Paul Rigby

For all we know, Sean, some or all of the others in the Geneva Hines group also got cokes. Can you prove they did not? For all we know, Ray, some or all of the others in the Geneva Hine group went upstairs to have furtive group sex in the second-floor toilets. Can you prove they did not? "Do not block the way of orgy," Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol 1, para 135 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce

Good Lord, what an amazing coincidence - UPI Newsfilm managed to lose, or claimed to have lost, the original of the film attributed to Mary Muchmore. This was compelling and, seemingly, due to the source, definitive: The original Muchmore had ceased to exist as a film no later than late-December 1963, and for many years after that, with the publication of the joint UPI-American Heritage Magazine commemorative work, Four Days: The Historical Record of the Death of President Kennedy, a work, it should be noted, of quite astonishing tedium. It was also quite surprising, as according to the FBI in February 1964, based on conversations the previous day with senior people in UPI rather well-placed to know, the original was still intact, and residing happily in a New York bank vault - a full two months after being cut up. Sometimes I really don’t know which is the more remarkable – those slippery media types, or the strange assassination films which passed through their hands. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=12216&p=253798 From the thread, Was Muchmore’s film shown on WNEW-TV, New York, on November 26, 1963?, post#245 (29 May 2012) Thank heavens the explanation was such transparent nonsense.

If Oswald is indeed Prayer Man, and if things went down as I have been suggesting in this thread, then the injustice infllcted upon him by the 'investigating' authorities, with collusion from his bosses, was even more monstrous than we had imagined. ** The first on-the-record reference to a second-floor lunchroom incident (as opposed to an uneventful pre-assassination visit up to the lunchroom to buy a coke by Oswald) does not come until the evening or night of November 22nd, when Roy Truly is interviewed by the F.B.I. The interview takes place at some point after – and as a result of - Oswald’s first interrogation, which concluded around 4:15 p.m. We know this because Truly is asked in this interview to answer a disturbing allegation which Oswald has made: Mr. TRULY advised that it is possible OSWALD did see him with a rifle in his hands within the past few days, as a Mr. WARREN CASTER, employed by Southwesterrn Publishing Co., which company has an office in the same building, had come to his office with two rifles, one a .22 rifle which CASTER said he had purchased for his son and the other a larger more high powered rifle which CASTER said he had purchased with which to go deer hunting, if he got a chance. Mr. TRULY examined the high powered rifle and raised it to his shoulder and sited [sic.] over it, then returned it to CASTER, and CASTER left with both rifles. Mr. TRULY stated he does not own a rifle and has had no other rifle in his hands or in his possession in a long period of time. Truly’s explanation was investigated and found to check out. But the rifle incident was not the only occasion for his name to come up in Oswald’s interrogation. Oswald had also evidently mentioned an incident involving Truly and a police officer. Here is Truly’s response to that claim: […] He […] noticed a Dallas City Police officer wearing a motorcycle helmet and boots running toward the entrance of the depository building and he accompanied the officer into the front of the building. They saw no one there and he accompanied the officer immediately up the stairs to the second floor of the building, where the officer noticed a door and stepped through the door, gun in hand, and observed OSWALD in a snack bar there, apparently alone. This snack bar has no windows or doors, facing the outside of the building, but is located almost in the center of the building. The officer pointed to OSWALD and asked if OSWALD was an employee of the company and he, TRULY, assured the officer that OSWALD was an employee. He and the officer then proceeded onto the roof of the building [...] As far as I have been able to ascertain, the above text constitutes the very earliest reference anywhere to a second-floor lunchroom incident. As we have already seen, it contains five words which, however seemingly innocuous, may well be of explosive significance: …he accompanied the officer into the front of the building. They saw no one there and he accompanied the officer immediately up the stairs to the second floor of the building… “They saw no one there”… The fact that Truly is even pointing out this gratuitous fact can only indicate one thing: that he has been confronted with Oswald’s claim that it was precisely “there”, inside the front of the building on the first floor, that the officer and Truly met him. Truly’s disclaimer draws ironic attention to what it is disclaiming. Whether Truly fed the F.B.I. the second-floor lunchroom version of events, or whether it was the F.B.I. who helped him get it straight, the upshot is the same: the lunchroom story appears to be a fabrication, a fiction designed for the sole purpose of eliminating Oswald’s all too real alibi for the President’s murder. Great work, Sean, for which many thanks. Keep going. It's worth recalling that there were two powerful additional incentives for the FBI to embark upon hasty revisions - the objective of which was simply to banish Oswald from the doorway of the TSBD almost irrespective of the problems this initial change brought with it - during the late afternoon of November 22: 1) the Parkland doctors' press conference on Kennedy, which insisted upon a shot (or shots) from the front; 2) and Altgens 6 (specifically, the identity of doorway man). The second consideration above does not require the reader to accept the identification of the patsy as doorway man; merely, rather, to have the honesty to acknowledge what is plainly true from the FBI's own internal documentation - the question was, at that juncture, unresolved, at least to the Bureau's satisfaction. The cover-up is, after all, a process, not an event, with many errors, early inadequacies, and/or improvisations, many of them subsequently abandoned. Paul

http://www.globalresearch.ca/jfk-assassination-marked-the-end-of-the-american-republic/5346419 Interview with Martin Broeckers, author of JFK: Coup d’Etat in America“By Lars Schall Global Research, August 20, 2013

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/08/jfk-anniversary-what-if-kennedy-had-lived The JFK anniversary: What if Kennedy had lived?James G. Blight & Janet M. Lang Actual JFK

Walter Pforzheimer, the Agency’s Historical Curator, in a memo lamenting the publication of Richard Starnes’ Requiem in Utopia, July 1967: http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/5829/CIA-RDP80B01676R001600030024-8.pdf Or here for many additional reviews of books of interest to Langley in the same year: http://www.foia.cia.gov/search-results?search_api_views_fulltext=&field_collection=&page=23619

The Kennedy assassination cover-ups were & remain small beer to the Anglo-American elite. To gain a better perspective on the scale of their crimes, see Docherty & Macgregor's Hidden HIstory: The Secret Origins of the First World War (Mainstream, 2013) & Guido Preparata's Conjuring Hitler.

Guns Review Official Journal of the The British Sporting Rifle Club Vol 4 No 2 (February 1964), 65-66 Details and Doubts about the Assassination Gun By Lieut.-Colonel A. Barker Many of the details attendant on the tragic demise of John F. Kennedy have been obscured by the shock with which the world received the news that the President of the United States could be assassinated in his own country, in this day and age. Of those facts which have been revealed, it is difficult to reconcile the technicalities associated with shooting at a moving target, surrounded by security guards trained to react at the first sign of any hostile action against their ward, with an old hand-operated carbine fitted with a cheap telescopic sight. On the basis of the information revealed in the Press, the following essay is an attempt to highlight some of the considerations which may be considered irreconcilable by those who know something of the world of small arms. The first thing an assassin has to decide is whether he wishes to escape the consequences of his crime. If he does, then this excludes any method of closing on his victim and using a short range weapon. Stabbing, or shooting in the stomach with a pistol is out, since this means capture. Execution from a distance entails much more careful consideration. A warehouse is ideal since an upper storey window will provide a clear field of fire over the heads of the crowd. Choosing the weapon The next problem is the choice of weapon. The specification for this is that it should be capable of delivering a number of aimed shots quickly and accurately, and that the bullets themselves should be lethal. This suggests some form of automatic or semi-automatic weapon, which is known to have a high stopping power. It is possible to kill with a .22 weapon, or even an air gun, but such a killing is dependent on striking a vital organ and to ensure success a larger calibre weapon which will deliver a heavy, smashing projectile will be necessary. Whether it is preferable to deliver a large number of projectiles with lesser accuracy rather than one or two carefully aimed shots hinges on the problem of surprise, and the feasibility of concealing the firing point. If the guards react as quickly as they might be expected to react, the location of an automatic weapon will be determined very quickly, whereas the first report of rifle shot may not even cause a head to turn. If, as result of this argument, it is decided to use a few, well-aimed highly lethal rounds, what is needed is a high-powered self-loading rifle. And, if the weapon is fitted with a telescopic sight, the system must be carefully zeroed at the anticipated range and thereafter preserved, almost in cotton wool in its fully assembled state, until the fateful hour. (Ideally the zeroing will be done as close to this time as possible.) Having selected his weapon and found a suitable firing point, the next considerations are of the target. For the occasion, the victim is travelling in an open car across the assassin’s front at an approximate speed of 20 m.p.h. The minimum ground range is estimated to be not more than 100 yards. In ten seconds, if the speed of the car remains constant, it will have travelled another 100 yards; this will mean a slight increase in range, but of more importance for another shot there will have been a rather large change in the lateral angle. In 30 seconds the car – still travelling at 20 m.p.h. – will have covered almost 300 yards; the range will have more than trebled and the aspect of the target will have changed considerably. There will be a lesser vulnerable area at which to shoot, and for the next shot a sighting correction must also be applied. Consideration might even have to be given to a change in the firing point. £7 10s. carbine Economic reasons may well decide the type of gun which our assassin is able to procure; its size may be influenced by the need for concealment. Unfortunately the requirements of an accurate and reliable weapon are at variance with both of these facts. Well-made and reliable guns are never cheap, accurate guns tend to have long barrels and are not easily disassembled. Good telescopic sights add to the cost, as does a semi-automatic mechanism. In the event, an ex-Italian army carbine, of a design perfected in 1891, which had been fitted with a cheap 4x telescopic sight was selected. Its cost ($19.95) was less than £7 10s. Now, carbines are not the most suitable weapon for the requirements that have been discussed. Developed originally as a lighter version of the rifle, shorter and more handy, for use by mounted troops, such a weapon has most of the disadvantages of that from which it has been cut down; together with a few others. It uses the same ammunition as its big-brother rifle which, fired through a shorter barrel, produces greater flash and heavier recoil. Not that these effects are relevant to our problems of assassination; it is just that the adoption of modern self-loading rifles by the Services of most European countries has made such weapons virtually obsolete – hence presumably the disposal of the Mannlicher-Carcano with which the President’s assassin was able to equip himself. Three shots apparently struck the car in which the President was travelling; the time taken to fire these shots is variously reported as 5.5 seconds, 8 seconds and 15 seconds. Even allowing for the fact that the Mannlicher bolt action is reasonably quick and easy to work, the added telescopic attachment undoubtedly would tend to hinder its quick manipulation when the gun was reloaded. Much play has been made of the assassin’s marksmanship capabilities and there is no doubt that it is possible for an expert to fire three rounds in 5.5 seconds with such a weapon. To do so demands constant and recent practice however, and it seems doubtful whether the man Oswald had any opportunity to keep his marksmanship up to scratch since he left the U.S. forces. It seems that there had been no such opportunity during his sojourn in Russia, since lack of shooting facilities was one of the things he complained about. Remarkable accuracy Nor was the President an easy target. The problems associated with a moving target and a depressed line of fire have already been mentioned (dependent on how long it took for the occupants of the car to realise what was happening and for the driver to accelerate out of range), together with the state of the gun and Oswald’s skill...so the accuracy of the shots seems remarkable. The fatal shot was said to have been a 6.5 mm. round, which ballistic tests showed to have been fired from the Mannlicher-Carcano found in the Dallas warehouse. The carbine was easily traced to Oswald’s ownership and his fingerprints were on it. After his capture Oswald’s hands were subjected to a liquid paraffin test to determine whether he had filed a rifle, but as he had fired a pistol and killed a policeman immediately prior to his capture the validity of this test seems to be somewhat dubious. Finally there is the question of the missing “charger” – the clip which holds the six rounds which are the magazine capacity of the weapon. In loading the gun the charger is discarded and might be expected to have been found near the firing position, or on Oswald’s person. It was never found. And if the carbine was loaded at the time of the shooting without a charger there can be no question of his being able to discharge three shots in even 15 seconds. Like so many other enigmas, so much depends on the factor of time. But let us return briefly to the assassination planning. If one way to really make certain of an assassination is to have more than one shot, then surely it might be preferable to have more than one man shooting.

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00310 Ian Fleming and the Public Profile of the CIA By Christopher Moran Journal of Cold War Studies, Winter 2013, Vol. 15, No. 1, Pages 119-146 Posted Online April 29, 2013.

HARRY S. TRUMAN ON CIA COVERT OPERATIONS Hayden B. Peake The now defunct Washington Daily News, on 5 January 1964, carried an article by Richard Starnes, "Harry S. Fires Telling Broadside at the CIA," which is typical, though more strident in tone, of the early press reaction: “The Central Intelligence Agency, a cloudy organism of uncertain purpose and appalling power, promises to have an uncomfortable time of it in the year just begun. Former President Truman, who hatched the coiling, mysterious creature, spoiled the holidays for the busy apologists of the CIA by firing a telling broadside in a copyrighted newspaper article. Mr. Truman is no great shucks as a writer, but there is nothing wrong with his thinking or his facts. He echoed the charge (early made here) that the monstrous spook apparatus had metastasized into policymaking and operational functions, neither of which was intended by the founders of the CIA ... in spite of the outraged howls of denial by the nominal head of the CIA, both charges are quite true.” http://media.nara.gov/dc-metro/rg-263/6922330/Box-7-89-4/263-a1-27-box-7-89-4.pdf

How to identify CIA limited hangout op? By Dr. Webster G. Tarpley and Press TV http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/06/18/snowden-cia-shill/ The operations of secret intelligence agencies aiming at the manipulation of public opinion generally involve a combination of cynical deception with the pathetic gullibility of the targeted populations. There is ample reason to believe that the case of Edward Joseph Snowden fits into this pattern. We are likely dealing here with a limited hangout operation, in which carefully selected and falsified documents and other materials are deliberately revealed by an insider who pretends to be a fugitive rebelling against the excesses of some oppressive or dangerous government agency. But the revelations turn out to have been prepared with a view to shaping the public consciousness in a way which is advantageous to the intelligence agency involved. At the same time, gullible young people can be duped into supporting a personality cult of the leaker, more commonly referred to as a “whistleblower.” A further variation on the theme can be the attempt of the sponsoring intelligence agency to introduce their chosen conduit, now posing as a defector, into the intelligence apparatus of a targeted foreign government. In this case, the leaker or whistleblower attains the status of a triple agent. Any attempt to educate public opinion about the dynamics of limited hangout operations inevitably collides with the residue left in the minds of millions by recent successful examples of this technique. It will be hard for many to understand Snowden, precisely because they will insist on seeing him as the latest courageous example in a line of development which includes Daniel Ellsberg and Julian Assange, both still viewed by large swaths of naïve opinion as authentic challengers of oppressive government. This is because the landmark limited hangout operation at the beginning of the current post-Cold War era was that of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon papers, which laid the groundwork for the CIA’s Watergate attack on the Nixon administration, and more broadly, on the office of the presidency itself. More recently, we have had the case of Assange and Wikileaks. Using these two cases primarily, we can develop a simple typology of the limited hangout operation which can be of significant value to those striving to avoid the role of useful idiots amidst the current cascade of whistleblowers and limited hangout artists. In this analysis, we should also recall that limited hangouts have been around for a very long time. In 1620 Fra Paolo Sarpi, the dominant figure of the Venetian intelligence establishment of his time, advised the Venetian senate that the best way to defeat anti-Venetian propaganda was indirectly. He recommended the method of saying something good about a person or institution while pretending to say something bad. An example might be criticizing a bloody dictator for beating his dog – the real dimensions of his crimes are thus totally underplayed. Limited hangout artists are instant media darlings The most obvious characteristic of the limited hangout operative is that he or she immediately becomes the darling of the controlled corporate media. In the case of Daniel Ellsberg, his doctored set of Pentagon papers were published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and eventually by a consortium totaling seventeen corporate newspapers. These press organs successfully argued the case for publication all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where they prevailed against the Nixon administration. Needless to say, surviving critics of the Warren Commission, and more recent veterans of the 9/11 truth movement, and know very well that this is emphatically not the treatment reserved for messengers whose revelations are genuinely unwelcome to the Wall Street centered US ruling class. These latter are more likely to be slandered, vilified and dragged through the mud, or, even more likely, passed over in complete silence and blacked out. In extreme cases, they can be kidnapped, renditioned or liquidated. Cass Sunstein present at the creation of Wikileaks As for Assange and Wikileaks, the autumn 2010 document dump was farmed out in advance to five of the most prestigious press organs in the world, including the New York Times, the London Guardian, El Pais of Madrid, Der Spiegel of Hamburg, and Le Monde of Paris. This was the Assange media cartel, made up of papers previously specialized in discrediting 9/11 critics and doubters. But even before the document dumps had begun, Wikileaks had received a preemptive endorsement from none other than the notorious totalitarian Cass Sunstein, later an official of the Obama White House, and today married to Samantha Power, the author of the military coup that overthrew Mubarak and currently Obama’s pick for US ambassador to the United Nations. Sunstein is infamous for his thesis that government agencies should conduct covert operations using pseudo-independent agents of influence for the “cognitive infiltration of extremist groups” – meaning of those who reject in the establishment view of history and reality. Sunstein’s article entitled “Brave New WikiWorld” was published in the Washington Post of February 24, 2007, and touted the capabilities of Wikileaks for the destabilization of China. Perhaps the point of Ed Snowden’s presence in Hong Kong is to begin re-targeting these capabilities back towards the original anti-Chinese plan. Snowden has already become a media celebrity of the first magnitude. His career was launched by the US left liberal Glenn Greenwald, now writing for the London Guardian, which expresses the viewpoints of the left wing of the British intelligence community. Thus, the current scandal is very much Made in England, and may benefit from inputs from the British GCHQ of Cheltenham, the Siamese twin of the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland. During the days of his media debut, it was not uncommon to see a controlled press organ like CNN dedicating one third of every broadcast hour of air time to the birth, life, and miracles of Ed Snowden. Another suspicious and tell-tale endorsement for Snowden comes from the former State Department public diplomacy asset Norman Solomon. Interviewed on RT, Solomon warmly embraced the Snowden Project and assured his viewers that the NSA material dished up by the Hong Kong defector used reliable and authentic. Solomon was notorious ten years ago as a determined enemy of 9/11 truth, acting as a border guard in favor of the Bush administration/neocon theory of terrorism. Limited hangouts contain little that is new Another important feature of the limited hangout operation if that the revelations often contain nothing new, but rather repackage old wine in new bottles. In the case of Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers, very little was revealed which was not already well known to a reader of Le Monde or the dispatches of Agence France Presse. Only those whose understanding of world affairs had been filtered through the Associated Press, CBS News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post found any of Ellsberg’s material a surprise. Of course, there was method in Ellsberg’s madness. The Pentagon papers allegedly derived from an internal review of the decision-making processes leading to the Vietnam War, conducted after 1967-68 under the supervision of Morton Halperin and Leslie Gelb. Ellsberg, then a young RAND Corporation analyst and militant warmonger, was associated with this work. Upon examination, we find that the Pentagon papers tend to cover up such CIA crimes as the mass murder mandated under Operation Phoenix, and the massive CIA drug running associated with the proprietary airline Air America. Rather, when atrocities are in question, the US Army generally receives the blame. Politicians in general, and President John F. Kennedy in particular, are portrayed in a sinister light – one might say demonized. No insights whatever into the Kennedy assassination are offered. This was a smelly concoction, and it was not altogether excluded that the radicalized elements of the Vietnam era might have carried the day in denouncing the entire package as a rather obvious fabrication. But a clique around Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn loudly intervened to praise the quality of the exposé and to lionize Ellsberg personally as a new culture hero for the Silent Generation. From that moment on, the careers of Chomsky and Zinn soared. Pentagon papers skeptics, like the satirical comedian Mort Sahl, a supporter of the Jim Garrison investigation in New Orleans and a critic of the Warren Commission, faced the marginalization of their careers. Notice also that the careers of Morton Halperin and Leslie Gelb positively thrived after they entrusted the Pentagon papers to Ellsberg, who revealed them. Ellsberg was put on trial in 1973, but all charges were dismissed after several months because of prosecutorial misconduct. Assange lived like a lord for many months in the palatial country house of an admirer in the East of England, and is now holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He spent about 10 days in jail in December 2010. Assange first won credibility for Wikileaks with some chum in the form of a shocking film showing a massacre perpetrated by US forces in Iraq with the aid of drones. The massacre itself and the number of victims were already well known, so Assange was adding only the graphic emotional impact of witnessing the atrocity firsthand. Limited hangouts reveal nothing about big issues like JFK, 9/11 Over the past century, there are certain large-scale covert operations which cast a long historical shadow, determining to some extent the framework in which subsequent events occur. These include the Sarajevo assassinations of 1914, the assassination of Rasputin in late 1916, Mussolini’s 1922 march on Rome, Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, the assassination of French Foreign Minister Barthou in 1934, the assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, in 1963 Kennedy assassination, and 9/11. A common feature of the limited hangout operations is that they offer almost no insights into these landmark events. In the Pentagon Papers, the Kennedy assassination is virtually a nonexistent event about which we learn nothing. As already noted, the principal supporters of Ellsberg were figures like Chomsky, whose hostility to JFK and profound disinterest in critiques of the Warren Commission were well-known. As for Assange, he rejects any further clarification of 9/11. In July 2010, Assange told Matthew Bell of the Belfast Telegraph: “I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.” This is on top of Cass Sunstein’s demand for active covert measures to suppress and disrupt inquiries into operations like 9/11. Snowden’s key backers Glenn Greenwald and Norman Solomon have both compiled impressive records of evasion on 9/11 truth, with Greenwald specializing in the blowback theory. The Damascus road conversions of limited hangout figures Daniel Ellsberg started his career as a nuclear strategist of the Dr. Strangelove type working for the RAND Corporation. He worked in the Pentagon as an aide to US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He then went to Vietnam, where he served as a State Department civilian assistant to CIA General Edward Lansdale. In 1967, he was back at RAND to begin the preparation of what would come to be known as the Pentagon papers. Ellsberg has claimed that his Damascus Road conversion from warmonger to peace angel occurred when he heard a speech from a prison-bound draft resister at Haverford College in August 1969. After a mental breakdown, Ellsberg began taking his classified documents to the office of Senator Edward Kennedy and ultimately to the New York Times. Persons who believe this fantastic story may be suffering from terminal gullibility. In the case of Assange, it is harder to identify such a moment of conversion. Assange spent his childhood in the coils of MK Ultra, a complex of Anglo-American covert operations designed to investigate and implement mind control through the use of psychopharmaca and other means. Assange was a denizen of the Ann Hamilton-Byrne cult, in which little children that were subjected to aversive therapy involving LSD and other heavy-duty drugs. Assange spent his formative years as a wandering nomad with his mother incognito because of her involvement in a custody dispute. The deracinated Assange lived in 50 different towns and attended 37 different schools. By the age of 16, the young nihilist was active as a computer hacker using the screen name “Mendax,” meaning quite simply “The xxxx.” (Assange’s clone Snowden uses the more marketable codename of “Verax,” the truth teller.) Some of Assange’s first targets were Nortel and US Air Force offices in the Pentagon. Assange’s chief mentor became John Young of Cryptome, who in 2007 denounced Wikileaks as a CIA front. Snowden’s story, as widely reported, goes like this: he dropped out of high school and also dropped out of a community college, but reportedly was nevertheless later able to command a salary of between $120,000 and $200,000 per year; he claims this is because he is a computer wizard. He enlisted in the US Army in May 2004, and allegedly hoped to join the special forces and contribute to the fight for freedom in Iraq. He then worked as a low-level security guard for the National Security Agency, and then went on to computer security at the CIA, including a posting under diplomatic cover in Switzerland. He moved on to work as a private contractor for the NSA at a US military base in Japan. His last official job was for the NSA at the Kunia Regional SIGINT Operations Center in Hawaii. In May 2013, he is alleged to have been granted medical leave from the NSA in Hawaii to get treatment for epilepsy. He fled to Hong Kong, and made his revelations with the help of Greenwald and a documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. Snowden voted for the nominally anti-war, ultra-austerity “libertarian” presidential candidate Ron Paul, and gave several hundred dollars to Paul’s campaign. Snowden, like Ellsberg, thus started off as a warmonger but later became more concerned with the excesses of the Leviathan state. Like Assange, he was psychologically predisposed to the world of computers and cybernetics. The Damascus Road shift from militarist to civil libertarian remains unexplained and highly suspicious. Snowden is also remarkable for the precision of his timing. His first revelations, open secrets though they were, came on June 5, precisely today when the rebel fortress of Qusayr was liberated by the Syrian army and Hezbollah. At this point, the British and French governments were screaming at Obama that it was high time to attack Syria. The appearance of Snowden’s somewhat faded material in the London Guardian was the trigger for a firestorm of criticism against the Obama regime by the feckless US left liberals, who were thus unwittingly greasing the skids for a US slide into a general war in the Middle East. More recently, Snowden came forward with allegations that the US and the British had eavesdropped on participants in the meeting of the G-20 nations held in Britain four years ago. This obviously put Obama on the defensive just as Cameron and Hollande were twisting his arm to start the Syrian adventure. By attacking the British GCHQ at Cheltenham, Britain’s equivalent to the NSA, perhaps Snowden was also seeking to obfuscate the obvious British sponsorship of his revelations. Stories about Anglo Americans spying on high profile guests are as old as the hills, and have included a British frogman who attempted an underwater investigation of the Soviet cruiser that brought party leader N. S. Khrushchev for a visit in the 1950s. Snowden has also accused the NSA of hacking targets in China — again, surely no surprise to experienced observers, but guaranteed to increase Sino-American tensions. As time passes, Snowden may emerge as more and more of a provocateur between Washington and Beijing. Limited hangouts prepare large covert operations Although, as we have seen, limited hangouts rarely illuminate the landmark covert operations which attempt to define an age, limited hangouts themselves do represent the preparation for future covert operations. In the case of the Pentagon papers, this and other leaks during the Indo-Pakistani Tilt crisis were cited by Henry Kissinger in his demand that President Richard Nixon take countermeasures to restore the integrity of state secrets. Nixon foolishly authorized the creation of a White House anti-leak operation known as the Plumbers. The intelligence community made sure that the Plumbers operation was staffed by their own provocateurs, people who never were loyal to Nixon but rather took their orders from Langley. Here we find the already infamous CIA agent Howard Hunt, the CIA communications expert James McCord, and the FBI operative G. Gordon Liddy. These provocateurs took special pains to get arrested during an otherwise pointless break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the summer of 1972. Nixon could easily have disavowed the Plumbers and thrown this gaggle of agent provocateurs to the wolves, but he instead launched a cover up. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, equipped with a top secret security clearance from the Office of Naval Intelligence, then began publicizing the story. The rest is history, and the lasting heritage has been a permanent weakening of the office of the presidency and the strengthening of the worst oligarchical tendencies. Assange’s Wikileaks document dump triggered numerous destabilizations and coups d’état across the globe. Not one US, British, or Israeli covert operation or politician was seriously damaged by this material. The list of those impacted instead bears a striking resemblance to the CIA enemies’ list: the largest group of targets were Arab leaders slated for immediate ouster in the wave of “Arab Spring.” Here we find Ben Ali of Tunisia, Qaddafi of Libya, Mubarak of Egypt, Saleh of Yemen, and Assad of Syria. The US wanted to replace Maliki with Allawi as prime minister of Iraq, so the former was targeted, as was the increasingly independent Karzai of Afghanistan. Perennial targets of the CIA included Rodriguez Kirchner of Argentina, Berlusconi of Italy, and Putin of Russia. Berlusconi soon fell victim to a coup organized through the European Central Bank, while his friend Putin was able to stave off a feeble attempt at color revolution in early 2012. Mildly satiric jabs at figures like Merkel of Germany and Sarkozy of France were included primarily as camouflage. Assange thus had a hand in preparing one of the largest destabilization campaigns mounted by Anglo-American intelligence since 1968, or perhaps even 1848. If the Snowden operation can help coerce the vacillating and reluctant Obama to attack Syria, our new autistic hero may claim credit for starting a general war in the Middle East, and perhaps even more. If Snowden can further poison relations between United States and China, the world historical significance of his provocations will be doubly assured. But none of this can occur unless he finds vast legions of eager dupes ready to fall for his act. We hope he won’t.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013 NSA scandal: the deepest secret of the Ed Snowden operation Jon Rappoport Activist Post http://www.activistpost.com/2013/06/nsa-scandal-deepest-secret-of-ed.html Everyone wants to see a hero. When that hero emerges from the shadows and says all the right things, and when he exposes a monolithic monster, he’s irresistible. However, that doesn’t automatically make him who he says he is. That doesn’t automatically exempt him from doubts. Because he’s doing the right thing, people quickly make him into a spokesman for their own hopes. If he’s finally blasting a hole in the dark enemy’s fortress, he has to be accepted at face value. He has to be elevated. When dealing with the intelligence community and their spooks and methods, this can be a mistake. Deception is the currency of that community. Layers of motives and covert ops are business as usual. In previous articles, I’ve raised a number of specific doubts about Ed Snowden. Here I want to replay four statements Snowden made and examine them. "When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses, and when you talk about them in a place like this [NSA]…over time that awareness of wrongdoing sorts of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about it, and the more you talk about it, the more you’re ignored, the more you’re told it’s not a problem…" This statement describes Snowden, an analyst working at NSA, chatting regularly to colleagues about his growing doubts over the morality of NSA spying. This is quite hard to believe. As Steve Kinney, writing at the Centre for Research on Globalisation points out, Snowden would have raised all sorts of red flags about himself. If he hadn’t been fired outright, he certainly would have come under serious scrutiny, which, at the very least, would have reduced his ability to hack documents out of NSA’s most secret recesses. And yet, Snowden, an analyst, claims he had access to “full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community and undercover assets all around the world, the locations of every station we have, what their missions are and so forth.” Really? That stretches doubt far beyond the point of credulity. Both The Guardian and the Washington Post supposedly vetted Snowden carefully. I’d really like to see the results of that vetting. “Rosters of everyone working at the NSA [and] the entire intelligence community…” That’s untold thousands of people. That’s referring to many separate agencies. Snowden doesn’t stop there. He maintains the security of NSA is not just a sieve, it’s also thousands of separate hunting parties, undertaken at the whim of any analyst: "Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere… I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President…" Sure. NSA just opens the door to their own analysts, who can, on their own hook, launch spying episodes on anyone in the US. Boom. No operational plans, no coordination. A free-for-all. “Hey, dig this. Nancy Pelosi was just talking to her hairdresser. I’m going to follow up on her. Think I’ll spy on Nancy and her husband, see what they’re up to. I’ll file reports as I go along…” “A guy at Los Alamos just wrote to his boss about a new weapons system. Want to see what they’re planning?” Finally, Snowden claimed he could “shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. But that’s not my intention.” Not just spy on everybody in the US. Snowden asserts he could do that. But he could also make the entire spying apparatus of NSA (and even all other intelligence agencies?) go dark with a few hours of work—and he’d evade notice of his NSA bosses as he performed this herculean task. No. Ridiculous. The very first thing an agency like NSA does is set up a labyrinth to prevent itself from being taken down. Consider these four Snowden statements together, back up and think. These are propositions that cast the man into a deep pit of doubt. Who is he? What is his mission? Is that mission his own, or is he working for someone who wants to punch a hole in the NSA? In another article, I’ve developed the hypothesis that Snowden is still actually operating for his former bosses at the CIA; people at the CIA, long engaged in a turf war with the NSA, are running him in this op. Snowden didn’t steal anything from NSA. He couldn’t. People at the CIA could and did steal, and they handed him documents to use in his assigned op. There are other possible explanations. None of them exonerates the NSA or what it is doing. Let’s be clear about that. But how far would the CIA go in exposing the guts of the NSA? It’s clear that these intelligence agencies overlap in their efforts (crimes). Therefore, the CIA would be satisfied to smear the NSA without exposing too much. If so, Snowden’s cache of documents won’t “go all the way.” His documents won’t yield the longed-for holy grail, though Snowden implies he could unwrap it. I’m talking about the entire interlocking system of US and global surveillance and how it is built. More than piecemeal exposures about PRISM, US hacks of China, and the G20 meeting in England, an account of the technical “architecture,” as John Young of Cryptome rightly calls it, would torpedo the underlying global Surveillance State. If Snowden can do that, he hasn’t shown it so far. Right now, he’s put his work in the hands of several journalists, who will dole it out on their own inexplicable timetables. Why make that move? Why hasn’t Snowden put up a dozen sites and laid everything he has on the line? Before those sites could be taken down, the material would have been copied and sent around the world thousands of times. Snowden has already said he won’t endanger specific spies or operations that could actually prevent terrorists’ missions. All right. Then give us everything else. Give us the whole shooting match. Let’s see how the watchers have built their edifice. But so far, Snowden has shown himself to be a different kind of person, someone who makes claims that far exceed his reach. Read his four statements again. The sub-text is: I could complain, raise doubts, and criticize NSA openly at work. No one cared. It was a typical office you’d find in any company. It certainly wasn’t a super-controlled environment. Things were so loose, I could access the complete map of the entire NSA network. Names, places, operations. On a whim, any analyst could spy on anyone in the US. If I wanted to, I could shut down all of US intelligence in a few hours. Forget the popular image of NSA as a fortress with dozens of layers of protection. Forget the notion that I’d have to be granted elite privilege to all sorts of secret keys to get into the inner sanctum, or that, while navigating my way in, I’d be setting off alarm bells all over the place. It was a piece of cake. Smear. “NSA is an open book. A book written by idiots. It cost a trillion dollars, but anyone could waltz in there and read the whole thing. Use a thumb drive, and you can also walk out with the whole thing.” If you set aside Snowden’s remarks about his motives, his morality, and his high mission, his explanation falls apart. It makes no sense. His CIA handlers would now be telling him that. “Hey Ed, tone down the ‘child’s-play’ angle, okay? You’re making it sound too easy. Remember? You’re the ‘whiz kid genius.’ Yeah, we want to smear NSA, but it’s got to be credible. People have to think it took at least some ingenuity to access the most heavily protected data in the world. Get it?” A common man of the people, serving the greater good, exposing ongoing crimes that threaten the very lifeblood of the Republic? Is Ed Snowden that hero? Or is he an operator, an agent? So far, he’s made himself seem like the agent. Executives at the NSA are well aware of this. Sitting down with their counterparts at the CIA, they’d be getting an earful. CIA people would be saying: “Of course Snowden is our boy. He worked for us in Geneva, and he’s working for us now. We told you, after 9/11, we didn’t like you clowns at NSA throwing all the blame on CIA for the Trade Center attacks. We didn’t like that at all. And in the intervening years, we haven’t liked you cutting us out of the spying game. We warned you. So now we’ve given you a taste of what we can do. We can do more. Either we play ball together, or we’ll put NSA in the dumper. Get it?” Playing ball together. Harmonization. A sharp reader has just pointed out to me that this is the op behind the op. The fallout from Snowden will be used as the reason for more and better global sharing of spying and surveillance data. Separate Surveillance States, which already share mountains of data, will come together to coordinate their efforts in an even tighter Surveillance Planet. The US NSA won’t be tolerated as the pompous king of the hill any longer. It will have to play well with others. After all, Globalism means the whole globe. And “we’re all in this together.” “We” meaning the elites who want to track every move made by every person on Earth, 24/7, in order to predict and control in the new paradise, where the sun rises every day on …compliance. That’s the takeaway from the Snowden affair. That’s why the secret surveillance/spying at the G20 meeting in England was exposed. “Gentlemen, we’re all rational here at the table. This is ridiculous. We’re all spying on each other. This can’t go on. It’s counterproductive. We want to work together. So let’s do it. We all want the same thing. A planet under control. The way to achieve that goal is to cooperate. We’ll spy on those who need to be spied on: the population of the planet. We’ll do it together. The primary violator of cooperation is that cowboy outfit in America, the NSA. They have to be brought into line. They have to learn they’re only part of the Whole. Agreed?” “Agreed.”

NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s path from security guard to security clearance Edward Snowden dropped out of high school in the middle of 10th grade, yet won high-paying positions that came with overseas travel and access to some of the world’s most closely held secrets. http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/06/16/nsa_leaker_edward_snowdens_path_from_security_guard_to_security_clearance.html He dropped out of high school in the middle of 10th grade, yet won high-paying positions that came with overseas travel and access to some of the world’s most closely held secrets. He had a vivacious, outgoing girlfriend and boasted online about his interest in nubile, beautiful women, even as he secluded himself in a nightscape of computer games, anime and close study of the Internet’s architecture. Edward Snowden, the skinny kid from suburban Maryland who took it upon himself to expose — and, officials say, severely compromise — classified U.S. government surveillance programs, loved role-playing games, leaned libertarian, worked out hard and dabbled in modelling. He relished the perks of his jobs with the CIA and some of the world’s most prestigious employers. Yet his girlfriend considered it a major accomplishment when she got him to leave the house for a hike. Snowden, 29, emerged a week ago from his status as an anonymous source for stories in The Washington Post and the Guardian, announcing to the world that he was prepared to be prosecuted for breaking his pledge to keep classified materials secret. But as quickly as he popped up in a fancy Hong Kong hotel, he vanished again Monday. He could not be reached for comment for this story. For years, Snowden has sought to keep his online activities hidden, posting under pseudonyms even as a teen and hanging out on anime, gaming and tech sites, chatting with fellow webheads about how to be on the Internet without being traced. “I wouldn’t want God himself to know where I’ve been, you know?” he wrote in 2003 on a bulletin board for the technically inclined. Halfway through 10th grade, during the 1998-1999 school year, Snowden dropped out of Arundel High School, where he had made little impression. Three years later, his parents divorced. He dipped in and out of course work over the next dozen years and was eventually certified as a Microsoft Solutions Expert — a gateway to tech jobs. But Snowden felt stuck in those first years of adulthood. In 2004, he enlisted in the Army Reserve as a Special Forces recruit but less than four months later he was discharged. Snowden struggled through a period of joblessness, spending long nights playing computer games and chatting online. In 2006, Snowden made a remarkable leap from security guard at the University of Maryland to security clearance. His new position with the CIA put him on the path to extensive travel, a six-figure income and extraordinary access to classified material. How he managed that jump remains unclear. Snowden’s girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, had no idea her beau was going to leak classified data, according to a friend. Snowden said last week that his “sole motive is to inform the public as to that which was done in their name and that which is done against them.” He now presents himself as a reasoned protester, a conscientious objector of sorts, but he has also shown flashes of anger and even contempt for some aspects of American society. “Go back to your meaningless consumerist life,” he wrote four years ago in a comment on a YouTube video that poked fun at the ritual of high school reunions.

My Creeping Concern that the NSA Leaker Edward Snowden is not who he Purports to be… By Naomi Wolf Global Research, June 15, 2013 NaomiWolf.org http://www.globalresearch.ca/my-creeping-concern-that-the-nsa-leaker-edward-snowden-is-not-who-he-purports-to-be/5339161 I hate to do this but I feel obligated to share, as the story unfolds, my creeping concern that the NSA leaker is not who he purports to be, and that the motivations involved in the story may be more complex than they appear to be. This is in no way to detract from the great courage of Glenn Greenwald in reporting the story, and the gutsiness of the Guardian in showcasing this kind of reporting, which is a service to America that US media is not performing at all. It is just to raise some cautions as the story unfolds, and to raise some questions about how it is unfolding, based on my experience with high-level political messaging. Some of Snowden’s emphases seem to serve an intelligence/police state objective, rather than to challenge them. a) He is super-organized, for a whistleblower, in terms of what candidates, the White House, the State Dept. et al call ‘message discipline.’ He insisted on publishing a power point in the newspapers that ran his initial revelations. I gather that he arranged for a talented filmmaker to shoot the Greenwald interview. These two steps – which are evidence of great media training, really ‘PR 101′ – are virtually never done (to my great distress) by other whistleblowers, or by progressive activists involved in breaking news, or by real courageous people who are under stress and getting the word out. They are always done, though, by high-level political surrogates. In the Greenwald video interview, I was concerned about the way Snowden conveys his message. He is not struggling for words, or thinking hard, as even bright, articulate whistleblowers under stress will do. Rather he appears to be transmitting whole paragraphs smoothly, without stumbling. To me this reads as someone who has learned his talking points – again the way that political campaigns train surrogates to transmit talking points. c) He keeps saying things like, “If you are a journalist and they think you are the transmission point of this info, they will certainly kill you.” Or: “I fully expect to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.” He also keeps stressing what he will lose: his $200,000 salary, his girlfriend, his house in Hawaii. These are the kinds of messages that the police state would LIKE journalists to take away; a real whistleblower also does not put out potential legal penalties as options, and almost always by this point has a lawyer by his/her side who would PROHIBIT him/her from saying, ‘come get me under the Espionage Act.” Finally in my experience, real whistleblowers are completely focused on their act of public service and trying to manage the jeopardy to themselves and their loved ones; they don’t tend ever to call attention to their own self-sacrifice. That is why they are heroes, among other reasons. But a police state would like us all to think about everything we would lose by standing up against it. d) It is actually in the Police State’s interest to let everyone know that everything you write or say everywhere is being surveilled, and that awful things happen to people who challenge this. Which is why I am not surprised that now he is on UK no-fly lists – I assume the end of this story is that we will all have a lesson in terrible things that happen to whistleblowers. That could be because he is a real guy who gets in trouble; but it would be as useful to the police state if he is a fake guy who gets in ‘trouble.’ e) In stories that intelligence services are advancing (I would call the prostitutes-with-the-secret-service such a story), there are great sexy or sex-related mediagenic visuals that keep being dropped in, to keep media focus on the issue. That very pretty pole-dancing Facebooking girlfriend who appeared for, well, no reason in the media coverage…and who keeps leaking commentary, so her picture can be recycled in the press…really, she happens to pole-dance? Dan Ellsberg’s wife was and is very beautiful and doubtless a good dancer but somehow she took a statelier role as his news story unfolded… f) Snowden is in Hong Kong, which has close ties to the UK, which has done the US’s bidding with other famous leakers such as Assange. So really there are MANY other countries that he would be less likely to be handed over from… g) Media reports said he had vanished at one point to ‘an undisclosed location’ or ‘a safe house.’ Come on. There is no such thing. Unless you are with the one organization that can still get off the surveillance grid, because that org created it. h) I was at dinner last night to celebrate the brave and heroic Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Several of Assange’s also brave and talented legal team were there, and I remembered them from when I had met with Assange. These attorneys are present at every moment when Assange meets the press – when I met with him off the record last Fall in the Ecuadoran embassy, his counsel was present the whole time, listening and stepping in when necessary. Seeing these diligent attentive free-speech attorneys for another whisleblower reinforced my growing anxiety: WHERE IS SNOWDEN’S LAWYER as the world’s media meet with him? A whistleblower talking to media has his/her counsel advising him/her at all times, if not actually being present at the interview, because anything he/she says can affect the legal danger the whistleblower may be in . It is very, very odd to me that a lawyer has not appeared, to my knowledge, to stand at Snowden’s side and keep him from further jeopardy in interviews. Again I hate to cast any skepticism on what seems to be a great story of a brave spy coming in from the cold in the service of American freedom. And I would never raise such questions in public if I had not been told by a very senior official in the intelligence world that indeed, there are some news stories that they create and drive – even in America (where propagandizing Americans is now legal). But do consider that in Eastern Germany, for instance, it was the fear of a machine of surveillance that people believed watched them at all times – rather than the machine itself – that drove compliance and passivity. From the standpoint of the police state and its interests – why have a giant Big Brother apparatus spying on us at all times – unless we know about it?

The Aspen Flier - and legendary legover merchant - remains ever-vigilant in the face of that enormous threat to Western civilization otherwise known as, yes, the conspiracy theorist. From this week's serving of any-old rope entitled: "Is the age of the billboard MP upon us?" http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2013/jun/14/simon-hoggart-age-billboard-mp Quite possibly, but then it's also the age of the straw-man mainstream journo.

THE STONE, June 14, 2013 The Real War on Reality By PETER LUDLOW http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/the-real-war-on-reality/#more-145378 If there is one thing we can take away from the news of recent weeks it is this: the modern American surveillance state is not really the stuff of paranoid fantasies; it has arrived. The revelations about the National Security Agency’s PRISM data collection program have raised awareness — and understandably, concern and fears — among American and those abroad, about the reach and power of secret intelligence gatherers operating behind the facades of government and business. Surveillance and deception are not just fodder for the next “Matrix” movie, but a real sort of epistemic warfare. But those revelations, captivating as they are, have been partial —they primarily focus on one government agency and on the surveillance end of intelligence work, purportedly done in the interest of national security. What has received less attention is the fact that most intelligence work today is not carried out by government agencies but by private intelligence firms and that much of that work involves another common aspect of intelligence work: deception. That is, it is involved not just with the concealment of reality, but with the manufacture of it. The realm of secrecy and deception among shadowy yet powerful forces may sound like the province of investigative reporters, thriller novelists and Hollywood moviemakers — and it is — but it is also a matter for philosophers. More accurately, understanding deception and and how it can be exposed has been a principle project of philosophy for the last 2500 years. And it is a place where the work of journalists, philosophers and other truth-seekers can meet. In one of the most referenced allegories in the Western intellectual tradition, Plato describes a group of individuals shackled inside a cave with a fire behind them. They are able to see only shadows cast upon a wall by the people walking behind them. They mistake shadows for reality. To see things as they truly are, they need to be unshackled and make their way outside the cave. Reporting on the world as it truly is outside the cave is one of the foundational duties of philosophers. In a more contemporary sense, we should also think of the efforts to operate in total secrecy and engage in the creation of false impressions and realities as a problem area in epistemology — the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge. And philosophers interested in optimizing our knowledge should consider such surveillance and deception not just fodder for the next “Matrix” movie, but as real sort of epistemic warfare. To get some perspective on the manipulative role that private intelligence agencies play in our society, it is worth examining information that has been revealed by some significant hacks in the past few years of previously secret data. Important insight into the world these companies came from a 2010 hack by a group best known as LulzSec (at the time the group was called Internet Feds), which targeted the private intelligence firm HBGary Federal. That hack yielded 75,000 e-mails. It revealed, for example, that Bank of America approached the Department of Justice over concerns about information that WikiLeaks had about it. The Department of Justice in turn referred Bank of America to the lobbying firm Hunton and Willliams, which in turn connected the bank with a group of information security firms collectively known as Team Themis. Team Themis (a group that included HBGary and the private intelligence and security firms Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and Endgame Systems) was effectively brought in to find a way to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks and the journalist Glenn Greenwald (who recently broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leak of the N.S.A.’s Prism program), because of Greenwald’s support for WikiLeaks. Specifically, the plan called for actions to “sabotage or discredit the opposing organization” including a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error. As for Greenwald, it was argued that he would cave “if pushed” because he would “choose professional preservation over cause.” That evidently wasn’t the case. Team Themis also developed a proposal for the Chamber of Commerce to undermine the credibility of one of its critics, a group called Chamber Watch. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to “prove that U.S. Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.” In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to infiltrate Chamber Watch. They would “create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.” Psyops need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them. The hack also revealed evidence that Team Themis was developing a “persona management” system — a program, developed at the specific request of the United States Air Force, that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (“sock puppets”) for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grass roots support. The contract was eventually awarded to another private intelligence firm. This may sound like nothing so much as a “Matrix”-like fantasy, but it is distinctly real, and resembles in some ways the employment of “Psyops” (psychological operations), which as most students of recent American history know, have been part of the nation’s military strategy for decades. The military’s “Unconventional Warfare Training Manual” defines Psyops as “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.” In other words, it is sometimes more effective to deceive a population into a false reality than it is to impose its will with force or conventional weapons. Of course this could also apply to one’s own population if you chose to view it as an “enemy” whose “motives, reasoning, and behavior” needed to be controlled. Psyops need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them, and in the case of private intelligence contractors, there are both incentives (billions of dollars in contracts) and capabilities. Several months after the hack of HBGary, a Chicago area activist and hacker named Jeremy Hammond successfully hacked into another private intelligence firm — Strategic Forcasting Inc., or Stratfor), and released approximately five million e-mails. This hack provided a remarkable insight into how the private security and intelligence companies view themselves vis a vis government security agencies like the C.I.A. In a 2004 e-mail to Stratfor employees, the firm’s founder and chairman George Friedman was downright dismissive of the C.I.A.’s capabilities relative to their own: “Everyone in Langley [the C.I.A.] knows that we do things they have never been able to do with a small fraction of their resources. They have always asked how we did it. We can now show them and maybe they can learn.” The Stratfor e-mails provided us just one more narrow glimpse into the world of the private security firms, but the view was frightening. The leaked e-mails revealed surveillance activities to monitor protestors in Occupy Austin as well as Occupy’s relation to the environmental group Deep Green Resistance. Staffers discussed how one of their own men went undercover (“U/C”) and inquired about an Occupy Austin General Assembly meeting to gain insight into how the group operates. RELATED More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series. Stratfor was also involved in monitoring activists who were seeking reparations for victims of a chemical plant disaster in Bhopal, India, including a group called Bophal Medical Appeal. But the targets also included The Yes Men, a satirical group that had humiliated Dow Chemical with a fake news conference announcing reparations for the victims. Stratfor regularly copied several Dow officers on the minutia of activities by the two members of the Yes Men. One intriguing e-mail revealed that the Coca-Cola company was asking Stratfor for intelligence on PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) with Stratfor vice president for Intelligence claiming that “The F.B.I. has a classified investigation on PETA operatives. I’ll see what I can uncover.” From this one could get the impression that the F.B.I. was in effect working as a private detective Stratfor and its corporate clients. Stratfor also had a broad-ranging public relations campaign. The e-mails revealed numerous media companies on its payroll. While one motivation for the partnerships was presumably to have sources of intelligence, Stratfor worked hard to have soap boxes from which to project its interests. In one 2007 e-mail, it seemed that Stratfor was close to securing a regular show on NPR: “[the producer] agreed that she wants to not just get George or Stratfor on one time on NPR but help us figure the right way to have a relationship between ‘Morning Edition’ and Stratfor.” On May 28 Jeremy Hammond pled guilty to the Stratfor hack, noting that even if he could successfully defend himself against the charges he was facing, the Department of Justice promised him that he would face the same charges in eight different districts and he would be shipped to all of them in turn. He would become a defendant for life. He had no choice but to plea to a deal in which he may be sentenced to 10 years in prison. But even as he made the plea he issued a statement, saying “I did this because I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors. I did what I believe is right.” (In a video interview conducted by Glenn Greenwald with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong this week, Snowden expressed a similar ethical stance regarding his actions.) Given the scope and content of what Hammond’s hacks exposed, his supporters agree that what he did was right. In their view, the private intelligence industry is effectively engaged in Psyops against American public., engaging in “planned operations to convey selected information to [us] to influence [our] emotions, motives, objective reasoning and, ultimately, [our] behavior”? Or as the philosopher might put it, they are engaged in epistemic warfare. The Greek word deployed by Plato in “The Cave” — aletheia — is typically translated as truth, but is more aptly translated as “disclosure” or “uncovering” — literally, “the state of not being hidden.” Martin Heidegger, in an essay on the allegory of the cave, suggested that the process of uncovering was actually a precondition for having truth. It would then follow that the goal of the truth-seeker is to help people in this disclosure — it is to defeat the illusory representations that prevent us from seeing the world the way it is. There is no propositional truth to be had until this first task is complete. This is the key to understanding why hackers like Jeremy Hammond are held in such high regard by their supporters. They aren’t just fellow activists or fellow hackers — they are defending us from epistemic attack. Their actions help lift the hood that is periodically pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth. Peter Ludlow is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University and is currently co-producing (with Vivien Weisman) a documentary on Hacktivist actions against private intelligence firms and the surveillance state.

Snowden and the war between the CIA and the Pentagon http://xymphora.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/snowden-and-war-between-cia-and-pentagon.html FRIDAY, JUNE 14, 2013 "Did someone help Ed Snowden punch a hole in the NSA?" by Jon Rappoport: "Snowden worked for the CIA. He was pushed up the ranks quickly, from an IT position in the US to a posting in Geneva, under diplomatic cover, to run security on the CIA’s computer systems there. Then, Snowden quit the CIA and eventually ended up at Booz Allen, a private contractor. He was assigned to NSA, where he stole the secrets and exposed the NSA. The CIA and NSA have a long contentious relationship. The major issue is, who is king of US intelligence? We’re talking about an internal war. Snowden could have been the CIA’s man at NSA, where certain CIA players helped him access files he wouldn’t have been able to tap otherwise." "NSA leaker: are there serious cracks in Ed Snowden’s story?" by Jon Rappoport "Did the CIA give the NSA documents to Ed Snowden?" by Jon Rappoport The two big oddities in the Snowden story are his remarkable employment history and his remarkable access to high-level secrets for somebody who was a relatively low-level employee of an outside contractor. Snowden was recruited as a CIA asset at an early age, probably is still a CIA asset today, and could very easily have been manipulated by the CIA into a position where he could plausibly pose as a whistleblower against the NSA. This does not impugn his personal credibility or the credibility of his information, but answers some big mysteries about how he came to be the face of all the secrets. Barry just replaced the #2 at the CIA with an outsider: "President Obama's pick for the CIA's second-in-command once held erotica nights at her Baltimore bookstore" She replaces a career CIA guy who retired, in the words of John Brennan, "to spend more time with his family and to pursue other professional opportunities". Standard firing words. A thirty-three year CIA veteran replaced by Barry with an erotica expert. Ever since 9/11, the CIA has been losing power and influence to the Pentagon. Most recently, Barry is moving the current jewel of American might, the drone program, from the CIA to the Pentagon. The NSA is part of the Pentagon (something that is seldom mentioned). The way things are going, erotica may be all the CIA has left.

Did someone help Ed Snowden punch a hole in the NSA? by Jon Rappoport June 11, 2013 https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/06/11/did-someone-help-ed-snowden-punch-a-hole-in-the-nsa/ Snowden worked for the CIA. He was pushed up the ranks quickly, from an IT position in the US to a posting in Geneva, under diplomatic cover, to run security on the CIA’s computer systems there. Then, Snowden quit the CIA and eventually ended up at Booz Allen, a private contractor. He was assigned to NSA, where he stole the secrets and exposed the NSA. The CIA and NSA have a long contentious relationship. The major issue is, who is king of US intelligence? We’re talking about an internal war. Snowden could have been the CIA’s man at NSA, where certain CIA players helped him access files he wouldn’t have been able to tap otherwise. You can bet your bottom dollar that NSA analysts are looking into this possibility right now. Did the CIA give the NSA documents to Ed Snowden? by Jon Rappoport June 13, 2013 JON RAPPOPORT'S BLOG http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/did-the-cia-give-the-nsa-documents-to-ed-snowden/ Current press reports focus on PRISM, the NSA’s relationships with the biggest tech companies in the world, and the spilled leaks of Ed Snowden. I’ve already laid out serious questions about Snowden’s work history and whether he’s told the truth about it. Is it likely he could have accessed and snatched thousands of highly classified NSA documents? “Let’s see. Who’s coming to work for us here at NSA today? Oh, new whiz kid. Ed Snowden. Outside contractor. He’s not really a full-time employee of the NSA. Twenty-nine years old. No high school diploma. Has a GED. He worked for the CIA and quit. Hmm. Why did he quit? Oh, never mind, who cares? No problem. “Tell you what. Let’s give this kid access to our most sensitive data. Sure. Why not? Everything. That stuff we keep behind 986 walls? Where you have to pledge the life of your first-born against the possibility you’ll go rogue? Let Snowden see it all. Sure. What the hell. I’m feeling charitable. He seems like a nice kid.” Here is a more likely scenario. Snowden never saw any of those thousands of documents on an NSA computer. Never happened. Instead, he was either used or volunteered as a CIA operative to carry the endless turf war between CIA and NSA a new step forward. People at the CIA WERE able to access those NSA documents and they gave the documents to Snowden and he ran with them. This was a covert op launched by the CIA against a chief rival, the NSA. NSA, the agency that’s far bigger than the CIA. NSA, the agency that’s been taking over intelligence gathering, that considers itself superior to everybody else in the intelligence field. The CIA, of course, couldn’t be seen as the NSA leaker. They needed a guy. They needed a guy who could appear to be FROM the NSA, to make things look worse for the NSA and shield the CIA. They had Ed Snowden. He had worked for the CIA in Geneva, in a high-level position, overseeing computer-systems security. People would later assume he had the wherewithal to get into NSA files and steal documents all by himself. Somewhere in his CIA past, Ed meets a fellow CIA guy who sits down with him and says, “You know, Ed, things have gone too damn far. The NSA is spying on everybody all the time. I can show you proof. They’ve gone beyond the point of trying to catch terrorists. They’re doing something else. They’re expanding a Surveillance State, which can only lead to one thing: the destruction of America, what America stands for, what you and I know America is supposed to be. The NSA isn’t like us, Ed. We go after terrorists for real. That’s it. Whereas NSA goes after everybody. We have to stop it. We need a guy…and there are those of us who think you might be that guy…” During the course of this one disingenuous conversation, the CIA is killing 37 innocent civilians all over the world with drones, but that’s beside the point. Ahem. Ed says, “Tell me more. I’m intrigued.” He buys in.

NSA Deception Operation? Questions Surround Leaked PRISM Document’s Authenticity Was Edward Snowden spotted before he decided to leak documents, and set up by the NSA? By Steve Kinney Global Research, June 12, 2013 http://www.globalresearch.ca/nsa-deception-operation-questions-surround-leaked-prism-documents-authenticity/5338673 “I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.” - Edward Snowden Intelligence services have been feeding false information to known enemy informants in their own ranks for a long time, and they are very good at it. Today, the potential whistleblower is one of the most dangerous informants an intelligence service can confront. Was Edward Snowden spotted before he decided to leak documents, and set up by the NSA? Substantial evidence supports the possibility that he was. Numerous questions cast doubt on the authenticity of the Power Point slide show describing PRISM, but the UK Guardian has not seen fit to release it to the public. Perhaps Glenn Greenwald should anonymously leak this file: In the words of Snowden himself, “The public needs to decide.” Was Edward Snowden under surveillance at intelligence contractor Booz Allen in advance of releasing the PRISM document? In the wake of the Wikileaks scandals, the U.S. intelligence community has answered “Who shall watch the watchmen?” by introducing active surveillance and detailed profiling of their own analysts and contractors, looking for potential whistleblowers.[1] By his own account, Snowden often discussed perceived Agency wrongdoing with his co-workers, which suggests that he should have been profiled and flagged as a potential leaker by the NSA’s internal surveillance process. Interviewed by Glenn Greenwald, Snowden described his workplace behavior in the time leading up to his decision to leak documents: Questioning The Document Classified DoD briefing files are created to meet formal style specifications and are subject to stringent internal reviews. After the publication of pages from the PRISM presentation, independent analysts were quick to notice and report substantial deficiencies in the document.[3] Others have expressed serious doubts about the PRISM slide show’s pedigree, including the NSA’s former top attorney: “Stewart Baker, the NSA’s general counsel in the 1990s and now an attorney at Steptoe and Johnson, said he was not familiar with PRISM or similar government activity, but the leaked Powerpoint presentation sounds “flaky,” as do the initial reports. “The Powerpoint is suffused with a kind of hype that makes it sound more like a marketing pitch than a briefing — we don’t know what its provenance is and we don’t know the full context,” Baker said. He added, referring to the Post’s coverage: “It looks rushed and it looks wrong.” – Declan McCullagh, Wired, June 7, 2013[4] The logos of major U.S. IT and communication service providers are splashed across the top of PRISM power point slides like sponsor patches on a NASCAR driver’s jacket. Vendor logos often do appear next to product illustrations in DoD briefing documents, and are sometimes used to indicate a vendor’s position in process or procurement flow charts. But the “ad banner” format present in the leaked PRISM slides is very unusual and apparently unique to the PRISM document. All of the vendors named have vehemently denied knowledge of the PRISM program described in the slides.[5] Some of these denials, such as those by Twitter and Google, are from companies which have previously fought court battles against arbitrary disclosure of their users’ data to Federal agencies.[6] A second PRISM? Unclassified documents available on the Internet identify a completely different PRISM program, a powerful integrated network communications tool for Department of Homeland Security counter-terrorism crisis management. This PRISM integrates incident reporting, GPS tracking of emergency service and law enforcement vehicles, “outbound 911″ public alert networks, CBN and other technical sensor data, etc. A detailed, unclassified 2004 description of the “DHS PRISM” is available at Cryptome.[7] A 2007 report from the RAND Corporation defines PRISM as a “Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management”[8]. It seems unlikely that two network-centric programs as large and different as the DHS and NSA PRISMs, both operating inside the United States, would bear the same name. Only Monty Python calls everyone Bruce “to avoid confusion.” Would the NSA lie to us? The National Security Administration is one of the country’s most officially secretive agencies. In the Washington press corps, its popular nicknames have included “No Such Agency” and the “Never Say Anything” agency. It is against long standing Agency policy to comment directly on any classified matter, and its Directors have consistently refused to confirm or deny any Agency activity when questioned by the press. But when the UK Guardian broke the story of the PRISM leak, the Director of National Intelligence promptly confirmed the document as authentic, calling the leak “reprehensible”: “The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans.” – James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence[9] This very unusual confirmation raises more questions about the PRISM document than it answers. Is it possible that the PRISM leak was set up by the NSA as a deception operation in support of the Obama Administration’s ongoing wars against whistleblowers and the 4th Amendment? Documents from Federal intelligence contractor HBGary, published in 2011 by anonymous hackers, include a Power Point presentation proposing methods for attacking Wikileaks, and this document names Glenn Greenwald, who broke the PRISM story, as a specific target: “The presentation, which has been seen by The Independent, recommends a multi-pronged assault on WikiLeaks including deliberately submitting false documents to the website to undermine its credibility, pioneering cyber attacks to expose who the leakers to WikiLeaks are and going after sympathetic journalists. “One of those mentioned is Glenn Greenwald, a pro-WikiLeaks reporter in the US. Writing on Salon.com. Greenwald stated that his initial reaction was “to scoff at its absurdity.” – Jerome Taylor, The Independent[10] The UK Guardian released the PRISM story on the opening day of PFC Bradley Manning’s court martial. The leaked PRISM document will certainly influence public debate on both whistleblower protections and State surveillance – and influence is one of our intelligence community’s regular daily chores. Some commentators have been very quick to present forceful talking points in favor of free and unrestrained State surveillance[11], and there is growing consensus that reports depicting PRISM as a mass domestic surveillance dragnet were a false alarm. The Washington Post, which broke the story at the same time as the UK Guardian, has walked back its position on the civil rights implications of the PRISM materials.[12] Meanwhile, it seems that everyone has forgotten about Romas/COIN. Universal Surveillance: Romas/COIN, Odyssey and beyond The same security breach at HBGary that revealed formal proposals to plant false leaks and target reporter Glenn Greenwald personally, also disclosed the existence of a real surveillance program with dramatically more dangerous civil liberty implications than PRISM: Romas/COIN, and its planned successor, Odyssey. Barrett Brown summarizes what is known about this program in an article on the Project PM website: According to its internal e-mail from 2010 and 2011, HBGary was a prime contractor coordinating bids from Google, Apple, AT&T and others to build an expanded, upgraded version of the Romas/COIN information warfare system. Minor publicity attending the naming of these high profile vendors in the HBGary documents may have inspired the NASCAR-style sponsor logos decorating the dubious PRISM slides. When HBGary’s e-mails were disclosed, the Odyssey bid was on hold with HBGary and its partners waiting for a revision in program requirements from the DoD. Two years have passed since HBGary was preparing to bid against Northrop Grumman for the prime contractor position on the Odyssey program. Odyssey should now be completed or nearing completion. Is it possible that the PRISM leak was intended to mislead the American people into dramatically under-estimating the real domestic surveillance capabilities of our National Security Agency? You might well think so, but this reporter could not possibly comment. Notes 1) Eric Schmitt, White House Orders New Computer Security Rules, New York Times, October 6, 2011 https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/us/politics/white-house-orders-new-computer-security-rules.html 2) Glenn Greenwald interviews Edward Snowden, Guardian US, Sunday 9 June 2013 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-video 3) Are the NSA’s PRISM slides photoshopped?, Top Level Telecommunications, June 7, 2013 http://electrospaces.blogspot.nl/2013/06/are-nsas-prism-slides-photoshopped.html 4) Declan McCullagh, “No evidence of NSA’s ‘direct access’ to tech companies”, Wired, June 7, 2013 at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588337-38/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-to-tech-companies/ 5) Joanna Stern, NSA PRISM: Dissecting the Tech Companies’ Adamant Denials of Involvement in Government Spying Program, ABC News, June 7, 2013 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/nsa-prism-dissecting-technology-companies-adamant-denial-involvement/story?id=19350095 6) Declan McCullagh, Justice Department tries to force Google to hand over user data, CNET News, May 31, 2013 http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587005-38/justice-department-tries-to-force-google-to-hand-over-user-data/ Declan McCullagh, DOJ sends order to Twitter for WikiLeaks-related account info, CNET News, January 7, 2011 http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20027893-281.html 7) MAJ Gregg Powell and COL Charles Dunn III, Homeland Security: Requirements for Installation Security Decision Support Systems, Battle Command Battle Lab (Gordon), March 21, 2004 http://cryptome.org/2013/06/dhs-prism.pdf 8) Carl Rhodes, Jeff Hagen, Mark Westergren, A Strategies-to-Tasks Framework for Planning and Executing Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Operations, RAND Corporation, 2007 http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/TR434.html 9) James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, DNI Statement on Activities Authorized Under Section 702 of FISA, June 06, 2013 http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-press-releases-2013/869-dni-statement-on-activities-authorized-under-section-702-of-fisa 10) Jerome Taylor, The US bank and the secret plan to destroy WikiLeaks, The Independent February 13, 2011 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-us-bank-and-the-secret-plan-to-destroy-wikileaks-2215059.html 11) Tim Worstall, NSA’s PRISM Sounds Like A Darn Good Idea To Me: This Is What Governments Are For, Forbes, June 7, 2011 http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/07/nsas-prism-sounds-like-a-darn-good-idea-to-me-this-is-what-governments-are-for/ 12) Peter Weber, Is the NSA PRISM leak much less than it seems?, Yahoo! News, Jun 10, 2013 http://news.yahoo.com/nsa-prism-leak-much-less-seems-141000562.html?.tsrc=rtlde/ 13) Barrett Brown, Romas/COIN, Project PM, http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Romas/COIN, See also Barrett Brown, A sinister cyber-surveillance scheme exposed, UK Guardian, June 22, 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/22/hacking-anonymous Steve Kinney is an independent researcher and writer on computer and network security topics, with a long standing interest in the civil and human rights implications of Internet censorship and surveillance by State and corporate actors.

The question of timing is an interesting one. The only sustained attempt I've found so far to make sense of it is the following. I can't say I'm in agreement with all of it, but it does offer food for thought, not least in its characterisation of Petraeus, and the enduring appeal of the man to a significant section of the US elite. Britain, France prodding Obama into attacking Syria Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D. PressTV, June 8, 2013 http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/06/08/307786/uk-france-goading-us-into-striking-syria/ On the eve of this year’s Bilderberg meeting, the Anglo-French intelligence bosses have clearly shown their hand with two high-profile attacks on Obama. Wednesday, June 5 marked the liberation of Qusayr, the great Stalingrad of the Syrian terrorist death squads deployed by NATO against Assad. With the rout of these terrorists, the main units of the self-styled Free Syrian Army, along with the Nusra branch of al Qaeda, are likely to face annihilation in the short to medium term. On the same day that Qusayr fell, the British and French governments hysterically demanded that Obama undertake a total bombing campaign against Syria, whatever the consequences in regard to Russia and other powers. To his credit, Obama is continuing to say no to this lunatic Anglo-French neocolonial adventure. On that same June 5, the London-based daily The Guardian, in an article by the expatriate American Glenn Greenwald, hyped a court order from the secret FISA panel of federal judges showing that the US National Security Agency was routinely monitoring the telephone records (including time, locations, call duration, and unique identifiers, but not the contents of the conversations) of possibly unlimited millions of Verizon phone subscribers. Back in the US, reactionary talk show hosts began screaming “Obama taps your phones!” On June 6, again in advance of every other newspaper in the world, The Guardian published another article by Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill revealing that the National Security Agency, under a program called Prism, had obtained direct access to the servers of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, Youtube, Skype, AOL, and Microsoft, and was busily monitoring the content of e-mails, file transfers, and live conversations. Back in the US, reactionary talk show hosts began screaming, “Obama reads your e-mail!” Under George Bush, warrantless wiretaps and similar illegal programs were revealed by various media organs. These revelations had minimal impact on Bush, whose base was indifferent to civil liberties. Obama’s base, by contrast, cares very much, and has been visibly upset by these new reports. While strongly condemning these totalitarian programs, we must also not lose sight of who is putting these reports into circulation, and why. Phone taps are bad, but a general war in the Middle East leading to a possible Third World War is far worse. The British and French defense and intelligence establishment (they have virtually merged) want Obama and the American people to take the lead and shoulder the risk in a perilous attack on Syria, in time to preserve the death squads so they can fight another day in another country. London and Paris, of course, see themselves as the principal beneficiaries of the breakup of Syria. Since Obama is currently blocking their plans, they are bringing up their big guns of scandal, with the center-left Guardian evidently chosen to take the point, doubtless to obtain more attention among Obama’s leftist supporters. (During the initial Clinton scandals of Whitewatergate and Troopergate, the flagship of scandal was the reactionary London-based Daily Telegraph, especially through its columnists Peregrine Worthshorne and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.) Coming as they do on the eve of the yearly Bilderberg conference, these scandals stamped Made in England suggest that the majority of this elitist cabal have maintained their anti-Obama line already evident in last year’s meeting, and are using the current gathering to further their plans. From Lady Astor’s Cliveden Set to the Bilderbergs This year’s Bilderberg conference is beginning today at the Grove Hotel in the town of Watford, England, not far from Heathrow Airport. Up to 150 announced and unannounced members of the transatlantic financier oligarchy and their retainers are expected to attend. Watford is only 15 miles away from Cliveden, infamous as the country home of Lady Nancy Astor, where some 75 years ago a clique of fascist “cagoulords” including Lord Waldorf Astor, Lord Vincent Astor, Lord Brand, Lord Lothian, Lord Halifax, Geoffrey Dawson of the London Times, and Sir Neville Chamberlain schemed with the likes of Joachim von Ribbentrop to build up Hitler and then play him against Stalin in an apocalyptic world war that somehow went awry. Today’s financier elite is ideologically very much the descendent of that “Cliveden Set” which often dictated policy to the British Foreign Office. Will any of today’s Bilderbergers make the 20-minute drive to Cliveden? The big news at this year’s Bilderberg meeting is the arrival of General David Petraeus, who was forced out last November as head of the US Central Intelligence Agency under circumstances which strongly suggested that he had taken part in a Seven Days in May scenario, joining with a shadowy cabal of generals, admirals, politicians, pollsters and defense contractors to oust Obama from the White House regardless of the actual vote count last November, and to install a permanent dictatorship of war and austerity under the figurehead of the Wall Street financier Willard Mitt Romney. The best-known public manifestation of that effort has so far been the Benghazi incident of September 11, 2012, an orchestrated pre-election provocation (or “October surprise”) intended to put the Obama campaign on the defensive. The Benghazi incident occurred in the area of command responsibility of General Petraeus as CIA Director, and of General Carter Ham, head of the US Africa Command. Both of these officers, along with Afghanistan commander General Allen, NATO commander Admiral Stavridis, and a dozen or more others of flag rank were ousted for various official reasons in a post election purge. But there is good reason to conclude that the United States had narrowly escaped what might be called a veiled military coup d’état. Last year’s Bilderberg meeting in Chantilly, Virginia was clearly dominated by anti-Obama and pro-Romney forces. At that time, it was revealed by Charlie Skelton ofGuardian - one of the very few serious and reliable Bilderberg observers -- that Romney had made an unannounced visit to the Bilderberg confab. Obama, on the other hand, had not attended, although both he and Hillary Clinton had reportedly been on hand in 2008. The Bilderbergers had also provided valuable assistance to the Romney campaign. One leading example, which I discuss in detail in my book Just Too Weird: Bishop Romney and the Mormon Takeover of America - Polygamy, Theocracy, and Subversion is the activities of the PayPal and Facebook financier Peter Thiel, who contributed a reported $3.9 million to a super pack active on behalf of presidential candidate Ron Paul, who assisted Romney by draining votes away from serious candidates challenging Romney from his right, such as Senator Rick Santorum. Without a well-funded Ron Paul, the Ohio and Michigan primaries might have gone to Santorum, quite possibly giving him the Republican nomination. Ron Paul, representing the racist Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, was seeking to obtain the vice presidential nomination for Senator Rand Paul, his son. As it turned out, Romney did not need Paul’s convention votes, and turned elsewhere for his running mate. At that time, it was widely recognized in Washington that Bilderberg was backing Romney. For example, an article in the superficial gossip blog Wonkette by Kirsten Boyd Johnson dated June 6, 2012 was headlined: “Did Bilderberg Monsters Just Crown Mitt Romney Your Next Leader?” We can therefore assume that be 2012 Bilderberg meeting also involved planning for the provocations and media strategies that would attempt to catapult Romney into the White House by fair means or foul. In the event, the sneering plutocrat Romney turned out to be so inept and odious as a candidate that not even the massive resources of the Bilderberg network sufficed to make him president. This outcome teaches an important lesson: however preponderant their power, the Bilderberg elite does not possess magical powers to shape world events. If they want to take the presidency while preserving the formalities of an election, then they too must mobilize their forces for the long slog, and in this the Obama forces proved more adroit. But, by the same token, the Bilderbergers have not given up on their project of a permanent austerity and aggression dictatorship for the United States. Quite the contrary. Petraeus and the problem of Bonapartist dictatorship For years, General David Petraeus has been the principal focus of Bonapartist and authoritarian tendencies in US politics. We can think of him as a kind of American equivalent of France’s Marshall Philippe Pétain, especially as the latter emerges from the groundbreaking historical studies of historian Annie LaCroix-Riz. After World War I, Pétain - a defeatist and pessimist who had never really won a battle, and who collapsed psychologically during the final German assault of 1918 - became the convergence of French fascist forces associated with the secret networks known as the Cagoule and the Synarchie. General Petraeus, for his part, has long been the darling of the neocon faction, which wanted him to run for president in 2012. Petraeus has attended the Bilderberg meeting several times before, and has long been a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations. Petraeus has signaled that the disagreement with Obama’s policy of ending the Iraq war, and now of winding down Afghanistan. We can assume that Petraeus shares the violent contempt for Obama which was imprudently expressed by his close associate, General Stanley McChrystal, who got fired when his comments were revealed by a journalist. It may be argued that Petraeus has never really won a campaign. One could just as easily argue that the US military has not won against an opponent capable of serious warfare since General Douglas MacArthur’s masterful Inchon landing of September 1950. Although Petraeus has bitter enemies, he is widely regarded as the leading general of the current age. His return to Bilderberg this year shows that last year’s Paula Broadwell adultery scandal has not removed him from contention. Pétain, after all, was also famous for his dalliances. Petraeus’ patron, Henry R. Kravis of KKR General Petraeus does not arrive in Watford alone. He comes as the central figure of his own delegation. He is accompanied by his current patron, the Wall Street financier Henry Kravis of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts. Kravis, with a personal fortune in excess of $4 billion, gives Petraeus a fantastically wealthy sponsor for his future activities. Kravis has just appointed Petraeus to head the KKR Global Institute, a new think tank supposedly devoted to studying problems of environment, economics, society, and governance. In reality, the KKR Global Institute looks very much like the kind of private intelligence operation which would be needed to launch a rather unorthodox quest for the White House. One of Petraeus’ associates in his new job will be Ken Mehlman, a veteran political hack who once headed the Republican National Committee. Mehlman would not be much use for forecasting global trends, but would be tremendously valuable for someone attempting to assemble a political faction centered on Republican and reactionary circles. A certain Henry McVey of KKR will also be involved. The Kravis family has something of a history of promoting presidential contenders. As I show in the chapter entitled “The Permian Basin Gang” of my 1992 George Bush: the Unauthorized Biography, the founder of the Kravis family fortune was Oklahoma oilman Ray Kravis, who became a close friend of GOP Senator Prescott Bush of the Wall Street firm Brown Brothers Harriman, for many decades the most politically connected private bank. When Prescott Bush wanted to send the young George H. W. Bush to learn the oil business, he asked Ray Kravis to give his son a job. Henry Kravis later served as a top financial angel for Bush 41. During those years, Henry Kravis wrote the largest single check in world history to complete his leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. Also part of Petraeus retinue is Henry’s third wife Marie Josée Kravis, the dominant figure of the reactionary/neocon Hudson Institute. With this, the Petraeus regroupment acquires the services of a significant think tank to generate policy positions, personnel and staffing choices, and the like. Also part of the Petraeus party is Michael Gfoeller, who has ties to former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and served for over a quarter century in the State Department. Gfoeller has been associated with Petraeus in the past, and is currently a political consultant with the lobbying division of Exxon Mobil. The Bilderbergers supported Obama in 2008 because they wanted to use him as a tool to get the Anglo-American banking system safely through the world derivatives panic with US Treasury and US Federal Reserve bailouts, and a minimum of additional regulation. This was the function which Obama fulfilled. But now, the Bilderbergers are dissatisfied with Obama, and wish to reward him for his services by dumping him as soon as possible, as we saw in 2012. On the one hand, the Bilderberg group remains deeply dissatisfied with what they regard as the slow and inadequate pace of primitive accumulation and austerity measures under the Obama regime. Obama promises the gradual demolition of Social Security and Medicare, but not fast enough to satisfy these austerity ghouls. Romney would have attempted a much more ambitious program of entitlement destruction, union busting, service cuts, and related measures. Qusayr, the Stalingrad of the terrorist death squads Another principle of Bilderberg complaint against Obama has emerged with greater urgency during the last several days. The civil war in Syria systematically fomented by NATO intelligence with the help of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and the other reactionary Persian Gulf monarchies has now reached a decisive turning point with the fall of the rebel stronghold of Qusayr on June 5. Tens of thousands of terrorists organized into anti-Assad death squads over several years with the help of the CIA and the State Department now face short-term defeat, rout, encirclement, and annihilation. In the meantime, the British and especially the French government are busy manufacturing dubious stories about the alleged use of poison gas by the Syrian government against the Anglo-French terrorist clients. This operation reeks of the worst neocolonialism: it is the Paris-London entente cordiale of 1904, the Sykes-Picot powers, and the infamous duo of Suez 1956, who are demanding the re-imposition of colonial rule in the Levant. Ironically, current Russian opposition and US skepticism in regard to this project are also a distant echo of that same Suez crisis. The British, the French, the Israelis, and the neocons are doing everything possible to pressure Obama into attacking Syria and Hezbollah now, a move which would commit him to an attack on Iran a little later. Obama is guilty of numerous crimes and atrocities, including drone strikes, assassinations, cyber warfare, economic sanctions, the bombing of Libya, and many more, but the simple fact is that the Syrian crisis has gone on for more than two years and Obama is still refusing to launch the massive US bombing campaign demanded by the British Colonel Blimps and the French Vichy nostalgics. No one can tell how long Obama’s resolve will last, but this is the reality we have observed so far. Even Obama’s appointments of the warmongers and meddlers Susan Rice and Samantha Power to important regime posts can be variously interpreted. According to one view, these two charming ladies are being set up as prominent and visible targets for the raving attacks of the Congressional tea party fanatics, meaning that Obama personally will be spared a significant part of the flak. Whether Obama will ever follow their urgings towards aggression has yet to be seen. He turned down a demand from Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey and Petraeus to arm the Syrian death squads in the fall of 2012, and Rice and Power are both far weaker than that combination. Assuming that Obama continues to resist an attack on Syria, and continues to move towards austerity at the current pace, the moment may soon come when the Bilderbergers will want to get him out of the White House. Last year, that operation could have been accomplished under the cover of an election, which is always the preferred way. This year, Obama’s ouster would have to involve impeachment and removal from office on the Watergate model. There is no doubt that House Tea Party fanatics would be happy to impeach Obama at any time. They have pushed aside all other public business to focus on their lunatic account of the Benghazi events, their grotesque interpretation of the Internal Revenue Service affair, and their endless tub-thumping about regime snooping on the Associated Press, Fox reporter James Rosen, etc. At the present time, the impeachment of Obama might prove to be an exercise in futility, since his support in the Senate remains intact. But that can change. The chances of removing Obama have just improved today with the appointment of a new Republican Senator by New Jersey Governor Christie to replace the recently deceased Senator Lautenberg of that state until October. Ray McGovern: Obama fears assassination by the CIA And then, 50 years after the Kennedy assassination, there are more energetic methods, as Obama personally seems to realize. One source shedding light on this matter is ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern, the former intelligence briefer of President George H. W. Bush, and now a peace activist. On a recent Pacifica radio broadcast, McGovern has reported this interesting account of remarks made by Obama after hours with supporters: The notion that Obama’s life is in danger has been methodically cultivated by his devoted supporters from the start of his presidential campaign in 2007. Ray McGovern, however, cannot be counted as one of those acolytes, and would be more likely to lambaste Obama than to make excuses for him. This account therefore acquires a certain authority. From his own point of view, Obama has had a rough time lately. It has long been known that his greatest psychological satisfaction comes through the adulation he receives when making public speeches. When he delivered his speech on national security at the National Defense University, he was subjected to prolonged heckling by the veteran provocateur, Medea Benjamin of Code Pink. This heckling went on for a long time. Ms. Benjamin is very suspect, because she demanded that Obama stop old drone attacks and close Guant?namo, but said nothing at all about the far greater danger of a short-term attack on Syria, a country she has vilified in the recent past. And now, in an act of complete lese majesté, the hitherto untouchable First Lady Michelle Obama has been accosted at a private fundraiser by a lesbian activist demanding that Obama sign an executive order providing benefits for same-sex couples. Are these coincidences, or part of a psychological warfare pattern designed to remind Obama that he can be reached at any time? Hollywood accredits the meme of storming the White House There is also another dimension. Serious students of the events of September 11, 2001 are aware of the process by which the memes or elements of that tragic day were carefully introduced, accredited, and developed in the public mind, especially through a series of Hollywood movies. An example is the final scene of the movie The Fight Club, which shows the collapse of a number of skyscrapers in a manner eerily prophetic of the fate of the New York Twin Towers. Hollywood is, after all, not far away from Santa Monica, the home of that leading scenario factory known as the Rand Corporation. Precisely in this field we have this sudden emergence of a new genre of a Hollywood blockbuster - the movie extravaganza devoted to an armed assault on the White House. The first of these arrived in March of this year under the title of Olympus Has Fallen, directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Gerard Butler, Ashley Judd, and Morgan Freeman. Here a large force of North Korean rogue terrorists strafe and storm the White House and take the president prisoner in the situation room, demanding that the US get out of Korea. The tone is paranoid/serious, with no element of satire or irony. The accent is on a certain kind of naturalism, including by having the real-life MSNBC commentator Lawrence O’Donnell report the events in a newscast. Many images portray the blowing up of the entire West Wing of the premises. Due in theaters in late June is a second movie with virtually the identical theme, this time called White House Down, from Sony Pictures and Columbia. The director is the German Roland Emmerich, known for Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Patriot. The stars are Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx. This time, the White House is attacked by a domestic paramilitary group led by Emil Stenz, according to the script by James Vanderbilt of the well-known oligarchical clan. The attackers also blow up the dome of the US Capitol as a diversion. So far as is known, Obama has not commented on either of these two motion pictures. The Kokesh march on Washington: Rifle-toting reactionaries Are there correlated developments in the real world? There certainly are: over a period of several weeks, the disgruntled Iraq war veteran Adam Kokesh was recently calling for a July 4 anti-Obama march of 10,000 black-clad white reactionaries to violate federal and District of Columbia law by crossing the Potomac from Virginia into the District and thence around the National Mall, passing by most of the executive departments, the Congress, and the White House - all the while armed with loaded rifles. Until about a year ago, Kokesh was a leading supporter of the Republican austerity fanatic and antigovernment demagogue Ron Paul, but he then broke with Paul and set out on his own course of provocation and adventurism. In the unlikely event that Kokesh’s march had succeeded, he would have had the equivalent of one rifle division in position to intimidate the Congress and the White House in turn - a clear step towards anarchy. After being arrested at a pro-marijuana rally in Philadelphia and spending a few days in jail, Kokesh has changed his strategy, and is now calling for marches on July 4 in the 50 state capitals to demand immediate secession and breakup of the federal union. Loaded rifles would still be de rigeur. The question of secessionism was answered with thundering finality in the American Civil War of a century and a half ago, an episode which caused this nation more than 700,000 dead. Since the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, anyone attempting to be open this question must be regarded as a dangerous madman. For our purposes here, it is enough to recall that the Kokesh march is too close for comfort to the two scenario films we have just discussed. Such then is the immediate background for the Bilderberg 2013 deliberations this weekend. It remains to say a word about the abysmal quality of most Bilderberg analysis. Last year at Chantilly, they obtained an incongruous situation in which the majority of the protesters assembled outside of the hotel gate were supporters of the Ron Paul presidential campaign. Whether they know it or not, these poor dupes were thus also supporting Mitt Romney, for whom Paul was serving as the right wingman. There was a direct convergence between Paul backer Peter Thiel inside the meeting, and the Paul backers outside. This amounts to a classic control the opposition. Things like this have been happening since ancient Greece, when it was the general rule that the cult of Apollo at Delphi controlled the various cults of Dionysios which appeared to naïve observers as the opposition. Cutting through disinformation and controlled opposition Any group as sophisticated as Bilderberg knows that its arrogant and oligarchical machinations will inevitably call forth a resistance. One way to control such a resistance is by providing them with a steady flow of disinformation, disguised as leaks from the inside. A conduit for such leaks was precisely the late Jim Tucker, who wrote for the American Free Press, the descendent of the house organ of the Roosevelt-hating and fascist-loving American Liberty League of the 1930s. Tucker was an unreconstructed Confederate racist. At his last Bilderberger meeting, Tucker told a group of journalists that he regarded the American Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression.” He added that he wanted reparations, not for those who had been enslaved, but rather for the slave owners, whom he said had been illegally deprived of their property by the evil President Lincoln. Tucker claimed that the Bilderberg group was in favor of socialism, and ferociously opposed to free market laissez-faire capitalism. In reality, David Rockefeller, one of those who paid for Bilderberg activities over several decades, had hired the Austrian school libertarian economist Friedrich von Hayek as his personal tutor at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, and had later financed an American professorship for Ludwig von Mises, another Austro-libertarian luminary. This means that David Rockefeller must be regarded as a founder of both the Bilderberg group and the Austrian school of economics. But it did no good to call these plain facts to Tucker’s attention: he kept repeating that the Bilderberg group supported Obama for reelection. Whether Tucker was fed these stories by a functionary from within Bilderberg, or whether he simply invented them out of whole cloth on his own, is a matter for further inquiry. To the extent that Tucker was seen as the public face of the opposition to Bilderberg, the elitists had nothing to worry about. Similarly, at last year’s Bilderberg event it was breathlessly reported that the name of Ron Paul was being cursed inside the meeting. Since the Bilderberg faction around Thiel was contributing large sums to help Ron Paul’s campaign efforts, and since the overwhelming consensus of Bilderberg as a whole was pro-Romney, we might be driven to the conclusion that this report was just a face-saving trick by the Paulbearers to conceal the embarrassing elitist support for their man. But it is also possible that the name of Ron Paul was being cursed by the waiters, busboys, and cleaning ladies when they found out that Paul wanted to take away their union, their minimum wage, their food stamps, their unemployment benefits, their hope for Social Security and Medicare in their old age, the Head Start program and Pell Grants for their kids, and the WIC high-protein meals for their pregnant wives and babies. The Paul supporters feel an enduring gratitude towards Thiel. This week, we read in an article by Paul Joseph Watson appearing on Infowars of June 3, 2013: “Another notable attendee is Peter Thiel, the man who provided the financial muscle for online ventures like Facebook and Paypal, as well as LinkedIn and Friendster.” More to the point is the fact that Thiel also “provided the financial muscle” for Ron Paul’s super pack to the tune of $3.9 million. The fear is evidently that this inconvenient fact might cause some pesky cognitive dissonance among Watson’s readers, many of whom were and are devoted supporters of the Paul dynasty’s inhuman super-austerity policies. This line of argument currently also attempts to portray the anarcho-capitalist Thiel as a benign force for openness and transparency within the sinister Bilderberg context. This is so absurd that no comment is necessary. It will be wise to remain skeptical in regard to such accounts. The inability of libertarians to discover and report the truth about Bilderberg comes down to this. Bilderberg is a creature of the Rockefellers, and so is the Austrian school to which the libertarians subscribe. They are thus pre-programmed, as if with an inner gyroscope, to converge on the policy goals of the financier elite. The Bilderberg group demands genocidal austerity across the board. The libertarians, calling this the fight against big government (even though the sacrifices are borne by innocent individuals), heartily agree. The Bilderberg group ardently desires to oust Obama from the White House. The libertarians, blinded by their fanatical hatred of Obama, and long since aligned with the far right demagogic line emanating from such scurrilous websites as Drudge and Breitbart, are totally on board. Only when it comes to the attack on Syria, Hezbollah, and Iran, about which Obama is dragging his feet, might the libertarians have some objections. But by that point, they themselves, through their very own efforts, would have largely destroyed the institutional basis for resistance to a future and wider war - such as through trade unions, which the Pauls wish to destroy. The irony of the libertarians is that they always claim technically not to be fascists in the full 1930s central European sense of the term- but, as the example of German Chancellor Brüning shows, libertarian economic and social policies can be counted on to degrade social and economic conditions to the point where fascist rule becomes virtually inevitable, as seen in 1932-1933. And remember: Bilderberg is of Dutch origin, and so is Petraeus.

So who did instruct Rather to repeat his description of the Z-film, only this time with a shift in emphasis, so soon after delivering his first attempt on CBS TV on the afternoon of November 25, 1963? After leaving The Washington Post in 1977, Carl Bernstein spent six months looking at the relationship of the CIA and the press during the Cold War years. His 25,000-word cover story, published in Rolling Stone on October 20, 1977, is reprinted below. THE CIA AND THE MEDIA How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up BY CARL BERNSTEIN http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php Notes: (3) From the CIA point of view, access to newsfilm outtakes and photo libraries is a matter of extreme importance. The Agency's photo archive is probably the greatest on earth; its graphic sources include satellites, photoreconnaissance, planes, miniature cameras ... and the American press. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Agency obtained carte‑blanche borrowing privileges in the photo libraries of literally dozens of American newspapers, magazines and television, outlets. For obvious reasons, the CIA also assigned high priority to the recruitment of photojournalists, particularly foreign‑based members of network camera crews. (4) On April 3rd, 1961, Koop left the Washington bureau to become head of CBS, Inc.’s Government Relations Department — a position he held until his retirement on March 31st, 1972. Koop, who worked as a deputy in the Censorship Office in World War II, continued to deal with the CIA in his new position, according to CBS sources.

John F Kennedy: 'We all breathe the same air' In June 1963, JFK made a speech that changed the outcome of the cold war. Fifty years on, modern politicians should follow his example of leading, not following, public opinion By Jeffrey Sachs The Guardian, Saturday Review, 1 June 2013, 19-20 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/31/jfk-to-move-the-world • To Move the World: JFK's Quest for Peace by Jeffrey Sachs is published by Bodley Head

How the United States keeps British journalists "on-side", method the first: http://www.colorado.edu/cwa/news/2011Hoggart.html Not quite a bung, you understand, more a case of flying the lucky recipient, all expenses paid, to a bucolic jamboree, and there flattering the journo's self-importance. Mr. Hoggart is, it almost goes without remarking, a world-renowned expert on patriotism:

Simon Hoggart's week: time to admit we're living in a kleptocracy? http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2013/may/31/simon-hoggart-time-living-kleptocracy Suggested title: Bonkers Angletonian conspiracy theorist praised by ageing British presstitute.

Posted by Tracy Riddle at the DPF - very interesting it is, too: The CIA at CBS (Daniel Schorr 1977) http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisb.../Item%2001.pdf Found in Wesiberg's archives