The Last Circle: Welcome to the Spookloop

“Nothing is as it appears to be.”


-Robert Booth Nichols


Be patient, spread the word among friends, do your little bit. The system will self-destruct because it is funded on corruption and untruth.


-Anthony Sutton

 

It was evident that when the body of freelance writer Danny Casolaro was found in a bathtub of bloody water on August 10, 1991, his wrists deeply slashed multiple times that it was already a highly unusual ‘suicide’. That he was in the final stages of wrapping up his investigation of an association of mobsters, government officials and rogue intelligence figures grown out of a dirty CIA “Old Boy network that he had dubbed The Octopus and that his body was discovered in a Martinsburg, West Virginia hotel room where he had gone to pick up the final piece of evidence for his story made his death all the more suspicious. The fact that his briefcase and files (always present during his work) were missing, his body prematurely and illegally embalmed prior to the notification of his family and room 517 of the Martinsburg Sheraton professionally cleaned, making any sort of law enforcement forensic investigation prohibitive are not signs that would indicate a typical suicide. Casolaro, according to sources was not despondent but rather quite elated that his investigation was nearing completion when he had made the trip to “bring back the head of the octopus” where he was reportedly set to meet a key figure and to trade information that he had in his possession. There was a ‘suicide’ note found at the scene but it was short and cryptic, not what a professional writer would likely leave as his final words. There was however, another piece of paper that was found tucked inside of his discarded shoe that would be far more compelling . The mystery surrounding Casolaro is still to this day unsolved and largely forgotten but through the dedicated work of others who were able to pick up the trail and to continue his research into this most important of matters there have been enough pieces of a very elaborate puzzle put together, and the picture is extremely disturbing.

One of the researchers, who has worked tirelessly over the years, at times under great risk to get the real story is author Cheri Seymour, a California based writer who picked up the baton and carried it further and continued to interview Casolaro’s sources as well as to expand his scope. Her laboriously researched and now completed book entitled The Last Circle (published by Trine Day) was recently released and provides what is to date the most detailed and damning analysis of The Octopus. Seymour provides a fascinating account of events surrounding not only Casolaro’s investigation but also takes a look at the trickery and deceit of figures within the Reagan Department of Justice and the theft of the Inslaw Corporation’s highly sophisticated PROMIS software program. Described as a precursor to artificial intelligence and the highly technical computer systems of today the story of PROMIS would come to figure prominently in many of the most disturbing aspects of our current system of what is at least for the moment, a soft fascism where Big Brother style surveillance and control, financial chicanery of the highest order and the ominous contingency plans for government reactions to potential domestic unrest are ubiquitous yet they remain largely unnoticed by the average American citizen. Thanks to a cunning and relentless shadow government and a controlled media, most have no idea that they are inside of a rapidly closing trap. Seymour’s book, which is subtitled Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into The Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal is a must read for those who truly have a serious understanding that something in this country has gone terribly wrong.

The Last Circle of the title refers to the bottom level of Dante’s pits, the area that is populated by the real scum, those who were traitors to their country, friends and lords; at this point in late 2010 this pit must have a multi-year waiting list given the wanton and systemic criminality in our rotting Empire. For a subject as important as the Casolaro research, the PROMIS software story, The Octopus and the huge reverberations forward into our current and thoroughly corrupt high-tech militarized surveillance state there has been little written outside of dated magazine and newspaper articles and one book. While bits and pieces are scattered throughout many books based on larger subjects such as BCCI and Iran-Contra, Casolaro’s Octupus has only prominently been featured in one book to my knowledge that even attempted to do it justice, Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith’s The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. While a draft internet version of The Last Circle which has been available on the internet for years and has provided invaluable material to serious researchers the completed version of The Last Circle is a must read, not only for the updated additional information but for the large appendix of well over 100 pages of images and documents including some of Danny Casolaro’s own handwritten notes. It is such a detailed and meticulously researched book that it is truly impossible to even begin to do it justice in any sort of short review. I will however try to offer up a high-level overview of the incredible story presented by Cheri Seymour.

The Last Circle begins with the story of how Seymour who was at the time working as a reporter for the Mariposa Gazette came to realize that local law enforcement figures were involved in drug trafficking. The dark, snaking trail that is described runs through our hidden history and corrupted institutions like the roiling river Styx. Cheri Seymour picks up the trail with a bizarre accident during the Queen of England’s 1983 visit to Yosemite National Park when a routine scouting of the Queen’s motorcade route resulted in a head on collision between a local Sheriff’s car and a car driven by members of the U.S. Secret Service. The accident resulted in the deaths of three Secret Service agents. The Mariposa County Sheriff’s officer, Sergeant Roderick Sinclair was found to have been under the influence of illegal drugs. Three years prior to the accident, Sinclair also had previously investigated the disappearance and presumed drowning of whistleblower deputy Ron Van Meter, a law officer who had been outraged at having discovered drug trafficking within the department. Cover-ups occurred as they typically do in such matters and Van Meter’s death was attributed to a boating accident (he had borrowed the boat to arrest fellow deputies at Lake McClure), the body was not recovered at the time of the incident. Ten years after the “accident”, his body was recovered, wrapped in a fish net and weighted down by several objects including a fire extinguisher.

Subsequent research revealed that Sinclair had connections and powerful ones at that. His father had been an aide to General Douglas MacArthur, the vaunted WW II leader of forces in the Pacific who became a hero to the more virulent elements of the far right after being dismissed by President Truman during the Korean War. Members of the general’s staff, most prominently Charles Willoughby in the postwar period became integral in the Cold War and the ‘ends justify the means’ ideology that would define the jihad against the Red Menace of Communism that served as blanket justification for immorality and lawlessness from which The Octopus would be birthed. With anti-Communism as a cover and with the postwar creation of the National Security State and the CIA it very quickly became possible for connected insiders to engage in great acts of criminality and atrocity in order to fund off the books operations and enrich themselves while expanding their dark reaches into the global narcotics and drug trade. The fight against Communism provided justification for alliances with former Nazi war criminals who were assisted in escaping justice by U.S. intelligence and then sent to the Eastern Bloc as well as Latin America to protect the ability of U.S. corporations and banking interests to ensure that countries would stay ‘business friendly’ which translates into torture, coups, black ops and most importantly riches. But I am getting ahead of myself.

With growing evidence of the collaboration of local officials and the out of control drug trade that included burgeoning methamphetamine labs and a strange connection through a subsidiary of mega-corporation MCA (the Curry Company was the largest concessions company in Yosemite National Park, hit hard by drug distribution activities at the time); concerned residents of Mariposa County mobilized and attempted to use the legal system to address the very serious problems of illegality that existed. Local groups were formed and lawsuits filed, a letter was written to then President Ronald Reagan by the wife of attorney Ben Wagner who was to represent citizen’s group D.I.G. (Decency in Government) in District Court. In one of the more eerie passages from this very disturbing book Ben Wagner received a response from a “Chuck” at the Reagan White House who scheduled a meeting with him, a secret meeting per White House request. Seymour writes that “However, the day after meeting with “Chuck”, Wagner unplugged his phone and walked out on his law practice and his home in Jackson California, taking nothing with him except his clothes and has wife, never to be seen again”. There are many similar stories of those who have gotten too close to the truth when investigating this intricate web of spooks, mobsters, corrupt government officials and their activities, some have simply disappeared, others have met with strange demises, suspicious accidents and ‘suicides’, the pattern is a consistent one.

Seymour’s investigation led her to a retired FBI agent named Ted Gunderson, a figure who seems to often appear in some of the most sordid and scandalous investigations in recent history who in turn led her to The Octopus. On the basis of earlier material that was provided by Gunderson on the drug trade to the disappeared Wagner for use in the case against drug trafficking cops Seymour called him and a meeting was set up at Gunderson’s home in Manhattan Beach. After the meeting, Gunderson gave the author a series of newspaper clippings and documents, many of which dealt with Danny Casolaro and his investigation of The Octopus. There was also material on Inslaw and PROMIS, Iran-Contra activities, financial scandals including the Savings and Loan crisis and defense contractor the Wackenhut Corporation. The next day Seymour received a collect call from a man named Michael Riconosciuto and he had a tale to tell. Calling from jail in Tacoma, Washington Riconosciuto provided her with the names of people who were in charge of methamphetamine operations in Mariposa and Fresno Counties. When asked who was behind the ring he revealed something much larger and more sinister than would have been imaginable:

“It’s the Company. Arms get shipped to the Contras, the Afghanistan rebels [Mujahaden], the Middle East. You know, to fight the Soviet influence. But the Contras and Mujahaden don’t have the money to pay for the arms, so they pay with drugs, cocaine or heroin. The Company handles the drug end of it in the U.S. …”

The bombshell unleashed by Riconosciuto cut right to the heart of The Octopus, and his entanglements with it were numerous. He divulged that was incarcerated as a result of corrupt Justice Department figures seeking to discredit him for his affidavit provided to Inslaw’s attorney Elliott Richardson for the purpose of providing the House Judiciary Committee that was investigating the theft and illegal modification of Inslaw’s PROMIS software with pertinent. In the affidavit, Riconosciuto admitted that it was he who had modified the software to include a “back door” which would allow for remote users to access information on the host computer. The software, once modified was then sold by Reagan administration cronies to foreign governments where it was used for reasons of espionage. Prior to the affidavit, Riconosciuto had been contacted by a Peter Videnieks of the Justice Department threatening him if he were to cooperate with the Judiciary Committee probe that there would be consequences. Eight days after the affidavit was filed Riconosciuto was arrested for allegedly running a meth lab. Videnieks would himself come under scrutiny in a U.S. Customs Department Internal Affairs probe for potential perjury and other activities. He had also been at DOJ as a contract administrator during the time of the PROMIS theft and modifications and had alleged but never completely proven ties to dirty figures in the Reagan administration.

Riconosciuto stated that he had altered the software largely on the Cabazon Indian Reservation in Indio, California where the Wackenhut Corporation and the tribe had a joint-venture to use the sovereign lands for weapons testing, for sales to Latin America and other overseas destinations. It was a perfect situation, the reservation provided cover for variety of endeavors including the development and testing of arms including a fuel air explosive, biochemical warfare agents and other armaments that could be provided to third world regimes, primarily to right-wing governments in Latin America. It was an oversight free zone and a haven for spooks, paramilitary figures including Contra leaders such as Eden Pastora during Reagan’s dirty wars south of the border during the 1980s. In his book The Crimes of a President , author Joel Bainerman described the reservation as a “CIA cutout” which would be consistent with the type of activities that were conducted there. Riconosciuto was a technical wizard, a child prodigy who at the tender age of 10 had wired his parents neighborhood with a private telephone system and who won numerous science fairs in his youth. A computer expert who at some point became attractive to intelligence figures and who later became a critical figure in the dark trades practiced by the shadowy operatives of the National Security State. Riconosciuto was also a major source for Danny Casolaro.

The story of the PROMIS software, an abbreviation for Prosecutors Management Information System is complicated and full of the sort of intrigue that would normally be found in something like a Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy novel. Developed by Inslaw Corporation’s Bill Hamilton, it was designed as a legal case management tool where cases could be tracked and with over half a million lines of computer code was an innovative and unprecedented piece of high-technology for its time. The program was capable of integrating numerous databases and was to have been sold by Inslaw to the U.S. Department of Justice to replace the antiquated system in use at the time. However, Inslaw’s contract with the government was subverted by corrupt figures within the Reagan Justice Department who conspired with a Reagan and Edwin Meese crony named Earl Brian (long alleged to be associated with the October Surprise) who then used legal trickery to steal the PROMIS software and drive Inslaw into bankruptcy. The software, after being stolen was modified by Riconosciuto and then distributed by Brian and others to various foreign countries including Israel with the modification allowing intelligence figures to engage in espionage using the back-door feature. The flag waving, drug-running Reagan National Security Council aide Colonel Oliver North also saw much potential in using PROMIS for the surveillance of American citizens as a function of the infamous REX 84 program, a subsidiary of FEMA and the Continuity Of Government contingency plans that were solidified during the Reagan years. Recently, there were two critical articles that referenced the use of PROMIS and derivatives in regards to current day shadow government contingency plans for the tracking and rounding up of potential dissidents, these being Christopher Ketcham’s The Last Roundup and Tim Shorrock’s Exposing Bush’s Historic Abuse of Power, both referenced in my own series on the abuse of the software by the shadow government entitled Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government.

The use by extreme reactionaries to assist in the implementation of a fascist police state infrastructure, the spying on foreign countries including allies (which has just been confirmed once again as a matter of policy with the recent Wikileaks data dump and the mandate to collect biometric and credit card data on United Nations officials) and the use of surveillance for control and political blackmail were not the only functions of PROMIS. More darkly, the program could work very well in the laundering of money from illegal narcotic trafficking, the manipulation of financial markets and to the benefit of corrupt government officials in providing intel to organized crime figures. Another Casolaro source, Robert Booth Nichols, a suave dashing sort of a no-holds barred super spook whose activities and work facilitated some of the most sinister elements of what prominent author Peter Dale Scott refers to as the “Deep State” figures prominently in the saga. Nichols, a man who had connections between both legitimate government, shadowy intelligence figures and organized crime figures is a key figure in The Last Circle. Smooth enough to be retained for sensitive foreign intelligence affairs by the U.S. government and ruthless enough to hang a man upside down in front of a running airplane propeller as a method of persuasion Nichols is like a character straight out of central casting, more on him in a little bit.

The Cabazon Indian Reservation, where PROMIS was modified, is a critical piece of the story; it is the nexus point where many of the elements of the shadow government and its underworld cohorts all intersect. In thoroughly examining Cabazon, it is possible to trace decades of criminality, black operations and the accompanying subversion of the democratic institutions of this nation both backwards into the post WW II era as well as forward to events of late 2010. The clouds of intrigue swirling around the reservation begin with the 1981 execution of Cabazon Indian Tribal Council vice-chairman Fred Alvarez along with friends Ralph Boger and Patricia Castro. Alvarez was appalled at the use of the reservation for sinister purposes and the corruption of then administrator John Phillip Nichols, a connected man whose juice had been instrumental in the Cabazon-Wackenhut joint venture; Alvarez was about to blow the whistle at the time of the triple murders. Shortly afterwards, there were weapons testing demonstrations held for Iran-Contra leaders at Lake Cahuilla and attended by the aforementioned Earl Brian who in an official document in the appendix of Seymour’s book, was identified as a CIA employee.

As Seymour continues to untangle the web of deceit there are more disturbing revelations regarding the Cabazon Reservation and those who used it as a base for operations. Through contact with Riconosciuto and access to a treasure trove of his files kept hidden away in a trailer in Death Valley, she was able to expand her research. In addition to the Alvarez murders, there was another strange death associated with the Cabazon Reservation. The body of Paul Morasca, a Riconosciuto associate, was found in his San Francisco condo hog-tied and slowly strangled with a telephone cord around his legs and neck. He was also pretty good, as was Riconsciuto at moving money around through the SWIFT-CHIPS financial clearing houses utilized by banking institutions. Morasca, who had been appointed to a management position with the Cabazon Reservation casino, was dead months later. He was a financial wizard when it came to moving money through the interbank clearinghouse systems; according to some he may even have been involved in the transfer of funds out of the notorious Australian CIA connected drug-money laundering Nugan Hand Bank as it collapsed; Morasca allegedly had access codes to several accounts used to launder funds at the time of his murder and may have been tortured to provide the information to his killer (s). Another strange death, a school teacher named Mary Quick, the aunt of a Morasca/Riconosciuto associate who may have mistakenly been involved with the access codes was shot in the face during what was ostensibly made to look like a robbery. The Cabazon Reservation’s casino, according to a San Francisco Chronicle article received seed money from the Gambino Crime Family.

Now here is a bit of food for thought, the note that was found inside of Danny Casolaro’s shoe in Room 517 of the Martinsburg Sheraton had the names of Fred Alvarez and Paul Morasca were among the information that was written on it. It was known that Casolaro had planned a trip to Indio and the Cabazon Reservation as a continuation of his research, a trip that he never was able to make thanks to those who had one hell of a lot to lose were they to be exposed. They would have revealed a very ominous connection between intelligence figures and off the books ops, mob figures and political figures burrowed deep inside the bureaucracy and working hand in hand with criminal elements. I excerpt from the press release for The Last Circle:

During the last week of his life, Danny had discovered a connection between 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 Danny’s Octopus.

Danny had confronted Nichols about the former DOJ director 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 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.

Said Justice Department official was a man named Mike Abbell, a top ranking bureaucrat who after leaving the Justice Department where he once headed the Office of International Affairs, was indicted in a massive drug racketeering case against the Cali Cartel. Casolaro’s research had touched upon many corrupt and powerful interests and their long-running illicit schemes but his tracing the criminality directly into the United States Department of Justice may just have been the third rail. The Last Circle provides a substantial amount of information on just how dirty that elements of the nation’s top law enforcement institution may have been and provides plenty of information including wiretaps, interviews with the good guys who were trying to get to the bottom of it all and in perhaps the most chilling statement of all, that there are extremely high-ranking officials who may have been involved in obstruction of justice and who are still at the DOJ where their duties now have come to include providing legal cover for torturers and war criminals such as John Yoo and Jay Bybee and frantically working to prevent Wikileaks from publishing information on Bank of America by revising the 1917 Espionage Act. Given the ugly hidden activities of the banksters and a history of fraud and money laundering such a leak could expose the whole game and shine a light on the longtime institutional corruption in this country, especially the collusion between banks, drug traffickers and government figures and we certainly can’t have that can we?

Now to return to the previously mentioned Robert Booth Nichols, the intelligence man who was a major source of Danny Casolaro (Casolaro’s last days included numerous calls to Nichols) as well as a business partner of Michael Riconosciuto. Nichols was also a board member of FIDCO (First Intercontinental Development Corporation) which includes such interesting luminaries as former Howard Hughes aide and known CIA employee Robert Maheu as well as Texas oil billionaire and former NFL franchise owner of the Dallas Cowboys Clint W. Murchison Jr., a man whose father has been linked by some to the power cabal that would have a hell of a lot to gain were President John F. Kennedy to end up dead. Nichols was a big time player, according to accounts he had done independent contract work for the CIA, the NSA and had been tied to figures in both the Japanese Yakuza as well as the Gambino Crime Family. He dealt in military grade weaponry and had been under Federal investigation for international money laundering at one time. Nichols, it appears was a crucial go-between for darker elements of the U.S. state and organized crime. Former business partner and head of MCA Home Entertainment Eugene Giaquinto, a man with known mob ties was recorded on wiretap as saying that Nichols was his “government man” and that he could be counted on to provide official government documents pertaining to investigations. That figures within the government would have cozy relationships with the mob is really nothing surprising, and I must offer up my standard disclaimer regarding such collaborations. As in previous work that I have done on the subject of mob influence with U.S. government activities and figures I make no moral judgment regarding mob activity, it’s a business to these people and the costs associated are of no regard to me. What I DO have a serious problem with are corrupt or compromised government officials allowing themselves to be used by organized crime or to misuse their positions of trust as public servants to enrich themselves and their organized crime partners. For these rats truly belong within Dante’s last circle or in a Supermax prison at the very least.

There is a long history of the CIA/OSS in working with organized crime figures, the traceable beginning point would be World War II and the government’s deal with Charles “Lucky” Luciano and other bosses to assist the American war effort, notably Operation Underworld. War was war and such alliances were deemed necessary during a time of great national crisis and mobilization, that sort of alliance is much different than the criminality that grew out of the ongoing marriage of the CIA and other intelligence arms with organized crime figures. Such collaborations have a tendency over time to pollute and corrupt the ideals and objectives that they at one time purported to justify, for another example one need look no further than the CIA/OSS providing amnesty to Nazi war criminals, for example General Reinhard Gehlen who was brought in to the U.S. intelligence apparatus, ostensibly to wage the war against demonic Communism. This is a story for another time though, I just needed to make it clear that I have no personal bone to pick with organized crime, only with the officials who betray the country and the public trust by abusing their positions to enrich themselves by working with them.

Nichols seems to be one of those who benefited immensely by playing both sides and through parlaying his connections and interests into a very nice career. He was so important that as recently as 2004 was still a big time go to guy when he was involved in a scheme with chasing down a $250 billion treasury note (Serial Number SC 3040-20) that was allegedly backed by 2,500 metric tons of gold stored at the Atlanta Federal Reserve. Nichols, described in a lawsuit brought by Bayou LLC hedge fund’s Samuel Israel against Nichols for his role in an alleged scam involving the note was said by his attorney as:

“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 was vouched for by one John P. Ellis, a cousin of then President George W. Bush whose long family history of intelligence ties is hardly a secret and whose moral traditions would be consistent in those who would have no qualms about engaging in alliances with organized crime figures. After all, it was George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush whose Wall Street firm was closed down by FDR back in 1942 under the Trading With The Enemies Act for helping to launder money for the Nazis, not that Prescott Bush was unique, plenty of Wall Street bankers and American industrialists cashed in by helping to build the Third Reich. Other than to use those sort of alliances to illustrate the lack of morality, principals or loyalty to their own countries which are exactly the sort of traits that are present in The Octopus and it’s disregard for anything even remotely resembling honor, decency and traditional American values, I will leave that story to be told in the future. Nichols by the way is now deceased, he died in Geneva, Switzerland; a victim of a massive heart attack and interestingly enough there was evidence of a blow to the head. It would seem that he had outlived his usefulness and in my personal opinion, considering his history and the type that he ran with I personally am skeptical as to the official cause of death. In The Last Circle, Cheri Seymour describes a harrowing visit to interview a chain-smoking and wily Nichols, after which she, for reasons of personal safety, decided to take an extended vacation away from her home. The creepiest part of the visit being when he broke out his version of the Zapruder film from his personal video collection.

A hugely important part of Seymour’s book is the section where she meets with investigators Sean McDade of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and California Homicide Detective Sue Todd (who was investigating another potentially connected murder of a father and son) at her home. McDade was investigating the PROMIS software story on an official national security assignment for Canada and contacted Seymour for information given his research of the draft version of her book on the internet. An arrangement was made for McDade to visit Seymour in order to gain access to her research materials and he and Detective Todd met with her, and in the process of culling and copying documents he dropped a couple of bombshells. First being a reference to a December 1999 meeting at the Los Alamos facility in New Mexico attended by heads of the intelligence services of the United States, Britain, Israel and Canada over the potential for disruptive shared computer problems due to the Y2K period. McDade had a source that alluded to all four countries using the PROMIS software. He offered up a scenario that the “Israeli Mossad may have modified the original PROMIS modification, or back door, so that it became a ‘two-way’ back door allowing the Israelis access to U.S. weapons secrets at Los Alamos and other installations.” and according to Seymour, McDade “hinted through innuendo that the Israelis may now possess all the nuclear secrets of the United States.” There would seem to be some additional evidence that may support this sort of Israeli espionage in a London Times story on whistleblower Sibel Edmonds entitled For Sale: West’s Deadly Nuclear Secrets. McDade also stated that : “The details of my findings in Canada could cause a major scandal in both Canada and the U.S. If my investigation is successful, it could cause the entire U.S. Republican party to be dismantled, and more than one presidential administration will be exposed for their knowledge of this.”

McDade returned to Canada along with a load of copied documents and the investigation continued. The probe continued and eventually progressed enough to become sufficiently disturbing to those affected. The FBI as well as the Israeli Mossad were monitoring him as he progressed through the process of conducting interviews with potential witnesses and building the case. He had obtained several tapes that according to Riconsciuto contained the boot up versions of the modified PROMIS software. He planned to fly Bill Hamilton of INSLAW to RCMP headquarters to assist in accessing the tapes when a Toronto Star article was published in late August 2000 that resulted in the shutdown of the 8 month investigation. Chapter 21 of The Last Circle details a long conversation between Detective Sue Todd and the author on what the findings had been and which she wanted published were anything to happen to her. A subsequent investigation of the closed down RCMP investigation was undertaken by journalist Kelly O’Meara of Insight Magazine and the four parts are available here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. Despite the official stonewalling, obfuscation and danger involved, the author reveals that both Sue Todd and Kelly O’Meara developed a proposal in 2001 to continue to work to expose The Octopus, let us hope that we have not heard the last from them and their dedication to justice serves as an inspiration to all.

“Organized crime will put a man in the White House someday – and he won’t know it until they hand him the bill”


-Ralph Solerno, NYPD (from Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob)

The Last Circle also devotes considerable space to the relationship between former President Ronald Reagan and the MCA Corporation, his agent. Drawing on Dan Moldea’s book Dark Victory, subtitled Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob. It isn’t well publicized that the hallowed national icon of those who dabble in the black arts of revisionist history, Ronald Reagan is a man with more than a few skeletons in his closet. Reagan was in the 1940-50s a struggling B-movie actor and Democrat who campaigned for Harry Truman in 1948 (this link is as priceless as it is stunning). Reagan, at some point realized that the real future laid in his willingness to sell out whatever ideals that he may have had and join the Republican party, ratting out his Hollywood peers as Communists to a McCarthyist nation braying for blood while president of the Screen Actors Guild and building up the necessary resume and connections for his ascension to America’s throne. Long before Saint Ronald Reagan was authorizing criminals like Edwin Meese and Oliver North and their ilk to destroy the national regulatory structure, wantonly subvert the Constitution, and engage in a global spree of weapons and drug trafficking to fund torturers and murders in Latin America he made his pact with the devil.

Reagan’s rise to power and later, canonization by the conservative movement was helped along enormously by his affiliation with MCA and the accumulated chits that he would receive which would serve him in his rise to the presidency. MCA, originally a talent agency that became the 800 pound gorilla of Hollywood as well as a partner of organized crime figures had benefited greatly when Reagan, as SAG president played an integral role in negotiating a deal that would allow the corporation to circumvent antitrust laws in order to enter into television production as well as talent. Reagan was subsequently targeted by a federal grand jury for his role in the “sweetheart deal” between MCA and the actor’s union. According to a Justice Department memorandum from the case described a Hollywood source as saying that “Ronald Reagan a complete slave of MCA who would do their bidding on anything.” Reagan changed his political affiliation to Republican, citing a newfound contempt of big government, became wealthy and increasingly strident in his ideology and rhetoric, so much so that General Electric Theatre, he was a host became uncomfortable with his on air reactionary rants. Reagan then ran for and was elected Governor of California where he continued to hone his act and pile up favors that would serve him for his enthronement at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Reagan, like all presidents came into power surrounded by cronies and lackeys, one of course was Edwin Meese who rose to Attorney General and according to information obtained from FBI wiretaps on Gambino crime family figures may have intervened in order to foil a federal investigation into MCA and alleged mob connections that could have torpedoed the sale of MCA to Japanese interests. On the wiretaps, Eugene Giaquinto who was a board member of the MCA Corporation who had a lifetime relationship to Gambino boss John Gotti had stated that “he would call Edwin Meese and have the FBI’s investigation of MCA stopped.” The Reagan era Justice Department was not only engaged in corrupt practices such as the theft of Inslaw’s PROMIS software but also was actively engaged in the obstruction of justice in order to protect Reagan’s longtime benefactor MCA. The investigation was of course shut down and the MCA deal went through, principled and honest public servants resigned out of disgust and the bad guys won again. The litany of crimes and unethical practices of the Reagan administration is long and his Octopus’s tentacles have slithered into too many scandals and institutions to list here but there are two very important and serendipitous connections. Giaquinto had bragged about his “government man” Robert Booth Nichols who provided him with critical information and Danny Casolaro was also investigating MCA connections to The Octopus at the time of his death.

“After a six-year hitch in the military, I became a professional hit man for the Mafia. I collected money, hurt a lot of people and saw a lot of blood. I know what it’s like to cut the throat of a man, see a man die, or throw a man in the trunk of a car and take him to his death. I did many horrible things. I allowed myself to do whatever was necessary.


-Jimmy Hughes: Admitted killer

An Authorized, Government Backed Covert Action: The final chapter in The Last Circle deals with the quest for justice by Rachel Begley, whose father Ralph Boger was murdered along with Fred Alvarez, the man who was about to blow the whistle on the illicit activities at the Cabazon Indian Reservation in 1981. Begley relentlessly pursued the truth about the murders and her story was chronicled in the work of Emmy Award winning reporter Nathan Baca’s 35 part series on the Octopus Murders for Palm Springs KESQ-TV. Also known online as Desertfae, she at great personal danger considering the malevolent figures that she was dealing with successfully worked to expose the truth about her father’s murder and her tenacity led to the cold case being re-opened by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. Her courageous efforts led to the arrest of admitted hitman Jimmy Hughes, now running a pseudo religious organization in Honduras.

Detective John Powers of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department was investigating the cold case of the Alvarez murders, having been led in that direction as a result of a more recent probe into the 2005 murder- suicide of David McGowan and his family. McGowan, a Riverside County District Attorney investigator who may have been digging too deeply. According to Baca (whose links have all apparently been disappeared down the memory hole at KESQ now that he is working for a Las Vegas station but fortunately desertfae has posted many of the videos on her You Tube site) in his work on the story that:

The murder case has been reopened and closed multiple times in the past 27 years. Sheriff’s investigators have asked friends and former partners of District Attorney Investigator David McGowan whether he was working the case in 2005. An investigation concluded that McGowan murdered his family of five before shooting himself on May 10th, 2005. Surviving family members tell News Channel 3 they believe the investigation was rushed and incomplete.

Detective Powers and Rachel Begley were working on seeking justice for the murders when they met with Cheri Seymour who assisted them in gleaning important information on the case. She strongly encouraged Powers to get copies of the Paul Morasca Homicide Investigation File of which no electronic copies existed and access was restricted. The file, Case No. 82-1052505 was being stored with the San Francisco Police Department records and contained long missing files on the Alvarez murders which he has now backed up lest it be conveniently misplaced. An arrest warrant for Hughes was issued and he was apprehended in September 2009 as he was boarding a plane in Miami.

Hughes, a former head of security at the Cabazon reservation has admitted to being a hired gun for both the mafia and the CIA. Hughes incidentally was the guy who Financial Times reporter Anson Ng was allegedly chasing down when he himself was murdered in Guatemala in July of 1991. His organization, very originally named Jimmy Hughes Ministries is a testament to the adage of religion being the last refuge of scoundrels and provides cover by serving as a front for black ops such as the 2009 Honduran coup d’etat against president Manuel Zelaya who had to be deposed for being an ally of Venezuala’s Hugo Chavez. Chavez is a man the U.S. power structure despises and has already moved against and failed and whose ability to stand up to the United States plutocracy cannot be allowed to spread regionally lest the rivers of blood that have been loosed by dictators, their thugs and their CIA facilitators, most trained at the torture institute The School of the Americas stop flowing so that lust for money and power can be slaked. In The Last Circle it is noted that Hughes, sponsored by the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International (FGBMFI) provided support for the overthrow. Hughes never ceased being a thug for hire, he just changed venues.

Hughes has stated in a 1985 television interview that the Alvarez murders were “an authorized, government backed covert action” and was caught on video by Rachel Begley and Fred Alvarez’s son Mikel during his February 2008 appearance at an FGBMFI dinner event in Fresno stating that:

“I was trained in the military. I killed people all of the world, right or wrong, because the government ordered me to. Your dad and I were friends. He touched somebody…they gave an order and that’s what happened to him. It’s a lot bigger than the murder of this guy or the murder of that guy. It’s big …. You’re talking political people. “

Hughes also made veiled threats like the chilling “you’ve got to be crazy…you’re knocking on some very dangerous doors..just think about your children..they need a mother” to Begley. Once arrested and extradited to California to stand trial Hughes was due to finally face the judgement of the law but then in

another one of the travesties that plague the rotten to the core judicial system of this corrupt empire the case against Hughes were dismissed, and with a deft twisting of the knife, the charges were dropped on the very anniversary of the murders. Jimmy Hughes walked, perhaps he knew fully well where too many bodies were buried, that and he continues to serve the dark forces of The Octopus. As of this writing, Rachel Begley is not giving up, she has justifiably filed a formal complaint against Deputy Attorney General Mike Murphy, just another one of the charlatans masquerading as servants of the law in this terminally damaged republic.

Who Watches the Watchers?

The dismissal of the case against Jimmy Hughes is just another example of the vast corruption that has slowly eaten away at the once strong interpinnings of the American system of justice. Today, there is no consistent enforcement of the law, there exists a system that has been throughout the years rigged in order to allow those who have the financial means or the political connections to circumvent justice. In the post-9/11 era in which our once vibrant democracy has turned into something perversely un-American that has now very appropriately been named the HOMELAND, our true birthright, the civil liberties as set forth in the Bill of Rights have been eroded and are on the verge of extinction. All due to systemic corruption and the actions of The Octopus and those who serve it.

We have seen the gradual erosion of such long-standing legal principles such as Habeas Corpus disposed, under the guise of course of fighting ‘terrorism’. Posse Comitatus has been struck from the books with the establishment of NORTHCOM and the surveillance colossus that grew out of PROMIS is rendering obsolete the right to privacy. Our airports have turned into something out of post Stalin Russia with the TSA ‘pat-downs’ and naked body scanners and just this week word comes that Janet Napolitano, top apartchik of the Department of Homeland Security will be appearing on TV screens in the nation’s Wal-Marts with the “If You See Something, Say Something” inducement to report ‘suspicious’ behavior. The noose is tightening and as has been predicted by many of us, the entire facade of the War On Terror was only a ruse, every oppressive tactic, every torture chamber and secret prison was being prepared for the real enemy: patriotic Americans demanding the truth. The entire system has now been transformed in order to protect the interests of criminals, looters and the progeny of The Octopus. You will see no serious investigation of the heads of Wall Street banks, their profits largely derived through fraud, money laundering and other ill gotten gains from cash cows such as drug trafficking. Nor will you see any war criminals, war profiteers or the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats who cover up for them, rig the laws and engage in acts of subterfuge for money be prosecuted. This is the country in which we now live.

As Cheri Seymour writes:

“Every government official I talked to, every journalist, told me that nothing can be done to dismantle The Octopus, there is no one in office in this great nation that has the power to prosecute the Octopus criminals because the tentacles have become an integral, and accepted culture within our society, and indeed within our economy.”

So the responsibility in stopping this all lies with us. I opened this essay with the quote from Anthony Sutton that appeared in The Last Circle : “Be patient, spread the word among friends, do your little bit. The system will self-destruct because it is funded on corruption and untruth”. This much is essential, for the only way to regain our freedom, dignity and liberty and to ensure that those who are guilty of a myriad of crimes is to be tenacious in researching – and reporting on their crimes. It is true that the only things that The Octopus, now fully assimilated into the system understands is power and money, the only thing that it fears is the truth.

Joseph Daniel Casolaro 1947-1991

The Octopus: Eight people who have changed the course of the world, a real life “Mission Impossible” team whose gifts exploited the secret empires of rogue spy networks, big oil and organized crime.

-From Danny Casolaro’s notes

EE

Jesse Ventura on Fusion Centers, FEMA Camps and the Police State

Yesterday I happened to catch the most recent episode of Jesse Ventura’s compelling TruTv series, this one on the Police State. The series, Conspiracy Theory With Jesse Ventura is an amazing piece of work not only for the taboo subject matter (God forbid that Americans really understand exactly what the fuck is going on) but for the host himself. It’s not often that a major media figure with credentials like Ventura’s, Governor of Minnesota, Navy Seal, actor, athlete, commentator would dare to venture into the darkest bowels or this now thoroughly rotted through empire of blood and corruption. The safe bet would be to either sell out and become a shill for official conspiracy theories such as the laughable government tale of the accounts on that holiest of holy days, September 11, 2001 when the reset button was hit on America, the coup cemented into place and our tickets to the fascist state punched or to suffer the slings and arrows of media mockingbirds and payroll pundits who would perform their standard electornic character assassinations. Ventura is a different breed though, he gets it and as a patriotic American does his duty to get at the real nasty stuff that crawls beneath the paper thin facade of our God-kissed, flag-swaddled, John Wayne can of red, white and blue whup ass version of history.


This week’s edition of Ventura’s show, the fourth installment of the second season (previous installments were on Plum Island, Area 51 and Wall Street) got right into the most obvious and dangerous issue of the transformation of America into a police state. The process has been ongoing, when you really bother to think about the ongoing and incessant indoctrination to worship the law through vicarious exposure to head bashing and door kicking police and paramilitary television shows, movies and even video games and combined with the ginned-up hysterics of the “terrorist” plot du jour, most recently the alleged print cartridge bomb plot delivered with Bushian timing a few days prior to the latest elections or more appropriately, the latest churn of our political cesspool – Americans are conditioned like lab rats to surrender, grovel and submit. Not that the fear-mongering is any sort of recent phenomena, our entire fucking history (or at least our entire histroy since Kennedy’s head was blown off by rogue elements of the shadow government) has this malevolent and poisonous undercurrent snaking through it. A few years back I stumbled across an interesting little book on the entertainment industrial complex and the necessity to promulgate the narrative of FEAR in order to justify American imperialism. It was called American Terminator: Myths, Movies and Global Power from which I am going to excerpt the following:

Fear is essential: ‘Be afraid, be very afraid’ is the American condition. To live in America is to be beset by fear, anxiety and insecurity, to be surrounded by potential harm, enemies and evil intent. And the wolf is always at the door. A nation of optimists is the more usual self-representation of America. Repetitively, Hollywood films conclude with a resolution, a rescue, and the winners ride off into the sunset or snuggle into a warm embrace that reassures us they will live happily ever after. The formulaic ending, however, is necessary because the plot, the narrative, is founded on and propelled by fear and anxiety, the dark essential underpinning of the American condition. For America fear is an original, natural condition, the inescapable birth rite (and birth right), the inherited condition of a fragile existence that must constantly be defended. Without fear there is no America; constant recourse to fear is the motivating force that determines its actions and reactions

True to the nth degree. Fear is the coin of the realm in the new American century, the land of the free and the home of the brave is no longer the brand associated with life in Der Homeland. Fear of joblessness, fear of homelessness, fear of that secret Muslim in the White House and his militant Negro army ACORN cutting a brutal swarth of rape and pillage through lilly white Murka as announced by Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and the rest of the imperial propagandists and rabble rousers…and most importantly fear of the dread Islamofascism (a masterful piece of marketing churned out of one of those neocon think tanks) and the swarthy Arab terrorists. Never mind that it’s all bullshit, contrived to justify illegal wars for resources, oligarchical plundering and the enablement of the corporate vampires and Wall Street parasites to use their corrupt government subsidized schemes to enslave the sheep and to get them to not only tolerate but to enjoy their enslavement. It is a brilliant and long term implementation of a fascist state across the fruited plain, conceived by traitors and thieves and carried out with stunning precision by the CIA, the Military Industrial Complex and their profiteering partners. As Aldous Huxley described this Brave New World in this speech given at Berkeley:

“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.”

Sound familiar? Prozac, Viagra and their counterparts, 46 inch plasma televisions, bread and circuses, junk food, electronic gadgetry, porn on demand and most importantly Dancing With The Stars….praise the lord, pass the remote and please line up for your full body cavity search before entering those wonderful naked body scanners brought to you by another one of our fine Israeli ‘friends’, dual citizen Michael Chertoff and the Chertoff Group. Another insider using his government connections to peddle the wares of another one of the corporate behemoths cashing in big on the FEAR that is now a by God American birthright. Shit, the bastards were already cashing in while the crisp fall breezes in lower Manhattan were still carrying the stench of rotting flesh back in 2001.


But I digress…


Been away for awhile, so just stretching my legs with that little rant. What I really wanted to talk about was the Ventura episode. While I have not seen every episode of Conspiracy Theory those that I have watched in their entirety have been powerful (although a bit silly with the team angle but you have to have a hook to draw in viewers I guess) but none quite so as the most recent installment. It starts out with a conversation with a young woman named Catherine Bleish whose work on behalf of the Ron Paul campaign landed her on one of those growing government watchlists that anyone who is reading this is no doubt on as well. When she dared to pursue the reasoning for being classified as a potential enemy of the state for exercising her first amendment rights she quickly discovered that such activity can get one in big trouble in the land where Habeas Corpus and the Posse Comitatus Act have already been dismantled and the Obama administration has not only escalated the programs of Bush-Cheney (and further back to Reagan and Ollie North) but have forever legitimized them by failing to enforce the Constitution. The wars continue and Gitmo remains open, the torturers continue their sadistic perversions and the police state infrastructure continues unabated despite the forgotten campaign rhetoric of our weasel in chief and soon it will be handed off to the next puppet who will undoubtedly find a reason to take it to the next level.


The wettest of dreams of this now despotic state has always been rooted in total control, ubiquitous and ever present surveillance and if necessary martial law. Gun running, drug dealing uber patriot Ollie North dabbled in the rounding up of dissidents with the REX 84 program that would have enabled FEMA to pick up and intern American citizens. There was also Garden Plot, Cable Splicer and a myriad of other anti-American schemes to do away with meddlesome citizens who may not be down with the scum that have hijacked the country (see Ed Encho’s series on the shadow government) and can no longer be troubled with anything as quaint as constitutional law or democracy. This must is documented, but never has any of it been as dangerous, or as readly to be rolled out as what is currently in process. The police state conspiracy as examined in the Ventura program looks into the metastaziing growth of Fusion Centers, command and control centers coordinating local law enforcement, military, private intelligence corporations and the Gestapo Department of Homeland Security. These well-funded high tech and unaccountable spy shops were an outgrowth of 9/11 (what isn’t?) and with the American Reichstag Fire as justification to combine state, local and federal agencies ostensibly to prevent terrorism. What they are in actuality are antennae of the tyrannical state using data-mining, profiling and sophisticated pattern analysis to keep tabs on potential threats to the power of a system run amok, as capitalism continues into the final states, come to home to roost and now in full cannibalistic mode it is only a matter of time until the inevitable economic collapse, food shortages and civil unrest similar to what is occurring in Europe. Now in full regonition that the vast majority of slothlike, dumbed down and wretchedly cowardly Americans will remain parked in front of the flat-screened electronic living room gods that they worship it scares the bejesus out of the establishment that the 1-2 percenters who still give a damn may revolt. What better way to keep tabs on them than by Big Brother style surveillance?


There are at least 72 of these fusion centers in operation at this time and that number will continue to grow as the day of judgement gets closer.


That a woman like Catherine Bleish can be sucked into this monstrous and oppressive system for nothing more than political activism should illustrate the true nature of the bottomless rabbit hole that our country has been dragged into. While Ventura’s show uses imagery of the co-opted teabaggers waving their Gadsden flags as visuals of the sort who are subject to being guilty without the pretenses of a trial as well as singles out Obama’s diabolical adviser Cass Sunstein (he of the now infamous Conspiracy Theories white paper) this needs some context. During the Bushreich protesters were routinely rounded up and herded into “free speech zones” (I seem to remember when the entire fucking country was a free speech zone), interned in temporary prisons during the virulently fascist 2004 Republican National Convention in New York or the 2003 WTO protest and crushing of dissent in Jeb Bush’s Miami not to mention the transformation of Pittsburgh into a martial law zone during the 2009 G20 meetings giving a new meaning to the term Iron City. What is and has been occurring in America to political dissent is an abomination and is not limited to anything out of the bogus left-right paradigm, it is directed at ALL who dare to question the establishment. In fact if anything, the Tea Party being a plutocratic backed hijacking of the original Ron Paul libertarian based movement it represents not so much a threat to the established order but rather useful idiots and shocktroops to defend it.


Ventura goes on to team with Alex Jones of Infowars.com (a man who I have mixed feelings about regarding some of the material that he covers) to actually visit some of the detention facilities or U.S. concentration camps that are currently operational. That such facilities are so often dismissed out of hand as being only the delusions of the paranoid fringe is indicative of the deep denial that Americans hide in as though it were a coccoon, and the raw cynicism of the politicians who are supposed to work for them but instead are fully complicit in the construction of these camps/detention facilities (there is a real hoot in the program where a P.R. woman at one of the facilities states that it is a residential center). Not only are these camps documented in mainstream news on occasion like the 2006 New York Times story on the $ 385 million in taxpayer money given to Haliburton subsidiary KBR to build detention centers. Americans are not only funding their own enslavement but seem to be incapble of understanding that it could happen here. If these facilities aren’t enough to prove what is coming then just Google Manzanar. To his credit Ventura addresses the FDR order to intern over 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. This is one of the most shameful stories in our national history yet it is largely unknown, another of the great sins of ommission when it comes to teaching America’s real history.


The show also draws attention to the Obama administration’s recent executive order that establishes the Council Of Governors, 10 executives who will rule over 10 regions in the always vaguely worded event of the “national emergency” that previous executive orders, such as Bush’s NSPD-51, all laying down the legal parameters for the declaration of martial law. Interestingly the 10 zones overlap nicely with FEMA’s. It is late in the episode where Jones and Ventura film a huge repository of plastic coffins/graveliners in Madison, Georgia and speculate on whether there will be a controlled release of a biological warfare agent or some other form of virus to create a pandemic that would trigger the roundups and the filling of the camps with those who try to fight it and don’t end up in one of the plastic coffins. I have always been a bit skeptical of this but have read a good deal of material that offers a glimpse into the sort of thinking that drives the pigs who run this system and despite my skepticism that they would actually trigger this sort of event it does fit within their worldview. When thugs and servants of the elite like war criminal Henry Kissinger can come out and refer to people as “useless eaters” it is obvious that there are only two lifeforms in America, vampires and cattle. Being aware of the military and intelligence experimentations with biowarfare and the rumored but not to this point proven existence of race specific bioweapons it would be foolish and naive to not believe that those who are able to conceive of this stuff don’t have the stones to use it to further their agendas. There was much hysteria over last year’s H1N1/Swine Flu potentially being this event but rather it was in all likelihood the result of greed with Big Pharma rushing to sell as much untested vaccine to a terrified public as they possibly could to juice their stock prices. Again, I am skeptical that the elite would actually carry out such a thing but given the real problems of overpopulation and the need for a big culling don’t reject it as paranoia. It would likely be blamed on Iran and then used like 9/11 was to start another war.


Finally, the best part of the show was when Ventura confronted Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen on the existence of the camps. Cohen is a perfect example of the corrpution and amoral elitism that has taken control of our government. Initially the smarmy little bastard is dismissive and mocking, talking about green martians, paranoia and other talking points used to equate honest questioning with the real black helicopter types (even they don’t seem to be quite as crazy anymore in this terminally diseased society) and UFO freaks. But when Ventura had a copy of the bill, H.R. 645: National Emergency Centers Establishment Act that was a co-sponsor of the condescension quickly evaporated and this cringing little rat gave up the ghost, being reduced to a quivering blog of jelly when confronted with the truth and disingenuously claiming that he didn’t know what was in the bill.  Pretty ironic that Cowen is Jewish, it would seem that of all people that he should have an appreciation of the dangers of allowing such facilities to be built by an out of control regime under the pretense of security. That this vile piece of fascist legislation was produced by the so-called liberal Democratic Congress is just another indictment of our thoroughly rancid and compromised two-party game of three-card Monte that passes for American democracy.


The trap my friends has already been built and is rapidly closing, have no illusions that you will be able to resist when the orders are given to pick up the future residents of the camps, there is no match for raw power and serious military weaponry. The only hope, given that it is not too late already is to espose the bastards, Ventura has done a damned good job of it but it’s not enough. I am going to post the segment with the camps, coffins and Cohen below.

When the Nazis came for the communists,

I remained silent;

I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,

I remained silent;

I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,

I did not speak out;

I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,

I remained silent;

I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,

there was no one left to speak out.

– Pastor Martin Niemöller

Main Core, PROMIS and the New American Fascism

In this revised and updated version of my four-part series entitled Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government I am going to both clarify and build upon concepts of what was originally written over a period of nearly a year beginning in late 2008. It is essential to now place the surveillance state in a context that takes into account the administration of Democratic president Barack Obama. For those who believed that the George W. Bush presidency was a horrific aberration in all of its constitution desecrating glory and that a changing of the guard to more responsible leadership would lead to a rollback of the creeping fascism that emerged from the ashes of World War II, assumed control by coup d’etat with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and then became dominant in the aftermath of the ‘terrorist’ attacks of September 11, 2001 the initial fourteen months of the Obama administration should be a wake up call. As writer Naomi Wolf summed it up during a controversial recent interview piece:

“Bush legalized torture, but Obama is legalizing impunity. He promised to roll stuff back, but he is institutionalizing these things forever.”

Of course those who are familiar with the concepts of the deep state or the permanent government it is unsurprising that any president, despite the figurehead status is ultimately subservient to the monstrous powers of the state, at times groups that are fully aligned with the shadow government such as former “Vice-President” Richard B. Cheney and his warmongering neoconservative cabal are better able to enforce their agendas as they mesh with the radical, militarist imperialism that is at the core of the American state and that primarily serves the interests of a multi-generational oligarchy, the financial cartels, the big energy conglomerates and most importantly the military industrial complex.

The real business of America is imperialism and preservation of the empire at all costs, today, in this darkest of historical periods that militarism and institutionalized need for conquest has come home to roost and to wreak economic devastation on the populace. The loss of economic opportunity along with the need to preserve corrupt institutions and the failed political system that serve them will soon lead to massive civil unrest, this much is certain and there are signs of it now, largely confined to the extreme right that serve as shocktroops to the criminal Republican party to ensure that the criminal Democratic party will be forced from control of the spoils system and their servitude to the oligarchy. This will ultimately not remain confined to the extreme right and the co-opted Republican -FOX News led Tea Party movement that is already undergoing fragmentation as the undercurrent of political violence percolates, driving off many angry and desperate Americans who sought refuge in it’s ranks.

Thus the necessity for the police state and the high-tech totalitarian systems of control that will continue to be implemented under the premise of the phony war on terror but have always been intended to serve as a firewall between the elite and the rabble. There is no longer the ability to beat the swords back into ploughshares and the oligarchy will preserve itself and the war machine at the expense of the citizenry. As Randolph Bourne once wrote “war is the health of the state”, and as we enter the second decade of the new American century it will become increasingly necessary to use a militarized police machine and an advanced technological surveillance colossus to maintain order, suppress dissent and continue to provide grist for the highly lucrative, for-profit prison industrial complex that will ensure that Oceania will always be at war.

EE

Part One: Main Core and PROMIS

“Over the last two weeks I have encountered just such an apocalyptic situation, where I and the Department of Justice have been asked to be part of something that is fundamentally wrong.”

(Excerpt from Deputy Attorney General James Comey’s draft letter of resignation to President Bush, dated March 16, 2004, which Comey did not in the end send.)

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull”

– George Orwell: 1984

Suppose that the United States government, or more likely an unaccountable privatized intelligence colossus empowered by the reaction to the 9/11 attacks and fueled by the rampant cronyism of a system long ago gone rotten had a surveillance tool capable of peering into the most private aspects of American lives on a whim.

Now suppose that the new growth industry of a previously unthinkable futuristic police state was already in place, fully operational and has been actively been being utilized for domestic spying for years even before the World Trade Center and Pentagon were struck on that pristine Tuesday September morning that irreversibly ensured that our rendezvous with a destiny of becoming a full blown fascist society would be fulfilled. What if this surveillance industrial complex was in possession of a database that was so large and so powerful that not only could it instantly process and retrieve the most minute or intimate aspects and details of the lives of American citizens but was also able to utilize extremely sophisticated artificial intelligence capabilities to actually predict likely patterns of future behavior.

Such a huge database would be able to use cutting edge technology that is largely funded by taxpayer dollars and awarded to unaccountable private corporations through the typical business as usual, crony capitalist no bid contracts to create the most invasive tool of oppression this country has ever seen. This database would rely on software that was capable of performing highly sophisticated forms of social network analysis based on block modeling technology in order to monitor all forms of electronic communications including telephone, email, chat, Twitter and cell phones and personal digital assistants, satellite navigation systems, all internet searches, all credit card transactions, all book purchases, all grocery or other store purchases, all travel arrangements, all library records, utility usage, all bank activity and down to what is watched or listened to as entertainment in all American homes.

It would then be able to use the data to not only find links between persons who already know and interact with each other but to categorize each individual into a particular group that possess similar behavioral and purchasing habits. These groups could then be further divided into subgroups and further analyzed in order to determine under some loosely defined and largely unknown guidelines whether they could potentially represent a threat. While all of this may sound like some sort of futuristic dystopian nightmare straight out of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report and Precrime, it is very real and it goes by the name of Main Core.

For example, if you are selling say a bicycle and you run an advertisement in your local newspaper or on Craig’s List or some other internet board and you just happen to receive a call from a Muhammad who is interested in buying your bicycle and this Muhammad happens to have certain friends who may have relationships with an organization that is determined by some unknown criteria to be a potential terrorist organization. With the surveillance capability of Main Core and with the resources of massive bureaucracies at the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security such an innocent contact would set off a series of flags that would categorize the conversation as sufficiently suspicious to merit further examination.

Once that has been analyzed (likely in real time) the call that you received from Muhammad would then in all likelihood place you in the requisite database and at the very best would subject to an increased level of scrutiny by government and any number of unaccountable private intelligence firms. These are institutions with the power to then take control of your banking account (in an action that could be justified as prevention of the flow of funds to ‘terrorists’) and further monitor your own network of family, friends, acquaintances and co-workers who also could be suspect to being defined loosely as potential ‘terrorism’ sympathizers. At worst your life could become a nightmare of abduction, indefinite detention without access to the U.S. legal system, mental abuse, torture and perhaps eventually murder. The system is in place, 9/11 has been used as the excuse for expansion of police state powers and our government over the past two administrations has rendered habeas corpus irrelevant, codified torture and warrantless wiretapping and created a network of secret prisons. The underlying concept that is behind Guantanamo Bay prison is to create a legal black hole into which even American citizens can be thrust into under the guise of being “enemy combatants” or the even more sinister “enemy belligerents” as proposed in the new John McCain-Joseph Lieberman civil liberty destroying Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010.

This technology is being used today absent any form of legitimate oversight or controls, in fact it is expanding exponentially and will continue to do so absent any sudden mass injection of honor and morality to a congress that depends on the entire war on terror paradigm to retain political power. This despite the considerable damage that has already been done to the constitution which was for all intents and purposes eviscerated with the privacy and judicial protections effectively nullified by Bush, Cheney and there army of legal experts such as David Addington and John Yoo who specialized in circumventing the laws of the land. Despite the fallacious campaign rhetoric of President Obama that promised change nothing has to this point in time been done to reign in the massive police state powers that were largely installed by his predecessor. If anything, Obama has institutionalized the surveillance state and escalated the wars of imperialism. His failure to hold accountable any member of the Bush administration for myriad crimes against the republic has rendered any concept of a criminal elite dug into our political establishment being subject to the law into a mockery. Much like President Bill Clinton did when he failed to investigate and prosecute the criminals of Iran-Contra the rogue elements have been effectively been given a pass from our constitutional law professor in chief. As with Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama is simply a product, a smiling new face as the putative head of the empire while the real business of warfare, profiteering and immense transfers of wealth to the oligarchy continue.

It is though a very sophisticated form of fascism that we are living under in America today, unlike the more outwardly obvious regimes from the past. Author Bertram Gross published a book back in 1980 that was entitled Friendly Fascism, Jim Garrison once said that “fascism would come to America in the name of national security”, and author Kevin Phillips in his 1983 book Post-Conservative America warned of the potential of an “apple pie authoritarianism” and a coming society in which: “the Star Spangled Benner would wave with greater frequency and over many more parades; increased surveillance would crack down on urban outbreaks and extreme political dissidents”. This very accurately describes post 9/11 America where any semblance of reason has been abandoned for cheap jingoism and flag-waving pimped off as patriotism. Criticism of authority has made into potential treason by the highly paid shills for neoconservative doctrine and corporate looters, sloganeering and demagoguery have replaced discourse, critical thinking is becoming extinct and just as George Orwell so accurately predicted Big Brother is now watching over us, protecting us and ensuring that we understand that war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

There still exists not only a militarized police force but a vast gulag network of top secret prisons and ‘detention facilities’, not to mention the for-profit prison system that should be the shame of the nation. Add in the now quaint and antiquated pretense of being innocent until proven guilty, the increasingly brazen attempts by those in charge of Homeland Security such as Senator Joseph Lieberman with his kangaroo court Senate committee, the revelations that Obama advisor Cass Sunstein (a horrifying possibility to one day end up on the Supreme Court) favors the most draconian style of crackdowns against free speech and inquiry as was promulgated in a 2008 article entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures”. According to Sunstein, groups that dare to research the all too common blanket pejorative “conspiracy theories”, a longtime defense of the ruling elite to discredit the official conspiracy theories were a threat to the credibility of the government and should be stamped out. Sunstein advocates a COINTELPRO style infiltration of such groups using government agents and paid operatives to undermine the efforts of any attempt to debunk the official conspiracy theory. Sunstein specifically singles out those believe that “the attacks of 9/11 were carried out not by Al Qaeda, but by Israel or the United States. Those who subscribe to conspiracy theories may create serious risks, including risks of violence, and the existence of such theories raises significant challenges for policy and law.” I am reasonably certain that if finding out the truth behind the American Reichstag Fire is something that should be verboten then I can only imagine what he and his ilk would think about what I am discussing here. Now there is change that you can believe in.

But I digress

Main Core has received some attention in two 2008 articles, one a piece by investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham entitled The Last Roundup (which also looks at Continuity of Government programs but more on that in a little while) and Tim Shorrock that is entitled Exposing Bush’s Historic Abuse of Power. Both articles tie Main Core to the now legendary PROMIS software, an extremely advanced program designed to aid federal prosecutors in case management tracking. PROMIS could pull and put together a wide range of data from disparate sources into a single record. The PROMIS software was created by INSLAW Inc., a company owned by a former NSA intelligence officer named William Hamilton. PROMIS was to have been licensed to the U.S. government in the early 1980’s before the technology boom became widespread but was then stolen by the seamy officials in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department. The software was modified for espionage purposes to include a ‘back door’ that could be used for spying on those that it was sold to and in a detail that should be especially relevant with the economic crisis that threatens to crash the global financial system, the software could also be used to track in real time (in order to manipulate?) stock market transactions, once can certainly speculate as to how such a tool could have contributed to an economic catastrophe as we are now facing if it were used for such a thing. It is important to keep in mind the period when PROMIS was stolen in the early 1980’s and the fact that the techology boom was still years in the future which should give one an idea to just how far advanced and therefore how important that it was to those who would use it in order to promote a sinister agenda.

Shorock’s piece goes into the relationship between PROMIS and Main Core in some detail:

According to William Hamilton, a former NSA intelligence officer who left the agency in the 1970s, that description sounded a lot like Main Core, which he first heard about in detail in 1992. Hamilton, who is the president of Inslaw Inc., a computer services firm with many clients in government and the private sector, says there are strong indications that the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance operations use Main Core.

Hamilton’s company Inslaw is widely respected in the law enforcement community for creating a program called the Prosecutors’ Management Information System, or PROMIS. It keeps track of criminal investigations through a powerful search engine that can quickly access all stored data components of a case, from the name of the initial investigators to the telephone numbers of key suspects. PROMIS, also widely used in the insurance industry, can also sort through other databases fast, with results showing up almost instantly. “It operates just like Google,” Hamilton told me in an interview in his Washington office in May.

Since the late 1980s, Inslaw has been involved in a legal dispute over its claim that Justice Department officials in the Reagan administration appropriated the PROMIS software. Hamilton claims that Reagan officials gave PROMIS to the NSA and the CIA, which then adapted the software — and its outstanding ability to search other databases — to manage intelligence operations and track financial transactions. Over the years, Hamilton has employed prominent lawyers to pursue the case, including Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general and secretary of defense who died in 1999, and C. Boyden Gray, the former White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush. The dispute has never been settled. But based on the long-running case, Hamilton says he believes U.S. intelligence uses PROMIS as the primary software for searching the Main Core database.

Hamilton was first told about the connection between PROMIS and Main Core in the spring of 1992 by a U.S. intelligence official, and again in 1995 by a former NSA official. In July 2001, Hamilton says, he discussed his case with retired Adm. Dan Murphy, a former military advisor to Elliot Richardson who later served under President George H.W. Bush as deputy director of the CIA. Murphy, who died shortly after his meeting with Hamilton, did not specifically mention Main Core. But he informed Hamilton that the NSA’s use of PROMIS involved something “so seriously wrong that money alone cannot cure the problem,” Hamilton told me. He added, “I believe in retrospect that Murphy was alluding to Main Core.” Hamilton also provided copies of letters that Richardson and Gray sent to U.S. intelligence officials and the Justice Department on Inslaw’s behalf alleging that the NSA and the CIA had appropriated PROMIS for intelligence use.
Hamilton says James B. Comey’s congressional testimony in May 2007, in which he described a hospitalized John Ashcroft’s dramatic standoff with senior Bush officials Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card, was another illuminating moment. “It was then that we [at Inslaw] started hearing again about the Main Core derivative of PROMIS for spying on Americans,” he told me.

Through a former senior Justice Department official with more than 25 years of government experience, Salon has learned of a high-level former national security official who reportedly has firsthand knowledge of the U.S. government’s use of Main Core. The official worked as a senior intelligence analyst for a large domestic law enforcement agency inside the Bush White House. He would not agree to an interview. But according to the former Justice Department official, the former intelligence analyst told her that while stationed at the White House after the 9/11 attacks, one day he accidentally walked into a restricted room and came across a computer system that was logged on to what he recognized to be the Main Core database. When she mentioned the specific name of the top-secret system during their conversation, she recalled, “he turned white as a sheet.”

An article in Radar magazine in May, citing three unnamed former government officials, reported that “8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect” and, in the event of a national emergency, “could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention.”

The INSLAW/PROMIS story reached deep into the darkest bowels of an increasingly secretive and malevolent National Security State that had manifested itself in the Reagan administration. The arms for hostages “October Surprise” deal that helped to sink Jimmy Carter’s bid for re-election leading to the Reagan-Bush hostile takeover of America, Iran-Contra, BCCI, media manipulation (see Robert Parry’s excellent special report for Consortium News that is entitled Iran-Contra’s ‘lost chapter’), Oliver North’s swashbuckling adventures involving weaponry and drugs, a shadow government and subversion of Congress were all were components of Reagan’s administration. Reagan, a career corporate shill presided over a government that he hypocritically railed against for its intrusiveness and yet his regime would serve as an incubator for the very shadow government that would one day rise again with the Supreme Court’s 2000 installation of George W. Bush as president despite evidence of a stolen election. Bush II’s administration was stocked with many of the key operatives of Reagan and his father’s regime being given key positions in the most brazenly lawless administration in history that brought America to the brink of fascism.

Ketcham’s The Last Roundup is particularly of interest in that he examined the now infamous 2004 visit of Bush administration officials Alberto Gonzalez and Andrew Card to the hospital room of Attorney General John Ashcroft who had been stricken with pancreaitis after acting A.G. James Comey refused to sign off on the reauthorization of what was an illegal surveillance program related to Continuity of Government. The story is fascinating in that it not only illustrated the length to which the Bush-Cheney junta would go to in order to keep their illegal programs in place but also for the high speed chase through the streets of Washington and the race up the hospital stairs that Comey engaged in to beat Gonzalez and Card to the sedated Ashcroft to take advantage of a sick man. When John Ashcroft actually comes out looking like a heroic figure it becomes very apparent of just how grossly un-American that this flagrantly criminal administration truly was. James Comey went on to give testimony to Congress over the hospital room showdown and more details are available from blogger Glenn Greenwald in his piece entitled What illegal “things” was the government doing in 2001-2004? and in Barton Gellman’s book Angler with excerpts published in the Washington Post. Journalist Murray Waas also has done a story on whether then A.G. Alberto Gonzalez created a set of falsified notes in order to provide a cover story for what occurred while trying to bully Comey and Ashcroft into signing off on the obviously illegal surveillance program.

Excerpts from The Last Roundup are bone chilling:

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a “national emergency.” Executive orders issued over the past three decades define it as a “natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency,” while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like “riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order.” According to one news report, even “national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad” could be a trigger.

Let’s imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in several American cities culminating in a major blast—say, a suitcase nuke—in New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during the Cold War and aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a “parallel government” that consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police state.

And –

Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem far-fetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese Americans—everyone from infants to the elderly—be held in detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of “militants” and “American negroes,” who were to be held at “assembly centers or relocation camps.” In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root—then a subsidiary of Halliburton—was handed a $385 million contract to establish “temporary detention and processing capabilities” for the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be used for “an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs.” Just what those “new programs” might be is not specified.

In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who—for a tremendously broad set of reasons—have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.

Martial law is a very serious possibility with it having now been established that the executive branch can exercise dictatorial powers during a “catastrophic emergency” (as put forth in the Bush administration’s NSPD-51) which is defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy or government functions”. President Obama has done absolutely nothing to roll back any of this and as the axiom goes about absolute power corrupting absolutely this new administration is a prime example. There is little to no resistance to these sweeping accumulations of dictatorial powers either on the pathetic excuse for the American left (which is more interested in exploiting socially divisive wedge issues like immigration and same sex marriage) or in the ridiculous, co-opted Tea Party Movement that has no problem with either a police state run amok or the ongoing militarism that feeds the war machine. Both are morally bankrupt and willfully allow themselves to be used as pawns by a two-headed monster of a one party fully cancerous capitalist dictator ship that supports an immoral and thoroughly corrupt plutocracy. They may one day get a clue and recognize the real enemy but it likely won’t be until they are being transported to debtor prisons, forced labor camps or detention facilities. For those skeptical about martial law in the U.S. I would suggest that they simply look at the city of Pittsburgh lockdown during last year’s G20 conference.

With events unfolding as they currently are it is especially troubling to note that the “economy” is one of the criteria that would trigger the declaration of martial law, the current economic crisis along with the lack of will to do what it takes to make corrections rather than bailing out and essentially giving amnesty to the Wall Street looters who are responsible for it only guarantees that the collapse when it does come will be much more devastating. A 2008 article in The Army Times revealed that troop deployments would now include ‘Homeland’ duty under the command of NORTHCOM. Assignments will allow for an increased public visibility (translation: getting Americans used to seeing troops on the streets) and will have a stated purpose as follows: “They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.” If action by the military (and the unaccountable mercenaries from privatized ‘security’ firms like Blackwater now Xe) is decided to be merited by the unitary executive and a state of martial law declared, then what exactly is going to happen to those “8 million” names that are classified as “potentially suspect” that are in the Main Core database? For any skeptics on martial law I would ask that they just do a quick bit of research on the lockdown of the city of Pittsburgh for the G20 meetings in 2009 as well as contingency plans for large scale quarantines during the H1N1 swine flu panic of that same year.

That Main Core and PROMIS are linked raises some provocative questions in regard to intent of elements of the government to subvert the constitution as a matter of national security policy as well as the ability of the shadow government to usurp the legitimate leadership. When referencing the shadow government it is imperative to realize that the term is used loosely as if by some crazed conspiracy theorist but refers to the actual parallel infrastructure that exists and has existed for years that is the Continuity Of Government (C.O.G.) program. The rogue elements have been using PROMIS for illegal surveillance (likely also for money laundering to fund off the books operations) purposes at least since the 1980s. In The Last Roundup, Ketcham also references a 1993 piece from Wired Magazine entitled The INSLAW Octopus that examines the use of PROMIS for extra-constitutional activities by none other than Lt. Colonel Oliver North:

Lt. Col. Oliver North also may have been using the program. According to several intelligence community sources, PROMIS was in use at a 6,100-square-foot command center built on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. According to both a contractor who helped design the center and information disclosed during the Iran-Contra hearings, Oliver North had a similar, but smaller, White House operations room that was connected by computer link to the DOJ’s command center.

Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States as part of a domestic emergency preparedness program, commissioned under Reagan’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to sources and published reports. Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy’s blacklist look downright crude. This operation was so sensitive that when Rep. Jack Brooks asked North about it during the Iran-Contra hearings, the hearing was immediately suspended pending an executive (secret) conference. When the hearings were reconvened, the issue of North’s FEMA dealings was dropped.

North’s involvement with Continuity of Government programs including REX 84 has long been known and while Lt. Colonel North likely is no longer is active in such programs (at least not to the knowledge of anyone) a larger part of the C.O.G./shadow government infrastructure continued to breed in darkness and secrecy and on that most glorious day for American fascism, 9/11/2001 went live under the guidance of one of its most ardent and longtime architects, Vice President Richard B. Cheney. Continuity Of Government will be discussed later in this essay.

The secrets of Main Core, PROMIS and other variations and evolutions of the oppressive tools of an out of control power structure are the crown jewels of the rising fascist police state and and every effort has and will continue to be vigorously employed to stifle any investigations through the official channels. The means to prevent disclosure will not stop with official government actions, lawsuits and classifications of national security, as we will see, there is a trail of dead bodies of those who have gotten too close for comfort to these programs and their offshoots. An important thing to understand is that the spying is not only being conducted by domestic forces (there are many connections to our “ally” Israel as well) and likely includes political dirty tricks and blackmail as well as the monitoring of the work of reporters and potential whistleblowers so as to bring to a halt any opposition to the ongoing illegal warrantless surveillance.

Now if PROMIS was being used by Lt. Colonel North as a part of REX 84 back in the 1980’s when the Continuity of Government plans were being tweaked, FEMA was being set up for the eventual incorporation into the massive Department of Homeland Security and financial transactions as well as communications already being monitored what does that say about the current state in which we all find ourselves in? The ability to monitor dissent is the key element of any tyrannical regime for it facilitates control, allows for the identification of associates of threats to the system, intimidation, forced confessions and show trials. We are well on the way towards all of this is America, note the new focus on using the police state to monitor the more independent elements of the Tea Parties, the ones that can’t be assimilated into the Republican Borg but with the acts of political intimidation and threats of violence make for a convenient excuse to expand the spying powers. In a sardonic way it is easy to find some humor into this recent monitoring of some of these people for they were for the most part silent and largely supportive of the Bush-Cheney administration’s USAPATRIOT Act (which our new president recently extended) so it is somewhat amusing to see them about to be hoisted on their own petard but any sense of schadenfreude is short-lived because this is gravely serious.

The list of potential enemies of the state will change with administrations but the one thing that will remain consistent is that the use of unconstitutional spying will only continue to evolve along with technology and the always necessary fearmongering to keep the sheeple in line. None of this expanded power is about protecting us from those who hate us for our way of life and can easily be turned into ‘terrorist’ bogeymen by a media propaganda machine that Joseph Goebbels would be proud of; it never has been.

The real purpose is to facilitate the implementation of a fascist dictatorship in America.

To be continued…

Joe Stack, a Rising Tide and a Restless Oligarchy

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

-H. L. Mencken

There is something in the air in America, something very big is happening. With the already lame duck Barack Obama administration having done more to delegitimize the myth that the government is there to serve the people and that the Bush years were but an aberration. Now after the Wall Street bailouts and the continuing exporting of American jobs to juice corporate profits, the undermining of serious health care reform and the escalation of both wars and the police state an extremely ominous undercurrent is rippling through the land and while still in the early stages it has the establishment terrified and circling the wagons.

The weekly column by Frank Rich of the damned librul [sic] New York Times is one of the first things that I read every Sunday morning and today’s offering is a mish-mash of conflation, myths and propaganda designed of course to protect the establishment. The piece, mockingly entitled The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged starts off with the foreboding two paragraphs which I excerpt:

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.

First off, I don’t really think that you can fairly lump all of the teabaggers into one group quite so easily, for example Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Ron Paul is a consistently principled man who has done more to stand against the imperialist gangster state in the last several years than anyone elso other than maybe Dennis Kucinich who is much easier marginalized than Paul. Glenn Beck is a half batshit crazy multimillionaire former shock jock turned FOX propagandist and the faction of the Tea Party that he represents are largely igoramuses, racists and useful idiots who lack the principles of Ron Paul. Mega-star Sarah Palin is largely a creation of the Weekly Standard/Commentary crowd and has already come out to herd the teabaggers to the GOP and has the allure to reinvigorate the ‘Christian’ fascists of the Religous Right whose militant shocktroops served the Bush administration and the Republican party so well until the disastrous overreach of the Terry Schaivo debacle followed by the exposure of Ted Haggard’s secret life and the death of Jerry Falwell.

Hell, I guess you can count me in with the anti-government types now that the government no longer exists as an entity to maintain infrastructure, act in the common good and maintain a level playing field but instead has been hijacked and weaponized against the people as we can see in the police state that is being built. Any government that has become that poisoned really has to go in my opinion, the path that was taken after JFK’s execution has led us here and we can thank the internet for allowing those of use who are awake to rage against the machine. But the internet is soon going bye-bye, at least in its current incarnation and it will as usual be under the guise of protecting the sheeple from those big bad terrorists that are in actuality running our own government and have been doing so for a good long time now. I know of many liberals and progressives who are slowly starting to lose their idea of a big benevolent government and coming to the belated realization that in 2010 the government IS the enemy.

Per Rich’s column I also see the John Birch Society being dragged out again. The JBS has quite often been mentioned these days as a painted up fake devil. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, when not doing his moronic falsetto imitations of his opposite numbers on FOX and horseface Rachel Maddow have both been going after the JBS for months. I would not be understating it in saying the Birchers have been getting more free publicity from the comedians and corporate hacks on what passes for the liberal media than they have in decades, I would not be surprised if their membership numbers are up as well. Now as I have mentioned before, I have worked at times with the JBS in fighting intrusions on civil liberties which seem to scantly bother either the teabaggers who were nowhere to be found during the worst years of the Bushreich or the bleeding heart types whose great crusade in these times of tyranny, endless war and economic devastation seems to be forcing gay marriage initatives down the throats of a populace that just isn’t quite evolved enough to swallow it therefore only feeding the freaks on the extreme right more bloody red meat. But really, the JBS, while there are many things where I disagree with them are actually far more liberal than the Obama administration on civil liberties issues so perhaps therein lies the need to demonize them. God knows that we can’t have what was stripped away in the aftermath of the American Reichstag Fire by Bush and Cheney restored.

As for quoting off of anything from the Southern Poverty Law Center I would take that very warily. It is only natural for skeptics to question the agenda of the institution (just as that of the ADL) as any sort of a really legitimate source of information. They too are masters at conflation and depend on the presence of demons to exist, the more demons the better. The piece by Frank Rich in a prominent paper that builds on a previous New York Times Tea Party story by David Barstow entitled Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right that conjures up the specter of Timothy McVeigh shows that they are going to be conducting a witch hunt across the internet and chances are a good deal of the people who come to this site and many, many others are going to be the prey.

As I recall, the Tea Party actually began with the 9/11 Truth movement and then also the Ron Paul people, it was only after Obama’s election that the establishment hacks like Rick Santelli, Wall Street pimp and the insipid multi-millionaire Beck hijacked it with Republican backing. Now I would also suspect a certain level of hard-line Zionist infiltration like the laughably transparent Birthers (leader Orly Taitz is yet another Israeli right-wing shill) to discredit Obama for not nuking Tehran, you could see that when Sarah Palin appeared in Nashville for the high-roller version of the National Tea Party Convention wearing that Israeli flag pin and later said that Obama could be reelected were he to attack Iran. I know the way the Israelis operate and there is no way that they are not stirring the pot with at least the Beckers and Palinazis with lot of assistance from the American neocon propagandists but those useful idiots aren’t the ones that scare the bejesus out of the greedy swine who run this place.

Rich and the rest of the elite establishment seem to be extremely scared of the actions of Joe Stack who flew his plane into an IRS office. Now I am neither a right winger nor a teabagger but I did read the Stack ‘manifesto’ and it had a contempt for the entire rotten system as a whole and could not be easily stuffed into any pre configured cartoon character. I even wrote a piece called In Defense of Joe Stack where I condemned the use of violence but agreed with the anti establishment message. There is undeniably a growing sense of anger in America and with the left being pretty much a non-factor in directing the rage towards serious and constructive change it creates a vacuum which unfortunately has filled up with some of the worst type of miscreant that this country has to offer….along with a lot of others who just have nowhere else to go and are being used as human shields.

The fear of a Joe Stack whose grievances transcend the traditional left vs right paradigm by not only calling out the IRS but the the rancid piece of crap that is the national health care system, the crony capitalist government and closes with a line out of the Communist Manifesto sends shivers up the spines the real rulers of this country. The one thing about what Rich refers to as an inchoate movement is that it could very easily evolve into something that is a serious threat to the looters and blood barters and their tax the hell out of the rest of us to build their police state, fund their illegal wars and enrich their criminal buddies on Wall Street.

The thing about the guy killed in the IRS office, Vernon Hunter is also something that has been making the rounds a good deal lately, kind of reminds me the sort of raw cynicism when during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions was trolling the wreckage looking for a corpse that could bolster the case for the estate tax to protect multimillionaire chiselers. I had more than a few of the corpse humpers and ambulance chasers attack my piece on Stack over what was in essence collateral damage.

Maybe it makes me a bad person because I could give a rat’s ass about the guy who got killed in the building, just like the people who got blown up in 9/11 (I pretty much share Ward Churchill’s sentiment about the Little Eichmanns) whose deaths at the hand of the shadow government justified a new century of raw tyranny because in a way we are all guilty of participation in this monstrous system. Hell, I could get killed in my damned car on the way to or from work every day, I always had this problem with the big contradiction of the average American life being worth more than the brown and non-Christian women and children who have our tax dollar funded bombs dropped on them. Americans have a peculiar reverence for life, the trainer that got killed by the whale at Sea World is practically causing a national outpouring of mourning but how many people were eradicated by U.S. drone strikes, bombs gone off target or people who are dying right here in the good ole US of A due to poverty, starvation and lack of health care?

So basically the IRS is a representative form of a larger tyranny and Joe Stack happened to strike a blow against it , we can argue all day about ideology but when it all comes down to it there are only two life forms in America post 9/11, vampires and cattle. I do find it more than a bit cynical that the ‘left’ is canonizing poor Vernon as some kind of national victim in order to try to affix the ‘terrorist’ label that is used so often as a bludgeon against them by the fascist elements of the right. Failed crusades have a way of wearing people down especially when the pigs who run the system only care about who is yoking the slaves and delivering them to the man.

Rich seems to be keeping alive a certain storyline that is going to be used in order to justify Cass Sunstein style infiltrations, more police state measures (maybe even naked boy scanners in shopping malls) and a demonizing of many law abiding American citizens who are inadvertently being sucked into groups of potentially violent individuals including racist white supremacists that the GOP and the neocons have used as shock troops in the Tea Party Movement.

I believe that if it were cleaned up with a lot of the scum sent packing, Glenn Beck turned off and more of an anti-establishment, anti-war, anti-Wall Street and pro-restoration of civil liberties along the lines of a Ron Paul only with an acceptance of angry progressives and liberals who don’t drink the FOX fascist Kool Aid that the Tea Party Movement could become a formidable threat to the whole corrupt system.

Which is of course why it must be seen by a populace growing madder by the minute as nothing more than through a lens of demonizing the more ostentatious and vile elements.

Just my two cents

EE

FL Gov. Charlie Crist Stonewalls in Octopus Murders Case

Under constant seige by the Dick Armey of Darkness and ambitious Jeb Bush protege Marco Rubio’s savage pandering to rabid right wingers, Florida Governor Charlie Crist’s office is according to a press release by Rachel Begley of Desertfae currently blocking the extradition of Octopus Murders suspect Jimmy Hughes.

Mr. Hughes is a key player in the nexus of black ops, arms dealing and shadow government activities that took place on the Cabazon Indian Reservation. I would recommend brushing up on the details by visiting KESQ TV’s website for Nathan Baca’s Emmy Award winning investigative series on The Octopus Murders. If Hughes is allowed to sing a lot of the darkest secrets of America’s clandestine government could come to light with devastating consequences. This is a massive story that encompasses the theft and modification of Inslaw Inc’s highly advanced PROMIS software, Iran-Contra, numerous murders including that of Cabazon Indian Tribal Council Vice Chairman Fred Alvarez (along with two friends) who was going to blow the whistle on the whole sordid affair as well as investigative reporter Danny Casolaro who was working on the story when he was ‘suicided’ back in 1991. There is also foreign espionage, illegal spying, blackmail, arms deals, drug trafficking and corruption that reaches into the highest levels of government.

I would refer to my four part series Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government as well as visiting Rachel’s website Desertfae for background on this massive, decades running criminal enterprise. Charlie Crist is a master politician, back-slapping, flip-flopping con artist and empty suit whose fight for his very political career is taking place. Rubio and the teabaggers are sharpening their knives and perhaps it’s time for Florida’s Governor to call in some favors by obstructing justice in order to preserve his Senate campaign hopes. I have published Rachel Begley’s press release below:

Florida Governor Charlie Crist’s Office Stalls On Extradition of Jimmy Hughes Arrested on Murder Charges: “Octopus Murders”

November 6, 2009

Self-described Mafia hit-man James “Jimmy” Hughes, 52, was arrested on September 26 as he boarded a plane at Miami-Dade International Airport heading for Honduras. The fugitive warrant lists three counts of murder and conspiracy to commit a crime for the 1981 execution-style murder of Cabazon Tribal Council Vice-Chairman Fred Alvarez, his friend Ralph Boger, and Patricia Castro in Rancho Mirage, California.

Detective John Powers at the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department in California, Central Homicide Unit – Cold Case Division, was assigned to investigate the 28-year-old triple homicide case about 2 years ago when Rachel Begley, the daughter of victim Ralph Boger, convinced the sheriff’s department to re-open the case.

Both Powers and Begley were aware of what they were stepping into when they launched their investigations. Today, their respective findings include information relating to Jimmy Hughes’ political and military connections in Honduras, as well as his political ties to the republican politicians in the US.

Rachel Begley & Det. John Powers Working: 03/02/09

Hughes has been held at Miami-Dade Metro West Detention Center since his arrest on 09/26/09. The extradition process involves a Governors Warrant being sent from the State of California to the office of Charlie Crist, Governor of Florida. During the time that the paperwork is being completed, Hughes is required to have a hearing approximately every 30 days. The State of Florida can hold Hughes up to 90 days while the paperwork is being completed, after which time, they reportedly must release him.

Today, for the second time, the hearing scheduled for Jimmy Hughes has been delayed. The hearing today was to take place before Judge Bertila Soto at 9:00am Eastern Time. Monica Torline, reporter for The Desert Sun confirmed today through both the County Clerks Office and the Miami Dade County State Attorney’s Office that the hearing has been moved a second time, this time being held on November 20, 2009.

Upon learning the news of the second delay, Rachel Begley decided to take action to find the reason for the delay. During the course of the day, she was able to confirm that Governor Charlie Crist’s Office has had the completed paperwork in their possession for over two weeks. She made multiple calls, left multiple voice mails, sent emails, and faxes to attempt to speed up the extradition of Jimmy Hughes.

After being transferred she was able to speak with multiple individuals in the legal department at the Governor’s Office. Rachel was informed by Kerry Owens that only one person is in charge of the extradition, Susan Smith, Florida State Extradition Coordinator. In attempting to speak with Susan Smith, Rachel was informed by a Heidi, within the legal department, that Susan Smith was not in court today due to her being at a conference. Rachel asked to speak with Susan Smith’s supervisor and was told by Heidi that her immediate supervisor is Charlie Crist and that nobody is allowed to speak with him nor leave him a voice mail.

Monica Torline of The Desert Sun wrote today, “Once we issue the warrant we are not involved in the extradition process as it moves through the court system,” Florida press secretary Sterling Ivey told The Desert Sun by e-mail Friday. Officials in the extradition unit of the Miami Dade County State Attorney’s Office said in most cases, the governor’s warrant is filed with the court during an extradition hearing.”

This extradition hearing has yet to take place. One must wonder how long the delays and stalling will take place? Will Jimmy Hughes be released due to the State of Florida’s stalling techniques or a technicality?

NOTE: For in-depth background details on the history of the triple homicide and Cabazon investigations see: “Octopus Cold Case File” dated June 23, 2009 http://desertfae.com/pressrelease.htm

Rachel Begley can be contacted at: desertfae@gmail.com

The Loudening Drumbeat

The sleazy, subversive campaign to incite some demented loser to actually go out and take a shot at President Obama continues. As with JFK the fascist forces that really run this country are working desperately at setting into place conditions to mount another ‘intervention’ against one who threatens their war machine, their empire, their God given ability to loot and plunder with masturbatory glee. The above Pat Oliphant cartoon is brilliant in its audacity at calling it out as it is with the filthy Rupert Murdoch’s FOX News being the chief force in instigating a dupe to start to plan an assassination (which will of course be used as cover for the REAL plot that is likely being hatched in the darkest bowels of the institutions of the shadow government now). It is all so much like those days of Camelot interruptus, the Obama Joker poster is a modern day copy of the now infamous Bircher JFK Wanted For Treason posters only updated for modern moron society by cribbing from pop culture.

Was Hitler in Uniform on Cover of Mein Kampf?
The warning signs are ominous, ammunition shortages are at a record as angry white dumbasses arm themselves to the teeth for the coming race war against ACORN and Obama’s secret army and did you see…..why the nigger bastard was sitting within FEET of Moammar Qadaffi at the UN, you know, the UN, the ones who are going to carry out the implementation of the NWO, the one world government and the eugenics programs that will kill Christian white babies and rip God away from history. With the armed freaks ready to rile, their heads filled with FOX agitprop and dittohead dementia and marshalled by the beloved Glenn Beck (a man whose latest ghost written hunk of asswipe actually has him on the cover in a fucking fascist uniform), the man that a weird movement against Obama has coalesced. There is massive anger and unrest in Murka today and it’s not getting any better, each and every lie by the pundits and their whores in DC to prop up their bailed out stock market casino only exacerbates the fury as the Liliputiuns realize that trickle down economics only means that they are once again being pissed on by Gulliver.

This movement, due to the fecklessness of the left, the selling out by the Raht Emanuel wing of the Democrat party of the antiwar movement and the ongoing betrayal of labor only ensures that the victims of looter capitalism are ripe for the picking and the fascist element of this rotten empire of avarice and stinking viscera is running the harvest. I refer to my favorite blogger for a few comments on these folks, Glenn Greenwald from Glenn Beck and Left-Right Confusion:

Far more interesting than Beck himself is the increasingly futile effort to classify the protest movement to which he has connected himself. Here, too, confusion reigns. In part, this is due to the fact that these “tea party” and “9/12” protests are composed of factions with wildly divergent views about most everything. From paleoconservatives to Ron-Paul-libertarians to LaRouchians to Confederacy-loving, race-driven Southerners to Christianist social conservatives to single-issue fanatics (abortion, guns, gays) to standard Limbaugh-following, Bush-loving Republicans, these protests are an incoherent mishmash without any cohesive view other than: “Barack Obama is bad.” There are unquestionably some highly noxious elements in these groups, but they are far from homogeneous. Many of these people despised the Bush-led GOP and many of them loved it.

Add to all of that the fact that this anti-Obama sentiment is being exploited by run-of-the-mill GOP operatives who have no objective other than to undermine Democrats and return the Republicans to power — manifestly not the goal of many of the protesters — and it’s impossible to define what this movement is or what is driving it. In many ways, its leadership (both organizationally and in the media) is fundamentally at odds with the participants. How can people who cheered on the Bush/Cheney administration and who want to re-install GOP leaders in power (i.e., Fox News, Limbaugh, the right-wing blogosphere, GOP House members) possibly make common cause in any coherent way with those who are in favor of limited federal government power, reduced debt, privacy, and Constitutional protections — all the things on which the GOP relentlessly waged war for years? In one important sense, the “tea party” movement is similar to the Obama campaign for “change”: it stays sufficiently vague and unspecific to enable everyone to read into what they want, so that people with fundamentally irreconcilable views believe they’re part of the same movement.

But all that said, there are some identifiable — and plainly valid — underlying causes to these protests that are neither Republican nor Democratic, or even left or right. That’s when conventional political language ceases to be useful.

Is opposition to the Wall Street bailout (supported by both parties’ establishments) left or right? How about the view that Washington is inherently corrupt and beholden to the richest corporate interests and banks which, through lobbyist influence and vast financial contributions, own and control our political system? Is hostility towards Beltway elites liberal or conservative? Is opposition to the Surveillance State and endless expansions of federal police powers a view of liberals (who vehemently opposed such measures during the Bush era but now sometimes support or at least tolerate them) or conservatives (some of whom — the Ron Paul faction — objected just as vigorously, and naturally oppose such things regardless of who is in power as transgressions of the proper limits of government)? Liberals during the Bush era continuously complained about the doubling of the national debt, a central concern of many of these “tea party” protesters. Is the belief that Washington politicians are destroying the economic security of the middle class, while the rich grow richer, a liberal or conservative view? Opposition to endless wars and bankruptcy-inducing imperial policy generally finds as much expression among certain quarters on the Right as it does on the Left.

It’s a pity that the ones who are out there who could be swayed into joining a REAL populist movement that in any sane society would be dragging Wall Street bankers from their ivory towers and hanging them in the streets is so easily co-opted by demagogues and their well paid stooges. In America after multiple coup d’etats (the Kennedy assassination, 9/11), the creation of the National Security State to serve as an enforcer for the oligarchy and the gutting of the real left, the labor left, the socialist left we have allowed the piss reeking miscreants of the extreme right to drag out their soapboxes and lay the ground work for the coming civil war. American will be killing American in order to distract and protect the money power, the gutters will be filled with blood and the looting spree will be completed come hell or high water.

The pigs in Pittsburgh at the G20 have implemented a state of lockdown in the Iron Fist City, even if they were inclined to do so you won’t see a teabagger or Becker within a hundred miles of this gathering of globalists protected by a military lockdown. No, they are too busy out hoarding bullets and plotting to take down the Manchurian Candidate, goddammit…..can’t anybody even unnerstan that he ain’t one of us????? As General Stan McChrystal has his intransigence printed on the front page of the Washington Post to prevent the pulling out of the already lost and phony war in Afghanistan by this latest administration it brings to mind the animosity festering in that den of war criminals, The Pentagon that has haunted the building like a malevolent spirit since that Communist Kennedy bailed out on the Bay of Pigs and caved in to Kruschev.

A storm is coming….

Just my two cents over the mornin cup o’ joe

EE

Cheney’s Death Squads

Here is a very interesting piece that I ran across courtesy of conspiracy researcher Jim Fetzer on the Cheney death squads. Anyone who truly understands the nature of the deep state and especially Cheney and Rummy’s involvement with the Shadow Government through their avid participation in Continuity Of Government (COG) programs knows that this is no earth shaking revelation. Of course there are death squads operational in America, the number of conveniently suicided or otherwise dead in fortuitous accidents is far too long to list here. So without further adieu here is Fetzer’s piece:

Has Cheney Been Murdering Americans?

By Jim Fetzer (via Op Ed News)

Madison, WI (OpEdNews) April 12, 2009 –The stunning revelation from our nation’s premiere investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, that Vice President Dick Cheney was running an “executive assassination ring” directly under his control and outside of the normal chain of command has raised the specter that the Vice President of the United States may have been murdering Americans. As a scholar who has invested a considerable effort in the investigation of the death of US Senator Paul Wellstone, this comes as no surprise. I and other experts with whom I have collaborated long since concluded that the crash that took his life and those of his wife, daughter, three aides and two pilots was brought about deliberately, where Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Karl Rove are the principal suspects. Other cases in which assassination appears all too probable include those of NFL star Pat Tillman and of 9/11 activist Beverly Eckert.

According to Paul Joseph Watson, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) did not originate with Cheney but was founded in 1980, which suggests that it may have been initiated by our then-Vice President George H. W. Bush, a former Director of the CIA. It consists primarily of Delta Force soldiers and SEALs, who are stationed at Pope Air Force Base and at Fort Bragg, NC. According to Watson, this assassination unit is still active under President Obama. The very existence of an operation of this kind raises questions of the utmost seriousness about democracy in America. What has become of this country when the expression of your political convictions and the pursuit of what you think best for this nation runs the risk of bringing about your termination? When our elected officials, like Hitler and Stalin, have the power to decide whether we live or die depending on their whims, this country has ceased to be the home of the brave or the land of the free.

Outing an “Executive Assassination Ring”

The story broke on Minn Post.com (March 11, 2009), when Eric Black wrote of a “Great Conversations” even at the University of Minnesota, where, during the question and answer session, Hersh reported not only that the CIA has been “deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state” but that a special unit of our military called the JSOC was set up independently of the normal chain of command, reporting only to the Vice President and to neither the Joint Chiefs or even the Secretary of Defense:

Congress has no oversight of it,” Hersh explained. “It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on.… Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the Ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on in the name of all of us.”

If the only targets were foreign terrorists who were threatening to attack the United States, of course, many Americans might be sympathetic and even forgiving. But, after publishing ten news columns, co-authoring a book, and following up with an expert in extending the scope of my research about the death of Senator Paul Wellstone, it would not surprise me whatsoever that Dick Cheney deployed one of these JSOC teams to bring about his death.

The crucial consideration in evaluating alternative hypotheses in cases like these—such as accident or assassination—is calculating the probability of the evidence on the assumption that each of them is true and comparing their values. These are known as “likelihood” measures of evidential support, where the hypothesis that confers the highest probability on the evidence qualifies as the preferable hypothesis. When the available evidence “settles down” (that is, points in the same direction), then the preferable hypothesis is also acceptable as true, in the tentative and fallible fashion of science.

The Death of Sen. Paul Wellstone

The plane crash that took the life of Senator Paul Wellstone occurred on October 25, 2002, just ten days before the election that pitted him against former St. Paul Mayor, Norm Coleman. It was widely known in Washington that the Bush leadership had targeted Wellstone for elimination, although most would have assumed that was politically speaking rather than literally. One of the first to raise alarms was Michael Niman, a professor at Buffalo State College, who enumerated reasons why they wanted to get rid of him. In an early article, “Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?” (October 28, 2002), he explained that Wellstone was the only progressive in the US Senate and an outspoken critic of the Bush administration. No one knew of Cheney’s assassination unit, but the circumstances of his death raised suspicions on their own. Control of Congress hung in the balance, since Jim Jeffords (R-VT) had left the Republican Party and become an independent. There were 50 Democrats and 49 Republicans.

On the day of the crash, several signs suggested to me that something was not right. The crash had occurred at about 10:22 AM/CT, but the site was not discovered until 11 AM/CT by Gary Ulman, the Eveleth-Virginia Airport assistant manager, who then landed and picked up the local fire chief so they could fly over the crash site—which was in a wooded, swampy area—and figure out the best way to bring equipment to the scene. Remarkably, when Rick Wahlberg, the Sheriff of St. Louis Country arrived there at 1:30 PM/CT, he encountered members of the FBI’s Rapid Response Team from St. Paul, whom he knew personally, who told him that they had been there since noon. Christopher Bollyn, a reporter for American Free Press, noted in an article published on October 29, 2002, this was remarkable insofar as Gary Ulman had not notified them. Indeed, when I calculated the minimal time it would have taken to fly from St. Paul to Duluth, rent a car and drive to the crash scene, they had to have taken off at about 9:30 AM/CT, which was the same time the Senator’s plane had departed. It was very strange.

Moreover, after the plane crashed, even though the wings (which carry the fuel supply) had been sheared off by the surrounding trees and the tail had broken off (a common occurrence in plane crashes), the fuselage burned so intensely for seven hours the firemen were unable to extinguish it and the bodies would not be recovered until the following day. Nonetheless, an FBI spokesman, Paul McCabe, would announce that night that there were “no signs of terrorist involvement”. That struck me as rather odd, because terrorists are simply assailants with specific political motivation, who do not have special access to techniques for sabotaging aircraft. Since the cause of the crash was not yet known, how could the FBI have possibly known? It would be more than a year before the NTSB would announce its findings. According to its official report, the plane crashed because the pilots had lost track of their airspeed and allowed the plane to crash.

The plane, a King Air A-100, was akin to the Rolls-Royce of small aircraft and had an excellent maintenance record. While there had been many exaggerated reports about the weather—Wolf Blitzer, for example, attributed the crash to freezing rain and heavy snow—those of us in the vicinity knew that was not true. Indeed, a local TV-news anchorman, Denny Anderson, who was himself a pilot, spent much of the day correcting those false impressions. It turned out that other planes had landed there earlier in the day and that Ulman had had no hesitation in taking off to search for the plane when he noticed it was overdue. A pilot in the local vicinity, who had been out taking pictures across water in close proximity of the airport, sent them to me. It was clear by studying them that there was no rain, much less freezing rain. Indeed, the NTSB would eventually conduct simulations of the flight with pilots from Charter Aviation and, even though they had them fly abnormally slowly, they were unable to cause the plane to crash.

The NTSB Report

The NTSB pinned responsibility for the crash on the pilots. The principal pilot, Richard Conry, however, had some 5,200 hours of experience, an Air Transport Pilots certification–which is the highest civilian qualification short of astronaut—and had passed his FAA “flight check” just two days before the fatal flight. His co-pilot, Michael Guess, was not as highly qualified, but he was a competent pilot for a plane that did not require two. Indeed, one of the ironies of the FBI’s announcement is that Guess turned out to have known Zacharias Moussaoui, an accused 9/11 conspirator, whom he had met at the Pam Am International Flight Academic in Eagan, MN, where he had allegedly “inadvertently” allowed Moussaoui access to a computer program about flying a Boeing 747. So not only could the FBI not have known there was “no terrorist involvement” the evening of the crash but the co-pilot would turn out to have actually had contact with an alleged terrorist.

Several features of the crash caught my attention early on. Although there were two pilots, there had been no distress call. A loss of air speed brings with it a loss of altitude, and the plane had crashed two miles south of the airport, apparently flying on the wrong azimuth. I began to ask myself the probability that two pilots would neglect their air speed, their altitude, and their azimuth. If we assume that these are independent events that might happen, say, one time in a hundred—an absurdly high frequency—then for one pilot to neglect all three would be equal to 1/100 x 1/100 x 1/100 = 1/1,000,000 or one time in a million. And there had been two of them, where the probability that they would both neglect those factors was equal to 1/1,000,000 x 1/1,000,000, a very small number. And the plane was equipped with a loud warning alarm to alert them of any risk of stalling.

The more I investigated the case, the more peculiar it seemed. An odd cell-phone anomaly was reported to me, where the driver, passing just south of the airport en route to the funeral the senator had planned to attend, heard a loud wailing and war-belling sound, unlike anything he had heard before. I contracted an Australian colleague, John P. Costella, who has a Ph.D. in electromagnetism, and asked him if this could have been an effect of the use of a high-tech weapon, which could take out all the planes electronics, including its navigation system, communication system, and stall warning alarm. It would turn out that the props were on idle when it crashed, which the NTSB was unable to explain. A directed-energy weapon could not only have taken out the plane’s electronics, including its communications and navigation systems, but flipped the solenoids that control the pitch of the props and set them to “idle”. The more that I studied the case, the more it appeared that the plane was not under their control. They had apparently been unable to stop it.

AMERICAN ASSASSINATION

By this time, I had published ten columns on the case in an alternative newspaper in Duluth, which had led a Native American scholar from Northern Arizona University to contact me and offer to be co-author if I were disposed to turn my research into a book. We had both learned of an incident shortly before the crash where veterans at a meeting in Wilmer, MN, had learned from Wellstone that he had been threatened by Cheney, who told him that, if he opposed the administration on Iraq, there would be “severe ramifications” for him personally and for the state of Minnesota, which I confirmed with veterans who were there. He (Wellstone) had gone ahead and made a speech opposing the invasion of Iraq, which he thought might end his political career. Instead, he surged ahead of Coleman and was running 6-8 points and gaining at the time of the crash. Rove’s hand-picked candidate was going to lose to Wellstone.

We announced the publication of AMERICAN ASSASSINATION (2004) at the National Press Club exactly two years after the crash. My co-author, Don “Four Arrows” Jacobs, and I observed that the official account of the crash had a vanishing probability and that the NTSB had only considered accident-compatible alternatives, but that if you considered the possible use of a small bomb, a gas canister or a high-tech, directed-energy device, then the latter would confer a high probability upon the evidence, including the lack of any distress call, the odd cell-phone anomaly, and reports I had confirmed that garage doors in the vicinity had opened spontaneously that morning. I flew John to Minnesota and we visited the crash scene together in 35 degree-below-zero weather, picking up pieces of debris, studying the damage to the trees, and making other observations. He and I would also review some 2,500 pages of official documents and studies on which the NSTB report was purportedly based, where its report ran only sixty pages.

John Costella made the remarkable discovery of an odd meteorological phenomenon in the atmosphere above the crash site, where clouds that were normally loaded with ice were filled with water instead. This would be otherwise inexplicable, since the heat from the intense fire would fall off as a function of distance from its location. But it would be a predictable effect of the use of a directed-energy weapon. We authored a report, “The NTSB Failed Wellstone”, summarizing our findings, which Michael Ruppert would publish in his “From the Wilderness” newsletter. Indeed, his own research would lead him to the same conclusion, as he explained in his CROSSING THE RUBICON (2004). Ruppert had even been contacted by someone in the business of assassinations (“wet work”), who told him that some reinvigorated old white guys were in charge, that they were nobody to screw around with, and that he could anticipate there would be other “strategic accidents” in the future.

My own inference is that this was a small-scale conspiracy, which might have involved as few as ten persons. The King Air A-100 is manufactured by Beechcraft, which is owned by Raytheon. A military-industrial colossus, this company also owns numerous patents for directed-energy weapons. I believe it could have been as simple a matter as a phone call from one of the directors of Charter Aviation to Dick Cheney, telling him that Wellstone would be aboard. After consultation with Rumsfeld and Rove, a phone call to Raytheon would provide the information necessary about the best way to take the plane down. A small team from the JSOC could be entrusted with the assignment, where the crucial problem would be to lure the plane into the kill zone, apparently by manipulating the on-board GPS system, which is completely under military control. I even discovered corroboration that this is how it was done, as I have explained in a one-hour video lecture about 25-30 minutes into the program.

The Death of Cpl. Pat Tillman

There are typical signs that something is wrong in the case of deaths that have political ramifications. These include obfuscation about the cause of the event, especially by creating a false “first impression”, which tends to stick in the minds of most Americans. In the Wellstone case, it was that the cause had been the weather. In the case of Pat Tillman, it was that he had been killed in a fire-fight in Afghanistan. Although I shall not discuss it with the same degree of detail, the Tillman death appears to bear the signs that this, too, was an assassination. An article on Tillman in Wikipedia, exclusively based upon public sources, provides ample indications of the blatancy with which political killings can take place and then be covered up, especially by assassins who were themselves members of the military. (To insure its availability, I have archived it here under “Assassination”.)

An NFL star who enlisted in the Army in May 2002, he apparently became disenchanted with the conduct of the war. He not only did not support President Bush for reelection, but encouraged others to vote for John Kerry. According to his mother, a friend of his had arranged for him to meet with Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus from MIT and one of our nation’s most respected public intellectuals, who, no doubt, could have launched him into prominent orbit as an outspoken opponent of the war. In my opinion, the prospect of having a macho, NFL-complement to Cindy Sheehan—one who might inspire the nation to reconsider our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan—would have been a powerful incentive for removing him from the public arena in the minds of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Karl Rove. The use of these special operations military serving as an ‘assassination ring’ in this situation may very well have been irresistible.

According to Wikipedia’s entry about him, Tillman was redeployed to Afghanistan and, on April 22, 2004, he was killed. The Army initially claimed that he and his unit were hit by an ambush on a road outside a village not far from the Pakistan border. The Army Special Operations Command initially claimed that there was an exchange with hostile forces, but an investigation conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense concluded that his death was due to friendly fire “aggravated by the intensity of the firefight”. Another, more thorough investigation, concluded that hostile forces had not been involved in the firefight and that two allied groups fired on each other in confusion after a nearby explosive device was detonated. But it also makes these points:

* No evidence of enemy fire at the scene has ever been produced;

* The lieutenant general who withheld details of Tillman’s death from his parents for months told investigators “he had a bad memory, and could not recall details of his actions” on more than 70 occasions;

* According to The Washington Post, on May 4, 2005, the Army’s own investigators were aware that Tillman had been killed by being shot three times in the head;

* Senior Army commanders, including Gen. John Abizaid, knew of this fact within days of the shooting but nevertheless approved him for the Siver Star, the Purple Heart, and a posthumous promotion;

* Army doctors told the investigators that these wounds suggested murder and urged them to launch a criminal investigation, which would not be pursued; and

* Army attorneys congratulated each other in emails for impeding criminal investigation as they concluded that Tillman’s death was the result of friendly fire, and that only administrative, or non-criminal, punishment was indicated.

Evidence and Likelihoods

When we consider the alternatives of accident or assassination in this case, we have to compare their likelihoods In relation to the available evidence. If Tillman had been killed accidentally, even by “friendly fire”, then what is the probability that no evidence of friendly fire would be produced, that the Lt. General would suffer 70 “memory lapses”, that the corporal would have been shot three times in the head, that honors would be bestowed upon him, that the doctors would have suspected he was murdered, and that Army attorneys would impede criminal investigations? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to conclude that something is very wrong here. The probability of these effects appears to be very high if he was deliberately taken out and very low if his death was accidental, friendly fire or not.

And there is more. On July 26, 2007, for example, the AP received official documents stating that the doctors who performed the autopsy suspected that Tillman was murdered. High ranking officers knew better at least four days before his nationally televised memorial service during which he “was lauded as a war hero for dying while engaging the enemy”. Members of Tillman’s unit burned his body armor and uniform. Tillman’s diary was never returned to his family, and its whereabouts are not publicly known. As a former Marine Corps commissioned officer, I affirm that this treatment of the personal property of a deceased is not proper procedure. The missing diary is especially striking, since diaries are legally admissible as evidence in courts of law and would have attested to his state of mind.

Some prominent news personalities have figured out that something seems to be wrong. On July 26, 2007, for example, Chris Matthews reported that Tillman’s death might have been a case of fragging (of the deliberate killing of a soldier by his comrades at arms) because the bullet holes were tight and neat, suggesting that he was shot at close range. Matthews based his speculation on a report from the doctors who investigated Tillman’s body. The following day the AP reported that a doctor who examined Tillman’s body after his death wrote, “The medical evidence did not match up with the, with the scenario as described,” also noting that the wound entrances appeared as though he had been shot with an M16 rifle from less than 10 yards (9 m) away.” Even his mother, in her disturbing book, BOOTS ON THE GROUND BY DUSK (2008), has been shaken by the way the military has handled the death of her son.

The Official Finding

On March 26, 2007, the Pentagon released their report on the events surrounding Tillman’s death and cover-up. The report reads in part:

we emphasize that all investigators established the basic facts of CPL Tillman’s death — that it was caused by friendly fire, that the occupants of one vehicle in CPL Tillman’s platoon were responsible, and that circumstances on the ground caused those occupants to misidentify friendly forces as hostile. None of the investigations suggested that CPL Tillman’s death was anything other than accidental. Our review, as well as the investigation recently completed by Army CID, obtained no evidence contrary to those key findings.

The denial of contrary evidence appears to be contrived. If the doctors even suspected murder, if there were three shots to the head, and if they were tightly grouped and appeared to have been fired from close range by an M-16 from less than 10 yards away, the “friendly fire” scenario looks more and more like deliberate misinformation. Tillman is not the kind of man his fellow soldiers would frag. On the contrary, he is just the kind of guy—and football star, no less—his fellow soldiers would have respected and admired. He’s the kind of guy they would have written home about! Indeed, the article confirms that Tillman “was popular among his fellow soldiers and had no enemies”. They harbored no reason to murder him.

He may have been killed by a member of the armed forces, which could have been obscured by the use of the phrase, “friendly fire”, but it would not have been by his comrades in arms. Interestingly, there are reports of snipers in a second group of troops that encountered Pat’s squad shortly before an explosive device went off and the shooting started. This looks like an idea situation in which a designated assassin, who was a member of this second group, could have used the chaotic conditions created by the detonation of a distracting explosive device to take out a man who could have become an outspoken opponent of the war, especially if the members of this ring are military. In my opinion, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove would not have let his opposition to the war become public knowledge. His death does not appear to have been an accident.

The Death of a 9/11 Activist

The plane crash that took the life of 9/11 activist Beverly Eckert troubled me because of its striking similarities to the crash that took the life of Paul Wellstone. The plane, a Bombardier Q400, was an excellent commuter carrier with a 74-passenger capacity. Like the King Air A-100, it had no history of mechanical problems. Philip Trenary, the head of the Pinnacle Airlines that operated the plane, stated, “It’s an aircraft that’s had flawless service.” Reports of the weather appear to have been greatly exaggerated, where the plane, like the King Air A-100, was equipped with sophisticated de-icing equipment. Moreover—and this is especially notable—there was no distress call from the plane. According to an early report, Flight 3407 came straight down out of the sky, killing 50 persons, including Eckert.

There have been several stories about the crash in The New York Times, for example, including “Crew Reported ‘Significant Ice Buildup’ Before Crash” (February 14, 2009), “In Plane Crash, Loss of Momentum Still a Mystery” (February 15, 2009), and “Recreating a Plane Crash” (February 19 2009), where Matthew L. Wald offers speculation that the crew might have “overreacted” to a computerized flight-control system “trying to protect the aircraft from flying too slowly, going into a stall and crashing”.

Unfortunately, there are a number of disturbing signs that what we are being told does not add up. Consider the alleged ice-buildup. That report seems to be contradicted by the transcript of the final communications, as What Really Happened has highlighted, which has been compounded by another exaggerated report about the ice build-up in The New York Times. A very difference impression comes from Last moments of Buffalo Flight 3407, Webmaster’s Commentary, What Really Happened, on February 13, 2009 (http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/) as follows:

Read the transcript of the final communications from Colgan Flight 3407 in Buffalo.
No mention of ice being a problem for aircraft.

There is a brief incidental mention that there is an area of icing, but it is clear that nobody sees this as a problem. No mention of any problems at all.

3407 is there one moment, then gone the next.

Now, look at this line from the transcript:

17:40 – Delta 1998: Uh negative, Delta 1998, we’re just in the bottoms and nothing on the TKs …

Listening to the tape, it sounds like what the pilot of 1998 said was
“… nothing on the TCAS.”

TCAS (pronounced T-cass) stands for Traffic Collision Avoidance System, which sends out a lower power non-directional radar pulse and listens for any aircraft transponders in the vicinity in order to warn pilots of close approaching aircraft.

So, what the pilot of Delta 1998 is saying is that at the time Air Traffic Control asked him to look for a Dash-8 [Bombardier] at 2300 [feet altitude], 3407’s radar transponders had quit working.

One final note:

If the Air Traffic Controller is telling the pilot of Delta 1998 to look at 2300 feet altitude for the Dash 8, then that means the last altitude reading returned to the ATC was 2300 feet.

Air Traffic Radar never received a return showing a loss of altitude, which strongly suggests that the aircraft’s entire avionics (aircraft electronic control) system quit working while the plane was still half a mile in the air.

______________

Now this suggests to me that the reason there was no distress call is that the aircraft’s entire avionics system quit working while the plane was still half a mile in the air. What could possibly explain this? There are several disturbing parallels with the Wellstone crash: the plane was an excellent aircraft, very forgiving, with sophisticated equipment, including for de-icing; the weather reports have exaggerated conditions, which were actually rather mild, where other planes had had no problems coping with them on their approach into Buffalo; and both of the pilots were well-qualified. I am also struck that Beverly Eckert, a 9/11 widow, was aboard the plane. The situations here, including political motivation, appear to be parallel.

Why Beverly Might Matter

She was a prominent 9/11 activist whose husband had died that day in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. She had actually met with none other than President Barack Obama shortly before flying back to Buffalo to honor her late husband’s birthday. She was a member of “The Jersey Girls”, four 9/11 widows, whose efforts to promote an investigation of 9/11 made a crucial contribution to the creation of the commission, which President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had opposed. It is no exaggeration to observe that Cheney and the Neo-Cons—to this day—fear more than anything else a bona-fide, objective investigation into 9/11 (motive). Because Obama kept Robert Gates on as Secretary of Defense, no doubt, lingering elements of Cheney’s operation, including members of the assassination ring, almost certainly still exercise influence within the Pentagon (means), where, as in the case of Wellstone, this flight could very well have offered the perfect occasion to take her out of the equation (opportunity).

The argument has been made that Beverly was not committed to 9/11 as “an inside job”, which may have made her all the more threatening. For a woman whose husband was killed on 9/11, who had refused to take the government’s proffered compensation—widely regarded as “hush money” in the 9/11 movement—her insistence upon further investigation of the case would have been alarming to those who were involved. Bush and Cheney were adamantly opposed to any investigation and, when they were forced to create a commission of inquiry, they did their best to manage it from within. In fact, Mike Ruppert’s book, CROSSING THE RUBICON (2004) makes a powerful case for the inference that Bush had placed Cheney in control of the 9/11 attack. While Henry Kissinger’s appointment as Executive Director was thwarted, that of Philip Zelikow was not, even though his self-described area of expertise is neither science nor history but the creation and maintenance of public myths. (Since these entries are subject to alteration, I have archved the original to which I refer here.)

He thus appears to have been perfect for the task he was assigned, since THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT (2004) has been refuted on virtually very significant count. The buildings were designed to withstand even multiple impacts of commercial aircraft, the fires burner neither long enough nor hot enough to cause the steel to weaken, much less melt. The towers were destroyed from the top down, largely turned into very fine dust in just 10 seconds apiece, which is nearly the speed of free fall, even though, from the 80th floor down in the South Tower and the 96th in the North, they were both stone cold steel. The method by means of which this was done remains a matter of intense debate, but there are indications that, among other means, explosives and incendiary devices were employed. Public discussion of 9/11 is something they desperately want to suppress, since it has been the justification for the “War on Terror”, including the attacks upon Iraq and Afghanistan, restrictions upon civil liberties, and all the rest.

Where Things Stand

Use of plane crashes to take out your political opponents offers a virtually “fool proof” method. Unless the Attorney General declares a crash site to be a crime scene, the NTSB is restricted to the investigation of only accident-compatible alternatives, such as that the plane, the pilots, or the weather were responsible for the crash. Indeed, an even more peculiar policy of the NSTB is that its “official reports” are not admissible evidence in courts of law [49 USC 1441(e)]. The procedure, therefore, is simple. Take out your opponent using a plane crash, have a complicit or compliant Attorney General decline to declare it a “crime scene”, and the only recourse for the NTSB is to investigate it as an accident. That is what happened in the case of Paul Wellstone and will undoubtedly be followed in the case of Beverly Eckert. If Ruppert is right—and I believe that he is—then the murder of 50 more Americans to protect himself would have been “small potatoes” for Cheney.

While the evidence concerning Wellstone establishes his death as an assassination beyond a reasonable doubt, the same cannot yet be said about Eckert. There are reports that she was heading on to Chicago to meet with Federal Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald with new evidence related to 9/11 and that Russian satellites detected (what is described as) a “low level” electromagnetic emanating from an area near the eastern part of Lake Erie shortly before the plane plunged to the ground. The probability that a reliable airplane with qualified pilots would lose its capacity to communicate and fall to the ground absent a precipitating cause appears to be negligible. Indeed, the recent death via plane crash of Mike Connell, an IT wizard who appears to have been in a position to have stolen elections for Bush, occurred at a time the attorneys who were deposing him thought he was about to “spill the beans”.

Even though this assassination unit does not appear to have originated with Cheney, it appears all too probable that these groups or sub-units within it have been the cover for “wet work”, including assassinations and unofficial acts of terrorism, since their inception. In the case of Senator Paul Wellstone, no alternative to assassination can explain the evidence. In the case of Cpl. Pat Tillman the only alternative would appear to be that the Army, knowing he had been killed by “friendly fire”, wanted to capitalize upon his death for the sake of recruiting, a motive that can be subsumed by the assassination alternative. The phrase “friendly fire” is a euphemism for “an American soldier”, who appears to have committed this killing. I expect additional evidence to clarify the death of the 9/11 activist Beverly Eckert, but there is a discernable pattern here. In relation to the question with which we began, therefore, “Has Cheney been murdering Americans?”, the research I have reviewed suggests that the answer, alas!, appears to be an unequivocal “Yes!”

Professor Fetzer’s website is at: www.d.umn.edu/~jfetzer/

The Yankee and Cowboy War (Chapter Seven)

The Yankee and Cowboy War: Chapter Seven

By Carl Oglesby

The Watergate Plane Crash

“I don’t say this to my people. They’d think I’m nuts. I think the CIA killed Dorothy Hunt”

-Charles Colson

Time, July 8, 1974

Context

One workday morning in the capital, early in October 1972, McCord got a call from Gerald Alch, his CREEP-appointed attorney of that moment. Alch said he had important news to convey, could they meet for lunch. When they met, says McCord, Alch’s opening words were, “I have just come from Bittman’s office [White House attorney William Bittman]. Nobody gets up on that (witness) stand during trial. In return, they will get executive clemency, money while in prison and rehabilitation afterwards.” Alch assured McCord that this was a good deal under the circumstances. “Nobody,” he repeated, “gets up on that stand.”

Alch then asked McCord, “Why aren’t you taking the money from Mrs.Hunt?” In McCord’s account of Watergate, A Piece of Tape, from which I borrow this dialogue, he writes, “I went over my concerns that the whole business had the appearance of a control mechanism to keep the men quiet prior to the Nixon election by the use of money as a weapon and tool. Between that concern and the surveillance I had experienced on the 19th of September, I had decided to take no further money in order to be completely free to pursue whatever course of action my conscience dictated without being obliged.”

McCord says Alch “berated” him for taking this stand, then popped a question which McCord found “rather unusual in the wording and context.” Said Alch, “Just what would it take for you to turn state’s evidence?” McCord says Alch’s tone and manner made it clear that he was not sponsoring this alternative. It was “as though he were feeling me out for someone else.” McCord told Alch that he would follow his own course of action. Alch, he notes, “fell silent at that statement.”

MACHO BARKER: The next day I got a call. “Do you recognize my voice?” And I said yes. It was Dorothy Hunt. She told me to go to Miami and stay in the airport and meet the next flight of the same line. I made sure that Dorothy was not being followed, and then we went to my home. She said, “From now on I will be your contact,” and it was quite evident that the Dorothy that I had known had a split personality, because for the first time she used operational terms that Howard and I had always used. She said n ot to trust Rothblatt too much, that she didn’t like him. She said to start figuring out how much assistance we would need. Up to this time, we had not any at all. She said remember the spirit of the old organization – that if you are caught by the enemy, two things will be done: (1) every effort will be made to rescue you, and (2) all expenses and your family will be taken care of. Even today, the families of those who were lost at the Bay of Pigs are being aided, and that is something you expect on a mission.

Late October 1972. Dorothy Hunt called Colson’s office in an agitated voice demanding to speak to Colson, who declined. By Colson’s later account she was “upset at the interruption of payments from Nixon associates to Watergate defendants.”

November 15. Colson met with Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman in the Laurel Lodge presidential office at Camp David to play a tape of Hunt expounding his blackmail threat. That same afternoon, Dean flew to New York with this tape to play it for Stams and Mitchell, meeting in safe rooms at the Metropolitan Club. A week later, Hunt called Colson in order to have it recorded that “…we are protecting the guys who are actually responsible…and of course that is a continuing requirement, but at the same time, it is a two-way street….”

Late November. McCord: “In addition, Mrs. E. Howard Hunt, on or about November 30, 1972, in a personal conversation with me, stated that E. Howard Hunt had just dictated a three-page letter with Hunt’s attorney, William O. Bittman, had to read to Kenneth Parkinson, the attorney for the Committee to Re-elect the President, in which letter Hunt purportedly threatened to ‘blow the White House out of the water.’ Mrs. Hunt at this point in her conversation with me also repeated the statement which she too had made before, which was that E. Howard Hunt had information which would impeach the president.”

December 2 (Saturday). The president met at Key Biscayne with Colson and Rebozo to discuss the growing blackmail threat. Dorothy Hunt in Washington meanwhile was hounding Colson’s secretary, Joan Hall, with phone calls about “the problem.” She demanded that Hall get the word to Colson to get the word to Nixon “to get something done about it.”

Mitchell was ultimately reached, and he reached for Dean. Mitchell told Dean to use some White House cash to get the Hunt situation settled down. Haldeman came into the picture as well as their implicit electronic audience. His function indeed forces him in his ceremonial innocence (pretend ignorance) to teach the Nixon-person how to be the Nixon-president before an unseen listening audience which they both pretend not to notice.

Dean continues with a precise summary and an understated suggestion which manages to say to Nixon the man that he certainly must employ his own special resources in this flight to prop up the presidency. Though Dean always talks to the mask of Nixon-president, he still has his sense of limits, as though carelessly, laid across Nixon’s private parts. Thus the poignancy of Dean’s next speech:

DEAN: …. So what are the soft spots on this? Well, first of all, there is the problem of the continued blackmail which will not only go on now, but it will go on while these people are in prison, and it will compound the obstruction of justice situation. It will cost money. It is dangerous. People around here are not pros at this sort of thing. This is the sort of thing Mafia people can do ….

Now the dialogue unwinds, constantly returning to the question of Hunt.

NIXON: Your major guy to keep under control is Hunt?
DEAN: That is right….
NIXON: ….the vulnerable points being, the first vulnerable points would be obvious. That would be one of the defendants, either Hunt, because he is most vulnerable in my opinion, might blow the whistle and his price is pretty high….
…You can’t keep it out if Hunt talks….
…I think Hunt knows a hell of a lot more….
…You have no choice on Hunt….

And finally, breaking at last into a hole utterance:

…But my point is, do you ever have any choice on Hunt? That is the point. No matter what we do here now, John, whatever he wants if he doesn’t get it – immunity, etc., he is going to blow the whistle.

Then this cabalistic exchange at a later meeting the same day in which Haldeman and Ehrlichman sail in over Dean’s head:

DEAN:…Hunt has now sent a blackmail request directly to the White House.
NIXON: Who did he send it to? You?
DEAN: Yes.
NIXON: Or to me?
DEAN: Your counsel.
HALDEMAN: That is the interesting kind of thing, there is something there that may blow it all up that way and everything starts going in a whole new direction.
EHRLICHMAN: The he would hurt the Eastern Asian Defense. [?] Right there. That is blackmail.

The FBI and the Crash

The criticism of the official pilot-error theory of the Hunt crash has been overwhelmingly identified with Sherman Skolnick, a Chicago-based private investigator, and his colleague, companion, and bodyguard, Alex Bottos, who has a murky background and claims former FBI, CIA and narcotics connections. Skolnick and Bottos are a pungent Dickensian pair. Skolnick has been confined from birth to a wheelchair. He is intense, loud, overbearing, quick, suspicious, sometimes merry, all upper torso and arms, boisterous, gnomic-faced. Bottos is more somber and sepulchral. He says he was at Opalaka in 1960-61 with Hunt on the Bay of Pigs campaign. He carries a pistol and is fond of flashing it. He dresses with old-fashioned nattiness and polishes to a high gloss both his black hair and black patent leather loafers. Skolnick and Bottos have seen each other through great controversies. They project an ominous, swirling, shadowy atmosphere, Skolnick wheeling and challenging, Bottos in a tailored flak jacket brooding on collapse.

The instrument of their collaboration is Skolnick’s Citizens Committee ot Clean Up the Courts. Their most spectacular hit so far – until United flight 553 – was Chicago’s once-immaculate liberal, Governor Otto Kerner, whom they discovered and exposed in a race-track payoff scheme. Skolnick and Bottos have also helped put away several Illinois Supreme Court judges on corruption counts.

Skolnick was instantaneous in charging that the crash of United flight 533 was the result of sabotage and that there was a big Watergate connection. IN the weeks immediately following the crash, he claims to have received a flood of information from protected inside sources supporting him in this belief. He also tried to make that information public, thus to generate a controversy and a demand for a new investigation of the crash.

In the furor of claim and counterclaim that followed, Skolnick’s voice often reached an intensity that many found hysterical. Anyone who disagreed with him about anything (your author included) he denounced as a secret agent of the CIA. The controversy over his personality came to interfuse with the controversy over the crash. He made it easy for his detractors to ridicule him for rampant paranoia and to ignore his specific claims as wild raving.

Yet in the instances in which the dispute has been resolved by a subsequent factual disclosure, Skolnick’s contentions have been substantially borne out. The question of FBI involvement in the crash investigation is the perfect case in point.

The Boeing 737 had barely hit, said Skolnick, before the crash site was aswarm with large numbers (he sometimes said “carloads”, sometimes “200,” sometimes “dozens”) of “federal people” who shouldered Chicago police and firemen asise and kept to themselves why and on what authority they were doing so. When I first encountered the array of Skolnick’s arguments about the crash, I dismissed this particular item – the 200 FBI agents prowling the wreckage within moments of the crash – as an improbable piece of melodramatic adornment. In my original summary of Skolnick’s case in the Boston Phoenix (May 15, 1973), I left the point out altogether, concentrating on what I regarded as his more impressive arguments.

But then came the disclosure, as a result of Skolnick’s agitation in Washington, of the two letters which I reprint in their entirety below. The first is from the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, John Reed, to acting FBI Director William Ruckelshaus. The second is Ruckelshaus’s reply. The NTSB is a putatively independent branch of the Department of Transportation with responsibility for investigating all accidents involving commercial airliners. It investigated the crash of United 533. The NTSB chairman’s letter is dated June 5, 1973.

Dear Mr. Ruckelshaus:

As you may know, the National Transportation Safety Board is currently investigating the aircraft accident of the United Air Lines Boeing 737, at Midway Airport, Chicago, on December 8, 1972. Our investigative team assigned to this accident discovered on the day following the accident that several FBI agents had taken a number of non-typical actions relating to this accident within the first few hours following the accident.

Included were: for the first time in the memory of our staff, an FBI agent went to the control tower and listened to the tower tapes before our investigators had done so; and for the first time to our knowledge, in connection with an aircraft accident, an FBI agent interviewed witnesses to the crash, including flight attendants on the aircraft prior to the NTSB interviews. As I am sure you can understand, these actions, particularly with respect to this flight on which Mrs. E. Howard Hunt was killed, have raised innumerable questions in the minds of those with legitimate interests in ascertaining the cause of this accident. Included among those who have asked questions, for example, is the Government Activities Subcommittee of the House Government Operations Committee. On the basis of informal discussions with the staff of the Committee, it is likely that questions as to what specific actions were taken by the FBI in connection with this aircraft accident, and why such actions were taken, will come up in a public overhearing at which the NTSB will appear and which is now scheduled for June 13, 1973.

In order to be fully responsive to the Committee, as well as to be fully informed ourselves about all aspects of this accident so as to assure the complete accuracy of our determination of the probable cause, we would appreciate being advised of all the details with respect to the FBI activities in connection with this accident. We would like to have, for example, the following information: the purpose of the FBI investigation, the reasons for the early response and unusual FBI actions in this case, the number of FBI personnel involved, all investigative actions taken by the agents and the times they took such actions (including the time the first FBI agents arrived on the scene), and copies of all reports and records made by the agents in connection with their investigations (we already have copies of 26 FBI interview reports; any other documents should be provided, therefore).

While we have initiated action at the staff level between our agency and yours to effect better liaison and avoid engaging in efforts which may be I conflict in the future, we have determined that some formal arrangement – in the nature of an intra-agency memorandum of agreement of understanding, for instance – would seem appropriate. It would clearly delineate our respective statutory responsibilities and set forth procedures to eliminate any future conflicts. We would therefore appreciate it if you would designate, at your earliest convenience, an official with whom we may discuss this matter and with the authority to negotiate such a formal agreement with the Safety Board.

In the interim, however we would like to receive, in advance of the scheduled June 13, 1973, public oversight hearing, the specific information concerning the actions of the FBI in connection with the Midway accident and the reasons therefore, in order to enable us to be as fully responsive as possible to the House Subcommittee.

Sincerely,

(Original signed by John H. Reed, Chairman)

FBI Director Ruckelshaus answered on June 11, 1973.

Dear Mr. Reed:

Your letter dated June 5, 1973, concerning the FBI’s investigation into the crash of a United Air Lines Boeing 737 at Midway Airport, Chicago, Illinois, on December 8, 1972 has been received.

The FBI has primary investigative jurisdiction in connection with the Destruction of Aircraft or Motor Vehicles (DAMV) Statute, Title 18, Section 32, U.S. Code, which pertains to the willful damaging, destroying or disabling of any civil aircraft in interstate, overseas or foreign air commerce. In addition, Congress specifically designated the FBI to handle investigations under the Crime Aboard Aircraft (CAA) Statute, Title 49, Section 1472, U.S. Code, pertaining, among other things, to aircraft piracy, interference with flight crew members and certain specified crimes aboard aircraft in flight, including assault, murder, manslaughter and attempts to commit murder or manslaughter.

FBI investigation of the December 8, 1972, United Air Lines crash was instituted to determine if a violation of the DAMV or CAA Statutes had occurred and for no other reason. The fact that Mrs. E. Howard Hunt was aboard the plane was unknown to the FBI at the time our investigation was instituted.

It has been longstanding FBI policy to immediately proceed to the scene of an airplane crash for the purpose of developing any information indicating a possible Federal violation within the investigative jurisdiction of the FBI. In all such instances liaison is immediately established with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) personnel upon their arrival at the scene.

Approximately 50 FBI Agents responded to the crash scene, the first ones arriving within 45 minutes of the crash. FBI Agents did interview witnesses to the crash, including flight attendants. Special Agent (SA) Robert E. Hartz proceeded to the Midway Airport tower shortly after the crash to determine if tower personnel could shed any light as to the reason of the crash. ON arriving at the tower, SA Hartz identified himself as an FBI Agent and explained the reason for his presence. He was invited by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) personnel at the tower to listen to the recording made at the tower of the conversation between the tower and United Air Lines Flight 553. At no time did SA Hartz request to be allowed to listen to the tapes, SA Hartz identified a sound as being that of the stall indicator on the aircraft. The FAA agreed that SA Hartz was right and immediately notified FAA Headquarters at Washington, D.C.

The FBI’s investigation in the matter was terminated within 20 hours of the accident and on December 11, 1972, Mr. William L. Lamb, NTSB, was furnished with copies of the complete FBI investigation pertaining to the crash after it was determined there was apparently no violation of the DAMV or CAA Statutes.

In order to avoid the possibility of any misunderstanding concerning our respective agencies’ responsibilities and to insture continuing effective liaison between the NTSB and the GBI, I have designated SA Richard F. Bates, Section Chief, Criminal Section, General Investigative Division, FBI Headquarters, Washington, D.C., telephone number 324-2281, to represent the FBI concerning any matters of mutual interest.

Sincerely yours,

William D. Ruckelshaus
Acting Director

Based on the facts agreed upon by both sides, it is at least apparent from these letters that the FBI was all over Dorthy Hunt at the time of the crash, despite Ruckelshaus’s protest that Dorothy Hunt’s presence on 553 was “unknown to the FBI at that time.” There is no obvious way such a large response as fifty agents within the hour could have been generated from a standing start as of the moment of the crash itself. The closest FBI office is forty minutes from the crash site and there are never fifty agents available at once without warning. It is tradition that FBI agents do not gather in offices waiting for calls but stay in the field. When a really obvious intelligence agent, Hungarian Freedom Fighter Lazlo Hadek, died in a crash the next summer at Boston’s Logan Airport, leaving a trail of secret NATO nuclear documents strewn down the center of the runway, the FBI was barely able to get a solitary agent to the scene on the same day as the wreck. That this same FBI could get fifty agents to the scene of the Chicago crash within an hout is to my mind an interesting piece of information. How could the FBI have done this if it had not had Dorothy Hunt’s airplane, for whatever reason, under full company-scale surveillance before the crash ever happened? And why might the FBI have been doing that?

Note in this connection that it was specifically the airplane itself that was being followed, and not the person of Dorothy Hunt. That is, no FBI agent was aboard the plane. If the FBI was tailing Dorothy Hunt, why was she not being followed on the plane? Was it that her flight was too sudden? But it was delayed on the ground for fifteen minutes. Michelle Clark of CBS, who was on the same flight, knew she was going to be on it and may have been her companion in the first-class cabin. The Hunts took enough time at the airport to buy $250,000 worth of flight insurance.

Ruckelshaus does not meet Reed’s main questions. He reads the book with a straight face as though Reed had asked him what were the statutory grounds of the FBI intervention instead of why, suddenly, this time and no other time, and so massively, and hence with such a semblance of advance contrivance, were these grounds taken up and acted upon. One understands that the FBI will always be able to demonstrate a rudimentary legal basis for whatever it takes in its head to do. What we wan to know is where these whims and fancies bubble up from.

We wonder finally what in the world made the FBI think 553’s crash might have been a case of “willful disabling of a civil aircraft,” or of “crimes aboard the aircreft in flight, including assault, murder and manslaughter?” Not that any of this necessarily happened or did not but the FBI does not usually behave as if it might have. Does it? How does Ruckelshaus account fro this, especially in view of his assertion that the FBI acted with no knowledge of Dorothy Hunt’s presence? What was the chain-of-command activity and what were the reasons that so many FBI agents waiting to move when the plane came down?

The Plumbers and the Crash

The White House also responded immediately to the crash. Nixon moved Egil Krogh, Alex Butterfield, and Dwight Chapin, three of his remaining special agents, to positions of vantage around the crash investigation.

Krough was the organizer of the Nixon White House’s Special Investigative Unit, the “Room 16” group. Chapin was a key Haldeman aide who recruited and directed Segretti in his sabotage and espionage tasks. Butterfield, who so airily exposed the White House secret taping system on Friday, July 13, was a Haldeman man from UCLA, where their wives were sorority roommates. He has an Air Force background and some of his biographies say he flew with the Blue Angels. He served Nixon as White House liaison with the CIA.

There is how these agents were deployed in the days following the December 8 crash.

Krough:

On Saturday, December 9, 1972, Krough was suddenly made an undersecretary of the Department of Transportation, the DOT being the seat of larger bureaucratic responsibility for the crash investigation. There was no prior announcement of this appointment. There was no explanation of why it had to be implemented the same day it was announced, a Saturday, not normally a business day in Washington. Once installed in the DOT, Krough proceeded to pressure the NTSB to speed up its reports and restrain its criticism of DOT or face “discipline.”

Butterfield:

Ten days later, on December 19, Butterfield was appointed administrator of the Federal Aviatioin Administration, the parent body of the actual technical-investigation arm, the Bureau of Aviation Safety. Butterfield’s appointment was delayed to March because of a provision prohibiting any military or retired military officer from holding the position Nixon wanted to move him into. As when General Alexander Haig joined Kissinger’s National Security Council later, Butterfield had to resign his commission temporarily.

Chapin:

Early in January, Chapin left the White House behind a story that he was being drummed out because of his role in the activities of CREEP. He soon joined the staff of United Air Lines Chicago office as a “director of market planning.” He was present every day at the NTSB public hearings into the 553 crash that opened on February 28, 1973, in Chicago. He spent some of his time fending off Skolnick and Bottos and some of it intimidating the media with licensing threats.

Then there is the matter of Richard Spears.

In May 1973 stories reached the Senate Commerce Committee, overseer of the NTSB, that “officials of the White House or the Department of Transportation were trying to improperly influence members of the [Safety] Board in the pursuit of their lawful duties.” On May 3, Charman Warren Magnusen (D-Wash.) asked Chairman Reed to respond to these stories.

On May 9, exposed as a Plumber in the Fielding burglary, Krogh resigned his post as number two man in the DOT.

Magnussen’s inquiry motivated Reed and the Senate Commerce Committee to convene the sessions of May 21 and 23. These sessions were attended only by Senator Howard Cannon (D.-Nev.), although Senator Frank Moss (D.-Utah) submitted two questions to each witness remotely suggesting a suspicion of sabotage. But the most important development at these hearings was the clash between a Nixon appointee to the NTSB, General Manager Richard Spears, and the director of the Bureau of Aviation Safety, C.O. Miller.

Spears became a “consultant” to the NTSB in January 1971 shortly after the end of the term of Senator George Murphy (R.-Cal.), whom he formerly served as administrative assistant. Spears moved in as the head of the NTSB after a Nixon-inspired change in the regulations created the position of “NTSB general manager” and defined it as a political-patronage job. Spears had no former experience in the field of aviation safety, a specialized technical field.

According to Miller, Spears immediately began trying to run the NTSB. A quarrel developed between them. It boiled up in February 1973 just as the NTSB hearings into the Hunt crash were opening in Chicago. As BAS director, Miller was the boss of the technician, William Lamb, who would oversee the entire program of investigation, analysis and report on the crash of 553.

Late in February, Miller took off from his normal duties to attend a sixty-day Federal Executives Institute. When he was safely out of the building, Spears replaced him in the BAS directorship and let it out that his duties would be different upon return. Before Miller could return to challenge this personally, Spears himself rewrote the NTSB’s definition of “probably cause” of a crash, directed NTSB investigators to make fewer safety recommendations, and called for quicker completion of investigations and reports on all projects, including the 553 crash.

Miller returned for confrontation in April. He testified that Spears told him, “I have got orders from the only people that hire and fire me to become chief operating officer of the NTSB.” Asked by Senator Cannon how he interpreted this, Miller said he thought it meant that Spears “had some knowledge of some power base in the executive branch. One of the very serious impacts on the effectiveness of our Bureau, in my opinion, has been the use of this reference to outside power to, in a sense intimidate the people who perhaps are a little more concerned about their jobs than I am, to get things done without question.”

Miller’s appeal to the full NTSB was successful. He was restored to his former position as BAS director. Somewhat later, however, he began complaining of heart trouble and was obliged to retire.

What are we to make of Nixon’s evidently intense interest in the crash of the Hunt plane? FBI men intervening so quickly at company-level force; the three secret Nixon agents fanning out to positions of control around the crash investigation; Spears going to the report-writing center, cutting directly into the 553 investigation: What might all this mean?

This brings us to the detailed technical analysis of the NTSB report on the crash. It is a boggy and noxious area to explore because in entails necessarily technical exposition. At the same time, it is in the technical areas that our institutions have found strength before, so let us plunge ahead.

The Analysis of the Crash

We briefly and tersely dismissed Sherman Skolnick’s claims. We investigated thoroughly and found not a shred of evidence indicating the Dorothy Hunt plane was sabotaged.

-Brad Dunbar
NTSB spokesman
September 23, 1974

The technical questions of fact and interpretation in the crash of United 553, for better or worse, have taken from in the course of a polemic set in train by Skolnick’s early accusations of sabotage and cover-up. In this section, we will take up several particular questions emerging from this polemic.

We begin with the question of cyanide poisoning not because it is the strongest of Skolnick’s claims – indeed it is much the weakest – or because it is the most important, which it is not, but because it is the question on which Skolnick’s critics have concentrated most of their fire.

Then we will move to consider the more substantial technical doubts about the precise mechanisms of the crash, most of which involve questions also first articulated in some form by Skolnick.

Finally we will take up the theory of the crash developed by the NTSB and advanced in their final report, “Aircraft Accident Report 73-16, United Airlines, Inc., Boeing 737, N9031U, Chicago-Midway Airport, Chicago, Illinois, December 8, 1972,” dated August 29, 1973.

The Question of Cyanide

James Walsh, administrative assistant to the Cook County coroner, told James Brady of New York magazine, “We found seven bodies which contained enough cyanide to kill them. We are not saying cyanide killed them, but that there was enough of it to have done so.

Brady notes that Walsh refused to say whether or not the pilot’s body contained cyanide. But Skolnick had already unearthed FAA technical exhibit No. 6A, docket No. SA-435, entitled “Human Factors Group Chairman’s Factual Report,” by C. Hayden LeRoy. Page 8 of this exhibit contains in its entirety a typewritten table introduced by the words, “Federal Aviation Administration, Civil Aeromedical Institute, Aviation Toxicology Laboratory, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, examined specimens from three aircraft occupants. Results were as follows.” Among other things, the table shows that the three whose bodies were examined by the Civil Aeromedical Institute were Captain Whitehouse, Flight Officer W.O. Coble, and a first-class passenger otherwise unidentified. (According to NTSB spokesman Slattery, Dorothy Hunt was flying in the first-class cabin forward, just behind the cockpit.) By the item, “Cyanide (Conway Diffusion, NaOH),” the value entered for Captain Whitehouse is 3.9 micrograms per milliliter. In the columns for Coble and the first-class passenger there are hyphens indicating that the test for cyanide was not carried out on them.

What does it mean that Whitehouse had 3.9 micrograms per milliliter of cyanide in him? For the record, let us first note that the NTSB had some trouble in establishing that figure. The Chicago coroner’s office reported to begin with that Whitehouse’s blood showed cyanide in the amount of 0.211 milligrams per milliliter, an extremely high tamount which by itself would establish a prima facie case of foul play.

A defender of the no-sabotage theory, Ronald Dorfman, editor of the Chicago Journalism Review (true to character Skolnick denounces it as a CIA front), wrote that he checked this figure out with Dr. Paul W. Smith, chief of the Aviation Toxicology Laboratory of the Civil Aeromedical Institute and that Dr. Smith told him, “We were very unhappy, and frankly don’t know how they did their measurements.” He is talking about the Chicago coroners, a handful of whom were fired for “incompetence” on account of this controversy. Smith continued, “They picked up cyanide in ten or twelve victims and they were all very high. Then they realized they probably made an error, which they interpreted to be a decimal error, and they altered their report. In moving the decimal their figures become innocuous – all less than one microgram.”

There are a few problems with this simplification, however.

Dr. Smith proceeded to analyze a blood specimen from the pilot (but not the others) to see how much cyanide actually was present, and the value he came up with was not “an innocuous” 0.211 micrograms per milliliter, which is the value arrived at by assuming that there was an error in the placing of the decimal point. Rather, it is the 3.9 micrograms per milliliter value we found in Exhibit 6A. That value, in the first place, does not bear our the Chicago coroners’ guess that their assumed error was in the decimal; there is still a difference of a whole magnitude between their adjusted value of 0.2 micrograms per milliliter and Dr. Smith’s new value of 3.9 micrograms per milliliter. And in the second place, 3.9 micrograms per milliliter is not an innocuous level, a fact which even Dorfman concedes indirectly when he notes that this “is the highest blood cyanide reading [Dr. Smith] has ever recorded in a crash victim.”

Dorfman continues: “A research toxicologist I consulted confirmed that while a concentration of 3.9 micrograms is more than enough to kill, it is quite possible – depending on the concentration of cyanide gas in the air and the physical condition of the victim – to inhale that much before death occurs.

Very well, but observe how far this shifts the grounds of the argument. A moment before, we were being told that the pilot died a normal cyanide death, period. Now we are only being told that it is not absurd on the facts to speculate that he did.

The NTSB report states (pg 13) that “elevated hydrogen cyanide levels were found in the captain and in six fatalities in the crash,” but it says nothing of the new record poor Whitehouse set and does not pause to tell us what these “elevated levels” were, even though it notes (p. 14) that “smoke inhalation with carbon monoxide asphyxia and blood cyanide accumulation” was finally determined to have been the cause of the captain’s death. It merely explains that the plastics used extensively in the cabins of commercial airliners give off hydrogen cyanide as a gas when burned.

The crash was indeed followed by an intense fire in the center section, mainly in the first-class cabin where Dorothy Hunt and Michelle Clark were traveling. But there was little fire in the captain’s half of the cockpit, possibly because the nose and cockpit section broke off from the cabin and split in half. The NTSB report states (p. 12): “The left side of the cockpit and the left forward entry door were relatively intact. The captain’s seat was intact and sustained only minor fire damage.” And in any case, not to be too elementary, the possibility of a crash-normal cyanide gas poisoning would hardly cancel out the possibility of a non-crash-normal cyanide gas poisoning (as with a canister delivery mechanism). The existence of a convenient explanation (as in the use of potassium and cortisone as poisons) is actually the leading advantage of such a method.

It is certainly true, as Dorfman says, that Skolnick goes beyond the evidence in a self-discrediting way in claiming that the shadows like the above demonstrate intentional poisoning in the 553 crash. Here Skolnick seems at his most lurid, turning, in Dorfman’s words, every “assumption” into a “conclusion,” every “hunch” into a “fact”.

Still, Skolnick’s informed misses teach us more of the truth of Watergate power politics than the baseless reassurances Dorfman prefers. That is because, first, Skolnick’s overall conception of what goes into politics, wheat constitutes it, what comes out, is currently rooted in real experience. So even wandering at his most hysterical through dismal swamp, as perhaps with the cyanide question (and perhaps not), Skolnick still makes more sense and does more good teaching than those who use modest rhetoric to tell us there is nothing wrong. Something in fact may be quite wrong, the wrong may be of Satanic magnitude, and there is no way the standard statistic-ridden, political-sociology models employed in conventional federal-academic discourse can even focus the structured character of what is wrong. These models, these assumptions, give us a lone madman here and a lone madman there, as though our time’s violent assault on presidential figures were the purest contingency, purest acts of God, unstructured, random events lying outside the events constitutive of “politics” proper and of no greater interest to the “political scientist” than the normal airplane accident or normal heart attack.

Finally, as inadequately supported as it no doubt is, Skolnick’s assertion about 553 and cyanide poisoning still ought not to be dismissed altogether. A palpable residue of doubt remains, partly because the authorities have seemed so anxious to shut the question up, but also partly because these are not bare, naked allegations. In view of the extreme political sensitivity of Dorothy Hunt’s death, it might appear to the trusting among us that the public officials responsible would bend over backwards to follow every shadow of doubt all the way through to the end. What had they to fear? As it was, the very day after the crash, even as Plumber Krogh was being scrambled to the number two spot at the Department of Transportation over the FAA and NTSB, the official voices began their choral chant that there was no possibility of sabotage,” not a shred of evidence,” and let slip no chance to heap more vituperation on Skolnick. The FBI was saying no sabotage within twenty hours of the crash, before it was even announced to the public that Dorothy Hunt was among the victims, and NTSB spokesmen were saying it early in May at a moment when the analysis of the data had barely begun. There is too much intensity in this, too much head-shaking. Too much protest betokens fear of some discovery. It reeks of cover-up whether it is one or not.

In view of the report of the Cook County coroners and Dr. Smith’s own results in the retest of the captain’s blood, for example, why did Dr. Smith and the NTSB not press to examine the other seven or ten or twelve bodies said to contain “elevated levels” of cyanide? In view of the queer behavior of the FBI, why was not every angle looked into, every doubt openly faced, before the curtains started being closed on the play?

I have been nagging some version of this question, or it me, through many passages of this book: why the cover-up? A paragraph from the short-lived polemic that flared up between Dorfman and me in the Nation contains what may be a hint of an answer. Dorfman wrote:

I do not disbelieve in conspiracies. I have helped uncover a few myself. My quarrel is not even with Oglesby’s own treatment of the December crash, which he suggests has been carefully hedged about with distinctions between what is known and what needs to be known. Rather, I take issue with, and he defends, a style of political thinking [i.e. Skolnick’s] which turns assumptions into conclusions and hunches into facts, which are in turn [note:] broadcast to an increasingly receptive public content that, since the forces at work are not only beyond their reach but omnipotent, there is nothing they can or need do about public problems.

In other words, gentle reader, it is you despair that Dorfman fears. If you come to think that such theories as the sabotage theory of the Hunt crash are not crazy on facts, and that such things can actually happen and the offender not be caught, then your faith in politics will wither and die, and where shall we all be then.

To this I answer, first, that there is no point in trying to set preconditions on the truth. Either the airplane was sabotaged or it was not, just as John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and George Wallace either were or were not attacked by conspiracies acting behind cover stories of lone, mad, diary-writing gunmen. And either we can do something about this or we cannot. Nothing whatever is served by hiding from the question. If we cannot, then indeed the age of politics is behind us and we are the creature of new millennium.

Second, Skolnick’s track record does not entitle his detractor to such airy contempt. Dorfman may be unable to muffle a boast about helping to “uncover a few” conspiracies himself (he is too modest to remind us what they were), but Skolnick is something else. We have already noted his major works: the bust of some half-dozen federal and other judges in Illinois and Indiana, including three members of the Illinois Supreme Court, and the exposure of Kerner in 1969.

Finally, something in the turn of Dorfman’s last phrase in the above passage reminds me again that what academic liberals are typically so worried about is not the lapse of people’s faith in politics so much as the lapse of their faith in the politics of the current system. But it is the power and invisibility of that system’s demonstrated current corruption that threatens political demoralization, not the fact that a handful of people with virtually no resources are trying to expose it, analyze it, name it, and raise in public forums the question of direct political action to do something about it. To Dorfman I say, if that is what we are really talking about, preserving the people’s faith in a corrupt political system, I know I am not the only democratic-minded patriot who will say, let it bleed.

Technical Doubts

Skolnick and others have raised much more substantial questions about the actual mechanisms of the crash of United 553: that the in-flight recorders were stolen from the wreckage, that the altimeter was sabotaged, that the runway system at Midway was used irregularly on this landing, that an electronic landing aid was unaccountably switched off at a crucial moment, and that the crew failed even to take not of, much less to act on, the actuation of a cockpit stall-warning signal designed expressly to be imperative.

The Flight Recorders: The Boeing 737 caries two data-recording systems, both designed to survive crashes of much greater violence than that of 553. In the shock test, each package must withstand the blow of a five-hundred-pound steel bar dropped from ten feet. This is because their only purpose is to help crash investigators determine as absolutely as possible the cause or causes of a crash.

One is the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), a super-quality but otherwise ordinary tape recorder system wired through a network of microphones to tape a whole range of cockpit sounds – the distinctly different clicks, chimes, rattles, horns, and whirrs of the controls – besides every word of cabin conversation and any signals incoming from outside the aircraft, as from a tower, another airplane, or an electronic beacon on the ground. In other words, it is designed to record the total acoustical signal environment of the crew. This record of the cockpit acoustical environment is so sensitive that General Electric engineers, working with a tape that had been badly damaged (see below), were nevertheless able to reconstruct from its acoustical data precise thrust settings, left and right, for each of the 737’s two tail-mounted jet engines, right up to the moment of impact.

The other is the Flight Data Recorder (FDR). It is by far the more important of the two from the standpoint of technical crash analysis. The FDR keeps a continuous graph-paper trace on the stat of the aircraft’s nerve center, the Central Air Data Computer, mounted with the FDR in the tail because that is the safest part of the aircraft. The FDR records such parameters as air speed, barometric (coarse) altitude, transponder (fine) altitude, and aircraft roll and pitch angles, and it also records instrument presentations to the crew in order that errors in instrumentation can be discriminated from errors in sensing or servomechanization or the like.

The critical points in connection with the CVR and the DRR are threefold:

First, the NTSB did not recover these instruments from the crash, even though its technical team was already in the field early Saturday morning. News accounts at the time said that both recorders were turned over to the NTSB team by James McConaugh, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation, who actually held a little ceremony of handover to which he invited a handful of newspeople. No one asked, however, what the Department of Streets and Sanitation was doing with these instruments. They could not have simply tumbled into the street. The NTSB report tells us in fact that the nose and the tail sections of the aircraft suffered relatively little damage. News accounts incuriously note that the two recorders “had been recovered from the wreckage.” They do not pry into such questions as: By whom where they recovered, and in what way, and under what power and authority, whether by streets and Sanitation people or others?

What would Streets and Sanitation people know about extracting these recorders from a still-burning wreckage? Not that they could know nothing, but what did they know? In the immediate aftermath of a horrifying mid-afternoon plane crash in the heart of a residential neighborhood, when there were survivors still screaming in the wreckage, why would Streets and Sanitation people be in such a hurry to save the flight-data recorders? Not that there could be no innocuous explanation for this, but what is it? And if Streets and Sanitation gog the recorders from the FBI agents also present, as seems likely, then the question is: Why was Pat Gray’s FBI so hot to get its hands on the technical instruments needed for a precise reconstruction of the crash?

The second critical point bears on the state of the Cockpit Voice Recorder. A Dwight Chapin-inspired Chicago news story from the March NTSB hearings in Chicago ran as follows:

“United Air Line investigative committee members are suggesting that hydraulic pump failures may have contributed to the crash. They point out that the Cockpit Voice Recorder was filled with hydraulic oil when recovered from the wreckage, and some four days were required in the laboratory to clean the tape sufficiently for it to be played back to Safety Board listeners.

There is no mention of this oil, however in the NTSB’s final report, or of any need to treat the CVR tape in any way whatsoever, never mind for four days, before unnamed minds accounted it fit to be heard by the NTSB investigators.

The report reads, ‘Although the CVR showed evidence of extreme fire and heat damage, the entire tape was recovered with only moderate damage to a non pertinent area” (p.8); although another passage tells us that the normally high fidelity “CVR tape contained a high-level background noise which tended to mask meaningful frequency data.” (p.16); and in another context (p.8) notes without explanation that there were “variances” of up to six seconds in the “times of identical events recorded by Air Traffic Control sources [ground based] and the CVR.” The transcript of the last eight minutes of the CVR tape, printed in the NTSB report as Appendix F, shows fourteen “unidentified voice” entries and ten “unintelligibles,” ever so reminiscent of those other transcripts boiled in oil.

Or was Haig’s Sinister Force at Chicago, too?

The third critical point involves the all-important Flight Data Recorder, the one mounted in the tail near the Air Data Computer. The FDR shows that the crew did not get a suggestion of any FDR failure until about eight minutes later than that, and that up until about five minutes before the crash, the circuit and tape functions were still indicating positive.

Without exploring this side canyon, the NTSB report nevertheless acknowledges the importance of the simultaneous loss of capability in both recording systems at once: “The absence of FDR information, the [inherent] imprecision of the data, and the high ambient noise level of the CVR recording preclude a precise determination of the nature and tempo of events during the 60 seconds from the call for the final descent check until impact” (p.26)

The altimeters. Skolnick claimed shortly after the crash that the flight instrument actually sabotaged on 553 was the altimeter. He said his information from an FAA source inside the investigation was that the diaphragm of a barometric-pressure-sensing device had a pinprick in it. The NTSB established that the pilot’s altimeter had no such pinprick and showed that the copilot’s instrument was smashed too badly in the crash for a positive determination to be made.

There the NTSB laid the matter to rest and proceeded with its own reconstruction. In the course of this reconstruction, however, it appeared that there were indeed serious technical peculiarities in the performance of the altimeter system as a whole.

There are actually two independent altitude measuring and display systems on the Boeing 737, one for the pilot and one for the copilot. Each system begins with a barometric-pressure-sensing device mounted outside the aircraft on “independent Pilot-static probes which have no common connections.” The signals from each sensor go to one of two Central Air Data Computers (CADC) which continue the parallel redundancy of the system. Each CADC then supplies inputs to identical and independent altitude indicators, one at the pilot’s instrument console and the other at the copilot’s.

Indeed, the altitude-measuring system’s only catastrophic failure is the situation in which both the pilot’s altimeter and the copilot’s altimeter fail or malfunction in precisely the same way, in precisely the same magnitude, at precisely the same time. I am not a mathematician and will not try to compute the probability that these three conditions will ever be met in actual performance, but one’s inner ear says that the chance would be low, all the more so because of the unsurpassed reliability performance record of the Boeing 737. The only wreck this model ever had was the wreck it got into a mile and a half short of Midway.

What do you know, these three conditions appear nevertheless to have been met in the case of the crash of 553. “Both CADC units were capable of normal operation,” reads the NTSB report (p. 24), “but their altitude synchros, as recovered, showed an altitude higher than that of the crash site. The altitude differences, which could have been transmitted from the [independent] CADC units to the captain’s and first officer’s servo altimeters, were 157 feet and 103 feet, respectively.”

These are not trivial errors in either altimeter by itself, and it is putting it mildly to say that they are not trivial when they occur in the two independent systems at once.

Runway Utilization: Midway is an old airport with few of the modern electronic instrumentation systems which jet flight has come to depend on. One of its runways, however, runway 13R, is longer than the others and better equipped for jets. It has an electronic glidescope, a system that automatically tells the captain whether he is descending at the right altitude and rate throughout the whole length of the initial approach. Wind not being a factor (a light 4-6 knots at the time of the crash), it is the runway normally assigned to the few airline jets that still land at Midway instead of O’Hare. Use of this runway is all the more appropriate under conditions of low overcast, as on December 8, when the ceiling was about five-hundred feet.

The question of when and why flight 553 was reassigned to runway 31L, which is shorter and lacks a glidescope, is lost in the confusion of the lost “approach clearance,” that is, the word given, or in this case not given, by O’Hare tower (which handles all the graffic circulating around Chicago) and Midway’s story was never told. The whole question of O’Hare’s hand-off of 553 to the Midway tower is muddy with irregularities.

Related to the evident uncertainty in the cockpit of 553 about the landing procedure is the question of the light private plane, a two-prop Aero-Commander, that landed just ahead of 553 on Runway 31L. The more appropriate runway for such a small plane was 31R, which parallels 31L. Indeed, at one point the CVR transcript shows that Midway considered having the Aero-Commander go to that runway, but then changed its mind.

Less than twelve seconds later, with no communications intervening, the Midway tower sent its next and last message to 553: “United five fifty-three, execute a missed approach, make a left turn to a heading of – one eight zero, climb to two thousand.”

Nineteen-and-a-half seconds later came the crash. There were no future communications between the tower and 553 either way. The reason Midway gave for the wave-off was that 553 was going too fast and the distance between it and the Aero-Commander had closed to an unsafe margin. ON its first approach to the runway, 9VS had been well ahead of 553, some three miles. Unaccountably, its pilot requested a missed approach clearance from Midway tower and was given permission to pull up, circle, and come back for another try, all without giving place to 553 coming in behind it out of its holding pattern. The reason for the Aero-Commander’s missed-apporach request is not given in the NTSB report.

The Kedzie Outer Marker: Skolnick’s original claim was that the Kedzie Localizer/Outer Marker was turned off as 553 passed over it. This is a vertical electronic beam emitted by a transmitter located on Kedzie Avenue, 3.3 miles from the runway, on direct line with runway 31L. Especially in overcast conditions, it is needed to ensure that landing aircraft are headed in properly toward the runway.

The NTSB report ignores Skolnick’s assertions and puts a good face on the performance of the Outer Marker. The CVR transcript shows the Kedzie beacon tones sounding just after 553’s approach is handed over from O’Hare to Midway tower, a little less than two minutes before the crash. No irregularities are noted, and in its only remote approach to the point, the report says only (p.7) that “all navigational facilities associated with this approach procedure were flight-tested by the FAA immediately after the accident and wer found to be operating within prescribed tolerances. None of the flights using the localizer before or after the accident reported any problems.”

One must have access to the part of the CVR transcript not published with the NTSB final report to know of the following snatch of dialogue from the cockpit:

“Is Kedzie Localizer off – off the air, is that it?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Is Kedzie Localizer off the air? There’s an inbound, ah, there’s an in-bound on 31.”

As to the significance of the shut-off of the Kedzie Outer Marker, the NTSB report scatters fragments of the answer throughout its pages and never brings them together so that the meaning can come out clearly. On page 9 it tells us that 553 crashed “1/4 mile to the right of the localizer approach course.”

From the report in Appendix D, we learn that the magnetic heading of the path of the wreckage across three city blocks, hence the heading of the aircraft at impact, was 340 degrees.

From Appendix E we learn that the magnetic heading of runway 31L was 312 degrees. Thus, a little more than a mile-and-a-half after it had crossed the suddenly turned-off Kedzie beacon, in spite of the fact that its crew was turning 553 left for the missed-approach exercise in the moments just before impact, it was still a quarter-mile off course to the right on a magnetic heading in error by 28 degrees. This is precisely the kind of error that the electronic marker system is installed to prevent.

The Stickshaker: The eeriest technical oddity about this crash is the behavior of the flight crew when the stickshaker went off.

The stickshaker is a no-uncertain-terms warning device installed in the cockpit expressly to warn the flight crew if the airplane is ever in danger of going into a stall. It is operated by the Air Data Computer, which constantly monitors and reflects upon the airplane’s total flight state, including the airspeed, engine thrust, and aerodynamic configuration. By aerodynamic configuration is meant the positions of the variety of movable surfaces on the wings and tail – tabs, flaps, spoilers, landing gear, etc. – that affect the drag and lift of the airplane while moving through the airstream. Under some combinations of airspeed, thrust, and aerodynamic configuration, drag exceeds left, the nose spools up, and the aircraft stalls. If a stall happens at a high altitude, the plane will go into a spin; if at a low altitude, as with 553, it will crash tail first.

The stall is thus an eventuality not to be trifled with, and the designers of the super-safe Boeing 737 make it as unlikely an event as they can, partly by building into the crew’s control system a stall-warning device designed for absolute infallibility.

The warning system has two parts. One is a noisemaker in the roof of the cockpit. Its alarm is described as sounding something like a rattlesnake but louder. It is made to sound as alarming as possible, since its purpose is to get the crew to do something. The other part of the stall-warning system, from which the over-all system gets its name of “stickshaker,” is a mechanism for actually shaking the flight controls in the pilot’s and copilot’s hands. It produces something like the jerking felt in the steering wheel of a car when load exceeds power and the engine begins to lug, except that the stickshaker action is purposely mor eintense.

Commercial airline pilots say the stickshaker warning system should b ehard and felt only during training flights. “The sound of the shaker,” says the NTSB’s chief investigator, William Lamb, “should trigger an immediate alarm” in the crew.

The fact is that in the case of 553 it produced no apparent reaction whatsoever, though it came on twenty seconds before the crash and stayed on all the way to the end. The transcript of the well-oiled, well-cleaned CVR tape has it that two seconds after the stickshaker alarm went off, and unidentified voice in the cockpit spoke “two to three hurried words at very low amplitude and masked by noise of the stickshaker” (p. 52): the stickshaker went off simultaneously with the word “execute” in Midway tower’s abrupt command, “United five fifty-three , execute a missed approach.” Six seconds later, Flight Officer Coble “was almost languid” (NTSB report, Appendix F) in response to the tower’s command to “make a left turn to a heading of – one eight zero, climb to two thousand.” “Okay,”

Coble radios the tower, “left turn to one eight zero – left turn, okay?” A preliminary NTSB statement said, “The inquiry, which is far from concluded, has found that the final words of the plane crew showed no concern or alarm about the planned landing” and that “no vocal or other indication was received from United’s three-man flight crew that an emergency had developed onboard. Instead, the voice of Second Officer E.J. Elder [the final NTSB report assigns this speech to Coble] was almost languid as he responded to Midway tower’s instruction to ‘take it around again, you are too close to the Aero-Commander ahead.’” (This last language, incidentally – about being too close to the Aero-Commander – is quoted here in the NTSB statement as though it were the actual language of the tower, but no such words can be found in the CVR transcript or Appendix F.)

The stickshaker warning signal that was not evidently noted by the crew of 553 was not noted by tower personnel either until (in the story Ruckelshaus told Reed) FBI Special Agent Robert E. Hartz “proceeded to the Midway Airport tower shortly after the crash to determine if tower personnel could shed any light as to the reason for the crash….After listening to the [tower’s] tapes, SA Hartz identified a sound as being that of the stall indicator on the aircreft. The FAA agreed that SA Hartz was right and immediately notified FAA headquarters at Washington D.C.”

How is this to be explained? What chance is there that the sound of the stickshaker was electronically imposed on the tapes by some Startrekish internal device as the “de-gaussing gun” with which Charles Colson once considered erasing the White House tapes from a position beyond the White House grounds? I do not know if an instrument that can do that exists, but we know for a fact that the CVR tape transcript published in the NTSB report gives not the slightest indication of any vocal or operational reaction by any of the three flight crew members to the activation of a warning system designed to be irresistible. That intrigues me. If I had been the NTSB and known that the tapes had been in the possession of the Nixon-Gray FBI and Shicago Streets and Sanitation and/or others for twenty hours, I should hav einquired further into it.

The NTSB did not. But then, Krogh and Spears and Butterfield were telling them to hurry.

To sum up the is much, I am saying that we face serious technical doubts in six areas connected with the crash of this airplane:

1: The elevated levels of cyanide shown in the pilot’s body and at least six others aboard the flight.

2: The fate of the flight recorders, including:

a) the missing fourteen minutes of the FDR record;
b) the oil-pollution and “special treatment’ to which the CVR tape was subjected for four days and the garbled nature of its final input to the investigation;
c) the irregular way these vital instruments came into the hands of the NTSB though Streets and Sanitation.

3: The parallel and common errors occurring simultaneously in the captain’s altimeter system and the copilot’s altimeter system, physically independent of each other.

4: The irregular utilization of the runways.

5: The malfunction of the Kedzie Outer Marker on an apparently exclusive-to-553 basis, leading 553 a quarter-mile astray inside a mile and a half.

6: The apparent failure of the crew to respond in any way to the activation of the stickshaker stall-warning system.
I am not saying that these technical doubts cannot possibly be resolved in innocuous ways or that they constitute by themselves a proof of the sabotage theory of the plane crash. I am saying only that they have not yet been resolved, innocuously or not. In the Appendis to this book, I argue further that the NTSB’s technical explanation of the crash, a “pilot-error” theory, is based on assumptions contradicted by the NTSB’s own technical findings. What remains to be seen is whether a more likely reconstruction of the event can be put together.

The Sabotage Theory

I have mentioned Skolnick’s bodyguard and companion Alex Bottos. Following is ann outline of the story he tells of the Hunt crash.

In September 1971, Bottos and other Skolnick associates quietly began investigating records of the Lake County Coroner’s Office in connection with a number of mysterious deaths of people figuring in one way or another in court actions pending in Hammond, Chicago, and Omaha against former executives of Northern Natural Gas Company and an assortment of public officials in Hammond and East Chicago.

This is the same Northern Natural whose lawyers Blodgett and Krueger will bring the so-called Mitchell documents aboard United 553 a year and a half later.

Northern Natural had been accused of a basic big-utilities bribery scheme involving the regional price structure and the seduction of pliant officials in a variety of levers-of-power positions. The indictment was originally to have been drawn in June of 1972. It was delayed by the stir created by new Skolnick-Bottos disclosures to the effect that the case had precipitated a string of cover-up crimes including murder and the falsification of death records. By September, when the information was that the documents finally brought $5 million on the underworld market.

As Bottos saw it, this meant that the Sarelli mob had something to do with the 553 crash. The way he pieced the story together, a group which Bottos occasionally follows General Haig in calling “the Sinister White House Force” was strongly desirous that several passengers aboard 553 not reach Chicago alive: Dorothy Hunt, because of her involvement in the blackmail operation; Michelle Clark of CBS, because she could put Dorothy Hunt on the gib stage; Krueger and Blodgett, because they had the Mitchell documents, part of the Huntmail. Because of the short time in which the technically difficult job had to be contracted for and carried out, the Sinister Force betook itself to the Syndicate group with the greatest technological capability of carrying it out, the Sarelli group. The hit group then employed a technique classically indicated for do-or-die situations, the use of double cutouts, i.e., of a number of independent hit-men each acting in ignorance of the others to get rid of the same people. The kill mechanisms employed overlapped and produced the overkill of 553. Bottos claimed also the elements of the FBI and other federal agencies were involved.

The 553 investigation was meantime heating up on its own burner and Skolnick and Bottos, pressing their views where they could were demanding, but not winning, a chance to present evidence at the NTSB public hearings.

On March 1 Skolnick presented the NTSB Board of Inquiry chairperson, Isobel Burgess, with a letter outlining his claims and requesting an opportunity to present them in a regular public session. Burgess rejected this petition on the spot without comment or explanation.

On March 2, Skolnick denounced the hearings as “a sham and a pretense” and filed suit against Burgess in the Cook County District Court.

On March 5, Bottos was suddenly taken prisoner by federal marshals acting on the order of another Chicago federal judge.

Without formal charges, hearing, or trial, Bottos was spirited away for sixty days of “mental observation” at the Federal Medical Facility in Springfield, Missouri, a prison-hospital long reckoned by the cognoscenti to be the main high-technology dungeon of the high-technology state, a “Clockwork Orange” subcellar. Bottos was released without harm after about forty days owing to the intervention of the Northwest Indiana Crime Commission, a citizen’s watch agency connected with Skolkick. By this time, however, the Sarelli case had gone by and he had not given his testimony.

Bottos is convinced that it was to keep him from testifying in the Sarelli trial that he was taken off to Springfield. A point cited against him in the “mental observation” period, in fact, was that he had been pushing so irrationally hard to be heard as a witness in that case. Davidson and Roller wanted him out of the picture, he came to believe, because they were protecting the Sarelli-White House link in the 553 crash.

This was only obliquely denied by Peter Vaira, Davidson’s successor as head of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force in Chicago. Vaira told me in a telephone interview in late September 1974 (before all the CIA stories broke). “We did not put Alex on the stand because once he gets started, God almighty, he’d be all over the place. He talks about the CIA, the Bay of Pigs, all kind of weird stuff. Says he knew Howard Hunt at the Bay of Pigs. We figured the jury’s got enough problems. So we used the agent who listened into Alex’s conversations.”

The result even so was convictions for Sarelli and Chiodo. But as Vaira added sadly, “Unfortunately for us, they both got quick probation. I’d have thought they’d have done time. They got a lot of money.”

One of course lacks the means to evaluate the Skolnick-Bottos version of events from a distance; no doubt it is lurid and frightening. It goes beyond the image-frame of normal politics and so gives us an unwelcome, vertiginous sense of suddenly not understanding politics anymore. The act imputed is indeed so monstrous tha the imputation itself seems a monstrous act. Would this Sinister Force of ours really kill so many innocent people to protect itself? Would it actually do that? In the time of Mai Lai? Secret wars? Allende? Dallas? Memphis? Los Angeles? Laurel? Fred Hampton’s bedroom in Chicago? The Audubon Ballroom in Harlem? The road to Selma? Jackson State? Kent State? Watergate?

The Yankee and Cowboy War

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four (Pt.1)

Chapter Four (Pt.2)

Chapter Four (Pt.3)

Chapter Five

Chapter Six (Pt. 1)

Chapter Six (Pt. 2)

Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government (Pt.3)

I: WATCH LISTS, BLACK LISTS, ENEMIES LISTS…..HIT LISTS?

With the long overdue departure of the Bush administration from the White House it is the hope many that the myriad of transgressions against the Constitution and the people of America will begin to seep out into the public domain. It took a remarkably short time. The day after the helicopter hauled ole George away like so much rubbish a major story broke. In an astonishing shot across the bow directed at the shadow government the first significant whistleblower has already come out with a story (once again ignored by the corporate media) and delivered a devastating blow to the premise that the massive illegal domestic spying programs of the Bush administration were undertaken in order to protect America from terrorism in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001.

Former NSA analyst Russell Tice during two recent interviews on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann (pt1,pt2)confirmed that the Bush-Cheney-Rove phony war on terror was as people like myself have always strongly suspected in actuality a war on America itself. According to the patriotic Mr. Tice the targets of the domestic spying included news organizations and journalists and that the surveillance for specific targets was not limited to professional matters alone, they were spied on 24/7.

“The National Security Agency had access to all Americans’ communications,” he said. “Faxes, phone calls and their computer communications. … They monitored all communications.”

Tice said the NSA analyzed metadata to determine which communication would be collected. Offering a hypothetical example, he said if the agency determined that terrorists communicate in brief, two-minute phone calls, the NSA might program its systems to record all such calls, invading the privacy of anyone prone to telephonic succinctness.

Tice was involved in only a small part of the project, that involved trying to “harpoon fish from an airplane.”

He said he was told to monitor certain groups in order to eliminate them as suspects for more intense targeting. Those groups, he said, were U.S. journalists and news agencies. But rather than excluding the news organizations from monitoring, he discovered that the NSA was collecting the organizations’ communications 24 hours a day year round.

“It made no sense,” he said.

Tice did not identify the reporters or organizations allegedly targeted.

Olbermann asked if this means there’s a file somewhere containing every e-mail and phone conversation these reporters ever had with sources, editors and family members.

“If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything, yes.” Tice answered.

(Exerpted from Wired’s Kim Zetter’s blog)

The Tice interviews followed another former insider speaking out on the gross illegality of the Bush administration programs, a former DOJ employee named Thomas Tamm was featured in a Newsweek magazine cover story by Michael Isikoff entitled The Fed Who Blew the Whistle from which I excerpt the following:

In the spring of 2004, Tamm had just finished a yearlong stint at a Justice Department unit handling wiretaps of suspected terrorists and spies—a unit so sensitive that employees are required to put their hands through a biometric scanner to check their fingerprints upon entering. While there, Tamm stumbled upon the existence of a highly classified National Security Agency program that seemed to be eavesdropping on U.S. citizens. The unit had special rules that appeared to be hiding the NSA activities from a panel of federal judges who are required to approve such surveillance. When Tamm started asking questions, his supervisors told him to drop the subject. He says one volunteered that “the program” (as it was commonly called within the office) was “probably illegal.”

The name of the program was Stellar Wind and please pay particular attention to this next excerpted piece from Isikoff’s story:

The NSA, with the secret cooperation of U.S. telecommunications companies, had begun collecting vast amounts of information about the phone and e-mail records of American citizens. Separately, the NSA was also able to access, for the first time, massive volumes of personal financial records—such as credit-card transactions, wire transfers and bank withdrawals—that were being reported to the Treasury Department by financial institutions. These included millions of “suspicious-activity reports,” or SARS, according to two former Treasury officials who declined to be identified talking about sensitive programs. (It was one such report that tipped FBI agents to former New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s use of prostitutes.) These records were fed into NSA supercomputers for the purpose of “data mining”—looking for links or patterns that might (or might not) suggest terrorist activity.

This latest glimpse beneath the facade at the massive, secretive and highly illegal surveillance campaign against the American people is an outrage. Given the proclivity of those who run the system in this country to exert raw power to advance their own agendas it is no leap in logic that journalists alone were the only group targeted. There remains the question of whether blackmail, especially sexual blackmail is routinely used as a tool to keep government and media officials from not straying too far from the dirty business of imperialism and financial chicanery of the sort that has brought the economy to its knees. I personally found the media spectacle of the fortuitously timed prostitution bust of former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer who incidentally had just announced his intention to declare war on the banksters and their accomplices in the Bush White House in a February 14, 2008 Washington Post piece entitled Predatory Lenders Partner in Crime to be extremely suspicious. The rogue Bush regime and the NSA have been using their big lie of the war on terror as an excuse to scrutinize credit card use and Spitzer would have been an obvious target as is indicated by the above excerpt from the Newsweek story. It also makes skeptics such as myself wonder whether the witch hunt to impeach former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich may at least in part be attibuted to his threat to suspend state business with Bank of America, ‘Blago’ was arrested the day afterwards.

In light of the Tice revelations as well as an already long and extremely sordid history of U.S. government surveillance into the activities of dissidents and reporters that predated the Bush regime, we also need to ask some very serious questions of a much more troubling and nefarious nature. For example, how does such spying tie into not only the manipulation of the news but the now standard lack of spine from the Democratic congress when it comes to prosecuting the Bush administration criminals? Notorious fixer Karl Rove has already announced his intent to defy yet another subpoena for his testimony that was to have been delivered on Monday in front of the House Judiciary Committee. As of this writing, John Conyers has once again caved and the date has now been pushed into February and likely will soon disappear down the same memory hole where similar attempts to enforce the law have been flushed.

Intense political pressure, threats of unemployment in a time of economic crisis and potentially embarassing sexual acts subject to blackmail are all entirely made possible by the rampant unaccountability of the domestic spying programs, but are there measures that go far beyond just the spiking of stories, the discrediting or the ruining of careers alone? Think back to the vicious institutionalized slander directed former San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb for example for his Dark Alliance series. The savagery with which Webb was taken down by the establishment was stunning and it ultimately resulted in his suicide, a broken and haunted man who only dared to try to tell the truth.

There is a long trail of untimely demises of investigative journalists and other insiders whose knowledge represents a threat to very existence of the shadow government and those who it as a matter of routine does business with in order to avoid legitimate channels. Perhaps the most terrifying of all question is exactly what actions do end up being taken in order to prevent the exposure of widespread criminal activity, systemic grand scale fraud and extra-constitutional black operations that have been conducted for decades.

Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen wrote of an NSA database that was at one time named FIRSTFRUITS that was maintained to engage in surveillance against journalists and that was renamed after its discovery. Some of the names in this database allegedly included Christiane Amanpour, Seymour Hersh, James Bamford, James Risen and Madsen himself. According to chatter in the blogosphere that were it not consistent with the historical trail of dead bodies could easily be dismissed as paranoia and disinformation. One story floating around the internet mentioned an unnamed NSA security officer allegedly mused about ‘just killing’ troublesome bloggers. This may be a product of paranoia (one would think paranoia would be a natural state in a land of fear and loathing such as that which the United States has become post 9/11) but there is great progress currently being made by internet researchers and such reputed threats should not simply be waved off as the rantings of tin foil hatters or the favorite of all pejoratives directed at those who dare to ask inconvenient questions, conspiracy theorists. The fact that the alternative media and many bloggers are slowly starting to put the pieces together one can only reasonably suspect that such behavior scares the living hell out of the establishment, and after all, there is a history of that sort of thing. While this is not a comprehensive list the Committee to Protect Journalists keeps a database to track the prematurely deceased in a most dangerous profession.

The bizarre absence of any reporting of this very serious violation of civil liberties has received absolutely no coverage in the corporatized, mainstream pocket media. This is unconscionable that there is apparently no interest in exposing these crimes, especially considering that those targeted could actually save their own hides (and perhaps instill some dignity) by outing this program. It’s a sad testament to the state of today’s ‘journalism’ that is shameful by comparison to that of days of yore when reporters were intrepid souls determined to speak the truth to power.

Writer Eric Alterman puts it spot on in his recent Center for American Progress piece entitled Think Again: Spying on Journalists? Why the Silence? when he notes the lack of intestinal fortitude in the mainstream media:

Clearly something deeply disturbing lurks beneath these revelations, and with Bush gone from office, it’s hard to understand just what is preventing journalists from seeking the truth about this program more energetically. The only thing they have to fear is fear itself.

This sad state of affairs brings to mind the following:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

– Pastor Martin Niemöller

And the silence by those tasked by the First Amendment’s now quaint and antiquated imbuing upon them a responsibility for a free press as an essential check on authoritarianism is deafening in its absence. Quislings, cowards and public relations flacks seem to be the one thing that our journalism schools never failed to produce over the past several decades, feckless and spineless careerists with neither a sense of honor nor of their place as defenders of precious liberty. There shall be no refuge for the weasels nor the rats in the end therefore their mass abrogation of their chosen profession along with their acute absence of courage is even more damnable for when the time comes they will perhaps live to lament that they did not speak out when they had the chance.

II: NIGHT AND FOG

“Death Solves All Problems, No Man, No Problem”

-Joseph Stalin

The National Security State has a history of silencing those who would speak out and especially reporters deemed to have become a nuisance. This is done either through intense pressure brought down on media corporations through organized harassment of sponsors, brutal coordinated smear campaigns much like the one that took down the aforementioned Gary Webb or when all else fails, the reporters often just happen to turn up mysteriously dead. The list of ‘suicides’ and accidents is a long one and in the view of the ruthless psychopaths who both run and profit from a high-tech snooping network seems to be that any means are to be undertaken to keep their games going even if it ultimately results in termination with extreme prejudice. I believe that I will have to put together a list myself but when I just started writing down names off the top of my head of strange deaths I came up with over thirty right off the bat.
The ugly truth is that none of these police state powers are being used to protect the United States from foreign enemies, terrorism or any other excuse that is being made in order to get Americans to submit their rights. It is all in the name of power, money and to protect the interests of the oligarchy and the power elite who run the establishment and it needs to be stopped because it is out of control.

Take the strange case of Danny Casolaro for example…

Perhaps the closest to get at the truth about PROMIS and how it was an integral piece of the shadow government was investigative journalist Danny Casolaro. Casolaro had been working on research for a book on a shadowy transnational power group that seemed to run through the postwar era and had connections to many of the major scandals including Iran-Contra, BCCI, the Nugan Hand Bank, international drug cartels, weapons dealers and intelligence operatives in not only the U.S. government but internationally as well. Casolaro dubbed this group, one that largely rose out of a ‘dirty old boy network’ of the OSS/CIA out of the ashes of World War II as The Octopus. Casolaro began to become aware of the more sinister aspects of what Professor Peter Dale Scott refers to as the deep state but is more commonly known as either the shadow government, the parallel government and even arguably the permanent government while investigating the theft of the PROMIS software from the Inslaw corporation.

On Saturday, August 10, 1991 a maid at a Martinsburg, West Virginia Sheraton Inn was horrified to find the nude body of Joseph Daniel Casolaro in the bathtub, the victim of an apparent ‘suicide’. It was by accounts a particularly grisly scene and a strangely violent ‘suicide’ with both of his wrists slashed deeply multiple times with a razor blade. There was a very short and impersonal note, blood splattered on the tile walls and a pair of bloody towels under the sink away from the bathtub.

Strange circumstances followed in the aftermath of the discovery of Danny Casolaro’s corpse in a blood filled bathtub. His body was hastily taken away and embalmed (making any subsequent autopsy much more difficult) before family members were officially notified (a violation of state law by accounts) and room 517 had been professionally cleaned thereby removing critical evidence prior to any sort of thorough forensic investigation could be performed. Compounding doubts about the official ‘suicide’ story are contradictory statements made by friends and family that Casolaro was NOT suicidal at all but was actually quite exited over the prospect of publishing his book on the findings of his investigative work, even to the extent that he had scheduled a party to celebrate. He was in the final stages of nailing down the story of the century and had gone to West Virginia in search of the evidence that would prove his theory, make the connection to PROMIS and ‘bring back the head of the octopus’. The sudden ending (yet another hotel room ‘suicide’) was especially suspicious because when the body was discovered, his files were missing.

In addition to the shadowy players in the global arms and narcotics trades the Octopus also appeared to have had as tentacles rogue elements of U.S. intelligence Casolaro found connections to not only Iran-Contra but also BCCI, the Nugan Hand bank, the October Surprise, money launderers and organized crime as well as a continuous thread of involvement in dirty dealings both domestically and abroad. The roots of this milieu of malevolence stretched back to the post World War II era when a collection of spooks, corrupt bureaucrats and extremist right wing ideologues began to operate as a faction within the intelligence apparatus, a state upon themselves to profit financially while engaging in the darks forms of clandestine activities and black operations.

Author Joel Bainerman in his 1992 book entitled The Crimes of a President wrote the following (some of this ostensibly quoting William Hamilton of Inslaw as well as a 1991 story from the St. Louis Dispatch) that has a very good description on Casolaro’s theory:

“Casolaro had discovered a common denominator to the theft of Inslaw’s software and other recent scandals” says Hamilton who worked very closely with Casolaro right up to his death in helping him to uncover the dirty dealing behind the theft of Inslaw’s software. A group of individuals trained in covert intelligence operations and aligned with the U.S. political leadership who were allegedly profiting from each of these scandals. These veterans of U.S. covert intelligence operations had also allegedly been selling pirated copies of Inslaw’s software to foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies and funneling the funds through BCCI. Casolaro believed that some of the profits from these illegal sales made their way into a slush fund used for political payoffs and covert intelligence operations not authorized by congress.

Danny Casolaro is far from the only one to whom mysterious death had befallen after their investigative work got them too close to the real power structure or presented an obstacle to its need for the cloak of secrecy. Too many rising politicians, uncooperative politicians and judges, hostile witnesses, whistle blowers and reporters have met with no small number of strange and untimely deaths often attributed to accidents (small plane crashes in particular), ‘suicides’( a good deal of them in hotel rooms), sudden heart attacks or seizures (many in people with no history of such problems) and random acts of extreme violence that go unsolved by authorities.

In addition to Casolaro, other suspicious deaths of investigators of this particular nexus of evil include Financial Times reporter Anson Ng, reportedly a friend of Casolaro who was found dead from a gunshot wound in his Guatemala City apartment where he was reportedly working on a story related to BCCI as well as Jonathan Moyle whose body was found hanging in a closet in a Santiago hotel room.

Joel Bainerman also noted in his book that the Cabazon Indian Reservation where the PROMIS software was allegedly modified for espionage purposes by a very interesting character, a technical genius named Michael Riconosciuto to include the ‘back door’ feature (to allow for secret access) was in fact a “CIA cutout”. The government contracting firm Wackenhut, a Florida based security corporation was involved at the time in a joint venture with the Cabazon tribe to use the sovereign land status of the reservation to work on a variety of endeavors including the development and testing of arms including a fuel air explosive, biochemical warfare agents and other armaments that could be provided to third world regimes, primarily to right wing governments in Latin America. The Cabazon Indian Reservation was allegedly transformed into veritable spook nest as well as a staging ground for covert military industrial complex purposes. Wackenhut incidentally is back in the news (or at least the alternative media) with Ellen Brown’s recent story about the mysterious prison buses spotted in Arizona so they are still a player and a big one at that. I would venture to speculate that the truth about Wackenhut Corporation and its longtime involvement in the prison industrial complex that has become so very, very lucrative to this fascist society is something that deserves one hell of a good deal of scrutiny.

III: INDIO 2008

Interestingly enough there was a local news investigation in the Palm Springs area in 2008 that had focused on the 2005 multiple murder-suicide of Riverside County District Attorney Investigator David McGowan and five members of his family. As the series continued questions began to arise on whether McGowan had been digging a bit too deeply into a cold case file regarding a 1981 triple murder on the Cabazon Reservation that had ties to the covert activities that Danny Casolaro was investigating. Subsequent installments in the KESQ series by news reporter Nathan Baca began to ask questions about PROMIS as well as the other mysterious activities at the reservation and began to delve into the 1981 murders of tribal leader Fred Alvarez who resisted those behind the Cabazon-Wackenhut joint venture as well as two friends. An interview was conducted with the daughter of one of the victims who is to this day seeking justice for the murder of her father Ralph Boger. Rachel Begley (her website is called desertfae) very accurately described what has been going on at Cabazon as follows:

“I’m more shocked than anything. I had no idea these things were going on. Most of America doesn’t know these things are going on,” said Begley. “It’s still going on to this day. It’s a big web of corruption.”

The series ended abruptly in October after an installment that began to delve into whether other local Indian tribes may have been involved in dealings with Wackenhut and mentioned “an experimental electromagnetic weapon called a “railgun” as being one of the projects. That the KESQ story has not continued is disappointing but certainly not surprising given the history of what has happened to those digging too deeply into affairs involving the PROMIS software. I would strongly suspect that fear is a motivating factor in the termination of this series, especially after the detective who had been investigating the case stated that he: “doesn’t want to continue on the case based on the number of people who have met an untimely demise while doing so”. Because I feel that it is particularly relevant I am posting an email from said detective to a third party who has knowledge of the bigger picture and specifically for the comments of said detective that I have highlighted that should send a chill up the spine of all:

—– Original Message —–
From: X
To: X
Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 1:44 PM
Subject: Alvarez Triple Homicide

Hello X

My name is X and I’m with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. I’m a homicide detective assigned to the cold case division. The Alvarez triple homicide was assigned to me a couple of months ago.

For the past two months I have reviewed nearly a thousand documents of police reports, and spent many hours browsing the Internet for additional sources of information. As I am sure you can imagine, I feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland after falling down the rabbit hole. I no longer have a complete grasp on the real world.

You should know first off, that I am an experienced investigator with 18 years on the Sheriff’s Dept. and I consider myself pretty intuitive when it comes to filtering out the BS. After my first review of the police reports in this case, I wasn’t sure why it remained unsolved for over 26 years. All of the players were identified and the Modus Operandi seemed to be well established. I couldn’t understand why every few years the case was suddenly dropped and put back on the shelf.

That’s when Rachel Begley introduced me to the rabbit hole. After the countless hours I have now spent on her website and the numerous other conspiracy theorists websites, I’m having a very difficult time sifting through the BS.

I have also spent much time on your website and I have found your investigations impressive and your opinions refreshing. That is why I am writing to you now. I do not make it a habit of talking to journalists about open homicide investigations, however, it appears you are much more educated about this particular case than I am.

I know you are very busy and I understand the Alvarez triple homicide is a very small part of the Octopus, but I would be very interested in spending any time with you that you have available, in order to get some perspective on what I’ve read.

Just so you understand where I am in this case. I am currently preparing a review and summary for my Sergeant. My conclusion will be that I do not wish to continue investigating this case, based on the number of people who have met an untimely demise while doing so.

My actions in this matter go against everything I believe in, and this case is very difficult for me to walk away from, especially with the allegations that involve the deaths of Investigator Dave McGowan and his family. But I am conceding to a higher power (my wife) and trying to give her some peace of mind. I cannot look her in the eyes and tell her that I am willing to risk the life of my family by pursuing this.

I am interested in your opinion. Am I just another lamb to the slaughter? Is the Puppet Master pulling my strings via Rachel Begley? Is this just a simple case of murder by Jimmy Hughes at the direction of John P. Nichols, or is it really much more than that?

Thank you for your time and I look forward to hearing from you,

Detective X
RSO – Central Homicide
(951) X desk
(951) X cell

IV: Conclusion:

It is with the hope of this humble blogger that this series as well as other damning information such as that put forth by Mr. Tice, Mr. Tamm and other patriotic Americans who have risked all (and at times paid with their careers and lives) all in order to get the truth out will encourage others to do the same. It is long past time to bring attention to the history of grossly immoral and criminal acts that have been perpetrated against the people of the United States by the very institutions that are supposed to be protecting us. It is imperative that others begin to work independently (and together whenever possible) to mount their own investigations into how the government has been weaponized by a pack of fascist thugs so that they may reap the benefits at the expense of those who are not connected to an elitist ruling class that is hell bent on maintaining the status quo.

Danny Casolaro did not have the most powerful tool against injustice and corruption available while he was alive, the internet was only in its nascent stages and had he the ability that we enjoy due to advances in technology he may very well still be alive and the criminal usurpers of our democracy and violators of our constitution could be where they belong – in prison. It is my hope that one with more influence, internal knowledge and resources than I have at my disposal begin to not only do very serious investigative work but to also petition the new administration of President Barack Obama for the following:

1: An immediate cessation of all illegal, unconstitutional surveillance and data-mining that has been ongoing against law abiding American citizens.

2: The creation of an independent investigative body along the lines of the Church Committee imbued with sweeping powers to investigate abuses of intelligence both within the government as well as with private contractors who have collaborated in crimes against the republic and its citizens.

3: A case by case federal investigation into ALL suspicious deaths of reporters and other individuals either directly or indirectly involved in the investigation of what has been done with the PROMIS software, NSA spying and Continuity of Government programs. Especially now that it has been revealed that the NSA has been actively spying on journalists and news organizations.

4: A restoration of the rule of law as a bulwark against tyranny as was intended by our founding fathers who having full knowledge of how unaccountable despots behave risked all to lay the foundation of a free society where the highest ideals of liberty can be enjoyed by all.

5: In iron tight regulatory system to ensure that such flagrant abuses of power never be allowed to occur again in the future. The cloak of secrecy needs to be removed and all government must be open to the scrutiny of those who it is supposed to serve.

6: The prosecution to the full extent of the law of those who are currently or who have in the past been involved in any criminal activity in relation to the aforementioned.

Truly, nothing else will suffice if we are to have any credibility as a nation based on laws.

To Be Continued….

Next: Part Four – The Octopus

Link to Part One
Link to Part Two

Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government: 3

I: WATCH LISTS, BLACK LISTS, ENEMIES LISTS…..HIT LISTS?

With the long overdue departure of the Bush administration from the White House it is the hope many that the myriad of transgressions against the Constitution and the people of America will begin to seep out into the public domain. It took a remarkably short time. The day after the helicopter hauled ole George away like so much rubbish a major story broke. In an astonishing shot across the bow directed at the shadow government the first significant whistleblower has already come out with a story (once again ignored by the corporate media) and delivered a devastating blow to the premise that the massive illegal domestic spying programs of the Bush administration were undertaken in order to protect America from terrorism in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001.

Former NSA analyst Russell Tice during two recent interviews on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann (pt1,pt2)confirmed that the Bush-Cheney-Rove phony war on terror was as people like myself have always strongly suspected in actuality a war on America itself. According to the patriotic Mr. Tice the targets of the domestic spying included news organizations and journalists and that the surveillance for specific targets was not limited to professional matters alone, they were spied on 24/7.

“The National Security Agency had access to all Americans’ communications,” he said. “Faxes, phone calls and their computer communications. … They monitored all communications.”

Tice said the NSA analyzed metadata to determine which communication would be collected. Offering a hypothetical example, he said if the agency determined that terrorists communicate in brief, two-minute phone calls, the NSA might program its systems to record all such calls, invading the privacy of anyone prone to telephonic succinctness.

Tice was involved in only a small part of the project, that involved trying to “harpoon fish from an airplane.”

He said he was told to monitor certain groups in order to eliminate them as suspects for more intense targeting. Those groups, he said, were U.S. journalists and news agencies. But rather than excluding the news organizations from monitoring, he discovered that the NSA was collecting the organizations’ communications 24 hours a day year round.
“It made no sense,” he said.

Tice did not identify the reporters or organizations allegedly targeted.

Olbermann asked if this means there’s a file somewhere containing every e-mail and phone conversation these reporters ever had with sources, editors and family members.

“If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything, yes.” Tice answered.

(Exerpted from Wired’s Kim Zetter’s blog)

The Tice interviews followed another former insider speaking out on the gross illegality of the Bush administration programs, a former DOJ employee named Thomas Tamm was featured in a Newsweek magazine cover story by Michael Isikoff entitled The Fed Who Blew the Whistle from which I excerpt the following:

In the spring of 2004, Tamm had just finished a yearlong stint at a Justice Department unit handling wiretaps of suspected terrorists and spies—a unit so sensitive that employees are required to put their hands through a biometric scanner to check their fingerprints upon entering. While there, Tamm stumbled upon the existence of a highly classified National Security Agency program that seemed to be eavesdropping on U.S. citizens. The unit had special rules that appeared to be hiding the NSA activities from a panel of federal judges who are required to approve such surveillance. When Tamm started asking questions, his supervisors told him to drop the subject. He says one volunteered that “the program” (as it was commonly called within the office) was “probably illegal.”

The name of the program was Stellar Wind and please pay particular attention to this next excerpted piece from Isikoff’s story:

The NSA, with the secret cooperation of U.S. telecommunications companies, had begun collecting vast amounts of information about the phone and e-mail records of American citizens. Separately, the NSA was also able to access, for the first time, massive volumes of personal financial records—such as credit-card transactions, wire transfers and bank withdrawals—that were being reported to the Treasury Department by financial institutions. These included millions of “suspicious-activity reports,” or SARS, according to two former Treasury officials who declined to be identified talking about sensitive programs. (It was one such report that tipped FBI agents to former New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s use of prostitutes.) These records were fed into NSA supercomputers for the purpose of “data mining”—looking for links or patterns that might (or might not) suggest terrorist activity.

This latest glimpse beneath the facade at the massive, secretive and highly illegal surveillance campaign against the American people is an outrage. Given the proclivity of those who run the system in this country to exert raw power to advance their own agendas it is no leap in logic that journalists alone were the only group targeted. There remains the question of whether blackmail, especially sexual blackmail is routinely used as a tool to keep government and media officials from not straying too far from the dirty business of imperialism and financial chicanery of the sort that has brought the economy to its knees. I personally found the media spectacle of the fortuitously timed prostitution bust of former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer who incidentally had just announced his intention to declare war on the banksters and their accomplices in the Bush White House in a February 14, 2008 Washington Post piece entitled Predatory Lenders Partner in Crime to be extremely suspicious. The rogue Bush regime and the NSA have been using their big lie of the war on terror as an excuse to scrutinize credit card use and Spitzer would have been an obvious target as is indicated by the above excerpt from the Newsweek story. It also makes skeptics such as myself wonder whether the witch hunt to impeach former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich may at least in part be attibuted to his threat to suspend state business with Bank of America, ‘Blago’ was arrested the day afterwards.

In light of the Tice revelations as well as an already long and extremely sordid history of U.S. government surveillance into the activities of dissidents and reporters that predated the Bush regime, we also need to ask some very serious questions of a much more troubling and nefarious nature. For example, how does such spying tie into not only the manipulation of the news but the now standard lack of spine from the Democratic congress when it comes to prosecuting the Bush administration criminals? Notorious fixer Karl Rove has already announced his intent to defy yet another subpoena for his testimony that was to have been delivered on Monday in front of the House Judiciary Committee. As of this writing, John Conyers has once again caved and the date has now been pushed into February and likely will soon disappear down the same memory hole where similar attempts to enforce the law have been flushed.

Intense political pressure, threats of unemployment in a time of economic crisis and potentially embarassing sexual acts subject to blackmail are all entirely made possible by the rampant unaccountability of the domestic spying programs, but are there measures that go far beyond just the spiking of stories, the discrediting or the ruining of careers alone? Think back to the vicious institutionalized slander directed former San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb for example for his Dark Alliance series. The savagery with which Webb was taken down by the establishment was stunning and it ultimately resulted in his suicide, a broken and haunted man who only dared to try to tell the truth.

There is a long trail of untimely demises of investigative journalists and other insiders whose knowledge represents a threat to very existence of the shadow government and those who it as a matter of routine does business with in order to avoid legitimate channels. Perhaps the most terrifying of all question is exactly what actions do end up being taken in order to prevent the exposure of widespread criminal activity, systemic grand scale fraud and extra-constitutional black operations that have been conducted for decades.

Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen wrote of an NSA database that was at one time named FIRSTFRUITS that was maintained to engage in surveillance against journalists and that was renamed after its discovery. Some of the names in this database allegedly included Christiane Amanpour, Seymour Hersh, James Bamford, James Risen and Madsen himself. According to chatter in the blogosphere that were it not consistent with the historical trail of dead bodies could easily be dismissed as paranoia and disinformation. One story floating around the internet mentioned an unnamed NSA security officer allegedly mused about ‘just killing’ troublesome bloggers. This may be a product of paranoia (one would think paranoia would be a natural state in a land of fear and loathing such as that which the United States has become post 9/11) but there is great progress currently being made by internet researchers and such reputed threats should not simply be waved off as the rantings of tin foil hatters or the favorite of all pejoratives directed at those who dare to ask inconvenient questions, conspiracy theorists. The fact that the alternative media and many bloggers are slowly starting to put the pieces together one can only reasonably suspect that such behavior scares the living hell out of the establishment, and after all, there is a history of that sort of thing. While this is not a comprehensive list the Committee to Protect Journalists keeps a database to track the prematurely deceased in a most dangerous profession.

The bizarre absence of any reporting of this very serious violation of civil liberties has received absolutely no coverage in the corporatized, mainstream pocket media. This is unconscionable that there is apparently no interest in exposing these crimes, especially considering that those targeted could actually save their own hides (and perhaps instill some dignity) by outing this program. It’s a sad testament to the state of today’s ‘journalism’ that is shameful by comparison to that of days of yore when reporters were intrepid souls determined to speak the truth to power.

Writer Eric Alterman puts it spot on in his recent Center for American Progress piece entitled Think Again: Spying on Journalists? Why the Silence? when he notes the lack of intestinal fortitude in the mainstream media:

Clearly something deeply disturbing lurks beneath these revelations, and with Bush gone from office, it’s hard to understand just what is preventing journalists from seeking the truth about this program more energetically. The only thing they have to fear is fear itself.

This sad state of affairs brings to mind the following:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

– Pastor Martin Niemöller

And the silence by those tasked by the First Amendment’s now quaint and antiquated imbuing upon them a responsibility for a free press as an essential check on authoritarianism is deafening in its absence. Quislings, cowards and public relations flacks seem to be the one thing that our journalism schools never failed to produce over the past several decades, feckless and spineless careerists with neither a sense of honor nor of their place as defenders of precious liberty. There shall be no refuge for the weasels nor the rats in the end therefore their mass abrogation of their chosen profession along with their acute absence of courage is even more damnable for when the time comes they will perhaps live to lament that they did not speak out when they had the chance.

II: NIGHT AND FOG

“Death Solves All Problems, No Man, No Problem”

-Joseph Stalin

The National Security State has a history of silencing those who would speak out and especially reporters deemed to have become a nuisance. This is done either through intense pressure brought down on media corporations through organized harassment of sponsors, brutal coordinated smear campaigns much like the one that took down the aforementioned Gary Webb or when all else fails, the reporters often just happen to turn up mysteriously dead. The list of ‘suicides’ and accidents is a long one and in the view of the ruthless psychopaths who both run and profit from a high-tech snooping network seems to be that any means are to be undertaken to keep their games going even if it ultimately results in termination with extreme prejudice. I believe that I will have to put together a list myself but when I just started writing down names off the top of my head of strange deaths I came up with over thirty right off the bat.
The ugly truth is that none of these police state powers are being used to protect the United States from foreign enemies, terrorism or any other excuse that is being made in order to get Americans to submit their rights. It is all in the name of power, money and to protect the interests of the oligarchy and the power elite who run the establishment and it needs to be stopped because it is out of control.

Take the strange case of Danny Casolaro for example…

Perhaps the closest to get at the truth about PROMIS and how it was an integral piece of the shadow government was investigative journalist Danny Casolaro. Casolaro had been working on research for a book on a shadowy transnational power group that seemed to run through the postwar era and had connections to many of the major scandals including Iran-Contra, BCCI, the Nugan Hand Bank, international drug cartels, weapons dealers and intelligence operatives in not only the U.S. government but internationally as well. Casolaro dubbed this group, one that largely rose out of a ‘dirty old boy network’ of the OSS/CIA out of the ashes of World War II as The Octopus. Casolaro began to become aware of the more sinister aspects of what Professor Peter Dale Scott refers to as the deep state but is more commonly known as either the shadow government, the parallel government and even arguably the permanent government while investigating the theft of the PROMIS software from the Inslaw corporation.

On Saturday, August 10, 1991 a maid at a Martinsburg, West Virginia Sheraton Inn was horrified to find the nude body of Joseph Daniel Casolaro in the bathtub, the victim of an apparent ‘suicide’. It was by accounts a particularly grisly scene and a strangely violent ‘suicide’ with both of his wrists slashed deeply multiple times with a razor blade. There was a very short and impersonal note, blood splattered on the tile walls and a pair of bloody towels under the sink away from the bathtub.

Strange circumstances followed in the aftermath of the discovery of Danny Casolaro’s corpse in a blood filled bathtub. His body was hastily taken away and embalmed (making any subsequent autopsy much more difficult) before family members were officially notified (a violation of state law by accounts) and room 517 had been professionally cleaned thereby removing critical evidence prior to any sort of thorough forensic investigation could be performed. Compounding doubts about the official ‘suicide’ story are contradictory statements made by friends and family that Casolaro was NOT suicidal at all but was actually quite exited over the prospect of publishing his book on the findings of his investigative work, even to the extent that he had scheduled a party to celebrate. He was in the final stages of nailing down the story of the century and had gone to West Virginia in search of the evidence that would prove his theory, make the connection to PROMIS and ‘bring back the head of the octopus’. The sudden ending (yet another hotel room ‘suicide’) was especially suspicious because when the body was discovered, his files were missing.

In addition to the shadowy players in the global arms and narcotics trades the Octopus also appeared to have had as tentacles rogue elements of U.S. intelligence Casolaro found connections to not only Iran-Contra but also BCCI, the Nugan Hand bank, the October Surprise, money launderers and organized crime as well as a continuous thread of involvement in dirty dealings both domestically and abroad. The roots of this milieu of malevolence stretched back to the post World War II era when a collection of spooks, corrupt bureaucrats and extremist right wing ideologues began to operate as a faction within the intelligence apparatus, a state upon themselves to profit financially while engaging in the darks forms of clandestine activities and black operations.

Author Joel Bainerman in his 1992 book entitled The Crimes of a President wrote the following (some of this ostensibly quoting William Hamilton of Inslaw as well as a 1991 story from the St. Louis Dispatch) that has a very good description on Casolaro’s theory:

“Casolaro had discovered a common denominator to the theft of Inslaw’s software and other recent scandals” says Hamilton who worked very closely with Casolaro right up to his death in helping him to uncover the dirty dealing behind the theft of Inslaw’s software. A group of individuals trained in covert intelligence operations and aligned with the U.S. political leadership who were allegedly profiting from each of these scandals. These veterans of U.S. covert intelligence operations had also allegedly been selling pirated copies of Inslaw’s software to foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies and funneling the funds through BCCI. Casolaro believed that some of the profits from these illegal sales made their way into a slush fund used for political payoffs and covert intelligence operations not authorized by congress.

Danny Casolaro is far from the only one to whom mysterious death had befallen after their investigative work got them too close to the real power structure or presented an obstacle to its need for the cloak of secrecy. Too many rising politicians, uncooperative politicians and judges, hostile witnesses, whistle blowers and reporters have met with no small number of strange and untimely deaths often attributed to accidents (small plane crashes in particular), ‘suicides’( a good deal of them in hotel rooms), sudden heart attacks or seizures (many in people with no history of such problems) and random acts of extreme violence that go unsolved by authorities.

In addition to Casolaro, other suspicious deaths of investigators of this particular nexus of evil include Financial Times reporter Anson Ng, reportedly a friend of Casolaro who was found dead from a gunshot wound in his Guatemala City apartment where he was reportedly working on a story related to BCCI as well as Jonathan Moyle whose body was found hanging in a closet in a Santiago hotel room.

Joel Bainerman also noted in his book that the Cabazon Indian Reservation where the PROMIS software was allegedly modified for espionage purposes by a very interesting character, a technical genius named Michael Riconosciuto to include the ‘back door’ feature (to allow for secret access) was in fact a “CIA cutout”. The government contracting firm Wackenhut, a Florida based security corporation was involved at the time in a joint venture with the Cabazon tribe to use the sovereign land status of the reservation to work on a variety of endeavors including the development and testing of arms including a fuel air explosive, biochemical warfare agents and other armaments that could be provided to third world regimes, primarily to right wing governments in Latin America. The Cabazon Indian Reservation was allegedly transformed into veritable spook nest as well as a staging ground for covert military industrial complex purposes. Wackenhut incidentally is back in the news (or at least the alternative media) with Ellen Brown’s recent story about the mysterious prison buses spotted in Arizona so they are still a player and a big one at that. I would venture to speculate that the truth about Wackenhut Corporation and its longtime involvement in the prison industrial complex that has become so very, very lucrative to this fascist society is something that deserves one hell of a good deal of scrutiny.

III: INDIO 2008

Interestingly enough there was a local news investigation in the Palm Springs area in 2008 that had focused on the 2005 multiple murder-suicide of Riverside County District Attorney Investigator David McGowan and five members of his family. As the series continued questions began to arise on whether McGowan had been digging a bit too deeply into a cold case file regarding a 1981 triple murder on the Cabazon Reservation that had ties to the covert activities that Danny Casolaro was investigating. Subsequent installments in the KESQ series by news reporter Nathan Baca began to ask questions about PROMIS as well as the other mysterious activities at the reservation and began to delve into the 1981 murders of tribal leader Fred Alvarez who resisted those behind the Cabazon-Wackenhut joint venture as well as two friends. An interview was conducted with the daughter of one of the victims who is to this day seeking justice for the murder of her father Ralph Boger. Rachel Begley (her website is called desertfae) very accurately described what has been going on at Cabazon as follows:

“I’m more shocked than anything. I had no idea these things were going on. Most of America doesn’t know these things are going on,” said Begley. “It’s still going on to this day. It’s a big web of corruption.”

The series ended abruptly in October after an installment that began to delve into whether other local Indian tribes may have been involved in dealings with Wackenhut and mentioned “an experimental electromagnetic weapon called a “railgun” as being one of the projects. That the KESQ story has not continued is disappointing but certainly not surprising given the history of what has happened to those digging too deeply into affairs involving the PROMIS software. I would strongly suspect that fear is a motivating factor in the termination of this series, especially after the detective who had been investigating the case stated that he: “doesn’t want to continue on the case based on the number of people who have met an untimely demise while doing so”. Because I feel that it is particularly relevant I am posting an email from said detective to a third party who has knowledge of the bigger picture and specifically for the comments of said detective that I have highlighted that should send a chill up the spine of all:

—– Original Message —–
From: X
To: X
Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 1:44 PM
Subject: Alvarez Triple Homicide

Hello X

My name is X and I’m with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. I’m a homicide detective assigned to the cold case division. The Alvarez triple homicide was assigned to me a couple of months ago.

For the past two months I have reviewed nearly a thousand documents of police reports, and spent many hours browsing the Internet for additional sources of information. As I am sure you can imagine, I feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland after falling down the rabbit hole. I no longer have a complete grasp on the real world.

You should know first off, that I am an experienced investigator with 18 years on the Sheriff’s Dept. and I consider myself pretty intuitive when it comes to filtering out the BS. After my first review of the police reports in this case, I wasn’t sure why it remained unsolved for over 26 years. All of the players were identified and the Modus Operandi seemed to be well established. I couldn’t understand why every few years the case was suddenly dropped and put back on the shelf.

That’s when Rachel Begley introduced me to the rabbit hole. After the countless hours I have now spent on her website and the numerous other conspiracy theorists websites, I’m having a very difficult time sifting through the BS.

I have also spent much time on your website and I have found your investigations impressive and your opinions refreshing. That is why I am writing to you now. I do not make it a habit of talking to journalists about open homicide investigations, however, it appears you are much more educated about this particular case than I am.

I know you are very busy and I understand the Alvarez triple homicide is a very small part of the Octopus, but I would be very interested in spending any time with you that you have available, in order to get some perspective on what I’ve read.

Just so you understand where I am in this case. I am currently preparing a review and summary for my Sergeant. My conclusion will be that I do not wish to continue investigating this case, based on the number of people who have met an untimely demise while doing so.

My actions in this matter go against everything I believe in, and this case is very difficult for me to walk away from, especially with the allegations that involve the deaths of Investigator Dave McGowan and his family. But I am conceding to a higher power (my wife) and trying to give her some peace of mind. I cannot look her in the eyes and tell her that I am willing to risk the life of my family by pursuing this.
I am interested in your opinion. Am I just another lamb to the slaughter? Is the Puppet Master pulling my strings via Rachel Begley? Is this just a simple case of murder by Jimmy Hughes at the direction of John P. Nichols, or is it really much more than that?

Thank you for your time and I look forward to hearing from you,

Detective X
RSO – Central Homicide
(951) X desk
(951) X cell

IV: Conclusion:

It is with the hope of this humble blogger that this series as well as other damning information such as that put forth by Mr. Tice, Mr. Tamm and other patriotic Americans who have risked all (and at times paid with their careers and lives) all in order to get the truth out will encourage others to do the same. It is long past time to bring attention to the history of grossly immoral and criminal acts that have been perpetrated against the people of the United States by the very institutions that are supposed to be protecting us. It is imperative that others begin to work independently (and together whenever possible) to mount their own investigations into how the government has been weaponized by a pack of fascist thugs so that they may reap the benefits at the expense of those who are not connected to an elitist ruling class that is hell bent on maintaining the status quo.

Danny Casolaro did not have the most powerful tool against injustice and corruption available while he was alive, the internet was only in its nascent stages and had he the ability that we enjoy due to advances in technology he may very well still be alive and the criminal usurpers of our democracy and violators of our constitution could be where they belong – in prison. It is my hope that one with more influence, internal knowledge and resources than I have at my disposal begin to not only do very serious investigative work but to also petition the new administration of President Barack Obama for the following:

1: An immediate cessation of all illegal, unconstitutional surveillance and data-mining that has been ongoing against law abiding American citizens.

2: The creation of an independent investigative body along the lines of the Church Committee imbued with sweeping powers to investigate abuses of intelligence both within the government as well as with private contractors who have collaborated in crimes against the republic and its citizens.

3: A case by case federal investigation into ALL suspicious deaths of reporters and other individuals either directly or indirectly involved in the investigation of what has been done with the PROMIS software, NSA spying and Continuity of Government programs. Especially now that it has been revealed that the NSA has been actively spying on journalists and news organizations.

4: A restoration of the rule of law as a bulwark against tyranny as was intended by our founding fathers who having full knowledge of how unaccountable despots behave risked all to lay the foundation of a free society where the highest ideals of liberty can be enjoyed by all.

5: In iron tight regulatory system to ensure that such flagrant abuses of power never be allowed to occur again in the future. The cloak of secrecy needs to be removed and all government must be open to the scrutiny of those who it is supposed to serve.

6: The prosecution to the full extent of the law of those who are currently or who have in the past been involved in any criminal activity in relation to the aforementioned.

Truly, nothing else will suffice if we are to have any credibility as a nation based on laws.

To Be Continued….

Next: Part Four – The Octopus