Steven Gaal

The 1949 Geneva Conventions, which codified IHL after World War II, also marked the first inclusion in a humanitarian law treaty of a set of war crimes—the grave breaches of the conventions. Each of the four Geneva Conventions (on wounded and sick on land, wounded and sick at sea, prisoners of war, and civilians) contains its own list of grave breaches. The list in its totality is: willful killing;

^{LOOKS LIKE HOLE ,NOT DEBRIS AREA.}

^{+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++}

^{http://911blogger.com/news/2012-10-30/911-total-proof-bailed-out-banksters-inside-connections}

^{If vaults were empty...were they emptied before planes ?? ...foreknowledge}

she's a CT, she's a kook // END Colby

LEN NEEDS TO LOOK INWARD

LEFTY OBAMA ?

Clinton visit to Algeria prepares war in Mali

By Kumaran Ira

3 November 2012 world socialist websiye

The Bamako conference is hosting officials from the United Nations (UN), African Union (AU), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and European Union (EU). Opening the conference, Malian defence minister Yamoussa Camara said that war was inevitable, adding: “This conference is a meeting of harmonisation, which must lead to concrete proposals for the adoption of a strategic plan to liberate the north of our country.”

On October 12, a UN Security Council resolution gave ECOWAS until November 26 to offer detailed plans for military intervention in Mali. ECOWAS has already announced the deployment of 3,000 troops in Mali and is awaiting final UN Security Council approval.

The conference is taking place under the aegis of imperialist powers including the US and France, which are pressing for military intervention. They aim to use African troops as proxies against Islamist forces—including Ansar Dine and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJWA), both linked to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)—that have been active in northern Mali since this March.

At this point, Mali plunged into civil war, after Tuareg forces fleeing US-controlled Libya returned to northern Mali and took control of the region. These Tuareg-nationalist forces are organised in the National Movement for Liberation of the Azawad (MNLA), which joined with Islamist groups in taking control of the region. The rebels’ victory in the North led to a military coup in Bamako, ousting longtime president Amadou Toumani Touré (ATT).

Clinton’s visit to Algiers aimed to secure the support of Algeria, the major regional military power, for war in Mali. She argued strongly for military intervention as the primary strategy. One US official said: “The secretary underscored...that it is very clear that a political process and our counter-terrorism efforts in Mali need to work in parallel.”

Both France and the US see Algerian participation in the military intervention as vital. Before Clinton’s visit, a US State Department official said, “We have an awful lot at stake here, and an awful lot of common interests, and there’s a strong recognition that Algeria has to be a central part of the solution.”

After Clinton’s visit, the press reported that Algeria had approved the participation in the intervention in Mali. An Algerian Foreign Affairs Ministry official said, “The discussions between President Bouteflika and Mrs. Clinton addressed more the details of Algeria’s participation than the principle of it.”

Clinton’s visit came after Algeria and the US held a first-ever US-Algerian strategic dialogue in Washington on October 19, focused on strengthening cooperation between both countries at the political, security and economic levels.

The Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) regime cynically poses at home as a critic of imperialist policies. However, Clinton’s visit underscores that the FLN, 50 years after its independence from France, does not oppose imperialist policies in the region. It is reportedly coordinating military plans with the imperialist powers.

It has deployed more than 25,000 troops along the Malian and Libyan borders and allowed the CIA to install its Maghreb-Sahel regional headquarters in Algeria.

US and French officers and diplomats are holding talks to facilitate intervention plans, provide logistical support for an invasion, and deploy surveillance drones. Top US State Department and US Africa Command (AFRICOM) officials travelled to Paris for a security summit to discuss the Sahel region, in which Mali is located. The EU also announced a “Mali mission,” deploying military experts to train Malian and African troops over a four-to-six-month period.

Preparations for another war are proceeding in defiance of public opinion in both France and the US, which is hostile to wars in Afghanistan and Libya and the ongoing proxy war in Syria.

Washington and Paris cynically present their plans for war in Mali as part of the so-called war on terror. Last week, US defence secretary Leon Panetta vowed to eliminate the threat from “al-Qaeda” in northern Mali, claiming that Al Qaeda would have “no place to hide.”

Such comments are hypocritical. The US and France relied on Al Qaeda forces in the war against Libya to topple Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime. In the US-led proxy war to oust Bashar al-Assad government in Syria, US intelligence and its allies arm and rely on the same Al Qaeda and reactionary Islamist forces in stoking civil war.

France’s military intervention in Mali is prepared by the Socialist Party (PS) government of President François Hollande, who has called for an “African-led” military intervention in Mali “as quickly as possible.” Hollande is expected to visit Algeria in December.

French defence officials told AP they plan to send two surveillance drones to western Africa from Afghanistan by the end of 2012. France has deployed Special Forces in the region—including to Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Chad—and contracted out surveillance in Mali to private firms. Intelligence Online reported that France has contracted Luxembourg-based CAE Aviation to monitor parts of north Mali and neighbouring western Niger.

The imperialist intervention is reportedly planned for early next year, in particular before the rainy season. According to Le Monde, its main phases will be “a consolidation of Malian sovereignty in the south of the country and its capital, Bamako; then the preparation of three or four Malian battalions on which African armies and their European allies can rely to face the northern groups. After the retaking of several [northern] cities—Gao, Timbuktu—the stabilisation of the north will follow, in March. The plan includes bombings and the intervention of Special Forces. The United States will furnish intelligence capabilities.”

AP quoted US officials, who said “the US has already expanded its Mali-related intelligence effort with satellite and spy flights over the north to track and map the rebels.”

Employees of Romney family’s secret bank tied to fraud, money laundering, drug cartels and the CIA

===================

By Gerry Bello and Bob Fitrakis

Global Research, October 21, 2012

Free Press

ooooooooooooooooo

As previously reported in by the Columbus Free Press, the Romney family, namely Mitt, Ann, G Scott and Tagg Romney, along with Mitt’s “6th son” and campaign finance chair have a secretive private equity firm called Solamere Capital Partners. This firms ties to Romney’s campaign and bundlers is already well documented, along with its connection to the manufacture and distribution of voting machines. What is not as well documented is a subsidiary of that private equity firm hiring employees of a failed firm tied to a Ponzi scheme that has a long history of money laundering for Latin American drug cartels and to the Iran-Contra scandal.

As reported by ThinkProgress, Solamere Capital Partner’s subsidiary Solamere Advisors is a investment advisory group, providing advice to Solamere clients and boosting sales. Would-be corporate pugilist Tagg Romney is a director. According to the New York Times, all but one of its 11 employees came from the Charlotte office of the Stanford Financial Group, the US investment arm of convicted felon R. Allen Stanford’s offshore banking and fraud network that comprised a host of companies including the Stanford International Bank, Stanford Capital Management, The Bank of Antigua, Stanford Trust and Stanford Gold and Bullion. Three of these employees, Tim Bambauer, Deems May, and Brandon Phillips, received incentive compensation related to their direct sales of securities linked to a fraud that brought down this banking network.

Tim Bambauer has left his position as managing partner at Solamere Advisors. May and Phillips remain employed as partner and chief compliance officer respectively.

Allen Stanford is currently serving a 110-year prison sentence for convictions on 13 counts of fraud. His companies were placed in receivership. $8 billion of Stanford’s stolen money has yet to be recovered and the victims are in court to recover those funds and incentive pay bonuses to Stanford employees (including Bambauer, May and Phillips) for fraudulently getting people to invest in an operation that later bilked many of them out of their life’s savings.

Stanford’s shady history and criminality did not begin with the fraudulent investments that lead to his downfall, nor was it unknown at the highest level of United State’s Government. In a 2006 diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, the US Ambassador to Antigua advised “Embassy officers do not reach out to Stanford because of the allegations of bribery and money laundering. The Ambassador managed to stay out of any one-on-one photos with Stanford during the breakfast. For his part, Stanford said he preferred to conduct his business without contacting the Embassy, resolving any investment disputes directly with local governments. It is whispered in the region that Stanford facilitates resolution with significant cash contributions.”

Similarly investigations by the SEC, FBI and Scotland Yard into Stanford’s empire stalled or failed all the way back to the 1980s. The Independent Newspaper in the UK alleges that Stanford’s network was on the FBI’s radar for more than 20 years. Stanford set up his first offshore bank in 1986, just as Eugene Hausenfaus, shot down while gun running for the CIA in Nicaragua, was being connected to another company named Stanford, in this case the “Stanford Technology Trading Group” owned by Richard Secord, Albert Hakim, and 4 unknown other persons, perhaps including Allen Stanford. According to Iran-Contra Whistleblower Al Martin (Lt. Cmdr. USNR ret.) “Anything with the name Stanford on it belonged to Secord”. When finally brought to trial, Stanford employed the same defense attorney, Dick DeGuerin, as Iran-Contra defendant Oliver North.

As the Iran-Contra explosion crippled the CIA’s Caribbean bank of choice, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), Stanford’s offshore banking empire was using the same techniques and embracing the same moral category of clients. Stanford’s banks were known to have laundered money from the Juarez Cartel and alleged to have done so earlier for the Medellin Cartel, and one of his private planes has been seized by the Mexican government in a drug case.

On top of legal woes in the United States and Mexico, the London Daily Telegraph reported that Stanford’s Venezuelan offices were raided by Venezuela’s military intelligence over claims that its employees were paid by the CIA to spy on the South American country. When asked about this in a CNBC interview which was cited in a story by independent journalist Tom Burghardt, Stanford declined to comment on any involvement with the CIA rather than outright deny it.

All of the these dealings by Stanford, and the complicity of his employees in facilitating them, was public information before January 2010, when Mitt Romney addressed the first full meeting of Solamere’s investors. Yet his son Tagg chose to hire into his family these alleged white collar criminals as soon as Stanford’s criminal empire collapsed. The Romney family stands by the new employees associated with their secret bank, as evidenced by Tagg’s response to interview questions from ThinkProgress regarding Solamere’s ability to reign them in: “Hey guys, We’re done here”.

######################################## PART 2

Financial Fraud, The Laundering of Drug Money and the CIA

A Full-Service, Bank: Stanford International Bank (SIB)

=================

By Tom Burghardt

Global Research, August 05, 2010

Antifascist Calling... 4 August 2010

oooooooooooooooo

Last year, when a federal court in Texas handed down indictments charging Stanford International Bank (SIB) and its officers with “orchestrating a fraudulent, multibillion dollar investment scheme,” I wondered: was there more to the story?

Indeed there was.

Once described by fawning media as a “flamboyant Texan” and “philanthropist,” Stanford was founder and sole shareholder of a global banking empire once conservatively valued at $50 billion.

According to the federal indictment, “Sir Allen,” (R. Allen Stanford) as he was dubbed by a corrupt former minister of Antigua, ran a massive Ponzi scheme camouflaged as a bank that sold some $7 billion in self-styled “certificates of deposit” and $1.2 billion in mutual funds.

Operated from behind a façade of well-appointed offices and with a jet-set lifestyle to match, the SIB grift may have been impressive but it was a scam from the get-go. Lured by “high rates that exceed those available through true certificates of deposits offered by traditional banks,” thousands lost their shirts.

Those high rates were a lie and the bank’s “unique investment strategy” about as legitimate as a penny-stock fraud or advance fee scam on the internet. Of the $8 billion hoovered up by the banker and his cronies, only about $500 million have been recovered.

Facing the prospect of years in prison, The Miami Herald reported that SIB’s chief financial officer James Davis, once Stanford’s college roommate and originally charged in the indictment, copped a plea to save his own neck.

Davis told the Justice Department that “his boss had been stealing from investors for decades while paying bribes to regulators and even performing blood oaths never to reveal his secrets.”

Talk about a wise guy!

And with connections and generous pay-outs to U.S. politicians going back more than a decade, 65% of which went to Democrats including our “change” president, Allen Stanford was plugged-in.

Evidence also suggests he may have gotten an assist covering his tracks from regulators and U.S. secret state agencies, including the CIA.

SEC Stand Down

Allen Stanford did business the American way; he swindled depositors and then siphoned-off the proceeds into a spider’s web of offshore accounts.

The indictment charges “it was part of the conspiracy that Stanford … and others would cause the movement of millions of dollars of fraudulently obtained investors’ funds from and among bank accounts located in the Southern District of Texas and elsewhere in the United States to various bank accounts located outside of the United States … in order to exercise exclusive control over the investors’ funds.”

Auditors learned that funds were moved through Stanford-controlled accounts to offshore banks, including HSBC in London, Bank Julius Baer in Zurich and eight others; banks which have figured in past money laundering or tax-avoidance scandals. None have been charged with an offense in connection with the affair.

In all, 28 numbered accounts were listed by prosecutors, veritable black holes that escaped scrutiny; that is if regulators in Washington were minding the store, which they weren’t.

Years earlier, SEC investigators at the commission’s Ft. Worth office uncovered evidence of wrongdoing. According to an explosive report by the SEC’s Office of the Inspector General, Ft. Worth examiners launched a series of probes in 1997, 1998, 2002 and 2004 exploring SIB practices but their diligence was sabotaged by high-level officials.

That report, Investigation of the SEC’s Response to Concerns Regarding Robert Allen Stanford’s Alleged Ponzi Scheme, Case No. OIG-526, March 31, 2010, paints a damning picture of the regulatory process.

The inspector general states: “While the Fort Worth Examination group made multiple efforts after each examination to convince the Fort Worth Enforcement program (‘Enforcement’) to open and conduct an investigation of Stanford, no meaningful effort was made by Enforcement to investigate the potential fraud or to bring an action to attempt to stop it until late 2005.”

Last month, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that staff members, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared management retaliation, told the newspaper that higher-ups wanted “tools to do away with people who have a dissenting opinion.”

Senior managers called the probes a “goat screw” and ordered them killed.

The OIG investigation “found that the former head of Enforcement in Fort Worth, who played a significant role in multiple decisions over the years to quash investigations of Stanford, sought to represent Stanford on three separate occasions after he left the Commission, and in fact represented Stanford briefly in 2006 before he was informed by the SEC Ethics Office that it was improper to do so.” (emphasis added)

In Florida, The Miami Herald revealed that state regulators did the SEC one better and gave the bank carte blanche to operate secretly, moving “vast amounts of money offshore–without reporting a penny to regulators.”

The arrangement between the bank and the Florida Office of Financial Regulation was so brazen, that Stanford’s company “was allowed to sell hundreds of millions in bank notes without allowing regulators to check for fraud.”

And once those suspect instruments were sold, the Heraldreported that “employees shredded records of the trust agreements and CD purchases once the original documents were sent to Antigua, state records show.”

A sweet deal if you can get it, or have powerful friends who might wish to avoid messy inquiries touching upon sensitive matters.

The New York Times reported last year that current charges “stem from an inquiry opened in October 2006,” that is, nearly a decade “after a routine exam of Stanford Group, according to Stephen J. Korotash, an associate regional director of enforcement with the agency’s Fort Worth office.”

Korotash told the Times that the SEC “stood down” its investigation “at the request of another federal agency, which he declined to name.”

According to BusinessWeek, in 2006 the Bush administration “bestowed on his intelligence czar … broad authority, in the name of national security” to excuse companies from “their normal accounting and securities-disclosure obligations” if such disclosures revealed “certain top-secret defense projects.”

At the time, William McLucas, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s former enforcement chief told the publication that the ability to conceal financial information from regulators under the rubric of “national security” could lead some companies “to play fast and loose with their numbers.”

The former official said, “it could be that you have a bunch of books and records out there that no one knows about.”

In response to media reports, congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), wrote a letter to SEC Chair Mary Schapiro last year, demanding documents, and answers, why the SEC suspended investigations of the “Stanford Group under pressure from another unidentified federal agency.”

The Ohio congressman said, “if this is true … our subcommittee will demand that the SEC reveal the name of that agency which told it not to enforce federal laws which protect investors.”

Neither documents nor answers were forthcoming.

Cynics might see something untoward here, but I think it’s all just a coincidence, like drug planes bought with bundles of cashlaundered through American banks.

Drug Probes Killed

In 1986 during the Iran-Contra period, Allen Stanford’s Guardian International Bank set up shop on the sleepy Caribbean isle of Montserrat (pop. 5,870).

It didn’t take long before the bank came under scrutiny. Guardian was the subject of a joint Scotland Yard-FBI investigation “into so-called ‘brass-plate’ banks,” The Independent disclosed.

According to reporters David Connett and Stephen Foley, the bank “was suspected of laundering drug money from the notorious Medellin and Cali drug cartels run by Pablo Escobar and the Orejuela brothers.”

During the Iran-Contra scandal, congressional investigators and journalists scrutinized links between Colombian drug traffickers and the CIA’s Nicaraguan Contra army.

By 1986, evidence began to emerge that top Contra officials and the Agency enjoyed cosy ties with both Escobar and the Orejuela brothers. Under pressure from the Reagan administration however, both Congress and corporate media deep-sixed the story as the affair was covered-up.

A decade later, largely as a result of outrage generated by the late Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance series, a memorandum of understanding between Reagan’s Justice Department and the Agency entered the public record. That 1982 memo legally freed the CIA from reporting drug smuggling by their assets.

Former FBI agent Ross Gaffney who led the Guardian probe, told Connett and Foley that “we suspected that Stanford’s bank was involved in money laundering.” But before that investigation could be developed, Stanford suddenly pulled up stakes and “voluntarily surrendered his Montserrat banking licence and left the island.”

Gaffney said that even after Guardian closed, the FBI “continued to take an interest in Stanford and set up a second inquiry into that bank after receiving intelligence that it continued to launder money for the Medellin and Cali cartels.”

The former federal agent told The Independent, “We had hard intelligence about what he was doing and we began to develop it” but the investigation died or more likely, killed, by officials higher-up the food chain.

After leaving Montserrat, Stanford trained his sights on Antigua and Barbuda and developed a close relationship with former prime minister Lester Bird.

“Under the Bird family leadership” Connett and Foley reported, “the island was widely regarded as one of the most corrupt in the Caribbean, with well-documented links to arms and drug smuggling and money laundering.”

According to The Independent, “in 1990, Israeli automatic weapons ordered by Mr Bird’s brother Vere turned up in the hands of a notorious Colombian drug trafficker.”

Despite suspicions, it appears that Stanford was golden as far as the feds were concerned; just another guy with an endless supply of “get-out-of-jail-free” cards.

One reason Stanford operated with impunity, the BBC informs us, is that he “may have been a US government informer.”

DEA documents seen by BBC’s investigative unit Panorama, suggest that “drug money [was] originally paid in to Stanford International Bank by agents acting for a feared Mexican drug lord known as the ‘Lord of the Heavens’.”

Confidential DEA sources believe that Stanford turned over “details of money-laundering from Latin American clients from Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela and Ecuador,” thus “effectively guaranteeing himself a decade’s worth of ‘protection’ from the authorities, especially the SEC.”

“We were convinced that Stanford’s bank attracted millions of narco-dollars,” sources told Panorama, “but it was very difficult to get the evidence to nail him.”

“The word is” BBC reported, “that Stanford has been a confidential informer for the DEA since ’99.”

Snitch or not, this raises intriguing questions.

Was Stanford’s bank a black hole which U.S. intelligence agencies could exploit, in the interest of “national security” mind you, and therefore exempt from “normal disclosure obligations” asBusinessWeek averred?

If this were so, then even if Stanford were an informant he could have continued to launder drug money and profit nicely; such gentleman’s agreements are not without precedent.

One need only glance at internal U.S. government documentsreleased by the National Security Archive, documents which revealed the Cali cartel’s close collaboration with corrupt Colombian police, neofascist paramilitaries and the CIA when Medellín drug lord Pablo Escobar was run to ground.

Pointedly, was Stanford’s banking empire another in a long line of institutional channels that drug cartels and the CIA could both profit from?

Banks, Drugs and Covert Operations

Across the decades, historians, investigative journalists and researchers have uncovered strong evidence that various banks have served as virtual cut-outs for CIA covert operations.

Readers need only recall illegal activities by institutions as diverse as Paul Helliwell’s Castle Bank and Trust in the Bahamas, Frank Nugan and Michael Hand’s Nugan Hand Bank in Sydney and the Cayman Islands, or the far-flung empire of Agha Hasan Abedi’s Bank and Credit and Commerce International.

Separated in time and geography, what all three banks had in common was their close proximity to international drug trafficking networks and the CIA, particularly in areas of acute interest to U.S. policy planners. Did Stanford International Bank have a similar arrangement with the Agency?

When the scandal finally broke, the Houston Chronicle reported that authorities had been “looking for ties to organized drug cartels and money laundering, going back at least a decade.”

In the late 1990s, court documents revealed that “operatives of the Juarez cartel began opening accounts at Stanford’s Antigua-based bank,” laundering profits amassed by the Amado Carrillo Fuentes organization, the late “Lord of the Heavens” referred to in the BBC report.

The Chronicle notes that Fuentes’ representatives “used Stanford International Bank to open 10 accounts and deposit $3 million.” We should bear in mind however, these represent onlyknown accounts. Were there others? Federal and state investigators have said that there were.

After authorities determined the accounts were held by a notorious drug cartel, Stanford turned over the $3 million. Yet despite hard evidence of criminal wrongdoing, federal officials told the Chronicle that “any alleged Stanford connection to drug cartels and their money could lie buried in the paperwork gathered for the Security and Exchange Commission’s civil inquiry.”

One might even say rather conveniently.

During the same period, Texas state securities regulators uncovered more evidence of money laundering by Stanford entities. But because it involved offshore banks, they “referred it” to the FBI and SEC.

Texas Securities Commissioner Denise Voigt Crawford told a Senate Finance Committee last year, “Why it took 10 years for the feds to move on it, I cannot answer.”

Miffed by government foot-dragging, Crawford added, “We worked with the FBI and the SEC and basically gave them the case. We told them what we’d seen and they were going to run with it.”

But that investigation died on the vine.

Echoing similar themes, The Observer disclosed an FBI source close to the investigation confirmed that the Bureau “was looking at links to international drug gangs as part of the huge investigation into Stanford’s banking activities.”

The Observer reported that Mexican authorities seized one of Stanford’s private jets in connection with alleged links to the Gulf cartel and said that “cheques found inside the plane were linked to the cartel, which is one of the most violent criminal organisations in the world.”

DEA sources told the London newspaper “there may well have been a trail connecting his Mexican affairs to narco-trafficking interests.” However, a second DEA official told The Observer, “I think we’ll find that any possible drug-related trail and SEC priorities are not all in the same frame.”

A curious statement considering the billions of dollars in fraudulent activities alleged against the bank, some of which may have been derived from laundering drug money.

One would assume that evidence of serious wrongdoing would be motive enough to take a hard look at the allegations and not concoct a fairy tale that these charges lie “buried in the paperwork”!

A U.S. drug enforcement official told The Observer, “Any major US interest seeking to avoid fully disclosed investments would have to go to pretty careful lengths to avoid encountering cartel interests.”

“Anyone seeking to conceal or launder money would find it in safe and lucrative hands were they to forge alliances with, rather than skirt, the cartels,” The Observer noted, and would “find them accommodating in terms of remuneration.” The official hastened to add, it’s “nothing anyone will confirm for Stanford right now.”

The question is: why?

A Full-Service Bank

One possible answer may revolve around charges that SIB’s Venezuela branch was a conduit for laundered CIA funds.

If true, then the Agency would be dead set against trial disclosures that revealed the bank had been involved in laundering drug money, particularly if narcotics syndicates are playing a role in U.S. destabilization efforts there.

Months before Stanford’s empire collapsed, Venezuela’s socialist government launched a raid on SIB offices in Caracas.

The Daily Telegraph reported that “Sir Allen Stanford, the Texan billionaire … is now at the centre of an international spying row.”

The conservative British newspaper disclosed that “officials from Venezuelan military intelligence raided a branch of his offshore bank over claims that its employees were paid by the CIA to spy on the south American country.”

Although corporate media in the U.S. dismissed Venezuelan allegations as propaganda, questions persist.

While on a charm offensive before his arrest last year, Stanford gave an interview to CNBC’s Scott Cohn. When asked about claims that his bank may have been a cut-out for the Agency, this curious exchange took place:

Cohn: “You just by nature of your position and where you were got to know a lot of people in Latin America, in Africa, in Europe, around the world, and it strikes me that somebody in your position would be useful to the authorities in the US trying to find out what was going on there, what was going on in places like Venezuela. Can you tell me about any sort of role you played that way, were you helpful to the authorities in the US?”

Stanford: “Are you talking about the CIA?”

Cohn: “Well, you tell me.”

Stanford: “I’m not going to talk about that.”

Cohn: “Why not?”

Stanford: “I’m just not going to talk about that.”

Cohn: “Well, I mean, am I–is my premise correct that someone in your position would be helpful to those who wanted to know what was going on?”

Stanford: “I really don’t have anything to add to that that would be of any value.”

Stanford’s reticence is certainly understandable, considering Frank Hand’s fate 30 years ago.

During a similar scandal when the CIA-linked Nugan Hand bank collapsed amid charges of fraud and drug money laundering, the chief executive turned up dead in his Mercedes with a shot to the head.

Despite evidence uncovered by investigations going back to the 1980s, drug money laundering charges or any reference to Agency activities will not figure in the Justice Department’s case when Stanford goes on trial in January.

As ABC News delicately put it, SEC action against Stanford “may have complicated the federal drug case.”

Underscoring the federal government’s reluctance to explore this dark corner of Allen Stanford’s career, it might do well to keep in mind what one airline executive told investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker during his probe into the 9/11 attacks.

“Sometimes when things don’t make business sense, its because they do make sense…just in some other way.”

^{POST # 22 CIA SIDE UPDATE/ THIS POST PENTAGON SIDE UPDATE}

^{Nov 2, 2012 8:50pm ABC NEWS}

^{Pentagon on Benghazi Troop Movements: ‘Swift Action’ on Night of Attack}

^{A day after the release of a new timeline of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the Pentagon has released new details about the military forces moved that night in case they were needed in the region.}

^{The timeline released Thursday by a senior U.S. intelligence official revealed the major role that CIA security forces in Benghazi and Tripoli, Libya, played in responding to the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi.}

^{On Friday, Pentagon spokesman George Little provided new details of U.S. military movements made the night of the attack in case they were needed.}

^{Little said that within a few hours of the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered U.S. military forces to move to Sicily in preparation for an uncertain situation in Libya.}

^{“This department took swift action,” said Little. “It did respond, the secretary ordered forces to move.}

^{“We were prepared for a range of contingencies in the course of this very tragic incident,” said Little. “We were ready for the need to augment security measures at our facilities in Libya, if called upon. We were prepared for the possibility, for instance, of a hostage situation, as well. These were all the things that we were looking at for an event we did not know was going to happen in Benghazi that night. ”}

^{According to Little, Panetta ordered forces to move towards the naval air station in Sigonella, Italy, after conferring with Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of U.S. Africa Command who was in Washington for regularly scheduled meetings.}

^{Among the units ordered by Panetta on the night of the attack to Sicily, which is less than 500 miles from Libya,were two special operations teams that were moved to Sigonella.}

^{As previously reported, one of the units came from a U.S. military base in “Central Europe.” And Little disclosed that Panetta also ordered another team from the United States to head to Sigonella. Little refused to describe what kind of unit was sent from the U.S., though it was presumably a special operations team trained for hostage rescues.}

^{Little said both the units “did not arrive until after the entire sequence of events was complete. … They were in Sigonella many hours after the attacks.”}

^{The Pentagon spokesman said that it can take hours for troops to be organized and transported to where they might be used. He added that at the time they were ordered to move, policy makers ”did not know when the attacks would end.” Little said that, in theory, a hostage situation in Benghazi could have lasted for days.}

^{“We didn’t have forewarning of this tragic event in Benghazi,” Little said. “The entire U.S. government was starting from a cold start.”}

^{Another new detail disclosed Friday was that Panetta ordered the deployment of not one, but two platoons of specially trained Marines to protect U.S. diplomatic facilities in Libya.}

^{Based in Rota, Spain, the platoons headed to Sigonella for possible deployment to Libya. One platoon was dispatched on Sept. 12 to protect the U.S. embassy in Tripoli. The other platoon was to have gone to Benghazi to secure the consulate compound, but was never sent after it was determined that all U.S. personnel had been evacuated from Benghazi.}

^{Little reaffirmed that no other American aircraft were involved over Libya the night of the attack beyond the unarmed surveillance drone that arrived 90 minutes into the attack. As for reports that an AC-130 gunship could have been dispatched over Libya at the time of the attack, Little was clear that “there was no AC-130 within a continent’s range of Benghazi” that night}

THIS THREAD IS JUNK Mr. Colby ,not to educate but to attack. Its your habit. Its your nature. Character is as character does.

Michael Schweitzer

Michael Schweitzer

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Posted Today, 05:28 AM

I was once briefly suspended for a month because my annual dues payment was received late. I was quickly reinstated to active status. I have ever since remained a member of the State Bar in good standing and the State Bar has never said otherwise. I switched to inactive status when I retired, but can instantly resume practicing by simply contacting the State Bar and paying the difference between my inactive dues and active dues. You stated I was "illegally" practicing law. That is an actionable defamatory falsehood. If you attack me again, I'll make you put your money where your mouth is.

##########################################

ITS YOUR NATURE (to attack / not educate)

Saturday, Nov 03 2012 3AM

Syria captured SAS men

by MATTHEW HICKLEY, Daily Mail

• Two SAS soldiers on a secret mission were captured by Syrian authorities after straying across the border from Iraq, it emerged yesterday.
  

They were released only after a "high-level intervention" by the British Government - believed to involve a visit by Foreign Office Minister Mike O'Brien to the Syrian capital Damascus two weeks ago.

Last night, the Ministry of Defence refused to comment publicly on the embarrassing incident, but senior officials confirmed privately that members of the elite 22 SAS Regiment were involved.

Allied relations with Syria have deteriorated sharply during the war in Iraq.

America has branded the country a "rogue state" and accused Damascus of harbouring senior Iraqi figures, prompting fears of allied military strikes.

Although Syria bitterly opposed the invasion of Iraq, it agreed to release the SAS men unharmed.

Sources close to the Hereford-based regiment last night said the men had been setting up a classic Special Forces ambush to catch senior Iraqi figures seeking sanctuary in Syria.

An insider said: "The team was operating on a remote road into Syria. Two men were watching from a concealed position, and the two who were captured were waiting down the road to stop or ambush vehicles that looked promising.

"They were actually inside Syria, but they knew that. It wasn't a mistake. They chose the best spot and they knew there was a risk of being compromised and captured by the Syrians.

"They were under orders not to get into a firefight if that happened, as we weren't at war with Syria. Unfortunately, they were caught, but they followed orders and didn't resist. They're back safe and, frankly, that's all we're worried about."

British and American Special Forces were heavily involved in "screening" the border between Iraq and Syria to prevent Iraqi leaders fleeing to safety, as well as scouring the deserts of western Iraq for Scud missiles, and gathering intelligence on military sites across the country.

In a separate incident, two other members of Britain's Special Forces came close to being captured by the Iraqis. Insiders have blamed faulty American intelligence, which almost caused a disaster.

They say the two men were part of a covert patrol probing Iraqi defences around the northern city of Mosul, but found themselves surrounded by Iraqi units, despite US intelligence claims that their drop zone was clear of enemy troops.

They were cut off and managed to evade capture for three days, before finally being rescued by helicopter.

The Ministry of Defence was forced to admit to the incident when a captured military Land Rover was shown on television screens around the world.

The MoD said last night that there were no members of the British forces missing in Iraq.

Of the 32 fatalities, only one body had not been recovered - that of 26-year-old Royal Navy Lieutenant Marc Lawrence, who died in a helicopter collision at sea on March 22.

IF WTC 6 SMOKE RED CIRCLE at said time of cratering , then it seems not enough debris to make crater two stories down.

HOLY HOLY HOLY Colby's BBC

November 02, 2012

Syria conflict: Rebels may have committed war crime - UN

11/02/12: The BBC reports a video appearing to show Syrian rebels murdering soldiers or pro-government militiamen could be evidence of a war crime, the UN has said. The footage shows gunmen beating and shooting a group of prisoners who were cowering on the floor. It has been alleged that Islamist militants carried out the attack after seizing army checkpoints on Thursday. Unconfirmed reports say troops have now quit all bases near the strategic northern town of Saraqeb.

November 02, 2012 at 01:22 PM in International Law / Law of War / Human Rights, Middle East / Northern Africa, Syria | Permalink

==================== AND ===================================

Syria: US-Backed Terrorists Mass Murder Unarmed Civilians

By Tony Cartalucci

Global Research, November 02, 2012

Land Destroyer

The Washington Post claims “soldiers” were executed – terrorists in video clearly refer to victims as civilian “shabih.” Victims had no weapons, uniforms, or IDs indicating they were soldiers.

An egregious war crime was reported on by the Washington Post, but deceitfully and purposefully spun and shrugged off. In the Post’s article, “Syrian rebels execute unarmed government soldiers; dozens killed in fighting,” it is first reported:

Then:

The video clearly shows unarmed men, none of whom are wearing uniforms or equipment typical of “government soldiers.” The Washington Post then links to another video while reporting:

“Shabiha,” of course refers to alleged civilian militias organized locally to resist terrorists entering into and attempting to overrun neighborhoods. The term “shabiha” has been used by the Western media as a catch-all to spin any massacre committed against civilians by US-backed terrorists operating in Syria. That the murderers themselves, filming their own crime, refer to the victims as “shabiha” – indicates that civilians, not Syrian government forces, were murdered – contrary to what the Washington Post reported.

The term suspected “shabiha” has become analogous of the Western media’s use of the term “African mercenaries” in Libya during NATO destabilization and regime change operations there in 2011. These “African mercenaries” were lynched, beheaded, shot, burned, and hacked to pieces, just as terrorists are now doing to suspected “shabiha” across Syria.

It would later turn out these black Africans were not mercenaries, but citizens who had lived in Libya for generations fighting desperately for their lives against sectarian extremists intolerant of their complexion and creed. Racially motivated attacks by NATO-backed terrorists in Libya would culminate in the extermination of the entire city of Tawarga where an estimated 10,000-35,000 inhabitants were either exterminated, imprisoned, or exiled to refugee camps and then beyond Libya’s borders.

Video: Wiped out. Tawarga, once home to 10,000 (this video claims up to 35,000) people, many part of Libya’s black community who had resided in the country for generations, had its inhabitants either exiled, imprisoned or exterminated. NATO-backed militants told the Telegraph in 2011, ” every single one of them has left, and we will never allow them to come back.” And just as the Western media initially covered up these atrocities by merely labeling all black victims of NATO terrorists as “African mercenaries,” a similar propaganda campaign is underway in Syria, labeling civilian victims of NATO-backed foreign terrorists as suspected “shibiha.”

In Syria, suspected “shabiha” are in actuality Syrians unwilling or unable, because of their ethnicity or creed, to capitulate to roving bands of foreign-armed sectarian extremists. The Washington Post and others throughout the corporate-driven Western media are willfully covering up crimes against humanity through overtly deceitful reporting and semantics.

It should be remembered, that these terrorists who have video taped themselves committing a massacre of unarmed men, out of uniform, and referred to as civilian “shabiha,” not soldiers – are at the center of renewed US, NATO, Saudi and Qatari efforts to refocus Western support for the violent, armed overthrow of the Syrian government.

http://www.whale.to/b/wtc_6_h.html

What Does Romney's Campaign of Lies Say About Our Country?

Wednesday, 31 October 2012 11:33 By Dave Johnson, Campaign for America's Future | News Analysis

Last week Mitt Romney delivered possibly the most dishonest presidential campaign speech in American history. It contains lie after lie, distortion after distortion, and trick after trick. The fact that a person capable of giving such a speech has reached this level suggests that it may be too late to salvage the country. Our institutions may be corrupted beyond repair.

In the Friday post, The Romney Close: No Lie Left Behind, my colleague Bill Scher examined just some of the specific lies in Romney's "closing argument" speech. Romney said Obama promised that the stimulus would create 9 million jobs. Obama did no such thing. Romney said Medicare has been slashed to pay for Obamacare. Of course it has not. Romney said stand up to China's trade practices. Of course he did. Etc., Etc.

In the speech Romney also repeated a flat-out lie he had used multiple times in the debates. He said that President Obama has "doubled the deficit." In the post, What Was Romney's Biggest, Flatest-Outest Debate Lie? "Obama Doubled The Deficit" I explained,

Overwhelming The Truth

This is picking apart just one lie, showing how it is just a flat-out, blatant lie, intended to confuse and deceive voters. The Romney strategy has been to swamp us with so many flat-out lies that refuting them all would take a lifetime. And so they remain out there unrefuted. And if someone did spend that lifetime refuting each lie, there would of course be a dozen lifetimes worth more lies waiting.

Media Response To Lies Is To Not Respond

The "mainstream" media appears to have decided to the best way to deal with this level of deceit is to just gloss over it. They have largely responded to Romney's flat-out lies with silence, choosing instead to provide "both sides do it" nonsense, "he said-she said" excuses and "horse-race" coverage of who is winning and losing, calling the lies "strategies" and "attacks" to avoid calling it what it is. The lack of shocked and outraged response from all corners of the country shows that our institutions are corrupted to the point that they are not capable of

The Calculation

The Romney campaign is betting on voter ignorance -- that the "base" voters are going to stay with him out of FOX- and Limbaugh-induced belief in the lies, or by outright hatred for Obama. They are betting that the remaining undecided voters won't know better and can be scared into going Romney's way.

Then, if they do win the office, what will they do with it? Who can say? What did 'W' Bush do with it? War, debt, corruption -- and year after year denying global warming, allowing the problem to get worse and worse.

Abuse

Lying is a form of abuse. It is a form of battering. It shows incredible disrespect to the people you expect to believe your lies. People who are lied to repeatedly lose their sense of what truth is, their grounding and their faith. They can become cynical, and no longer even able to trust those they should trust.

Lying to a country harms the country. Policies based on lies lead to disasters. A population that has been primed to believe things that are not true is a population that can be herded into outrageous actions. Look at the damage done when the country discovered that Nixon was dishonest -- to this day people cannot believe in their government. Look at the damage done when people realized that Bush lied us into the Iraq war. If Romney is elected based on a campaign of lies, what will be left of us? What is left us us already, that he could rise so far?

What does Romney's campaign of lies say about our country -- and US? This is a question we all need to discuss honestly. Can we?

PS, Typically, Romney's "closing argument" speech was delivered at Kinzler Construction Services, a company that the Obama stimulus helped to save. The company benefited from more than $650,000 in stimulus funding.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

UPDATE / THE CIA SIDE OF EVENTS

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

US Says CIA Sent Security Team to Benghazi Consulate 25 Minutes After Attack, Refuting Claims of Delay

Friday, 02 November 2012 09:01 By Jonathan S Landay, McClatchy Newspapers | Report

Washington — A CIA security team rushed to the U.S. consulate in Libya’s eastern city of Benghazi less than 25 minutes after receiving the first call that the mission was under attack, while a second squad was dispatched by air from the capital, Tripoli, according to a timeline released on Thursday by U.S. intelligence officials.

The timeline is the most detailed accounting to date of the U.S. response to the attack on the consulate and was released to rebut news reports that U.S. officials had delayed a rescue.

“The officials on the ground in Benghazi responded to the situation . . . as quickly and as effectively as possible,” said a senior intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There were no orders to anybody to stand down in providing support.”

The timeline also revealed that a nearby CIA annex came under attack twice during the events, with the second assault coming more than seven hours after Islamist extremists first stormed the consulate.

Four Americans died in the assaults: U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and State Department computer specialist Sean Smith, who died at the consulate, and two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Wood and Glen Doherty, who were working as security contractors in Libya.

The events have become an issue in the U.S. presidential election campaign, with Republicans accusing the Obama administration of failing to provide adequate security to the mission amid mounting threats by al Qaida-linked militants and other groups.

Republican nominee Mitt Romney and others also have questioned the administration’s initial account that the assault was a spontaneous outgrowth of a protest against an online video denigrating the Prophet Muhammad, and not a pre-planned terrorist attack launched to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence later accepted responsibility for the administration’s initial account, acknowledging that the attackers were Islamist militants, including some suspected of having ties to al Qaida’s North African affiliate.

According to the timeline, the first call for help from the consulate was received at the CIA’s nearby Benghazi headquarters – referred to as a diplomatic annex by U.S. officials – at around 9:40 p.m., which is when the attack began.

“Fewer than 25 minutes later, a security team left the annex for the mission,” said the timeline, which added that the group spent about 25 minutes trying to take out militants firing heavy weapons as it fought its way to the walled compound and then entered it under heavy fire.

At 11:11 p.m., according to the timeline, an unmanned surveillance drone arrived over the complex while the CIA security team, which comprised about six officers, rounded up the approximately 30 staff members on the consulate premises and prepared to move them to the annex. The security team at that point had recovered Smith’s body but had been unable to locate Stevens, who local Libyan guards had spirited out a backdoor to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead from smoke inhalation.

The CIA security team and the mission staff drove out of the consulate under fire and returned to the annex, which had come under sporadic small arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire.

About the same time, according to the timeline, a team of about six CIA security officers and two U.S. military officers landed at Benghazi airport on a flight from Tripoli and began negotiating for transportation into the city.

After learning that Stevens was missing and that the initial attack on the annex had ended, the second team decided to concentrate on finding the ambassador.

“Still pre-dawn timeframe, that team at the airport finally manages to secure transportation and armed escort and – having learned that the ambassador was almost certainly dead and that the security situation at the hospital was uncertain – heads to the annex to assist with the evacuation,” the timeline said.

Backed by Libyan security men, the second team arrived at the CIA annex at 5:15 a.m., just before mortar rounds began hitting the building in a barrage that lasted 11 minutes. One round claimed the lives of Wood and Doherty.

A heavily armed Libyan military unit arrived less than an hour later and helped escort the U.S. personnel to the airport for a U.S. military evacuation flight.

“At every level in the chain of command, from the senior officers in Libya to the most senior officials in Washington, everyone was fully engaged in trying to provide whatever help they could. There was no second guessing those decisions being made on the ground, by people at every U.S. organization that could play a role in assisting those in danger,” said the senior U.S. intelligence official.

In a related development, Foreign Policy magazine on Thursday published draft memos recovered by its reporters from the ruins of the consulate that said that the compound had been under surveillance the day of the attack by a member of the Libyan police assigned to protecting the mission.

“Early this morning at 0643, one of our diligent guards made a troubling report. Near our main gate, a member of the police force was seen in the upper level of a building across from our compound,” said one memo, which was dated Sept. 11 and was intended for the local police chief, according to a handwritten notation at the top. “It is reported that this person was photographing the inside of the U.S. Special Mission.”

“We submit this report to you with the hopes that an official inquiry can be made into this incident and that the U.S. Mission may receive the full support of the Benghazi police,” it continued.

A second draft memo was marked in handwriting for Mohamed Obeidi, the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Benghazi office. It contained the same information as the first draft memo, but began with a complaint that a U.S. request for additional police to guard the mission during Stevens’ stay had gone unheeded.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a subcommittee chairman, wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asking for any documents or emails that reflected the information in the draft memos as part of a panel investigation into the attack.

“The documents paint a disturbing picture indicating that elements of the Libyan government might have been complicit in the . . . attack on the compound and the murder of four Americans,” wrote the pair.

The congressmen, who have led charges that the administration has suppressed information about the incident, said the documents “support a growing body of evidence indicating that the Obama administration has tried to withhold pertinent facts . . . from Congress and the American people.”

Jonathan S Landay

Jonathan S. Landay, national security and intelligence correspondent, has written about foreign affairs and US defense, intelligence and foreign policies for 15 years. From 1985-94, he covered South Asia and the Balkans for United Press International and then the Christian Science Monitor. He moved to Washington in December 1994 to cover defense and foreign affairs for the Christian Science Monitor and joined Knight Ridder in October 1999. He speaks frequently on national security matters, particularly the Balkans. In 2005, he was part of a team that won a National Headliners Award for "How the Bush Administration Went to War in Iraq.'' He also won a 2005 Award of Distinction from the Medill School of Journalism for "Iraqi exiles fed exaggerated tips to news media."

• I cant really think of a current date for you,so I came up with these two archetype examples below (since I think you swing both ways)
  If you can condense/distill the below info into your dating ad Im sure you will find your perfect match.
  
• http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Tokyo_Rose
  http://en.wikipedia..../Judas_Iscariot
  

Thank Bush, Sr. for A.Q. Khan, UBL and the Plame Case

Sat Jul 07, 2007 at 10:46 PM PDT DAILY KOS

Lost in all the hullabaloo over Dubya's commutation of the jail sentence handed former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was this little gem of a news item from Pakistan:

Strange coincidence? Perhaps. But, not unrelated. For it’s a small, small world in spookdom.

A strange coincidence, indeed.

More below . . .

A large part of Valerie Plame’s job at CIA was to track the illicit trade in nuclear technologies peddled by Dr. Khan’s network. Khan’s Nuclear Walmart made it very easy for customers to buy what they needed to start home bomb-making. Khan’s one-stop shop for WMDs made it just as easy for the CIA to keep track of nuclear programs in at least half-dozen unfriendly countries, and a variety of criminal organizations in a dozen more that supplied money and know-how. When Khan’s operation was publicized on June 1, 2001 by a Bush Administration official, that long-standing CIA counter-proliferation program was also effectively ended. That official was Richard Armitage, who is also said to be the first to out Plame, a key manager at CIA Counter-Proliferation.

There was never any chance that AQ Khan or Libby would do hard time - they were both "made men" who know too much.

A.Q. Khan

Khan was a founding member of the CIA and ISI partnership, going back to the mid-1970s, when he first started stealing U-235 enrichment technologies from the nuclear lab where he worked in the Netherlands. According to a BBC interview with the former Dutch PM, Ruud Lubbers, the Dutch police wanted to arrest A.Q. as early as 1975, but the CIA interceded to prevent Khan's arrest and enforcement of an INTERPOL warrant after he fled back the following year to Pakistan. During the six year period the warrant was on the books, Khan travelled freely to dozens of countries pursuing his global nuclear proliferation mission. http://news.bbc.co.uk/... ; http://www.hindu.com/...

The CIA's involvement and protection of Khan goes back years before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, so the Cold War rationale offered for the Agency's quarter-century long involvement with the Pakistan's nuclear program begins to break down under scrutiny. It wasn't just simply a matter of

doing a favor in exchange for the secret war in Afghanistan against Soviet invaders. Somebody wanted Pakistan to build atomic bombs, and the CIA was instrumental in allowing that to happen, as it was in the later spread of nuclear technologies to other countries.

The question is, why?

***

Intelligence historian Joe Trento writes in Prelude to Terror that the Reagan and Bush Administration entered into a quid pro quo with Pakistan and its Saudi and Gulf financial backers in exchange for their assistance in driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan. The financial, logistical, political and commercial networks that were cemented in place endured after the Russians retreated and the Soviet Union collapsed. To hear Trento tell it, the very same network of rogue spooks, corrupt bankers, and mercenary weapons designers was the seed from which BCCI, Iran-Contra, and 9-11 sprang.

This is the strange tale of the alliance of Middle East jihadists and their business partners, entrepreneurial elements of the CIA Old Guard led by George Herbert Walker Bush. Together, they developed a global network that peddled nuclear weapons, cultivated global terrorist groups, subverted the U.S. government, and tried to impose their own global dynasty under cover of a manufactured Forever War of religious genocide.

The Safari Club

The Khan network was the product of more than an alliance against the Soviet Union. It sprang out of a post-Watergate era partnership between disgraced former covert operators who had been thrown out of American intelligence, the Saudi Royal family, and third-country partners who provided manpower and technical assistance. It was called, "The Safari Club". In early 1976, under its outgoing Director George H.W. Bush, elements within the Agency turned to the Saudi royal family for help. Those were difficult times for CIA Old Guard. As ground involvement in Vietnam ended in 1973, the Agency ramped up the covert operations and secret wars that spread into Laos and Cambodia. The Phoenix Program targeted tens of thousands of South Vietnamese officials and suspected Vietcong sympathizers for assassination, a program in which James Mann tells us in Rise of the Vulcans a naval officer, named Richard Armitage, participated. http://www.warandpiece.com/...

Two years later, despite the extraordinary exertions of some within the Agency, and a fellowship of committed Cold warriors, Saigon fell. Within that group was the perception that the Cause had been betrayed by liberals, Democrats, and bean counters, and that would never again be allowed to happen.

1974 had seen the unraveling of the Watergate scandal, in which the hand of the CIA Old Guard in domestic politics was revealed. Finally, by 1976, it had become widely perceived as the rogue Agency. In the "Year of Intelligence," the Church and Pike Committees publicly exposed decades of shocking crimes carried out and covered up by the intelligence community. This forced newly-elected President Carter and Congress to finally exert real oversight and limit intelligence operations around the world.

In August 1977, CIA Director Stansfield Turner ordered 823 positions within the covert Directorate of Operations eliminated, firing most of the Agency's hard men such as Ted "Blonde Ghost" Shackley, Thomas Clines, and Edwin Wilson. Their response was to take their deadly talents and wares into the private sector. That same year, Armitage left his DIA post in Iran, where he worked with Richard Secord and the Shah’s Secret Police, SAVAK, and was reassigned to State Department cover in Thailand.

In a bid to reestablish their independence, Right-wing Agency operators turned to new sources of cash and foreign patronage, particularly the Saudis, for the resources needed to shake off strictures imposed by President Carter and the Democratic Congress.

Through the Safari Club, Trento writes, "the Saudi royal family had taken over intelligence financing for the United States" at 102. The shared cause of anticommunism justified the privatization and merger of U.S. and Saudi intelligence, but it also opened avenues for personal and political enrichment for those who would create and run a run a shadow oligarchy. It created a set of alliances and mutual obligations. It was also highly illegal under U.S. law for American intelligence officers and officials to accept private foreign cash -- whether or not this was the original intention, this ended up allowing the Saudis, Pakistanis, and other foreign members in the Safari Club blackmail and veto power over those U.S. officials involved. George H.W. Bush and those around him who had accepted the deal also had to live with it.

Another key figure in this saga is Prince Turki al-Faisal, until his sudden resignation on September 4, 2001, the 24-year veteran head of Saudi foreign intelligence, the General Intelligence Directorate - GID, and according to the Financial Times, Osama bin-Laden’s former case officer.

Turki gave a detailed description of the Safari Club in a 2002 speech to the Georgetown University alumni. Joseph Trento relates this oration:

CIA Goes Mercenary for the Saudis

What did all that Saudi money that started flowing into pockets at the CIA at the end of the Nixon Administration go to? Perhaps the best answer available without a security clearance is found in David Corn's 1994 book, Blonde Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusades. The main outlines of how the CIA's original mission of intelligence collection and analysis was subverted into one of intelligence falsified to support Presidential policy, assassination, torture, terrrism, overthrow of elected government, privatization of covert operations, and political warfare against Democratic Presidents and Congress follows the career of men such as Shackley, Wilson, Secord and, at the head of things, Bush, Sr. That set the pattern for the similar criminal abuses of intelligence carried out by Bush's son and those around him, many of whom started their careers during the Vietnam War. The chronology of events decades ago are summarized in this review of Corn's book: http://www.bearcave.com/...

Shackley's story continues:

Shackley also inherited an operation that was funneling money to right wing opponents of Salvador Allende, in Chile. Eventually Allende was overthrown. This was followed by the first act of international terrorism on American soil, the September,1976 car bombing in Washington's Embassy Row that took the lives of former Chilean Ambassador, Orlando Letelier, and a passenger, Ronni Moffitt, sister of a liberal U.S. Congressman from Connecticut. The assassination was later shown to have been organized by a Chilean military officer on the CIA payroll and carried out by an American-born extreme Rightist who was let into the U.S. despite being on the State Department Watch List. See, George H.W. Bush, the CIA & a Case of State Terrorism by Robert Parry, http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/...

David Corn recounts the events in the Chilean coup that overthrew what was then the second-oldest democracy in the world:

The reviewer recounts:

Why did Khan and Pakistan get into the proliferation game, and why did it take twenty years to get him out?

The other major project of the alliance between Bush Sr. rump CIA and the Saudis was to finance and organize the construction in Pakistan of the "Islamic Atom Bomb." This illegal program continued in direct defiance of U.S. commitments to UN anti-proliferation treaties as well as in contravention of the official policy of the United States during the Carter and Clinton Administrations opposing further proliferation on the sub-Continent.

The first part of that question is easily enough answered by a combination of greed, patriotism, and ideological zeal on the part of all those involved. However, the more interesting question is why did the U.S. allow it to go on for the better part of a quarter century? Author Gordon Corera, Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity and the Rise and Fall of the A.Q. Khan Network provides part of the answer to both sides of the Khan and CIA enigma. The Economist offers a good, but incomplete, answer:

www.economist.com/books/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=7218482

As Trento and Corera tell us, development of a nuclear program was not a stand-alone operation for the Pakistanis. They could not afford to do it on their own, and the Saudis demanded service for their money. The same deal applied to the CIA -- those who took money, had to deliver something of value. To keep their patrons happy, Pakistani and rogue U.S. intelligence operators formed an alliance. The CIA operated as ISI's enabler, shielding Pakistan from investigation and retaliation, just as elements of the Agency had the Saudi money men. In exchange, Pakistan provided services in the areas such as recruiting, harboring, and training terrorists. Thus, by 1985 every side had what it needed. Pakistan had the prestige of being treated as a de facto nuclear power, Right-wing elements within the CIA and the Reagan-Bush Administration had the money they needed to carry out covert domestic and international operations -- ie, Iran-Contra -- and the Saudis had veto and blackmail power over the key figures in American politics, intelligence, law enforcement and the private sector to sheild the international financial crimes carried out by more enterprising helpers -- BCCI and the S&L scandal.

The Reagan-Bush Administration was the first American Presidency that was truly controlled by spooks and foreign interests. The political crimes carried out under Nixon and Ford had been more insular, domestic affairs. From that time onward, the Pakistani military was free to spin-off a nuclear weapons retail business involving a global free trade in atomic bomb parts, dirty money, and terrorist provocateurs. As the Kerry Commission Report makes clear, BCCI, the S&L rip-off, and Iran-Contra were international crimes involving Saudis and Pakistanis facilitated by corrupt American political and intelligence officials. Elements of U.S. intelligence, federal law enforcement, the State Department, and the Pentagon were, of course, well aware of this. Those U.S. officials who tried to put a stop to it encountered the CIA Old Boys, and were pushed aside or silenced.

One such casualty was a CIA officer named Richard M. Barlow, a specialist on Pakistan’s nuclear program, who the NYT reports was fired two decades ago after he blew the whistle on his superiors at DoD – Cheney, Wolfowitz, Libby, and Hadley -- for lying to Congress about the state of that country’s nuclear program. The destruction and intimidation of honest U.S. intelligence, military and law enforcement was another aspect of the ongoing Bush Saudi ISI criminal enterprise: http://topics.nytimes.com/...

More recently that story was picked up by BBC, and reported here by Lukery, who has extensively covered the subject of FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who encountered the same network before 9/11 and was also silenced when she attempted to draw attention to it: http://www.dailykos.com/...

As we see it, there are several reasons why Khan's network continued as long as it did, and ended when it did. To recap: the Khan network started as part of a larger deal with the Saudis to revive the activist Right-wing of the CIA; was allowed to metasticize because it had US officials over a barrel; later, during the Clinton years, the A.Q. Khan operation was to some extent captured ( "turned" ) by (more or less) legitimate elements within CIA as a means to monitor and sabotage the nuclear program of several target countries, including North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Libya. The effectiveness of that Clinton-era program, I argue, was demonstrated last October when North Korea’s nuclear test shot was a dud. http://www.dailykos.com/...

Now, it becomes clearer how Khan came to act with near impunity for two decades, protected on several sides by the Pakistani government, his customers, monied Saudi backers, and several western intelligence agencies, including the Bush Sr. Old Spook crowd.

Then there's the final irony to this story. After Clinton-Gore were elected, proliferation continued, but his Agency minders were different. Khan was watched with care by career CIA officers and other U.S. officials as he spread his wares around the world. Those involved in this phase of the Agency operation were told by the Bush-era operatives that Khan had been "turned", which to some degree was quite plausible. The equipment that Khan sold to North Korea, Libya, and Iran was very expensive but very poor quality, prone to breakdown, constantly in need of spare parts, the flow of which was used to monitor the pace of production of fissionable material, which turned out to be far less than what any of these countries needed to make an enriched uranium bomb. By using Khan as a supplier, these countries actually set themselves back relative to what they might have achieved if they had made a real effort to obtain more modern, efficient designs available -- with much greater effort -- elsewhere on the international black market. See, http://www.democrati...erground.com... ; http://www.democrati...erground.com...

Two of those who monitored Khan were Valerie Plame and her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who followed Khan to Niger after A.Q. had visited that uranium-producing country in February, 1999. See, http://www.washingtonpost.com/... http://www.slate.com/...

Wilson’s uneventful follow-up trip to Niger in 2002 was to become a grand distraction in L’Affaire Plame. With so many people paying such close attention to him for so long, Khan must have felt as if he were truly untouchable.

But, after the 2000 election, the rules were changed about how the U.S conducted covert operations. With the Bush-Cheney Administration, quiet surveillance and penetration of Saudi-financed WMD and terrorist networks were out, and the very fact that target countries were running nuclear programs -- with the help of the CIA -- became a casus belli for military attack of "Axis of Evil" countries.

• One can easily accept that the Buxxxxes, now back in power, were desperate enough to advance their war-making agenda that they were willing to sacrifice the CIA’s most effective nuclear counter-proliferation program.
  
• An alternative explanation is that one faction of the Agency that had split in the 1970s was out to destroy its rival, which had managed the counter-proliferation and counter-terrorism divisions with a light touch during the Clinton years.
  
• Or, it has been suggested, that certain third countries had also piggy-backed onto the A.Q. Khan network, and outed the Pakistanis in an attempt to spark a regional war as a way manipulate the U.S. into, once-and-for-all, disposing of their regional rivals.
  
• Finally, there is evidence that the Bush team did some quick housekeeping once back in the White House, and simply did away with the source of so much incriminating evidence, the A.Q. Khan network had outlived its original purpose, and had to be shut down because it continued to use many of the same financial and logistical networks linked to the Saudis and Pakistanis, and that had already compromised too much.
  

Perhaps, some combination of these motives, along with a simple-minded executive decision to "take out" Khan explains it. The fact of the outing is indisputable, however. Within months of taking power, the Administration closed down much of the counter-proliferation and counter-terrorism programs they inherited. In May 2001, CIA Director George Tenet and Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage, an old Bush Asia hand, met with Pakistani President Musharaff. Two weeks later, Khan was outed with the publication on June 1 of a story in Rupert Murdoch's Financial Times quoting Armitage as saying that a certain ranking "retired figure" within the Pakistani nuclear establishment had been trading weapons technology with North Korea. See, http://www.globalsecurity.org/... http://www.dailykos.com/...

Bush-Cheney Closed Down U.S. Counterterrorism Along with the CIA's Khan "Sting" Operation, Leading to 9-11

At the same time, major U.S. counter-terrorism operations with a nexus in Pakistan were closed down, as they used much of the same financial and logistical network as Khan, But, for some reason, terrorist operatives scattered around the world -- a number of them inside the U.S.-- were not rolled-up or otherwise neutralized. In early 2001, the FBI terminated Operation Monarch Crossing, which linked Saudi-controlled financing in the U.S. with Pakistani nuclear proliferation. http://www.storiesthatmatter.org/... The Bureau was also forced to shutter Operation Catchers Mitt, http://www.dailykos.com/... at the same time NSA and DIA were ordered to erase much of the data it had compiled in Able-Danger, another Clinton-era secret program mapping the al-Qaeda network inside the U.S.

There has been little attention paid to the Bush-Cheney Administration's orders to shut down these counter-terrorism programs. Given the larger context, it should come as no surprise that these people are willing to sacrifice just about anything to cover their tracks.

END OF PART 1

Originally posted to leveymg on Sat Jul 07, 2007 at 10:46 PM PDT.

############

IF SAUDI/BUSH NETWORK DID 911,then needed a serious revision required in the official account of 9/11.

#####################################

No mention of Salem, let alone any indication he was the bomb maker. Try again. All you have is a mix of claims and speculation from an anonymous source. // end Colby post #37

VS

I don't think it was ever denied that Salem was involved in the construction of the bombs, in fact prosecutors turned the tapes where he discussed this with the FBI to defense attorneys. // end Colby post # 33

As for the Quigley quote humor us and post it in this thread. // END Colby

The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences."

-- Quote from Caroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope, Chapter 20

What Caroll Quigley predicted all coming true right before your eyes.

http://educationforu...8163&hl=quigley

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

http://educationforu...ey

The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue. [click on above link]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A new stage in the attacks on the European working class

http://educationforu...showtopic=19469

The European working class faces a new round of brutal social attacks. The process that began in Greece, Portugal and Ireland, and has continued in Spain and Italy, is now on the agenda for France. The government led by President François Hollande is due to announce the country’s budget for 2013 this month. The international business press is full of articles arguing for massive cuts.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A conspiracy against the people of the world.

http://educationforu...316&hl=trillion

A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network.

)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole = this is the NWO

George Bush Sr. New World Order Live Speech Sept 11 1991

September 11, 1990 -- President Bush [senior] gave speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress entitled, "Toward A New World Order".

On this date, President Bush gave a speech to a Congress and to an American people who were in an uproar over the Iraqi invasion and wanted to learn more of the gathering military response from a tough-talking American President. Once again, Bush presented the rationale for his military response, and held out the hope that the world would be able to use this event as a catalyst to propel us into the global cooperation, peace, and safety that the New World Order promises.

Eleven years to the day later , the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred. Exactly 11 years to the day after this speech, a great dual blow was struck that really would propel the world into the final stages of the New World Order. The event we are probably witnessing now is the planned final push into the "wars and rumors of wars" that will finally produce Antichrist. Thus, it is highly significant that analysts and commentators were immediately using the word "war" and "world war" in their talk.

JFK/RfK/Benghazi - a bloodless coup?

to coooooommmmmmplex for some to understand

VOTING MACHINE FRAUD IS A BLOODLESS COUP,happening NOW

BLACKBOXVOTING

- COLORADO SETS THE STAGE FOR A BOGUS ELECTION -

...

Colorado election integrity and transparency is now officially out the window, with a series of corruption protection rules and new laws.

1. Let's begin with the unflappable Donetta Davidson, who collaborated with convicted embezzler Jeffrey Dean(1) to remove voter privacy, through a contract specification that required him to redo his absentee mail software in order to embed a method to tie voted ballots to the voters. This shifty business, which now includes all absentee ballots cast on Hart eSlate machines, has led to a blockade on ALL Colorado election accounting records (see #4, below).

2. Next, in a move that has most of us scratching our heads, Colorado Sec. State Gessler proposed new rules in December 2011 to remove requirements for continuous video surveillance.(2) Though billed as "cost saving," note that most video surveillance nowadays is simply piped into digital files stored on a Web site. Since cameras are already installed, there is no significant cost savings in allowing non-continuous surveillance.

3. Sec. State Gessler also decided to reduce the number of seals on voting machines,(2) to the chagrin of election integrity groups like Voter Action, whose investigations and litigation demonstrated vulnerabilities requiring the seals in the first place. The "cost savings" in this measure can be counted in pennies.

4. A number of protective accounting measures crucial for evaluating election tampering have been taken off the table though a new law to block election-related public records examination.

Donetta Davidson led the lobbying for this law. Davidson had become a commissioner of the U.S. Election Assistence Commission, then took a step down to take over the Colorado Clerks Association. In this capacity she led a fight to block the media and citizens from examining the ballots. And no wonder: She knew that due to changes made under her administration, private companies had marks embedded on the ballots enabling them to harvest data tying votes to voters.

Thanks to a lawsuit by Colorado citizen Marilyn Marks, of The Citizen Center, sponsored and assisted by Black Box Voting, the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed right to examine ballots. Marks was shocked when she discovered that identifying marks on the ballots allowed her to immediately associate every voted ballot with the voter who cast it. Marks, The Citizen Center, (and Black Box Voting) are now involved in litigation to permanently prohibit this harvesting of personal political information. In the interim, Sec. State Gessler has required that the identifiers be removed for November 2012 only.

With ballot examination affirmed to be in the public domain, Davidson's next move was to block ballot examination until after all remedies had expired. Using her clout, she lobbied successfully for the removal of ballots -- AND OTHER CRUCIAL ELECTION RECORDS, SUCH AS POLL LISTS -- from any access by election watchdogs until 45 days after the election.(3)

One telltale sign of election tampering is when thousands more votes than voters show up. But in Colorado, neither the media nor the public will be allowed to examine the poll lists or the list of names for voters said to have voted absentee, until too late to do anything about discrepancies.

5. And then there is the matter of alleged Romney ties to the second-biggest voting machine manufacturer in America. These connections are being minimized by Internet outlets like Snopes, but the straight truth is that Hart Intercivic, the firm that supplies two-thirds of Colorado counties with their voting machines, is now owned by a spin-off of Bain & Company (H.I.G. Capital).(4)

A majority of Hart's directors are now H.I.G. guys, and the directors of H.I.G. are Romney bundlers and donors who don't hedge their bets by donating to any other presidential candidate.

This isn't the first time Romney has had his buddies in charge of crucial election processes this year. Some weeks after the misreported figures in the Iowa caucus, which incorrectly cited Romney as the winner, Black Box Voting uncovered that Romney staffers had been brought in to run the Iowa Caucus, and the Nevada Caucus too. Besides heading Romney campaign functions, these guys were associated with an odious Colorado political firm which narrowly escaped prosecution for maliciously misleading political ads.(5)

And the Romney affiliation with Hart Intercivic doesn't rule out his buddies -- or Obama's buddies -- or George Soros -- or the Chinese, for that matter -- owning the other companies. Election Systems & Software (ES&S) does not reveal who its owners are, and we don't know who owns Dominion either. ES&S directly handles voting machines in three Colorado counties; it co-produces elections on the old Diebold equipment with Dominion, with ES&S supplying technicians in some U.S. locations and Dominion in others. Dominion owns Sequoia Voting Systems (or does it? No one seems to be quite sure...), used in large metro Denver County and in Pueblo.(6) Confused? American elections are now so far removed from the hands of the people that self-governance is just a memory.

6. Romney's business buddies owning Colorado's main voting machine company demonstrates, at the very least, an appearance of impropriety, but it carries with it something more: Actual opportunity to alter results.

Unlike most Diebold voting machine locations, whose county technicians set up each election using voting company software, Hart has its customers send files directly to Texas, where its programmers and technicians have their way with the files, sending them back to the counties to put in their voting machines. This centralized control point does in fact enable tampering with results from a remote location. Paper ballots? Well, not all Colorado counties even have them, but thanks to Donetta Davidson and her cronies, they are off limits for human examination and will be interpreted only by the Hart machines.

The Hart system has built-in secret functions in its system, discovered by researchers in the Everest Study commissioned by then-Ohio Sec. State Jennifer Bruner. "Undocumented functions" are accessed through the registry, geek territory for most of us but accessible by any administrator. Voting systems are supposed to be certified and they are not supposed to contain "undocumented functions" accessible through sophisticated built-in back doors into the registry. These are certainly not accidental and not even the researchers for the EVEREST study were able to determine what these functions do.(7)

7. Loosey-goosey absentee system combines with obstruction of observation: Half of all ballots in Colorado are likely to be cast absentee, due to the implementation of not only no-fault absentee, but active promotion of "permanent" absentee status by Donetta Davidson's Colorado Clerks Assocation. With "permanent absentee" they send ballots even if they were not requested, and following a tussle, they also send ballots to people who didn't request them who haven't voted for years. Seems like a prescription for insider-driven absentee fraud (where an elections worker exploits names of inactive voters to insert ballots into the pool).

It also seems like it would at least be a good idea to allow extra careful observation of the whole absentee process, to authenticate the ID numbers of voters in whose name ballots are being cast.

Unfortunately, this is not the case.

"We used to stand beside the workers and look to see if the person reading an ID number and the person typing the ID number into the system were doing it properly," [Mary] Eberle said. [Eberle was a watcher for the American Constitution Party who is also a member of the watchdog group Citizen Center] "We could see how well they matched the signatures on a ballot envelope with the voter signature on file in [the state's registered voter database]. Well, we can't do that anymore..." (8)

According to The Colorado Independent: Marty Neilson, Republican Party election watcher, walked out of the Boulder County Clerk's building in disgust as workers there tabulated primary voting results the last week of June. Neilson said she couldn't see anything of substance and felt like she was participating in a sham exercise in oversight.

"[Clerk Hillary Hall] kept us behind [solid] walls and behind glass walls," Neilson told the Colorado Independent. "We are there to view the whole process, which is what the statutes say we're supposed to do, from the time the [election workers] get the ballots to the time they verify the signatures and then count the votes. But it was a charade. I left because why stay? There was no reason to be there."

* * * * *

The core of a true democratic system is the concept of self-governance. If the public is not allowed to see and authenticate essential parts of the election (who can vote - voter list; who did vote - poll lists; the counting of the vote; and chain of custody) -- if the public is left standing in the dark while insiders control the levers of operation and accounting, you don't have self-government at all.

What you are left with is the government choosing itself.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES

(1) Jeff Dean involvement in vote by mail software: http://www.bbvforums...0328/81241.html

Colorado demand to tie votes to voters:

(full transcript: http://www.blackboxv...4kim-v-dean.pdf - 1,007 KB) ; Page 19: ..."okay, if this voter showed up in the subsequent upload, then I need to ... tell them ... what ballot number he was assigned so they can pull it [the voted ballot] back out. It was a fundamental change in the way the program worked. Q When you say Colorado was told that, do you know who told them that the program was capable of doing that?

A Jeff [Dean]

More: http://www.bbvforums.../133/80503.html

(2) Denver Post; Posted: 12/07/2011 02:19:33 PM MST; Updated: 12/07/2011 03:52:07 PM MST; By Sara Burnett

http://www.denverpos...ews/ci_19490338

"Among the changes being considered:

- Eliminate the requirement that video security surveillance of areas where election software is used be "continuous." Video surveillance is required for 60 days prior and 30 days after an election.

- Eliminate requirement that a county clerk or election judge who suspects tampering report it to the Secretary of State. Instead, such investigations would be handled at the county level.

- Reduce the number of tamper-proof seals that must be placed on seams of cases that hold the equipment's electronic components.

(3) New law to restrict access to election records http://www.centerpos...2&story_id=1701

(4) Romney ties to Hart Intercivic: http://truth-out.org...own-your-e-vote

(5) Former Romney staffers run Iowa, Nevada caucuses: http://www.bbvforums...es/8/81900.html

(6) Map of voting machines in Colorado: http://www.verifiedvoting.org

(7) Hart use of registry for undocumented functions: http://www.bbvdocs.o...VEREST-Hart.pdf

"18.3.2 Windows Registry Misuse

The Windows registry is a operating system service that maintains configuration parameters for applications installed on the computer. The Hart system makes extensive use of the registry to enable/disable features of the system. While in general the use of the registry is not a problem, Hart uses it to enable critical functions and security sensitive operations. Issues arise because anyone with the appropriate privileges on the computer can read and change the registry. Thus an attacker without any Hart system passwords or hardware tokens can affect the security and behavior of the system.

"...An interesting characteristic of the registry use in the Hart software is that it (generally) periodically checks registry entries, rather that just checking them at start-up. This has the consequence that triggered features can be turned on and off without restarting the software.

"We found references to many dozens or more of registry entries used by the Hart EMS applications. We were only able to investigate a small number of these. The vast majority of registry entries are undocumented, and their purpose is often unclear.

(8) Blocking meaningful observation of absentee processing: http://coloradoindep...hor/johntomasic

The public must be able to see and authenticate these four essential steps for an election to be public, democratic, and valid: (1) Who can vote (voter list); (2) Who did vote (3) The original count; (4) Chain of custody.

#####################

BEV HARRIS

map of Hart locations in Colorado:

Green = Hart Intercivic

Red = ES&S / Diebold

Yellow = Sequoia / Dominion

For full map of voting systems in USA by vendor, see page 3 of this document:

http://www.blackboxv...rust-Letter.pdf

The public must be able to see and authenticate these four essential steps for an election to be public, democratic, and valid: (1) Who can vote (voter list); (2) Who did vote (3) The original count; (4) Chain of custody.

I have a liitle from

www.historycommons.org BOTTOM DATUM WOULD BE PLACE TO FIND VIDEO/ NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Early July 1992:

FBI Fires Informant Who Has Penetrated WTC Bombing Group

Emad Salem. [source: National Geographic]

In mid-June 1992, FBI informant Emad Salem talks to El Sayyid Nosair, who is in prison for killing Zionist leader Rabbi Meir Kahane (see November 5, 1990). Nosair and an associate of his named Ali Shinawy reveal to Salem that their group (all of whom are close to Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman) is plotting to set off bombs at twelve “Jewish locations” in New York City, including temples and banks. A few days later, Nossair’s cousin Ibrahim El-Gabrowny introduces Salem to “Dr. Rashid,” which is an alias for Clement Rodney Hampton-El, although Salem does not know that yet. “Dr. Rashid” says he is unable to get the remote bomb detonators the group wants, but he can get already assembled pipe bombs for about $1,000 apiece, and guns. Salem and Shinawy agree to find a warehouse where they can build the bombs. Salem tells all of this to his FBI handlers Louis Napoli and John Anticev, but their boss, Carson Dunbar, insists that Salem has to wear a wire so they can record conversations in order to get the evidence to make a convincing court case against the plotters. But Salem, who is only being paid $500 a week to inform for the FBI, refuses to wear a wire, saying it is too dangerous. The FBI had been able to corroborate most of Salem’s information through their own surveillance such as the monitoring of Nosair’s calls from prison. But even though Salem is easily the FBI’s best source of information on Abdul-Rahman’s group, the FBI fires Salem in early July 1991. [Miller, Stone, and Mitchell, 2002, pp. 70-75] The FBI had a long tradition of having pure intelligence agents who did not wear wires. One FBI source will later note that the FBI could have easily gotten what they needed to make a criminal case without Salem wearing a wire. “It would just take a little more work. We’d have to take his leads and do surveillance. Follow these guys and contain the threat. This is what the FBI does.” [Lance, 2003, pp. 92] Author Peter Lance will later comment that without Salem, “Now, when it came to Nosair, the bombing plot, and Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, the [FBI] was essentially flying blind.” The FBI will be unaware as the “Jewish locations” plot morphs into a plot to bomb the World Trade Center over the next several months. [Lance, 2003, pp. 92]

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

December 19, 1992:

FBI, Having Fired Key Informant, Misses Opportunity to Uncover WTC Bombing Plot Mahmud Abouhalima, one of the 1993 WTC bombing plotters, calls Emad Salem. Salem had been an FBI informant on a group close to the “Blind Sheikh,” Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, including Abouhalima, but he had been fired by the FBI some months before (see Early July 1992). Salem is mad at the FBI about being fired and doesn’t bother to tell them about the phone call, and doesn’t call Abouhalima back. It will later be discovered that on that same day other plotters begin calling chemical companies in search of bomb parts and the next day another FBI informant is contacted and asked to help get bomb parts (see Mid-November-December 20, 1992). Salem has bomb making expertise so it is likely Abouhalima was calling him to get help in making the bomb to blow up the WTC. The authors of the 2002 book The Cell will later note, “Had Salem still be working as an informant for [the FBI] at the time of the call, the World Trade center bombing plot might well have been cracked before Salem had hung up the phone.” [Miller, Stone, and Mitchell, 2002, pp. 84-85]

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The New York Times later reports on Emad Salem, an undercover agent who will be the key government witness in the trial against Yousef. Salem testifies that the FBI knew about the attack beforehand and told him they would thwart it by substituting a harmless powder for the explosives. However, an FBI supervisor called off this plan, and the bombing was not stopped. [New York Times, 10/28/1993] Other suspects were ineptly investigated before the bombing as early as 1990. Several of the bombers were trained by the CIA to fight in the Afghan war, and the CIA later concludes, in internal documents, that it was “partly culpable” for this bombing (see January 24, 1994).

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Spring 1993:

’Blind Sheikh’ Plot to Crash Airplane into US Embassy in Egypt

Siddig Siddig Ali. [source: Chester Higgins / New York Times]In March 1995, Emad Salem, an FBI informant and an ex-Egyptian army officer, publicly testifies in a 1995 trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plotters. He mentions a plot taking place at this time by Islamic radicals tied to the “Blind Sheikh,” Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman (see July 1990). A Sudanese Air Force pilot would hijack an airplane, attack Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, then crash the plane into the US Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. Siddig Siddig Ali, who will be one of the defendants in the trial, asks Salem for help to find “gaps in the air defense in Egypt” so the pilot could “bomb the presidential house and then turn around, crash the plane into the American embassy after he ejects himself out of the plane.” Abdul-Rahman gives his approval to the plot, but apparently it never goes beyond the discussion stage. Although details of this plot are in public records of the World Trade Center bombing trial, both the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry and 9/11 Commission fail to mention it. [Lance, 2004, pp. 196; Intelwire, 4/8/2004] Abdul-Rahman is closely tied to bin Laden and in fact in 1998 there will be an al-Qaeda hijacking plot designed to free him from prison (see 1998). Individuals connected to Abdul-Rahman and al-Qaeda will also plot to crash an airplane into the White House in 1996 (see January 1996)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

April 23, 1993:

FBI Discovers Follow-up Plot to WTC Bombing; Sudanese Diplomats Are Reportedly Involved In the wake of the 1993 WTC bombing (see February 26, 1993), Emad Salem is rehired as an FBI informant. Because Salem has the confidence of the group around the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdul-Rahman connected to the bombing, the FBI is so desperate to hire him back that they pay him over $1 million to return. It takes time for Salem to fully regain confidences, but on April 23, 1993, Siddig Siddig Ali approaches Salem and asks him to participate in a series of bombings that he is planning. Siddig Ali explains that he wants to simultaneously bomb four landmarks in New York City: the Lincoln and Holland tunnel, the United Nations headquarters, and the New York FBI office. This will later be known as the “Landmarks” plot. Siddig Ali later tells Salem that he has friends in the Sudanese Embassy who had approved the plan and are willing to help with diplomatic license plates and credentials. Wearing a wire, over the next weeks Salem meets and records others participating in the plot. Many of them, including Siddig Ali, attended a training camp the FBI briefly monitored back in January 1993 (see January 16-17, 1993). [Miller, Stone, and Mitchell, 2002, pp. 113-114] The FBI will expand its surveillance of the plotters and roll up the plot a couple of months later (see June 24, 1993). The US will later eject two Sudanese diplomats, Siraj Yousif and Ahmed Yousif Mohamed, for suspicions of involvement in the plot. Both are said to be intelligence agents posing as diplomats. Later in 1993, the US also places Sudan on a list of terrorist countries. [New York Times, 8/18/1993; New York Times, 4/11/1996]

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

June 24, 1993:

New York ‘Landmarks’ Bombing Plot Is Foiled

Informant Emad Salem, pictured bent over in a green shirt, enables the FBI to take surveillance footage like this of the plotters making a bomb. [source: National Geographic]Eight people are arrested, foiling a plot to bomb several New York City landmarks. The targets were the United Nations building, 26 Federal Plaza, and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels. This is known as the “Landmarks” or “Day of Terror” plot. The plotters are connected to Ramzi Yousef and the “Blind Sheikh,” Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman. If the bombing, planned for later in the year, had been successful, thousands would have died. An FBI informant named Emad Salem had infiltrated the group, gathering information that leads to arrests of the plotters (see April 23, 1993). [uS Congress, 7/24/2003] Abdul-Rahman will eventually be sentenced to life in prison for a role in the plot. Nine others will be given long prison terms, including Ibrahim El-Gabrowny and Clement Rodney Hampton-El. [New York Times, 1/18/1996] Siddig Siddig Ali, who was possibly the main force behind the plot (see April 23, 1993), will eventually be sentenced to only 11 years in prison because he agreed to provide evidence on the other suspects [New York Times, 10/16/1999]

LIve here ? Golly I wouldnt want to move in with you. COMPUTER PROBLEM last post for few days unless I solve in hour.

=====================

DEBT FREE MONEY was created . The Reserve Banks are the method to create NWO (Quigley quote I know you know Ive posted ten times on the ED Forum). DEBT is power. DEBT free money decreases power of FED. If its not debating points but you want to understand and not just post .. get PROBE ARTICLES by Donald Gibson on the creation of the WC. Study the Phone conversations between Paul Nitze and LBJ........its like Nitze is more powerful than LBJ. ....no its not , " its like" ......it IS. Nitze more powerful than LBJ. BTW every one of LBJ's pre WC Texas commission people on assassination had a CIA Connection. Dulles visited LBJ at ranch shortly before 11/22.

All the latter did was allow the Sec. of the Treasury on his own authority, economists explain this as a stop gap measure. And do you even read stuff before posting here? // END COLBY

DO YOU EVEN READ THE STUFF YOU POST HERE ? ,GAAL

US NOTES WERE ISSUED

##########################

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8rf0x0bzmg&feature=player_embedded

FTR #522 The Safari Club

An obscure kook who doesn't document his claims, he's more up your ally. // END Colby

PLEASE READ THE POST Mr. Colby.

Pre­lude to Ter­ror by Joseph J. Trento. In this book, the author sets forth infor­ma­tion about the Safari Club,

• MADE ERROR WAS VIDEO OF "LANDMARKS" BOMBING PLOT EMAD SALEM IN VIDEO MAKING BOMB
  

SANDY IN PERPECTIVE

wiki

Most intense (by minimum surface air pressure)

Most intense ever recorded: 870 mbar (25.63 inHg); eye of Super Typhoon Tip over the Pacific Ocean, 12 October 1979.[75]

Most intense in the Western Hemisphere: 882 mb (26.05 inHg); eye of Hurricane Wilma, 19 October 2005.[126]

Most intense ever recorded on land: 892 mb (26.35 inHg); Craig's Key, Florida, eye of the Labor Day Hurricane, 2 September 1935. While other landfalling tropical cyclones potentially had lower pressures, data is vague from areas other than the Atlantic basin, especially before the invention of weather satellites.[127]

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Lowest Barometric Pressures Ever Measured (900 mlb or lower)*

**RANK PRESSURE LOCATION DATE NAME

1)

870 (25.69)

W. Pacific

10/12/1979

Tip

2)

872 (25.75)

W. Pacific

10/19/1997

Joan

872 (25.75)

W. Pacific

10/18/1997

Ivan

872 (25.75)

W. Pacific

11/21/1992

Gay

3)

876 (25.86)

W. Pacific

9/23/1983

Forrest

876 (25.86)

W. Pacific

11/20/1975

June

4)

877 (25.89)

W. Pacific

10/5/1973

Nora

5)

878 (25.92)

W. Pacific

5/10/2000

Damrey

878 (25.92)

W. Pacific

10/14/1998

Zeb

878 (25.92)

W. Pacific

11/2/1997

Keith

878 (25.92)

W. Pacific

10/11/1992

Yvette

878 (25.92)

W. Pacific

10/23/1978

Rita

879 (25.95)

W. Pacific

8/23/2004

Chaba

6)

879 (25.95)

W. Pacific

12/17/2001

Faxai

879 (25.95)

W. Pacific

10/30/1995

Angela

879 (25.95)

W. Pacific

10/24/1984

Vanessa

7)

882 (26.05)

Caribbean

10/19/2005

Wilma

882 (26.05)

W. Pacific

9/13/1961

Nancey

882 (26.05)

W. Pacific

10/7/1961

Violet

9)

884 (26.11)

W. Pacific

11/11/1971

Irma

10)

885 (26.14)

W. Pacific

6/17/2004

Dianmu

885 (26.14)

W. Pacific

9/9/2003

Maemi

885 (26.14)

W. Pacific

11/27/1991

Yuri

885 (26.14)

W. Pacific

11/10/1990

Mike

11)

886 (26.16)

W. Pacific

12/16/1900

SS Arethusa

12)

887 (26.18)

W. Pacific

8/20/1979

Judy

887 (26.18)

W. Pacific

8/18/1927

SS Sapoeroea

13)

888 (26.22)

Caribbean

11/13/1988

Gilbert

888 (26.22)

W. Pacific

8/10/1983

Abby

14)

890 (26.27)

W. Pacific

8/8/1980

Wynke

890 (26.27)

W. Pacific

9/22/1969

Elsie

890 (26.27)

W. Pacific

11/13/1967

Gilda

891 (26.30)

W. Pacific

6/17/2003

Lupit

15)

891 (26.30)

W. Pacific

9/15/1990

Flo

891 (26.30)

W. Pacific

8/12/1987

Betty

891 (26.30)

W. Pacific

11/23/1987

Nima

891 (26.30)

W. Pacific

8/27/1959

Joan

891 (26.30)

Bay of Bengal

1833

SS Duke of York

16)

892 (26.35)

W. Pacific

4/20/1997

Isa

892 (26.35)

W. Pacific

9/27/1997

Ginger

892 (26.35)

W. Pacific

11/3/1992

Elsie

892 (26.35)

W. Pacific

10/24/1991

Ruth

*** 892 (26.35)

Long Key, Florida

9/5/1935

Labor Day Storm

17)

893 (26.37)

W. Pacific

9/26/1981

Elysie

893 (26.37)

W. Pacific

10/15/1973

Patsy

18)

894 (26.39)

W. Pacific

9/6/1964

Sally

19)

895 (26.39)

W. Pacific

10/4/1982

Mac

895 (26.42)

W. Pacific

11/3/1976

Louise

895 (26.42)

W. Pacific

5/3/1971

Amy

895 (26.42)

W. Pacific

9/23/1970

Hope

20)

896 (26.45)

W. Pacific

11/3/1983

Marge

896 (26.45)

W. Pacific

9/24/1959

Vera

21)

897 (26.48)

Gulf of Mexico

9/21/2005

Rita

897 (26.48)

W. Pacific

10/17/1985

Dot

897 (26.48)

W. Pacific

7/25/1969

Viola

897 (26.48)

W. Pacific

11/12/1962

Karen

22)

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

10/6/2004

Ma-On

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

5/16/2004

Nida

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

3/9/2002

Hary

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

10/23/2001

Podul

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

9/7/2000

Saomai

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

8/21/2000

Bilis

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

9/20/1999

Bart

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

9/11/1997

Oliwa

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

8/13/1997

Winnie

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

7/23/1997

Rosie

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

6/10/1997

Nestor

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

11/7/1996

Dale

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

9/7/1996

Sally

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

7/25/1996

Herd

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

7/16/1996

Eve

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

10/18/1995

Ward

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

9/14/1995

Oscar

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

8/28/1995

Kent

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

8/7/1994

Doug

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

10/4/1993

Ed

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

5/10/1991

Walt

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

11/26/1990

Owen

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

11/22/1990

Page

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

11/30/1989

Nima

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

10/18/1989

Elsie

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

7/14/1989

Gordon

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

4/21/1989

Andy

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

10/4/1988

Nelson

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

10/20/1987

Lynn

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

9/8/1987

Holly

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

7/29/1979

Hope

898 (26.51)

W. Pacific

7/23/1971

Nadine

23)

899 (26.54)

Caribbean

8/7/1980

Allen

* With the exception of a handful of lucky observations by ships, data prior to 1950 is inconclusive. Western Pacific typhoons were not consistently investigated by aircraft until 1959. Lower pressures undoubtedly occurred in earlier years in the Atlantic Basin before hurricane-hunting aircraft began making routine surveillance of tropical storms in 1950. So these records really represent only about 50 years of observation.

** Ranking has been made chronologically, with more recent measurements ranking first.

*** This is the lowest pressure ever observed at a land station.