Douglas Caddy
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March 30, 2011
Low Levels of Radiation Found in American Milk
The New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Tests of milk samples taken last week in Spokane, Wash., indicate the presence of radioactive iodine from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, but at levels far below those at which action would have to be taken, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday.
Radioactive materials in liquids are measured in pico-curies per liter, and the sample, taken March 25, showed a reading of 0.8 pico-curies, the agency said. Those numbers, it said, would have to be 5,000 times higher to reach the intervention level set by the Food and Drug Administration.
These types of findings are to be expected in the coming days and are far below levels of public health concern, including for infants and children, the environmental agency said.
Levels of iodine 131 entering the air can be very diluted, but if the iodine is deposited on grass eaten by cows, the cows will reconcentrate it in their milk by a factor of 1,000. This is mainly a concern with fresh milk, not for dairy products that are stored before consumption.
Iodine 131 has a half-life of eight days, meaning that every eight days it loses half its strength. Since production of iodine 131 stopped when the Fukushima reactors shut down on March 11, it has already been through two half-lives and could easily be halved once or twice more again before the milk is consumed as cheese or yogurt.
Iodine 131 emits beta particles, which resemble electrons. They are not considered a major hazard outside the human body, although in large doses, they can damage the cornea of the eye.
The problem arises when materials that emit beta particles are ingested or inhaled. Iodine 131 is chemically identical to normal, nonradioactive iodine and thus is absorbed into the body just as normal iodine is, mainly in the thyroid gland, where it delivers a concentrated dose to that small organ and can cause cancer.
In the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986, the biggest health effect was cases of thyroid cancer, especially in children living near the nuclear plant in Ukraine.
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Phone hacking: Yates defiant over claims he misled parliament
Scotland Yard acting deputy commissioner defends himself after criticism from MPs
By Nick Davies
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 29 March 2011 20.54 BST
Scotland Yard's acting deputy commissioner, John Yates, has continued to fight his corner in the face of further allegations that he misled parliament over the phone-hacking scandal.
In written evidence to the home affairs select committee, Chris Bryant MP, who first laid the charge against Yates in the House of Commons earlier this month, claimed that:
• Yates had always maintained there were very few victims in the affair, yet a briefing paper produced by Scotland Yard during the original inquiry had recorded that "a vast number of unique voicemail numbers belonging to high-profile individuals have been identified as being accessed without authority."
• Yates had told the home affairs committee last September that there was no evidence that MPs' phones had been tapped, yet "at least eight MPs that I am aware of, have now been shown evidence that has been in police possession since 2006 that shows precisely that."
• Yates claimed that police had approached all known and suspected victims, yet they had failed to inform a number of people who had now been confirmed as victims including, Bryant said, the former deputy prime minister, John Prescott, actor Sienna Miller and her friends and family and interior designer Kelly Hoppen.
• Yates had failed to tell select committees that police never fully searched the material which they seized in 2006 from Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the centre of the affair, and since this had later proved to include 2,978 mobile phone numbers, "it is difficult to see how his assertion that there were very few victims can possibly have been based on fact."
Yates emphatically denied he had ever misled parliament. He defended his position on the central point of law which has become the subject of a public dispute between him and the director of public prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer QC.
Yates has consistently said that it is an offence to intercept voicemail only if it has not already been heard by its intended recipient. On this narrow interpretation, the hacking affair involved few victims and few offenders.
However, the DPP has told the committee in writing that prosecuting counsel in the original inquiry in 2006 never adopted this interpretation and that it played no part in the charges brought against Mulcaire and the News of the World's royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, or in the legal proceedings generally.
Yates stood his ground. He said Bryant had been wrong to claim in the House of Commons on 10 March that the CPS had never advised police to adopt this narrow interpretation.
He provided the committee with a written summary of evidence which he gave last week to the media, culture and sport committee listing a series of occasions on which the CPS had specifically told police that they had to prove not only that voicemail had been intercepted but this had happened before their intended recipients had heard them. "That advice permeated the entire inquiry," he said.
Yates told the committee that the advice had remained unchanged until October 2010, when Scotland Yard started a new inquiry and the CPS advised them to take a broader approach, simply regarding all interception of voicemail as illegal.
He said Bryant had been wrong to suggest that in October 2010 the CPS had formally warned police that the previous advice had been wrong.
"A different QC had provided some differing advice. It signalled an intention to take the broader view for the future." He said Bryant had now "absolutely conceded" that he had been wrong on the point.
However, in his written evidence, Bryant conceded only that "it is true that during the very early days, a lawyer at the CPS may have advised" adopting the narrow version of the law. He quoted the DPP's claim that this advice "had no bearing on the charges brought against the defendants or the legal proceedings generally."
He suggested that that the original CPS advice had been set aside during the original inquiry, in August 2006, when David Perry QC was brought in as prosecuting counsel. "Perry expressly wrote to the CPS on October 3 2006 that all that they had to prove was that the message had been listened to by Mulcaire, not that the message was virgin."
Bryant went on to accuse Yates of misleading the culture, media and sport committee last week: "Even in his evidence to the DCMS committee last week, he disingenuously only referred to advice prior to August 9th 2006, before the first meeting at which David Perry gave the advice that secured the conviction of Goodman and Mulcaire." The committee chairman, Keith Vaz, said the DPP would be giving evidence on the matter.
The committee also asked Yates whether police had ever questioned Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the News of the World and the Sun, over her 2003 evidence to a select committee that her journalists had paid the police for information. Yates said she had not been questioned but that Scotland Yard was currently 'researching' the matter to see what had been done about it.
Yates was challenged by Mark Reckless MP to explain why he was willing to use public money to pay for lawyers to threaten newspapers whose reports he found objectionable, while victims of the hacking affair had had to spend large amounts of their own money to take civil actions to uncover the truth about crimes committed against them. Yates said the two points were completely separate and that, while he had asked for authority to use public funds for his legal advice, he had no intention of suing.
Bryant referred to recent disclosures about a series of dinners where Yates and other senior officers met News of the World editors: "The Met have not helped themselves by having regular meetings with the News of the World at the same time as they are supposed to be investigating them." There was, he said, "a serious risk that they might be perceived to be in collusion with the newspaper." Yates said police were "duty bound to engage at various levels with politicians, businessmen and media" and suggested that he had probably had more lunches with the Guardian than with the News of the World.
Bryant told the committee that he commended the current Yard inquiry under Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers. But he added: "The Met not only failed to do a full investigation in 2006; they have consistently and repeatedly failed to interrogate the evidence they seized in 2006; they have misled individual victims and potential victims; they have opened themselves to charges of collusion by frequently socialising with journalists and executives at the very organisation they were supposedly investigating; and they have consistently failed to give the full picture to this committee. Most worryingly, they have, for whatever reason, failed to expose the full degree of criminality involved, leaving victims to fend for themselves by dragging information out of the Met in civil
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Living and Dying Downwind
Radiation, Japan and the Marshall Islands
By GLENN ALCALAY
www. counterpunch.org
March 29, 2011
When the dangerous dust and gases settle and we discover just how much radiation escaped the damaged Fukushima reactors and spent fuel rods, we may never know how many people are being exposed to radiation from the burning fuel rods and reactor cores, and how much exposure they will receive over time. Minute and above-background traces of Iodine-131 are already showing up in Tokyo's water supply - 150 miles southwest of the leaking reactors - and in milk and spinach [with a dash of Cesium-137] from 75 miles away. The Japanese government has recently warned pregnant women and children to avoid drinking Tokyo tap water, and I-131 levels 1,200 times above background levels were recorded in seawater near the reactors.
Aside from sharing the dubious distinction of both nations having been at the receiving end of America's nuclear weapons, Japan and the Marshall Islands now share another dubious distinction. The unleashed isotopes of concern from the damaged Japanese reactors - Iodine-131, Cesium-137, Strontium-90 and Plutonium-239 - are well known to the Marshall Islanders living downwind of the testing sites at Bikini and Enewetak atolls in the central Pacific, following sixty-seven A- and H-bombs exploded between 1946-58. In fact, it is precisely these isotopes that continue to haunt the 80,000 Marshallese fifty-three years after the last thermonuclear test in the megaton range shook their pristine coral atolls and contaminated their fragile marine ecosystems.
In fact, it was the irradiated downwind Marshallese on Rongelap and Utrik in 1954 caught in the Bravo fallout - and I-131 - that taught the world about the thyroid effect from the uptake of radioactive iodine.
The U.S.' largest [fusion] hydrogen bomb - Bravo - was 1,000 times the Hiroshima atomic [fission] bomb, and deposited a liberal sprinkling of these and a potent potpourri of 300 other radionuclides over a wide swath of the Central Pacific and the inhabited atolls in the Marshalls archipelago in March 1954 during "Operation Castle."
The Rongelap islanders 120 miles downwind from Bikini received 190 rems [1.9 Sv] of whole-body gamma dose before being evacuated. The Utrik people 320 miles downwind received 15 rems [150 mSv] before their evacuation. Many of the on-site nuclear workers at Fukushima have already exceeded the Utrik dose in multiples.
Also entrapped within the thermonuclear maelstrom from Bravo was the not-so-Lucky Dragon [Fukuryu Maru] Japanese fishing trawler with its crew of twenty-three fishing for tuna near Bikini [see The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon by Ralph Lapp]. As the heavily exposed fishermen's health quickly deteriorated after Bravo, the radio operator Aikichi Kuboyama died of a liver illness six months after his exposure; his is now a household name in Japan and is associated with the "Bikini bomb."
Meanwhile, the Japanese fishing industry was rocked when Geiger counters registered "talking fish" [what the Japanese called the clicking sound of the contaminated fish being monitored] from the 800 pounds of tuna catch of the Lucky Dragon in Yaizu and in local fish markets. Much of the Japanese tuna at the time was caught by a fleet of 1,000 fishing boats operating in the fertile tuna waters near the U.S.' Pacific Proving Ground in the Marshalls.
In response to the plight and symbolism of the Lucky Dragon, Japanese women collected 34 million signatures on petitions advocating the immediate abolition of both atomic and hydrogen bombs in 1955. Pugwash, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning anti-nuclear organization was founded in 1955 by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in response to Bravo. The dangers of radioactive fallout from Bravo inspired Nevil Shute's classic nuclear dystopia On the Beach, as well as Godzilla.
To quell the diplomatic furor - whereby the Japanese representative to the U.N. accused the U.S. in March 1954 of "once again using nuclear weapons against the Japanese people" - the U.S. paid two million dollars to the fishing company which owned the Lucky Dragon; each of the 23 fishermen ended up with the princely sum of $5,000 in 1956 and the tuna company kept the rest.
AEC chair Lewis Strauss (who originally proposed nuclear energy "too cheap to meter" in the post-War Atoms for Peace program) told President Eisenhower's press secretary James Hagerty in April 1954 that the Lucky Dragon was not a fishing boat at all - it was a "Red spy outfit" snooping on the American nuclear tests.
The legacy of latent radiogenic diseases from hydrogen bomb testing in the Marshall Islands provides some clues about what ill-health mysteries await the affected Japanese in the decades ahead. Also, the Marshall Islands provide insight about ecosystem contamination of these dangerous radioactive isotopes, and what this means for the affected Japanese.
Profiles of the four isotopes
o Iodine-131 [radioactive iodine] has a half life of eight days, and concentrates in the thyroid gland about 5,000 times more efficiently than other parts of the body. Traces of I-131 have been discovered in Tokyo drinking water and in seawater offshore from the reactors. It took nine years for the first thyroid tumor to appear among the exposed Marshallese and hypothyroidism and cancer continued to appear decades later.
o Cesium-137 has a half life of thirty years and is a chemical analog of potassium; Cs-137 concentrates in muscle and other parts of the body. Rongelap Island has a new layer of topsoil containing potassium to help neutralize the Cs-137 left over from the H-bomb tests, but the Marshallese residents remain unconvinced and suspicious about the habitability of their long abandoned home atoll. Meanwhile, the U.S. is pressuring hard for their repatriation despite the fact that most islands at Rongelap will remain off limits for many decades with strict dietary restrictions of local foods.
o Strontium-90 has a half life of twenty-eight years, is a chemical analog of calcium and is known as a "bone seeker." Rongelap and the other downwind atolls have residual Sr-90 in their soils, groundwater and marine ecosystems.
o Plutonium-239 has a half life of 24,000 years, is considered one of the most toxic substances on Earth, and if absorbed is a potent alpha emitter that can induce cancer. This isotope too is found in the soils and groundwater of the downwind atolls from the Bikini and Enewetak H-bomb tests.
Lessons from the Marshall Islands
* It took nine years after exposure to the 1954 Bravo fallout for the first thyroid tumor and hypothyroidism to occur in an exposed Utrik woman from the I-131. Several more tumors [and other radiogenic disorders] among the exposed people appeared the following year and every year thereafter. The latency period for thyroid abnormalities and other radiogenic disorders [see below] endures for several decades.
* Because a child's thyroid gland is much smaller than an adult's thyroid, it receives a higher concentration of I-131 than an adult dose. Also, because a child's thyroid gland is growing more quickly than an adult's, it requires and absorbs more iodine [and I-131] than an adult thyroid gland. That is, the thyroid effect is age-related.
* Radioactive Iodine-129 with a half-life of 15 million years and a well-documented capacity to bioaccumulate in the foodchain, will also remain as a persistent problem for the affected Japanese.
* The Majuro-based Nuclear Claims Tribunal was established in 1988 to settle all past and future claims against the U.S. for health injury and property loss damages from the nuclear tests. As of 2006, the NCT had paid out $73 million [of the $91 million awarded] for 1,999 Marshallese claimants. There are thirty-six medical conditions that are presumed to be caused by the nuclear tests [http://www.nuclearclaimstribunal.com]. Eligibility for Marshallese citizens consists of having been in the Marshall Islands during the testing period [1946-58] and having at least one of the presumptive medical disorders.
* The sociocultural and psychological effects [e.g., PTSD] of the Fukushima nuclear disaster will be long-lasting, given the uncertainty surrounding the contamination of their prefecture and beyond. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton eloquently detailed this uncertain future and fears about "invisible contamination" concerning the Hiroshima and Nagasaki "hibakusha" ["A-bomb survivors"] in his award-winning 1968 magnum opus Death in Life.
* Noted radiation experts John Gofman [co-discoverer of U-232 and U-233 and author of Radiation and Human Health], Karl Z. Morgan [a founder of health physics] and Edward Radford [Chair of the National Academy of Sciences' BEIR III committee and advisor to the Nuclear Claims Tribunal] stated that there is no threshold dose for low level ionizing radiation:
Any amount of ionizing radiation - which is cumulative - can pose a health threat for certain individuals, and especially those with compromised immune systems.
Glenn Alcalay is an adjunct professor of anthropology at Wm Paterson Univ. and Montclair State Univ. in New Jersey. Alcalay was a Peace Corps volunteer on Utrik Atoll in the Marshalls, speaks fluent Marshallese, and has conducted anthropological research re: reproductive abnormalities among the downwind islanders. He can be reached at: alcalayg@wpunj.edu
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Radioactive particles from Japan have reached England, today's Daily Mail reports.
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Phone hacking: News of the World locates 'lost' archive of emails
Millions of emails from 2005 and 2006 are likely to include those by Andy Coulson and three former editors implicated in affair
By James Robinson
guardian.co.uk,
Monday 28 March 2011 21.17 BST
The News of the World has revealed that its computers have retained an archive of potentially damning emails, which hitherto it had claimed had been lost.
The millions of emails, amounting to half a terabyte of data, could expose executives and reporters involved in hacking the voicemail of public figures, including former deputy prime minister John Prescott, actor Sienna Miller, and former culture secretary Tessa Jowell.
The archived data is likely to include email exchanges between the most senior executives, including former editor Andy Coulson, who resigned as David Cameron's media adviser in January, as well as three former news editors – Ian Edmondson, Greg Miskiw, and Neville Thurlbeck – implicated in the affair by paperwork seized from Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who was on the News of the World's books. Edmondson was sacked in January. Miskiw and Thurlbeck were interviewed by police last autumn. No charge has been brought against any of them. Coulson and the three former news editors have all denied all involvement in criminal activity.
MPs on the home affairs select committee are likely on Tuesday to ask about the emails to John Yates, acting deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan police, when they question him over allegations he misled parliament in evidence he gave about the number of hacking victims originally identified by Scotland Yard. Yates told the committee six months ago the Met had only identified "10 to 12" individuals in a 2006 inquiry because the Crown Prosecution Service advised it to adopt a narrow legal definition of what constituted an offence. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, has said that prosecuting counsel never adopted this narrow definition.
Several News of the World journalists have since been linked with phone hacking after victims began legal battles, raising questions about why Scotland Yard failed to conduct a more comprehensive inquiry. Only one reporter, former royal editor Clive Goodman, was convicted of a crime along with Mulcaire. Both men were sentenced to jail terms in January 2007.
No other reporters or executives were questioned by the initial police investigation and only Goodman's computer was seized. Only a series of high court cases brought by Sienna Miller and others have forced the Met to make available the material seized in a 2006 raid on Mulcaire's home, including his handwritten notes.
But the disclosure of internal emails from 2005 and 2006, when Mulcaire was at his most active, could reveal the full extent of phone-hacking at the paper and the identities of those involved.
In a ruling on Friday, a high court judge ordered the News of the World to make them available to the growing list of people suing the paper. Justice Geoffrey Vos, in charge of the hacking cases, ordered "rolling disclosure" to all claimants on Friday; hundreds of thousands of emails will now be handed over to alleged victims.
Parts of the first tranche, which contains up to 8,000 emails, will be passed to Sienna Miller's legal team in April. Lawyers acting for Sky Andrew, the football agent who is also suing the paper, will then receive all the News of the World emails in which Andrew is mentioned days later.
News Group told the high court it is close to completing a search through archived emails it claimed had been lost when transferred to India by its IT provider; its lawyers formally apologised to the court for previous claims the archive was not available. David Sherborne, for Sienna Miller, added that it remained 'mysterious' that the editor of the Scottish edition of the News of the World, Bob Bird, had given evidence on oath at the trial of Tommy Sheridan last year that the email archive had been lost on the way to India.
News Group also admitted a work computer used by Edmondson had been destroyed before Christmas. They agreed to provide detailed information about its destruction to computer specialists advising Sienna Miller.
Computers used by other News of the World journalists have also been replaced or disposed of, but News Group's lawyer, Anthony Hudson QC, said the data they contained had been copied and retained.
Sherborne told the high court on Friday that evidence of "a scheme" between News Group and Mulcaire to hack into Miller's mobile phone had been recovered by the Met during the raid on his home. It included an agreement to provide "daily transcripts" to the paper and monitor the activities of the actor's friends and associates, Sherborne said.
Further disclosures have been ordered by Vos. They include a copy of an email sent to Mulcaire asking him to target a "wish list" of 17 footballers.
News International maintains it will take tough action against any employee who is found guilty of wrongdoing.
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http://whitehousetapes.net/clip/lyndon-johnson-jacqueline-kennedy-lbj-and-jacqueline-kennedy
This website offers recordings made by a number of U.S. presidents.
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Joseph Farrell comments on the Japanese earthquake.
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Phone hacking: Met and DPP clash over legal advice on stolen voicemails
John Yates and Keir Starmer each imply the other has misled parliament in evidence about phone hacking
By Nick Davies
guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 24 March 2011 14.40 GMT
The phone-hacking scandal has spilled over into an extraordinary public clash between the Metropolitan police and the director of public prosecutions, with each side implying the other has misled parliament.
The immediate focus of the dispute is a point of law. Its underlying significance is the light it may shed on whether the police have tried to hide the truth about the number of people whose phones were hacked by journalists and private investigators working for the News of the World.
In evidence to the House of Commons' culture, media and sport committee, Scotland Yard's acting deputy commissioner, John Yates, listed a series of occasions on which prosecutors had advised police that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa) made it an offence to intercept voicemail only if the voicemail had not already been heard by its intended recipient.
He said this advice had been given repeatedly during the original inquiry in 2006 that led to the jailing of the News of the World royal correspondent Clive Goodman. "It permeated every aspect of the investigative strategy." It was on this basis, Yates said, that he had previously told parliament police had found only 10 or 12 victims of the hacking even though the emerging evidence suggests there were many more.
Yates's evidence directly clashes with a written submission from the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, last October. Starmer said the question of how to interpret Ripa had not arisen during the original inquiry. The prosecution had attached no significance to the point in preparing charges or presenting the facts. "It is evident that the prosecution's approach to Ripa had no bearing on the charges brought against the defendants or the legal proceedings generally," he wrote.
Yates's new evidence on Thursday follows a claim in the House of Commons by Chris Bryant that Yates misled parliament over this point. Yates responded in a letter to the Guardian, quoting an earlier written submission from the DPP to the culture, media and sport committee. Starmer then replied with a further letter to the Guardian saying that it was "regrettable" Yates had quoted a single sentence from him out of context. This afternoon the DPP's office declined to comment on the new evidence produced by Yates.
The committee has heard that the family of one of the Soham murder victims was phone-hacked.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ4u-v-PJbs&feature=player_embedded
Key section starts around 3:30 into the video
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Key remarks in Sec. Cohen's speech below:
"Alvin Toeffler has written
about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to
devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic-specific so
that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and
others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects
that can destroy specific crops. Others are engaging even in an
eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off
earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic
waves."
Doug there was no need to post the whole speech. Cohen was (is) a smart guy but his background was in classics, law and public administration. He had only been SoD for 4 month at that point, there is no evidence his remarks were based inside knowledge rather than his own beliefs. You will search in vain for a scientist with relevant credentials saying such things.
http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2010/09/24/the-devils-haarp-weather-weapons/
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A Rosenberg Co-Conspirator Reveals More About His Role
The New York Times
March 20, 2011
By SAM ROBERTS
Morton Sobell, who was convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951 in an espionage conspiracy case and finally admitted nearly six decades later that he had been a Soviet spy, now says he helped copy hundreds of pages of secret Air Force documents stolen from a Columbia University professor’s safe in 1948.
According to an article by two cold war historians, Ronald Radosh and Steven T. Usdin, in The Weekly Standard, Mr. Sobell, who is 93, said in an interview last December that he, Julius Rosenberg, William Perl and an unidentified fourth man spent a weekend, probably Independence Day, frantically copying the classified documents in a Greenwich Village apartment before they were missed.
That Monday, Mr. Sobell is quoted as saying, he and Mr. Rosenberg filled a box with canisters of 35-millimeter film and delivered it to Soviet agents on a Long Island Rail Road platform.
In addition to elaborating on Mr. Sobell’s admission in a 2008 interview with The New York Times that he had stolen military radar and artillery secrets, the December interview appears to stoke the smoldering embers of the case on several other counts.
Mr. Sobell’s comments, according to the authors, identify Mr. Perl not as an innocent aeronautical engineer who was entitled to inspect the secret papers and was implicated in the espionage conspiracy only by circumstantial evidence, but as a conspirator against his mentor, Theodore von Karman.
Mr. Perl, a fellow student with Mr. Sobell and Mr. Rosenberg at City College, worked with Professor von Karman for the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics at Langley Army Air Base in Virginia during World War II. Testifying before the Rosenberg grand jury, Mr. Perl denied any relationship with Mr. Rosenberg or Mr. Sobell. He was convicted of perjury in 1953.
Mr. Sobell’s latest comments also validate an account of the photocopying of the secret papers conveyed to federal investigators by Jerome Tartakow, a jailhouse informer often discredited by supporters of the Rosenbergs, who said he learned of the photocopying from Julius Rosenberg himself.
Finally, Mr. Sobell’s comments, as quoted by the authors, shed more light on his motive.
“I did it for the Soviet Union,” he said, leading Mr. Radosh and Mr. Usdin to conclude that Mr. Rosenberg and his fellow American Communists “were motivated by loyalty to the Soviet Union, not opposition to fascism as their defenders claim.”
The Rosenbergs, who were accused of conspiracy to steal atomic bomb secrets from the United States, were sentenced to death and executed in 1953. Mr. Sobell served 18 years for nonatomic spying. He was released in 1969 and, until the Times interview, maintained his innocence and insisted that he had been framed by the government.
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My father was the mafia hitman who killed Jimmy Hoffa
By Annette Witheridge
Last updated at 3:38 PM on 20th March 2011
Daily Mail
Robert De Niro is about to bring the extraordinary story of Frank Sheeran - The Irishman - to the big screen. But his daughter reveals how the man who killed his mentor Jimmy Hoffa was a loving father who kept his gruesome past from his family...
When Frank Sheeran, the mafia contract killer known as 'The Irishman', got the order to assassinate his mentor Jimmy Hoffa, he knew he had no choice.
It was a case of kill on command or die for disobedience.
The disappearance of Teamsters union leader Hoffa 36 years ago remains one of America's most enduring mysteries.
Contract killing: Frank 'The Irishman' Sheeran (right) with union boss - and future victim - Jimmy Hoffa
To this day, no one knows where his body ended up - except for those who buried him.
And if not for Sheeran's Catholic guilt at the end of his life and a tenacious former prosecutor turned crime writer, the story of how Hoffa died would never have been known either.
Now Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro are set to bring Sheeran's extraordinary life to the big screen.
The Irishman starts filming later this year and will also cover Sheeran's alleged role in the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy.
For Sheeran's daughter Dolores Miller, the interest in her father is bittersweet. 'I suspected my father was behind Jimmy's death but I never asked him directly,' says Dolores.
'My mother disagreed. She said he and Jimmy were as thick as thieves but my gut instinct told me otherwise.
'The year before, when I was 19, there was a big benefit party for my father. There must have been 1,000 people there, including Jimmy.
'One of my father's most cherished possessions was a gaudy gold and diamond watch Jimmy gave him. He wore it to the day he died.
'I remember my father phoning to say Jimmy had disappeared from outside a restaurant in Detroit.
'I asked him where he [sheeran] had been and he said a wedding in the same area. I made a comment about the coincidence but he brushed it off.
'He was among the top suspects and the FBI put him in prison time and again, hoping he'd crack. But he never did.
'Then towards the end of his life he told me he wanted absolution. I remember saying he had to be truly sorry for the things he'd done in the past, that if he had his time again he wouldn't do the things he'd done.
'He said he was sorry and I drove him to the church to confess. He seemed much happier after that.'
In the final five years of his life, Sheeran poured his heart out to writer Charles Brandt. He died in 2003, aged 83, six weeks after reading the finished manuscript, and without revealing to his family what he'd done.
'We never discussed it before he died and Charles didn't tell me the truth until the book came out,' says Dolores, a 55-year-old medical secretary.
'Charles told me to read the story to the end and as I turned every page it got worse. It was awful. I didn't want it to be true that my father killed Jimmy.'
Despite her shock, Dolores knew her father wasn't a saint - in the 1980s then-US attorney Rudy Giuliani named Sheeran as one of only two non-Italians on the list of 26 top mobsters.
Sheeran grew up in the Great Depression in the tough Philadelphia suburb of Darby, with devoutly religious Irish-American parents.
'We could never tell him our problems for fear of what he'd do to bullies'
At 17, Sheeran lied about his age to serve in the war and joined General George S. Patton's 'killer division' - a band of men who showed no remorse as they moved through Europe slaughtering the enemy.
He returned to Pennsylvania, drove a lorry and married Mary, an Irish immigrant. Daughters Mary Anne, Peggy and Dolores were born in the years that followed.
'My first big memory of [my dad] was when I was five,' Dolores says.
'My mother told him to take me to see Mary Poppins but instead he took me to The Valentine's Day Massacre.
'I was six when my parents first separated. That's when he met mafia boss Russell Bufalino and my mother said everything changed.
'Bufalino was a nasty, mean man but my father started doing odd jobs for him. It's only now that we know what some of those jobs were.'
Sheeran and Mary divorced when Dolores was 12. He would go on to marry his second wife, Irene, and have another daughter, Connie.
'We saw him at weekends and he was always loving. But we could never tell him about our problems because of what he would do. My sister once knocked something over in a store and was bawled at by the owner.
'My father went round and broke the owner's hands. I was being bullied and my father dragged me out to find the bully.
'I begged to go home and was so grateful we couldn't find the boy for fear of what my father would do to his father.
'It was the same with the local flasher - God only knows what he would have done to him if I'd told him. My father wanted to protect us because his world was unsafe .'
She adds: 'I was nine when it came on the TV news that my father had been sent to prison.
'No one in the house said a word until I blurted out, "Why's Daddy gone to prison?" I think that's when I got my first inkling that what he did for a living wasn't kosher.'
Years later, Sheeran - who was 6ft 4in, with a fair Irish complexion -- would tell Brandt how he completed hits. 'I look like a broken down truck driver with a cap on, coming to use the bathroom.
'I don't look like a mafia shooter,' he said, explaining how he murdered Joseph 'Crazy Joe' Gallo at Umberto's Clam House in New York's Little Italy.
Gallo's death - in front of his wife and young daughter - remained a mystery until Sheeran confessed to Brandt.
'I know now Dad had no choice but to kill his friend Jimmy Hoffa'
He also told how IRA man John 'The Redhead' Francis drove the getaway car, explaining how mobsters were given different tasks during a hit so that no one knew the entire details.
'If one person did everything, they'd be shot afterwards to keep them quiet. So everyone had a role without anyone else knowing. It meant there wouldn't be a massacre afterwards,' Sheeran told Brandt, a former Delaware prosecutor.
Brandt called his book I Heard You Paint Houses - the first words Hoffa uttered to Sheeran. The phrase was mob slang for a killer - as in splattering blood over floors and walls.
Sheeran replied that he was also a carpenter - mafia-speak for someone who disposes of bodies.
Hoffa was a working-class icon who turned the Teamster union into a nationwide movement before falling from grace and going to jail for racketeering.
He was pardoned by President Richard Nixon and was making his comeback when he was summoned to a meeting with two mafia dons on July 30, 1975.
His abandoned car was found outside the Detroit restaurant and no trace of him has been found since.
There are many theories about why the mob wanted Hoffa dead.
One suggests that the Teamsters' pension fund had been supporting mafia projects such as building in Las Vegas and the mob was afraid Hoffa's bid to take over the union would lead to funds drying up.
It is thought JFK's assassination was a way to placate Hoffa - as Bobby Kennedy was closing in on him with racketeering charges. Some within the mafia believed Hoffa wasn't grateful enough for the intervention
It is also thought that JFK's assassination was a way to placate Hoffa - as the president's brother, attorney general Bobby Kennedy, was closing in on him with further racketeering charges.
Some within the mafia believed Hoffa wasn't grateful enough for the intervention.
Sheeran told Brandt how he lured Hoffa into an empty house and shot him twice in the back of the head. A second mafia hit squad disposed of the body.
'The Irish FBI guy Bob Garrity wrote a memo about the chief suspects - Sheeran's name was always there,' Brandt, 68, says.
'But no one could prove it. I met Sheeran when the mafia hired me to get him out of jail. He was 74 and in poor health. I got him out on medical grounds and we sat down for a chat.
'He invited me to a mob trial - this wasn't in the book and De Niro and Scorsese were fascinated by it when we met to discuss the script.
'Two mobsters owed Sheeran money and there was a mafia civil court. Sheeran let me listen in, then we went back to my house and started talking. It was 1991 and he had a lot to get off his chest.
'He wanted me to write his book then but backed out because many of the characters were still alive. Then eight years later he approached me again.
'We spent five years going through everything. I used to be a prosecutor and I kept cross-examining him. I checked and double-checked everything he told me.
'My mother told him to take me to see Mary Poppins but instead he took me to The Valentine's Day Massacre'
'He was actually a very likeable man. My wife said she used to have to pinch herself to remind herself he was a hitman. He was full of Irish charm, very intelligent and witty.'
But he adds: 'Sometimes I'd get chills as I checked out his stories.'
Brandt goes on: 'Hoffa was Sheeran's friend but you didn't defy orders. If he hadn't killed him he'd have been shot himself. He said the mafia was upset because Hoffa hadn't shown enough gratitude over Dallas.
'I realised he was talking about the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. It was always rumoured that the killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, wasn't working alone and that the mob was behind it.
'So I asked Sheeran and his face turned to stone, he raised his right hand at me and just brushed me off, saying "I'm not going anywhere near Dallas".
'I was sure he had something to do with it and kept asking. It was a classic mob hit - Oswald thought he would get away, but Jack Ruby then killed him.
'Eventually Sheeran admitted to taking three rifles to Baltimore - he understood these had then gone to Dallas. I didn't get anything more juicy than that but when I told De Niro and Scorsese they were fascinated.
'We met with the scriptwriter around 5pm and we were still talking at 9.30pm.
It was a real thrill that they wanted to know all the background, all the stuff that wasn't in the book.'
One of Sheeran's final acts was to read the manuscript of Brandt's book. By now wheelchair-bound and a widower, Brandt recalls: 'He held the pages up in front of a video recorder, said everything in the book was true, then stopped eating. Six weeks later he was dead.'
Sheeran gave daughter Dolores power of attorney, explaining he didn't want to be force-fed - he had no intention of living once his mind started to falter.
After his death, Dolores and her husband Michael cleared out Sheeran's apartment and discovered the extent of his passion for clothes.
'He was always dressed like something out of Gentlemen's Quarterly,' Dolores says.
'He had 200 designer suits, 100 pairs of shoes. Then there was his jewellery...'
'I know now that he killed his friend Jimmy,' Dolores says. 'He had no choice, he was acting on orders. If he hadn't done it, he would have been killed.
'My father lived to a great age. Most of his associates died horrible early deaths. I am eternally grateful he didn't die like that.
'He chose his own time to go after confessing to his sins.'
Doug, I've read several articles on this book, and have looked through the book a number of times at bookstores over the years, and Sheeran does not claim he killed JFK. I'm not sure where you got this from, but it's not in the article. Apparently, he said things to Brandt that suggested JFK was killed by the mob. A number of other mobsters--including Joe and Bill Bonanno, said the same. So, it's definitely something they whispered about--whether or not it was true.
From the above article
"The Irishman starts filming later this year and will also cover Sheeran's alleged role in the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy."
-
My father was the mafia hitman who killed Jimmy Hoffa
By Annette Witheridge
Last updated at 3:38 PM on 20th March 2011
Daily Mail
Robert De Niro is about to bring the extraordinary story of Frank Sheeran - The Irishman - to the big screen. But his daughter reveals how the man who killed his mentor Jimmy Hoffa was a loving father who kept his gruesome past from his family...
When Frank Sheeran, the mafia contract killer known as 'The Irishman', got the order to assassinate his mentor Jimmy Hoffa, he knew he had no choice.
It was a case of kill on command or die for disobedience.
The disappearance of Teamsters union leader Hoffa 36 years ago remains one of America's most enduring mysteries.
Contract killing: Frank 'The Irishman' Sheeran (right) with union boss - and future victim - Jimmy Hoffa
To this day, no one knows where his body ended up - except for those who buried him.
And if not for Sheeran's Catholic guilt at the end of his life and a tenacious former prosecutor turned crime writer, the story of how Hoffa died would never have been known either.
Now Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro are set to bring Sheeran's extraordinary life to the big screen.
The Irishman starts filming later this year and will also cover Sheeran's alleged role in the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy.
For Sheeran's daughter Dolores Miller, the interest in her father is bittersweet. 'I suspected my father was behind Jimmy's death but I never asked him directly,' says Dolores.
'My mother disagreed. She said he and Jimmy were as thick as thieves but my gut instinct told me otherwise.
'The year before, when I was 19, there was a big benefit party for my father. There must have been 1,000 people there, including Jimmy.
'One of my father's most cherished possessions was a gaudy gold and diamond watch Jimmy gave him. He wore it to the day he died.
'I remember my father phoning to say Jimmy had disappeared from outside a restaurant in Detroit.
'I asked him where he [sheeran] had been and he said a wedding in the same area. I made a comment about the coincidence but he brushed it off.
'He was among the top suspects and the FBI put him in prison time and again, hoping he'd crack. But he never did.
'Then towards the end of his life he told me he wanted absolution. I remember saying he had to be truly sorry for the things he'd done in the past, that if he had his time again he wouldn't do the things he'd done.
'He said he was sorry and I drove him to the church to confess. He seemed much happier after that.'
In the final five years of his life, Sheeran poured his heart out to writer Charles Brandt. He died in 2003, aged 83, six weeks after reading the finished manuscript, and without revealing to his family what he'd done.
'We never discussed it before he died and Charles didn't tell me the truth until the book came out,' says Dolores, a 55-year-old medical secretary.
'Charles told me to read the story to the end and as I turned every page it got worse. It was awful. I didn't want it to be true that my father killed Jimmy.'
Despite her shock, Dolores knew her father wasn't a saint - in the 1980s then-US attorney Rudy Giuliani named Sheeran as one of only two non-Italians on the list of 26 top mobsters.
Sheeran grew up in the Great Depression in the tough Philadelphia suburb of Darby, with devoutly religious Irish-American parents.
'We could never tell him our problems for fear of what he'd do to bullies'
At 17, Sheeran lied about his age to serve in the war and joined General George S. Patton's 'killer division' - a band of men who showed no remorse as they moved through Europe slaughtering the enemy.
He returned to Pennsylvania, drove a lorry and married Mary, an Irish immigrant. Daughters Mary Anne, Peggy and Dolores were born in the years that followed.
'My first big memory of [my dad] was when I was five,' Dolores says.
'My mother told him to take me to see Mary Poppins but instead he took me to The Valentine's Day Massacre.
'I was six when my parents first separated. That's when he met mafia boss Russell Bufalino and my mother said everything changed.
'Bufalino was a nasty, mean man but my father started doing odd jobs for him. It's only now that we know what some of those jobs were.'
Sheeran and Mary divorced when Dolores was 12. He would go on to marry his second wife, Irene, and have another daughter, Connie.
'We saw him at weekends and he was always loving. But we could never tell him about our problems because of what he would do. My sister once knocked something over in a store and was bawled at by the owner.
'My father went round and broke the owner's hands. I was being bullied and my father dragged me out to find the bully.
'I begged to go home and was so grateful we couldn't find the boy for fear of what my father would do to his father.
'It was the same with the local flasher - God only knows what he would have done to him if I'd told him. My father wanted to protect us because his world was unsafe .'
She adds: 'I was nine when it came on the TV news that my father had been sent to prison.
'No one in the house said a word until I blurted out, "Why's Daddy gone to prison?" I think that's when I got my first inkling that what he did for a living wasn't kosher.'
Years later, Sheeran - who was 6ft 4in, with a fair Irish complexion -- would tell Brandt how he completed hits. 'I look like a broken down truck driver with a cap on, coming to use the bathroom.
'I don't look like a mafia shooter,' he said, explaining how he murdered Joseph 'Crazy Joe' Gallo at Umberto's Clam House in New York's Little Italy.
Gallo's death - in front of his wife and young daughter - remained a mystery until Sheeran confessed to Brandt.
'I know now Dad had no choice but to kill his friend Jimmy Hoffa'
He also told how IRA man John 'The Redhead' Francis drove the getaway car, explaining how mobsters were given different tasks during a hit so that no one knew the entire details.
'If one person did everything, they'd be shot afterwards to keep them quiet. So everyone had a role without anyone else knowing. It meant there wouldn't be a massacre afterwards,' Sheeran told Brandt, a former Delaware prosecutor.
Brandt called his book I Heard You Paint Houses - the first words Hoffa uttered to Sheeran. The phrase was mob slang for a killer - as in splattering blood over floors and walls.
Sheeran replied that he was also a carpenter - mafia-speak for someone who disposes of bodies.
Hoffa was a working-class icon who turned the Teamster union into a nationwide movement before falling from grace and going to jail for racketeering.
He was pardoned by President Richard Nixon and was making his comeback when he was summoned to a meeting with two mafia dons on July 30, 1975.
His abandoned car was found outside the Detroit restaurant and no trace of him has been found since.
There are many theories about why the mob wanted Hoffa dead.
One suggests that the Teamsters' pension fund had been supporting mafia projects such as building in Las Vegas and the mob was afraid Hoffa's bid to take over the union would lead to funds drying up.
It is thought JFK's assassination was a way to placate Hoffa - as Bobby Kennedy was closing in on him with racketeering charges. Some within the mafia believed Hoffa wasn't grateful enough for the intervention
It is also thought that JFK's assassination was a way to placate Hoffa - as the president's brother, attorney general Bobby Kennedy, was closing in on him with further racketeering charges.
Some within the mafia believed Hoffa wasn't grateful enough for the intervention.
Sheeran told Brandt how he lured Hoffa into an empty house and shot him twice in the back of the head. A second mafia hit squad disposed of the body.
'The Irish FBI guy Bob Garrity wrote a memo about the chief suspects - Sheeran's name was always there,' Brandt, 68, says.
'But no one could prove it. I met Sheeran when the mafia hired me to get him out of jail. He was 74 and in poor health. I got him out on medical grounds and we sat down for a chat.
'He invited me to a mob trial - this wasn't in the book and De Niro and Scorsese were fascinated by it when we met to discuss the script.
'Two mobsters owed Sheeran money and there was a mafia civil court. Sheeran let me listen in, then we went back to my house and started talking. It was 1991 and he had a lot to get off his chest.
'He wanted me to write his book then but backed out because many of the characters were still alive. Then eight years later he approached me again.
'We spent five years going through everything. I used to be a prosecutor and I kept cross-examining him. I checked and double-checked everything he told me.
'My mother told him to take me to see Mary Poppins but instead he took me to The Valentine's Day Massacre'
'He was actually a very likeable man. My wife said she used to have to pinch herself to remind herself he was a hitman. He was full of Irish charm, very intelligent and witty.'
But he adds: 'Sometimes I'd get chills as I checked out his stories.'
Brandt goes on: 'Hoffa was Sheeran's friend but you didn't defy orders. If he hadn't killed him he'd have been shot himself. He said the mafia was upset because Hoffa hadn't shown enough gratitude over Dallas.
'I realised he was talking about the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. It was always rumoured that the killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, wasn't working alone and that the mob was behind it.
'So I asked Sheeran and his face turned to stone, he raised his right hand at me and just brushed me off, saying "I'm not going anywhere near Dallas".
'I was sure he had something to do with it and kept asking. It was a classic mob hit - Oswald thought he would get away, but Jack Ruby then killed him.
'Eventually Sheeran admitted to taking three rifles to Baltimore - he understood these had then gone to Dallas. I didn't get anything more juicy than that but when I told De Niro and Scorsese they were fascinated.
'We met with the scriptwriter around 5pm and we were still talking at 9.30pm.
It was a real thrill that they wanted to know all the background, all the stuff that wasn't in the book.'
One of Sheeran's final acts was to read the manuscript of Brandt's book. By now wheelchair-bound and a widower, Brandt recalls: 'He held the pages up in front of a video recorder, said everything in the book was true, then stopped eating. Six weeks later he was dead.'
Sheeran gave daughter Dolores power of attorney, explaining he didn't want to be force-fed - he had no intention of living once his mind started to falter.
After his death, Dolores and her husband Michael cleared out Sheeran's apartment and discovered the extent of his passion for clothes.
'He was always dressed like something out of Gentlemen's Quarterly,' Dolores says.
'He had 200 designer suits, 100 pairs of shoes. Then there was his jewellery...'
'I know now that he killed his friend Jimmy,' Dolores says. 'He had no choice, he was acting on orders. If he hadn't done it, he would have been killed.
'My father lived to a great age. Most of his associates died horrible early deaths. I am eternally grateful he didn't die like that.
'He chose his own time to go after confessing to his sins.'
-
To read Kris Millegan's daily installments on this Watergate topic, go to:
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Met must hand over News of the World phone-hacking evidence
Police must pass documents seized from Glenn Mulcaire to lawyers representing growing number of people suing paper
By James Robinson
guardian.co.uk,
Friday 18 March 2011 19.44 GMT
The growing number of public figures suing the News of the World won a major high court victory when a judge said Scotland Yard must hand over a mass of phone-hacking evidence that has never before been disclosed.
The ruling by Justice Geoffrey Vos, who was appointed this week to handle the 14 phone-hacking cases currently going through the courts, means the Metropolitan police will be forced to pass reams of documents seized from Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who worked for the News of the World, to lawyers acting for the politicians, celebrities and football figures who are suing the paper. They include Sienna Miller, Paul Gascoigne, Steve Coogan and the former culture secretary Tessa Jowell.
Vos ruled on Friday that the Met must give unredacted documents – including Mulcaire's emails, address and contacts books, and phone bills – to another hacking victim, the football agent Sky Andrew. The decision sets a precedent for the other hacking cases and has far-reaching implications for the NoW, police and other litigants. It will lead to a flood of hacking documents being released to other claimants, all of whom are seeking copies of papers seized by police in a 2006 raid on Mulcaire's home.
That could lead to more NoW journalists being named in connection with phone hacking. So far six reporters and executives have been publicly linked to the practice. One, former royal editor Clive Goodman, was convicted and jailed. A second, assistant editor (news) Ian Edmondson, has been sacked by the paper.
Scotland Yard has been slow to hand over the paperwork, arguing in court that to do so would undermine a fresh investigation into hacking it began at the start of the year. It also claimed a potential suspect would be tipped off if unredacted evidence were made public. Vos rejected that argument, giving the Met 28 days to comply with his order and 21 days to appeal.
-
Key remarks in Sec. Cohen's speech below:
"Alvin Toeffler has written
about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to
devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic-specific so
that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and
others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects
that can destroy specific crops. Others are engaging even in an
eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off
earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic
waves."
COHEN ADDRESS 4/28 AT CONFERENCE ON TERRORISM
Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy
Sam Nunn Policy Forum
April 28, 1997 University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia.
SECRETARY COHEN:
Senator Nunn, thank you very much. As Senator Nunn
has indicated, he and I have worked for many years together, along
with Senator Lugar. The two of these gentlemen I feel are perhaps the
most courageous and visionary to have served in the Senate. They were
largely responsible, of course, for adopting the so-called Nunn/Lugar
legislation.
I'll comment on that later during the course of the morning, but I've
had occasion to meet with a number of Russian counterparts, and as we
go through various translations of the communications that we're
having, the two words they are able to articulate very clearly, they
say "Nunn/Lugar, Nunn/Lugar." So they know exactly what that means,
and that means the Cooperative Threat Reduction Act that these two
gentlemen were indispensable in shepherding through the United States
Congress.
It was Nunn/Lugar I that dealt with the reduction of nuclear weapons
between the United States and the Soviet Union in terms of trying to
come to grips with how we helped the Russians dismantle hundreds of
their nuclear weapons, and also helped them with their destruction of
chemical weapons. But they, of course, have looked beyond simply that
particular relationship, which is very important, but also looking to
the future that we face as far as the rise of terrorism -- both
international and domestic -- and finding ways in which the Department
of Defense can become involved in helping local states and local
agencies to deal with the threat of terrorism which is quite likely to
increase in the coming years.
It's a pleasure for me to be here. Both Senator Nunn and Senator Lugar
are close friends, and I look forward to, I think, a very productive
seminar. Once again demonstrating that although Senator Nunn has left
public service in the Senate, he has not left public service as far as
the nation is concerned.
It's a pleasure for me to be here, Sam.
SENATOR NUNN: Thank you very much, Bill.
...Let me ask if there are any questions for Secretary of Defense
Cohen.
Q: The dual containment policy in Iran and Iraq, do you think that's
conducive to regional stability in that region? And do you think (it)
can cause further terrorism in the United States? That type of
containment policy in the Middle East.
A: I think Secretary Albright articulated our policy as far as dealing
with Iraq, that it's clear that we have been unable to strike any kind
of a productive relationship with Saddam Hussein, and as soon as
Saddam Hussein is no longer the head of that government, that there's
(a) new regime that follows him, that we will look forward to finding
ways in which we could engage them in a much more productive fashion,
particularly after they comply with all of the UN sanctions. There's
an eagerness on our part to do that. But I think as long as he remains
in office as the head of that state, it's unlikely that we could have
anything but the current policy in place, with very little prospects
for relief.
With respect to Iran, I think Iran continues to present a long-term
threat to the region. They are acquiring and have acquired weapons of
mass destruction, substantial levels of chemicals and we believe
biological weapons as well. They have made an effort to acquire
nuclear capability. So I think that our policy of dual containment is
the right one, and we are going to encourage our allies to support
that one.
Q: What does it mean that Clinton (inaudible) proliferation?
A: To the extent that we see the level of communication available
today, the Internet and other types of interwoven communicative skills
and abilities, we're going to see information continue to spread as to
how these weapons can be, in fact, manufactured in a home-grown
laboratory, as such. So it's a serious problem as far as living in the
Information Age that people who are acquiring this kind of information
will not act responsibly, but rather act in a terrorist type of
fashion.
We've seen by way of example of the World Trade Center the
international aspects of international terrorism coming to our home
territory. We've also seen domestic terrorism with the Oklahoma
bombing. So it's a real threat that's here today. It's likely to
intensify in the years to come as more and more groups have access to
this kind of information and the ability to produce them.
Q: How prepared is the U.S. Government to deal with (inaudible)?
A: I think we have to really intensify our efforts. That's the reason
for the Nunn/Lugar II program. That's the reason why it's a local
responsibility, as such, but the Department of Defense is going to be
taking the lead as far as supervising the interagency working groups,
and to make the assessments as to what needs to be done. So we're
going to identify those 120 cities and work with them very closely to
make sure that they can prepare themselves for what is likely to be a
threat well into the future.
Q: Let me ask you specifically about last week's scare here in
Washington, and what we might have learned from how prepared we are to
deal with that (inaudible), at B'nai Brith.
A: Well, it points out the nature of the threat. It turned out to be a
false threat under the circumstances. But as we've learned in the
intelligence community, we had something called -- and we have James
Woolsey here to perhaps even address this question about phantom
moles. The mere fear that there is a mole within an agency can set off
a chain reaction and a hunt for that particular mole which can
paralyze the agency for weeks and months and years even, in a search.
The same thing is true about just the false scare of a threat of using
some kind of a chemical weapon or a biological one. There are some
reports, for example, that some countries have been trying to
construct something like an Ebola Virus, and that would be a very
dangerous phenomenon, to say the least. Alvin Toeffler has written
about this in terms of some scientists in their laboratories trying to
devise certain types of pathogens that would be ethnic-specific so
that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races; and
others are designing some sort of engineering, some sort of insects
that can destroy specific crops. Others are engaging even in an
eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off
earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic
waves.
So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work
finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It's
real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and
that's why this is so important.
Q: What is response to (inaudible)?
A: We hope we will have access to the defector. In fact I was recently
in South Korea and talked with various officials in South Korea. As
soon as they complete their own interrogation of this defector, we
will have access to that individual. But much of what he has said to
date is reflected in the writings that he prepared last year. This is
prior to his defection. One would not expect a potential defector to
be writing about anything other than what the official doctrine or
dogma is of the North Korean government at that time. He is saying
essentially what we have known for a long, long time. Namely, that
North Korea poses a very serious threat against South Korea, and
potentially even Japan, by virtue of having the fourth largest army in
the world, by having 600,000 or more troops poised within 100
kilometers of Seoul, of possessing many SCUD missiles, also the
potential of chemically armed warheads, the attempt to acquire nuclear
weapons. So we know they have this potential, and the question really
is going to be what's in their hearts and minds at this point? Do they
intend to try to launch such an attack in the immediate, foreseeable
future? That, we can only speculate about, but that's the reason why
we are so well prepared to defend against such an attack to deter it
and to send a message that it would be absolutely an act of suicide
for the North Koreans to launch an attack. They could do great damage
in the short run, but they would be devastated in response. So we're
hoping we can find ways to bring them to the bargaining table -- the
Party of Four Talks -- and see if we can't put them on a path toward
peace instead of threatening any kind of devastating attack upon the
South.
Q: ...a little bit about the situation in (inaudible)?
A: I really don't have much more information than has been in the
press at this point. The Department has not been called upon to act in
this regard just yet, so I'm not at liberty to give you any more
information than you already have.
-
a picture really is worth a thousand words. that's some prevaricating he does there. it only further convinces me of his major involvement
Thank you, Duncan,for posting this revealing video. I concur with Martin's conclusion.
-
Murdoch sued for nepotism over £400m deal for daughter's firm
The Independent
By Ian Burrell, Media Editor
March 18, 2011
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is being sued by shareholders for the alleged "nepotism" of buying his daughter Elisabeth's television production company Shine for more than £400m. The Amalgamated Bank of New York (ABNY) and the Central Labourers Pension Fund (CLPF), both shareholders in News Corp, have filed complaints that accuse the media mogul of treating the business "like a wholly-owned family candy store".
The action surprised the company, which had considered the matter a done deal. But as a trustee for several funds, the ABNY holds about a million shares in News Corp and filed its complaint in Wilmington, Delaware. The CLPF, based in Illinois, filed a separate complaint and demanded access to the News Corp books and the records which explain its decision-making process in buying Shine.
Lawyers for the bank said in the complaint that the News Corp board should have done more to ensure the deal represented good value for shareholders. "Although the transaction makes little or no business sense for News Corp and is far above a price any independent, disinterested third party would pay for Shine, it is unsurprising that the transaction was approved by News Corp's board," it said. "In addition to larding the executive ranks of the company with his offspring, Murdoch constantly engages in transactions designed to benefit family members."
ABNY said the Shine transaction was an attempt to further the "selfish" interests of News Corp's controlling shareholder at the expense of the company. "The transaction violates the entire fairness standard both on the basis of price and process," it said. "Once the prodigal daughter is back into the News Corp fold, she will vie with her brothers, board members James Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch, for the position of successor to Rupert Murdoch's global media dynasty." News Corp described the claim as "without merit".
ABNY's shares amount to only 0.003 per cent of News Corp stock. The company argues that Shine, one of Britain's largest independent production companies with a turnover of £396m, is a "great fit" for the business which will give it more international reach. The deal – which still has to go before News Corp's audit committee – is expected to pave the way for Elisabeth, 42, to take a seat on the board. She had previously declined invitations to join, although she has attended meetings as an observer. When the deal was agreed in principle, Rupert Murdoch said: "Shine has an outstanding creative team that has built a significant independent production company in major markets in very few years, and I look forward to them becoming an important part of our varied and large content creation activities. I expect Liz Murdoch to join the board of News Corporation on completion of this transaction."
His daughter expressed delight that Shine, which she founded in 2001 and which has a portfolio that includes Spooks and Masterchef, would be joining "such an extraordinary group of companies" as News Corp. She said: "In a rapidly consolidating global TV industry, this alliance uniquely provides the conditions in which Shine can continue to lead and prosper. News Corporation is the partner that enables us to maintain our aspiration to be best in class."
Mr Murdoch is trying to buy all the shares he does not own in the satellite broadcaster BSkyB. Although the Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt controversially decided not to refer the deal to the competition authorities, Mr Murdoch faces a period of tough negotiations with BSkyB's minority shareholders over the price of the 61 per cent of company shares he does not own.
How the tycoon bestrides News Corp
Rupert Murdoch dominates News Corp, a company that began with his father's newspaper, The Adelaide News, and which now spans the globe. But that does not mean he can do with it as he pleases.
The Murdoch family owns 40 per cent of one category of shares in the company. The rest are traded on the stock market in the US, among individual shareholders who want a piece of the vast profits Mr Murdoch generates, and among institutions who invest other people's pension fund money or savings. The owners of these shares have a say in how the company is run, even if they rarely gang up in sufficient numbers to trouble Mr Murdoch. They have a say in the election of directors – and have been happy to go along with the appointment to the board of James Murdoch, Mr Murdoch's son, and two other siblings, Elisabeth and Lachlan before him. They have a say, also, on spending, on outside advisers, and on any other issue that shareholders want to raise at their annual meeting.
But when they think directors are squandering the company's money on a bad deal – squandering, in effect, profits that should be given to them in dividends or reinvested in new business ventures that could boost the value of their shares – sometimes the quickest and best way to get a hearing is through the courts.
The two shareholders who have revolted over the Shine deal own only a tiny sliver of the company, little more than 1 million shares out of more than 2 billion, but they are standing up for even smaller voices. Amalgamated Bank of New York is a trustee for funds popular with individual investors, while the Central Labourers Pension Fund invests on behalf of 500,000 workers from 12 unions, mainly in the construction industries in the Midwest.
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Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media
Exclusive: Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda
By Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain
guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 17 March 2011 13.19 GMT
General David Petraeus has said US efforts to spy on social media are aimed at 'countering extremist ideology and propaganda'. Photograph: Cliff Owen/AP
The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media using fake online personas designed to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.
A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with the US Central Command (Centcom) to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities at once.
The contract stipulates each persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 controllers must be able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries".
The project has been likened by web experts to China's attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet.
Centcom's contract requires the provision of one "virtual private server" in the United States and eight appearing to be outside the US to give the impression the fake personas are real people located in different parts of the world. It calls for "traffic mixing", blending the persona controllers' internet usage with the usage of people outside Centcom in a manner that must offer "excellent cover and powerful deniability".
Once developed the software could allow US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with a host of co-ordinated blogposts, tweets, retweets, chatroom posts and other interventions. Details of the contract suggest this location would be MacDill air force base near Tampa, Florida, home of US Special Operations Command.
Centcom spokesman Commander Bill Speaks said: "The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US."
He said none of the interventions was in English, as it would be unlawful to "address US audiences" with such technology, and any English-language use of social media by Centcom was always clearly attributed. The languages in which the interventions are conducted include Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto.
The multiple persona contract is thought to have been awarded as part of a programme called Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), which was first developed in Iraq as a psychological warfare weapon against the online presence of al-Qaida supporters and others ranged against coalition forces. Since then OEV is reported to have expanded into a $200m programme and is thought to have been used against jihadists across Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East.
OEV is seen by senior US commanders as a vital counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation programme. In evidence to the US Senate's armed services committee last year, General David Petraeus, then commander of Centcom, described the operation as an effort to "counter extremist ideology and propaganda and to ensure that credible voices in the region are heard". He said the US military's objective was to be "first with the truth".
This month Petraeus's successor, General James Mattis, told the same committee that OEV "supports all activities associated with degrading the enemy narrative, including web engagement and web-based product distribution capabilities".
The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as "sock puppets" – could encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.
Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.
Centcom confirmed that the $2.76m contract was awarded to Ntrepid, a newly formed corporation registered in Los Angeles. It would not disclose whether the multiple persona project is in operation or discuss any related contracts.
Nobody was available for comment at Ntrepid.
In his evidence to the Senate committee, Gen Mattis said: "OEV seeks to disrupt recruitment and training of suicide bombers; deny safe havens for our adversaries; and counter extremist ideology and propaganda." Centcom was working with "our coalition partners" to develop new techniques and tactics that the US could use "to counter the adversary in the cyber domain".
According to a report by the inspector general of the US defence department in Iraq,, OEV was managed by the multinational forces rather than Centcom.
Asked whether any UK military personnel had been involved in OEV, Britain's Ministry of Defence said it could find "no evidence". The MoD refused to say whether it had been involved in the development of persona management programmes, however, saying: "We don't comment on cyber capability."
OEV was discussed last year at a gathering of electronic warfare specialists in Washington DC, where a senior Centcom officer told delegates that its purpose was to "communicate critical messages and to counter the propaganda of our adversaries".
Persona management by the US military would face legal challenges if it were turned against citizens of the US, where a number of people engaged in sock puppetry have faced prosecution.
Last year a New York lawyer who impersonated a scholar was sentenced to jail after being convicted of "criminal impersonation" and identity theft.
It is unclear whether a persona management programme would contravene UK law. Legal experts say it could fall foul of the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981, which states that "a person is guilty of forgery if he makes a false instrument, with the intention that he or another shall use it to induce somebody to accept it as genuine, and by reason of so accepting it to do or not to do some act to his own or any other person's prejudice". However, this would apply only if a website or social network could be shown to have suffered "prejudice" as a result
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Crimson Rose: The secret CIA project
Crimson Rose, an acronym, was a 400 page CIA document whose title was “Confidential Report on Intelligence of Military Secret Operations on Nixon” and whose subtitle was “Report of Operations of Secret Surveillance and Eavesdropping.”
My article, Crimson Rose and The Secret of the Two Keys, can be found on:
http://www.watergateexposed.com/
and also on
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=17478
I am posting this information on the JFK Assassination Debate because my article also deals with Howard Hunt and his deathbed confession about the role of certain CIA agents in the assassination.
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Yates offers to testify again in Parliament
The Independent
By Cahal Milmo and Martin Hickman
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
One of Britain's top police officers says he will appear before MPs to answer allegations that he misled Parliament over the phone hacking scandal, The Independent has learnt.
Scotland Yard's acting deputy commissioner John Yates has told the Home Affairs and Media select committees he is willing to testify to "rebut" claims he gave misleading evidence on the law on hacking and the number of victims involved.
The Metropolitan police said Mr Yates had written to the committees "offering to appear before them, if they so wish or think it appropriate, to provide the evidence necessary to rebut the allegations that [Chris Bryant MP] has made."
On Saturday, Mr Yates quoted legal advice on hacking from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer, who said his comments had been used "out of context". A spokesman said she could not say whether Mr Starmer would also be willing to appear before the committees, but pointed out that a DPP had never refused to do so in the past.
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Met fears release of 'evidence' would hurt phone-hacking case
The Independent
By Cahal Milmo and Martin Hickman
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
Scotland Yard is seeking to withhold evidence from alleged victims of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal over fears that doing so could endanger its criminal investigation.
The Metropolitan Police applied in private to the High Court last week for permission to keep back information which had been ordered disclosed in the damages claims of football agent Sky Andrew, comedian Steve Coogan and sports pundit Andy Gray.
The Yard argued that disclosing the documents – understood to be notes written by the private detective Glenn Mulcaire – risked "prejudicing" its new hacking investigation, Operation Weeting, whose tasks will include establishing whether there are grounds for bringing new prosecutions.
Scotland Yard announced the investigation in January, shortly after Rupert Murdoch's News International passed detectives "significant new evidence" about hacking at the NOTW. The Met's behind-closed-doors application for permission to withhold "some material" for up to 14 weeks in the cases of the three public figures emerged during a pre-trial hearing for Mr Andrew's privacy claim against the newspaper and Mr Mulcaire.
Mr Justice Geoffrey Vos told the the High Court in London: "The [Met] Commissioner applied for an order to withhold disclosure of some material which had previously been redacted on the grounds disclosure would be harmful to the public interest [because] it would hamper investigations currently being undertaken." The order has not yet been granted.
The hearing was told that Mr Mulcaire had named the NOTW's ex-head of news, Ian Edmondson, as the journalist who had commissioned him to eavesdrop on Mr Andrew's messages. Mr Edmondson denies any wrongdoing. Mr Mulcaire, from Sutton, Surrey, was jailed in 2007 along with the NOTW's royal editor, Clive Goodman, after the private detective admitted hacking into the phone messages of royal aides and five other people.
The court heard the Yard was concerned that legal moves by alleged victims of hacking to force the disclosure of the notebooks could imperil its investigation by putting potential evidence into the public domain and "tipping off" possible suspects. Jeremy Reed, Mr Andrew's barrister, said such concerns were "ludicrous" because of the amount of publicity about the scandal and the time which had lapsed since any offences. "It is laughable to suggest that civil disclosure in these proceedings will prejudice the police investigation," he said.
In a separate development, lawyers for Sienna Miller and Mr Andrew will launch proceedings later this week, asking News International to disclose electronic material, including emails, that could be relevant to their claims.
The key plaintiffs...
Sienna Miller
The actress will apply through her lawyers to the High Court on Friday for News International emails relevant to her phone-hacking claim and details on how the company stores its vast bank of electronic information.
Andy Gray
The football pundit's demand for evidence from notes seized by Scotland Yard from private investigator Glenn Mulcaire could disclose which 'News of the World' journalists allegedly asked for his phone messages to be hacked
Rupert Murdoch and the Corruption of the British Media
in Political Conspiracies
Posted
Hacking MPs' phones 'could amount to contempt of parliament'
Select committee also says MPs who believe they are victims of phone hacking should pursue the matter in court
By James Robinson
guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 31 March 2011 14.46 BST
A powerful committee of MPs said on Thursday that hacking mobile phones belonging to members of the House of Commons could amount to contempt of parliament.
A report on phone hacking published by the select committee on standards and privileges concluded hacking could be in contempt, "if it can be shown to have interfered with the work of the house or to have impeded or obstructed an MP from taking part in such work".
That might result in fines being levied in exceptional circumstances, MPs said. The committee added that in the vast majority of cases MPs who believe they have been victims of phone hacking should pursue the matter through the courts.
Former culture secretary Tessa Jowell is one of more than half a dozen public figures who are suing either the Metropolitan police or the News of the World for breach of privacy, alleging journalists on the paper worked with a private investigator to illegally access their mobile phone messages.
Chris Bryant, the Labour MP for Rhondda, has said "at least eight" MPs had their mobile phone voicemails hacked by the paper.
MPs passed a motion tabled by Bryant in September asking the cross-party committee to urgently consider whether hacking could be considered to be in contempt of parliament.
In their report, MPs said it was not within the committee's remit to consider the law surrounding hacking, which is currently the subject of a separate inquiry being carried out by the home affairs select committee.
But it said that if it was proved that hacking "impede[d] a member in the performance of his or her duty ... there would be little if any room for doubt that hacking could be a contempt".
It added that the house did not have the power or resources to investigate hacking and that this was a matter for the police. Members should notify the police if they suspected an offence had taken place, it said.
MPs recommended that a privileges bill due to go through parliament later this year should include a description of what constitutes contempt, which is currently not clearly defined.
The committee also said parliament's power of imprisonment should be removed in the bill but it should retain the right to reprimand offenders in person and levy fines.
"The imposition of a fine, where justified by the facts and by the circumstances, is more consistent with modern practice and would be more likely to be proportionate to an offence such as hacking".