Douglas Caddy
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Yes, it's clear that the fear factor from 9/11 is fading and worse still, the public can now see the war on terror for what it is. 'Murkans need a booster shot.
The Bush Administration's backers value life cheaply (unless its one of them and theirs of course), so the human cost of any planned false flag will not be an issue. However, getting a highly skeptical public to support any 'retaliatory' action against Iran might be a problem, I think.
Bush, his loyal puppet Western leaders, and the shrill supporters of war in the western media have too much form. It won't fool anyone, not even the flag waving trailer park crowd.
Tonkin Gulf II and the Guns of August?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
July 19, 2007
Is the United States provoking war with Iran, to begin while the Congress is conveniently on its August recess?
One recalls that it was in August 1964, after the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, that the Tonkin Gulf incident occurred.
Twice it was said, on Aug. 2 and Aug. 4, North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked the U.S. destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy in international waters. The U.S. Senate responded by voting 88 to two to authorize President Johnson to assist any Southeast Asian nation whose government was threatened by communist aggression.
The bombing of the North began, followed by the arrival of U.S. Marines. America's war was on.
As Congress prepares for its August recess, the probability of U.S. air strikes on Iran rises with each week. A third carrier, the USS Enterprise, and its battle group is joining the Nimitz and Stennis in the largest concentration of U.S. naval power ever off the coast of Iran.
And Tonkin Gulf II may have already occurred.
In Baghdad, on July 1, Gen. Kevin J. Bergner charged that Iranians planned the January raid in Karbala, using commandos in American-style uniforms, that resulted in the death of five U.S. soldiers.
As the New York Times reports, this "marks the first time that the United States has charged that Iranian officials have helped plan operations against American troops in Iraq and have had advance knowledge of specific attacks that have led to the death of American soldiers."
The Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards is using Hezbollah to train Shi'ites to attack our soldiers and providing them with enhanced IEDs that have killed scores of U.S. troops, Bergner charged. He says we have captured a veteran Hezbollah agent and documents pointing to direct Iranian complicity in the Karbala raid.
Iran has denounced the charge as "ridiculous." But the Senate has voted 97 to zero to censure Iran for complicity in killing the Americans.
If what Bergner alleges is true, President Bush has not only the right but appears to have the blessing of Congress to attack Iran. And he now has the naval and air forces at hand. What is stopping him?
For it is surely not Congress, which buried a resolution last spring declaring that Bush must come to Congress before taking us into a new war in the Middle East. Congress appears to be signaling Bush: "If you want to hit Iran, you have the green light. No need to consult us."
Is this yet another abdication by Congress of its moral and constitutional duty to decide when and whether America goes to war?
And something smells awfully fishy here.
Iran has no interest in a war with the United States, which it seems to be toying with. Iran supports the pro-American Shia regime in Baghdad. And the al-Qaeda umbrella group in Iraq, which is our mortal enemy, has just warned Iran it faces terror attacks if it does not stop supporting Shi'ites in Iraq.
Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who leads the al-Qaeda group known as the Islamic State in Iraq, says his fighters have been preparing for four years for war on Iran.
"We are giving the Persians, and especially the rulers of Iran, a two-month period to end all kinds of support for the Iraqi Shi'ite government and to stop direct and indirect intervention – otherwise a severe war is waiting for you," Baghdadi said in a 50-minute videotape.
Baghdadi also warned Arab Sunnis in the region who do business with Shi'ites in Iran that they were inviting assassination.
Query: If Iran's ally, the Maliki government, is our ally, and if Iran's enemy, al-Qaeda in Iraq, is our enemy, why would Iran use the Quds Force to attack Americans and risk U.S. retaliation?
Killing Americans in Iraq is not going to defeat the United States. But it could trigger heavy U.S. retaliation, not only on the Quds Force, but on Iran's nuclear facilities – and a war with the United States. Yet Iran's diplomatic behavior suggests it wishes to avoid such a war.
Another explanation comes to mind. Iran is not initiating, but is responding to U.S.-inspired attacks inside Iran, in the Kurdish north, the Arab southwest, and the Baluchi southeast of its country. Was Karbala an attempted kidnapping to exchange U.S. soldiers for the five Iranian "diplomats" we are holding?
Has Bush secretly authorized covert attacks inside Iran? Are U.S. and Israeli agents in Kurdistan behind the attacks across the border to provoke Iran? On July 11, Iranian troops clashed with Kurd rebels inside Iran, and the Iranians fired artillery back into Iraq.
Why is Congress going on vacation? Why are a Democratic-controlled House and Senate not asking these questions in public hearings? Why is Congress letting Bush and Vice President Cheney decide whether we launch a third war in the Middle East?
Or is Congress in on it?
July 19, 2007
Patrick J. Buchanan [send him mail] is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong, and A Republic Not An Empire.
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Or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy
Impeach Now
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Www.counterpunch.org July 16, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07162007.html
Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran.
Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of "executive orders" that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency. Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect a series of staged, or false flag, "terrorist" events in the near future.
Many attentive people believe that the reason the Bush administration will not bow to expert advice and public opinion and begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq is that the administration intends to rescue its unpopular position with false flag operations that can be used to expand the war to Iran.
Too much is going wrong for the Bush administration: the failure of its Middle East wars, Republican senators jumping ship, Turkish troops massed on northern Iraq's border poised for an invasion to deal with Kurds, and a majority of Americans favoring the impeachment of Cheney and a near-majority favoring Bush's impeachment. The Bush administration desperately needs dramatic events to scare the American people and the Congress back in line with the militarist-police state that Bush and Cheney have fostered.
William Norman Grigg recently wrote that the GOP is "praying for a terrorist strike" to save the party from electoral wipeout in 2008.
Chertoff, Cheney, the neocon nazis, and Mossad would have no qualms about saving the bacon for the Republicans, who have enabled Bush to start two unjustified wars, with Iran waiting in the wings to be attacked in a third war.
The Bush administration has tried unsuccessfully to resurrect the terrorist fear factor by infiltrating some blowhard groups and encouraging them to talk about staging "terrorist" events. The talk, encouraged by federal agents, resulted in "terrorist" arrests hyped by the media, but even the captive media was unable to scare people with such transparent sting operations.
If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush's declaration of "national emergency" and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.
A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives' Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel's complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel.
Think about it. If another 9/11-type "security failure" were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has "a gut feeling" that America will soon be hit hard?
Why would Republican warmonger Rick Santorum say on the Hugh Hewitt radio show that "between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public's (sic) going to have a very different view of this war."
Throughout its existence the US government has staged incidents that the government then used in behalf of purposes that it could not otherwise have pursued. According to a number of writers, false flag operations have been routinely used by the Israeli state. During the Czarist era in Russia, the secret police would set off bombs in order to arrest those the secret police regarded as troublesome. Hitler was a dramatic orchestrator of false flag operations. False flag operations are a commonplace tool of governments.
Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging "terrorist" attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?
Only a diehard minority believes in the honesty and integrity of the Bush-Cheney administration and in the truthfulness of the corporate media.
Hitler, who never achieved majority support in a German election, used the Reichstag fire to fan hysteria and push through the Enabling Act, which made him dictator. Determined tyrants never require majority support in order to overthrow constitutional orders.
The American constitutional system is near to being overthrown. Are coming "terrorist" events of which Chertoff warns and Santorum promises the means for overthrowing our constitutional democracy?
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
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Exorcising Nixon's ghost
By David Greenberg
Los Angeles Times
July 9, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-...inion-rightrail
A FEW YEARS after Richard M. Nixon's death in 1994, the LA Weekly reported that a guard at the Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda had noticed some eerie phenomena: a phosphorescent green cloud over the former president's headstone; a specter entering Nixon's boyhood house; knocking sounds from inside the museum's Watergate room.
From his multiple political comebacks to his post-Watergate bid to repair his tattered reputation, Nixon has refused to expire. If his ghost isn't literally with us, his influence very much is. This year alone has brought half a dozen major Nixon books and a play (soon to be a movie), "Frost/Nixon." And Wednesday, after nearly 17 years of exile, the Nixon Library will become part of the National Archives as an official federal presidential library.
Since 1974, Nixon's presidential papers and tapes have resided, by an act of Congress, not at the privately run Yorba Linda facility but at a National Archives building outside Washington. In 2004, however, President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress, with scarce debate or attention, changed the 1974 law, clearing a place for Nixon in the government-run library system.
I was among the many historians who objected. It seemed poetic justice that the Nixon Library, alone among such institutions, existed outside the system — for outside the system was where Nixon had operated. As the only president forced to resign for illegal deeds, he deserved pariah status, and excluding the Nixon Library from National Archives membership reflected that.
Practical concerns also recommended keeping Nixon's presidential documents out of Nixonian hands. Just as no president worked harder, through fair means or foul, to shape his public image while in office, so none pressed harder to revise history's judgment after he served. He tried to remove and destroy some of his records and sued to suppress others. Supporting a decision against Nixon in one of those lawsuits, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens described him as "an unreliable custodian."
The singularly self-serving and misleading exhibits about Nixon on display at the library, which opened in 1990, reinforced this prevalent skepticism. So did the library's cancellation in 2005 of a scholarly conference on the Vietnam War after it became clear that Nixon critics would outnumber defenders on the program. After that fiasco, 16 scholars appealed (in vain) to Congress to stop the library's transfer to the National Archives.
Surprising academics who feared he would toe a conservative line, Allen Weinstein, the archivist of the United States, won an agreement from the Nixon Foundation to overhaul the museum, grant full control of the documents to the National Archives, and even deed to the archives additional materials previously deemed private.
No one can predict how sweeping or effective that agreement will prove in practice. Several questions remain: Will the library finally make public the remaining unheard Oval Office tapes? Will the Nixon Foundation, which will still raise funds for the library, stay out of all questions of access to the tapes and papers? Or will it continue to throw up roadblocks for scholars? Will the newly released documents be spared the excessive redaction that can render them almost useless — as happened recently with the so-called CIA family jewels?
Wariness is warranted. As a longtime skeptic, however, I'm beginning to develop a cautious optimism that the change might be real.
My optimism may be, in part, a result of resignation. The transfer is a fait accompli. Stopping it would have taken an expensive, time-consuming and risky effort by a devoted scholar — something like historian Stanley Kutler's heroic, years-long battle to release Nixon's White House tapes. It's not surprising that no one tried to do so this time.
But my optimism also follows some encouraging signs. Timothy J. Naftali, a serious historian without loyalties to Nixon, was appointed library director last year, and he ripped out the shameful Watergate portion of the exhibit. He has expanded public programming beyond the old fare of Nixon apologists and Fox News-style pundits. His public statements bespeak a resolve to oversee a new, depoliticized institution.
Finally, it's becoming clear that Nixon's last comeback failed. When Gerald R. Ford died in December, some fretted that the outrage over his 1974 pardon of Nixon had faded, that Americans had forgotten Watergate's gravity and Nixon's malevolence. But I think any newfound support for the pardon signaled the opposite: Nixon's name has become so securely fused with the abuse of power that whether he served time in prison no longer troubles us much. Indeed, by 2006, Nixon's approval rating, having peaked at his death, had fallen back to 28%, near its Watergate nadir.
It was Nixon's war on history that made scholars leery of affording any legitimacy to his library. But while the process of revision never ceases, it now seems safe to say that — like the once-contentious debates about the morality of slavery, the futility of Prohibition or the greatness of FDR — that war is over. Nixon lost.
On Wednesday, the new Nixon Library will host a ceremony celebrating its debut as an official presidential archives. Whatever is sighted there, we can be confident that Nixon's ghost is not coming back.
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DAVID GREENBERG, the author of "Nixon's Shadow," teaches history and media studies at Rutgers University.
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Not all would put a heroic sheen on Thompson's Watergate role
By Michael Kranish, Boston Globe | July 4, 2007
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washingt...te_role/?page=2
WASHINGTON -- The day before Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel Fred Thompson made the inquiry that launched him into the national spotlight -- asking an aide to President Nixon whether there was a White House taping system -- he telephoned Nixon's lawyer.
Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with "no authority" in divulging the committee's knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon's resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson's actions.
"Thompson was a mole for the White House," Armstrong said in an interview. "Fred was working hammer and tong to defeat the investigation of finding out what happened to authorize Watergate and find out what the role of the president was."
Asked about the matter this week, Thompson -- who is preparing to run for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination -- responded via e-mail without addressing the specific charge of being a Nixon mole: "I'm glad all of this has finally caused someone to read my Watergate book, even though it's taken them over thirty years."
The view of Thompson as a Nixon mole is strikingly at odds with the former Tennessee senator's longtime image as an independent-minded prosecutor who helped bring down the president he admired. Indeed, the website of Thompson's presidential exploratory committee boasts that he "gained national attention for leading the line of inquiry that revealed the audio-taping system in the White House Oval Office." It is an image that has been solidified by Thompson's portrayal of a tough-talking prosecutor in the television series "Law and Order."
But the story of his role in the Nixon case helps put in perspective Thompson's recent stance as one of the most outspoken proponents of pardoning I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Just as Thompson once staunchly defended Nixon, Thompson urged a pardon for Libby, who was convicted in March of obstructing justice in the investigation into who leaked a CIA operative's name.
Thompson declared in a June 6 radio commentary that Libby's conviction was a "shocking injustice . . . created and enabled by federal officials." Bush on Monday commuted Libby's 30-month sentence, stopping short of a pardon.
The intensity of Thompson's remarks about Libby is reminiscent of how he initially felt about Nixon. Few Republicans were stronger believers in Nixon during the early days of Watergate.
Thompson, in his 1975 memoir, wrote that he believed "there would be nothing incriminating" about Nixon on the tapes, a theory he said "proved totally wrong."
"In retrospect it is apparent that I was subconsciously looking for a way to justify my faith in the leader of my country and my party, a man who was undergoing a violent attack from the news media, which I thought had never given him fair treatment in the past," Thompson wrote. "I was looking for a reason to believe that Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States, was not a crook."
Thompson was a little-known assistant US attorney in Tennessee when the Watergate investigation in Congress got underway. He had served as campaign manager for the successful 1972 reelection of Senator Howard Baker, a powerful Tennessee Republican.
When the Senate Watergate Committee was established in 1973, Baker became the ranking Republican member and brought Thompson to Washington to serve as minority counsel. Baker, who has been among those now urging Thompson to seek the presidency, did not return a call seeking comment.
John Dean , Nixon's former White House counsel, who was a central witness at the hearings, said he believed that Baker and Thompson were anything but impartial players. "I knew that Thompson would be Baker's man, trying to protect Nixon," Dean said in an interview.
The website of Thompson's presidential exploratory committee, imwithfred.com, suggests that Thompson helped reveal the taping system and expose Nixon's role in the Watergate coverup. And while Thompson's question to presidential aide Alexander Butterfield during a Watergate hearing unveiled the existence of the taping system to the outside world, it wasn't Thompson who discovered that Nixon was taping conversations. Nor was Thompson the first to question Butterfield about the possibility.
On July 13, 1973, Armstrong, the Democratic staffer, asked Butterfield a series of questions during a private session that led up to the revelation. He then turned the questioning over to a Republican staffer, Don Sanders, who asked Butterfield the question that led to the mention of the taping system.
To the astonishment of everyone in the room, Butterfield admitted the taping system existed.
When Thompson learned of Butterfield's admission, he leaked the revelation to Nixon's counsel, J. Fred Buzhardt .
"Even though I had no authority to act for the committee, I decided to call Fred Buzhardt at home" to tell him that the committee had learned about the taping system, Thompson wrote. "I wanted to be sure that the White House was fully aware of what was to be disclosed so that it could take appropriate action."
Armstrong said he and other Democratic staffers had long been convinced that Thompson was leaking information about the investigation to the White House. The committee, for example, had obtained a memo written by Buzhardt that Democratic staffers believed was based on information leaked by Thompson.
Armstrong said he thought the leaks would lead to Thompson's firing. "Any prosecutor would be upset if another member of the prosecution team was orchestrating a defense for Nixon," said Armstrong, who later became a Washington Post reporter and currently is executive director of Information Trust, a nonprofit organization specializing in open government issues.
Baker, meanwhile, insisted that Thompson be allowed to ask Butterfield the question about the taping system in a public session on July 16, 1973, three days after the committee had learned about the system.
The choice of Thompson irked Samuel Dash , the Democratic chief counsel on the committee, who preferred that a Democrat be allowed to ask the question. "I personally resented it and felt cheated," Dash wrote in his memoirs. But he said he felt he had "no choice but to let Fred Thompson develop the Butterfield material" because the question initially had been posed by Sanders, a Republican staffer.
When Dash told Thompson on the day of the hearing that he had agreed to let Thompson ask the question that would change US history, Thompson replied: "That's right generous of you, Sam."
So it was, at the hearing, that Thompson leapt into the national spotlight:
"Are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?" he asked Butterfield during the national televised hearings.
"I was aware of listening devices, yes, sir," Butterfield responded.
Even as he quizzed Butterfield during the hearing, Thompson said later, he believed the tapes would exonerate Nixon, so he saw no problem in pressing for their release. It was after Thompson heard Nixon incriminate himself on the tapes that Thompson finally decided that Nixon was a crook -- and stopped be ing a Nixon apologist.
"Looking back, I wonder how I could have failed to realize at once . . . the significance of the tapes," Thompson wrote. "I realized that I would probably be thinking about the implications of Watergate for the rest of my life."
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I genunely believe that if all the secretsbof the CIA were to be revealed, Washington would implode, such would be the resulting damage. That is why I also think the so called "Family Jewels" are made of paste and hung out to glitter and tempt but the real diamonds remain concealed in the safe.
David
Some of the Missing 'Family Jewels'
by William Norman Grigg
www.lewrockwell.com
July 5, 2007
“I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun.... Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, rape, and pillage with the sanction of the all-highest?” – Federal counter-narcotics agent George White, who conducted involuntary drug tests on unwitting subjects as part of the CIA's MKULTRA program.
As an agent of the federal Bureau of Narcotics, the forerunner to the Drug Enforcement Administration, George White “knew how to milk a drug bust for all it was worth – a skill that grew out of early years spent as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco and Los Angeles,” notes John Marks in his perversely fascinating study The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.
White migrated from journalism to law enforcement in 1934. Although he was too late to find employment enforcing alcohol prohibition, he was just in time to make a handsome living in the emerging field of narcotics enforcement, which began in earnest in 1937. Decades later, before dying of the liver disease brought about by his insatiable appetite for liquor (he reportedly could consume a bottle of gin in a single sitting), Marks would serve as a consultant for TV detective dramas, helping to create the now-customary image of police as intrepid, largely incorruptible paladins of public order.
Many police have earnestly tried to live up to that image. Marks had little use for such pretense. As a missionary in the service of the Almighty State, Marks indulged every familiar whim, as well as some that would never occur to most people.
For example: I doubt that most people would be party to an experiment in which an aerosol dispenser would be used to subject an unwitting guest to a potent dose of LSD. That particular experiment went awry because of unfavorable weather, but White and others involved in the CIA's MKULTRA program were successful in testing the drug on many unsuspecting people. It's likely that we'll never know how many.
During World War II, when the proto-CIA was known as the OSS, Marks – while on the payroll of a federal counter-narcotics agency, mind you – was used to test concentrated marijuana on several people associated with the Manhattan Project, both volunteers and unwitting non-volunteers. He also slipped a dose to August Del Gracio, a lieutenant in Lucky Luciano's criminal syndicate. (In exchange for “strategic cooperation” from his Sicilian syndicate in World War II, Luciano was permitted to run his criminal enterprises – which included the American heroin trade – unhindered from his prison cell.)
White was eager to join the CIA after WWII, but somehow this was prevented by J. Edgar Hoover. He also sought appointment as head of New York City's narcotics bureau, only to have his candidacy blocked by Governor Thomas Dewey. But his talents – such as they were – and, more importantly, his connections made White irresistible to Richard Helms, Sid Gottlieb, and the others involved in MKULTRA, who were eager to learn of LSD's utility as a truth serum, mind control drug, and general-purpose chemical weapon.
Photo: "My name is Sid Gottlieb. I'm a nice, clean-living Jewish man married to an equally upright Presbyterian woman. I milk goats every morning. My hobby – nay, passion – is folk dancing. My career is mind control." (All of these biographical details are accurate.)
“As a high-ranking narcotics agent, White had a perfect excuse to be around drugs and people who used them,” writes Marks. “He had proved during the war that he had a talent for clandestine work, and he certainly had no qualms when it came to unwitting testing. With his job, he had access to all the possible subjects the Agency would need, and if he could use LSD or any other drug to find out more about drug trafficking, so much the better.”
In May 1953, White and Sid Gottlieb set up a “safehouse” in Greenwich Village that was used to lure guinea pigs for drug experiments of various kinds (particularly LSD and concentrated marijuana), as well as tests involving knock-out drops and various kinds of surveillance equipment. The CIA paid all the bills, including the exorbitant expenses involved in keeping White's liquor cabinet full.
Two years later, with questions being asked by New York officials about White's activities, the CIA transferred the “safehouse” operation to the San Francisco Bay Area; he opened his first “pad” on Telegraph Hill, and later set up a branch in Marin County. The Bay Area safehouses were used to test drugs “on individuals of all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign,” noted an Inspector General's report years later. (San Francisco, ironically, was one of the first American jurisdictions to enact severe anti-narcotics laws in the late 19th Century.)
As the CIA examined the possible field use of LSD against hostile foreign leaders – such as Fidel Castro – it was necessary to test it on as many unsuspecting targets as possible. To facilitate such “dry runs,” White expanded his little federally sponsored criminal syndicate by setting himself up as a full-service vice lord – both drug pusher and pimp.
John Marks describes how this worked:
“An unsuspecting john would think he had bought a night of pleasure, go back to a strange apartment, and wind up zonked. A CIA document that survived Sid Gottlieb's shredding recorded this process.... For the MKULTRA chief, the whores were 'certain individuals who covertly administer this material [that is, the narcotics] to other people in accordance with [White's] instructions. White normally paid the woman $100 in Agency funds for their night's work.... The CIA's auditors had to settle for canceled checks which White cashed himself and marked either 'Stormy' or, just as appropriately, 'Undercover Agent.' The program was also referred to as 'Operation Midnight Climax.'”
By the time White's grimy business was shut down in 1963, the harvest had begun to come in from Sid Gottlieb's efforts – which had begun ten years earlier – to cultivate the drug culture in academia. Using tax-exempt foundations as cut-outs – particularly the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation and the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research – Gottlieb funded “LSD pathfinders” in such institutions as Columbia University, the University of Rochester, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Illinois Medical School, Mt. Sinai Hospital, Boston Psychopathic, and the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky (which was also funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health).
These CIA-sponsored researchers have been described as the “Johnny Appleseeds of LSD”; nearly all of them tried the drug themselves before experimenting with it on others. Prison inmates were offered various inducements – including other hard narcotics – to serve as test subjects. Among those recruited into this program was a small-time thug named James Bulger, who would go on to become the FBI-protected head of Boston's Irish Mob.
“Sharing the drug with the Army here, setting up research programs there, keeping track of it everywhere, the CIA generally presided over the LSD scene during the 1950s,” writes Marks. It is no small matter that there were, at that time, two companies producing LSD – Eli Lilly and the Swiss firm Sandoz; Lilly turned over its entire supply to the Agency, and Sandoz kept it apprised of every shipment it made anywhere in the world.
By the mid-1960s, the trade in narcotics – including LSD – had become more diversified, thanks in no small part to the academic “Johnny Appleseeds” who had worked with MKULTRA.
A 1969 study of LSD published by the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (George White's employer) noted that the drug's “early use was among small groups of intellectuals at large Eastern and West Coast universities. It spread to undergraduate students, then to other campuses. Most often, users have been introduced to the drug by persons of higher status. Teachers have influenced students; upperclassmen have influenced lower-classmen.” The BNDD described this as a “trickle-down phenomenon,” but as Marks points out, the agency missed the point that “somebody had to influence the teachers, and that up there at the top of the LSD distribution system could be found the men of MKULTRA.”
There's more than simple nastiness involved in the CIA's creation of the modern narcotics industry.
About a decade ago, former DEA undercover agent Mike Levine – one of the bravest and most self-effacing men I've been honored and blessed to meet – described a 1979 conversation with a CIA officer in Argentina.
"There was a small group of us gathered for a drinking party at the CIA guy's apartment," Levine recounted to me. "There were several Argentine police officers there as well; at the time, Argentina was a police state in which people could be taken into custody without warning, tortured, and then 'disappeared.'"
In other words, it was essentially the same as the United States under the reign of Bush the Dumber and Cheney the All-Malignant. Got it. To continue:
"At one point my associate in the CIA said that he preferred Argentina's approach to social order, and that America should be more like that country."
Wherever that guy is, assuming he's still among the living, he must be exceptionally pleased with what America has become; he may be playing a hands-on role in the nasty business he found so attractive. But again, I digress:
"Somebody asked, 'Well, how does a change of that sort happen?' The spook replied that it was necessary to create a situation of public fear – a sense of impending anarchy and social upheaval in which the people will literally plead with Congress, "Take whatever rights you need, but save us...."
That is, "save us" from the scourge of drugs, or terrorism, or violent crime, or whatever social plague leaves the public usefully terrified.
Levine, who spent decades in "deep cover" operations for the DEA, candidly admits that the "war on drugs" turned the federal government into "essentially a criminal enterprise." He also acknowledges that "the CIA has long been a major supporter of the people and organizations responsible for supplying drugs to this country"; this includes various factions of the Afghan Mujahadin and the Nicaraguan Contras, Khun Sa's Shan United Army in Burma's Golden Triangle, small-caliber despots like Manuel Noriega (anybody remember him?), the Kosovo Liberation Army, and others of that ilk.
"Los Novios de La Muerte," the paramilitary group that – with the CIA's help –turned Bolivia into (Klaus) Barbie's Playhouse.
The CIA, according to Levine, has also staged coups in order to install narco-regimes, as it did in Bolivia in 1980, working in concert with Los Novios de la Muerte ("The Fiancees of Death"), a paramilitary force recruited by Nazi fugitive Klaus Barbie.
The "war on drugs," as I've pointed out elsewhere, is a narcotics price support program, in addition to being a form of employment insurance for various three-letter agencies and militarized police units across the country.
I'm convinced that one reason so much effort is invested in drug "interdiction" campaigns – which is a bit like taking a sponge mop to the Atlantic Ocean – is that this inflates the amount of off-the-books funding available to the CIA and its satellite organizations. And as Levine points out, it's not true that the War on Drugs is a losing proposition: "The fundamental problem with the so-called war on drugs is that both sides are winning – the drug lords and the 'suits' – because they both are making a killing."
July 5, 2007
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What they didn't say at Kennebunkport
By Spengler
www.asiatimes.com
July 2, 2007
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/IG03Aa03.html
Nothing like the imagined dialogue below will have occurred at the Bush family compound on the Maine sea coast during President Vladimir Putin's July 1 retreat with US President George W Bush.
Putin, I expect, will have done his best to humor his American counterpart and keep him off his guard. Bush is prepared neither intellectually nor psychologically to understand what a Russian leader must do, and a practical man like Putin would not waste words explaining the unexplainable to the uncomprehending. Putin's unenviable task is to persuade Bush of his good intentions, while gaining maneuvering room to take measures that the US will regard as hostile. I have no idea how he tried to bring this off in Kennebunkport. But it is sobering to imagine how the conversation might have gone if Putin had told Bush the unvarnished truth.
Bush: You know, Vladimir, a lot of Americans worry that progress toward democracy in Russia has run into a rough patch. They see journalists being intimidated, businessmen being put in jail, and opponents of your government dying under suspicious circumstances. I want to improve relations with you, but you're getting a lot of bad press.
Putin: Tell me, George - what is your idea of Russian democracy?
Bush: Well, when Boris Yeltsin stood on top of a tank to face down the communists and then had free elections, Americans really got the idea that Russia was on the road to democracy.
Putin: We were on the road to something, that's for sure. Why do you think we went bankrupt in 1998? Everything that wasn't nailed down was going into someone's Swiss bank account. Ask your father about it - he gave a speech to a Goldman, Sachs conference in Moscow in July of that year telling investors what a great opportunity Russia was, a month before we ran out of money.
Bush: You don't need to drag my father into this ...
Putin: I'm not saying he was involved in the looting of Russia, the greatest larceny of all time - I'm pointing out that he was as clueless as the rest of you. If we hadn't cracked down on the crooks and thieves who took the country over and stole everything, we wouldn't be talking right now. There wouldn't be a Russia.
Bush: But can't you keep the country honest by democratic means?
Putin: George, everybody isn't like Americans. If Americans don't like what's going on, they elect a different congressman, sign a petition, take out newspaper advertisements, or whatever. For two generations Russians learned that if you made the wrong kind of joke, you disappeared in the middle of the night. You survived by keeping your head down and drinking your vodka. We used to have political troublemakers - in fact, some of the most enthusiastic ones in the world. They were called "communists". The ones that Josef Stalin didn't kill, he sent to the Gulag. Just who do you think is going to take the lead against crime syndicates with private armies? If the government doesn't do it, no one can - and the means we employ aren't going to be pretty.
Bush: I don't mean to get personal, Vladimir, but I guess you know something about those means.
Putin: You had better believe that I do. Why do you think that the Russian government is in the hands of people who served in State Security? In the bad old days, the only institution that could take initiative was the security services. There was no other place to learn how to exercise power.
Bush: I can understand how bad things were, Vladimir, but you've got to understand how much Americans care about democracy.
Putin: Of course you care about democracy - your population is made up of people who left their countries, forgot their language, abandoned their culture and threw themselves into the melting pot. They believe they have rights. Russians never had any rights to begin with and don't know what it means to defend them.
Bush: I've got to say, Vladimir, that's a hell of a way to run a country.
Putin: Who told you we were a country, George? Russia is an empire. We have 160 different ethnic groups spread across six time zones, and we have plenty of Russians in territories that used to belong to the Soviet Union. Maybe you don't like our history, but you can't run the tape in reverse. Let me give you an example: how many Muslims do you have in the US?
Bush: I don't see why that's relevant, but it's probably 3 million or 4 million.
Putin: That's not even 2% of your population. Do you know how many Muslims we have in Russia? At least 25 million, out of 150 million - and they might be a majority in 50 years, given their birth rates.
Bush: I don't understand your point.
Putin: My point is, do you really want democracy in Russia - one man, one vote? Because if you do, you might end up with an Islamic state half a century from now with more oil than Saudi Arabia and a big nuclear arsenal.
Bush: Vladimir, I don't get what you are driving at. Americans just don't think that way. We're trying to help Muslim countries build democracy so the Middle East can be at peace.
Putin: I don't want to throw cold water on your idea, George, but it doesn't seem to be working out too well in Iraq, or Palestine, or Lebanon, does it?
Bush: Vladimir, I just don't get you at all. If you are so concerned about the Muslims, how come you are making it so hard for us to put sanctions on Iran?
Putin: Did it ever occur to you that you have an insignificant number of Muslims to answer to - and half of them are native-born American blacks who never vote Republican? I have millions of Azeri Shi'ites attending mosques supported by Iran. I don't have the luxury to rap the mullahs on the knuckles and hope they stick their hands back in the pockets. Read what Niccolo Machiavelli had to say on the subject: never inflict a minor injury upon an opponent. Men will avenge themselves against minor injuries, but they can't avenge themselves against major injuries.
Bush: You're not telling me to inflict a major injury on Iran, by any chance, are you, Vladimir?
Putin: If anyone is going to do it, George, it's going to be you - you or the Israelis. I simply can't afford to - at least not for the moment, certainly not until after our presidential elections next March. Maybe you won't have to. Iran is weak. There's still an outside chance that someone reasonable like Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani might replace that lunatic Mahmud Ahmadinejad as president. But there's one thing you can count on: nobody hates the idea of an Iran with nuclear weapons more than we do. Our "near abroad" shares a border with Iran.
Bush: So when push comes to shove, Vladimir, you're going to let me do the dirty work and keep your hands clean?
Putin: Remember, I've got elections six months before you do, and a different kind of succession problem. Your democracy has been around for more than 200 years. We're barely adolescents. I need someone to follow me who's hard and sly enough to prevent Russia from flying apart. We can be tough when we have to be. Or haven't you heard of Chechnya?
Bush: You're not taking into account how tough my problem is - unless I can settle the Iran problem, there's no way I can get US troops out of Iraq without a full-scale war between Shi'ites backed by Iran and Sunnis backed by Saudi Arabia.
Putin: Well, you're on your own there. Don't blame me for that.
Bush: Vladimir, I was hoping we'd come out of this discussion with an understanding of at least one point: Why are you so upset about our putting anti-missile systems into places like the Czech Republic? You know that we can't defend Europe against a Russian missile attack.
Putin: George, it's not just about the missiles. It's about your lily-pad bases in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and elsewhere in our near abroad. It's about fomenting those pointless color revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. You aren't going to get democracy in these places - it's silly presumption. All you will do is foster the centrifugal forces that threaten to tear apart the Russian Federation. Don't you get it, George? We are only three-quarters Russian, and in a generation we might be only half Russian. We haven't recovered from the beating you gave us in the 1980s. Half of adult male deaths in Russia are due to alcoholism. Our women have 13 abortions for every 10 live births. We're fighting for our life. We are not going to let what remains of Russia be torn to pieces.
Bush: Do you think we can find some kind of common ground over Kosovo?
Putin: That's where you are really playing with fire, George. You are proposing to dismember Serbia to add a province to Greater Albania, and you will set a precedent for every breakaway minority that wants to leave Russia. We can't possibly accept this - and I warn you that if you insist on this dangerous and reckless course of action, we will do precisely the same for disputed territories in the near abroad, starting with South Ossetia.
Bush: But Vladimir, how are we going to convince the Muslim world that we can partner up with them for peace if we don't respect the wishes of an overwhelming Muslim majority in Kosovo?
Putin: I hate to put it this way, George, but I think I could teach you a lesson about how to gain influence among Muslims. You aren't particularly popular among Muslims at the moment.
Bush: Okay, you don't have to rub it in. How do you propose to gain influence among Muslims?
Putin: Do you know how many civilians died in Chechnya when we suppressed the rebellion there? No one knows exactly, but the number is around 100,000. We know that half a million Chechens lost their homes. That's half the country. We've been killing Muslims for 300 years. That's why they respect us.
Bush: Vladimir, what you are saying is horrible. The American people will never see the world that way.
Putin: The American people don't have to. They are sitting comfortably in their own continent and think it's a great disaster when a few thousand people are killed in an office building. I'm not suggesting that you go out and explain to your voters that things might be very different in other
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Word for Word | Spying on Reporters
J.F.K. Turns to the C.I.A. to Plug a Leak
By TIM WEINER
The New York Times
July 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/weekinre...ef=weekinreview
THE unsealing by the C.I.A last week of the documents it called its “family jewels” was an only-in-America moment. A secret intelligence service freely admitted its crimes and blunders. Americans were reminded of a piece of living history: the time in the 1960s and 1970s when presidents turned the spying powers of American intelligence on the United States itself, searching for an enemy within.
As the “family jewels” make clear, this web of intrigue began in the Kennedy White House.
Another treasure trove, however, was already in public view — tapes that President John F. Kennedy himself recorded in the Oval Office. Here are edited transcripts — and a link to the tapes themselves — of two August 1962 conversations in which Kennedy took steps to spy on the national security reporter for The New York Times, Hanson Baldwin. The president was furious. He wanted to stop secrets from leaking.
These Oval Office transcripts were published in October 2001 by the Miller Center of Public Affairs. But that was the month after 9/11, and they went largely unnoticed — until last week, when the more closely guarded “family jewels” were released.
Those documents include a description of Project Mockingbird, which involved the C.I.A.’s wiretapping of two unnamed Washington reporters. This surveillance began on March 12, 1963, under the authority of John A. McCone, the director of central intelligence, and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, both of whom were present in the Oval Office in August 1962.
It was 45 years ago. But it seems like yesterday. And it is.
In December 2005, The Times revealed that the executive branch was once again using its foreign intelligence powers to spy within the borders of the United States, also by warrantless wiretapping. We may learn the full story a generation from now, if and when the first of the 21st century’s “family jewels” are revealed. TIM WEINER
•
The chief protagonists in the transcripts:
President John F. Kennedy
John A. McCone, director of central intelligence.
James Killian, chairman of the president’s foreign intelligence advisory board.
Clark Clifford, adviser to Democrats since the Truman administration, and a member of the intelligence advisory board.
Hanson Baldwin, military analyst for The New York Times since 1937, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches from Guadalcanal and the western Pacific in 1943, a dependably pro-military reporter. He had infuriated the president with an article on the Soviets’ efforts to protect their intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites with concrete bunkers. His reporting accurately stated the conclusions of the C.I.A.’s most recent national intelligence estimate. He is not present; he is the object of the participants’ anger and concern.
Aug. 1, 1962, 5:35 p.m.-6:25 p.m., President Kennedy meets with his foreign intelligence advisory board. Present: the president, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Clark Clifford, Dr. James Killian, Dr. Edwin H. Land, a physicist, and Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, the president’s military representative and soon to be his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Killian: We would say to you unequivocally that this has been a tragically serious breach of security.
J.F.K.: What I find is incomprehensible ... that someone of Baldwin’s experience and stature and the status of The Times would do it. ...
Killian: The F.B.I. may not be the best agency to conduct investigations of leaks to this kind. ... We would suggest, therefore, that the director of central intelligence be encouraged to develop an expert group that would be available at all times to follow up on security leaks.
Clifford: I think this is the most effective recommendation that the group makes: that there be a full-time small group, devoting themselves to this all the time. I believe that that group could become knowledgeable about the pieces that these various men write, like Baldwin. ...
Killian: There are many things that such a sensitized group could do ... They could follow the press and see evidence of ——
Taylor: We’d know the trends, where their contacts ——
J.F.K.: That’s a very good idea. We’ll do that.
...
Clifford: They can find out who are Hanson Baldwin’s contacts. When he goes over to the Pentagon, who does he see? Nobody knows now. The F.B.I. doesn’t know. But I think it would be mighty interesting ... To my knowledge it’s never been done before and it is long overdue.
Aug. 22, 1962, 6:10-6:37 p.m.,meeting on intelligence matters. Present: The president, McCone, General Taylor.
J.F.K.: How are we doing with that set-up on the Baldwin business?
McCone: Well, I’ve got a ... finally got a plan in which C.I.A. is completely in agreement with. It does a number of things that were recommended, including the setting up this task force, which would be a continuing investigative group reporting to me. ...
J.F.K.: Would you have supervision over the leakage from the Department of Defense?
McCone: As far as intelligence information is concerned. ...
J.F.K.: Then anyone who had intelligence would have to log their meetings?
McCone: That’s right ... I get a log every week of all the contacts they make and memoranda of the discussions.
Taylor: Do you?
McCone: I write a memoranda ——
Taylor: Has that ever been revealed to the press? [Have] you ever been ——
McCone: Oh, no ——
Mr. McCone then awkwardly returned to the subject of the task force or investigative group the president wanted him to create. It was arguably illegal, and almost inarguably prohibited by the C.I.A.’s charter. That charter was signed on July 26, 1947, and Mr. Clifford was among those who helped to write it. The charter commanded the C.I.A. to protect intelligence sources and methods, but barred it from operating within the United States, spying on Americans, or behaving like secret police. Mr. McCone mumbles, and the tape is unclear.
McCone: It’s clearly a, it’s kind of a, of a directive that ... [to] avoid getting involved, you or your office getting involved ... [unclear] I can do under the law — there’s nothing wrong [with it] — By the National Security Act, I’m charged with [unclear].
J.F.K.: Well, I think they’re scared. ... Hanson Baldwin and these fellows who’ve got these very good contacts over there [at the Pentagon]. They’re all well regarded and they talk to them so frankly. So I think if they begin to think they’re going to have to write a report on it, it’s going to have a very inhibiting effect, I think. And especially when I saw from Hoover that they figured that there were 761 people that had this secret information.
•
After an interrogation from J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. about his New York Times article on Soviet nuclear forces, a shaken Hanson Baldwin told a colleague, in a conversation wiretapped and taped by the bureau: “I think the real answer to this is Bobby Kennedy and the president himself.” A transcript of that conversation was on the attorney general’s desk the next day.
As the newly released “family jewels” and other now public United States government records confirm, the C.I.A. kept watch on reporters and some of their sources for three years after Kennedy and Mr. McCone met. The surveillance continued after the president’s assassination, until 1965.
So now the record is clear: long before President Nixon created his “plumbers” unit of C.I.A. veterans to stop news leaks, President Kennedy tried to use the agency for the same goal. Nevertheless, throughout the decades, reporters have continued to plague the C.I.A. and presidents alike by reporting on secrets of state.
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In May 1979 two men were arrested in Los Angeles while President Jimmy Carter was visiting there in an alleged assassination attempt on Carter.
One was an Anglo and the other an Hispanic.
The Anglo, upon being arrested, was found to have a starter pistol on his person with 70 rounds of blank ammunition. The Anglo identified the Hispanic as his co-conspirator. Both men led the authorities to a hotel where the men, who were street people, claimed that they were recruited by three men from Mexico. The role of the two men was to create a diversion while the three men from Mexico assassinated Carter.
Within hours of the incident Carter cancelled a planned national television appearance that had been previously announced, which was never rescheduled.
The above incident is recounted by Jim Marrs in an interview this week for subscribers on www.dreamland.com.
Marrs noted that the names of the two men arrested were Raymond Lee Harvey and Oswaldo Artiz.
According to Marrs, after the incident, Carter evolved into a do-nothing president, apparently having come to the realization that the country was really run by a selected group of men and that being President of the United States meant he had power inferior to that exercised by the selected group.
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June 30, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
The Break-In That History Forgot
By EGIL KROGH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/30/opinion/...amp;oref=slogin
Seattle
THE Watergate break-in, described by Ron Ziegler, then the White House press secretary, as a “third-rate burglary,” passes its 35th anniversary this month. The common public perception is that Watergate was the principal cause of President Nixon’s downfall. In fact, the seminal cause was a first-rate criminal conspiracy and break-in almost 10 months earlier that led inexorably to Watergate and its subsequent cover-up.
In early August 1971, I attended a secret meeting in Room 16, a hideaway office in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. Huddled around the table were G. Gordon Liddy, a former F.B.I. agent; E. Howard Hunt, a former C.I.A. agent; and David R. Young Jr., a member of the National Security Council staff. I was deputy assistant to the president.
Two months earlier, The New York Times had published the classified Pentagon Papers, which had been provided by Daniel Ellsberg. President Nixon had told me he viewed the leak as a matter of critical importance to national security. He ordered me and the others, a group that would come to be called the “plumbers,” to find out how the leak had happened and keep it from happening again.
Mr. Hunt urged us to carry out a “covert operation” to get a “mother lode” of information about Mr. Ells-berg’s mental state, to discredit him, by breaking into the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding. Mr. Liddy told us the F.B.I. had frequently carried out such covert operations — a euphemism for burglaries — in national security investigations, that he had even done some himself.
I listened intently. At no time did I or anyone else there question whether the operation was necessary, legal or moral. Convinced that we were responding legitimately to a national security crisis, we focused instead on the operational details: who would do what, when and where.
Mr. Young and I sent a memo to John Ehrlichman, assistant to the president, recommending that “a covert operation be undertaken to examine all of the medical files still held by Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.” Mr. Ehrlichman approved the plan, noting in longhand on the memo, “if done under your assurance that it is not traceable.”
On Sept. 3, 1971, burglars broke into Dr. Fielding’s Beverly Hills office to photograph the files, but found nothing related to Mr. Ellsberg.
The premise of our action was the strongly held view within certain precincts of the White House that the president and those functioning on his behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if they were convinced that the nation’s security demanded it. As President Nixon himself said to David Frost during an interview six years later, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” To this day the implications of this statement are staggering.
With the Fielding break-in, some of us in the Nixon White House crossed the Rubicon into the realm of lawbreakers. In November 1973, I pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy in depriving Dr. Fielding of his civil rights, specifically his constitutional right to be free from an unwarranted search. I no longer believed that national security could justify my conduct. At my sentencing, I explained that national security is “subject to a wide range of definitions, a factor that makes all the more essential a painstaking approach to the definition of national security in any given instance.”
Judge Gerhard Gesell gave me the first prison sentence of any member of the president’s staff: two to six years, of which I served four and a half months.
I finally realized that what had gone wrong in the Nixon White House was a meltdown in personal integrity. Without it, we failed to understand the constitutional limits on presidential power and comply with statutory law.
In early 2001, after President Bush was inaugurated, I sent the new White House staff a memo explaining the importance of never losing their personal integrity. In a section addressed specifically to the White House lawyers, I said that integrity required them to constantly ask, is it legal?
And I recommended that they rely on well-established legal precedent and not some hazy, loose notion of what phrases like “national security” and “commander in chief” could be tortured into meaning. I wonder if they received my message.
Egil Krogh, a lawyer, is the author of the forthcoming “Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices and Life Lessons From the White House.”
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This is very important if it is true.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...7062102434.html
By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, June 22, 2007; Page A01
The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.
The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.
"Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history," Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests.
In anticipation of the CIA's release, the National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government discussions of the abuses. Those documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called "skeletons" in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts.
A New York Times article by reporter Seymour Hersh about the CIA's infiltration of antiwar groups, published in December 1974, was "just the tip of the iceberg," then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned Ford, according to a Jan. 3 memorandum of their conversation.
Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, "blood will flow," saying, "For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of [Cuban President Fidel] Castro." Kennedy was the attorney general from 1961 to 1964.
Worried that the disclosures could lead to criminal prosecutions, Kissinger added that "when the FBI has a hunting license into the CIA, this could end up worse for the country than Watergate," the scandal that led to the fall of the Nixon administration the previous year.
In a meeting at which Colby detailed the worst abuses -- after telling the president "we have a 25-year old institution which has done some things it shouldn't have" -- Ford said he would appoint a presidential commission to look into the matter. "We don't want to destroy but to preserve the CIA. But we want to make sure that illegal operations and those outside the [CIA] charter don't happen," Ford said.
Most of the major incidents and operations in the reports to be released next week were revealed in varying detail during congressional investigations that led to widespread intelligence reforms and increased oversight. But the treasure-trove of CIA documents, generated as the Vietnam War wound down and agency involvement in Nixon's "dirty tricks" political campaign began to be revealed, is expected to provide far more comprehensive accounts, written by the agency itself.
The reports, known collectively by historians and CIA officials as the "family jewels," were initially produced in response to a 1973 request by then-CIA Director James R. Schlesinger. Alarmed by press accounts of CIA involvement in Watergate under his predecessor, Schlesinger asked the agency's employees to inform him of all operations that were "outside" the agency's legal charter.
This process was unprecedented at the agency, where only a few officials had previously been privy to the scope of its illegal activities. Schlesinger collected the reports, some of which dated to the 1950s, in a folder that was inherited by his successor, Colby, in September of that year.
But it was not until Hersh's article that Colby took the file to the White House. The National Security Archive release included a six-page summary of a conversation on Jan. 3, 1975, in which Colby briefed the Justice Department for the first time on the extent of the "skeletons."
Operations listed in the report began in 1953, when the CIA's counterintelligence staff started a 20-year program to screen and in some cases open mail between the United States and the Soviet Union passing through a New York airport. A similar program in San Francisco intercepted mail to and from China from 1969 to 1972. Under its charter, the CIA is prohibited from domestic operations.
Colby told Ford that the program had collected four letters to actress and antiwar activist Jane Fonda and said the entire effort was "illegal, and we stopped it in 1973."
Among several new details, the summary document reveals a 1969 program about CIA efforts against "the international activities of radicals and black militants." Undercover CIA agents were placed inside U.S. peace groups and sent abroad as credentialed members to identify any foreign contacts. This came at a time when the Soviet Union was suspected of financing and influencing U.S. domestic organizations.
The program included "information on the domestic activities" of the organizations and led to the accumulation of 10,000 American names, which Colby told Silberman were retained "as a result of the tendency of bureaucrats to retain paper whether they needed it or acted on it or not," according to the summary memo.
CIA surveillance of Michael Getler, then The Washington Post's national security reporter, was conducted between October 1971 and April 1972 under direct authorization by then-Director Richard Helms, the memo said. Getler had written a story published on Oct. 18, 1971, sparked by what Colby called "an obvious intelligence leak," headlined "Soviet Subs Are Reported Cuba-Bound."
Getler, who is now the ombudsman for the Public Broadcasting Service, said yesterday that he learned of the surveillance in 1975, when The Post published an article based on a secret report by congressional investigators. The story said that the CIA used physical surveillance against "five Americans" and listed Getler, the late columnist Jack Anderson and Victor Marchetti, a former CIA employee who had just written a book critical of the agency.
"I never knew about it at the time, although it was a full 24 hours a day with teams of people following me, looking for my sources," Getler said. He said he went to see Colby afterward, with Washington lawyer Joseph Califano. Getler recalled, "Colby said it happened under Helms and apologized and said it wouldn't happen again."
Personal surveillance was conducted on Anderson and three of his staff members, including Britt Hume, now with Fox News, for two months in 1972 after Anderson wrote of the administration's "tilt toward Pakistan." The 1972 surveillance of Marchetti was carried out "to determine contacts with CIA employees," the summary said.
CIA monitoring and infiltration of antiwar dissident groups took place between 1967 and 1971 at a time when the public was turning against the Vietnam War. Agency officials "covertly monitored" groups in the Washington area "who were considered to pose a threat to CIA installations." Some of the information "might have been distributed to the FBI," the summary said. Other "skeletons" listed in the summary included:
· The confinement by the CIA of a Russian defector, suspected by the CIA as a possible "fake," in Maryland and Virginia safe houses for two years, beginning in 1964. Colby speculated that this might be "a violation of the kidnapping laws."
· The "very productive" 1963 wiretapping of two columnists -- Robert Allen and Paul Scott -- whose conversations included talks with 12 senators and six congressmen.
· Break-ins by the CIA's office of security at the homes of one current and one former CIA official suspected of retaining classified documents.
· CIA-funded testing of American citizens, "including reactions to certain drugs."
The CIA documents scheduled for release next week, Hayden said yesterday, "provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency."
Barred by secrecy restrictions from correcting "misinformation," he said, the CIA is at the mercy of the press. "Unfortunately, there seems to be an instinct among some in the media today to take a few pieces of information, which may or may not be accurate, and run with them to the darkest corner of the room," Hayden said.
Hayden's speech and some questions that followed evoked more recent criticism of the intelligence community, which has been accused of illegal wiretapping, infiltration of antiwar groups, and kidnapping and torturing of terrorism suspects.
"It's surely part of [Hayden's] program now to draw a bright line with the past," said National Security Archive Director Thomas S. Blanton. "But it's uncanny how the government keeps dipping into the black bag." Newly revealed details of ancient CIA operations, Blanton said, "are pretty resonant today."
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
CIA's family jewels reveal chilling past
www.newscientist
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shortshar...lling-past.html
Like many other reporters, I spent much of yesterday scrolling through the 702 pages of CIA documents known as "the family jewels", finally released after more than three decades in the shadows. Dating from 1973, they detail responses from CIA staff to then-director James Schlesinger, who wanted to know about activities that might be "inconsistent with the Agency's charter" – illegal, in plain English.
The documents reveal a paranoid web of domestic wiretapping and break-ins, and discuss the failed plot to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Most interesting to me, however, was the dearth of reports on some of the most unethical experiments ever conducted by the US government: the mind-control research programme known as MKULTRA, under which LSD and other drugs were given to unwitting subjects, including prison inmates and the patrons of brothels set up by the CIA.
The programme resulted in at least one death, that of Frank Olson, a biochemist at the US Army's biowarfare research centre in Fort Detrick, Maryland. After being given a drink spiked with LSD, he began behaving oddly and was taken to New York for psychiatric treatment. It was too late: on 28 November 1953, Olson plunged to his death from a hotel window.
This sordid enterprise was documented in John Marks' 1979 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. The surviving official documents, obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act, can be viewed here.
Some of MKULTRA's activities were also detailed in a 1963 internal report from the CIA's inspector general. This acknowledged that "concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people both within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical" and warned that "some MKULTRA activities raise questions of legality". But the details didn't become public until the late 1970s. So I was surprised not to see more on the programme in the "family jewels". Perhaps CIA staff didn't think that forcing mind-altering drugs onto unwitting citizens was a big deal. There was a lot of it going on in the 1960s, after all.
Still, the few references to drug testing in the newly-released documents make chilling reading. Go to page 416, and you will learn of a behavioural drug screened as part of "larger programme, in which the Agency had relations with commercial drug manufacturers, whereby they passed on drugs rejected because of unfavorable side effects". Drugs deemed interesting were later tested on "volunteer members of the Armed forces". The programme was apparently considered "defensive, in the sense that we would recognize certain behavior if similar materials were used against Americans".
It's the complicity of the pharmaceutical industry, passing on drugs known to be harmful, that I find most disturbing. Any ex-spooks or pharma executives care to comment?
Peter Aldhous, San Francisco Bureau Chief
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Does this document include a chapter on the clandestine uses of Polonium-210?
By Anonymous on June 27, 2007 5:20 PM
Not to my knowledge, but as of today, the documents are available as a PDF that can be searched by keyword at the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org
By Peter on June 27, 2007 8:58 PM
John Prados, a senior fellow with the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington DC sent me the following comment, which provides some interesting background:
MK/ULTRA is only one of a number of topics that seem to be underrepresented in the "Family Jewels." There are several contributing factors in my view. One is certainly the "people factor." Jim Schlesinger (contrary to his reception among CIA audiences today) was not well-liked at the agency, and learned only what agency employees wanted to tell him. The set represents a compilation of reports from division chiefs, and Sidney Gottlieb of the Technical Services Division, I'm sure, was not happy to be reporting on this at all, especially since he knew death had resulted. Since the experiments were not well known within the agency he probably thought he could get away with it. Especially given that TSD had a number of other things to report that would be sure to divert attention.
Another reason, I think, is that Watergate was a main impetus for the report and, again, would be sure to divert attention. My feeling is that Gottlieb put in enough to be able to say he had reported this, while avoiding details that might have called attention to it.
Peter Aldhous, San Francisco Bureau Chief
By Peter on June 28, 2007 6:42 PM
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......This $60 billion [intel budget] accounts for the funding received via the tax payer, but this figure is likely to grow by a huge amount when the drug trade is taken into account.
Is this figure included in the military budget or is it undisclosed as a seperate matter? I would assume that military intelligence and the CIA draw cash from different pots.
Sterling Seagrave makes a compelling case that many of the intelligence agencies made use of enormous stockpiles of gold that were plundered post-WWII for their blackest ops.
Besides the WWII plunder, intell agencies have access to enormous black funds via all sorts of illegal trade and other manipulations, including (but not limited to) revenue from the global drugs trade, arms sales (stolen from US domestic stockpiles warehoused in national armouries) vast stock and financial market manipulations, blood diamond transactions. In fact anything that can turn a quick and bountiful buck will do -- and often does.
David
June 12, 2007
The Biggest Scam in the World
Closing Down the Tax Haven Racket
By RALPH NADER
www.counterpunch.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/nader06122007.html
Lucy Komisar of the Tax Justice Network-USA (taxjustice-usa.org) spoke at the Conference on Taming the Giant Corporation last week about "Closing Down the Tax Haven Racket." Her words were so compelling that the rest of this column is devoted to excerpts from her presentation:
"The tax haven racket is the biggest scam in the world. It's run by the international banks with the cooperation of the world's financial powers for the benefit of corporations and the mega-rich. [M]ost Americans, including progressive activist Americans, don't know what I'm going to tell you. And that's part of the problem.
"Tax havens, also known as offshore financial centers, are places that operate secret bank accounts and shell companies that hide the names of real owners from tax authorities and law enforcement. They use nominees, front men. Sometimes offshore incorporation companies set up the shells. Sometimes the banks do it. Often someone will use a shell company in one jurisdiction that owns a shell in another jurisdiction that owns a bank account in a third. That's called layering. No one can follow the paper trial.
"Offshore is where most of the world's drug money is laundered, estimated at up to $500 billion a year, more than the total income of the world's poorest 20 percent. Perhaps another $500 billion comes from fraud and corruption.
"Those figures fit with [international Monetary Fund] numbers that as much as $1.5 trillion of illicit money is laundered annually, equal to two to five percent of global economic output.
"Wall Street wants this money. The markets would hurt, even shrivel without that cash. That's why Robert Rubin as Treasury Secretary had a policy, as Joseph Stiglitz told me, not to do anything that would stop the free flow of money into the US. He was not interested in stopping money laundering because the laundered funds ended up in Wall [street], maybe in Goldman Sachs where he had worked, or Citibank, where he would work.
"Attempts to find laundered funds are usually dismal failures. According to Interpol, $3 billion in dirty money has been seized in 20 years of struggle against money laundering -- about the amount laundered in three days.
"The other major purpose of offshore is for tax evasion, estimated to reach another $500 billion a year.
"That's how corporations and the rich have opted out of the tax system.
"They have sophisticated mechanisms. There's transfer pricing. A company sets up a trading company offshore, sells its widgets there for under market price, the trading company sells it for market price, the profits are offshore, not where they really were generated.
"Two American professors, using customs data, examined the impact of over-invoiced imports and under-invoiced exports for 2001. Would you buy plastic buckets from the Czech Republic for $973 each, tissues from China at $1874 a pound, a cotton dishtowel from Pakistan for $154, and tweezers from Japan at $4,896 each!
"U.S. companies, at least on paper, were getting very little for their exported products. If you were in business, would you sell bus and truck tires to Britain for $11.74 each, color video monitors to Pakistan for $21.90, and prefabricated buildings to Trinidad for $1.20 a unit.
"Comparing all claimed export and import prices to real world prices, the professors figured the 2001 U.S. tax loss at $53.1 billion.
"Or a company sets up subsidiaries in tax havens to "own" logos or intellectual property. Like Microsoft does in Ireland, transferring software that was made in America, that benefited by work done by Americans, to Ireland so Microsoft can pay taxes there (at 11%) instead of here (at 35%). Why is Ireland getting the benefit of American-created software? It's legal. We need to change the law.
"When logos are offshore, the company pays royalties to use the logo and deducts the amount as expenses. But the payments are not taxed or are taxed minimally offshore where they are moved. When Cheney ran Halliburton, it increased its offshore subsidiaries from 9 to at least 44.
"Half of world trade is between various parts of the same corporations. Experts believe that as much as half the world's capital flows through offshore centers. The totals held offshore include 31 percent of the net profits of U.S. multinationals.
"The whole collection of tax scams is why between 1989 and 1995, of US and multi-national corporations operating in the United States, with assets of at least $250 million or sales of at least $50 million, nearly two-thirds paid no U.S. income tax.
"In 1996-2000, Goodyear's profits were $442 million, but it paid no taxes and got a $23-million rebate. Colgate-Palmolive made $1.6 billion and got back $21 million. Other companies that got rebates in 1998 included Texaco, Chevron, PepsiCo, Pfizer, J.P. Morgan, MCI Worldcom, General Motors, Phillips Petroleum and Northrop Grumman. Microsoft reported $12.3 billion U.S income in 1999 and paid zero federal taxes. (In two recent years, Microsoft paid only 1.8 percent on $21.9 billion pretax U.S. profits.)
"During the 1950s, U.S. corporations accounted for 28 percent of federal revenues. Now, corporations represent just 11 percent.
"Those unpaid taxes can buy a lot of politicians and power. When Nixon needed money to pay the Watergate burglars, he got it from some corporate offshore bank accounts.
"The system has given the big banks and corporations and the super-rich mountains of hidden cash they use to control our political systems.
"The offshore system must be dismantled.
"So why isn't the progressive movement doing something about this? This is a case where some people in Congress are ahead of the activists. There are a handful of Democrats like Senators Levin (MI), Dorgan (ND) and Conrad (ND), like Rep. Doggett (TX), who are speaking out and introducing legislation. But there is no movement behind them. And while Obama has signed onto the Levin Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, Clinton, Biden and Dodd have not."
Ms. Komisar spreads out the proposed strategies at taxjustice-usa.org. One or more are structured so that you can play a part in furthering them toward adoption.
As she concluded: "Let's get the country to tell the corporations that the taxes they are dodging is our money."
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June 03, 2007
Exclusive: Office of Nation's Top Spy Inadvertently Reveals Key to Classified National Intel Budget
by Dr. R. J. Hill house
http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_w...sive_offic.html
In a holdover from the Cold War when the number really did matter to national security, the size of the US national intelligence budget remains one of the government's most closely guarded secrets. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the highest intelligence agency in the country that oversees all federal intelligence agencies, appears to have inadvertently released the keys to that number in an unclassified PowerPoint presentation now posted on the website of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). By reverse engineering the numbers in an underlying data element embedded in the presentation, it seems that the total budget of the 16 US intelligence agencies in fiscal year 2005 was $60 billion, almost 25% higher than previously believed.
In the presentation originally made to a DIA conference in Colorado on May 14, Terri Everett, an Office of the Director of National Intelligence senior procurement executive, revealed that 70% of the total Intelligence Community budget is spent on contractors. (This was reported by Tim Shorrock on Salon.com.) Everett also included a slide depicting the trend of award dollars to contractors by the Intelligence Community from fiscal year 95 through a partial year of fiscal year 06 (i.e. through August 31st of FY06.) Because these figures are classified, a scale of the total number of award dollars was omitted from the Y-axis of the bar chart. The PowerPoint presentation was first obtained by Shorrock for Salon.com and it was later posted on the DIA's website where I downloaded it. Although it would not have been visible to the conference attendees, the data underlying the bar graph--the total amount of Intelligence Community funds spent on contractors--is readily available in the actual presentation. By double clicking on the bar chart, a small spreadsheet with the raw classified data appears:
http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_w...sive_offic.html
(To view this spreadsheet in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's actual PowerPoint presentation, make sure you are opening the presentation in the PowerPoint program and not a web browser, view slide #11 and, depending upon your version of PowerPoint, making sure you're not on the 9/11 image object double-click on the chart or right click on it and choose Chart Object/Open.)
Here are the dollar amounts in tens of millions spent by the US Intelligence Community on contractors, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as embedded in the spreadsheet data underlying the bar graph (pictured above):
http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_w...sive_offic.html
Note: FY06 data as of 31 August. (The numbers are in tens of millions of dollars, although this is not noted, but it is previously known that the amount spent on contracts is a double-digit billion plus dollar figure.)
This 70% of the Intelligence Community budget spent on contractors most likely includes all Intelligence Community direct acquisitions from contractors, including satellites and other very expensive hardware programs as well as more mundane supplies in addition to contracted services--(e.g. "green badgers" or staff contracted to the CIA.) The remaining 30% of the Intelligence Community budget most likely includes both personnel (i.e., civilian federal employee) and as well as intergovernmental operations and maintenance and supplies (e.g. payments by some Intelligence Community elements to GSA to lease office space and acquire government pens and office supplies.) By taking the 70% of the intelligence community budget that now goes to contractors in conjunction with the actual dollars spent on contractors, it is possible to reverse-engineer the budget using simple algebra.
This top line $60 billion figure is 25% above the estimated $48 billion budget for FY 08. It is quite probable that this total figure was not even known by the government until recently. Greater control and oversight of the Intelligence Community budget was a hallmark of the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 that created the position of the Director of National Intelligence and gave it the mandate to get an overview of the entire amount spent on intelligence government-wide. To this end, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has recently gathered all parts of the previously fragmented Intelligence Community budget together for the first time as part of its Intelligence Resource Information System (IRIS). In the report from the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence released last Thursday, the committee praised the Office of the Director of Intelligence for creating a "single budget system called the Intelligence Resource Information System." It also recognizes their efforts in helping create what "will be used for further inquiry by the Committee’s budget and audit staffs and will be a baseline that allows the Congress and DNI to derive trend data from future reports."
Earlier, lower estimates were most likely only included what fell directly under the Director of Central Intelligence and which would have omitted parts of NSA, NRO. A total Intelligence Community number, with the Intelligence Community as defined by 50 U.S.C. 401a(4), would also now include the various military intelligence services (e.g. Army Intel, Navy Intel, etc.), each with its respective weapon technology intelligence exploitation shop. A total budget would also include a large portion of the budget of the Department of Homeland Security which was previously fragment across multiple government agencies. A $60 billion government-wide Intelligence Community budget is not at all out of line with the post 9/11 organizational reality. It seems that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is just now getting a clear picture of the fragmented intelligence community budget.
The overall Intelligence Community budget has long been a well kept secret and this classification did once have relevance when a large shift in the budget could have indicated to the Soviets an addition or cancellation of a major defense program. Now that our greatest adversaries are stateless entities that run on a shoestring budget and strike soft targets, signals of changes in high-dollar defense systems hardly seem worth hiding. Nonetheless, the federal government has frequently gone to court to keep the amount of the national intelligence budget secret. Only the budgets for 1963, 1997 and 1998 have been officially revealed, largely in response to FOIA lawsuits. And in 2005 a US News reporter picked up an apparent slip of the tongue by an official of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence at a conference when it was stated the national intel budget was $44 billion, but it was not clear which fiscal year this was in reference to and the DNI refused to confirm if the figure was accurate or the release accidental. At this time, they would not have had total dollar figures through the new IRIS system. But with such a staggering budget, it does seem that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would be well advised to find some room in the Intelligence Community budget for a staff training on PowerPoint and OPSEC.
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That's quite interesting; I hope further research goes into discovering the cause. I generally support GM agriculture, but we have to make sure that we have not unintentionally tampered with a delicate process.
I'd be grateful if you keep us up to date on this Doug, and I'll repost it at a science forum I belong to.
Suddenly, the bees are simply vanishing
Scientists are at a loss to pinpoint the cause. The die-off in 35 states has crippled beekeepers and threatened many crops.By Jia-Rui Chong and Thomas H. Maugh II
Los Angeles Times
June 10, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci...=la-home-center
The dead bees under Dennis vanEngelsdorp's microscope were like none he had ever seen.
He had expected to see mites or amoebas, perennial pests of bees. Instead, he found internal organs swollen with debris and strangely blackened. The bees' intestinal tracts were scarred, and their rectums were abnormally full of what appeared to be partly digested pollen. Dark marks on the sting glands were telltale signs of infection.
"The more you looked, the more you found," said VanEngelsdorp, the acting apiarist for the state of Pennsylvania. "Each thing was a surprise."
VanEngelsdorp's examination of the bees in November was one of the first scientific glimpses of a mysterious honeybee die-off that has launched an intense search for a cure.
The puzzling phenomenon, known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, has been reported in 35 states, five Canadian provinces and several European countries. The die-off has cost U.S. beekeepers about $150 million in losses and an uncertain amount for farmers scrambling to find bees to pollinate their crops.
Scientists have scoured the country, finding eerily abandoned hives in which the bees seem to have simply left their honey and broods of baby bees.
"We've never experienced bees going off and leaving brood behind," said Pennsylvania-based beekeeper Dave Hackenberg. "It was like a mother going off and leaving her kids."
Researchers have picked through the abandoned hives, dissected thousands of bees, and tested for viruses, bacteria, pesticides and mites.
So far, they are stumped.
According to the Apiary Inspectors of America, 24% of 384 beekeeping operations across the country lost more than 50% of their colonies from September to March. Some have lost 90%.
"I'm worried about the bees," said Dan Boyer, 52, owner of Ridgetop Orchards in Fishertown, Pa., which grows apples. "The more I learn about it, the more I think it is a national tragedy."
At Boyer's orchard, 400 acres of apple trees — McIntosh, Honey Crisp, Red Delicious and 11 other varieties — have just begun to bud white flowers.
Boyer's trees need to be pollinated. Incompletely pollinated blooms would still grow apples, he said, but the fruit would be small and misshapen, suitable only for low-profit juice.
This year, he will pay dearly for the precious bees — $13,000 for 200 hives, the same price that 300 hives cost him last year.
The scene is being repeated throughout the country, where honeybees, scientifically known as Apis mellifera, are required to pollinate a third of the nation's food crops, including almonds, cherries, blueberries, pears, strawberries and pumpkins.
Vanishing colonies
One of the earliest alarms was sounded by Hackenberg, who used to keep about 3,000 hives in dandelion-covered fields near the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania.
In November, Hackenberg, 58, was at his winter base in Florida. He peeked in on a group of 400 beehives he had driven down from his home in West Milton, Pa., a month before. He went from empty box to empty box. Only about 40 had bees in them.
"It was just the most phenomenal thing I thought I'd ever seen," he said.
The next morning, Hackenberg called Jerry Hayes, the chief of apiary inspection at the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and president of the Apiary Inspectors of America.
Hayes mentioned some bee die-offs in Georgia that, until then, hadn't seemed significant.
Hackenberg drove back to West Milton with a couple of dead beehives and live colonies that had survived. He handed them over to researchers at Pennsylvania State University.
With amazing speed, the bees vanished from his other hives, more than 70% of which were abandoned by February.
Hackenberg, a talkative, wiry man with a deeply lined face, figured he lost more than $460,000 this winter for replacement bees, lost honey and missed pollination opportunities.
"If that happens again, we're out of business," he said.
It didn't take researchers long to figure out they were dealing with something new.
VanEngelsdorp, 37, quickly eliminated the most obvious suspects: Varroa and tracheal mites, which have occasionally wrought damage on hives since the 1980s.
At the state lab in Harrisburg, Pa., VanEngelsdorp checked bee samples from Pennsylvania and Georgia. He washed bees with soapy water to dislodge Varroa mites and cut the thorax of the bees to look for tracheal mites; he found that the number of mites was not unusually high.
His next guess was amoebic infection. He scanned the bees' kidneys for cysts and found a handful, but not enough to explain the population decline.
VanEngelsdorp dug through scientific literature looking for other mass disappearances.
He found the first reference in a 1869 federal report, detailing a mysterious bee disappearance. There was only speculation as to the cause — possibly poisonous honey or maybe a hot summer.
A 1923 handbook on bee culture noted that a "disappearing disease" went away in a short time without treatment. There was a reference to "fall dwindle" in a 1965 scientific article to describe sudden disappearances in Texas and Louisiana.
He found other references but no explanations.
VanEngelsdorp traveled to Florida and California at the beginning of the year to collect adult bees, brood, nectar, pollen and comb for a more systematic study. He went to 11 apiaries, both sick and healthy, and collected 102 colonies.
A number of the pollen samples went to Maryann Frazier, a honeybee specialist at Penn State who has been coordinating the pesticide investigation. Her group has been testing for 106 chemicals used to kill mites, funguses or other pests.
Scientists have focused on a new group of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, which have spiked in popularity because they are safe for people, Frazier said. Studies have shown that these pesticides can kill bees and throw off their ability to learn and navigate, she said.
Researchers have yet to collect enough data to come to any conclusions, but the experience of French beekeepers casts doubt on the theory. France banned the most commonly used neonicotinoid in 1999 after complaints from beekeepers that it was killing their colonies. French hives, however, are doing no better now, experts said.
Sniffing out the culprit
Entomologist Jerry J. Bromenshenk of the University of Montana launched his own search for poisons, relying on the enhanced odor sensitivity of bees — about 40 times better than that of humans.
When a colony is exposed to a new chemical odor, he said, its sound changes in volume and frequency, producing a unique audio signature.
Bromenshenk has been visiting beekeepers across the country, recording hive sounds and taking them back to his lab for analysis. To date, no good candidates have surfaced.
If the cause is not a poison, it is most likely a parasite.
UC San Francisco researchers announced in April that they had found a single-celled protozoan called Nosema ceranae in bees from colonies with the collapse disorder.
Unfortunately, Bromenshenk said, "we see equal levels of Nosema in CCD colonies and healthy colonies."
Infected swarms?
Several researchers, including entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Penn State and Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a virologist at Columbia University, have been sifting through bees that have been ground up, looking for viruses and bacteria.
"We were shocked by the huge number of pathogens present in each adult bee," Cox-Foster said at a recent meeting of bee researchers convened by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The large number of pathogens suggested, she said, that the bees' immune systems had been suppressed, allowing the proliferation of infections.
The idea that a pathogen is involved is supported by recent experiments conducted by VanEngelsdorp and USDA entomologist Jeffrey S. Pettis.
One of the unusual features of the disorder is that the predators of abandoned beehives, such as hive beetles and wax moths, refuse to venture into infected hives for weeks or longer.
"It's as if there is something repellent or toxic about the colony," said Hayes, the Florida inspector.
To test this idea, VanEngelsdorp and Pettis set up 200 beehive boxes with new, healthy bees from Australia and placed them in the care of Hackenberg.
Fifty of the hives were irradiated to kill potential pathogens. Fifty were fumigated with concentrated acetic acid, a hive cleanser commonly used in Canada. Fifty were filled with honey frames that had been taken from Hackenberg's colonies before the collapse, and the last 50 were hives that had been abandoned that winter.
When VanEngelsdorp visited the colonies at the beginning of May, bees in the untouched hive were clearly struggling, filling only about a quarter of a frame. Bees living on the reused honeycomb were alive but not thriving. A hive that had been fumigated with acetic acid was better.
When he popped open an irradiated hive, bees were crawling everywhere. "This does imply there is something biological," he said.
If it is a pathogen or a parasite, honeybees are poorly equipped to deal with it, said entomologist May Berenbaum of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The honeybee genome has only half as many genes to detoxify poisons and to fight off infections as do other insects.
"There is something about the life of the honeybee that has led to the loss of a lot of genes associated with detoxification, associated with the immune system," she said.
In the absence of knowledge, theories have proliferated, including one that Osama bin Laden has engineered the die-off to disrupt American agriculture.
One of the most pervasive theories is that cellphone transmissions are causing the disappearances — an idea that originated with a recent German study. Berenbaum called the theory "a complete figment of the imagination."
The German physicist who conducted the tiny study "disclaimed the connection to cellphones," she said. "What they put in the colony was a cordless phone. Whoever translated the story didn't know the difference."
Another popular theory is that the bees have been harmed by corn genetically engineered to contain the pesticide B.t.
Berenbaum shot down the idea: "Here in Illinois, we're surrounded by an ocean of B.t. pollen, and the bees are not afflicted."
And so the search continues.
Many beekeepers have few options but to start rebuilding. Gene Brandi, a veteran beekeeper based in Los Banos, Calif., lost 40% of his 2,000 colonies this winter.
Brandi knows plenty of beekeepers who sold their equipment at bargain prices.
Scurrying around a blackberry farm near Watsonville, Brandi, 55, was restocking his bees. In a white jumpsuit and yellow bee veil, he pulled out a frame of honeycomb from a hive that had so many bees they were spilling out the front entrance.
"When it's going good like this, you forget CCD," he said.
Hackenberg, who has spent his whole life in the business, isn't giving up either. He borrowed money and restocked with bees from Australia.
In April, the normally hale Hackenberg started feeling short of breath. His doctor said he was suffering from stress and suggested he slow down.
Not now, Hackenberg thought. "I'm going to go down fighting."
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You've done a fine job as moderator, as usual, Evan. Thanks.
It seems to me the matter to dispense with initially is whether anyone on the forum wishes to argue that the attack on the USS Liberty was an accident.
If so, that should be discussed.
If not, I suggest we move to speculation about motive...
I also have a personal theory about great courage that has yet to be acknowledged which relates to the Liberty incident. I'll roll it out when we come to discuss possible motives for a deliberate attack.
If there is to be a detailed debate about what happened and whether the Israeli attack could have been an accidental mistake, perhaps people with first hand recollections of the event (notably USS Liberty survivors) could be asked to participate?
Why did Israel attack USS Liberty?
By Raffi Berg
BBC News
June 8, 2007
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6690425.stm
For former US seaman Gary Brummett, the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Middle East war has stirred painful memories.
As a 21-year-old third class petty officer, Mr Brummett was serving on board the USS Liberty off the coast of Egypt on 8 June, when, without warning, the vessel came under fire, first from fighter planes, then torpedo boats.
The attack, which lasted at least 40 minutes, resulted in the deaths of 34 of Mr Brummett's fellow crewmen, at least 170 injured and catastrophic damage to the ship.
Alarmingly, the assault had been carried out not by enemy forces, but by the US' closest regional ally, Israel.
Israel insists it mistook the Liberty for a hostile Egyptian ship, the El Quseir, and numerous US and Israeli inquiries have concluded the attack was accidental.
But for Mr Brummett and a growing body of conspiracy theorists, the authorities are guilty of a cover-up.
"I have more trouble with it today than when it happened because I know more of the facts about what was going on," said Mr Brummett.
"There's been an egregious wrong done here, there's been an extreme number of lies told to the American people and the American people do not know the truth about what happened."
'Sitting duck'
The attack on the Liberty - the gravest incident in the history of US-Israeli relations - has been a source of controversy for the past four decades.
Claim and counter-claim as to what happened have been fought out in every corner of the media, with the advent of the internet helping to reinvigorate the debate.
Israel's supporters say the incident is merely being used as a tool by critics to malign the Jewish state, while accusers say the attack was a war crime which has never come to light.
According to Israel, the incident was a tragic case of friendly fire occurring in the fog of war.
It says it believed the ship had been bombarding Israeli forces fighting in the Sinai, and that its pilots did not see any US flags (survivors say there were three) on the vessel before they opened fire.
Sceptics however claim the attack was premeditated and that the truth has been suppressed. The assertion of a cover-up was lent weight by a 2003 independent commission of inquiry which reported that the attack on the Liberty "remains the only serious naval incident that has never been thoroughly investigated by Congress".
Among the most popular theories as to why Israel would take such drastic action against its superpower ally is that the Liberty, a $40m state-of-the-art surveillance ship, was eavesdropping on an Israeli massacre of Egyptian prisoners of war.
Israel strongly denies its troops executed Egyptian POWs, saying those who died in an incident at that time were 250 armed Palestinian fighters killed in action.
Another is that the ship had learnt of secret Israeli plans to invade Syria's Golan Heights two days later and had to be destroyed.
'US collusion' theory
Perhaps the most sinister motive is that put forward by journalist Peter Hounam in his 2003 book "Operation Cyanide". The attack on the Liberty was pre-planned, perhaps from at least a year beforehand
Mr Hounam claims secret elements within the US and Israeli governments colluded to bomb the ship and blame the attack on Egypt and their superpower ally, the Soviet Union, triggering massive retaliation which would ensure Israeli victory.
"The attack on the Liberty was pre-planned, perhaps from at least a year beforehand," Mr Hounam says.
"The Liberty was sent into a very dangerous situation, where it was, in my view, placed in a position to be attacked."
Mr Hounam says the intention was to sink the ship and kill everyone on board, but as the Liberty remained afloat the plan was aborted and has been hushed up ever since.
'Presidential order'
Successive US and Israeli inquiries, and the declassification of thousands of pieces of information, have done little to dampen suspicions.
One of the most powerful claims of a cover-up has come from retired US Navy lawyer Capt Ward Boston, counsel to the Navy Court of Inquiry into the incident conducted just days after the event.
Capt Boston says the court's original findings, which he signed, were changed afterwards by government lawyers.
He also claims the president of the court, Rear Adm Isaac Kidd, told him he was ordered by US President Lyndon Johnson and Defence Secretary Robert McNamara to conclude the attack was a case of mistaken identity.
However, Capt Boston's version of events - and the notion that what happened was anything more than a tragic accident - are disputed by numerous academics and authors who have investigated the incident.
"It was a series of blunders by both the United States and Israel that resulted in a terrible tragedy and nothing more," says Jay Cristol, a federal judge and author of the book The Liberty Incident.
"All the official reports came to the same conclusion.
"Unfortunately there are a number of people who are on the other side of the Arab-Israeli conflict who think this is a way to attack the otherwise very strong relationship between the US and Israel, and they keep stirring the pot.
'No evidence'
It is a view with which historian Michael B Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem academic research institute, concurs.
"Many thousands of documents related to the Liberty have been declassified and in none of these documents will you find a scintilla of evidence to suggest any of these conspiracy theories are true," he says.
"The Golan one is the easiest to disprove because of where the Liberty was, not off the coast of Israel, but Egypt. Its listening devices weren't that powerful that they could listen in on communications in Tel Aviv.
"Moreover the Israelis were very upfront in telling the US that they planned to capture the Golan Heights and the Americans agreed to it.
"Regarding a massacre of Egyptian POWs, there's no evidence of that. And why would the Israelis try to cover up one atrocity by committing another?
He says the attack has remained a source of controversy because "it has all the ingredients of a good spy scandal. It involves espionage and it involves the Israelis, who are forever a focus of conspiracy theories.
"If I could prove the Liberty was attacked in a premeditated fashion, I would write it - it would be a great historical scoop - but the truth is far more mundane."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/midd...ast/6690425.stm
Published: 2007/06/08 11:19:19 GMT
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The article below states that Valenti had a reputation of generally not speaking ill of anyone – but this was not the case when he orchestrated the campaign against Barr McClellan’s book on LBJ and forced the History Channel to withdraw its segment on LBJ in its JFK assassination series.
I am reminded in reading the article of a statement made at a legal education seminar I attended years ago. The speaker, an attorney who clients were among the rich and powerful, remarked that in drawing up their testamentary documents he found that his clients viewed “death as an outrageous inconvenience.” I have the impression that Valenti fell into this category.
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June 7, 2007
Jack Valenti’s Memoir Suffers Without a Key Salesman
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/books/07...amp;oref=slogin
LOS ANGELES, June 6 — Jack Valenti’s death has created a marketing problem that would have challenged even him.
Mr. Valenti, a onetime Houston advertising man who became a confidant of President Lyndon B. Johnson and then, for nearly four decades, Hollywood’s spokesman as chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, died on April 26, just weeks before the release of his new memoir. Now his publisher, Harmony Books, and his survivors are struggling to ensure that the autobiography gets a modicum of the attention it would have received had Mr. Valenti, a singular raconteur, been around to talk it up himself.
Shaye Areheart, vice president and publisher of Harmony, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, said she last saw Mr. Valenti in February, when the two met to go over a second set of revisions and plans for promoting the book, “This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House and Hollywood.”
“He was like a kid in a candy shop,” Ms. Areheart said of the 85-year-old Mr. Valenti. “We had so much lined up for him: the ‘Today’ show. Don Imus, before he fell from grace. Larry King. NPR. CBS and Fox News. Everyone was so drawn to Jack, and he had so many stories to tell.”
Mr. Valenti had arranged much of the publicity himself, Ms. Areheart said. “We mentioned ‘Regis and Kelly,’ and he said he’d call Regis Philbin. He said he’d contact Les Moonves, Bob Wright, Roger Ailes. He could make a phone call and get straight to the top.”
Mr. Valenti, the master networker, had also arranged to be celebrated by his friends among the rich and powerful at book parties in New York (given by Barry Diller), Washington (Dan Glickman, Mr. Valenti’s successor at the Motion Picture Association, and Franco Nuschese, owner of the Georgetown power spot Café Milano), and Los Angeles (Kirk Douglas, Mr. Valenti’s closest Hollywood friend, and Robert A. Day Jr., founder of Trust Company of the West).
But his death left Harmony in a costly, and awkward, bind. The book was the imprint’s lead summer title, with an initial printing of 100,000 copies, and Harmony had bought front-of-store display space in the major booksellers for the two weeks before Father’s Day. “We had an enormous investment in Jack,” Ms. Areheart said. She would not disclose what he had been paid, but called it a “significant advance.”
Harmony sought to capitalize on the coverage of Mr. Valenti’s death by shipping the book to retailers early, to go on sale May 15, three weeks before the scheduled on-sale date of June 5. Nielsen BookScan said only 1,000 copies had been sold through June 3 — a grim indication, since the first sales are often the strongest. (BookScan captures about 70 percent of book sales.) But confusion over the correct day to display the title could have made those early numbers less predictive, some industry executives speculated.
Many books are published posthumously of course, like David Halberstam’s book on the Korean War, due this fall. This is not the first time an author’s death has created a publisher’s nightmare: In 1992 Sam Walton, the billionaire founder of Wal-Mart, died after having signed a $4 million contract with Doubleday for his memoirs. And Virginia Clinton Kelley, President Clinton’s mother, died in 1994 four months before her memoir was to be published. Mr. Walton’s book, written with John Huey, became a best seller anyway; Ms. Kelley’s did not.
Mr. Valenti’s book recounts his bootstraps rise from modest means in Houston; his bombing runs as a World War II pilot; his place in the motorcade when President John F. Kennedy was shot; his close relationship with Johnson; and his tenure in Hollywood as a starry-eyed but fierce advocate. It includes little that is newsworthy — no salacious anecdotes or score-settling barbs, which comes as no surprise, given Mr. Valenti’s reputation for seldom speaking ill of anyone. What it had to grab attention, in a word, was him, and he’d promised to devote all of June and July to publicizing the book.
In his absence Ms. Areheart has been working with Mr. Valenti’s daughter, Courtenay, a movie executive at Warner Brothers, to line up surrogates from among her father’s friends in Washington and Hollywood, something she said was a welcome distraction from her own grieving. So far, a Harmony publicist said, “Today” has agreed to interview Ms. Valenti and her mother, Mary Margaret, and “Tavis Smiley” on PBS has invited Sherry Lansing, the former Paramount chairwoman, to talk about Mr. Valenti, but no other spots have been confirmed.
“It’s awkward,” Ms. Valenti said. “For a lot of these different outlets, it’s harder for them to make the show interesting. We know that talking to us is not what people want.” She added that no celebrity or politician would be able to do justice to the full sweep of her father’s life. “We’re all dealing with the reality that the best salesperson for the book was Daddy.”
Ms. Valenti, meanwhile, was able to prevail upon one very famous friend of her father’s, Michael Douglas, to stand in for him in the audio version of “This Time, This Place.” (Mr. Valenti suffered a stroke a week before he was to begin recording the audio version in March.)
“I’m in the movie business, so I know what it is to ask somebody to do something like that, knowing how busy he is, and how long it takes to do,” Ms. Valenti said. It took Mr. Douglas three days. “But Michael, without batting an eye, said: ‘Don’t give it another thought. I’ll do it immediately.’ ”
Ms. Areheart said she regretted allowing Mr. Valenti to delay publication several times as he dredged up fond memories and thought up new chapters. “I kept saying, ‘Jack, let it go,’ ” she said. If she’d only stuck to a March date, she said, “he’d have been able to enjoy it.”
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Don't get too excited about Richard Hoagland.
He is the main proponent of the so-called Face on Mars theory.
This is not intended as a negative judgment of any such hypothesis, but rather as a heads-up that anything Hoagland proffers will be subject to ridicule because of his Martian civilization contentions.
Yet again focus on the "who and why" negatively impacts our efforts to seek and attain justice based on demonstration of the conspiratorial "how."
Charles
I failed to note in my report on the interview that Saint John said that he was in discussions with "60 Minutes" about a possible segment on its program dealing with the tape recording that his father had given to him to be released after his death.
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E. Howard Hunt Update
Filling in for Art Bell, Ian Punnett welcomed back the eldest son of "super-spy" E. Howard Hunt, Saint John Hunt, to coastotocoastam on June 2 for an update on what his father knew about the plot to assassinate President Kennedy and how the news media has reacted to this story.
Should you wish to listen to the four hour show at a nominal cost, click on the link below:
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2007/06/02.html#recap
Among the highlights of the interview were:
(1) Saint John said that William F. Buckley refused to write the Introduction to Howard Hunt’s biography, American Spy, until the reference to LBJ’s involvement in the JFK assassination was diluted. The CIA, which had to approve contents of the book, took the same position.
(2) Richard Hoagland, former science adviser to Walter Cronkite and former consultant to NASA, phoned in to say that he is writing a book on the history of NASA and that in the course of research he had uncovered evidence of LBJ’s role in the assassination. His said that LBJ was the tool of certain interests that he will describe in his new book and that the same interests told LBJ to “fold his cards” and not seek re-election in 1968 because he had fulfilled his assigned mission.
(3) Another caller said that Texans were deeply involved in the JFK assassination and that she spoke from personal knowledge as her father was a close associate of LBJ and that she was at one time married to a relative of Billie Sol Estes.
All in all, the interview with Saint John was extremely informative.
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I couldn't believe that the US and UK Governments would be stupid enough to invade Iraq - sadly I was proved wrong.
I don't believe that the US is stupid enough to invade Iran - I hope I'm not proved wrong again. If they do go ahead (and heaven help us all if that's the case), then I'm assuming it will be on their own - I don't think the UK has the militray resources or political will to go to war in Iran.
Does 'The Decider' Decide on War?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
May 30, 2007
www.lewrockwell.com
Has Congress given George Bush a green light to attack Iran?
For he is surely behaving as though it is his call alone. And evidence is mounting that we are on a collision course for war.
Iran has detained several Iranian-Americans, seemingly in retaliation for our continuing to hold five Iranians in Iraq.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, says Iran is making progress in the enrichment of uranium and denying it access to Iran's nuclear sites.
Bush is calling on Russia and China to toughen sanctions.
A flotilla of U.S. warships, including the carriers Stennis and Nimitz, has passed through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf.
U.S. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell has told CNN there is "very credible intelligence" Iran is funding Sunni extremists engaged in the roadside bombing of U.S. troops.
CBS reports the United States has engaged in the industrial sabotage of Iran's nuclear program by making the equipment Iran acquires on the black market unusable or destructive.
ABC reports that Bush has authorized the CIA to mount a "black" operation to destabilize Iran, using "non-lethal" means. The absence of White House outrage over the leak suggests it may have wanted the information out.
ABC.com reports U.S. officials are supporting a militant group, Jundallah, in the "tri-border region" of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Jundallah, a Sunni Islamist group seeking independence for Baluchistan, claims to have killed hundreds of Iranians.
While U.S.-Iran discussions have begun, there are reports Vice President Cheney and the neo-con remnant, along with the Israelis, are opposed to talks and believe that the only solution to Iran's nuclear program is military. Whether this is part of a good-cop, bad-cop routine to convince Tehran to suspend enrichment, we do not know.
But this much is sure. If the U.S. government is aiding Islamic militants who are killing Iranians, and Iran is providing roadside bombs to Iraqi militants, Sunni or Shia, to kill Americans, we are in a proxy war. And it could explode into a major war.
So the questions come. Where is the Congress, which alone has the power to take us to war? Why are the Democratic candidates parroting the "all-options-are-on-the-table!" mantra, when as ex-Sen. Mike Gravel noted in the first Democratic debate, this means George W. Bush is authorized to attack Iran.
Why does Congress not enact the resolution Nancy Pelosi pulled down, which declares that nothing in present law authorizes President Bush to launch a pre-emptive
strike or preventive war on Iran – and before launching any such attack, he must get prior approval from both houses of Congress?
If we are going to war, is it not imperative that, this time, we know exactly why we must go to war, what exactly the threat is from Iran, what are the likely consequences of a U.S. attack on a third Islamic country and what are the alternatives to war?
For there are arguments against war, as well as for war – and the former are not receiving a hearing, as both parties compete in their fulminations against Iran's
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new Hitler of the Middle East.
What are those arguments?
On Iran's nuclear progress, there is a real question as to whether they are producing purified uranium. Iran's refusal to let the IAEA see what it is doing suggests it may be covering up failure.
Second, though Iranians sound bellicose, Iran has not started a single war since the revolution of 1979. Indeed, Iran was the victim of a war launched by Saddam Hussein, whom we secretly supported. Not within living memory has Iran invaded or attacked another country.
But in the last 110 years, peace-loving Americans have fought Spain, Germany twice, Austria-Hungary, Japan, Italy, North Korea, North Vietnam, Iraq twice and Serbia. We have intervened militarily in the Philippines, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Lebanon and Grenada. We bombed Libya. Now, a case can be made for most of these wars, whose fallen we honor on Memorial Day.
But the point is this. Why would Iran, with no air force or navy that can stand up 24 hours against us, no missile that can reach us, no atom bomb, and no ability to withstand U.S. air and sea attack, want a war with us that could mean the end of Iran as a modern nation and possible breakup of the country, as Iraq is breaking up?
Whether one is pro-war or antiwar, ought we not – if we are going into another war – do it the right way, the constitutional way, with Congress declaring war? Or does the Democratic Congress think that what is best for America is to let "the decider" decide?
Because that is what George Bush is doing right now.
May 30, 2007
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President Kennedy and His Gay Best Friend
Spring 1933, two schoolmates began a lifelong friendship. LeMoyne Billings, a closeted gay teenager, was immediately attracted to the young Jack Kennedy. Though evidence suggests Lem made sexual advances that Kennedy spurned, their friendship flourished….
By Blase DiStefano
Outsmart Magazine
Houston, Texas
May 2007
http://www.outsmartmagazine.com/this_issue...ryid=1177953009
[Poster’s note: be sure to click on the above link to see the pictures of JFK and Lem Billings together.]
For those readers too young to remember the White House in the early '60s, here are a few facts: It was home to the youngest president ever. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was 43 years old (a first ... and a last) and Catholic (also a first ... and a last). The first lady was Jacqueline Kennedy, and the couple had two children, Caroline and John Jr. The First Couple had many gay friends, though the early '60s was not a time when that was discussed.
I spoke with David Pitts about his new book, Jack and Lem: John F. Kennedy and Lem Billings—The Untold Story of an Extraordinary Friendship (Carroll & Graf Publishers).
Blase DiStefano: How did you find out about Lem Billings?
David Pitts: I found out because of my own interest in the Kennedy presidency. I read all the JFK books, and I became aware of Lem Billings over the years in these books. Some writers suggested that he was gay, and Gore Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest even called Lem "chief faggot of Camelot"—he definitely picks up on Lem being gay. So it was kind of hinted at, but nobody really looked into it.
What made you decide to go this route?
It was kind of a circuitous route. When I left full-time journalism in 2003, I knew I wanted to do a JFK book because of my interest in the Kennedy presidency. I didn't want to do the same old story that everybody keeps on doing every time about the Cuban Missile Crisis and so on. So I thought to myself that Lem Billings—this kind of a shadowy figure that I'd read about over the years—was probably a close political confidant of the president and that there was a story here about his political influence behind the scenes.
That's what I thought was going to be the story when I started this project. And it was only after I got into the interviews and started looking into the documents and the letters that I realized this was a personal friendship and not a political friendship.
Was it common knowledge in the administration that Lem Billings was gay?
It's not clear that anybody in the administration knew for sure. They certainly thought that because he was at the White House so often, he seemed misplaced there. Some other people who weren't in the administration but were friends of the president certainly picked up on it. I had an interview with Ben Bradlee [former executive editor of The Washington Post] for example, and he certainly sensed LeMoyne was gay. But it was a different time, and there was no real discussion about it, and Ben Bradlee told me he didn't bring it up with the president and the president didn't bring it up with him. So I would say it was generally sensed but not known.
Is there any indication that Lem was in love with Jack?
Yes. There are various indications of that. I think the best example is a quote that I used in the book. He's on the record as saying, "Jack made a big difference in my life. Because of him, I was never lonely. He may have been the reason I never got married." So there are various indications of his profound attachment to Kennedy.
Is there any indication of Jack's response to his finding out that Lem was gay?
There is a response early on in the friendship. LeMoyne attempted a sexual proposal to John Kennedy—this was at Choate.
About how old were they at this time?
This would be when Lem was 17 and Jack was 16. Although we don't have a record of what Lem wrote to Jack, we do have a record of Jack's response, and he essentially rebuffed the sexual advance but not the friendship.
So how do you account for Kennedy, especially being Catholic, keeping the friendship going and not being homophobic?
Very, very surprising, especially in the 1930s before the Kinsey reports, before everything. This was a question I asked various people who knew John Kennedy, including Gore Vidal and Ben Bradlee. They basically said he was a member of the upper class, that he was comfortable around gay people, even as president, and he wasn't a judgmental type of guy. This was the response they gave to me—that it was never a problem to him, not only with LeMoyne, but with other gay people he knew, such as Gore Vidal.
What must it have been like for Lem being gay in the 1930s?
Extremely difficult. Like almost every gay man at that time he felt compelled to live a secret life, not only because he was a friend of Jack Kennedy, but in order to have a successful career, which he did in advertising. He knew that was necessary, and, like all gay people, he paid a price for that, which became apparent later in his life when he began drinking quite a bit.
It apparently colored his entire life. And I guess it colored how he later talked about his life, like the quote you mentioned about how he could have gotten married.
I hate to do what other authors always say, which is say read the book, but there is no substitute for reading the book and seeing what Lem himself said in the various letters and his 815-page oral history, which I used extensively for the book. You can see him struggling with trying to be candid about what he felt. He obviously wanted to be. He died in 1981, and certainly during the time when he was alive, he felt it was not possible for him to be that candid.
At the time that Lem and Jack met, basically it was OK for men to be intimate, affectionate without sex. I was thinking specifically of the photo of men and women arm in arm, with Lem and Jack the only two males arm in arm. That to me says a whole lot about that era, because in today's society, certain people would look at that and flinch.
That's one point I tried to make in the book in one of the chapters. Ironically, in some ways gay people had more license at that time than they do now. Homosexuality wasn't on the radar screen, the general population wasn't really aware of it, and so, in a sense, gay people could do certain things, such as the example that you gave, and it did not come under suspicion the way it clearly would today.
Today it would be assumed they were gay. And about the quote, about Lem never getting married — do you think his love for Jack kept him from having a serious relationship with another man?
It seems to have. A major source for the book was a man named Larry Quirk, who is an editor and writer in New York and has published a number of books himself. He knew Lem and had a sexual involvement with Lem, but he told me that even though Lem had various sexual involvements throughout his life, including with him, that there was only one person he really loved and that was Jack Kennedy.
Do you think Kennedy's most important relationships were with men?
I've thought about it a great deal after writing the book. Our language in society is really inadequate to express the range of involvements and emotions that people have in this regard. But if I were to summarize John Kennedy, I think what I found out in writing this book is that his sexual preferences were women, but his attachments were to men. So I don't know what that makes him—there's no word for that, right? [both laugh] He did have some pretty profound attachments to women, but he also seemed to want and need strong attachments to men that were not sexual.
At that time I think it was easier to do that. Now it's more suspect: "If I have this type of relationship with a man, people are going to think I'm gay..."
I think you're exactly right. I don't think it was uncommon at the time. This was before the women's movement when women were thought of as sex objects and they weren't allowed into certain clubs, particularly in Washington, or even in the National Press Club where women weren't allowed even as journalists. Women were considerably downgraded in importance in society at large, so it wouldn't be surprising, particularly in elite circles, if men's strongest attachments were to other men.
Do you think Jack used Lem as a gofer? It seemed like Lem allowed it, so it wasn't one-sided.
Doing the research for the book and talking to some people, I found conflicting evidence on that. Gore Vidal said he was the gofer. I think the phrase he used was, "Lem was the guy who carried the bags for Jack." And he called him "Jack's slave" at one point. But other people discounted that. Jack's sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, said that the friendship was very equal. And I did find evidence in the letters when they were both at college—Lem was at Princeton and Jack was at Harvard—I did find evidence when they got together in New York on weekends, it was as much Jack who was suggesting their getting together as it was Lem. So it wasn't always Lem asking for the time. The friendship seems to have been quite mutual. And in one of the interviews with Gore Vidal [Pitts had three interviews with him], he seems to concede that the friendship was a bit more than carrying the bags.
Lem was very useful in Kennedy's political campaigns.
Exactly. He wasn't very good [both laugh], but the important point that was made was that no matter how inexperienced Lem was politically, no matter how much he messed things up sometimes, Jack wanted him involved, which is another indication of the strength of the friendship, because the president didn't seem to care that he wasn't that efficient at times in the political sense.
It does seem like the friendship was serious, because Kennedy could have dropped him easily, especially considering that Kennedy may have been concerned about people finding out that Lem was gay.
That's one of the most amazing things. Of course, when it started in 1933 and Jack was at school, you can certainly argue that for the first 10 or 15 years, there was no political threat, but once he started on the road to the White House after World War II, this friendship posed a political threat, and if the Russians would have gotten hold of this information, it could have been problematic.
Lem was considered part of the Kennedy family, wasn't he?
He certainly was. All the evidence I've found was that every single member of the Kennedy family just adored him. It wasn't just Jack Kennedy. He became close to Robert Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ethel Kennedy, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver. The only person who is a little circumspect in her affections was Jackie Kennedy, for maybe obvious reasons.
After Jack married Jackie, what was the relationship like between Jack and Lem?
From all accounts, it stayed the same.
Jackie did like Lem, didn't she?
All the evidence seems to indicate she liked him quite a lot. In actuality, she had more things in common with Lem than she did with Jack. Jack was a political animal, and her main interest was in the arts, which was Lem's main interest. So they had much in common. The other point that seemed to be very salient was the fact that in the early years of her marriage when she was having some difficulties with Jack Kennedy, Lem was a kind of humorous intermediary who helped break the tension. But he was always there, and on many occasions she wanted him there, but on other occasions she didn't.
What about Lem's relationship with Caroline and John Jr.?
With Caroline and John Jr., it seems to have been affectionate and close. After the assassination, Jackie was in New York for roughly five years before she married Aristotle Onassis in 1968. That's when both Caroline and John were quite young, so Jackie Kennedy was keen to have them spend time with Lem so they could learn all about the president in his younger days, pre-dating the time she knew him.
I remember reading in the book that Lem had all this information that nobody else seemed to have.
Most of the people around Jack Kennedy had met him after the war when his political career began, and Jackie hadn't met him until 1951. So almost nobody outside the family knew him from 1933. So that was important to her. And he saw much less of them when she moved outside of the United States after her marriage to Onassis. But when she returned in the mid-'70s and started working in New York, they were teenagers by then, and they would go over to his place by themselves. So they knew him quite well, Caroline probably a little bit more than John Jr.
Didn't Lem basically have his own room in the White House?
It was on the third floor. The chief White House usher at the time, J. B. West, confirmed that, and it was basically his room. And Lem himself talked about it in his oral history.
How important was that oral history?
That document was vital to this book. It's 815 pages. I was working on the book for three years, and for most of the time I couldn't get access to it, because although it's in the Kennedy Library, it's off limits to authors and journalists. The only person who can give you permission to get to it is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he finally gave me permission in the final months when I was preparing the book.
Do you know why he finally gave in?
I don't. I pestered him a lot, sending letters. That may have been part of the reason. He also probably checked me out as a journalist [Pitts has written various articles on John Kennedy] and realized I wasn't some kind of far-right writer. The Kennedys are getting kind of suspicious of journalists these days, because there have been a lot of trash books or political-attack books from the right about the Kennedys in recent years, so that may have been one reason for his caution, but I really don't know.
Wasn't Lem such a regular visitor at the White House that security would let him pass without some kind of badge?
Yes, they did. He never had a White House pass. He said all the guys knew him, and he just waltzed right on in there. He was also a frequent guest at the president's retreat outside Washington in Glen Ora, Virginia.
Where was Lem when Kennedy was assassinated?
He was in New York. He was on his lunch hour from his job at an advertising company called Lennen & Newell.
Is there any information on how it affected him at the time?
Not immediately. I wasn't able to talk to anybody who talked to him that day. I think the only person he did talk to was Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who was at the White House at the time. But his close friends, Frances McAdoo and John Seigenthaler, talked to him within the next few days after it happened, and they described him as you can imagine—devastated, just unable to process it all.
But at the time he was very helpful to the family.
He knew this was going to be a time of incredible anguish for the Kennedy family. He knew all of them from the early 1930s, when Jack used to take him to Palm Beach in Hyannis Port. He felt incredibly responsible and loyal to them. He held himself together through the funeral period and then just fell apart.
I found it very interesting that a gift from Lem was buried with Kennedy. Were there other things buried with him?
I don't know the answer to that, although I understand that Jackie Kennedy was going to have the ring he'd given her buried with him, and somebody persuaded her she should keep it. So that's the only other gift I know about. But the gift from Lem that was buried with him was a set of whale's-tooth scrimshaw. This is apparently something that Kennedy had been interested in collecting over the years, and Lem had given him some, and it had been on the desk of the president in the White House.
I find that fascinating. It brings it back again to how close they were. Did Lem ever recover from the assassination?
Not in total. Grief is a strange thing. Some days he'd be the same old Lem joking, and other days he would think about what had happened. It was something that he apparently was never able to come to terms with. The best way he seemed to be able to deal with it was to talk about JFK to the younger Kennedys, to journalists, really to anybody who would listen.
1. Didn't he remain a part of the Kennedy family?
He became very close to Senator Robert Kennedy. But that wasn't just the post-1963 phenomenon either. He'd known Bobby since the early 1930s, and it was natural that they would become close since he'd seen so much of Jack Kennedy in Bobby, and he had it happen all over again in 1968 when Bobby was killed.
Did he help in Bobby's campaign?
He was very involved in his campaign first when he ran for senator of New York in 1964 and then in the presidential campaign in 1968. And he was professionally involved. His company, Lennen & Newell, was involved in doing many of the political commercials that aired at the time. He was closely involved in Robert Kennedy's political efforts as well.
Wasn't Lem's boss not only a Republican but also charmed by President Kennedy?
A guy by the name of Adolph Toigo--yes, he was a Republican, as indeed was Lem until 1960. This is really one of the funny things because Lem's family was a Republican family, and Lem himself was a registered Republican--he switched his registration in 1960--and so were some of the other people we were just talking about. I guess it's part of John Kennedy's charisma. He met with some of Lem's friends, including Lem's boss, because he wanted Lem to help on the campaign, which was the initial reason, but then he also persuaded the boss to change his political allegiance. It's incredible his effect on people.
The Kennedys embracing the friendship between Lem and Jack says a whole lot about the family.
Yes, it does. There have been various rumors flying over the years, in some of the right-wing periodicals especially, that Lem, being a gay man, tried to seduce some of the younger Kennedys. I did look into that, but I was able to find no evidence of that, and certainly none of the younger Kennedys, including Bobby Kennedy, has said that was the case.
How did Lem die?
He died of a heart attack in 1981 at the age of 65. Although when I looked into it a little bit more, he did have a heart condition for some time, and to what degree his drinking contributed to that, I'm not really sure. But the technical cause of death was a heart attack.
Not long before that, didn't he still see the younger kids?
Right. After Senator Robert Kennedy's assassination in June of 1968, he then became close to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the person who gave me permission to look at the documents. This seems to have been the instigation of Ethel Kennedy, who had 11 children. Again, Lem knew Bobby from when he was a little kid, and she asked various people to help out with the boys. Some other guys helped out with the other boys, and she asked Lem to help out with Bobby. So they became really close. Bobby Kennedy Jr. was only 14 when his father was assassinated. So Lem took Bobby under his wing, and they often went on vacations together, and Bobby was often at his New York townhome.
Did the fact that you are gay prove a help or a hindrance in writing the book?
I don't really feel that it either helped or hindered me in writing the book. I took a journalistic approach in writing this. I only included information in the book that I could verify either through documentary evidence or with interviewees in a position to know.
I think President Kennedy--if he were alive today--would be horrified at the resurgence of conservatism and the attack on civil liberties in the United States. Just a few weeks ago even, General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called homosexual acts immoral--and survived in his job, despite the bigotry. But 47 years ago, we had a president whose best friend was gay and who seemed quite comfortable with it.
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Douglas Caddy Posted May 26 2007, 12:05 AM
QUOTE(Antti Hynonen @ May 24 2007, 12:25 PM)
Mr. Caddy,
You have told us that you had met Guy Bannister on a few occasion while your were living in New Orleans. Any chance that you knew or met any other individuals related to the JFK/Oswald discussions, such as David Ferrie, Dr. Ochsner, Dr. Sherman, Jim Garrison etc. If so, is there anything you could share with us, i.e. your impressions of them?
I believe you are roughly the same age as Lee Oswald would be today. Did you by chance ever meet or know any of his acquaintances, his brothers or him?
Thank you.
I did not know any of these other individuals. I departed New Orleans in 1956 to enroll in Georgetown University. Lee Harvey Oswald lived in New Orleans in the years immediately preceding the assassination of JFK in 1963, long after I had left the city, and following his return from the Soviet Union.
Mr. Caddy,
Thank you for your reply. Chances that you might know Lee or any of his acquaintances from that era are slim, but sometimes it is a small world. Lee lived in (and around) New Orleans at a number of different addresses and at a number of different times, according to my information also from 1/1954- roughly 6/1956, before his military service.
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/oswald1.htm
During his early childhood and adolescence in New Orleans, Lee Oswald lived with his divorced mother at a number of different locations, usually in small rented houses or apartments in a moderateto-lower-income section of the city. (1) While the record of residences is not complete, one address was 126 Exchange Alley. (2) During her testimony before the Warren Commission, Mrs. Marguerite Oswald indicated that she and her son lived there when Oswald was about to 16 years old, roughly the years 1955-56. (3) They were "living at 126 Exchange Place, which is the Vieux Carre section of the French Quarter of New Orleans." (4) During her testimony, Mrs. Oswald noted that "the papers said we lived over a saloon at that particular address * * * that is just the French part of town. It looks like the devil. Of course I didn't have a fabulous apartment. But very wealthy people and very fine citizens live in that part of town. * * .. (5) While Mrs. Oswald correctly noted that "wealthy" citizens resided in some sections of the French Quarter, Exchange Alley was well known as the location of other elements; it was an area notorious for illicit activities. As the managing director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans, Aaron Kohn recalled, "Exchange Alley, specifically that little block that Oswald lived on, was literally the hub of some of the most notorious underworld joints in the city." (6). He noted further that Exchange Alley was the location of various gambling operations affiliated with the Marcello organization. (7) Noting the openness with which such activities were conducted there, (8) Kohn said, "you couldn't walk down the block without literally being exposed to two or three separate forms of illicit activities and underworld operations." (9)
Very interesting. I did not know that Lee and his mother lived in New Orleans from 1955-56. Do you know what high school he attended? I was graduated from Alcee Fortier High School in 1956.
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From an email announcement received May 23, 2007:
Dreamland: Jim Marrs Guest Hosts a Free Blockbuster Conspiracy Show
Ed Haslam was a dynamite Dreamland guest on on May 7, 2005 (interview available to our paid subscribers)and now he's back with phenomenal new material about how the unsolved murder of a doctor, a secret laboratory in New Orleans and cancer-causing viruses are linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK assassination and the horrific epidemics of cancer and bizarre diseases that now haunt our world.
The last time we talked to Ed, his only missing piece was a key witness. HE HAS FOUND THAT WITNESS.
And who better to conduct this interview that one of the world's greatest authorities on JFK, our own guest host Jim Marrs, upholding Dreamland's exclusive tradition of having EXPERTS interview EXPERTS.
It doesn't get better than this, so DON'T MISS DREAMLAND this weekend. The show can be accessed free of charge beginning on Saturday, May 26.
To listen, click on "Listen Now" on the right side of the Unknowncountry.com masthead. If you can't listen, please click on our "Listening Problems" FAQ.
Click on Ed's picture to explore his website.
Get Ed's new book with a foreword by Jim Marrs from our Amazon.com store!
I could be wrong, but I believe Haslam's new witness is Judyth Baker.
I just finished listening to the interview on Dreamland with Ed Haslam. You are correct: his new witness is indeed Judyth Baker. In any event the interview is informative and fascinating and time well spent.
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While at Georgetown University, in 1959 I founded the National Student Committee for the Loyalty Oath, which evolved into Youth for Goldwater. A year later, in 1960, I help found Young Americans for Freedom, which was organized at the family estate of William F. Buckley.
The above is a capsule history of how the mass conservative movement began.
You clearly played an important role in establishing the “New Right” movement in 1960. I believe the main intention of the Young Americans for Freedom was to get Barry Goldwater elected as president.
(1) Could you explain why you supported Barry Goldwater? Why aspects of John F. Kennedy did you disagree with? What do you think Goldwater would have done differently to LBJ if he had become president in 1964?
(2) I know that you no longer hold extreme right-wing views. When and why did you change your political views?
I supported Barry Goldwater because I got to know him fairly well as a person and even arranged for him to speak at Georgetown University while I was an undergraduate there. He was a rational person and not a knee-jerk, right-wing zealout. My opposition to Senator Kennedy was based on my being a loyal Republican at the time, holding the position of chairman of the College Young Republican Federation of the District of Columbia.
LBJ was a tool of Texas-based Brown and Root, which later became Haliburton. Brown and Root prospered dramatically during the Vietnam war (just as Haliburton has during the present Iraq war.) Goldwater, heir to an Arizona department store fortune, was fiercely independent and not a tool of any entity.
My views on Kennedy have changed over the years. From what I gather from research and reading, had he lived he would have made profound changes in our federal government, mostly to the good. An example of this was his threat to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces following the Bay of Pigs debacle.
My views began to change in 1974 when Joseph Coors, Ed Fuelner and Paul Weyrich threatened to destroy the directors of the Schuchman Foundation unless we did what they wanted. Schuchman was the first chairman of Young American for Freedom and died at an early age. The directors refused to be threatened. Fuelner then founded the Heritage Foundation and Weyrich the Committee for a Free Congress, both bankrolled by Joseph Coors. Today America and the world are reaping the whirlwind of corruption and evil that these men and their organizations have spawned.
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Mr. Caddy,
You have told us that you had met Guy Bannister on a few occasion while your were living in New Orleans. Any chance that you knew or met any other individuals related to the JFK/Oswald discussions, such as David Ferrie, Dr. Ochsner, Dr. Sherman, Jim Garrison etc. If so, is there anything you could share with us, i.e. your impressions of them?
I believe you are roughly the same age as Lee Oswald would be today. Did you by chance ever meet or know any of his acquaintances, his brothers or him?
Thank you.
I did not know any of these other individuals. I departed New Orleans in 1956 to enroll in Georgetown University. Lee Harvey Oswald lived in New Orleans in the years immediately preceding the assassination of JFK in 1963, long after I had left the city, and following his return from the Soviet Union.
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While at Georgetown University, in 1959 I founded the National Student Committee for the Loyalty Oath, which evolved into Youth for Goldwater. (Douglas Caddy)
Douglas,
Thanks for sharing some information in this thread. Interesting indeed.
Regarding the National Student Committee for the Loyalty Oath, I believe a loyalty oath and a non-subversive affidavit were required if students were to receive benefits under the National Defense Education Act. Do you know if John Kennedy as a Senator actually introduced a bill to repeal the requirements?
James
James -- You are correct as to the intent of the loyalty oath. Senator John Kennedy was indeed sponsor of the bill to repeal the oath from the National Defense Education Act. Our organization was designed to uncover and recruit conservative youth around the nation. It was a strategic move to break away from the Young Republican National Federation by establishing a national conservative youth organization that would appeal to rank-and-file union members and residents of the South who normally would not identify with the GOP.
Upon being formed the National Student Committee for the Loyalty Oath received national publicity. Senator Style Bridges (R.-N.H.) praised the organization on the floor of the Senate as did Congressman H. R. Gross in the House of Representatives.
Of course, old line liberals were upset. Gerald Johnson wrote in The New Republic that our Committee was a plea of subservience to the state. In fact, we were just the opposite.
I never met Senator Kennedy. However, the Senator and Mrs. Kennedy lived on N St., NW, just a few blocks from the campus of Georgetown University. In my sophmore and junior years I served as editor the student publication, the Foreign Service Courier. To celebrate my birthday a few of the girls on the publication's staff baked a cake. While they were carrying the cake up the the campus to surprise me, Senator Kennedy emerged from his house and, upon being told of the special occasion, promptly stuck his finger into the cake, tasted it and pronounced to be superb. When the cake was presented to me, there was a general discussion of whether we should eat it or have it preserved somehow for posterity. We chose the former option.
Doug
Are GM Crops Killing Bees?
in Political Conspiracies
Posted
Asian Parasite Killing Western Bees - Scientist
July 19, 2007 - Reuters
MADRID - A parasite common in Asian bees has spread to Europe and the Americas and is behind the mass disappearance of honeybees in many countries, says a Spanish scientist who has been studying the phenomenon for years.
The culprit is a microscopic parasite called nosema ceranae said Mariano Higes, who leads a team of researchers at a government-funded apiculture centre in Guadalajara, the province east of Madrid that is the heartland of Spain's honey industry.
He and his colleagues have analysed thousands of samples from stricken hives in many countries.
"We started in 2000 with the hypothesis that it was pesticides, but soon ruled it out," he told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.
Pesticide traces were present only in a tiny proportion of samples and bee colonies were also dying in areas many miles from cultivated land, he said.
They then ruled out the varroa mite, which is easy to see and which was not present in most of the affected hives.
For a long time Higes and his colleagues thought a parasite called nosema apis, common in wet weather, was killing the bees.
"We saw the spores, but the symptoms were very different and it was happening in dry weather too."
Then he decided to sequence the parasite's DNA and discovered it was an Asian variant, nosema ceranae. Asian honeybees are less vulnerable to it, but it can kill European bees in a matter of days in laboratory conditions.
"Nosema ceranae is far more dangerous and lives in heat and cold. A hive can become infected in two months and the whole colony can collapse in six to 18 months," said Higes, whose team has published a number of papers on the subject.
"We've no doubt at all it's nosema ceranae and we think 50 percent of Spanish hives are infected," he said.
Spain, with 2.3 million hives, is home to a quarter of the European Union's bees.
His team have also identified this parasite in bees from Austria, Slovenia and other parts of Eastern Europe and assume it has invaded from Asia over a number of years.
Now it seems to have crossed the Atlantic and is present in Canada and Argentina, he said. The Spanish researchers have not tested samples from the United States, where bees have also gone missing.
Treatment for nosema ceranae is effective and cheap -- 1 euro (US$1.4) a hive twice a year -- but beekeepers first have to be convinced the parasite is the problem.
Another theory points a finger at mobile phone aerials, but Higes notes bees use the angle of the sun to navigate and not electromagnetic frequencies.
Other elements, such as drought or misapplied treatments, may play a part in lowering bees' resistance, but Higes is convinced the Asian parasite is the chief assassin.
Story by Julia Hayley
Story Date: 19/7/2007
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Posted on Fri, Jul. 13, 2007
USDA buzzing with new plan to fight collapse of bee colonies
Michael Doyle | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: July 14, 2007 09:50:15 AM
WASHINGTON — Agriculture Department scientists are mobilizing to fight the puzzling and potentially catastrophic collapse of the nation's honey bee colonies.
Citing a "perfect storm for beekeepers," alarmed officials admitted Friday they still don't know why bees are dying in large numbers in more than 22 states. But prodded by Congress and farmers alike, the scientists will be devoting new resources to protecting the diligent pollinators some call six-legged livestock.
"There were enough honey bees to provide pollination for U.S. agriculture this year, but beekeepers could face a serious problem next year and beyond," Agriculture Undersecretary Gale Buchanan warned Friday.
Nationwide, honey bees pollinate more than 130 crops. They are particularly dutiful in some areas, such as California's nearly $3 billion-a-year almond industry. Of the nation's 2.4 million commercial bee colonies, 1.3 million pollinate almond orchards.
"The bee industry is facing difficulty meeting the demand for pollination in almonds because of bee production shortages in California," the Agricultural Research Service noted.
Prepared with the help of scientists at North Carolina State University and Pennsylvania State University, among others, the 28-page action plan issued Friday proposes:
• Spending more money. The Agricultural Research Service has a bee research budget of $7.4 million this year. Officials will redirect new funds to the cause, including an additional $1 million annually for work on honey bee health.
• Conducting new surveys. Officials cautioned Friday that current colony surveys have been either "limited in scope (or) fundamentally flawed." Agriculture Department agencies will collaborate with university researchers to obtain "an accurate picture of bee numbers," as well as a better understanding of the pesticides, pests and environmental stresses plaguing the bees.
• Finding fixes. This is particularly hard, since no one really knows why the bee colonies are collapsing. But officials say they will focus on "developing general best management practices" and distributing information through the Internet.
The new work will focus on so-called "colony collapse disorder." This is when the colony's adult bee population abruptly dies, leaving only the queen and a few attendants alive. Typically, there is no sign of mite or beetle damage. Some think toxic exposure or nutritional deficits might be undermining the bees' immune systems.
Gene Brandi, a beekeeper in California's San Joaquin Valley, told lawmakers that 800 of his 2,000 bee colonies collapsed inexplicably last winter. Brandi lost an estimated $60,000 in pollination income from his Los Banos-based operation, and he's spent an additional $48,000 to restock his lost colonies.
"This is the greatest winter colony mortality I have ever experienced in 30 years of beekeeping," Brandi testified earlier this year.
A draft farm bill scheduled for House Agriculture Committee approval next week includes new funding to study colony collapse disorder. Separately, Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., has introduced legislation to authorize an additional $7.25 million annually for related research.
"Colony collapse disorder is a looming disaster on the horizon," Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., said Friday. "We must continue to devote significant resources to understanding and treating the disorder."
Earlier this year, as chair of the House horticulture and organic agriculture subcommittee, Cardoza convened the first congressional hearing into the colony collapses. Spokesman Jamie McInerney said Friday that Cardoza and other lawmakers might seek additional honey bee funding as part of the fiscal 2008 Agriculture Department appropriations package.
The Agriculture Department plan sets out goals for both the short and long term. Immediately, for instance, scientists will "refine" symptoms to define what colony collapse disorder "is and what it is not." Longer term, the National Agricultural Statistics Service will develop a more reliable annual survey on honey bee colony production and health.
At the same time, officials are ruling out some theories.
"Based on misleading news reports, the public has become concerned that cell-phone use may be causing bee die-offs," the Agricultural Research Service noted Friday. "However, scientists have largely dismissed this theory, because exposure of bees to high levels of electromagnetic fields is unlikely."
McClatchy Newspapers 2007