Steven Gaal

Wired: Natural Gas Fracking Industry Paying Off Scientists -----------------------------------------o--------------------------------------------- http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/07/31/wired-natural-gas-fracking-industry-paying-scientists-156081/ Taking a page out of the tobacco industry playbook research claiming fracking is safe is revealed to have done by scientists paid off by the Natural Gas industry. In the latest battle over the basic facts of fracking in America, the provost of the University of Texas announced he would re-examine a report by a UT professor that said fracking was safe for groundwater after the revelation that the professor pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Texas natural gas developer. As wired reports below, this is just one of many instances were widely cited research claiming fracking is safe has been revealed to have been secretly paid for by the natural gas industry. Two more recent examples: •Timothy Considine, another Penn State grad who’s now a geologist at the University of Wyoming, was the lead author on a SUNY-Buffalo report in May that claimed state regulation had made fracking safe in Pennsylvania. Within days, a top Pennsylvania environmental official quoted the Buffalo study in testimony to Congress about the effectiveness of fracking regulations. But both the official and the study itself declined to mention that Considine’s close ties to the industry—and that his department had received nearly $6 million in donations from the oil and gas industry last year. Considine—whom one Pennsylvania newspaper called “the shale gas industry’s go-to professor”—also helped write the controversial 2009 Penn State study and a 2010 expansion of it that was funded by the American Petroleum Institute. •In February a University of Texas professor and former head of the US Geological Survey, Charles G. Groat, penned a study that found no evidence of groundwater contamination from fracking; the study didn’t disclose Groat’s seat on the board of major Texas fracker Plains Exploration & Production Company, for which he was reportedly paid $400,000 in 2011—more than double his university salary. The director of Groat’s UT program told Bloomberg News he had “no idea” of Groat’s connection to Plains, but last Tuesday the University of Texas provost said in response to mounting concern that he would convene a panel to re-examine Groat’s findings. Of course, industry funding of research has been commonplace since at least the heyday of Big Tobacco, and is still de rigueur for pharmaceuticals, among others. But Thomas McGarity, a UT-Austin law professor whose research on industry money in university research led him to write the book Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research, said it’s almost impossible to imagine a bias-free study with industry cash behind it. The Wired article goes on to detail one of the biggest culprits of all Robert Chase Last week the University of Texas provost announced he would re-examine a report by a UT professor that said fracking was safe for groundwater after the revelation that the professor pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Texas natural gas developer. It’s the latest fusillade in the ongoing battle over the basic facts of fracking in America. Texans aren’t the only ones having their fracking conversations shaped by industry-funded research. Ohioans got their first taste last week of the latest public-relations campaign by the energy policy wing of the US Chamber of Commerce. It’s called “Shale Works for US,” and it aims to spend millions on advertising and public events to sell Ohioans on the idea that fracking is a surefire way to yank the state out of recession. The campaign is loaded with rosy employment statistics, which trace to an April report authored by professors at three major Ohio universities and funded by, you guessed it, the natural gas industry. The report paints a bright future for fracking in Ohio as a job-creator. One co-author of the study, Robert Chase, is poised at such a high-traffic crossroads of that state’s natural gas universe that his case was recently taken up by the Ohio Ethics Commission, whose chairman called him “more than a passing participant in the operations of the Ohio oil and gas industry,” and questioned his potential conflicts of interest. As landowners in a suite of natural gas-rich states like Texas and Ohio struggle to decipher conflicting reports about the safety of fracking, Chase is a piece in what environmental and academic watchdogs call a growing puzzle of industry-funded fracking research with poor disclosure and dubious objectivity. “It’s hard to find someone who’s truly independent and doesn’t have at least one iron in the fire,” said Ohio oil and gas lease attorney Mark F. Okey. “It’s a good ol’ boys network and they like to take care of their own.” Chase got his petroleum engineering PhD from Penn State. In 2009, long after Chase left the university, it came under fire for a fracking report, widely cited by state politicians as evidence for opening up the fracking market, which an in-house investigator said “crossed the line between policy analysis and policy advocacy.” Early in his career, Chase worked as a consultant for many of the nation’s biggest oil and gas developers, including Halliburton, Cabot, and EQT. In 1978 he began teaching petroleum engineering at Marietta College, the small Ohio liberal arts school where he remains on faculty today. In 2008, Ohio’s then-governor Ted Strickland appointed him to the Ohio Oil & Gas Commission, an independent judiciary board that hears complaints from landowners and developers against the state’s Division of Mineral Resources Management. And last year, he founded his own consultancy, Chaseland LLC, that helps connect landowners with gas companies seeking drilling rights, for which Chase collects a commission. In February, Chase gave glowing testimony to Congress on the benefits of fracking, and included a swipe at anti-fracking advocates by citing the very same study now being investigated at the University of Texas. In recent years, Chase has taken his pro-fracking stance to the pages of Ohio newspapers to call for increased fracking and to assure locals of its safety; his latest column was soundly rebutted by a pair of Cincinnati geologists, who wrote that Chase had made “several misleading assertions.” State officials tightened fracking regulations after a series of earthquakes in northeastern Ohio, including a 4.0 quake in Youngstown on New Year’s Eve. The founding of Chaseland was a bit too much for Oil & Gas Commission director Linda Osterman, who in February asked the state ethics board to investigate Chase; they ruled that he would have to recuse himself from any Commission hearings involving companies or people he had worked with at Chaseland. Chase has only had to sit out once, Osterman told Climate Desk, on the Commission’s most recent hearing, in which a local cattle farm disputed a permit given to Chesapeake Energy to drill on the farm’s land, because he had consulted with Chesapeake. Otherwise, Osterman said, “I’ve never had any concerns about his ability to be impartial.” Still, Osterman was concerned enough to initiate the ethics inquiry. In an interview, Chase said his wide network made him uniquely suited to put the pieces together for his most recent economic impact study. “It’s very cut and dry,” he said. “If you don’t have someone who really has the experience, then it doesn’t make sense to do the study.” The study’s other authors were economists and business professors. David Brown, a member of Marietta’s Faculty Council, defended his colleague, saying that the fracking study’s funding source “should not by itself call into question his research,” and that Chase letting his varied roles compromise his academic research “is not something I would expect from him.” But Jack Shaner of the Ohio Environmental Council expressed a different take. “There’s a clear and present danger of industry and university being way too cozy. [Chase] is cleary a poster child for the need for a clear bright line between industry and academia.” A staff attorney for OEC called for Chase to step down from his seat on the Commission. Indeed, Chase isn’t the only professor who has come under fire for not disclosing proximity to the natural gas industry. “They’re trying to buy the prestige of the university,” he said. “And the universities are happy to sell their prestige, I suppose.” Source:Wired ++++++++++++++++++++++ DEEP BACKGROUND // UPDATE SITE http://www.grwabucks.org/fracturing.htm

SOME DATA ON YOUR SIDE OF FENCE +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Revealed: Colorado killer's psychiatrist 'was disciplined for prescribing herself Xanax, her husband Ambien and a colleague Vicodin' More details have emerged about the psychiatrist who was said to be treating Batman killer James Holmes before he allegedly opened fire on a Colorado movie theater killing 12 people and injuring 58. Dr Lynne Fenton - who is said to specialize in schizophrenia and 'threat assessment' - may become the subject of a number of lawsuits if it emerges she could have prevented the massacre. Her job as part of the 'threat assessment' team is to alert authorities if any student is considered dangerous or violent. Holmes sent a notebook to Dr Fenton before the shooting which was allegedly filled with details and drawings of how he was planning to 'kill people'. She has worked for the University of Colorado since 2009 and in that time has faced some disciplinary action. In 2004, state records show Dr Fenton was prescribing herself anti-anxiety drug Xanax when her mother was dying and it also emerged she prescribed her husband sleeping tablet Ambien, allergy medicine Claritin and Vicodine. She was also said to have prescribed an employee Vicodin, neither of whom were registered patients. It emerged last week that Holmes took Vicodin hours before the massacre. The University of Colorado's website states that Dr Fenton is the medical director of the school's Student Mental Health Services. An online resume says she sees ten to 15 graduate students a week for medication and psychotherapy, as well as five to ten patients in her general practice as a psychiatrist. According to CNN, the 50-year-old has held many jobs over the years. She worked as a physician in private practice in Denver from 1994 to 2005, and was chief of physical medicine with the U.S. Air Force in San Antonio, Texas, where she was also an acupuncturist. Since 2008, she's won various grants and contracts to study schizophrenia. Read more: http://www.dailymail...l#ixzz227WBX5YD ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ LET ME ADD Under the leadership of Dr. Hubertus Strughold, 34 ex-Nazi scientists accepted "Paperclip" contracts, authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and were put to work at Randolph Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas. http://cc157.blogspo...ee-project.html ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ALSO http://depletedcrani...ter-conspiracy/ As for his Father, he apparently worked at HNC Software. HNC Software is a company which produced computer software for business and government which included neural networktechnology andvarious predictive and learning-algorithm software. Their primary sector appears to be related to financial service systems. This area of software is a major growth area which has become an important area of research for a number of companies. It’s also of interest to DARPA and it seems that they have, at least once, had a government contract with DARPA. The research they were involved with was related to the use of computer algorithms that process visual data in a manner similar to the human brain. In principle, this could be used to recognize objects and has a variety of potential defense-related applications, including target identification and detection, terrain-based navigation, automated security and vehicle guidance. ============================= http://usahitman.com/jhfwfdal/ Robert Holmes brief bio at linked in states the following: “My educational background is in Mathematics and Statistics. My experience over the last 10 years at HNC and FICO has been in developing predictive models for financial services; credit & fraud risk models, first and third party application fraud models and internet/online banking fraud models.”

The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies 7/12/12 http://pastebin.com/irj4Fyd5 1. COINTELPRO Techniques for dilution, misdirection and control of a internet forum 2. Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation 3. Eight Traits of the Disinformationalist 4. How to Spot a Spy (Cointelpro Agent) 5. Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression ______________________________________________________________________________________ COINTELPRO Techniques for dilution, misdirection and control of a internet forum.. There are several techniques for the control and manipulation of a internet forum no matter what, or who is on it. We will go over each technique and demonstrate that only a minimal number of operatives can be used to eventually and effectively gain a control of a 'uncontrolled forum.' Technique #1 - 'FORUM SLIDING' If a very sensitive posting of a critical nature has been posted on a forum - it can be quickly removed from public view by 'forum sliding.' In this technique a number of unrelated posts are quietly prepositioned on the forum and allowed to 'age.' Each of these misdirectional forum postings can then be called upon at will to trigger a 'forum slide.' The second requirement is that several fake accounts exist, which can be called upon, to ensure that this technique is not exposed to the public. To trigger a 'forum slide' and 'flush' the critical post out of public view it is simply a matter of logging into each account both real and fake and then 'replying' to prepositined postings with a simple 1 or 2 line comment. This brings the unrelated postings to the top of the forum list, and the critical posting 'slides' down the front page, and quickly out of public view. Although it is difficult or impossible to censor the posting it is now lost in a sea of unrelated and unuseful postings. By this means it becomes effective to keep the readers of the forum reading unrelated and non-issue items. Technique #2 - 'CONSENSUS CRACKING' A second highly effective technique (which you can see in operation all the time at www.abovetopsecret.com) is 'consensus cracking.' To develop a consensus crack, the following technique is used. Under the guise of a fake account a posting is made which looks legitimate and is towards the truth is made - but the critical point is that it has a VERY WEAK PREMISE without substantive proof to back the posting. Once this is done then under alternative fake accounts a very strong position in your favour is slowly introduced over the life of the posting. It is IMPERATIVE that both sides are initially presented, so the uninformed reader cannot determine which side is the truth. As postings and replies are made the stronger 'evidence' or disinformation in your favour is slowly 'seeded in.' Thus the uninformed reader will most like develop the same position as you, and if their position is against you their opposition to your posting will be most likely dropped. However in some cases where the forum members are highly educated and can counter your disinformation with real facts and linked postings, you can then 'abort' the consensus cracking by initiating a 'forum slide.' Technique #3 - 'TOPIC DILUTION' Topic dilution is not only effective in forum sliding it is also very useful in keeping the forum readers on unrelated and non-productive issues. This is a critical and useful technique to cause a 'RESOURCE BURN.' By implementing continual and non-related postings that distract and disrupt (trolling ) the forum readers they are more effectively stopped from anything of any real productivity. If the intensity of gradual dilution is intense enough, the readers will effectively stop researching and simply slip into a 'gossip mode.' In this state they can be more easily misdirected away from facts towards uninformed conjecture and opinion. The less informed they are the more effective and easy it becomes to control the entire group in the direction that you would desire the group to go in. It must be stressed that a proper assessment of the psychological capabilities and levels of education is first determined of the group to determine at what level to 'drive in the wedge.' By being too far off topic too quickly it may trigger censorship by a forum moderator. Technique #4 - 'INFORMATION COLLECTION' Information collection is also a very effective method to determine the psychological level of the forum members, and to gather intelligence that can be used against them. In this technique in a light and positive environment a 'show you mine so me yours' posting is initiated. From the number of replies and the answers that are provided much statistical information can be gathered. An example is to post your 'favourite weapon' and then encourage other members of the forum to showcase what they have. In this matter it can be determined by reverse proration what percentage of the forum community owns a firearm, and or a illegal weapon. This same method can be used by posing as one of the form members and posting your favourite 'technique of operation.' From the replies various methods that the group utilizes can be studied and effective methods developed to stop them from their activities. Technique #5 - 'ANGER TROLLING' Statistically, there is always a percentage of the forum posters who are more inclined to violence. In order to determine who these individuals are, it is a requirement to present a image to the forum to deliberately incite a strong psychological reaction. From this the most violent in the group can be effectively singled out for reverse IP location and possibly local enforcement tracking. To accomplish this only requires posting a link to a video depicting a local police officer massively abusing his power against a very innocent individual. Statistically of the million or so police officers in America there is always one or two being caught abusing there powers and the taping of the activity can be then used for intelligence gathering purposes - without the requirement to 'stage' a fake abuse video. This method is extremely effective, and the more so the more abusive the video can be made to look. Sometimes it is useful to 'lead' the forum by replying to your own posting with your own statement of violent intent, and that you 'do not care what the authorities think!!' inflammation. By doing this and showing no fear it may be more effective in getting the more silent and self-disciplined violent intent members of the forum to slip and post their real intentions. This can be used later in a court of law during prosecution. Technique #6 - 'GAINING FULL CONTROL' It is important to also be harvesting and continually maneuvering for a forum moderator position. Once this position is obtained, the forum can then be effectively and quietly controlled by deleting unfavourable postings - and one can eventually steer the forum into complete failure and lack of interest by the general public. This is the 'ultimate victory' as the forum is no longer participated with by the general public and no longer useful in maintaining their freedoms. Depending on the level of control you can obtain, you can deliberately steer a forum into defeat by censoring postings, deleting memberships, flooding, and or accidentally taking the forum offline. By this method the forum can be quickly killed. However it is not always in the interest to kill a forum as it can be converted into a 'honey pot' gathering center to collect and misdirect newcomers and from this point be completely used for your control for your agenda purposes. CONCLUSION Remember these techniques are only effective if the forum participants DO NOT KNOW ABOUT THEM. Once they are aware of these techniques the operation can completely fail, and the forum can become uncontrolled. At this point other avenues must be considered such as initiating a false legal precidence to simply have the forum shut down and taken offline. This is not desirable as it then leaves the enforcement agencies unable to track the percentage of those in the population who always resist attempts for control against them. Many other techniques can be utilized and developed by the individual and as you develop further techniques of infiltration and control it is imperative to share then with HQ. ______________________________________________________________________________________ Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation Note: The first rule and last five (or six, depending on situation) rules are generally not directly within the ability of the traditional disinfo artist to apply. These rules are generally used more directly by those at the leadership, key players, or planning level of the criminal conspiracy or conspiracy to cover up. 1. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Regardless of what you know, don't discuss it -- especially if you are a public figure, news anchor, etc. If it's not reported, it didn't happen, and you never have to deal with the issues. 2. Become incredulous and indignant. Avoid discussing key issues and instead focus on side issues which can be used show the topic as being critical of some otherwise sacrosanct group or theme. This is also known as the 'How dare you!' gambit. 3. Create rumor mongers. Avoid discussing issues by describing all charges, regardless of venue or evidence, as mere rumors and wild accusations. Other derogatory terms mutually exclusive of truth may work as well. This method which works especially well with a silent press, because the only way the public can learn of the facts are through such 'arguable rumors'. If you can associate the material with the Internet, use this fact to certify it a 'wild rumor' from a 'bunch of kids on the Internet' which can have no basis in fact. 4. Use a straw man. Find or create a seeming element of your opponent's argument which you can easily knock down to make yourself look good and the opponent to look bad. Either make up an issue you may safely imply exists based on your interpretation of the opponent/opponent arguments/situation, or select the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Amplify their significance and destroy them in a way which appears to debunk all the charges, real and fabricated alike, while actually avoiding discussion of the real issues. 5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary 'attack the messenger' ploy, though other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as 'kooks', 'right-wing', 'liberal', 'left-wing', 'terrorists', 'conspiracy buffs', 'radicals', 'militia', 'racists', 'religious fanatics', 'sexual deviates', and so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues. 6. Hit and Run. In any public forum, make a brief attack of your opponent or the opponent position and then scamper off before an answer can be fielded, or simply ignore any answer. This works extremely well in Internet and letters-to-the-editor environments where a steady stream of new identities can be called upon without having to explain criticism, reasoning -- simply make an accusation or other attack, never discussing issues, and never answering any subsequent response, for that would dignify the opponent's viewpoint. 7. Question motives. Twist or amplify any fact which could be taken to imply that the opponent operates out of a hidden personal agenda or other bias. This avoids discussing issues and forces the accuser on the defensive. 8. Invoke authority. Claim for yourself or associate yourself with authority and present your argument with enough 'jargon' and 'minutia' to illustrate you are 'one who knows', and simply say it isn't so without discussing issues or demonstrating concretely why or citing sources. 9. Play Dumb. No matter what evidence or logical argument is offered, avoid discussing issues except with denials they have any credibility, make any sense, provide any proof, contain or make a point, have logic, or support a conclusion. Mix well for maximum effect. 10. Associate opponent charges with old news. A derivative of the straw man -- usually, in any large-scale matter of high visibility, someone will make charges early on which can be or were already easily dealt with - a kind of investment for the future should the matter not be so easily contained.) Where it can be foreseen, have your own side raise a straw man issue and have it dealt with early on as part of the initial contingency plans. Subsequent charges, regardless of validity or new ground uncovered, can usually then be associated with the original charge and dismissed as simply being a rehash without need to address current issues -- so much the better where the opponent is or was involved with the original source. 11. Establish and rely upon fall-back positions. Using a minor matter or element of the facts, take the 'high road' and 'confess' with candor that some innocent mistake, in hindsight, was made -- but that opponents have seized on the opportunity to blow it all out of proportion and imply greater criminalities which, 'just isn't so.' Others can reinforce this on your behalf, later, and even publicly 'call for an end to the nonsense' because you have already 'done the right thing.' Done properly, this can garner sympathy and respect for 'coming clean' and 'owning up' to your mistakes without addressing more serious issues. 12. Enigmas have no solution. Drawing upon the overall umbrella of events surrounding the crime and the multitude of players and events, paint the entire affair as too complex to solve. This causes those otherwise following the matter to begin to lose interest more quickly without having to address the actual issues. 13. Alice in Wonderland Logic. Avoid discussion of the issues by reasoning backwards or with an apparent deductive logic which forbears any actual material fact. 14. Demand complete solutions. Avoid the issues by requiring opponents to solve the crime at hand completely, a ploy which works best with issues qualifying for rule 10. 15. Fit the facts to alternate conclusions. This requires creative thinking unless the crime was planned with contingency conclusions in place. 16. Vanish evidence and witnesses. If it does not exist, it is not fact, and you won't have to address the issue. 17. Change the subject. Usually in connection with one of the other ploys listed here, find a way to side-track the discussion with abrasive or controversial comments in hopes of turning attention to a new, more manageable topic. This works especially well with companions who can 'argue' with you over the new topic and polarize the discussion arena in order to avoid discussing more key issues. 18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can't do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how 'sensitive they are to criticism.' 19. Ignore proof presented, demand impossible proofs. This is perhaps a variant of the 'play dumb' rule. Regardless of what material may be presented by an opponent in public forums, claim the material irrelevant and demand proof that is impossible for the opponent to come by (it may exist, but not be at his disposal, or it may be something which is known to be safely destroyed or withheld, such as a murder weapon.) In order to completely avoid discussing issues, it may be required that you to categorically deny and be critical of media or books as valid sources, deny that witnesses are acceptable, or even deny that statements made by government or other authorities have any meaning or relevance. 20. False evidence. Whenever possible, introduce new facts or clues designed and manufactured to conflict with opponent presentations -- as useful tools to neutralize sensitive issues or impede resolution. This works best when the crime was designed with contingencies for the purpose, and the facts cannot be easily separated from the fabrications. 21. Call a Grand Jury, Special Prosecutor, or other empowered investigative body. Subvert the (process) to your benefit and effectively neutralize all sensitive issues without open discussion. Once convened, the evidence and testimony are required to be secret when properly handled. For instance, if you own the prosecuting attorney, it can insure a Grand Jury hears no useful evidence and that the evidence is sealed and unavailable to subsequent investigators. Once a favorable verdict is achieved, the matter can be considered officially closed. Usually, this technique is applied to find the guilty innocent, but it can also be used to obtain charges when seeking to frame a victim. 22. Manufacture a new truth. Create your own expert(s), group(s), author(s), leader(s) or influence existing ones willing to forge new ground via scientific, investigative, or social research or testimony which concludes favorably. In this way, if you must actually address issues, you can do so authoritatively. 23. Create bigger distractions. If the above does not seem to be working to distract from sensitive issues, or to prevent unwanted media coverage of unstoppable events such as trials, create bigger news stories (or treat them as such) to distract the multitudes. 24. Silence critics. If the above methods do not prevail, consider removing opponents from circulation by some definitive solution so that the need to address issues is removed entirely. This can be by their death, arrest and detention, blackmail or destruction of their character by release of blackmail information, or merely by destroying them financially, emotionally, or severely damaging their health. 25. Vanish. If you are a key holder of secrets or otherwise overly illuminated and you think the heat is getting too hot, to avoid the issues, vacate the kitchen. ______________________________________________________________________________________ Eight Traits of the Disinformationalist 1) Avoidance. They never actually discuss issues head-on or provide constructive input, generally avoiding citation of references or credentials. Rather, they merely imply this, that, and the other. Virtually everything about their presentation implies their authority and expert knowledge in the matter without any further justification for credibility. 2) Selectivity. They tend to pick and choose opponents carefully, either applying the hit-and-run approach against mere commentators supportive of opponents, or focusing heavier attacks on key opponents who are known to directly address issues. Should a commentator become argumentative with any success, the focus will shift to include the commentator as well. 3) Coincidental. They tend to surface suddenly and somewhat coincidentally with a new controversial topic with no clear prior record of participation in general discussions in the particular public arena involved. They likewise tend to vanish once the topic is no longer of general concern. They were likely directed or elected to be there for a reason, and vanish with the reason. 4) Teamwork. They tend to operate in self-congratulatory and complementary packs or teams. Of course, this can happen naturally in any public forum, but there will likely be an ongoing pattern of frequent exchanges of this sort where professionals are involved. Sometimes one of the players will infiltrate the opponent camp to become a source for straw man or other tactics designed to dilute opponent presentation strength. 5) Anti-conspiratorial. They almost always have disdain for 'conspiracy theorists' and, usually, for those who in any way believe JFK was not killed by LHO. Ask yourself why, if they hold such disdain for conspiracy theorists, do they focus on defending a single topic discussed in a NG focusing on conspiracies? One might think they would either be trying to make fools of everyone on every topic, or simply ignore the group they hold in such disdain.Or, one might more rightly conclude they have an ulterior motive for their actions in going out of their way to focus as they do. 6) Artificial Emotions. An odd kind of 'artificial' emotionalism and an unusually thick skin -- an ability to persevere and persist even in the face of overwhelming criticism and unacceptance. This likely stems from intelligence community training that, no matter how condemning the evidence, deny everything, and never become emotionally involved or reactive. The net result for a disinfo artist is that emotions can seem artificial. Most people, if responding in anger, for instance, will express their animosity throughout their rebuttal. But disinfo types usually have trouble maintaining the 'image' and are hot and cold with respect to pretended emotions and their usually more calm or unemotional communications style. It's just a job, and they often seem unable to 'act their role in character' as well in a communications medium as they might be able in a real face-to-face conversation/confrontation. You might have outright rage and indignation one moment, ho-hum the next, and more anger later -- an emotional yo-yo. With respect to being thick-skinned, no amount of criticism will deter them from doing their job, and they will generally continue their old disinfo patterns without any adjustments to criticisms of how obvious it is that they play that game -- where a more rational individual who truly cares what others think might seek to improve their communications style, substance, and so forth, or simply give up. 7) Inconsistent. There is also a tendency to make mistakes which betray their true self/motives. This may stem from not really knowing their topic, or it may be somewhat 'freudian', so to speak, in that perhaps they really root for the side of truth deep within. I have noted that often, they will simply cite contradictory information which neutralizes itself and the author. For instance, one such player claimed to be a Navy pilot, but blamed his poor communicating skills (spelling, grammar, incoherent style) on having only a grade-school education. I'm not aware of too many Navy pilots who don't have a college degree. Another claimed no knowledge of a particular topic/situation but later claimed first-hand knowledge of it. 8) Time Constant. Recently discovered, with respect to News Groups, is the response time factor. There are three ways this can be seen to work, especially when the government or other empowered player is involved in a cover up operation: a) ANY NG posting by a targeted proponent for truth can result in an IMMEDIATE response. The government and other empowered players can afford to pay people to sit there and watch for an opportunity to do some damage. SINCE DISINFOINANG ONLY WORKS IF THE READER SEES IT - FAST RESPONSE IS CALLED FOR, or the visitor may be swayed towards truth. When dealing in more direct ways with a disinformationalist, such as email, DELAY IS CALLED FOR - there will usually be a minimum of a 48-72 hour delay. This allows a sit-down team discussion on response strategy for best effect, and even enough time to 'get permission' or instruction from a formal chain of command. c) In the NG example 1) above, it will often ALSO be seen that bigger guns are drawn and fired after the same 48-72 hours delay - the team approach in play. This is especially true when the targeted truth seeker or their comments are considered more important with respect to potential to reveal truth. Thus, a serious truth sayer will be attacked twice for the same sin. ______________________________________________________________________________________ How to Spot a Spy (Cointelpro Agent) One way to neutralize a potential activist is to get them to be in a group that does all the wrong things. Why? 1) The message doesn't get out. 2) A lot of time is wasted 3) The activist is frustrated and discouraged 4) Nothing good is accomplished. FBI and Police Informers and Infiltrators will infest any group and they have phoney activist organizations established. Their purpose is to prevent any real movement for justice or eco-peace from developing in this country. Agents come in small, medium or large. They can be of any ethnic background. They can be male or female. The actual size of the group or movement being infiltrated is irrelevant. It is the potential the movement has for becoming large which brings on the spies and saboteurs. This booklet lists tactics agents use to slow things down, foul things up, destroy the movement and keep tabs on activists. It is the agent's job to keep the activist from quitting such a group, thus keeping him/her under control. In some situations, to get control, the agent will tell the activist: "You're dividing the movement." [Here, I have added the psychological reasons as to WHY this maneuver works to control people] This invites guilty feelings. Many people can be controlled by guilt. The agents begin relationships with activists behind a well-developed mask of "dedication to the cause." Because of their often declared dedication, (and actions designed to prove this), when they criticize the activist, he or she - being truly dedicated to the movement - becomes convinced that somehow, any issues are THEIR fault. This is because a truly dedicated person tends to believe that everyone has a conscience and that nobody would dissimulate and lie like that "on purpose." It's amazing how far agents can go in manipulating an activist because the activist will constantly make excuses for the agent who regularly declares their dedication to the cause. Even if they do, occasionally, suspect the agent, they will pull the wool over their own eyes by rationalizing: "they did that unconsciously... they didn't really mean it... I can help them by being forgiving and accepting " and so on and so forth. The agent will tell the activist: "You're a leader!" This is designed to enhance the activist's self-esteem. His or her narcissistic admiration of his/her own activist/altruistic intentions increase as he or she identifies with and consciously admires the altruistic declarations of the agent which are deliberately set up to mirror those of the activist. This is "malignant pseudoidentification." It is the process by which the agent consciously imitates or simulates a certain behavior to foster the activist's identification with him/her, thus increasing the activist's vulnerability to exploitation. The agent will simulate the more subtle self-concepts of the activist. Activists and those who have altruistic self-concepts are most vulnerable to malignant pseudoidentification especially during work with the agent when the interaction includes matter relating to their competency, autonomy, or knowledge. The goal of the agent is to increase the activist's general empathy for the agent through pseudo-identification with the activist's self-concepts. The most common example of this is the agent who will compliment the activist for his competency or knowledge or value to the movement. On a more subtle level, the agent will simulate affects and mannerisms of the activist which promotes identification via mirroring and feelings of "twinship". It is not unheard of for activists, enamored by the perceived helpfulness and competence of a good agent, to find themselves considering ethical violations and perhaps, even illegal behavior, in the service of their agent/handler. The activist's "felt quality of perfection" [self-concept] is enhanced, and a strong empathic bond is developed with the agent through his/her imitation and simulation of the victim's own narcissistic investments. [self-concepts] That is, if the activist knows, deep inside, their own dedication to the cause, they will project that onto the agent who is "mirroring" them. The activist will be deluded into thinking that the agent shares this feeling of identification and bonding. In an activist/social movement setting, the adversarial roles that activists naturally play vis a vis the establishment/government, fosters ongoing processes of intrapsychic splitting so that "twinship alliances" between activist and agent may render whole sectors or reality testing unavailable to the activist. They literally "lose touch with reality." Activists who deny their own narcissistic investments [do not have a good idea of their own self-concepts and that they ARE concepts] and consciously perceive themselves (accurately, as it were) to be "helpers" endowed with a special amount of altruism are exceedingly vulnerable to the affective (emotional) simulation of the accomplished agent. Empathy is fostered in the activist through the expression of quite visible affects. The presentation of tearfulness, sadness, longing, fear, remorse, and guilt, may induce in the helper-oriented activist a strong sense of compassion, while unconsciously enhancing the activist's narcissistic investment in self as the embodiment of goodness. The agent's expresssion of such simulated affects may be quite compelling to the observer and difficult to distinguish from deep emotion. It can usually be identified by two events, however: First, the activist who has analyzed his/her own narcissistic roots and is aware of his/her own potential for being "emotionally hooked," will be able to remain cool and unaffected by such emotional outpourings by the agent. As a result of this unaffected, cool, attitude, the Second event will occur: The agent will recompensate much too quickly following such an affective expression leaving the activist with the impression that "the play has ended, the curtain has fallen," and the imposture, for the moment, has finished. The agent will then move quickly to another activist/victim. The fact is, the movement doesn't need leaders, it needs MOVERS. "Follow the leader" is a waste of time. A good agent will want to meet as often as possible. He or she will talk a lot and say little. One can expect an onslaught of long, unresolved discussions. Some agents take on a pushy, arrogant, or defensive manner: 1) To disrupt the agenda 2) To side-track the discussion 3) To interrupt repeatedly 4) To feign ignorance 5) To make an unfounded accusation against a person. Calling someone a racist, for example. This tactic is used to discredit a person in the eyes of all other group members. Saboteurs Some saboteurs pretend to be activists. She or he will .... 1) Write encyclopedic flyers (in the present day, websites) 2) Print flyers in English only. 3) Have demonstrations in places where no one cares. 4) Solicit funding from rich people instead of grass roots support 5) Display banners with too many words that are confusing. 6) Confuse issues. 7) Make the wrong demands. Cool Compromise the goal. 9) Have endless discussions that waste everyone's time. The agent may accompany the endless discussions with drinking, pot smoking or other amusement to slow down the activist's work. Provocateurs 1) Want to establish "leaders" to set them up for a fall in order to stop the movement. 2) Suggest doing foolish, illegal things to get the activists in trouble. 3) Encourage militancy. 4) Want to taunt the authorities. 5) Attempt to make the activist compromise their values. 6) Attempt to instigate violence. Activisim ought to always be non-violent. 7) Attempt to provoke revolt among people who are ill-prepared to deal with the reaction of the authorities to such violence. Informants 1) Want everyone to sign up and sing in and sign everything. 2) Ask a lot of questions (gathering data). 3) Want to know what events the activist is planning to attend. 4) Attempt to make the activist defend him or herself to identify his or her beliefs, goals, and level of committment. Recruiting Legitimate activists do not subject people to hours of persuasive dialog. Their actions, beliefs, and goals speak for themselves. Groups that DO recruit are missionaries, military, and fake political parties or movements set up by agents. Surveillance ALWAYS assume that you are under surveillance. At this point, if you are NOT under surveillance, you are not a very good activist! Scare Tactics They use them. Such tactics include slander, defamation, threats, getting close to disaffected or minimally committed fellow activists to persuade them (via psychological tactics described above) to turn against the movement and give false testimony against their former compatriots. They will plant illegal substances on the activist and set up an arrest; they will plant false information and set up "exposure," they will send incriminating letters [emails] in the name of the activist; and more; they will do whatever society will allow. This booklet in no way covers all the ways agents use to sabotage the lives of sincere an dedicated activists. If an agent is "exposed," he or she will be transferred or replaced. COINTELPRO is still in operation today under a different code name. It is no longer placed on paper where it can be discovered through the freedom of information act. The FBI counterintelligence program's stated purpose: To expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize individuals who the FBI categorize as opposed to the National Interests. "National Security" means the FBI's security from the people ever finding out the vicious things it does in violation of people's civil liberties. ______________________________________________________________________________________ Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression Strong, credible allegations of high-level criminal activity can bring down a government. When the government lacks an effective, fact-based defense, other techniques must be employed. The success of these techniques depends heavily upon a cooperative, compliant press and a mere token opposition party. 1. Dummy up. If it's not reported, if it's not news, it didn't happen. 2. Wax indignant. This is also known as the "How dare you?" gambit. 3. Characterize the charges as "rumors" or, better yet, "wild rumors." If, in spite of the news blackout, the public is still able to learn about the suspicious facts, it can only be through "rumors." (If they tend to believe the "rumors" it must be because they are simply "paranoid" or "hysterical.") 4. Knock down straw men. Deal only with the weakest aspects of the weakest charges. Even better, create your own straw men. Make up wild rumors (or plant false stories) and give them lead play when you appear to debunk all the charges, real and fanciful alike. 5. Call the skeptics names like "conspiracy theorist," "nutcase," "ranter," "kook," "crackpot," and, of course, "rumor monger." Be sure, too, to use heavily loaded verbs and adjectives when characterizing their charges and defending the "more reasonable" government and its defenders. You must then carefully avoid fair and open debate with any of the people you have thus maligned. For insurance, set up your own "skeptics" to shoot down. 6. Impugn motives. Attempt to marginalize the critics by suggesting strongly that they are not really interested in the truth but are simply pursuing a partisan political agenda or are out to make money (compared to over-compensated adherents to the government line who, presumably, are not). 7. Invoke authority. Here the controlled press and the sham opposition can be very useful. 8. Dismiss the charges as "old news." 9. Come half-clean. This is also known as "confession and avoidance" or "taking the limited hangout route." This way, you create the impression of candor and honesty while you admit only to relatively harmless, less-than-criminal "mistakes." This stratagem often requires the embrace of a fall-back position quite different from the one originally taken. With effective damage control, the fall-back position need only be peddled by stooge skeptics to carefully limited markets. 10. Characterize the crimes as impossibly complex and the truth as ultimately unknowable. 11. Reason backward, using the deductive method with a vengeance. With thoroughly rigorous deduction, troublesome evidence is irrelevant. E.g. We have a completely free press. If evidence exists that the Vince Foster "suicide" note was forged, they would have reported it. They haven't reported it so there is no such evidence. Another variation on this theme involves the likelihood of a conspiracy leaker and a press who would report the leak. 12. Require the skeptics to solve the crime completely. E.g. If Foster was murdered, who did it and why? 13. Change the subject. This technique includes creating and/or publicizing distractions. 14. Lightly report incriminating facts, and then make nothing of them. This is sometimes referred to as "bump and run" reporting. 15. Baldly and brazenly lie. A favorite way of doing this is to attribute the "facts" furnished the public to a plausible-sounding, but anonymous, source. 16. Expanding further on numbers 4 and 5, have your own stooges "expose" scandals and champion popular causes. Their job is to pre-empt real opponents and to play 99-yard football. A variation is to pay rich people for the job who will pretend to spend their own money. 17. Flood the Internet with agents. This is the answer to the question, "What could possibly motivate a person to spend hour upon hour on Internet news groups defending the government and/or the press and harassing genuine critics?" Don t the authorities have defenders enough in all the newspapers, magazines, radio, and television? One would think refusing to print critical letters and screening out serious callers or dumping them from radio talk shows would be control enough, but, obviously, it is not.

The following is the introduction to "Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion," edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank recently published by AK Press. "Those who feel that like lemmings they are being led over a cliff would be well-advised not to read this book. They may discover that they are right," advises Noam Chomsky. Damaged goods, send them back I can't work, I can't achieve, send me back Open the till, give me the change You said would do me good Refund the cost You said you're cheap, but you're too much -"Damaged Goods," Gang of Four Barack Obama was in Brasilia on March 19, 2011, when he announced with limited fanfare the latest war of his young presidency. The bombing of Libya had begun with a hail of cruise missile attacks and air strikes. It was something of an impromptu intervention, orchestrated largely by Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and the diva of vengeance Samantha Power, always hot for a saturation bombing in the name of human rights. Obama soon upped the ante by suggesting that it was time for Qaddafi to go. The Empire had run out of patience with the mercurial colonel. The vague aims of the Libyan war had moved ominously from enforcing "a no-fly zone" to seeking regime change. Bombing raids soon targeted Qaddafi and his family. Coming in the wake of the extra-judicial assassination of Osama Bin Laden in a blood-spattered home invasion, Qaddafi rightly feared Obama wanted his body in a bag, too. (In the end, Qaddafi's butchered body was put on public display in a Benghazi meat locker.) Absent mass protests against the impending destruction of Tripoli, it fell to Congress to take some tentative steps to challenge the latest unauthorized and unprovoked war. At an earlier time in the history of the Republic, Obama's arrogant defiance of Congress and the War Powers Act of 1973 might have provoked a constitutional crisis. But these are duller and more attenuated days, where such vital matters have been rendered down into a kind of hollow political theater. All the players duly act their parts, but everyone, even the cable news audience, realizes that it is just for show. The wars will proceed. The Congress will fund them. The people will have no say in the matter. As Oscar Wilde quipped: "All the world's a stage, badly cast." That old softy John Boehner, the teary-eyed barkeep's son, sculpted a resolution demanding that Obama explain his intentions in Libya. It passed the House overwhelmingly. A competing resolution crafted by the impish gadfly Dennis Kucinich called for an immediate withdrawal of US forces from operations in Libya. This radically sane measure garnered a robust 148 votes. Obama dismissed both attempts to downsize his unilateralist approach to military operations, saying with a chill touch of the surreal that the 14,000-and-counting sorties flown over Libya didn't amount to a "war." This is Barack Obama, the political moralist? The change agent? The constitutional scholar? Listen to that voice. It is petulant and dismissive. Some might say peevish, like the whine of a talented student caught cheating on a final exam. Yes, all the political players were acting their parts. But what role exactly had Obama assumed? Obama, the Nobel laureate, casts himself as a New Internationalist, a chief executive of the global empire, more eager to consult with European heads of state than members of Congress, even of his own party. Indeed, his co-conspirators in the startling misadventure in Libya were David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, an odd troika to say the least. Even Obama's own Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, seems to have been discreetly cut out of the decision loop. We are beginning to see why Obama sparks such a virulent reaction among the more histrionic precincts of the libertarian right. He has a majestic sense of his own certitude. The president often seems captivated by the nobility of his intentions, offering himself up as a kind of savior of the eroding American Imperium. While Obama sells pristine idealism to the masses, he is at heart a calculating pragmatist, especially when it comes to advancing his own ambitions. Obama doesn't want to be stained with defeat. It's one reason he has walked away from pushing for a Palestinian state, after his Middle East envoy George Mitchell resigned in frustration. It's why Obama stubbornly refused to insist on a public option for his atrocious health care bill. It's why he backed off cap-and-trade and organized labor's card check bill and the DREAM Act. Obama assumed the presidency at a moment when much of the nation seemed ready to confront the unwelcome fact that the American project had derailed. Before he died, Norman Mailer lamented that the American culture was corroding from a bad conscience. The country was warping under the psychic weight of years of illegal wars, torture, official greed, religious prudishness, government surveillance, unsatisfying Viagra-supplemented sex, bland genetically engineered food, crappy jobs, dismal movies, and infantile, corporatized music—all scrolling by in an infinite montage of annoying Tweets. Even the virtual commons of cyberspace had gone solipsistic. Corporate capitalism just wasn't delivering the goods anymore. Not for the bottom 80 percent, any way. The economy was in ruins, mired in what appeared to be a permanent recession. The manufacturing sector had been killed from the inside-out, with millions of well-paying jobs outsourced and nothing but dreary service-sector positions to take their place. Chronic long-term unemployment hovered at more than 10 percent, worse, much worse, in black America. Those who clung to their jobs had seen their wages stagnate, their home values shrivel and were suffocating under merciless mounds of debt. Meanwhile, capital moved in ever-tightening circles among a new odious breed of super-rich, making sweat-free billions from the facile movement of digital money. By 2008, the wistfulness seemed to have evaporated from the American spirit. The country had seen its own government repeatedly prey on its citizens' fear of the future. Paranoia had become the last growth industry. From the High Sierras to the Blue Ridge, the political landscape was sour and spiteful, the perfect seed-ground for the sprouting of the Tea Party and even ranker and more venomous movements on the American right. These were not the ideological descendents of the fiery libertarian Barry Goldwater. The tea-baggers lacked Goldwater's western innocence and naïve idealism. These suburban populists, by and large, were white, unhappy and aging. Animated by the grim nostalgia for a pre-Lapsarian fantasyland called the Reagan administration, many sensed their station in society slipping inexorably away. They wanted their country back. But back from whom? Instead of blaming corporate outsourcers or predatory bankers, they directed their vindictive impulse toward immigrants and blacks, government workers and teachers, scientists and homosexuals. There's something profoundly pathetic about the political fatalism of this new species of Know-Nothings. But, it must be said, their wrath was mostly pure. This strange consortium of discontent seethed with an inchoate sense of alienation, an acidic despair at the diminished potentialities of life in post-industrial America. No, these were not fanatical idealists or even ante-bellum utopians. They were levelers, of a sort, splenetic and dread-fueled levelers, conspiratorialists with a Nixonian appetite for political destruction. Primed into a frenzy by the cynical rantings of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, mass gatherings of Tea Partiers across the summer of 2009 showed signs of a collective psychopathy, as if the enervating madness from decades of confinement in the hothouse of the American suburbs had finally ruptured in primetime for all the world to watch over and over again on YouTube with mounting mortification. Right there on the National Mall could be heard the vapid gibberish of Michele Bachmann and the new American preterite, those lost and bitter souls who felt their culture had left them far behind. With his sunny disposition and Prospero-like aptitude for mystification, Obama should have been able to convert them or, at least, to roll over them. Instead, they kicked his ass. How? Obama is a master of gesture politics, but he tends to flinch in nearly every pitched battle, even when the odds and the public are behind him. His political instincts drive him to seek cover in the middle ground. He is a reflexive compromiser, more Rodney "Can't We All Just Get Along" King than Reverend King. Even when confronted by bumbling hacks like John Boehner and Eric Cantor, Obama tends to wilt. Perhaps Obama had never before been confronted with quite this level of toxic hostility. After all, he'd lived something of a charmed life, the life of a star-child, coddled and pampered, encouraged and adulated, from Indonesia to Harvard. Obama was the physical and psychic embodiment of the new multiculturalism: lean, affable, assured, non-threatening. His vaguely liberal political ideology remained opaque at the core. Instead of an over-arching agenda, Obama delivered facile jingoisms proclaiming a post-racial and post-partisan America. Instead of radical change, Obama offered simply managerial competence. This, naturally, the Berserkers of the Right interpreted as hubris and arrogance and such hollow homilies served only to exacerbate their rage. The virulent right had profiled Obama and found him to be the perfect target for their accreted animus. And, even better, they had zeroed-in on an enemy so innately conflict-averse that even when pummeled with racist slurs he wouldn't punch back. Of course, Obama's most grievous political wounds were self-inflicted, starting even before his election when he rushed back to Washington to help rescue Bush's Wall Street bailout. This was perhaps the first real indication that the luminous campaign speeches about generational and systemic change masked the servile psyche of a man who was desperately yearning to be embraced by the nation's political and financial elites. Instead of meeting with the victims of Wall Street predators or their advocates, like Elizabeth Warren and Ralph Nader, Obama fist-bumped with the brain trust of Goldman Sachs and schmoozed with the crème de la crème of K Street corporate lobbyists. In the end, Obama helped salvage some of the most venal and corrupt enterprises on Wall Street, agreed to shield their executives from prosecution for their financial crimes and, predictably, later got repaid with their scorn. Thus the Obama revolution was over before it started, guttered by the politician's overweening desire to prove himself to the grandees of the establishment. From there on, other promises, from confronting climate change to closing Gitmo, from ending torture to initiating a nationalized health care system, proved even easier to break. Take the issue that had so vivified his campaign: ending the war on Iraq. Within weeks of taking office, Obama had been taken to the woodshed by Robert Gates and General David Petraeus and had returned to the White House bruised and humbled. The withdrawal would slowly proceed, but a sinister force would remain behind indefinitely, a lethal contingent of some 50,000 or so CIA operatives, special forces units, hunter-killer squads and ruthless private security details. Bush's overt war quietly became a black op under Obama. Out of sight, out of mind. By the fall of 2009 even the most calloused Washington hands had grown weary over how deeply entangled the US occupation of Afghanistan had become. The savage rhythms of the war there had backfired. Too many broken promises, too many bombed weddings and assassinations, too many dead and mutilated children, too much cowardice and corruption in the puppet satrapy in Kabul. The tide had irrevocably turned against the US and its squalid policies. Far from being terminally crippled, the Taliban was now stronger than it had been at any time since 2001. But instead of capitalizing on this tectonic shift of sentiment by drawing down American troops, Obama, in a cynical ploy to prove his martial mettle, journeyed to West Point and announced in a somber speech that he was raising the stakes in Afghanistan by injecting a Petraeus-sanctioned surge of forces into the country and unleashing a new campaign of lethal operations that would track and target suspected insurgents across the Hindu Kush and into Pakistan. That night Obama spoke in a stern cadence, studded with imperious pauses, as if to suggest that he, unlike the fickle George W. Bush, was going to wage the Afghan war until it was won. But he knew better. And so did his high command—even Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, who had trademarked the counter-insurgency strategy. There was nothing to win in Afghanistan. Out on that distant rim of the world, there weren't even any standards to gauge military success. This was meant to be a punitive war, pure and simple, designed to draw as much blood as possible, an obscene war fought largely by remote-controlled drones attacking peasant villages with murderous indiscretion. Afterwards, the American peace movement could only bray in impotent outrage. But as Obama's wars spread from Afghanistan and Iraq to Pakistan and Yemen, Somalia and Libya, outside of the redoubtable Catholic Workers and Quakers and a few Code Pinkers - the last flickering moral lights in the nation - even those empty yawps of protest dissipated into whispered lamentations, hushed murmurs of disillusionment. Could it be that the American Left had gone extinct as any kind of potent political force and it took the election of Barack Obama to prove it? And what of Obama's spellbound followers, those youthful crusaders who saw him illumined in the sacral glow of his ethereal rhetoric and cleaved to him during the hard slog of two campaigns with a near-religious devotion? What was running through their minds when the mists finally parted to reveal that Obama was implementing cunning tracings of Bush-era policies on everything from the indefinite detention of uncharged prisoners in the war on terror to raids on medical marijuana distributors in states where medical pot has been legalized? What, indeed. Illusions die hard, especially when shattered by cruise missiles =================================================. This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. POSTED IN FAIR USE

UPDATE DARPA's Blue Angel - Pentagon prepares millions of vaccines against future global flu July 28, 2012 by legitgov http://rt.com/usa/ne...a-research-255/ DARPA's Blue Angel - Pentagon prepares millions of vaccines against future global flu 28 Jul 2012 The Pentagon's DARPA lab has announced a milestone, but it doesn't involve drones or death missiles. Scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency say they've produced 10 million doses of an influenza vaccine in only one month's time. In a press release issued by the agency's office this week, scientists with DARPA say they've reach an important step in being able to combat spread a flu pandemic that might someday decimate the Earth's population. By working with the Medicago Inc. vaccine company, the Pentagon's cutting edge research lab says that they've used a massive harvest of tobacco plants to help produce a plethora of flu-fighting vaccines. [Am I the *only one* wondering: WHY is the *Pentagon* manufacturing vaccines? You would have to be *out of your mind* to allow an injection of *anything* concocted by the Pentagon!]

THE POLYGRAPH NOT OVERRATED.....ITS JUST A LIE. GAAL -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- xxxx, xxxx, Set the Polygraph on Fire from cfif.org Dr. William Marston, creator of the comic strip Wonder Woman, penned under the pseudonym of Charles Moulton, now has people amused by another of his creations — the lie detector test. A new report from the National Academies' National Research Council supports what many junk science opponents have long argued: lie detector (polygraph) tests, which measure heart rate, respiratory rate and perspiration during interrogation, are too flawed to be relied upon and do not justify the government's heavy use. Former FBI head J. Edgar Hoover had great enthusiasm for the lie detector.Consequently, it became a routinely used tool by the FBI in its investigations of crimes, employee screenings and spy matters. U.S. police forces, the Pentagon and other government departments followed suit. Just this past spring, another former FBI Director, William Webster, filed a report with the FBI about the Robert Hanssen Soviet-spy incident, criticizing the Bureau for its procedures and recommending a major expansion of lie detector use in ferreting out traitors. The overuse of polygraph tests has also spread to the private sector. Some insurers now use lie detector technology when policyholders call to make a claim. Polygraph tests became so routine in workplace investigations that Congress passed the Federal Employee Polygraph Protection Act in 1998, banning the use of polygraphs in most private employment settings. Yet numerous exceptions to the ban remain, including the permitted use in situations involving public employees, job applicants to drug manufacturers, job applicants to security firms, and in cases where an employer (public or private) is investigating a financial loss with reasonable suspicion that a specific employee was involved. Privacy concerns plague the polygraph's use, including maintenance and disclosure of results. The Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that the "jury is the lie detector" and there is a per se inadmissibility rule for polygraph tests. Though courts do not permit lie detector results to be entered as evidence because they are too unreliable, polygraphs are still commonly used by investigators, prosecutors and even by suspects proclaiming their innocence. O.J. Simpson is rumored to have flunked; the parents of Jon Benet Ramsey proclaimed to have passed. For many years, there has been no consensus in the scientific community over the reliability of polygraph evidence. Bill Casey, former CIA chief, commented on the ease with which one can manipulate the test. Entire web sites, such as PassaPolygraph.com, are devoted to teaching methods to fool the lie detector. Yet, at least until now, tens of thousands of polygraphs are given each year. Lie detection is big business, with one Texas-based polygraph examiner reporting he receives over $50,000 annually from his client, the City of Arlington, to conduct about 40 polygraph tests a month. The study by the National Research Council, which took almost two years to complete, will be discussed by Congress early next year. Dr. Stephen Fienberg, a prominent computer scientist who headed the panel of experts that produced the report, stated: "National security is too important to be left to such a blunt instrument." At a recent press conference, he added: "We believe that testing yields a choice between two unsatisfactory results: either too many loyal employees may be falsely judged as deceptive, or too many major security threats could go undetected." The Department of Energy commissioned the study after the embarrassing Los Alamos fiasco. There, Wen Ho Lee, an experienced scientist at Los Alamos, underwent a series of polygraph tests, which were the basis of accusations against him of passing nuclear secrets to China, charges for which he was later exonerated. The good news for parents is that the study results may culminate in a massive government sale of unreliable polygraph machines, making them more readily available to Robert DeNiro wannabes who can conduct Meet the Parents-like interrogations in their basements. The bad news is that the study recommends further research into other truth-screening methods, like brain fingerprinting, voice tremor analysis and thermal imaging +++++++++++++++++ see http://antipolygraph.org/pubs.shtml The Lie Behind the Lie Detector is free for non-commercial use and distribution.

I HAVE HIT THE REPORT TO ASK THAT YOUR POST MR. COLBY BE REMOVED AS OFFENSIVE AND A BREECH OF FORUM RULES. I AM NOT PRO MURDER GAAL I imagine Steve G. is secretly salivating at the prospect of such an attack, he would be vindicated.

ITS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE TO REMOVE EAR WAX ================================================= at 1:22 "To some extent they were intimitated" (re Obama by CIA) http://antiwar.com/b...tiwar.com Blog) +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ PROBABLY THE CIA BLACKMAIL OF OBAMA DEEP ------------------oooooooooooooooooooooooooooo--------------------- April 7, 2011Morning Line: Obama and America's shadowy elite Sam Smith http://prorevnews.bl...as-shadowy.html +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Review has previously reported on the apparent connections between Barack Obama and his family with the CIA. Now investigative reporter Wayne Madsen has come up with a large collection of new information that adds to the extremely murky story of Obama's background. Writes Madsen, "It is now evident, from information gleaned from African-American associates of Obama's in Chicago in the mid-1980s, that Stanley Armour and Madelyn Dunham, like their [anthropologist] daughter Stanley Ann Dunham, have fabricated personal histories" including omitting their involvement with the OSS. For example, Madsen suggests that Obama's grandfather, far from working in an American furniture store in the 1950s, appears to have been assigned to Beirut as an intelligence agent. While one may be skeptical of former intelligence officer Madsen's report, there is no doubt that Obama's resume has an exceptional number of gaps. Further, none of what Madsen writes is surprising to your editor who was, for example, introduced to the connection between anthropology and intelligence as an anthropology major. One of my professors was Cora Dubois, a onetime student of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, who strode into class in a trench coat as if just off a flying boat from the Pacific. Her passion for trench coats may have come from her service in the OSS. She had headed its Indonesian section during WWII and later participated in the Free Thai underground movement. She was, I believe, the only woman to have made it that far in the OSS. Further, only in the past few years have I discovered evidence of my own father's participation in the OSS connected Operation Safehaven, designed to keep the Nazis from hoarding art, gold and other wealth at the end of the war. This is not my imagination; I have a note from one of the surviving OSS officials confirming my suspicions. The media shuns this kind of thing and ridicules all who ask questions, but I've had enough personal experience and covered enough stories to believe that, absent contrary evidence, Obama and his family were in some way part of America's shadowy elite. The irony of all this, of course, is that if Obama's past could be better documented, we might find that it wasn't his birth that should interest us at all, but family and personal connections to American intelligence that should greatly please the very conservatives questioning his provenance. The Progressive Review, 2009 - As we have noted, one of the unanswered questions about Barack Obama is how a young politician of such little achievement got so far so fast - from state senator to president in four years. Wayne Madsen and Bill Blum provides new light on the subject. To understand this phenomenon, it is important to recognize that if a young Obama was vetted or otherwise used by the CIA, it was not all that unusual. From the 1950s on, the agency repeatedly interfered in the education of the talented young by recruiting or co-opting them for its own purposes. Yale's Skull & Bones Club, for example, was a classic case of a recruitment camp for future intelligence types. The purpose - for the short run - is more information, and - for the long run - a supply of US future government officials whom the agency trusts and can use. And it often begins with a bright college student an insider thinks might fill the bill. . . . Wayne Madsen Report - WMR has obtained additional details on Business International Corporation, the CIA front company where President Obama spent a year working after graduating from Columbia University in 1983. BIC used journalists as non-official cover agents around the world. The firm published weekly and fortnightly newsletters for business executives. . . On February 24, WMR reported: "For one year, Obama worked as a researcher in BIC's financial services division where he wrote for two BIC publications, Financing Foreign Operations and Business International Money Report, a weekly newsletter. An informed source has told WMR that Obama's tuition debt at Columbia was paid off by BIC. In addition, WMR has learned that when Obama lived in Indonesia with his mother and his adoptive father Lolo Soetoro, the 20-year-old Obama, who was known as 'Barry Soetoro,' traveled to Pakistan in 1981 and was hosted by the family of Muhammadmian Soomro, a Pakistani Sindhi who became acting President of Pakistan after the resignation of General Pervez Musharraf on August 18, 2008. WMR was told that the Obama/Soetoro trip to Pakistan, ostensibly to go 'partridge hunting' with the Soomros, related to unknown CIA business. The covert CIA program to assist the Afghan mujaheddin was already well underway at the time and Pakistan was the major base of operations for the CIA's support . . . Through its contacts with leading liberals around the world, BIC sought to recruit those on the left as CIA agents and assets. . . . Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, and his father, Barack Obama, Sr., met at the University of Hawaii in 1960 in a Russian-language class. . . After marrying Indonesian national Lolo Soetoro, Dunham moved with Barack Obama, Jr. to Indonesia in 1966. . . Dunham left Indonesia in 1972, returning to Hawaii with her son. Dunham periodically made trips back to Indonesia, as well as to Pakistan, while working for the Ford Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the latter commonly used by the CIA for official cover agents. Dunham Soetoro was in Indonesia when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Barack Obama visited Lahore, Pakistan, where his mother worked as a "consultant," in 1981. . . Bill Blum, Anti-Empire Report - The question that may never go away: Who really is Barack Obama? In his autobiography, "Dreams From My Fathers", Barack Obama writes of taking a job at some point after graduating from Columbia University in 1983. He describes his employer as "a consulting house to multinational corporations" in New York City, and his functions as a "research assistant" and "financial writer." The odd part of Obama's story is that he doesn't mention the name of his employer. However, a New York Times story of 2007 identifies the company as Business International Corporation. Equally odd is that the Times did not remind its readers that the newspaper itself had disclosed in 1977 that Business International had provided cover for four CIA employees in various countries between 1955 and 1960. The British journal, Lobster Magazine -- which, despite its incongruous name, is a venerable international publication on intelligence matters -- has reported that Business International was active in the 1980s promoting the candidacy of Washington-favored candidates in Australia and Fiji. In 1987, the CIA overthrew the Fiji government after but one month in office because of its policy of maintaining the island as a nuclear-free zone, meaning that American nuclear-powered or nuclear-weapons-carrying ships could not make port calls. After the Fiji coup, the candidate supported by Business International, who was much more amenable to Washington's nuclear desires, was reinstated to power. In his book, not only doesn't Obama mention his employer's name; he fails to say when he worked there, or why he left the job. There may well be no significance to these omissions, but inasmuch as Business International has a long association with the world of intelligence, covert actions, and attempts to penetrate the radical left -- including Students for a Democratic Society -- it's valid to wonder if the inscrutable Mr. Obama is concealing something about his own association with this world. Colony Net, 2008 - In an effort to shore up his foreign policy credentials during the primary campaign, the junior senator from Illinois - then in a tight primary contest with Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania - bragged about the time he had spent in Pakistan. He argued that Clinton's foreign policy "experience" consisted only of quick photo ops, while he had spent "quality time" with "real people." Not only that, he had actually gone on a partridge-hunting trip near the Pakistan city of Larkana. His partridge-hunting apparently impressed the gun owners of Pennsylvania very little, inasmuch as Clinton won that primary by 10 per cent. Eager to impress the Pennsylvania crowd with his "foreign policy experience" and knowledge of guns, Obama thus let slip the fact that he'd been to Pakistan. (It is believed that he made two trips to Pakistan.) There must have been more to that trip than meets the eye, however, because the candidate has said virtually nothing about it since. You won't find anything on the Obama campaign site. . . Astute readers may have begun to wonder how a struggling young college student with a divorced, middle-class mother managed to fund a three week trip to Pakistan. . . But Barry Obama-Soetoro was off shooting partridges in Pakistan, hosted by a young man named Muhammed Hasan Chandio. Chandio's family owned a substantial amount of land in the region, and Obama apparently met him while both were students. (Chandio is currently a financial consultant in New York, and a donor to the Obama campaign.). . . Another of Obama's hosts in Pakistan was Muhammadian Mian Soomro, Obama's senior by about 11 years, son of a Pakistani politician and himself a politician, who became interim President of Pakistan when Pervez Musharraf resigned in August of 2008. Soomro has said that "someone" personally requested that he "watch over" Barack Obama, but will not name that individual . . . A trip to Pakistan is no doubt more than a jaunt to a Florida beach. Few Americans would consider traveling there now, thinking it to be a dangerous place. In 1981, when one of Obama's possible two trips there occurred, it was less safe. Because of the war between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, millions of Afghan refugees fled to Pakistan, which was under martial law. The Afghan "mujahedeen" fighters had bases in Pakistan, and they moved back and forth to fight the Soviets. . . In the early 1980s, Pakistan was one of the destinations Americans were prohibited from visiting - it was on the State Department's list of banned countries. Non-Muslims were not welcome, unless they were on official business, formalized through the embassy of the country of origin. The simple truth is that no young American would have a reason to or be able to visit Pakistan in 1981, unless he was on official government business of which the State Department was aware. . . Adding to the mix is the fact that Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, had visited at least 13 countries in her lifetime, and had worked for companies that required travel to Pakistan. Her employers appear to have included the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation, Women's World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. Note that USAID and the Ford Foundation have (allegedly) been used as covers for CIA agents. . . . The story of Business International also includes its 1960s joint meetings with members of SDS at the prodding of Carl Oglesby. Not everyone was happy at the idea - including Bernadette Dorn - and probably for good cause. Obama also was one of eight students selected to study sovietology by Columbia professor Zbigniew Brzezinski who, if he wasn't a CIA official, was as close as you can otherwise get. Brzesinski is now a member of Obama's inner circle. If the Obama Pakistan story sounds somewhat familiar, it may because the Review was one of the few places that reported one of Bill Clinton's similar interesting trips: "1960s: Bill Clinton, according to several agency sources interviewed by biographer Roger Morris, works as a CIA informer while briefly and erratically a Rhodes Scholar in England. Although without visible means of support, he travels around Europe and the Soviet Union, staying at the ritziest hotel in Moscow. During this period the US government is using well educated assets such as Clinton as part of Operation Chaos, a major attempt to break student resistance to the war and the draft. According to former White House FBI agent Gary Aldrich Clinton is told by Oxford officials that he is no longer welcome there." see re Clinton http://www.copi.com/...es/clintan.html =================== additional OBAMA/CIA http://www.newswithv...a/deanna113.htm

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ For a few bucks you can get the source notes. Arthur E. Rowse, GLADIO: THE SECRET U.S. WAR TO SUBVERT ITALIAN DEMOCRACY. Covert Action Quarterly: December 1994 HERES one for free http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9556

Its the eye of the beholder,to me waPO and Slate are bad sources. Say HI !, to your anti-GAGE friend Jeremy Stahl of Slate. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1374 http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2010/12/washington-post-fair-game-valerie-plame http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3700.htm http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/07/25/ny-times-government-censors-control-major-news-outlet-151551/ --------------------------- wiki Slate is a US-based English language online current affairs and culture magazine created in 1996 by former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, initially under the ownership of Microsoft as part of MSN. On 21 December 2004 it was purchased by the Washington Post Company. Since 4 June 2008 Slate has been managed by The Slate Group, an online publishing entity created by the Washington Post Company to develop and manage web-only magazines.[1] A French version (slate.fr) was launched in February 2009 by a group of four journalists, including Jean-Marie Colombani, Eric Leser, and economist Jacques Attali. Between them, the founders hold 50% in the publishing company, while the Slate Group holds 15%.[2][3] Since June 2008, David Plotz has served as the editor of Slate.[1][4] He had been the deputy editor to Jacob Weisberg, Slate's editor from 2002 until his designation as the Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of The Slate Group.[1] The Washington Post Company's John Alderman is Slate's publisher.[5] Slate (ISSN 1091-2339), which is updated daily, covers politics, arts and culture, sports, and news.

Syrian officials have stated for years and years that they feel it appropriate to have some deterrent against Israel's similarly non-admitted nuclear weapons program when questioned about the (gas weapon) topic. CASE OPEN. Gee we just need Israel to admit its atomic bomb stockpile. When is that going to happen.......hell freeze over ??

http://www.investiga...mes_Corbett.htm By Tom Secker As I explained in two conversations with the incomparable James Corbett, one on 7/7 and one specifically on predictive programming, the BBC programming before 7/7 pre-empted not just the official conspiracy theory, but also many of the alternative conspiracy theories. The first season of Spooks has an episode where Islamic terrorists take control of the Turkish embassy in London, but this is used as a cover by an ex-MI5 agent so he can hack into MI5's secret bank. This is far from the only example of false flags. Continuing the theme, in the final episode of season one, MI5 fake a (non-fatal) attack on a train station in London to trick some Irish terrorists they are colluding with into thinking their planned attack has been successful. The Irish terrorists then give up valuable information on some Muslim terrorists who are trying to blow up a nuclear power station. The Muslim terrorists are shot dead. In the second series, a Muslim suicide bombing is depicted in episode two, but MI5 have a double agent who has infiltrated the group behind the bombing. The double agent fails, and is killed in the explosion. This is, in dramatic form, the official version of 7/7, where intelligence failings lead to a Muslim suicide bombing. That said, the inquests concluded that there was no intelligence failure. Three episodes later, on July 7th 2003 (exactly two years prior to 7/7), the fifth episode of the series features an MI5 training exercise that coincides with a real major terrorist attack on London. Along very similar lines, the 2004 made-for-TV movie Dirty War begins with a large-scale emergency exercise, and concludes with a real attack that is just like the scenario for that exercise. Predicting the official conspiracy theory of 7/7, the film depicts a team of four Muslim suicide bombers attacking London - two at Liverpool Street tube station, no less. Predicting the alternative Canary Wharf conspiracy theory, the other two are shot dead by police marksmen. Indeed, all the major components of the popular alternative conspiracy theories, from exercises that go live to Israeli false flags, to bombs planted underneath the trains, were predicted either before 7/7 even happened, or before they became popularised by 7/7 Ripple Effect. Indeed, virtually the entire story imagined by the makers of 7/7 Ripple Effect appears to have been lifted from episodes of Spooks and similar shows. It is entirely possible, if not probable, that the Peter Power exercise theory was fuelled by the predictive programming, and that the whole exercise question is part of a pre-planned disinformation campaign. That is not to dismiss the relevance of exercises with regards to other attacks, such as 9/11, at least some of the attacks under the Operation Gladio umbrella, and the CIA's anti-Castro operations in the 1960s such as Zapata and Northwoods. It is simply to raise a distinct interpretation of the Peter Power exercise, one that is valided by a lot more evidence than the interpretation that he recruited the alleged bombers as dummy terrorists. http://www.globalres...articleId=31798 ++++++++++++++++ related 7/7 (story not true) http://www.globalres...xt=va&aid=31745

Per Masonic Idea of Video = on 3 & 1/3 day = Masonic number ######################################## http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=40350 MI5, CIA and TSA at the 2012 London Olympic Games ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Susanne Posel The UK government has deployed an extra 1,200 more troops to aid in protection measures at the 2012 Olympic Games. The lack of confidence in the G4S security firm has prompted the use of military forces. The opening ceremony will provide an estimated 18,200 UK military personnel. Another 5,500 troops will be stationed outside the venue. Jeremy Hunt, Olympics Secretary released a statement explaining: On the eve of the largest peacetime event ever staged in this country, ministers are clear that we should leave nothing to chance. The Government continues to have every confidence that we will deliver a safe and secure Games. The armed forces will be soldiers formerly stationed in Afghanistan. Security at the Games is beginning to be referred to as “the biggest peacetime security operation in Britain’s history.” Surveillance at the Games promises to rival any other Big Brother monitoring as of yet. More than 4.2 million CCTV cameras will be used to watch the general public while the Games commence. Licensed software used for spying has been provided by the CIA, FBI and TSA. In fact, TSA cronies will be monitoring airports in London to aid in the search for terrorists scheming. At London’s Heathrow airport the TSA will be molesting British citizens. The TSA is scheduled to assist US and British airlines; however, they are supposedly restricted from screening passengers, conducting inspections, or go beyond the gates, but this promise will most likely be broken at some point for security’s sake. Lt. Colonel Brian Fahy, senior army officer, seems to believe that it is “feasible” that unmanned drones equipped with poison could be flown over-head at the Games and used for biological warfare in London. Fahy explained: An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can be put in a backpack. They come in all sorts of sizes and it’s feasible they could be filled with something noxious and flown by remote-control. Threats of the spread of infectious diseases looms as the Europe Center for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC) reports that global mass gatherings are rife for bacteria and viruses to infect thousands of people at once due to proximity and exposure. The ECDC and the Health Protection Agency (HPA) will be monitoring spectators and provide “risk assessment” of the potentials with regard to public health and communicable disease. According to the ThreatMatrix, an integrated cybercrime prevention software program, mobile phones (including smartphones and tablets) are a significant threat to the Games. Andreas Baumhof, chief technology officer, ThreatMatrix, says: With such a large audience seeking information on the Olympic Games, cybercriminals will seize this opportunity to attack PCs, mobile devices and even tablets. Cybercrime today is so advanced that in many cases users are completely unaware they are being attacked. The Olympic audience needs to be vigilant when browsing the Internet and researching the games. Whether you are searching for Michael Phelps or real-time medal count updates, make sure you are using sites that can be trusted – mainstream news sites, or better yet the official Olympics website. The London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, in preparation for cyber threats, has allocated an estimated $3.1 billion to spend on technology securitization alone. Terrorists using blended attacks, which is the application of simultaneous destruction of physical targets, could be carried out as an attack on the Games and London. The security agents and military forces may be pulled in opposite directions to mitigate damage. MI5, British internal counter-intelligence and security agency, will collaborate with the Secret Intelligence Service to focus on minimizing foreign threats. Mainstream media is claiming that MI5 may have to worry about: Organized plots hatched by al-Qaeda or affiliated jihadist groups. An individual with an Islamist background intent on carrying out a “lone wolf” attack. An attempt by a rogue Irish Republican group to do something attention-getting on the mainland. Dissident groups from other countries who see an opportunity to strike at the head of a hated government while he is in London. The “lone wolf” is being touted as the biggest threat to the Games. Islamic extremist, plants of al-Qaeda or other Irish dissidents could, according to Will Hartley, defense specialist at HIS Jane’s, who warns that the lone wolf “by definition, they are unpredictable and could be potentially motivated by any number of causes.” Hartley refers to “chatter” that specifies a target at the Games that militant Islamic online forums have revealed points to anarchists who represent a clear and obvious threat to the Games. __ Susanne Posel is the Chief Editor of Occupy Corporatism. Our alternative news site is dedicated to reporting the news as it actually happens; not as it is spun by the corporately funded mainstream media.

JUST IN http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/07/27/syria-terrorists-preparing-chemical-weapons-false-flag-152811/

NIH did not give money directly to Colorado shooting suspect http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-the-nih-did-not-give-money-directly-20120724,0,4358097.story?track=rss Many news reports have suggested that Holmes applied for and received an NIH grant. This is not true, and it implies an NIH vetting process regarding Holmes that never took place. According to a statement from the university, Holmes was paid by what’s called an institutional training grant. The University of Colorado, Denver has had this particular grant since 1993. That means the NIH funds went to the school’s neuroscience department, and from there they were distributed to six students at a time, including Holmes. Because of this, the NIH likely never even saw Holmes' name.

Only a true believer would be impressed by unnamed 'experts' cited by obscure sources.// END COLBY ======================================= Gee I think ,"Robert Fisk, in The Independent" knows more about the Middle East than Colby. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Ari Ben-Menashe is more Relible source than Defense Secretary Robert Gates . ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Yes its troubling about Robert Mugabe and Ari Ben-Menashe and I thought you might bring it up. However I felt that I had a response. Gary Mack had $$ problems and he turned to the DARK SIDE IMHO. If one person turns from the truth and then sells out ,gives up to the evil side....thats what people do,thats life. Frank Sinatra That's Life ==========================

Waddles & Quacks like propaganda ..... its propaganda The US and Israel Following Globalist Script for the Post-Assad Syria ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://occupycorpora...st-assad-syria/ Susanne Posel Occupy Corporatism July 27, 2012 -----------------------o--------------------------- The mainstream media is reporting that Israelis are rushing out to purchase government-issued gas masks out of fear that Syria will attack them with chemical weapons. It has been assumed that Assad has stockpiles of mustard and nerve gas and Israeli officials are decrying that they will be given to Islamic militants via Hezbollah should the Syrian government fall under a forced regime change. Ehud Barak, Israeli Defense Minister and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister, are asserting that Syria is targeting Israel and requested that Israeli military prepare for this supposed attack. The psy-op of Operation Damascus Volcano was coordinated with bombings in Damascus committed by the CIA backed Free Syrian Army (FSA). This attack was followed by the usurpation of satellite channels that broadcast fake reports about the militia’s offensive stance against the Syrian government. While at the UN Security Council (UNSC), Russian and China were condemned for their position against the US/Israeli desire to strike Syria. In Turkey, where the CIA have been training and arming the FSA, the efforts to undermine the Syrian government have resulted in a violent campaign between the Turkish government and Kurdish rebels. Propaganda surrounding Obama’s establishment of “safe zones” in Syria and the outright governmental officials admitting that options for a force regime change are being discussed by the US, the Syrian National Council and globalist think-tanks. The allocation of a “no-fly zone” with the consultation of the US Congress in conjunction with “regional partners” to create aerial centers of patrol to ensure that provoked aggression by Assad is the cause for further military force and justification for the FSA’s continued attacks. The magazine Foreign Policy, an outreach of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is admitting that the US State Department funded US Institute of Peace (USIP) is “quietly planning for a post-Assad Syria”. This plot was well thought out and is being implemented under the global Elite’s march toward global domination and ultimate governmental control in the Middle East. With support of the US government the USIP is rewriting the Syrian constitution as a “transition strategy document”. Through Turkey “weapons are ferried into Syria, delivered by Turkish military trucks and picked up by fighters on the other side in the dead of night.” Both Saudi Arabia and Qatar are providing money and weapons to militants that are working with the US government in a covert invasion operation . The purpose is to undermine Assad while the UNSC formulates plans for a “political transition and establishment of a democratic government in Syria.” Ultimately, it has been decided that the US State Department and the Syrian National Council will control Syria . As of now, they are involved in a strategic divide and conquer mission. In the future, as Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, has stated , the geopolitical objective is to turn fake humanitarian efforts by the UN’s Kofi Annan while establishing international mandate that will end in the globalist control over this region. It may be safe to say that Bassma Komandi, who is head of the Syrian National Council and attendee of the latest Bilderberg meeting in Chantilly, Virginia, would be put into power after Assad is forced out. Komandi, will take her direction from Clinton, who gets her orders from the CFR, and through puppeteering, the global Elite will run the Syrian government. The false flag assertion of Syrian chemical weapons is giving the general public the necessary fuel to support the US/Israeli military attack of Syria. It is being kept secret from the general public with the assistance of the MSM that the murder of Syrian civilians is being committed by the FSA under the direction of the CIA, the script being played out to keep Assad’s armies under foot with “little chance of turning defeat into victory.” ##################################################### #######################o###o######################### "Progressive" War Propaganda: Deception with a Human Face _________________________________________________________ http://globalresearc...xt=va&aid=32076 Selected Articles Global Research, July 26, 2012 Is the Western "progressive" alternative media being duped by classic war propaganda cloaked in a humanitarian narrative or is it trying to lure the public into supporting military intervention? Several Global Research authors have questioned the focus of high profile alternative news outlets, which have supported the so-called Arab Spring revolutionaries in Libya and Syria. Throughout history "left-wing" pundits have been recruited by war propagandists to galvanize "progressive public opinion" in favour of a humanitarian "Responsibility to Protect" military intervention. Even though this deceitful technique has been used from time immemorial, it still works remarkably well today. With mainstream war mongering and the absence of a real Western antiwar movement, war propaganda is now storming on all fronts and facing hardly any resistance. Here is a list of recent articles published by Global Research on this topic. SELECTED ARTICLES "Progressive" Journalism's Legacy of Deceit - by Prof. James F. Tracy - 2012-07-20 Progressive-left media persist in acting as propaganda outlets for the US-NATO destabilization of Syria. The historical record suggests how this is not the first time "Progressive publicists" were used to sell a war. The Arab Spring story in a nutshell: Fake springs, post-modern coup d'etat - by Prof. Ismael Hossein-zadeh - 2012-07-22 Soon after being caught by surprise by the glorious uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, the counterrevolutionary forces headed by the United States embarked on damage control. A major strategy in pursuit of this objective has been to foment civil war and regime change in "unfriendly" places, and then portray them as part of the Arab Spring ‘Don’t be duped by Western humanitarian rhetoric on Syria’ Interview with Russia’s UN ambassador - by Vitaly Churkin - 2012-07-20 Humanitarian intervention unfortunately only sounds humane, but the fact of the matter is that any military intervention for whatever reason is inevitably going to cause more bloodshed. And we know the greatest humanitarians in the world – the US and UK – intervened in Iraq, for instance, citing all sorts of noble pretexts, in that particular case – non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Watching Syria, remembering Nicaragua History shows U.S. viciously attacks—not supports—real revolutions - by Richard Becker - 2012-07-22 The Rise of the Police State and the Absence of Mass Opposition - by James Petras, Robin Eastman Abaya - 2012-07-25 Recycled Propaganda from Libya: Media Hysteria Over Syrian Government "Bombings" of Aleppo If tired WMD lies won't convince the public to back foreign intervention, perhaps recycled lies from Libya? - by Tony Cartalucci - 2012-07-25 Freedom is slavery, popular support is authoritarianism The Mainstream Media's double-speak - by Lizzie Phelan - 2012-07-26 "Democracy Now" and the "Progressive" Alternative Media: Valued Cheerleaders For Imperialism and War - by Finian Cunningham - 2012-07-13 Because the alternative media are supposed to be independent, critical, non-corporate, the public tends to consider their reports as objective and unbiased... "Manufacturing Dissent": the Anti-globalization Movement is Funded by the Corporate Elites The People's Movement has been Hijacked - by Michel Chossudovsky - 2010-09-20 The People's Movement has been Hijacked

Colby says 1 peer review, Journal of 9/11 Studies says 60. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ New papers and a new format at the Journal of 9/11 Studies http://911blogger.com/news/2012-07-01/new-papers-and-new-format-journal-911-studies We have a new format at the Journal of 9/11 Studies. As before, there are over 60 peer-reviewed articles, nearly 70 letters, and a section for those just beginning to look into the unanswered question of 9/11. There are two new entries in the letter section. The first is a detailed paper by Dr. Frank Legge entitled The 9/11 Attack on the Pentagon: the Search for Consensus. The second is a letter written last year by the board of directors of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, addressed to Sir Paul Nurse of the Royal Society of London. Unfortunately, Sir Paul and the Royal Society could not be troubled to respond. If you're wondering why, the Society's contact page is at this link. The journal has also signed an agreement with a major distributor of academic content. As a result, the articles and letters in the Journal of 9/11 Studies will begin to see a wider audience.

National Geographic a key pro-evolution institution.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Gee LEN GOOGLE ......... ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ARTHUR E. ROWSE'S EXHAUSTIVE INVESTIGATION OF THE ORIGINS AND ACTIVITIES OF THE DECADES-LONG COVERT U.S. EFFORT TO INFLUENCE ITALIAN POLITICS MARKS THE FIRST COMPREHENSIVE LOOK AT "GLADIO" IN A U.S. PUBLICATION. ARTHUR E. ROWSE, FORMERLY ON THE STAFF OF THE WASHINGTON POST AND U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT IS AVAILABLE FOR INTERVIEWS. ((1996-Feb-23)) +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.mega.nu/ampp/gladio.html source www.worldmedia.com/caq/articles/gladio.html +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ****************************************** GLADIO: THE SECRET U.S. WAR TO SUBVERT ITALIAN DEMOCRACY This January, Silvio Berlusconi rode onto the turbulent Italian political scene on a white charger. Voters had become disenchanted with long-time centrist leaders who were mired in massive corruption scandals. With crucial parliamentary elections only two months away and the likelihood that the left would win power for the first time since World War II, 1 the billionaire businessman entered the fray with a slate of right-wing candidates who had never held office. Helped by voter disgust and his own vast media and industrial holdings, Berlusconi's coalition won big, averting the anticipated leftist victory. His win lifted the right, including the neo-fascists, to new postwar heights. 2 Real change seemed unlikely, however, as Berlusconi repackaged the old politics with new names and slogans. Berlusconi himself was weaned on the system and owed much of his success to Bettino Craxi, a former Socialist prime minister who went on trial for corruption the day after the March election. It wasn't long before the right's ``clean hands'' were upstaged by arms raised in fascist salutes and cries of ``Il Duce.'' by Arthur E. Rowse ****************************************** While Berlusconi's rapid ascent took most observers by surprise, the stage was set for it by nearly 50 years of U.S. interference in Italian politics. In the name of fighting communism, the U.S. helped generate a level of political turmoil that sometimes approached civil war. U.S. agents and their Italian surrogates took control of key government agencies, at times reducing Italian democracy to little more than a proving ground for the CIA's and the White House's aggressive tactics. The undercover campaign, known as ``Gladio,'' for a double-edged Roman sword, was officially acknowledged for the first time in 1990, when it was finally closed down. THE DIMENSIONS OF GLADIO The Italian people had received many signs over the years that the centrist parties (the Christian Democrats and the Socialists) were promoted and to some degree controlled by Washington. But it was only when the Italian government officially admitted it in 1990 that the ruling coalition began to crumble, ready to be picked apart two years later by corruption scandals. The startling story of Gladio, which continues to make headlines in Europe, has barely been mentioned in the U.S., where many of its darkest chapters remain secret. The program in Italy was aimed at the threat that communists might mount an insurrection or gain a share of political power through the ballot box. An insurrection was unlikely, however, since nearly all posts in the bureaucracy were filled after the war by solidly anticommunist veterans of Mussolini's forces, with Allied approval. During the war, most Americans considered themselves heroes who freed Western Europe from its brutal Nazi and fascist rulers. It wasn't long after the American landings on Italian soil, however, that the white hats got sullied. While some OSS agents worked with antifascists to help lay the basis for Italian democracy, many of those higher up the ladder conspired with backers of Mussolini or the former king to impede it. 3 Although many European intelligence agencies have admitted participating, the CIA has denied any connection with Gladio. But enough information has emerged to show that the CIA sponsored and financed a large portion of the terrorism and disruption that plagued Italy for nearly half a century. Among other things, the U.S. government: Forged secret alliances with the Mafia and right-wing elements of the Vatican to prevent the left from playing any role in government; Recruited Mussolini's ex-police into paramilitary bands secretly financed and trained by the CIA, ostensibly to fight Soviets, but really to conduct terror attacks blamed on the left; Employed the gamut of psychological warfare tactics, including paying millions in slush funds to political parties, journalists, and other influential contacts to tilt parliamentary elections against the left; Created a secret service and a parallel government structure linked to the CIA whose ``assets'' attempted several times to overthrow the elected government; and Targeted Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was later kidnapped and murdered under mysterious circumstances after offering to bring communists into the Cabinet. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE SECRET NATO COVER The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) provided international cover for Washington's postwar operations in Italy. A secret clause in the initial NATO agreement in 1949 required that before a nation could join, it must have already established a national security authority to fight communism through clandestine citizen cadres. This ``Stay Behind'' clause grew out of a secret committee set up at U.S. insistence in the Atlantic Pact, the forerunner of NATO. Each NATO member was also required to send delegates to semiannual meetings on the subject. 4 U.S. authority for such moves flowed in a steady stream of presidential directives transmitted through the National Security Council (NSC). In December 1950, the council gave the armed forces carte blanche to use ``appropriate'' military force even if the communists merely ``gain participation'' in government by legal means or ``threaten to achieve control...or the government ceases to evidence a determination to oppose communist internal or external threats.'' 5 The CIA helped the Italian police set up secret squadrons staffed in many cases with veterans of Mussolini's secret police. 6 The squadrons were trained for intensive espionage and counter-espionage, against communists and other perceived enemies of the status quo. The plan to use ``exceptional means'' was patterned after the highly militarized French intelligence service, the Suret Nationale, which was reportedly so tough on communists that many fled to other countries. 7 The newly organized intelligence agency, SIFAR, began operations in September 1949, under the supervision of an undercover American, Carmel Offie, nicknamed ``godfather'' by the Italians. 8 Interior Minister Mario Scelba headed the operation. At the same time, Scelba was directing a brutal repression, murdering hundreds of workers and peasants who sought improved conditions after the war. 9 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- OPERATION DEMAGNETIZE With the Italian secret service under control, the Americans then expanded it under the name Operation Demagnetize and tied it to an existing network of cadre in northern Italy. In 1951, the Italian secret service formally agreed to set up a clandestine organization within the military to coordinate with the northern cadres. In 1952, SIFAR received secret orders from Washington to adopt ``a series of political, paramilitary and psychological operations destined to diminish the power of the Italian Communist Party, its material resources, and its influence on government. This priority objective must be attained by all means.'' 10 Operation Demagnetize marked the institutional hardening of Gladio. A State Department historian characterized it as the ``strategy of stabilization,'' 11 although it could be more accurately described as one of destabilization. From the start, the offensive was secretly directed and funded by the U.S. government. In 1956, the arrangement was formalized in a written agreement, using the name ``Gladio'' for the first time. According to 1956 documents uncovered in Italy in 1990, Gladio was divided into independent cells coordinated from a CIA camp in Sardinia. These ``special forces'' included 40 main groups. Ten specialized in sabotage, six each in espionage, propaganda, evasion and escape tactics, and 12 in guerrilla activities. Another division handled the training of agents and commandos. These ``special forces'' had access to underground arms caches, which included hand guns, grenades, high-tech explosives, daggers, 60-millimeter mortars, 57-millimeter machine guns and precision rifles. 12 In 1956, Gen. Giovanni De Lorenzo was named to head SIFAR on the recommendation of U.S. Ambassador Claire Boothe Luce, the avidly anticommunist wife of the publisher of Time magazine. 13 A key player in Gladio was now in place. In 1962, the CIA helped place De Lorenzo at the head of the national police (carabinieri), while he retained effective control of the secret service. The general brought with him 17 lieutenants to begin purging insufficiently right-wing officers. It was the first step to a right-wing coup attempt, with U.S. military attaché Vernon Walters in the vanguard. In a memo to De Lorenzo the same year, Walters suggested types of intervention aimed at provoking a national crisis, including blocking a center-left coalition, creating schisms among the socialists, and funding forces favorable to the status quo. 14 Meanwhile, according to CIA files found in Rome in 1984, CIA station chief William Harvey began to recruit ``action teams'' based on a list of 2,000 men capable of throwing bombs, conducting attacks, and accompanying these actions with indispensable propaganda. 15 These teams had a chance to practice their skills in 1963 as part of an anti-union offensive. U.S.-trained gladiators dressed as police and civilians attacked construction workers peacefully demonstrating in Rome, leaving some 200 wounded and a large section of the city in shambles. The link to Gladio was made in later testimony by a former general in the secret service. 16 SIFAR Lt. Col. Renzo Rocca was also training a civil militia composed of ex-soldiers, parachutists and members of Junio Valerio ``Black Prince'' Borghese's paramilitary organization, Decima MAS (Tenth Torpedo Boat Squadron), for the pending coup. 17 President Antonio Segni reportedly knew of the plan, which was to conclude with the assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro, under fire for not being tough enough with the communists. 18 The long-planned takeover, known later as Plan Solo, fizzled in March 1964, when the key carabinieri involved remained in their barracks. As a subsequent inquiry moved to question Rocca about the coup attempt, he apparently killed himself, possibly to fulfill Gladio's oath of silence. After officials determined that state secrets were involved, three hamstrung inquiries failed to determine the guilty parties. 19 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE STRATEGY OF TENSION Despite the failure of Plan Solo, the CIA and the Italian right had largely succeeded in creating the clandestine structures envisioned in Operation Demagnetize. Now the plotters turned their attention to a renewed offensive against the left. To win intellectual support, the secret services set up a conference in Rome at the luxurious Parco dei Principi hotel in May 1965, for a ``study'' of ``revolutionary war.'' The choice of words was inadvertently revealing, since the conveners and invited participants were planning a real revolution, not just warning of an imaginary communist takeover. The meeting was essentially a reunion of fascists, right-wing journalists, and military personnel. ``The strategy of tension'' that emerged was designed to disrupt normality with terror attacks in order to create chaos and provoke a frightened public into accepting still more authoritarian government. 20 Several ``graduates'' of this exercise had long records of anticommunist actions and would later be implicated in some of Italy's worst massacres. One was journalist and secret agent Guido Giannettini. Four years earlier, he had conducted a seminar at the U.S. Naval Academy on ``The Techniques and Prospects of a Coup d'Etat in Europe.'' Another was notorious fascist Stefano Delle Chiaie, who had reportedly been recruited as a secret agent in 1960. He had organized his own armed band known as Avanguardia Nationale (AN), whose members had begun training in terror tactics in preparation for Plan Solo. 21 General De Lorenzo, whose SIFAR had now become SID, soon enlisted these and other confidants in a new Gladio project. They planned to create a secret parallel force alongside sensitive government offices to neutralize subversive elements not yet ``purified.'' Known as the Parallel SID, its tentacles reached into nearly every key institution of the Italian state. Gen.Vito Miceli, who later headed SID, said he set up the separate structure ``at the request of the Americans and NATO.'' 22 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FRATERNAL BONDS Two ancient, mysterious, international fraternities kept the loosely-linked Gladio programs from flying apart. The Knights of Malta played a formative role after the war (see box), but the order of Freemasonry and its most notorious lodge in Italy, known as Propaganda Due (pronounced ``doo-ay'' ), or P-2, was far more influential. In the late 1960s, its ``Most Venerable Master'' was Licio Gelli, a Knight of Malta who fought for Franco with Mussolini's Black Shirts. At the end of World War II, Gelli faced execution by Italian partisans for his Nazi collaboration, but escaped by joining the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps. 23 In the 1950s, he was recruited by SIFAR. After some years of self-imposed exile in Argentine fascist circles,24 he saw his calling in Italy as a Mason. Quickly rising to its top post, he began fraternizing in 1969 with Gen. Alexander Haig, then assistant to Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's national security chief. Gelli became the main intermediary between the CIA and SID's De Lorenzo, also a Mason and Knight. Gelli's first order from the White House was reportedly to recruit 400 more top Italian and NATO officials. 25 To help ferret out dissidents, Gelli and De Lorenzo began compiling personal dossiers on thousands of people, including legislators and clerics. 26 Within a few years, scandal erupted when an inquiry found 157,000 such files in SID, all available to the Ministers of Defense and Interior. 27 Parliament ordered 34,000 files burned, but by then the CIA had obtained duplicates for its archives. 28 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Provocateurs on the Right In 1968, the Americans started formal commando training for the gladiators at the clandestine Sardinian ``NATO'' base. Within a few years, 4,000 graduates had been placed in strategic posts. At least 139 arms caches, including some at carabinieri barracks, were at their disposal. 29 To induce young men to join such a risky venture, the CIA paid high salaries and promised that if they were killed, their children would be educated at U.S. expense. 30 Tensions began to reach critical mass that same year. While dissidents took to the streets all over the world, in Italy, takeovers of universities and strikes for higher wages and pensions were overshadowed by a series of bloody political crimes. The number of terrorist acts reached 147 in 1968, rising to 398 the next year, and to an incredible peak of 2,498 in 1978 before tapering off, largely because of a new law encouraging informers ( penitenti ). 31 Until 1974, the indiscriminate bombers of the right constituted the main force behind political violence. The first major explosion occurred in 1969 in Milan's Piazza Fontana; it killed 18 people and injured 90. In this and numerous other massacres, anarchists proved handy scapegoats for fascist provocateurs seeking to blame the left. Responding to a phone tip after the Milan massacre, police arrested 150 alleged anarchists and even put some on trial. But two years later, new evidence led to the indictment of several neofascists and SID officers. Three innocent anarchists were convicted, but later absolved, while those responsible for the attack emerged unpunished by Italian justice. 32 Conclusive Gladio links to political violence were found after a plane exploded in flight near Venice in November 1973. Venetian judge Carlo Mastelloni determined that the Argo-16 aircraft was used to shuttle trainees and munitions between the U.S. base in Sardinia and Gladio sites in northeast Italy.33 The apogee of right-wing terror came in 1974 with two massacres. One, a bombing at an antifascist rally in Brescia, killed eight and injured 102. The other was an explosion on the Italicus train near Bologna, killing 12 and wounding 105. At this point, President Giovanni Leone, with little exaggeration, summed up the situation: "With 10,000 armed civilians running around, as usual, I'm president of xxxx." 34 At Brescia, the initial call to police also blamed anarchists, but the malefactor later turned out to be a secret agent in the Parallel SID. 35 A similar connection was also alleged in the Italicus case. Two fascists who were eventually convicted were members of a clandestine police group called the Black Dragons, according to the left-wing paper, Lotta Continua. 36 Their sentences were also overturned. Although in these and other cases, many leftists were arrested and tried, fascists or neofascists were often the culprits, in league with Gladio groups and the Italian secret services. Reflecting the degree to which these forces controlled the government through the Parallel SID, nearly all the rightists implicated in these atrocities were later freed. By 1974, right-wing terror began to be answered by the armed left, which favored carefully targeted hit-and-run attacks over the right's indiscriminate bombings. For the next six years, leftist militants, especially the Red Brigades, responded with a vengeance, accounting for far more acts of political violence than the right. 37 For several years, Italy plunged into a virtual civil war. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PLOTTING COUPS D'ETAT Meanwhile, groups of right-wingers were busy planning more takeovers of the elected government, with the active encouragement of U.S. officials. A seminal document was the 1970 132-page order on ``stability operations'' in ``host'' countries, published as Supplement B of the U.S. Army's Field Manual 30-31. Taking its cue from earlier NSC and CIA papers, the manual explained that if a country is not sufficiently anticommunist, ``serious attention must be given to possible modifications of the structure.'' If that country does not react with adequate ``vigor,'' the document continues, ``groups acting under U.S. Army intelligence control should be used to launch violent or nonviolent actions according to the nature of the case.'' 38 With such incendiary suggestions and thousands of U.S.-trained guerrillas ready, the fascists again attempted to take over the government by force in 1970. This time, the instigator was the ``Black Prince'' Borghese. Fifty men under the command of Stefano Delle Chiaie seized the Interior Ministry in Rome after being let in at night by an aide to political police head Federico D'Amato. But the operation was aborted when Borghese received a mysterious phone call later attributed to General Vito Miceli, the military intelligence chief. The plotters were not arrested; instead, they left with 180 stolen machine guns. 39 News of the attack remained secret until an informer tipped the press three months later. By then, the culprits had escaped to Spain. Although the ringleaders were convicted in 1975, the verdict was overturned on appeal. All but one of the machine guns were returned earlier. 40 It was in this atmosphere that the U.S. decided to make another all-out effort to block the communists from gaining strength in the 1972 elections. According to the Pike Report, the CIA disbursed $10 million to 21 candidates, mostly Christian Democrats. 41 That amount did not include $800,000 that Ambassador Graham Martin, going around the CIA, obtained through Henry Kissinger at the White House for General Miceli. 42 Miceli would later face charges for the Borghese coup attempt but, fitting the pattern, he was cleared. Police foiled another attempted coup that same year. They found hit lists and other documents exposing some 20 subversive groups forming the Parallel SID structure. Roberto Cavallaro, a fascist trade unionist, was implicated, as were highly placed generals, who said they got approval from NATO and U.S. officials. In later testimony, Cavallaro said the group was set up to restore order after any trouble arose. ``When these troubles do not erupt [by themselves],'' he said, ``they are contrived by the far right.'' Gen. Miceli was arrested, but the courts eventually freed him, declaring that there had been no insurrection. 43 Still another right-wing attempt to overthrow the government was set for 1974, reportedly with the imprimatur of both the CIA and NATO. Its leader was Edgardo Sogno, one of Italy's most decorated resistance fighters, who had formed a Gladio-style group after the war. Sogno, who had gained many influential American friends while working at the Italian embassy in Washington during the 1960s, was later arrested, but he, too, was eventually cleared. 44 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- GLADIO UNRAVELS A triple murder at Peteano near Venice in May 1972 turned out to be pivotal in exposing Gladio. The crime occurred when three carabinieri, in response to an anonymous phone call, went to check out a suspicious car. When one of them opened the hood, all three were blown to bits by a boobytrap bomb. 45 An anonymous call two days later implicated the Red Brigades, the most active of the left's revolutionary groups. The police immediately rounded up 200 alleged communists, thieves and pimps for questioning, but no charges were brought. Ten years later, a courageous Venetian magistrate, Felice Casson, reopened the long-dormant case only to learn that there had been no police investigation at the scene. Despite receiving a false analysis from a secret service bomb expert and confronting numerous obstructions and delays, the judge traced the explosives to a militant outfit called New Order and to one of its active members, Vincenzo Vinciguerra. He promptly confessed and was sentenced to life, the only right-wing bomber ever locked up. 46 Vinciguerra refused to implicate others, but described the coverup: "The carabinieri, the Ministry of Interior, the Customs and Excise police, the civilian and military secret services all knew the truth behind the attack, that I was responsible and all this within 20 days. So they decided, for totally political reasons, to cover it up. 47" As for his motive, the fascist true believer Vinciguerra said his misdeed was ``an act of revolt against the manipulation'' of neofascism since 1945 by the whole Gladio-based parallel structure. 48 Casson eventually found enough incriminating evidence to implicate the highest officials of the land. In what was the first such request to an Italian president, Casson demanded explanations from President Francesco Cossiga. But Casson didn't stop there; he also demanded that other officials come clean. In October 1990, under pressure from Casson, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti ended 30 years of denials and described Gladio in detail. He added that all prime ministers had been aware of Gladio, though some later denied it. 49 Suddenly, Italians saw clues to many mysteries, including the unexplained death of Pope John Paul I in 1978. Author David Yallop lists Gelli as a suspect in that case, saying that he, ``for all practical purposes, ran Italy at the time.'' 50 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MEMENTO MORO Perhaps the most shocking political crime of the 1970s was the kidnapping and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro and five of his aides in 1978. The abduction occurred as Moro was on his way to submit a plan to strengthen Italian political stability by bringing communists into the government. Earlier versions of the plan had sent U.S. officials into a tizzy. Four years before his death, on a visit to the U.S. as foreign minister, Moro was reportedly read the riot act by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and later by an unnamed intelligence official. In testimony during the inquiry into his murder, Moro's widow summed up their ominous words: ``You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration...or you will pay dearly for it.'' 51 Moro was so shaken by the threats, according to an aide, that he became ill the next day and cut short his U.S. visit, saying he was through with politics. 52 But U.S. pressure continued; Senator Henry Jackson (D-Wash.) issued a similar warning two years later in an interview in Italy. 53 Shortly before his kidnapping, Moro wrote an article replying to his U.S. critics, but decided not to publish it. 54 While being held captive for 55 days, Moro pleaded repeatedly with his fellow Christian Democrats to accept a ransom offer to exchange imprisoned Red Brigade members for his freedom. But they refused, to the delight of Allied officials who wanted the Italians to play hardball. In a letter found later, Moro predicted: ``My death will fall like a curse on all Christian Democrats, and it will initiate a disastrous and unstoppable collapse of all the party apparatus.'' 55 During Moro's captivity, police unbelievably claimed to have questioned millions of people and searched thousands of dwellings. But the initial judge investigating the case, Luciano Infelisi, said he had no police at his disposal. ``I ran the investigation with a single typist, without even a telephone in the room.'' He added that he received no useful information from the secret services during the time. 56 Other investigating magistrates suggested in 1985 that one reason for the inaction was that all the key officers involved were members of P-2 and were therefore acting at the behest of Gelli and the CIA. 57 Although the government eventually arrested and convicted several Red Brigade members, many in the press and parliament continue to ask whether SID arranged the kidnapping after receiving orders from higher up. Suspicions naturally turned toward the U.S., particularly Henry Kissinger, though he denied any role in the crime. In Gladio and the Mafia, Washington had the perfect apparatus for doing such a deed without leaving a trace. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PENETRATING THE RED BRIGADES That the Red Brigades had been thoroughly infiltrated for years by both the CIA and the Italian secret services is no longer contested. The purpose of the operation was to encourage violence from extremist sectors of the left in order to discredit the left as a whole. The Red Brigades were a perfect foil. With unflinching radicalism, they considered the Italian Communist Party too moderate and Moro's opening too compromising. The Red Brigades worked closely with the Hyperion Language School in Paris, with some members not realizing it had CIA ties. The school had been founded by three pseudo-revolutionary Italians, one of whom, Corrado Simioni, had worked for the CIA at Radio Free Europe. 58 Another, Duccio Berio, has admitted passing information about Italian leftist groups to SID. 59 Hyperion opened an office in Italy shortly before the kidnapping and closed it a few months later. An Italian police report said Hyperion may be ``the most important CIA office in Europe.'' 60 Mario Moretti, one of those who handled arms deals and the Paris connection for the Red Brigades, managed to avoid arrest in the Moro case for three years even though he personally handled the kidnapping. 61 Venice magistrate Carlo Mastelloni concluded in 1984 that the Red Brigades had for years received arms from the PLO. 62 Mastelloni wrote that ``the de facto secret service level accord between the USA and the PLO was considered relevant to the present investigation into the ... relationship between the Red Brigades organization and the PLO.'' 63 One Gladio scholar, Phillip Willan, concludes that ``the arms deal between the PLO and the Red Brigades formed part of the secret accord between the PLO and the CIA.'' 64 His research indicates that the alleged deal between the CIA and the PLO occurred in 1976, a year after the U.S. promised Israel that it would have no political contacts with the PLO. At the time of the Moro kidnapping, several leaders of the Brigades were in prison, having been turned in by a double agent after they kidnapped a judge. According to journalist Gianni Cipriani, one of those arrested was carrying phone numbers and personal notes leading to a high official of SID, who had boasted openly of having agents inside the Red Brigades. Other intriguing finds included the discovery in the Brigade offices of a printing press which had previously belonged to SID and ballistics tests showing more than half of the 92 bullets at the kidnapping scene were similar to those in Gladio stocks. 65 Several people have noted the unlikelihood of the Red Brigades pulling off such a smooth, military-style kidnapping in the center of Rome. Alberto Franceschini, a jailed member of the Brigades, said, ``I never thought my comrades outside had the capacity to carry out a complex military operation. ... We remembered ourselves as an organization formed by inexperienced young lads.'' 66 Two days after the crime, one secret service officer told the press that the perpetrators appeared to have had special commando training. 67 When letters written by Moro were found later in a Red Brigades site in Milan, investigators hoped they would reveal key evidence. But Francesco Biscioni, who studied Moro's responses to his captors' questions, concluded that important sections had been excised when they were transcribed. Nonetheless, in one uncensored passage, Moro worried about how Andreotti's ``smooth relationships with his colleagues of the CIA'' would affect his fate. 68 The two people with the most knowledge of Moro's letters were murdered. The Carabiniere general in charge of anti-terrorism, Carlo Alberto Della Chiesa, was transferred to Sicily and killed Mafia-style in 1982, a few months after raising questions about the missing letters. 69 Maverick journalist Mino Pecorelli was assassinated on a Rome street in 1979 just a month after reporting that he had obtained a list of 56 fascists betrayed to the police by Gelli. 70 Thomas Buscetta, a Mafia informer under witness protection in the U.S., accused Andreotti of ordering both killings for fear of being exposed. 71 But an inquiry by his political peers last year found no reason to prosecute the prime minister. Della Chiesa and Pecorelli were only two of numerous witnesses and potential witnesses murdered before they could be questioned by judges untainted by links to Gladio. 72 President Cossiga, the interior minister when Moro died, told BBC: ``Aldo Moro's death still weighs heavily on the Christian Democrats as does the decision I came to, which turned my hair white, to practically sacrifice Moro to save the Republic.'' 73 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My "ANGOL" as you so 'quaintly' put it, brings me to the understanding that the OBAMA administration did the will of the CIA. With the implication that they would be hard pressed or pressured not to do otherwise.

That's not what Mayer said. ######################################## I heard the word intimidate. definition of bullying by the Free Online Dictionary ...www.thefreedictionary.com/bullyingCached Definition of bullying in the Online Dictionary. Meaning of bullying. ... To force one's way aggressively or by intimidation: "They bully into line at the gas pump" ...

? ? ? ? No security at Israeli swimmers' Olympic training camp ‎ Ynetnews - 13 hours ago Culture, Sports: Team holds training camp in England with no security measures in place at site. Israeli officials refusing to take responsibility; ...

al-QAEDA will get the nerve gas,NATO/Israel must invade !!!!!!!!!!!! MUST !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ((Gaal)) ###################################### German Intelligence: "al-Qaeda" All Over Syria http://en.ammonnews....articleNO=17300 2012-07-25 By John Rosenthal German intelligence estimates that "around 90" terror attacks that "can be attributed to organizations that are close to al-Qaeda or jihadist groups" were carried out in Syria between the end of December and the beginning of July, as reported by the German daily Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). This was revealed by the German government in a response to a parliamentary question. In response to the same question, the German government admitted that it had received several reports from the German foreign intelligence service, the BND, on the May 25 massacre in the Syrian town of Houla. But it noted that the content of these reports was to remain classified "by reason of national interest", Like many other Western governments, Germany expelled Syria's ambassador in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, holding the Syrian government responsible for the violence. Meanwhile, at least three major German newspapers - Die Welt, the FAZ, and the mass-market tabloid Bild - have published reports attributing responsibility for the massacre to anti-government rebel forces or treating this as the most probable scenario. Writing in Bild, longtime German war correspondent Jurgen Todenhofer accused the rebels of "deliberately killing civilians and then presenting them as victims of the government". He described this "massacre-marketing strategy" as being "among the most disgusting things that I have ever experienced in an armed conflict". Todenhofer had recently been to Damascus, where he interviewed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for Germany's ARD public television. Wring in Die Welt, Alfred Hackensberger noted that Taldo, the sub-district of Houla where the massacre occurred, has been under rebel control since December 2011 and is in an open plain, making it unlikely that "hundreds of soldiers and Assad supporters" could have entered the village to commit the massacre. (An abridged version of Hackenberger's report also appeared in Die Berliner Morgenpost.) Hackensberger visited Houla to conduct investigations for his report. He also interviewed an alleged eyewitness - identified simply by the pseudonym "Jibril" - at the Saint James Monastery in Qara, Syria. In contrast to an earlier report in the FAZ, which had claimed that the victims were largely Shi'ites and Alawis, Jibril told Hackensberger that all of the victims were Sunnis "like everybody here". By his account, they were killed for refusing to support the rebellion. Jibril added that "a lot of people in Houla know what really happened" but would not say so out of fear for their lives. "Whoever says something," he explained, "can only repeat the rebels' version. Anything else is certain death." While traveling in the region of Homs, Hackensberger heard similar stories about the conduct of the rebels. One - now former - resident of the city of Qusayr told him that not only were Christians like himself expelled from the town, but that anyone who refused to enroll their children in the Free Syrian Army had been shot. Hackensberger's source held foreign Islamists responsible for the atrocities. "I have seen them with my own eyes," he said, "Pakistanis, Libyans, Tunisians and also Lebanese. They call Osama bin Laden their sheikh." A Sunni resident of Homs told Hackensberger that he had witnessed how an armed group stopped a bus: "The passengers were divided into two groups: on the one side, Sunnis; on the other, Alawis." According to Hackenberger's source, the insurgents then proceeded to decapitate the nine Alawi passengers. That the German government would cite national interest in refusing to disclose its information concerning the circumstances of the Houla massacre is particularly notable in light of Germany's support for the rebellion and its political arm, the Syrian National Council (SNC). While France, the United Kingdom, and the United States have figured as the most visible Western powers supporting the rebellion, Germany has been quietly playing a major role behind the scenes. According to a new report in the FAZ, the German foreign office is working with representatives of the Syrian opposition to develop "concrete plans" for a "political transition" in Syria following the fall of Assad. John Rosenthal is a journalist who specializes on European politics and transatlantic security issues. His website is Transatlantic Intelligencer +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ THE HELL KNOWN AS SYRIA HAS JUST BEGUN (AS I PREDICTED,Gaal)

Will Iran Attack Israeli Olympic Team ??? I DONT THINK SO. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Israel alert for attacks abroad, eyeing Olympics Published July 22, 2012 Associated Press JERUSALEM – Israel's prime minister said Sunday that his country is on alert for plots to kill more Israelis overseas, after speculation that last week's deadly bombing of an Israeli tour bus in Bulgaria was a rehearsal for a spectacular attack on Israel's Olympics team. Israel blames Iran and its Lebanese Hezbollah proxies for last week's bombing at an airport in the Bulgarian resort town of Burgas, just a little over a week before the opening of the London Games. Five Israelis, a bus driver and the bomber were killed. While Israeli officials are tight-lipped about security procedures for its athletes, they're on high alert on the 40th anniversary of a Palestinian attack at the 1972 Olympics in Munich that killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches. Read more: http://www.foxnews.c.../#ixzz21YpBrS8T ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Well if Olympic Israeli team attacked, I think I know who will do it. Talk about self hating Jews !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ============================================== The next day, after being refused permission by the Syrian government to dock at Tartus, the hijackers singled out Leon Klinghoffer, a Jewish retired businessman who was in a wheelchair, for murder, shooting him in the forehead and chest as he sat in his wheelchair. They then forced the ship's barber and a waiter to throw his body and wheelchair overboard. Marilyn Klinghoffer, who did not witness the shooting, was told by the hijackers that he had been moved to the infirmary. She only learned the truth after the hijackers left the ship at Port Said. PLO Foreign Secretary Farouq Qaddumi said that perhaps the terminally ill Marilyn Klinghoffer had killed her husband for insurance money;[1] however, the PLO later accepted responsibility, apologized, and reached a financial settlement with the Klinghoffer family.[2][3] Leon Klinghoffer, 69, a retired businessman who was in a wheelchair, ################################################################## http://www.thetruths...cle.asp?ID=6942 Was the Achille Lauro another Zionist 'Black Op' SUMMARY: --- The Mossad in a attempt to sway world opinion in favor of Zionist Jews or provoke a armed reaction constantly stages events and blames Arabs. In this episode the Zionists use Mossad operative Arabs to hijack a cruise ship. The crowning scene - played over and over - is where the Mossad Arabs throw a 75 yr old Jewish man, Leon Klinghoffer, over the side in his wheelchair. Jewish version ........ Achille Lauro Hijacking Oct 7, 1985 Four heavily armed Palestinian terrorists in October hijack the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, carrying more than 400 passengers and crew, off Egypt. The hijackers demand that Israel free 50 Palestinian prisoners. The terrorists killed a disabled American tourist, 69-year-old Leon Klinghoffer, and threw his body overboard with his wheelchair. After a two-day drama, the hijackers surrendered in exchange for a pledge of safe passage. But when an Egyptian jet tries to fly the hijackers to freedom, U.S. Navy F-14 fighters intercept it and force it to land in Sicily. The terrorists are taken into custody by Italian authorities. Counter- terrorist units from the U.S responded, including elements of Delta Force and SEAL Team Six, however the situation was resolved before an assault became necessary. The terrorist group who hijacked the Achille Lauro was the Palestine Liberation Front. What Really Happened The hi-jacking of the Italian cruise ship the Achille Lauro by "Palestinian terrorists" was later reliably reported by former IDF arms dealer Ari Ben-Menashe in his 1992 book, Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network, to have been ordered and funded by Mossad. Ben-Menashe revealed that Israeli intelligence organizations regularly engaged in "black operations," espionage activity designed to portray Palestinians and others in the worst possible light. "An example," wrote Ben-Menashe, "is the case of the 'Palestinian' attack on the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. That was, in fact, an Israeli 'black' propaganda operation to show what a deadly, cutthroat bunch the Palestinians were. " According to Ben-Menashe, Israeli spymasters arranged the attack through "Abu'l Abbas, who, to follow such orders was receiving millions from Israeli intelligence officers posing as Sicilian dons. Abbas . . . gathered a team to attack the cruise ship. The team was told to make it bad, to show the world what lay in store for other unsuspecting citizens if Palestinian demands were not met. As the world knows, the group picked on an elderly American Jewish man in a wheelchair, killed him, and threw his body overboard. They made their point. But for Israel, it was the best kind of anti-Palestinian propaganda." It should be noted that in April 1996, Abbas returned to Gaza and in a show of support for Yasser Arafat apologized for the hi-jacking and the killing of the American Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer without mentioning him by name, saying, "The hi-jacking was a mistake, and there were no orders to kill civilians." Abbas made no mention of Mossad involvement in the hi-jacking according to the April 23, 1996 Associated Press report. ----------------------------------------------0000----------------------------------------------------- RELATED ISSUE IS ABU NIDAL Other names his terror teams had The Abu Nidal Organisation took the name from its founder Sabri al-Banna but like other terrorist organisations, it also went by a variety of other names. Here are some of the common ones. Arab• Revolutionary Brigades (ARB) Arab Revolutionary Council• Black June• Organisation (BJO) Black September Organisation (BSO)• Fatah• al-Qiyadah al-Thawriyyah Fatah Revolutionary Council (FRC)• • Revolutionary Organisation of Socialist Muslims (ROSM) Fatah the• Revolutionary Council (FRC) Involvements Date ... Location Action Sept 1972 .. * Munich Germany Olympics killing of Israelis athletes Sep 1973..Paris, France Attacked Saudi Arabian Embassy Oct 1974.Damascus, Syria Assassination attempt on Arafat Sep 1976.Damascus, Syria Attacked Semiramis Hotel Oct 1976..Rome, Italy Attacked Syrian Embassy Oct 1976.Islamabad, Pakistan Attacked Syrian Embassy Nov 1976.Amman, Jordan Occupied International Hotel Dec 1976..Syria Assassination attempt on Syrian Minister of Foreign Affairs Oct 1977..Abu Dhabi Killed UAE Secretary of State, Foreign Affairs Jan 1978..London, England Assassination of PLO representative Feb 1978..Cyprus Assassination of the chairman of the Egyptian Press Trade Union Jun 1978..Kuwait Assassination of PLO representatives Mar 1980..Madrid, Spain Assassination of Spanish lawyer thought to be Jewish leader Max Mazini Jul 1980...Brussels, Belgium Claimed responsibility for killing the Israeli Commerce Attaché May 1981...Vienna, Austria Murdered City Councilman and threatened to kill Austrian Chancellor Aug 1981...Vienna, Austria Machine-gunned a synagogue, killing two and injuring 17 Jun 1982..London, England Attempted assassination of Israeli Ambassador Jun 1982...Rome, Italy Killed PLO official Husayn Kamal with a car bomb Aug 1982... *Paris, France Killed six and injured 22 in a grenade and machinegun attack on a restaurant frequented by French Jews Aug 1982.Bombay, India Attempted murder of UAE Consul Aug 1982.Kuwait Shot and wounded UAE diplomat Sep 1982.Madrid, Spain Assassinated Kuwaiti diplomat Oct 1982.Rome, Italy Killed a child and injured ten in a grenade and machinegun attack on a synagogue Apr 1983..Lisbon, Portugal Murdered PLO official Issam Sartawi at a conference October 1983....Rome, Italy Attempted to kill the Jordanian Ambassador to Italy Oct 1983..New Delhi, India Severely wounded the Jordanian Ambassador to India Nov 1983.Athens, Greece Attacked security guards in front of the Jordanian Embassy, killing one guard and injuring another Dec 1983.IzTnir, Turkey Bombing of the French Cultural Centre Feb 1984.Paris, France Murdered the UAE Ambassador to France Mar 1984..Athens, Greece Assassinated a British diplomat Nov 1984..Bombay, India Assassinated British High Commissioner Dec 1984.Rome, Italy Killed Arafat-supporter Ismail Darwish Dec 1984.Bucharest, Romania Assassinated Jordanian diplomat Mar 1985.Beirut, Lebanon Kidnapped and suspected murder of British journalist Mar 1985.Rome, Italy Attacked Alia, the Royal Jordanian Airlines office injuring three Apr 1985.Athens, Greece Fired a rocket at an Alia airliner damaging fuselage .. Jul 1985.Madrid, Spain Bombed a British Airways office killing one and injuring 27 Jul 1985..Madrid, Spain ..Attacked Alia offices injuring two Jul 1985..Ankara, Turkey Assassinated the first secretary of the Jordanian Embassy Sep 1985..Rome, Italy Grenade attack on a cafe wounding 38 Sep 1985... *Malta Hijacked an Egyptian airliner where 60 people were killed in the rescue attempt Dec 1985... *Rome and Vienna Attacked both airports with machineguns and grenades killing 16 and injuring 60 Jul 1986... *City of Poros, Greece Attacked excursion ship Sep 1986... *Karachi, Pakistan Hijacked Pan Am flight 73 killing 17 and wounding over 150 Sep 1986..Istanbul, Turkey Attacked Neve Shalom synagogue killing 22 April 1986 -- *Berlin Germany Attack on LaBelle Disco killing 3 US serviceman Sep 1987...West Bank, Lebanon Bombing of restaurant wounding 15 people Nov 1987...Israel Hijacked a yacht off the coast taking eight hostages Mar 1988..Bombay, India Attacked Alitalia airlines crew aboard a commuter bus, seriously wounding the captain May 1988..Nicosia, Cyprus Detonated a car bomb near the Israeli Embassy, killing three and injuring 17 May 1988.Khartoum, Sudan Gunmen attack hotel and club killing eight (five British) and injuring 21 Dec 1988. Lockerbie Killed 299 people ################################################################## Saturday, October 25, 2008 Abu Nidal reportedly worked for the CIA and MOSSAD http://aangirfan.blo...or-cia-and.html Robert Fisk, in The Independent, 25 October 2008, tells us about Abu Nidal. Reportedly, Abu Nidal, was a spy for the USA. Documents which are now in the hands of The Independent (Abu Nidal, notorious Palestinian mercenary, 'was a US spy'), written by Saddam Hussein's security services, state that Nidal had been "colluding" with the Americans and, with the help of the Egyptians and Kuwaitis, was trying to manufacture evidence linking Saddam and al-Qa'ida. In 1974, Abu Nidal set up Fatah, thus weakening Arafat's PLO. This worked in the interests of Israel. ################################################# Abu Nidal Attacks ???? ((deep background wiki) At some early point real PLO man became MOSSAD man. Its not if, but when. (GAAL)) http://en.wikipedia....ed_to_Abu_Nidal ########################################## whatreallyhappened Abu Nidal was undoubtedly a Mossad agent. Practically every job he did benefited Israel. Confirming Seale's theory are top Middle East terrorism experts, including intelligence officers in Arab countries, and even within Abu Nidal's own organization. All the European and Mid-East terror experts agree that Nidal was Mossad. He was a prot?g? of Menacham Begins ... ran free for 30 yrs ...used to kill unwanted Palestinians Seale pointed out the senseless and extremely brutal attacks only benefited Israel. Nidal had two thrusts .... He killed Palestinians that were a threat to Israel, and hijacked American and European jets. SEE BELOW LINK http://www.whale.to/c/abu_nidal2.html +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ reliable witness Ari Ben-Menashe +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ http://www.consortiu...hive/lost2.html Troubling Witnesses Much as the Congress had rejected witnesses and failed to followobvious leads in the mid-1980s as the Iran-contra scandal was building, Boren's Intelligence Committee brushed aside two witnesses connecting Gates to the alleged GOP actions in 1980and the purported CIA arms deals with Iraq a few years later.The witnesses, former Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe and Iranian businessman Richard Babayan, both offered details about Gates's alleged connections to those schemes. Ben-Menashe, who worked for Israeli military intelligence from1977-87, first fingered Gates as an operative in the secret Iraq arms pipeline in August 1990 during an interview I conducted for Public Broadcasting System's FRONTLINE program. Ben-Menashe wasin jail in New York on charges of trying to sell cargo planes to Iran (charges which were later dismissed). When I interviewed Ben-Menashe in 1990, Gates was in an obscure position, as deputy national security adviser to President Bush and not yet a candidate for the top CIA job. In that interview and later under oath, Ben-Menashe put Gates ina 1986 meeting with a Chilean arms manufacturer Carlos Cardoen who allegedly was supplying cluster bombs and chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein's army. At the time, Iraq was at war with Iran. Babayan, an Iranian exile working with Iraq, also connected Gates to the Iraqi supply lines and to Cardoen. Ben-Menashe insisted, too, that Gates joined in meetings between Republicans and senior Iranians in 1980 when President Carterwas trying to gain release of 52 Americans then held in Iran.Ben-Menashe claimed that he and Gates were with Casey and Bush in Paris for a round of meetings in October 1980. The Israeli said he got Gates's help, too, in bringing a suitcase full of cash into Miami in early 1981 to pay off some of the participants in the hostage gambit. In fall 1980, Gates was executive assistant to CIA director Stansfield Turner, a job giving Gates extraordinary access to the Carter administration's most closely held secrets. But, if true, Ben-Menashe's allegations would mean that Gates had betrayed his official duties. For his part, Gates has steadfastly denied involvement in either October Surprise or Iraqgate. Alibis, Anyone? "I was accused on television and in the print media by people I had never spoken to or met of selling weapons to Iraq, or walking through Miami airport with suitcases full of cash, of being with Bush in Paris in October 1980 to meet with Iranians,and on and on," Gates writes in his memoirs. "The allegations of meetings with me around the world were easily disproved for the committee by my travel records, calendars, and countless witnesses." Gates blames the Ben-Menashe/Babayan charges on "the magnetic attraction of media attention in drawing out all manner of verystrange people." But none of Gates's supposedly supportive evidence was ever made public by either the Senate Intelligence Committee or the later inquiries into either October Surprise or Iraqgate. Not one of Gates's "countless witnesses" who could vouch for Gates's whereabouts was identified. Though Boren pledged publicly to have his investigators question Babayan,they never did. Most galling was the Intelligence Committee's handling of aclaim by Ben-Menashe to have met with Gates in Paramus, N.J., onthe after noon of April 20, 1989. The date was pinned down by the fact that Ben-Menashe had been under Customs surveillance in the morning. So it could have been a perfect test for either destroying or buttressing Ben-Menashe's credibility. When I first asked about this claim, congressional investigators told me that Gates had a perfect alibi for that day: he had been with Boren at a speech in Oklahoma. But when FRONTLINE checked that out, we discovered that Gates's Oklahoma speech had been on April 19, a day earlier. Gates also had not been with Boren and had returned to Washington by that evening. So where was Gates the next day? Could he have taken a quicktrip to northern New Jersey? The committee said no again, citing two points: Gates denied going to New Jersey and his calendar made no reference to the trip. But the investigators could not tell me where Gates claimed to be that afternoon. They also admitted they had questioned no witnesses to corroborate his alibi. Essentially,the alibi came down to Gates's word. An Affidavit Then, in January 1995, a new witness linked Gates to arms shipments to Iraq. Howard Teicher, a staffer on Ronald Reagan's National Security Council, submitted a sworn affidavit in an arms-to-Iraq case in Miami, Fla. "Under CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, the CIA authorized, approved and assisted [Carlos] Cardoen in the manufacture and sale of cluster bombs and other munitions to Iraq," Teicher declared. In other words, an insider on Reagan's NSC staff was leveling the same Iraqgate charge against Gates that Ben-Menashe and Babayan had made earlier. The Clinton administration, however, chose not to pursue this new avenue of investigation. Instead, Clinton prosecutors suppressed the affidavit and attacked Teicher's credibility. The federal judge ruled Teicher's testimony to be irrelevant in the Miami case against a mid-level Teledyne salesman, Edward Johnson, who was then convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. The Democratic failures to enforce meaningful oversight on that12-year Republican era again had left dangling historical questions. Robert Gates remained a respectable man writing memoirs celebrating U.S. victory in the Cold War. But the truth, it seems, has yet to make the nation free. ###################################### ###################################### http://consortiumnew...iness-of-lying/ Bob Gates’s ‘Business’ of Lying June 17, 2011 A Special Report: As Defense Secretary Robert Gates prepares to retire in late June, he is routinely lauded as a “wise man” committed to telling it like it is, even making a frank comment this week about how “most governments lie to each other.” But Gates’s own record for honesty is a deeply checkered one, Robert Parry reports. By Robert Parry June 17, 2011 On Wednesday, Sen. Patrick Leahy asked departing Defense Secretary Robert Gates about future U.S. relations with Pakistan and other “governments that lie to us.” Gates responded, in his flat Kansas twang, that “most governments lie to each other. That’s the way business gets done.” Gates’s Realpolitik answer before the Senate Appropriations Committee drew appreciative laughter from the audience and the usual press kudos for his “refreshing candor,” but Gates’s response could also be a reminder about his own dubious honesty regarding his role in major government scandals. After all, if “most governments lie to each other,” it follows that government officials do the lying and the U.S. government is not immune from the practice. So, if Gates felt that his work for past presidents – while he was at the CIA or the White House – needed to be protected by lying, would he lie? Despite his current reputation for candor, Gates’s honesty or lack thereof was a key issue during his earlier incarnation as a young, ambitious national security bureaucrat elbowing his way through the corridors of Washington power in the 1980s and early 1990s. For various reasons, from his personal charm to his powerful patrons, Gates evaded serious investigations of his questionable activities in those years. Both in official testimony then and in his 1996 memoir, From the Shadows, Gates provided only sweeping denials of accusations coming from both U.S. government co-workers and international intelligence operatives. Gates relied on his influential allies in the Executive Branch, Congress and the Washington press corps to shut down any full-scale examination of what he actually did. Thus, Gates emerged from several scandals – mostly relating to secret dealings with Iran, Iraq and Israel – relatively unscathed. However, two decades ago, U.S. history could have taken a very different course if Gates and his cohorts had faced real accountability and their secrets had been exposed. That more contentious route was opened in 1991 when President George H.W. Bush nominated Gates, then Bush’s deputy national security adviser, to become CIA director. Indeed, Bush’s selection of Gates represented its own mystery: Why would Bush risk adding fuel to still-smoldering investigative fires, especially since Gates’s first nomination to head the CIA had been rebuffed by the Senate in 1987 because of doubts about his honesty regarding the Iran-Contra scandal? Did Bush’s stratospheric poll numbers after the Persian Gulf War create a sense of hubris, or was the President desperate, needing a co-conspirator at the CIA’s helm to stop dangerous disclosures of incriminating information? A Crossroads In 1991, Gates’s nomination stood at a crossroads of several intersecting scandals including: –The Iran-Contra investigation led by special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, who had just penetrated a long-running White House cover-up of the secret arms deals from 1985-86 and who had revealed the hidden role of the CIA where Gates had lurked in the background as the agency’s deputy director. –The October Surprise case, an Iran-Contra prequel of secret dealings with Iran dating back to the 1980 presidential campaign, an inquiry which finally had reached a critical mass of congressional interest amid belated mainstream press attention (with Gates and Bush linked to those allegations as well). –Iraq-gate, suspicions that President Ronald Reagan and then-Vice President George H.W. Bush had covertly aided and armed Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, which represented an embarrassment given the just-completed Persian Gulf War against Hussein (with Gates again implicated in those secret dealings on behalf of Reagan and Bush). –Politicization of U.S. intelligence, a behind-the-scenes dispute at the CIA which was brought into the daylight by veteran CIA analysts who accused Gates of waging bureaucratic war on their independent judgment and giving the Reagan administration pre-cooked conclusions to support desired policies. Besides his high poll numbers in 1991, President Bush had other reasons to feel confident about making his protégé, Gates, head of the CIA. Though Democrats controlled Congress, they had little stomach for a pitched battle over national security issues. They had already retreated on the Iran-Contra Affair and the related Contra-cocaine scandal. By contrast, emboldened congressional Republicans were ready to fight any new investigative threat to their party’s hold on the White House. Also, after more than a decade of Reagan-Bush rule, the Washington press corps had gone from standing upright in the 1970s to being “on bended knee” before Reagan in the 1980s – as author Mark Hertsgaard put it – to nearly prostrate under Bush-41. The smart play for an ambitious national journalist was to take the Reagan-Bush side on almost any topic and mock anyone who gave credence to allegations of serious government wrongdoing. Indeed, the media Zeitgeist of 1991 was a preview of the behavior of Washington journalists a dozen years later when they fell in line behind President George W. Bush’s progression toward war with Iraq and marched in lock step behind his false claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In both cases, in 1991 and 2003, staying obedient was the smart career play. In 1991, part of the media’s role in running interference for Gates involved rejecting the testimony of witnesses who implicated Gates in various scandals starting with the alleged back-channel negotiations with Iran in 1980, through the arming of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the mid-1980s, to the Iran-Contra scandal which broke open in late 1986. Two Witnesses Responsible for Gates’s CIA confirmation in 1991, Sen. David Boren, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, brushed aside two witnesses who connected Gates to those illicit schemes, former Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe and Iranian businessman Richard Babayan. Both offered detailed accounts about Gates’s alleged links to the arms transfers. In an interview with PBS “Frontline,” Boren promised to question Babayan about his claims of secret U.S. support for Iraq’s Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, but Boren reneged when Gates issued a denial of the Iraq-gate charges. But who was lying, Babayan or Gates? The shoddiness of Boren’s investigation became apparent four years later – in January 1995 – when Howard Teicher, one of Reagan’s National Security Council officials, added more details about Gates’s role in the Iraq shipments. In a sworn affidavit submitted in a Florida criminal case, Teicher stated that the covert arming of Iraq dated back to spring 1982 when Iran had gained the upper hand in the war, leading President Reagan to authorize a U.S. tilt toward Saddam Hussein. The effort to arm the Iraqis was “spearheaded” by CIA Director William Casey and involved his deputy, Robert Gates, according to Teicher’s affidavit. “The CIA, including both CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, knew of, approved of, and assisted in the sale of non-U.S. origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq,” Teicher wrote. That same pro-Iraq initiative involved Donald Rumsfeld, then Reagan’s special emissary to the Middle East. An infamous photograph from 1983 showed a smiling Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. But Teicher described Gates’s role as far more substantive than Rumsfeld’s. “Under CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, the CIA authorized, approved and assisted [Chilean arms dealer Carlos] Cardoen in the manufacture and sale of cluster bombs and other munitions to Iraq,” Teicher wrote. Even in 1995, during the Clinton administration (when Teicher’s affidavit was submitted), the Iraq-gate allegations were not seriously examined. After Teicher provided the affidavit to a federal court in Miami, it was classified a state secret and Teicher’s credibility was attacked. Prosecutors saw the affidavit as disruptive to their case against a private company, Teledyne Industries, and one of its salesmen, Ed Johnson, for selling explosives to Cardoen, who then fashioned them into cluster bombs for Iraq. (With Teicher’s affidavit kept from the jury, Johnson was convicted and sent to prison.) An Israeli’s Testimony In 1991, Boren and his committee staff also swatted away Ben-Menashe’s accounts of Gates as the point man for the CIA’s covert supplying of Iraq in the 1980s. In interviews with me, Ben-Menashe described a personal relationship with Gates dating back to the 1970s when both men were aspiring intelligence officers working for their respective governments. Ben-Menashe claimed that his mother even made meals for Gates when he was visiting Israel. When Ben-Menashe began talking to the press in 1990 after he was arrested in the United States on charges of selling planes to Iran, Israeli authorities deemed him as an impostor who never worked for the government, but had to back track when I obtained documentary evidence showing that Ben-Menashe had served as an operations officer for a unit of Israeli military intelligence from 1977 to 1987. Though Israel had to recant its initial lie — and Ben-Menashe won acquittal on the plane-sale charges in late 1990 – his credibility continued to be assailed, especially by neoconservatives in the U.S. press apparently upset that Ben-Menashe was exposing closely guarded secrets, including speaking with investigative reporter Seymour Hersh about Israel’s nuclear-weapons program. [see Hersh’s The Sampson Option.] U.S. journalists with close ties to the Israeli Right, such as Steven Emerson, began parroting Israel’s fallback position on Ben-Menashe, that he was only a “low-level translator.” That talking point gained currency even though well-placed Israeli officials privately dismissed it as just another cover story. But Ben-Menashe’s claimed relationship with Gates represented a real test of his credibility. Some well-respected journalists, including Hersh, doubted Ben-Menashe’s story about knowing Gates because Gates had been a Soviet analyst during his early career at the CIA and thus, presumably, would have no reason to become operationally involved with an Israeli intelligence officer. I, too, was skeptical of Ben-Menashe’s claims about Gates. But I later learned from Gates’s CIA co-workers that his duties as a Soviet analyst involved Moscow’s policies toward the Middle East, offering a plausible reason for Gates to have spent time meeting intelligence officials in Israel. It also struck me as odd that Ben-Menashe would have dredged up Gates’s name during interviews with me and other journalists in 1990 because by then Gates had slipped back into relative obscurity as a deputy director at Bush-41’s National Security Council staff. If the Israeli had wanted to puff himself up about knowing someone important in the U.S. government, why pick Gates? Tripping Up a Source My trying to disprove Ben-Menashe’s claims about Gates – and thus punch a major hole in the Israeli’s credibility – became a regular feature in my periodic contacts with Ben-Menashe. Once when I met Ben-Menashe’s aging mother during a visit to the United States, I popped a question about whether she recalled making meals for Robert Gates. Her eyes immediately brightened and she responded in the affirmative. “Yes, Bobby Gates,” she said. I thought I had Ben-Menashe tripped up another time after he insisted he had met with Gates in April 1989 during a trip to Paramus, New Jersey. I even pinned the time down, to the afternoon of April 20, 1989 because Ben-Menashe had been under Customs surveillance that morning. Since Gates denied knowing Ben-Menashe at all, it was a perfect test for determining which one was lying. It was before Gates’s CIA confirmation, so I brought the information about the alleged New Jersey meeting to Senate Intelligence Committee staffers. They checked on Gates’s whereabouts and came back to me, laughing. They said Gates had a perfect alibi for that day. They said Gates had been with Sen. Boren at a speech in Oklahoma. But when I cross-checked that claim, it turned out that Gates’s Oklahoma speech had been on April 19, a day earlier, and that Boren had not been present. I also discovered that Gates had returned to Washington by that evening. So where was Gates the next day? Could he have taken a quick trip to northern New Jersey? Since senior White House national security officials keep detailed daily calendars, it should have been easy for Boren’s investigators to check Gates’s scheduled meetings and corroborate his alibi with a few interviews. After I pointed out their screw-up on the Oklahoma speech, the committee staffers agreed to check again on the right date. They later called me back saying that Gates’s personal White House calendar showed no trip to New Jersey and that Gates had denied taking such a trip. That was good enough for the committee, they said. But the investigators couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell me where Gates was that afternoon or with whom. They also acknowledged that they interviewed no alibi witnesses. And they rebuffed my later request to review their copy of Gates’s calendar, which they claimed to have returned to him. For his part, Gates wrote in his memoir that “the allegations of meetings with me around the world were easily disproved for the committee by my travel records, calendars, and countless witnesses.” But none of Gates’s supportive evidence was made public by Gates, by the Intelligence Committee, or by later inquiries into the Iran-hostage allegations or the Iraq-gate scandal. Not one of Gates’s “countless witnesses” who could vouch for Gates’s whereabouts was identified. Perhaps most galling for those of us who were trying to assess Ben-Menashe’s credibility was the committee’s failure in 1991 to fully test Ben-Menashe’s claim about the April 20, 1989, meeting. Calendar Revealed It wasn’t until 2007 after Gates had become George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary (replacing Donald Rumsfeld) that I finally secured a copy of Gates’s calendar from the National Archives, via a Freedom of Information Act request. I quickly leafed through the FOIA packet and pulled out the April 20, 1989, page. I finally thought I had the proof to confront Ben-Menashe with a clear-cut lie. The calendar showed Gates with a full slate of White House meetings through the afternoon, including a public signing ceremony for the Space Council at 1:05 p.m., an Oval Office meeting with Belize’s Prime Minister Manuel Esquivel at 3 p.m., and a session with two journalists John Cochran and Sandy Gilmore at 4 p.m. However, before I challenged Ben-Menashe to his face, I thought I should check out the calendar as best I could, given the lapse of 18 years and the likelihood that memories of Gates’s routine meetings with White House staff might be especially hazy. Still, I could ask the archivists at the George H.W. Bush Library to check for photos of the public signing event. A picture of Gates would surely nail down that part of the time window. There also are sign-in sheets for Oval Office meetings like the one with the prime minister, so that would cover mid-afternoon. And the reporters might recall a White House sit-down with Gates. It didn’t seem likely that Ben-Menashe could slip away from such conclusive proof. So, at my request, the archivists located both still photos and video footage of the Space Council event. The images covered pretty much the entire room, but to my surprise, Gates was nowhere to be seen. I then got the sign-in sheet for the Oval Office meeting. Gates’s name was missing. When I tracked down the two reporters, neither had any recollection of the interview with Gates. In other words, there were still holes in Gates’s alibi for the time frame that Ben-Menashe had indicated for their meeting in northern New Jersey. Although these lapses do not prove that Gates did sneak off for a quick trip, the gaps did kill my plan of confronting the Israeli with hard evidence that he had lied. The flawed alibi also represents another indictment of the Senate Intelligence Committee under Boren and his then-chief of staff George Tenet. In 1991, it would have been simple to check with Gates’s alibi witnesses whose memories would have been much fresher and who could have easily checked their notes. Instead, Boren and Tenet essentially accepted Gates’s word and the reliability of his calendar entries, which at least in several instances appeared to be false. In his 1996 memoir, Gates thanked his friend, David Boren, for pushing through his CIA nomination. “David took it as a personal challenge to get me confirmed,” Gates wrote. Fouling Investigations The dismissal of Ben-Menashe’s claim that he met with Gates in April 1989 had consequences for other related investigations, since Ben-Menashe also had placed Gates, along with George H.W. Bush, at a secret meeting between Republicans and Iranians in Paris in October 1980. That was when Jimmy Carter was still president and 52 Americans were being held hostage in Iran. According to Ben-Menashe, Israeli intelligence officers were in Paris to coordinate arms shipments to Iran that the Republicans would approve once Ronald Reagan entered the White House in January 1981. In October 1980, Bush was Reagan’s vice presidential running mate, and Carter was desperate to gain freedom for the hostages before the November 1980 election. As part of the alleged Paris deal, the Iranians were to release the hostages only after Carter lost reelection. (As it turned out, Iran let the hostages go immediately after Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.) The repudiation of Ben-Menashe’s credibility helped shut the door on a 1992 congressional inquiry into the so-called October Surprise case, despite a good deal of corroborating evidence of a Republican-Iranian deal in Paris. The House October Surprise Task Force was wrapping in December 1992 with a finding of Reagan-Bush innocence when a flood of evidence incriminating the Republicans arrived late (enough to prompt chief counsel Lawrence Barcella to unsuccessfully request an extention of the inquiry). Instead, the task force leaders – Reps. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, and Henry Hyde, R-Illinois – chose to press ahead with the previous conclusion, that there was no credible evidence implicating Reagan, Bush, Gates or Casey, who had been Reagan’s campaign chief in 1980. But there was still one more twist for the task force. In January 1993, just days before the task force findings were due for release, an extraordinary report was delivered from the Russian government, responding to an earlier request for information from Hamilton. According to this Russian report, Soviet-era intelligence records revealed that Bush, Gates and Casey participated in secret contacts with Iranian officials to delay release of the U.S. hostages in Iran. “R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part” in a meeting in Paris in October 1980, according to the Russian report. Despite its explosive information, the Russian Report was kept hidden by the House October Surprise Task Force, which went ahead with its exculpatory findings. Later, I discovered the report when I gained access to some of the task force’s unpublished files. Years later, Hamilton told me that he had never seen the report, although it was addressed to him. Barcella acknowledged that he might never have forwarded the report to Hamilton. [For the text of the Russian report, click here. To view the actual U.S. embassy cable that includes the Russian report, click here.] Weapons Shipments Despite lingering uncertainties about the details of the October Surprise case, what is beyond dispute is that once in office, President Reagan did permit weapons to flow to Iran via Israel. One of the Israeli planes carrying an arms shipment was shot down over the Soviet Union on July 18, 1981, after straying off course, but the incident drew little attention at the time. The secret arms flow continued, on and off, until late 1986 when the Iran-Contra scandal – another case of arms-for-hostages dealing with Iran – broke into public view. [For more details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.] Regarding the Iran-Contra scandal – which might be viewed as the sequel to the October Surprise case – independent counsel Walsh chose not to indict Gates, though Walsh’s final report didn’t endorse Gates’s credibility either. After recounting discrepancies between Gates’s Iran-Contra recollections and those of other CIA officials, Walsh wrote: “The statements of Gates often seemed scripted and less than candid. Nevertheless, given the complex nature of the activities and Gates’s apparent lack of direct participation, a jury could find the evidence left a reasonable doubt that Gates either obstructed official inquiries or that his two demonstrably incorrect statements were deliberate lies.” For his part, Gates also denied any wrongdoing in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostage deal and expressed only one significant regret – that he acquiesced to the decision to withhold from Congress the Jan. 17, 1986, presidential intelligence “finding” that gave some legal cover to the Iran arms shipments. Besides the questions about whether Gates lied to protect himself and his superiors in these scandals involving Iran, Iraq and Israel, Gates also faced charges from senior colleagues inside the CIA’s analytical division that he corrupted their standards for providing honest assessments to U.S. policymakers. Once Casey became Reagan’s CIA director in 1981, Gates was put on the fast track for career success. Shoving aside more senior officials, Gates rose quickly to head the CIA’s analytical division, where he reversed decades of CIA traditions regarding objective analysis. In that job – and later as Casey’s deputy director – Gates oversaw an analytical division that began exaggerating dangers abroad to justify Reagan’s massive military buildup. Instead of seeing the signs of a coming Soviet collapse, Gates’s analytical product conjured up a Soviet empire gaining on all fronts. To fit with Reagan’s geopolitical needs, Gates’s CIA also downplayed real dangers that ironically would emerge as greater threats today. For instance, analysts who warned about Pakistan’s secret work on a nuclear bomb were ignored and even punished, apparently because the Reagan administration needed Pakistan’s help in supporting anti-Soviet mujahedeen rebels in Afghanistan. At Gates’s confirmation hearings in 1991, former CIA analysts, including renowned Kremlinologist Melvin A. Goodman, took the extraordinary step of coming out of the shadows to accuse Gates of politicizing intelligence. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mysterious Robert Gates.”] ‘Wise Man’ Despite this checkered record for wisdom and truth-telling, Gates today is renowned across Washington as a modern “wise man.” In 2009, Washington Post columnist David Broder, the late “dean of the Washington press corps,” hailed Gates as “incapable of dissembling.” Now, as Gates prepares to retire as Defense Secretary in late June, he is being showered with rose petals of official praise. His insights – like the one about governments lying to one another – are greeted with appreciative chuckles and appreciation for his “candor.” At Wednesday’s hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, which was billed as his last congressional appearance as Defense Secretary, Gates was depicted in the media as a straight talker who had run out of patience with America’s erstwhile allies and the political posturing of Congress. Despite his curt responses to questions from Leahy and others, the New York Times reported that “Wednesday’s hearing … was in fact mostly a lovefest as members of the committee lavished praise on Mr. Gates. On June 30 he is to walk out of the Pentagon and into a life of writing books lakeside near Seattle. “‘Secretary Gates, I look forward to you coming home to our home state,’ Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, said at one point in the hearing. ‘I know you must be looking forward to that.’ “‘Fifteen days,’ Mr. Gates replied, to laughter.” It is probably not likely that Gates will use his book writing to tell the full truth and nothing but the truth about what he did as a government official. After all, as Gates has made clear, lying is “the way business gets done.” [For more on these topics, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, now available in a two-book set for the discount price of only $19. For details, click here.]