to confront that 'conspiracy theory,' haven't they?

Blah blah blah... let's get to the good stuff: [Below the fold - favorite chunks of much of the crazy essay]

The late great Robert Nichols, a $250 billion Treasury Note, the Octopus Wiki (all your Iran-Contra/PROMIS style tiebacks) and Main Core, to boot

In a popular culture that has gotten more sympathetic to conspiracies, things that nagged at us out on the shady Internets have been shot into the mainstream in a weird way lately - it seems people like Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann are "gatekeeping" around very weird stories -- they inject a bunch of crazy spin to some very strange, but real, facts, leaving a messy ideological wreckage behind, leaving existing small Internet communities of thoughtful observers dazed and confused...

(the leading recent example here would be how Alex Jones tried to raise alarm about the "FEMA Camp" federal paperwork and policies out there, and Bachmann and Beck parachuted in and made it all seem crazy, which caused the documentation-driven alarm from Jones to get totally overrun with nonsense. Not that Jones' analytic framework is necessarily good all the time - but in this case it was substantive).

But no one like Beck or Bachmann will stir up the loose change left behind by Danny Casolaro or the Octopus. You can bet on it.

*****

One of the great figures in the whole Iran-Contra/BCCI/Savings&Loan scandal complex mix was Danny Casolaro, a journalist who got into what he called the Octopus. Casolaro was abruptly murdered by someone like Oliver North's henchmen, or something roughly along those lines.

A new Octopus tentacle, which happens to match pretty well with an old one, washed up dead in Switzerland. Robert Nichols' name goes right back through everything, and it matches nicely the latest turn -- sadly, he turned up dead in February. From there, it gets into the Original Big Murky Ink Cloud.

One angle to this whole thing is that corrupt and powerful people can sometimes obtain really awesome letters of credit from government entities, and stash them away. The notes can then be used to build new financial instruments and complex frauds - Al Martin's book The Conspirators (almartinraw.com) had a bunch of stuff about the Bush family doing this in the 1980s.

So it made a very certain sense to me when I caught this story - off a site that seems to be run by Casolaro's daughter (or someone else whose parent was murdered in the broader Iran Contra/Octopus mix). Haters of the Federal Reserve, check it out!

$250 Billion Treasury Note Cloaked in Mystery – Evades Public Scrutiny | Desertfae

It all started with a Bloomberg News article entitled “Bayou’s Israel Cheated in Scam,” published on July 15, 2008 by court reporters David Glovin and Bob Van Voris.http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601127&sid=aLCwdJsx0V3M&refer=law

The article talked about Samuel Israel of Bayou Management Group LLC being cheated by Robert Booth Nichols, “who in a 1993 lawsuit claimed to have worked for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for 20 years. Nichols was also the target of a 1987 probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of organized crime in the entertainment industry,” wrote Bloomberg.

An excerpt of the article read as follows: “As Samuel Israel grew desperate to raise money in 2004 to save his Bayou Group LLC hedge fund firm, he turned for help to a Hawaii man who promised a windfall and then conned him out of $10 million, said a U.K. investigator.

“Robert Booth Nichols cheated Israel, later convicted in his own $400 million theft, in a ‘prime bank’ fraud, a scheme used by con-artists promising quick riches in secret markets, the U.K. investigator said in a document filed in June in federal court in New York. U.S. prosecutors seeking to recover funds for Bayou investors won a British judge’s ruling in November freezing $1 million Nichols held there, and they may be pursuing millions more in Singapore, Nichols’s lawyer said.

Robert Booth Nichols, 65, denied wrongdoing and sought to retain the $1 million in London. He said in court papers that he helped Israel invest in a legitimate, though unspecified “project” involving U.S. government obligations. Nichols said he had no reason to believe Israel was engaged in fraud.

“He was asked to find something, and he found it,” Nichols’s lawyer, Joseph Bainton, told Bloomberg, declining to elaborate. “There are very few people capable of performing this service, for which he was paid a lump sum of $10 million.

Nichols said in court papers that he believed the investment was on behalf of Israel personally, that Nichols was told his services involved matters of national interest,” and that a first cousin of President G. W. Bush, John P. Ellis, vouched for the legitimacy of the transaction. Nichols said the deal required him to contact representatives of foreign governments that he knew, according to court documents.

Nichols’ lawyer told Bloomberg that Mr. Ellis attended some meetings and gave Mr. Nichols some assurance with respect to the approval of the United States. Ellis worked at GH Venture Partners in 2004, according to Nichols’ court documents.

The criminal case is U.S. v. Israel, 05cr1039, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

The bankruptcy case is In re Bayou Group LLC, 06-22306, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District New York (White Plains).

The missing link in the above story is the $250 Billion Treasury Note secured by 2,500 metric tons of gold at the Atlanta Federal Reserve, Serial Number SC 3040-20. Robert Booth Nichols’ lawyer described this to Bloomberg as an unspecified “project” involving U.S. government obligations. However, the reporters had no knowledge at the time they wrote the story that the “project” for which Nichols was paid $10 million allegedly involved Nichols locating and obtaining the Treasury Note for Samuel Israel and depositing it at the London Safe Deposit Box Company Ltd. http://londonsafedeposit.co.uk/

Yumz. Now we are getting somewhere. Christopher Story (Worldreports.org) also talked a lot about this certain raid against the London safe deposit boxes - the idea is that several months ago the London Metropolitan Police raided a huge bunch of safe deposit boxes, and these boxes contained all sorts of weird items, blackmail, leverage, the shadow wealth of a bunch of players who believed themselves untouchable.

But London Metro managed to take their stuff, and thereby actually, roughly speaking, damaged a huge chunk of the shady "intelligence power" as Mr Story likes to call it.

So that is one side... i will leave it there for now. Wayne Madsen had stuff on it too.

Anyway the Desert Fae blog has a lot of backstories like for example the Frank Sinatra mob stuff - Dr Nichols is showing up at the Cabazon Indian Reservation in the 1980s (Cabazon was where, according to the great Iran Contra Octopus tapestry, they were hacking PROMIS backdoors, something about weird weapons and the Contras, it was quite a classic set of data points that you find, when you go looking....)

Meanwhile running attached is The Octopus Wiki! Not too shabby!! It sort of suggests that major drug cartels and the Italian mob are subsets or sub-pathways of the Octopus. From the Wiki front page, just a few of the angles you need to nibble at:

The Inslaw Affair

Danny Casolaro, Michael Riconosciuto, Robert Booth Nichols, and others were mentioned rather prominently in the final House of Representatives Report #102-857 released to the public on September 10, 1992. The Investigative Report, put together by the Committee on the Judiciary headed by Senator Jack Brooks of Texas, entitled “The Inslaw Affair,” summarized a three year investigation into the theft of the PROMIS software from Bill and Nancy Hamilton, owners of Inslaw Corporation in Washington D.C. (The investigators who handled the three-year probe were listed on the Report as James E. Lewin, Chief Investigator, and John D. Cohen, Investigator.)

As a result of media exposure, Inslaw’s owners, Bill and Nancy Hamilton, had received information which subsequently led them to believe that the Department’s actions were part of a high level conspiracy within Justice to steal the “enhanced” version of PROMIS.

Inslaw alleged that former Attorney General Edwin Meese and Deputy Attorney General Lowell Jensen forced Inslaw into bankruptcy by intentionally creating a sham contract dispute over the terms and conditions of the contract which led to the withholding of payments due Inslaw by the Department.

Two federal court judges and the House Judiciary Committee ultimately concluded that “the United States Department of Justice‎ acted willfully and fraudently” and “took, converted and stole” Inslaw’s enhanced PROMIS software by “trickery, fraud and deceit.”

EXCERPTED from High Times Magazine, August 2001 issue, Vol. No. 313 – Title of article: "The Ghost ofDanny Casolaro.” [3]

“ --- Danny Casolaro's tragic death essentially opened a Pandora's Box which the DOJ was never able to close. During the last week of his life, Danny had discovered a connection between Mike Abbell, a former director of international affairs for the Justice Department, the Cali Drug Cartel, and Robert Booth Nichols, an international intelligence operative whom he had been interviewing extensively for months. Danny's last phone bills indicated he'd spent hundreds of hours on the phone with Nichols, most of the calls averaged one to two hours. This in effect, was one tentacle of the Octopus.

“Danny had confronted Nichols about Mike Abbell and the Cali Cartel while staying in Martinsburg. It was the last conversation Danny ever had with Nichols, and with Bob Bickel, a friend whom Danny confided in. Bickel subsequently confirmed the conversation, but for reasons unknown, the Abbell - Cali Cartel connection was never published in any of the official investigative reports on Danny's death. These included the DOJ report of September 27, 1994.

“In fact, a note handwritten by Danny four days before his death, found by relatives, read as follows: ‘Bill Hamilton - August 6. MR … also brought up 'Gilberto.’ Unknown to anyone outside the DOJ at that time, a [secret]FBI investigation of Mike Abbell was underway at the time of Danny's death. Years later, an indictment unsealed in Miami on June 6, 1995 charged Abbell with laundering money for the Cali Cartel. Surveillance reports indicated he'd made frequent visits to the home of Gilberto Rodriguez, leader of the Cali Cartel in Bogota, Columbia.

Top notch.

PROMIS was originally Prosecutor's Management Information System - early in the era, it seems to have been a kind of nice IT case management system that would let the suits tie into various government databases. According to reams of odd stuff out there (yet never definitively presented to the American public) it got stolen from INSLAW and mutated by the CIA and other assorted lunatics. (American intelligence sold a backdoor'd PROMIS to the RCMP and the Mounties were fucking pissed when they found out - I want Dan Aykroyd to play the Mountie boss in the film.)

From there PROMIS sort of seems to morph into a magic skeleton key into all types of data mining - by extending its ability to probe around into all government databases.

It seems too much the handy conspiracy program: It sort of plays like a MacGuffin or other placeholder "program that all the players have, to dominate reality in bizarre and invisible ways." There's no other program out there in the Internet conspiracy world I know of that compares to PROMIS. But I don't get what that means!

The idea from Chris Ketcham is that PROMIS became extended into MAIN CORE, the master NSA program that was spun out of DARPA's Total Information Awareness effort. Check this out - it does have the areas about "Continuity of Government" -- which is often an odd kind of logistical code or cipher for hardcore martial law, it seems, especially in the REX84 era (also Operation Sledgehammer, and Ollie North's Civilian Labor Inmate Facility [CLIF] proposal) --- myahhh I'm getting caught up in keywords now.

Check the Ketcham article for how MAIN CORE grew from PROMIS:   The Last Roundup : Information Clearing House - ICH

More goods:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Core
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19871.htm
http://digitizedrevolution.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/christopher-ketcham-the-last-roundup-2/
(great google ads at the end of this one ^ )
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/05/hbc-90002972
http://cryptogon.com/?p=2590

Excerpt of Wayne Madsen: http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/articles/20090508

May 8-10, 2009 -- Was Clan Bush involved in looting of other Federal Reserve Banks?

There is additional information to report on the Treasury Note that is secured by $250 billion in gold (2500 metric tons) at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. After the sudden resignation of New York Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Stephen Friedman, a one-time top economic adviser to President George W. Bush and someone who apparently profited from the government's bailout of Goldman Sachs while he served as both Chairman of the New York Fed and as a board member for Goldman Sachs, the entire Federal Reserve Bank system appears to be involved in a massive ploy to loot the United States of its gold and cash reserves.

On May 5, 2009, WMR reported: "According to WMR's sources, the FBI and London police are working together on a case that involved a $250 billion U.S. Treasury Note seized by the FBI from a London safety deposit box company, London Safe Deposit Company, Ltd. The box was reportedly placed at the London firm by self-described 20-year CIA veteran Robert Booth Nichols, who reportedly died in Geneva, Switzerland on February 14, 2009.

A heart attack was believed to have been the cause of death but there was a blow to Nichols's head. A 'friend' of Nichols, a New York stockbroker who was reportedly helping Booth move a large sum of cash, bonds and gold in Geneva, arranged for a quick cremation of Nichols's body and the U.S. embassy in Bern was notified. ........

Well, consider yourself educated at least in a few classic slices of Octopus lore, and how, in theory, they fit into the modern NSA panopticon. That's the damn thing about these freakkin conspiracies:

the same people pop up over and over and over. It's really fuckin' annoying.

Even more link barrage? Fitts on the Fed/mortgage/Narco-dollars & other fun items

Blah... I have been going all over doing who knows what this month. A lot of cool things accomplished, but many badass items are stuck at 70% completion. Yet I constantly want to shuffle onto more nifty projects. There are so many radical changes going on that it's hard to try and keep tabs on everything.

Anyway. Time for tons of links.

If you complain about Comcast online, you may get them to give you the secret discounts. My Twitter Comcast Story | zarzax the blog This guy also bailed on Drupal for Wordpress. (so sad). Really tho, Drupal and Wordpress have different purposes, and it's more suited for the linear personal blogs (and the plugins have certainly gotten pretty good).

White House Using Google Moderator For Town Hall Meeting. And AppEngine. And YouTube.

Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler : Full Commanding Denial

and also: Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler : What Next?

The collapse of complex systems is actually predicated on the idea that the systems would mutually reinforce each other's failures. This is now plain to see as the collapse of banking (that is, of both lending and debt service), has led to the collapse of commerce and manufacturing. The next systems to go will probably be farming, transportation, and the oil markets themselves (which constitute the system for allocating and distributing world energy resources). As these things seize up, the final system to go will be governance, at least at the highest levels.
     If we're really lucky, human affairs will eventually reorganize at a lower scale of activity, governance, civility, and economy. Every week, the failure to recognize the nature of our predicament thrusts us further into the uncharted territory of hardship. The task of government right now is not to prop up doomed systems at their current scales of failure, but to prepare the public to rebuild our systems at smaller scales.

Police raid home of Wikileaks.de domain owner over censorship lists - Wikileaks

The Easiest Way to Use Any Font You Wish - Nettuts+

MinnPost - Braublog: The man who 'out-Sid' Sid Hartman

James K. Galbraith: No Return to Normal - Why the economic crisis, and its solution, are bigger than you think | The Agonist

Between Kunstler and Kurzweil | The Agonist

Kurzweil has a weird movie coming out:

The weirdo filez: Educate-Yourself.org:The Freedom of Knowledge; The Power of Thought

WE heard the Israelis were wack but this is serious: Gaza_pregnant_woman.jpg picture by tr_gentry - Photobucket

Economic madness: Tomgram: A Second 9/11 in Slow Motion

The feds must investigate AIG's fishy $12.9 billion payment to Goldman. - By Eliot Spitzer - Slate Magazine

Florida sneeky business: sketch guy who wound up with the Terror Flight School hangar in Florida also ran a ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff, "Mini M," & Mohamed Atta

Drugs and "loophole airlines" as well! Charter Company Ran Second Jet Off Runway

Check this! The Fed Did Indeed Cause the Housing Bubble at The Catherine Austin Fitts Blog

My company served as lead financial advisor to the Federal Housing Administration between 1994 and 1997. I watched both the Administration and the Federal Reserve aggressively implement the policies that engineered the housing bubble. These are described at my website and in my on-line book,Dillon Read & the Aristocracy of Stock Profits(http://www.dunwalke.com).

One story, for example, is the following:
“In 1995, a senior Clinton Administration official shared with me the Administration’s targets for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage volumes in low- and moderate-income communities. We had recently reviewed the Administration’s plans to increase government mortgage guarantees — most of these mortgages would also be pooled and sold as securities to investors. Even in 1995, I could see that these plans would create unserviceable debt loads in communities struggling with the falling incomes expected from globalization. Homeowners would default on mortgages while losses on mortgage-backed securities would drain retirement savings from 401(k)s and pension plans. Taxpayers would ultimately be hit with a large bill . . . but insiders would make a bundle. I looked at the official and said that the Administration was planning on issuing more mortgages than there were houses or residents. “Shut up, this is none of your business,” the official snapped back.”

From: “Sub-Prime Mortgage Woes Are No Accident” (http://solari.com/news/announcements/08-07-07/)

One of the dirty little secrets behind the housing bubble is the long standing partnership of narcotics trafficking and mortgage fraud and the use of the two in combination to target and destroy minority and poor communities with highly profitable economic warfare. This model is global. It is operating in counties throughout the world as well as in US communities.

Of all the actions that the Federal Reserve took to engineer this housing bubble, the one that I would note is Mr. Greenspan’s efforts to pacify Congresswoman Waters regarding allegations of government sponsored narcotics trafficking at a time when open Congressional hearings would have contributed to an important discussion of the operations engaging in mortgage fraud in minority communities. See, “Financial Coup d’Etat,” Chapter 16, Dillon Read & the Aristocracy of Stock Profits which was written in 2005 and published in April 2006, drawing from an article I first published in May 1999.

“On December 18, 1997, the CIA Inspector General delivered Volume I of their report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding charges that the CIA was complicit in narcotics trafficking in South Central Los Angeles. Washington, D.C. ’s response was compatible with attracting the continued flow of an estimated $500 billion–$1 trillion a year of money laundering into the U.S. financial system. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in January 1998 visited Los Angeles with Congresswoman Maxine Waters — who had been a vocal critic of the government’s involvement in narcotics trafficking — with news reports that he had pledged billions to come to her district. In February Al Gore announced that Water’s district in Los Angeles had been awarded Empowerment Zone status by HUD (under Secretary Cuomo’s leadership) and made eligible for $300 million in federal grants and tax benefits.”

But wait - there's more! Fitts sez to some dumb square who says he was an honest narc, in the comments:

Perhaps you would like to explain to us how a half a trillion military and intelligence establishment is helpless up against all those African-American teenagers? Or why the NY Fed/Fed wires and clearing systems that aggregate and control all wire transfers and clearance are helpless to notice $500 billion - $1 trillion plus of annual money laundering.

The reality is that no one needs to waste time running in circles on evidence games related to one particular narcotics trafficking operation. The truth is so obvious and the corruption so blatant that we can just use our common sense.

Who is running the high margin, profitable businesses? The people with the money or the poor people?

As someone once said to me, “I know how organized crime works. I dealt with the mafia when I was growing up. All I need to know when I watch the Harvard Endowment operate, is that I am watching the mafia model. Once I get over that I was the patsy and really did not know that the system was not legitimate, it is relatively easy to understand my world.”

Good times! Stand by for a little more along these lines! :-)

Yow! Introducing new HongPong.com Mogulus TV channel thingy!

How fun is this?? I have set up an account @ mogulus.com, a marvelous streaming video service. I can do a live stream, or else just queue up some videos zapped straight over from YouTube.

It's very nicely available @ http://mogulus.com/hongpong - This can show you how many ppl might be tuned in at any time. The whole thing is financed via yellow popup ads, which I think are not such a bad exchange to get the whole thing of hosting and routing out the video going nicely.
I have added a bunch of music videos and some fun Iran-Contra stuff from YouTube, as well as clips of the RNC flick Terrorizing Dissent and a bit from The Uptake.

It can even spit out embeddable hongpong channels for you.... Or set up your own channel. You can connect it to multiple logins and multiple webcam feeds...

Iran-Contra Cliff's Notes on hostage crises, PSYOPS, and GOP perception management, see 1991's "October Surprise" by Gary Sick

There is another category of offenses, described by the French poet André Chenier as "les crimes puissants qui font trembler les lois," crimes so great that they make the laws themselves tremble. We know what to do with someone caught misappropriating funds, but when confronted with evidence of a systematic attempt to undermine the political system itself, we recoil in a general failure of imagination and nerve.

-- Gary Sick, October Surprise (p 226)

******

I have never understood why "normal" people are supposed to believe that the Iranians let the hostages go during Reagan's inauguration because he intimidated them, but then Reagan quickly pivoted to sell them all those weapons in the 1982-1986 period traditionally known as "Iran Contra".

It seems like a pretty half-assed coverup, really.

I mean, look at all these damn data points we have to digest. And we're supposed to somehow forget, hold as innocent / benign, fail to comprehend, etc.

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The terrible thing is, I'm beginning to understand it.

Byzantine accounts of shell corporations (aka brass plates) get quite addictive. I think it's worse than the cocaine & cash they funneled in the good old days.

This gets back to the intersection of the Savings & Loan scandals & Iran-Contra, as well as many other choice items... Stew Webb is his own case altogether, he made the mistake of marrying into a high level Bush-affiliated fraudster family, the Millmans, out in Denver.

Webb launched a website with perhaps the ugliest color scheme I have ever seen (including the once-thought-extinct HTML blink tag), but there are plenty of awesome primary source documents linked off this page... Be sure to hit up the Sarah McClendon 1991 Washington Report October Surprise items, which explain quite clearly the coverup of chemical weapons to Iraq that later contributed to Gulf War Syndrome, Webb's fate and the general 1991 coverup in Congress.

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Before I run the book back to Minneapolis' fab new Central Library, I have to post a review of "October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan" by Gary Sick, the 1991 first edition version.

In a lucky break, I finished this book the evening before a fresh new fake hostage crisis in Colombia. It felt like a lightning bolt to have another cheesy hostage rescue thingy, the very next day! The secret to the FARC Colombia scenario was much like the 1979-1980 classic episode: pay off the bad guys and put on a good show for the American press! CNN and the rest of them will believe every fucking word for two news cycles, and then forget it!

*****

The vast reservoir of cognitive dissonance embedded within the brains of America's Establishment political journalists and analysts makes up the foundation of accepted "consensus political reality." The weird stuff is never talked about, yet becomes heavier by the day. The room's elephants are becoming... super elephants? (Ask the accountant @ Fannie Mae.)

Prior to the emergence of the Internet, all and sundry could easily agree that if a given political fact or event did not get placed in the Washington Post, the New York Times, TIME Magazine, Newsweek, the Associated Press wire or a couple other key press outlets, everyone could safely agree the proposition in question did not exist, and they were safe from being 'burned' by further revelations. "We didn't know, it wasn't in our favorite paper!"

Of course, these outlets occasionally cut to the quick of matters like the Pentagon's military analyst PSYOP news manipulation program, the domestic wiretap program, or other affairs. However, the unique class of Establishment douchebags like David Broder will always fail to synthesize a new analysis of political/government affairs by taking into account their own paper's muckraking, and thus the ruling class can avoid swallowing the bitter pills of their own complicity in general malfeasance and alarming trends of criminality.

(Or shorter: the analysts will never place the results of muckraking in context).

*****

Such is the case with many of my favorite topics, in particular areas with huge layers of documentary evidence, eyewitness accounts and other "weird things" that get left by the wayside all too often. In the last two years I have been fascinated by the historical period of about 1977-1992, the period between when Pres. Jimmy Carter's CIA director, Stansfield "Choir Boy" Turner, fired hundreds of incensed CIA agents, and the election of Bill Clinton.

"October Surprise" was written by Gary Sick (a Carter-era National Security Council staffer with a role in the Middle East) after allegations surfaced in the 1988 presidential election that George H. W. Bush had attended secret meetings in Paris including himself, former CIA honcho and Reagan campaign manager Bill Casey, and various Iranians, with the intent of preventing the hostages from getting released before the November 1980 election. This was the famous, mythical "October Surprise".

Sick provides a sober and cautious synthesis of everything he can, without going out on a limb or offering extraneous, false nuggets that were surely offered by the shady characters that were his sources. He keeps the case minimal, and where he can't verify the names, he doesn't name them.

The American intelligence community in general got pissed at Carter after he took such measures against them, in the wake of partial exposures like the 1975-76 Church Commission, ominous mind control programs and other awesome items. Hundreds of pissed off CIA operators were suddenly cast off the government payroll, and some who you might call "The Cowboys" of the original school were pretty tight with George Bush - after all, he was a player with them since his earliest days. Many of the Cowboys entered fuzzy cargo aviation businesses and other cool cat fronts designed to be geopolitically useful.

In the old days, they knew how to fly copters in hot zones, dammit!

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Gen. Claire Chennault put this all together, back then... The survivors of a geopolitically awkward venture, they deserved better than a pink slip from a uptight dude like CIA director Stanfield Turner. Back in China, Nam, elsewhere.... Many died to bring the guns over the line that the pukes in Washington didn't dare tell the public about.

This is true. And under-appreciated. If people in Washington had the guts to be more honest about things (and the press held them to it) then people like Air America and Southern Air Transport (way to go Wikipedia) would never have gotten the short end of the stick. The same is true today.

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In the 1980 election, Bush elbowed aside the more regular GOP establishment for the role of Vice Presidential candidate. Bush had a lot of friends in the intelligence community, still, and the unemployed freelancers felt ready to participate in organizing serious operations monitoring Carter. After the Iranians captured the hostages (where was Ted Shackley during the pre-coup period... not sure), Bill Casey, of all people, the grizzled ex-CIA honcho and "half crazy" by all accounts, was suddenly Reagan's campaign manager.

I mean really. The ex-CIA honcho is the campaign manager, and George Bush, ex-CIA director, is the VP candidate, and somehow this does not become a huge mess of covert operations and total PSYOPS subversion?!

How is that no one reminds us how hardcore cool kats in intelligence community put together the whole Reagan campaign?

Damn...

And thus began the Perception Management expertise we know and love today... [see below]

It all began with making sure that FUCKING CARTER couldn't get the FUCKING HOSTAGES out. And all it took was some arms dealers, some arms and some of that old backdoor, secret hotels in Madrid/Paris, don't tell the nerds in the "elected" Democratic White House, old wheeler dealer Texas-sized gambles.

And where did it lead? Getting Felix Rodriguez into the White House? Hurray!


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When you wins, you gets ta write the history, eh?

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*****

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I gotta throw in one of my favorite smoking guns: a rare 1985 document that survived the shredder, wherein Ollie describes the "Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into U.S."

They do NOT show this one on FOX News War Stories!

*****

Some morons on Amazon are claiming that Sick claims that George Bush flew to Paris in an SR71 Blackbird, which is never floated at all. In fact, Sick provides a good analysis of how the Bush-in-Paris claims acted as a "poison pill" or intentional red herring diversion to embarrass journalists and drive them away from further inquiry.

*****

Apart from the facts of the hostage crisis, the way the whole press coverage got manipulated by disinformation (propaganda) specialists becomes quite important.

Grizzled Iran-Contra-exposing reporter Robert Parry recently put out the formerly "lost chapter" of the Democrats' whitewash committee report, which has TONS of details about how the disinfo experts manipulated the scene in the 1980s. GET THE PDF fools!

In a rare new addition to Iran Contra documentation, an awesome "Lost Chapter" of the Democratically-controlled investigation committee has been unearthed. The Lost Chapter got deleted from the Final Report, because it spelled out how "perception management" type dudes got brought into the inner circle, running interference all around. The tone and substance of how these guys operated gets explained in a choice narrative style.

Of course, this surfaced from Robert Parry, who got the tar kicked out of him by pursuing Iran-Contra deeply and professionally. This turned out to be a terrible mistake, since the Establishment coverup took hold and Parry went down some of the many cul-de-sacs put there by the disinfo Beltway experts. So instead of a fancy TV spot, he is here & there, and this lost chapter turned up not in Newsweek but on ConsortiumNews.com.

*****

I will add the October Surprise book jacket notes because they encompass the most important dimensions of the case, and are well-substantiated:

This book was never supposed to have been written. It is an account of a political mystery never intended to be solved, a tale of bold deception by a few powerful men who apparently calculated that political manipulation, if conducted on a sufficiently grand scale, would be essentially invisible and ultimately beyond the law.

October Surprise reconstructs the story of how the 1980 Reagan-Bush presidential campaign, intent on delaying the release of the fifty-two Americans held hostage in Tehran until after the election, made clandestine overtures to Iran and arranged illegal arms shipments through Israel. Thiss effort, spearheaded by Republican campaign manager William Casey, not only prevented President Carter from reaping the political benefits of an early hostage release, but also hobbled his ability to exercise the full powers of his elective office.

This book brings to light startling new information, including:

• The Reagan-Bush campaign's systematic penetration of the national security complex of the U.S. government, through which a network of former and current intelligence agents kept Casey--not then in any government position--informed of highly classified military movements, diplomatic initiatives, and policy decisions.

• The secret meetings that took placed in Europe during the summer and fall of 1980, at which Casey hammered out the deal with the Iranians.

• Israel's shipment of arms to Iran during the last weeks of the presidential campaign (in deliberate violation of the U.S. embargo) and the massive covert arms transfers between the two nations that begin immediately after Reagan's inauguration.

• The connection between the Republicans' 1980 arms-for-hostages deal and the Iran-Contra Affair five years later.

The result of three years of research and hundreds of interviews, October Surprise lays bare an elaborate network of political intrigue and treachery, subversive in its actions and chilling in its implications. It is a cautionary tale about the seductions of power and the fragility of our democratic system.

He spells out the series of events, including the weird and messy power mesh that made up the nebulous Iranian ruling circles, which, in their splintering, oddly mirrored the splintered American side. (Numerous arms dealers and shadeballs, (in particular the Hashemi brothers as channels), "fairly" offered similar terms, separately, to Carter and Casey's people.)

His conclusion chapter was really interesting, as it encompassed the case of the United States of America v. Richard J. Brenneke, as they were ticked off that Brenneke

"had been accused of falsely stating that William Casey, Donald Gregg and possibly George Bush were in Paris on that particular weekend, and that he was employed by the CIA at that time.... Although this case received virtually no attention in the national media, it marked the only time that the U.S. gvoernment had systematically and athoritatively attempted to refute the allegations of an October surprise. All of those accused had an unparalleled opportunity to rebut the charges, and they had all the resources of the U.S. government at their command to research and document their case. To my surprise, and to the surprise of nearly everyone who followed the trial closely, they failed." (p 212)

All they had to do to win the case was prove that George Bush or Casey or Gregg were anywhere but Paris, in the middle of the damn campaign. And they failed. And it was forgotten.

*****

In my own fishing in the murky waters, I would be wise to remember this conclusion about the general morass.

This is hardly earth shattering, but it's a clear explanation of a fundamental principle of all stories about espionage and Deep Politics: (p 214-216):

Over the course of the next two years, during the research and writing of this book, I would meet many men like Richard Brenneke. To my frustration, Brenneke's idiosyncrasies and character flaws were too often representative of the general nature of the sources. These mens were denizens of a shadowy yet flamboyant subculture who expected absolute discretion in dealing with outsiders but tolerated boasting and exaggerated tales of past exploits among the members of the fraternity. They took pains to conceal key facts from an obvious outsider, and when they chose to talk they routinely embellished the facts and inflated their own importance.

Such characters are a researcher's nemesis; they are meant to be. When the CIA or other intelligence agencies need to hire a "contractor," who may be required to carry out tasks that are potentially dangerous and of questionable legality, they look for three things: a specific and useful skill (a knowledge of money-laundering, for example); a romantic streak that glorifies both the secrecy and the risk; and a propensity for exaggeration and trouble. One former CIA officer, David MacMichael, has said that the agency looks for these free-lancers at small community airports and gun ranges--places where men go to escape the boredom of everyday life. Looking for adventure, these men are fascinated by the imagined glamour and excitement of the world of espionage. MacMichael said that often, after one or two assignments, the agency will put the contractor on a case in which he runs afoul of the law. The contractor finds himself in a compromising position--nothing so major as to put him permanently out of commission, but significant enough that if he ever starts telling tales out of school about covert operations, his record will discredit his testimony.

Essentially, such a free-lancer is a skilled Walter Mitty, who delights in possessing arcane knowledge and who imagines himself the instrument that secretly drives events behind the scrim of history. It is a profile, alas, of a less-than-credible witness. Intelligence agencies understand this very well, and bank on it. A free-lancer is inherently difficult to control; if he wanders off the reservation and begins blabbing, it is helpful if no one believes him. A retired CIA covert-operations officer, when asked about the extravagant behavior of a former contract employee, said: "The agency likes things that way... The wilder and crazier and sillier the story, the more they like it. The agency indulges people to come up with that. It's the best defense." MacMichael confirmed that the agency permits contractors to become entangled in a legally compromising position, so that if an operation goes awry they can be cut loose. "When a contractor gets caught," he said, "all their 'friends' disappear. It happens over and over again."

In a story in which the principal actors have no desire for the facts to come out, one does not have the luxury of choosing one's sources. The "respectable" people who plotted and carried out a covert operation refuse to comment or, at worst, fabricate stories to protect themselves and their reputations; because of their "respectability," most people are inclined to believe them. The contractors who were hired to do the dirty work are not "respectable" at all, and if they decided to tell their story, most people assume they are lying.

And sometimes they are. These free-lancers, on occasion, are deliberately recruited as front men for disinformation campaigns. In 1988, when stories about possible Republican tampering with the hostage issue began to emerge in the national media, Oswald LeWinter said he was contacted by some people he had known through his intelligence background. They were concerned, he said, that the United States was once again facing the possibility of a Watergate-type scandal that risked tearing the country apart, discrediting the candidacy of George Bush, and electing a Democratic candidate who was unsympathetic to the intelligence community. He claimed to have been offered $40,000 to undertake a disinformation campaign designed to discredit the stories about the 1980 elections and the Paris meetings. He agreed, and for several months he spoke to journalists and others who were investigating the allegations of an "October surprise." He said that he used the pseudonym "Razin," and refused to be interviewed in person. INstead he spoke to reporters only by telephone, offering a few bits and pieces of accurate information laced with fanciful inventions and false leads. His purpose, as he now freely admits, was to throw dust in the air, to invent tantalizing leads that would eventually prove to be false, and thereby generate so much fruitless commotion that the story would be discredited and abandoned.

To get at the truth, one must listen to those who know something about what happened and who are willing to talk, even if they exaggerate and embroider the truth. Then every significant statement must be carefully weighed against the known facts -- dates, places, times, identities -- and other witnesses. A bald assertion, however intriguing, must be regarded as false unless it can be corroborated independently, and not just from one of the sources' cronies who may have compared stories. When the allegations of Casey's participation in the secret talks with the Iranians surfaced in 1988, the CIA director's defenders swore up and down that Casey had not traveled abroad on the dates that the Madrid meetings were said to have taken place. However, one of my researchers found an obscure item tucked away in the second section of The New York Times of July 30, 1980, in which the following sentence appeared: "A spokesman at Reagan headquarters said that the national campaign chairman, WIlliam Casey, would begin negotiations with the Right to Life group when he returns today from a trip abroad." Suddenly the denials were less convincing.

Casey died of a brain tumor on May 6, 1987, making it impossible to get his side of the story. Nevertheless, he had made several public statements which I now viewed in a new light. For example, when he was questioned in the 1984 Senate investigation into the mysterious theft of President Carter's briefing book four years earlier, he described his knowledge of the hostage crisis at the time as follows: "Information about negotiations for the release of the hostages in Iran came to me from many sources, including bankers involved in loans to Iran and frozen Iranian funds." That Casey admitted, under oath, that he was privy to inside information about the negotiations between the government of the United States and the government of Iran is itself revealing.

All right, I have to put in a couple more passages... This is taking a while, but key to the case: (p 222-223)

I would not be human if I did not confess that I have at one time or another awakened in the middle of the night with the thought: what if all of these people are lying to me? Is it possible that all of these accounts are themselves a conspiracy of lies?

In the early stages of the research, when the descritpiton of these events relied on only a handful of admittedly unreliable source, I had to take that possibility seriously. But as time went on and the number and diversity of sources increased, the likelihood of a concerted, organized disinformation campaign dwindled. At some point, I had to ask myself why all of these individuals might have decided to propagate false statements, and how they had managed to coordinate their stories. Most of these men did not know one another, and those who had met or talked at some pont in the past frequently distrusted one another. Most of them did not come forward of their own accord to publicize this story. On the contrary, most of them were discovered only as the result of persisten digging by journalists and researchers. To believe that there was an orchestrated effort to plant these individuals in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, and that each was supplied with the same false story, required a considerable leap of imagination -- a grand conspiracy theory to counter a conspiracy theory. Is it easier to believe that all of these sources surreptitiously coordinated their stories to create trouble for the Reagan and Bush administrations, or alternatively, that each of these sources may be telling the truth (or pieces of the truth) as perceived on the basis of his own personal background and personal experience? The answer seems obvious: The chance that these sources are telling their version of the truth is much higher than the chance they are all lying in concert. These sources seemed to be describing the same event, albeit from different perspectives, rather than merely improvising a description based on sketchy published accounts.

In the absence of convincing corroboration, however, I have reserved judgment. For example, several reports have surfaced claiming that vice-presidential candidate George Bush was present at least briefly in Paris during the course of negotiations in October. I have always been incomfortable about this allegation. There was little reason for a vice-presidential candidate to take such an extreme risk at the very peak of a political campaign. Besides, it would have been difficult for any candidate to slip away from his campaign responsibilities, not to mention his Secret Service protection, for a transatlantic flight. Even if the Iranians insistend on very high-level personal assurances as part of the final agreement, which would be entirely characteristic of Iranian bargaining style, surely someone would have been found to stand in for the candidate.

I was also aware that the allegation about Bush might have been deliberately floated in order to discredit the story. An effective way to divert attention from what really happened is to invent a sensational story and send the media scurrying off on a wild-goose chase. That is essentially what happened in the Iran-Contra Affair, where all journalistic resources and public attention were fixated on the question of whether the President knew about the diversion of Iranian arms-sales profits to the Nicaraguan contras. When that could not be proved, because the original memos with identifying signatures had been destroyed and because Admiral Poindexter testifeid that "the buck stopped here, with me," the entire congressional case came to an end. Other important constitutional and legal issues simply faded into the background or were shunted off to the special prosecutor's office.

When the "October surprise" story first received wide publicity in 1988, much of the media attention was devoted to the question of whether or not George Bush had been in Paris. When the evidence proved to be ambiguous, and especially after Bush won the 1988 presidential election, the entire story was shelved.

We gotta get to the nut grafs, the finale..... (p 226-228)

In the end, it is irrelevant whether Bush went to Paris or whether Reagan approved or knew of the deal. The critical question is whether representatives of a political party out of power secretly, and illegally, negotiated with representatives of a hostile foreign power, thereby distorting or undermining the efforts of the legitimate government. Even today, more than a decade later, it is still difficult to imagine that an opposition political faction in the United States would employ such tactics, willfully prolonging the imprisonment of fifty-two American citizens for partisan political gain. Nevertheless, that is what occurred: the Reagan-Bush campaign mounted a professionally organized intelligence operation to subvert the American democratic process.

We are accustomed to the petty scandals of Washington politics: A candidate for high office is a lush or a compulsive womanizer; a member of Congress diverts campaign funds to a private account; an official lies to cover up an embarrassing policy failure. These are misdeeds on a human scale, and these miscreants who are unfortunate enough or careless enough to get caught are pilloried and punished by the press and their peers in periodic cleansings. We regard such rituals with a certain satisfaction, evidence of our democracy at work.

There is another category of offenses, described by the French poet André Chenier as "les crimes puissants qui font trembler les lois," crimes so great that they make the laws themselves tremble. We know what to do with someone caught misappropriating funds, but when confronted with evidence of a systematic attempt to undermine the political system itself, we recoil in a general failure of imagination and nerve.

We understand the motives of a thief, even if we despise them. But few of us have ever been exposed to the seductions of power on a grand scale and we are unlikely to have given serious thought to the rewards of political supremacy, much less to how it might be achieved. We know that groups and individuals covet immense power for personal or ideological reasons, but we suppose that these ambitions usually will be pursued within the confines of the laws and values of our society and democratic political system. If not, we assume we will recognize the transgressions early enough to protect ourselves.

Those who operate politically beyond the law, if they are deft and determined, benefit from our often false sense of confidence. There is a natural presumption, even among the politically sophisticated, that "no one would do such a thing." Most observers are predisposed toward disbelief, and therefore may be willing to disregard evidence and to construct alternative explanations for events that seem too distasteful to believe. This all-too-human propensity provides a margin of safety for what would otheriwse be regarded as immensely risky undertakings.

Illegitimate political covert actions are attempts to alter the disposition of power. Since all of politics involves organized contention over the disposition of power, winners can be expected to maintain that they were only playing the game, while those who complain about their opponents' methods are likely to be dismissed as sore losers. Even if suspicions arose, the charges are potentially so grave that most individuals will be reluctant to give public credence to allegations in the absence of irrefutable evidence. The need to produce a "smoking gun" has become a precondition for responsible reporting of political grand larceny. The participants in political covert actions understand this and take pains to cover their tracks, so the chance of turning up incontrovertible documentation of wrongdoing--such as the White House tapes in the Watergate scandal--is thin.

This leads to a journalistic dilemma. In the absence of indisputable evidence, the mainstream media --themselves large commercial institutions with close ties to the political and economic establishment -- are hesitant to declare themselves on matter of great political gravity. The so-called alternative media are less reluctant, but they are too easily dismissed as irresponsible. By the time the mainstream media are willing to lend their names and reputations to a story of political covert action, the principal elements of the story have almost always been reported long before in the alternative media, where they were studiously ignored.

When the Iran-Contra scandal exploded in 1986, both the Congress and the media pulled up short. Neither had the stomach for the kind of national trauma that would have resulted from articles of impeachment being delivered against a popular President who was in his last two years of office. So, when it could not be proven conclusively that the President saw the "smoking gun" in the case--a copy of the memo to Reagan reporting in matter-of-fact terms that proceeds of Iranian arms sales were being diverted to the Nicaraguan contras-- the nation seemed to utter a collective sigh of relief. (The original memo, bearing the signatures of those who had seen it, had been deliberately destroyed.) The laws trembled at the prospect of a political trial that could shatter the compact of trust between rulers and ruled, a compact that was the foundation upon which the laws themselves rested. The lesson seemed to be that accountability declines as the magnitude of the offense and the power of those charged increase.

The ultimate dilemma, which Chenier captured so perfectly in his comment on the revolutionary politics of eighteenth-century France, is the effect of very high stakes. A run-of-the-mill political scandal can safely be exposed without affecting anyone other than the culprits and their immediate circle. A covert political coup, however, like the one engineered by Casey in 1980, challenges the legitimacy of the political order; it deliberately exploits weaknesses in the political immune system and risks infecting the entire organism of state and society. Such a virus of secrecy and subterfuge would permeate the Reagan administration and would culminate in the Iran-Contra Affair, the contours of which bore an uncanny resemblance to Casey's 1980 deal to swap arms for hostages. One of the more puzzling aspects of the Iran-Contra Affair was the Reagan administration's dogged pursuit of a deal in the face of repeated Iranian demands. Yet Reagan's men refused to take no for an answer. The reason now seems plain: The same parties had cut a deal once before.

The weight of the evidence speaks for itself - and the establishment arms/drugs/coverup pattern is damn thick. You can't wrap your head around the JFK assassination, 9/11, other weird political events, without taking into account the real substrate of covert operations, 'perception management' AKA PSYOPS, and the dumb rules that control Washington journalists.

After trekking through the murky wasteland of mirrors, I cannot help but reach the conclusion that the extended cloud of covert activities behind Iran-Contra makes up a totally pivotal - and misunderstood - episode of American political history. The history isn't even past. In order to process the ugly stack that makes up today's political perceptions, the old affairs have to finally get digested.

As long as the rules of the game stay this way, Iran-Contra will never be seen as a complete mesh, the opening episode of total mindwar domination, total PSYOPS, the surrender of Beltway journalism, the death of that heady Woodward-Bernstein take-em-on era.

Oliver North has his TV show, we have the Internets. One of them will finally win.

In the words of Al Martin, a self-described "fourth-level player" in Iran-Contra,

"Iran-Contra is still alive."

New Atmosphere album; Twine.com helps me analyze CIA Iran-Contra narcotics conspiracy networks!

I've been so damn busy these days, writing anything interesting for good ol Hongpong.com has been pretty much set aside.

It's a really weird political season, hell, around here it's been a weird weather season. There was freezing rain all over my car on Friday night. It's already the end of April. It's probably a good thing that I haven't been puttering around blogging and obsessing over what's on the Internet. That shit gets tiresome!

Can't Mess With The Atmos: I got the new Atmosphere album, "When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That S*** Gold", and it's damn good. Slug dropped damn near all the bombast, now he's just trying to tell us kids to pay the bills and get it together... Be sure to check out their awesome "Paint it Gold" webcasts - they have been really excellent.

Visit the "not Google Killer Google Killer": Twine.com: Quite a while ago I mentioned the interesting Twine.com project, which lets you add all your own bookmarks/notes/videos/etc into a big online repository, kind of like Del.icio.us plus Facebook.
Basically you can cluster your areas of interest by setting up "Twines" of semantically tagged content. Most interestingly, you can upload huge chunks of text and PDFs, and it will automatically scan through and pull out the names and organizations involved.
Finally I got the 'beta invite' to join Twine, and of course I dumped in as much hard Iran-Contra conspiracy evidence text I had laying around. Add a few bookmarks, and Twine went crazy all over the stuff, indexing all the CIA drug dealers, locales and front companies of interest. Verdict: Fantastic conspiracy data mining!
Look at all the Conspiracy Entity Names it automatically spit out (in orange at right) when I put in the famed CIA Limited Hangout Frederick Hitz report on "Allegations of connections between CIA and Contras in cocaine trafficking to the United States." Contrary to popular belief, you can still read this report on the CIA's website (with some alterations). twine-iran-contra-analysis.png
If anyone else would like an invitation to try Twine, plz send me an email @ hongpong AT hongpong.com ! Use data mining to exp0se the stuff! Oh noooes!!

Random links: The latest Systemic Margin Call; Russians blame 85% of Afghanistan opium on American aviation!

Or also, from the last several days...

Clinton_Plan.jpg

Political Punch: Liberal bloggers sayin Clinton ads darken Obama. Some others say it is a YouTube artifact effect.

Atmosphere released a free MP3 from the next album.

Hillary, Obama and the Establishment Machine | The Agonist

Hm. Definitely interesting: The Man Between War and Peace, Admiral Fallon.

Cuban Cyber Rebels and their flash drives and blogs! Viva Cuba flashdriva!

Smashing Magazine has nice design and free fonts.

io9 has random sci fi stuff. cool design too.

When in doubt, check out the Gary Webb video @ Archive.org, late in his life reflecting on the whole Los Angeles CIA crack cocaine thingy.

Global Guerillas is pretty buzzwordy, but it's pretty good. For your daily dose of super-modern open source insurgent warfare, extortion through DDoS - both Russian and Botnet variants, the imminent insect techno-eschaton, and how one super-empowered individual guerilla Henry Okah has brought Nigeria into total chaos and propelled oil over $100 a barrel. This Robb guy is definitely paying attention. National security bureaucracies are doomed?! Not if they can hoard up their own very biggest bestest haystack!

Meanwhile the economic crash continues apace. Much hand-wringing at one of my favorite spots, the Agonist . Wheat is over $12/bushel.

Buffett: it's a recession, stupid.

Banks face systemic margin call, $325 billion hit: JP Morgan!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street banks are facing a "systemic margin call" that may deplete banks of $325 billion of capital due to deteriorating subprime U.S. mortgages, JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N:Quote, Profile, Research), said in a report late on Friday.

JPMorgan, which sent a default notice to Thornburg Mortgage Inc. (TMA.N: Quote,Profile, Research) after the lender missed a $28 million margin call, said more default notices and margin calls were likely. The Carlyle Group's mortgage fund also failed to meet $37 million in margin calls this week.

"A systemic credit crunch is underway, driven primarily by bank writedowns for subprime mortgages," according to the report co-authored by analyst Christopher Flanagan. "We would characterize this situation as a systemic margin call."

The credit crisis that began about a year ago will likely intensify after Friday's weak February U.S. employment report "that most definitely signals recession," JPMorgan said.

Bush Family Piggy Bank Receives Default Notice! | The Agonist

The best news I have heard is the insane bastards in Florida who have taken advantage of the crashed system. They are sitting in their homes, paying nothing at all, waiting for the totally conked court system to struggle with the lost paperwork at every level of the mortgage. An awesome thing to behold!! The Big Picture | Foreclosure-proof Homeowners:

What is shocking, that in each and every case, I have been told by brokers and banks that the owners, have ceased paying their mortgages in some cases for nearly 2 years and have continued to occupy these homes. Now, these are homes in excess of $2,000,000 in the very best neighborhoods in South Florida. Brokers have added that these buyers further complicated things by putting huge home equity lines on top of their mortgages and now have no possibility of selling their homes for amounts needed to cover their accumulated debt.

America is amazing. Ok.

Bloomberg.com Citigroup needs Arab cash, fast!!!! Rlly fast!!!

Russians pissed off about American/Pakistani opium smuggling support in Afghanistan: (via cryptogon)

Narco Aggression: Russia accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan by Vladimir Radyuhin

Global Research, February 24, 2008: Global Research Editor's Note

The global proceeds of the Afghan drug trade is in excess of 150 billion dollars a year. There is mounting evidence that this illicit trade is protected by the US military.

Historically, starting in the early 1980s, the Afghan drug trade was used to finance CIA covert support of the Islamic brigades. The 2003 war on Afghanistan was launched following the Taliban government's 2000-2001 drug eradication program which led to a collapse in opium production in excess of 90 percent.

The following report, which accuses the United States of using military transport planes to ship narcotics out of Afghanistan confirms what is already known and documented regarding the Golden Crescent Drug Trade and its insiduous relationship to US intelligence.

February 23, 2008

Russia, facing a catastrophic rise in drug addiction, accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking from Afghanistan.....

....“Unfortunately, they [NATO] are doing nothing to reduce the narcotic threat from Afghanistan even a tiny bit,” Putin angrily remarked three years ago. He accused the coalition forces of “sitting back and watching caravans haul drugs across Afghanistan to the former Soviet Union and Europe.” As time went by, Russian suspicions regarding the U.S. role in the rise of a narco state in Afghanistan grew deeper, especially after reports from Iraq said that the cultivation of opium poppies was spreading rapidly there too.

“The Americans are working hard to keep narco business flourishing in both countries,” says Mikhail Khazin, president of the consultancy firm Niakon. “They consistently destroy the local infrastructure, pushing the local population to look for illegal means of subsistence. And the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] provides protection to drug trafficking.”

U.S. freelance writer Dave Gibson recalled in an article published in American Chronicle in December what a U.S. foreign intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told NewsMax.com in March 2002 of the CIA’s record of involvement with the international drug trade. The official said: “The CIA did almost the identical thing during the Vietnam War, which had catastrophic consequences – the increase in the heroin trade in the USA beginning in the 1970s is directly attributable to the CIA. The CIA has been complicit in the global drug trade for years, so I guess they just want to carry on their favourite business.”

AFP

(A USAF cargo plane takes off from the U.S. airbase in Incirlik in Turkey in March 2003. A Russian news channel reported that drugs from Afghanistan were hauled by American transport aircraft to the U.S. airbases in Kyrgyzstan and Turkey.)

Now Russia has joined the fray accusing the U.S. military of involvement in the heroin trafficking from Afghanistan to Europe. The Vesti channel’s report from Afghanistan said that drugs from Afghanistan were hauled by American transport aircraft to the U.S. airbases Ganci in Kyrgyzstan and Incirlik in Turkey.

The Ganci Air Force base at the Manas international airport in Kyrgyzstan was set up in late 2001 as a staging post for military operations inside Afghanistan. The Kyrgyz government threatened to close the base after neighbouring Uzbekistan shut down a similar U.S. airbase on its territory in 2005, but relented after Washington agreed to make a one-off payment of $150 million in the form of an assistance package and to pay $15 million a year for the use of the base.

One of the best-informed Russian journalists on Central Asia, Arkady Dubnov, recently quoted anonymous Afghan sources as saying that “85 per cent of all drugs produced in southern and southeastern provinces are shipped abroad by U.S. aviation.”

A well-informed source in Afghanistan’s security services told the Russian journalist that the American military acquired drugs through local Afghan officials who dealt with field commanders in charge of drug production.

Writing in the Vremya Novostei daily, Dubnov claimed that the pro-Western administration of President Hamid Karzai, including his two brothers, Kajum Karzai and Akhmed Vali Karzai, are head-to-heels involved in the narcotics trade.

The article quoted a leading U.S. expert on Afghanistan, Barnett Rubin, as telling an anti-narcotics conference in Kabul last October that “drug dealers had infiltrated Afghani state structures to the extent where they could easily paralyse the work of the government if decision to arrest one of them was ever made.”

Sure, they can say the Russians are grumbling like usual. But from Moscow's perspective, the U.S. is just trying to keep on top of all the Players in the Game. And they run the Wire all over the whole territory, so they know exactly who is doing what where, and can watch the opium caravans go cruising by. The fact that this doesn't track in American conventional wisdom is a monument to the intentional ignorance of Baby Boomers, regardless of how accurate the Russians are here.

The planes, the drugs, the detainees, it all seems to be part of a nexus of secret military/DHS contractor airlines. These guys are soooo 1980s. The ponzi scheme depends on information asymmetry, which can always be disrupted......

NSA/FBI fun; Spook 411 prank: Cryptome lists all damn fake White House/CIA/NSA phone numbers; Obama/Hillary Denver fight fantasy

Three examples of American political culture in 2008.

First, the latest efforts of the NSA to read my email and discover its exciting secrets. (Hayden's Haystacks: Chilling Effects and Fluffy Data Goodness...)

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Well well, we got a couple funny things which are probably Too Hot To link to - or something. I don't get it...

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This is pretty funny, but first I need to take note of their latest plans to spy on everybody... Wait... first, let's go back a couple years... These guys have such a great sense of humor.

I think this latest prank tops that Total Information Awareness logo in complete Maximum Conspiracy Irony. Back in the day...

2002: 'Mythical Evil Conspiracy Irony from the Establishment': We never thought anything would top the 'all seeing pyramid staring at Mideast.' But this is the Federal Government! They are Creative!

IAO-logo.png

Fortunately the big pyramid is still up-n-beamin' around with it's Data Mining Sunshine and, yes, they are chucking all your emails and credit card transactions into the big Vortex. What were you expecting, punk?

The Wall Street Journal puts on their tinfoil hat to give us some nice radio waves: Via Cryptogon: NSA’s Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data:

Wall Street Journal: NSA’s Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data; Terror Fight Blurs Line Over Domain;Tracking Email By SIOBHAN GORMAN; March 10, 2008; Page A1

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system. The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence gathering has never been publicly disclosed. But an inquiry reveals that its efforts have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people’s communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Largely missing from the public discussion is the role of the highly secretive NSA in analyzing that data, collected through little-known arrangements that can blur the lines between domestic and foreign intelligence gathering. Supporters say the NSA is serving as a key bulwark against foreign terrorists and that it would be reckless to constrain the agency’s mission. The NSA says it is scrupulously following all applicable laws and that it keeps Congress fully informed of its activities.

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called “transactional” data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA’s own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge’s approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.

The NSA’s enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light. They include a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world’s main international banking clearinghouse to track money movements.

The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called “black programs” whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.

It isn’t clear how many of the different kinds of data are combined and analyzed together in one database by the NSA. An intelligence official said the agency’s work links to about a dozen antiterror programs in all....

But wait! Folks, it gets better. All they gotta do is Wire in your phone number to all the others!

Social-Network Analysis

The NSA uses its own high-powered version of social-network analysis to search for possible new patterns and links to terrorism. The Pentagon’s experimental Total Information Awareness program, later renamed Terrorism Information Awareness, was an early research effort on the same concept, designed to bring together and analyze as much and as many varied kinds of data as possible. Congress eliminated funding for the program in 2003 before it began operating. But it permitted some of the research to continue and TIA technology to be used for foreign surveillance.

Some of it was shifted to the NSA — which also is funded by the Pentagon — and put in the so-called black budget, where it would receive less scrutiny and bolster other data-sifting efforts, current and former intelligence officials said. “When it got taken apart, it didn’t get thrown away,” says a former top government official familiar with the TIA program.

Two current officials also said the NSA’s current combination of programs now largely mirrors the former TIA project. But the NSA offers less privacy protection. TIA developers researched ways to limit the use of the system for broad searches of individuals’ data, such as requiring intelligence officers to get leads from other sources first. The NSA effort lacks those controls, as well as controls that it developed in the 1990s for an earlier data-sweeping attempt.

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who led the charge to kill TIA, says “the administration is trying to bring as much of the philosophy of operation Total Information Awareness as it can into the programs they’re using today.” The issue has been overshadowed by the fight over telecoms’ immunity, he said. “There’s not been as much discussion in the Congress as there ought to be.”...

Oh yeh let's put in another tasty WSJ nibble about how the Posse Comitatus Act never covered how the Military would build the SuperOrwell HAL FBI Fishing Expedition Big Brother 2008 model...

FBI-NSA Projects

The NSA quietly redefined its role. Joint FBI-NSA projects “expanded exponentially,” said Jack Cloonan, a longtime FBI veteran who investigated al Qaeda. He pointed to national-security letter requests: They rose from 8,500 in 2000 to 47,000 in 2005, according to a Justice Department inspector general’s report last year. It also said the letters permitted the potentially illegal collection of thousands of records of people in the U.S. from 2003-05. Last Wednesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller said the bureau had found additional instances in 2006.....

Alright, so these guys are tracking all transactions, yet they can't find where the drug money goes. It just gets away every fucking time!

And just to drive the point home, the guys that specialized in the drug trafficking networks back in the 1980s get honored in a whole new way, somewhere deep in the Data System....

Now, for something completely different. But also not. Our second awesome story...

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According to the spy-exposure-weird-shit site Cryptome.org, a ton of 'telephone pseudonyms and true names' were listed at 411.com for a secret CIA phone number. That is, a ton of joke and real entries all assigned to (703) 482-1100, a CIA number in McLean Virginia.

Somehow 10,000+ records got assigned many-to-one to one phone number. Just for the CIA.

And better yet, a huge swath of the names are fucking pranks. Pranks about favorite names in the Conspiracy.

2008: 'Yes, the CIA put in all the best conspiracy names onto their own damn 411 reverse phone number lookup, just to piss me off!!!'
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THIS IS TOO MUCH!!! OMG!!!! There are another 9980 fake names drawn from the great fabric of American spy conspiracy lore. Barry Seal has his place (or several). As we posted 11 months ago:

200803110131.jpg

"William Buckley" has three listed CIA phone numbers @ (703) 482-1100. Don't these guys have something better to do? God damn, 'Ahmad Chelebi' is also listed @ (703) 482-1100. And 'Libby Plame.' and 'Laiffaire Plame'. And 'Judith Plame.' And Richard Secord. and Jose Rodriguez. And felix rodriguez. And Barry Seal. And Adler Seal. Covert Ops, the Skull & Bones days, all kinds of stuff. Maybe 'real names' of current people too? Put out onto the Web's 411 system? Really?

Cryptome

White House Telephone Nyms and Names

10,751 CIA Telephone Nyms and Names

4,151 NSA Telephone Nyms and Names. More aboot that last one: NSA Telephone Pseudonyms and Names: About 4,151 NSA telephone pseudonyms and true names are available via http://switchboard.intelius.com through a reverse telephone number look-up for (301) 688-0400. Some names are humorous ("Lawrence Waterhousespy," "Bin Laden") or ironic ("Hayden Lied," "Odom Warns"); others are spoofs: "Justin Rood" is the name of a national security journalist for CQ.com......

A2 provides a full index of the 10,751 CIA nyms and names, linked to Google Search for each name:

http://cryptome.org/cia-nyms-idx.htm

All right kids, now that we are really on a roll...

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Rumors of Denver Democratic National Convention deadlock to Hillary => Really pissed off Hordes vs. the Hacks? What would happen if the Hillary people went all the way to the convention and somehow ganked the nomination? Rick Perlstein passed along some emails from people comparing it to Chicago '68.

However, this kind of fucked up violent incident isn't going to happen at the Democratic National Convention, but its pretty likely to expect a lot more of Raving Loonies in Emails getting treated as proof that the end is near. Chaos looms etc. Doom memes are self reproducing!

I think it's a good example of... political science fiction, showing how people's fantasies play out in an imagined reality. Stuff like this generates an atmosphere of tension and can be used to basically troll. It's just like everything else on the Internet. combine Obama + Battle in Seattle fantasies... Huffington Post: Some Apocalyptic Observations on the Democratic Nomination Fight from Here on Out:

A young friend who lives in a small town in a rural state sent me the following observation today:

If the Clintons push for the win in Denver, they're going to split the goddamn party down the middle. I read your chapter on 1968 Chicago, obviously. I'm of the generation who supports Obama. I know what we're like. Shit, I know what I'm like.



Rick, if the Machine tries to give the Clintons the victory at the convention, I swear to God, Chicago's going to look like a Sadie Hawkins dance. People my age are going to be throwing stones. We all have transportation -- cell phones -- disposable income -- the Internet -- free time -- and Seattle as our example. Part of me is scared of a riot. Part of me isn't. The nomination belongs to Obama. Do you think we're going to let the Democratic Leadership Council take it? "God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time."

and then the ominous Iraq vet reference... A different guy who works inside the Democratic Party somewhere told Rick Perlstein:

Not to mention that there's going to be a significant Iraq veteran contingent at the convention, ready to rock 'n' roll. We've already had planning meetings about it -- we're going about it the same way that we would plan any decent military operation.... I can't emphasize enough how potentially scary things could get -- we've got folks working on the inside of the convention, and it's all done on a cell basis, so that folks only know what they need to know.

I feel like you'd get too many hits from the Man over this kind of material. On a day like today, why not?********Well, I would say that these three elements - building the Big Brother Machine, the CIA's own prank phone index, and the fantasies of militant anti-Hillaryites, it reminds me of why American political culture has that certain outrageous, cowboy, bravado thing. Read all the emails! Why not?! Are ya... yellow?!
The British are way too half-assed to have a country where such utter bullshit holds forth. That's America!

Another linkdump for today; the I-35W collapse conspiracies! NAFTA Superhwy news spreads all over!

Whichever day that is. In these dark months, you get the drift of active time, as your circadian rhythms get farther and farther from the intervals of natural light.

At least, I sure do, since my job does not require me to show up anywhere at a certain time every day (besides at my computer to send out the Morning Report).

Start here: Lolcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures - I Can Has Cheezburger? Incredible.

WIRED: Phone and email data mining used on War on Drugs. Surprise! AT&T invents a new programming language to parse mass data mining streams, dubbed Hancock.

The always-excellent Cryptogon changed its banner to a NATO tank behind some opium poppies, which is about as apt a geopolitical symbol as you ever need these days.

Hard Times Cafe in Cedar-Riverside is BACK!

So here are a bunch of links to spice your day: Informed Comment: Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2007.

The Charlie Wilson Afghan adventure movie: pretty awesome.

I feel sorry for Pakistan, which was a mistake anyway. What Bhutto's Death Means and Al Qaeda is not taking credit for it. This is big.

Daily Kos: FISA, SCHMISA: DHS Eye in the Sky ready to spy on Americans Related!: TwinCities.com - Inherent powers, ignoble history make new idea anything but innocuous: The Thought Crime thing and also DHS Finalizing Spy Satellite Program To Watch Americans Without Congressional Oversight.

Go here and put in funny searches. You will be amused: CIA FOIA - Overview. Putting in "Barry Seal" is what got me in trouble!

NAFTA Superhighway skepticism dominates leftie interwebs: The existing left-wing blogosphere wisdom is very skeptical: ‘There’s no such thing as a proposed NAFTA Superhighway’ - The Carpetbagger Report

The whole idea was considered bullshit propped up by Jerome Corsi, at least along the left. Example: Crooks and Liars » The NAFTA Superhighway doesn’t exist and ‘There’s no such thing as a proposed NAFTA Superhighway’ - The Carpetbagger Report and Rumors of a Superhighway - New York Times Blog. Also Matthew Yglesias, same thing: Aug 13, 2007 - The Highway That Wasn't there supporting The Nation's skepticism. But there are also impressively ugly 'tinfoil' sites like this one: NAFTA FLAG.

Here are some other random threads about the subject: NAFTA Super HighWay - Canada links to Mexico! - Canada/US Relations - CKA and NAFTA Superhighway - Ready to shit your pants?, and Anomaly Television » Is the North American Union Conspiracy Theory Really Real? Also, Aftermath News had Campaign of mass-deception exposed over NAU-NAFTA Superhighway agenda.

Interestingly, Wikipedia Nafta Super Highway goes to Trans Texas Corridor! Trans-Texas Corridor - Wikipedia.

This seems to be from the same docs that I put out there: Sound Of Cannons: Money From The SuperCorridor: Already Falling Into The Elite's Hands

The latest popular item is: WorldNetDaily: North-of-border link finishes NAFTA superhighway grid

Fake Christians: NAFTA Highway is Holy. This is weirding people out.

So here are just some of the places that the MnDOT docs I got out there ended up:

Oddly it got into what appears to be a White Supremacist forum Vanguard News Network: there are a lot of angry signatures about the Jews... Yeck. New NAFTA NASCO Superhighway Docs released from MnDOT: The whole plan - Vanguard News Network Forum

The grand list of misc Corridor Watch North American Union activists (weirdos?) etc: For your reference!

The I-35W collapse conspiracies! I really have nothing new on this but wanted to put the links anyway. I-35W bridge theories collapse « Mysterious Universe

Don the Drug Smuggling Cowboy.

I received a total of fifteen years for my crimes. Under current law, it would have been much more, perhaps in the neighborhood of twenty years, and I would not be eligible for parole. My children grew up without a father and bear the scars even today.

I think it fair to say that none of us emerged from this business unscathed.

I think it is also fair to say that we all – the smugglers, the dealers and the whores – have been replaced, and that a similar or worse fate awaits the present day crowd involved in the business. And then they will be replaced.

Don Henry Ford is really cool. He wrote stories about his times as a drug smugglin Iran Contra cowboy. And tells everyone good stories @ the Agonist. All right: Cinco Puntos Press: Portrait of a dope-smuggling cowboy by NarcoNews

Speir Publishing runs the fictional account.

Cinco Puntos Press: CONTRABANDO: Confessions of a Drug-Smuggling Texas Cowboy

Reviewed: Austin Chronicle:

He spent seven years smuggling marijuana into the United States over the border from Mexico and somehow lived to write about it. From the dusty streets of dirt-poor mountain villages to the gleaming corruption of the American justice system, Don Henry Ford paints a picture of a business where no hands are clean – it’s that old song about the war nobody wins, only this time it’s being played out of a beat-up old truck as it heads north filled with dope. All but bankrupted after a failed attempt at cotton farming in the 1970s but in possession of an indomitable work ethic and a fierce desire for self-determination, Ford slips into the role of drug smuggler with a nonchalance (“This is too damned easy”) and an audacity you have to marvel at: He just dreams it up and does it, headfirst all the way. Temerity, Ford demonstrates time and again, is the one compulsory attribute of the drug smuggler, and the one he’s most blessed with. The really remarkable thing about Ford and his book isn’t so much the experiences he’s had – his stories probably aren’t all that dissimilar from those of 10,000 of his colleagues – but rather the humanity and philosophical distance he maintains while having them. His sympathy for the plight of the working poor and disenfranchised, regardless of class, color, or country; his distaste for the indifference of the rich and the laws that favor them; his ability to step back and view the larger universe of the war on drugs, and his role in it, through the lens of a class-conscious, homegrown philosophy: They all mark him as a decent man, regardless of his occupation or criminal record. And I’d be willing to guess this kind of sympathy and awareness is rare among those who traffic in illegal narcotics, rarer even than it is among those who don’t. Don Henry Ford’s no saint and no Robin Hood but at the same time, those expecting the self-indulgent confessions of an unrepentant outlaw will be disappointed: Ford’s harder on himself than the legal system and the drug lords ever were. And it’s to his credit that in a business built on dehumanization, he managed to retain his humanity and conscience and see beyond himself to something larger.

And the Austin American Statesman too.

Repossessin' Texas--a review by the author :)

***** MISC LINKS TIME! *****

RNC Protest news for St. Paul 2008: See UnconventionalAction.org . Shh!

Useful: a large set of embedded social bookmarking HTML codes. Slashdot badges. Digg HTML embeds.

SoCal anarchists inherently a fire hazard -> Shutdown!

Cool graphic novels of 2007 - Salon.

For paranoias check out the Main Page - TinWiki.org: the first full-feature Wiki dedicated exclusively to all the topics that inspires the authors to consider "Tin foil hats". Topics such as conspiracy theories, UFO cover ups,extraterrestrial programs, New World Order, Illuminati, secret government programs, top secret bases, and nearly any other "alternative topic" that would cause paranoid fear of the government reprisals, wire taps, and email monitoring are the focus of this collaborative Wiki.

Bear Sterns reaps what they sow.

The war on greed! We Need A War On Greed.

These so-called Al Qaedas in Iraq are by and large from Saudi Arabia according to West Point. What a surprise.

Wall Street like a cockroach - interesting ideas here.

Journalism today! In cartoon form.

Fimoculous.com - misc - Best Blogs of 2007 That You (Maybe) Aren't Reading by the guy that Started Mnspeak. Admittedly I have never heard of many of these blogs but they sounded good. MeFi was snarky on it: Best Blogs of 2007 That You (Maybe) Aren't Readin | MetaTalk

This seemed like a weird site, which had crossposted the SRI thing but also features news about Solar X-Rays in badge form: Scientists on Acid: The Story Behind “Changing Images of Man”

Anonymous email services have been bought out by the NSA. Someone on Digg said "Poor big brother is going to have to read a shitload of Viagra ads." Hah.

Air America Notebooks very complete.

This story has NOTHING to do with ANYTHING: 2,600 Pages of Clinton Records Withheld: These nothings: Barry Seal, Air Contra, and Mena Airport - Ambrose Evans-Pritchard [Free Republic]. Also: Political Friendster - Rose Law Firm - Connections and Political Friendster - Mena, Arkansas 1980's Narcotics Ring - Connections Awesome LOLS!

Best of The MadCowMorningNews:

Kroll makes Blackwater look like wimps

Onion's worst band names of 2007 included local Gay Witch Abortion!

This seemed nuts.

About the NIE - the day the spooks cancelled the Iran war: Cool review in the Guardian. Neo-cons attack. Annapolis Iran schemes noted by ex-CIA honcho Phil Giraldi. The quiet counter-coup.

St. Paul real estate blog.

Say no to GMOs: wow! Klebsiella Planticola almost killed the earth! Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms.

Inside the CIA's notorious black sites.

AFRICOM: the Pentagon's new African fishing expedition.

Link was dropped before: Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation.

The Clusterfuck Nation: Jim Kunstler is the dude when it comes to vaguely apocalyptic visions of social collapse and such. He's The Long Emergency guy. Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler : A Christmas Eve Story

Making Sense of Ethanol and Related Fuels. | The Agonist

I was advised by someone to look at: John Taylor Gatto - Challenging the Myths of Modern Schooling

Sic Semper Tyrannis 2007: Habakkuk on the neocons' use of intelligence. Very old school.

Get Familiar with Zbigniew Brzezinski // Skilluminati Research

Interest Rate Freeze: Real Story Is Fraud

I just thought this was funny: Bill Clinton Joined Masons When He Was 15

Some stuff: The Dark Face of Populism: Why Paul and Huckabee have had a dramatic rise | The Agonist. I had some rambly response to this.

For the space cadet in all of us: Doug Yurchey's World of Tomorrow

I read this guy's book: DOD Plan: 21st Century Global Police Force

Psychotropic Drug Use Skyrockets 400%

Fun stuff: ROGUEGOVERNMENT.COM - Exposing Government Corruption and the New World Order including CIA Fights Terror With GI Joe Action Figures

The Indypendent » The RAND Corp: Here, There, Everywhere

The planned collapse of America. Why not?

I liked this guy's style: The Bwog: Blogging AIPAC: part one of two and part two of two.

HAARP: The Men who Control the Weather (and vibrated 35W to bits!):

All right, pretty weird stuff. Thanks for joining us!

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