Tuesday 31 August 2004

Behind The Israeli Mole Affair

The Point Of Maximum Danger Of War With Iran Approaching

by Webster Griffin Tarpley


News of the investigation of Larry Franklin, a middle-level functionary working for the Wolfowitz-Feith-Luti-Shulsky clique in the Pentagon, indicates that we are now approaching a critical choice-point on the road to war with Iran, and towards a synthetic terrorism attack inside the US which would be used as an additional pretext to start such a war.

The probe of an Israeli mole in the Pentagon was made public by CBS news last Friday evening. The Saturday edition of the Washington Post named Larry Franklin as being identified by sources as the person under investigation. In Sunday,s Washington Post, it was confirmed that Lawrence A. Franklin was the person at the center of investigation.

As seen in the excerpt below, this same Larry Franklin was named in my June 6 news release, "Rogue Bush Backers Prepare Super 9-11 False Flag Terror Attacks. Franklin was indicated as one of the vulnerable links in the neocon network which finds itself in a hysterical flight forward to try to salvage the debacle of their Iraq war by expanding that war to neighboring countries, notably Iran. The threat of a new round of "own goal synthetic terrorism, quite possibly in the ABC dimension, was linked to the preparation of that wider war. The logic at work was that of an "October surprise, this time on the scale adequate to shock the post 9-11 world.

The best working hypothesis to understand the new mole investigation is that neocon networks in the Pentagon may be very close to embroiling the United States in a war with Iran. This would likely come as an Israeli or US pre-emptive bombing attack on Iran,s nuclear facilities, possibly combined with a terrorist attack inside the US using weapons of mass destruction, which the corporate controlled media would immediately blame on Iran.

Whatever forces are behind the naming of Franklin, it must be assumed that their main aim is to break up neocon preparations for a surprise attack on Iran, which the neocons have been boasting about in the media with special emphasis for some weeks. Backing the Franklin probe may well be military factions who have no desire to be fed into the Iranian meatgrinder, and who not fancy neocon fascist dictatorship. The immediate goal would be to knock Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton, Rice, Abrams and their cheering section in the media and think-tanks onto the defensive. While the exposure of Franklin is a positive step, it is far from decisive, and the neocons are still in a position to unleash the dogs of war over the next days and weeks.

We are therefore now most probably on the brink of war with Iran, and at the same time entering a period of steadily increasing danger of synthetic terrorism designed to steal or cancel the November elections, and thus freeze the current neocon clique in power for the foreseeable future. The calculation of the rogue network operating behind the scenes is evidently that terrorism taking place a few days before the elections will stampede the electorate to support Bush, while terrorism well in advance of the elections will give the public time to recover enough to advance recriminations and demands for accountability on the part of the administration. We are now entering the time frame when the terrorist controllers can expect the maximum impact of their handiwork, either in stampeding the electorate, or in calling off the elections completely.

Full story...

How Blair betrayed me - and the BBC

Greg Dyke was at the centre of a battle that pitted him against an old ally - the Prime Minister. For the first time, he reveals the full truth about Blair, Campbell and Hutton

I first met him at a dinner party in north London around 1980. I remember the evening well, and in particular this fresh-faced young man with a very upmarket accent, which was unusual in the circles I moved in. In those days in the media, even people brought up with plums in their mouths spent most of the time pretending they did not have them. He told me he was a barrister but what he really wanted to do was 'to serve' his country. I genuinely thought he meant he wanted to join the priesthood. He explained he wanted to serve the country by becoming a Labour MP.

As the wine flowed I explained that I didn't think his idea was a particularly good one. I think my exact words were: 'The Labour party needs another barrister like it needs a hole in the head.'

Roll forward to May 1997. It had been a beautiful day and it was a beautiful night. My partner Sue and I were at the Royal Festival Hall in London with the great and the good to celebrate Labour's election victory. Tony Blair arrived amid huge jubilation in the early hours. This was the same man who had been my table companion nearly 20 years earlier.

I remember the excitement of the following day as if it were yesterday. One friend said to me that Blair was the first prime minister who looked as though he might have been round Tesco's. I checked that out with Cherie later, and she laughed at the idea.

Seven years on all that optimism has gone. Tony Blair has turned out to be just another politician and in some ways worse than those before him. They never promised us a new sort of politics. He did.

For me, disillusionment came late. At the BBC I took no part in politics and kept my feelings about it to myself. Then came Iraq, Gilligan and Hutton, and suddenly it struck me how naive I had been.

It is now obvious; the decision to go to war was made first, and the intelligence to support that move was discovered afterwards. One by one the reasons the prime minister gave us have been proved to be wrong. But it's even worse than that. He took us to war on the basis of intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and the 45-minute threat which, at the very least, he didn't understand and didn't question.

The charge against Blair is damning. He was either incompetent and took Britain to war on a misunderstanding, or he lied when he told the House of Commons that he didn't know what the 45-minute claim meant. It was he who said Gilligan's reports were 'a mountain of untruth'. That wasn't the case.

But there were 'mountains of untruth' - the dossiers he and his colleagues in Downing Street produced to justify the war. And yet the Prime Minister has never said to the British people: 'I am sorry.' There was a moment when he could have done so, and we might have forgiven him. That moment is past.

We were all duped. History will not be on Blair's side. It will not absolve him, but will show that the whole saga is a great political scandal. What is really frightening is that Blair still doesn't believe or understand that what he did was fundamentally wrong.

In the five years before I joined the BBC the donations I'd made to Labour totalled £55,000, a significant sum but nothing compared to the £1 million I'd given to charity in the same period. That's not to say there haven't been times recently when I haven't been tempted to write to the party and ask for my money back.

And a decade ago, in a very small way, I helped Blair to become Labour leader by giving £5,000 to help him run his leadership campaign. Of course he would have become leader without my money, but I regret giving it. He's a decent man but I don't like what he has allowed to happen to our political system. I don't like 10 Downing Street's obsession with spin, and I believe he misled the nation on Iraq.

Blair is, in electoral terms, the most successful Labour leader ever, and New Labour can claim some real achievements. And yet I suspect his legacy will be summed up in two words: Iraq and spin. The Gilligan affair was about both.

In Alastair Campbell I believe the government had a time bomb waiting to go off. He just happened to go off in the direction of the BBC. For me to have been cowed by a bully whom the Prime Minister was clearly unable to control, would have betrayed everything I believed in.

In my four years as director-general of the BBC it was a standing joke that I always seemed to be away when really big stories broke about the corporation. True to form, I was on holiday in the west of Ireland on 29 May 2003, the day Andrew Gilligan, the Radio 4 Today programme's defence correspondent, broadcast his story on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

You can get a signal in that part of Ireland, but I wasn't up in time to hear the report that eight months later would lead to my exit from the BBC.

My private view of the war was that I was marginally in favour of trying to get rid of Saddam Hussein. I regarded him as a nasty bastard whom the world could well do without. Mistakenly, as it turned out, I also thought Blair and the government knew more about Iraq's weapons than they were able to tell us.

As director-general, however, my feelings about the war were irrelevant. The BBC's job was to be impartial and tell the story as our journalists saw it. It was certainly not to be the government's propaganda machine.

For Campbell and his team our refusal to report what they wanted us to, in the way they wanted us to, made us a target even before the war began. It was easy to see why he was so anxious, Blair's whole future was in the balance.

In the run-up to war, criticisms of the BBC's reporting were largely confined to complaints to Richard Sambrook, head of BBC News. I heard nothing directly from Downing Street until the week the war started, when both the chairman Gavyn Davies and I received private letters from the prime minister.

The letter to me, sent on 19 March 2003, said that while Blair accepted it was right that 'voices of dissent' were heard, the BBC had gone too far, and he had been shocked by some of 'the editorialising' of our interviewers and reporters.

Full story...

Friday 27 August 2004

Russia Proves 'Peak Oil' is a Misleading Zionist Scam

This is what I love about the Internet, every time you think you find some answers to some of your questions, someone comes along and adds loads of other stuff to the equation that messes it all up again. So, is oil or is oil not running out? I think a fair answer to that question is; DUNNO...! Welcome to the world of codshit where nothing is really as it seems and no-one is telling the whole truth...

While Moscow invests heavily in unlimited oil production for the future, New York squanders America's dwindling oil profits on fast cars and fast women

by Joe Vialls


In 1970 the Russians started drilling Kola SG-3, an exploration well which finally reached a staggering world record depth of 40,230 feet. Since then, Russian oil majors including Yukos have quietly drilled more than 310 successful super-deep oil wells, and put them into production. Last Year Russia overtook Saudi Arabia as the world's biggest single oil producer, and is now set to completely dominate global oil production and sales for the next century. We gratefully accept credit cards here: If the opening paragraph of this report started by claiming that completely unlimited crude oil reserves exist inside planet earth, readers might be tempted to regard the entire text as preposterous ghostwriting for a novelist like Frederick Forsyth. If the report then went on to claim that the Russians have exploited this stunning reality for nearly thirty years, right under the largely unwitting noses of western intelligence, readers could be excused for mistaking the author for a lunatic, or perhaps as a front for spy novelist John le Carré. The problem here is that unlimited oil reserves do exist inside planet earth, and the Russians long ago developed the advanced technology necessary to recover these unlimited oil reserves in an efficient and timely manner.

Profoundly disturbing hard intelligence like this does not sit well with the frantic cries of western academic shills and lobbyists, determined to convince you all that the end of the oil world is nigh, or, more accurately, that America faces an imminent catastrophe when global production capacity "Peaks", i.e. when world demand for crude oil finally exceeds the rate at which we can physically pump the required product out of the ground. The gist of these false claims are outlined in a speech given at the at the University of Clausthal, by lobbyist Doctor Colin Campbell during December 2000:

"In summary, these are the main points that we have to grasp: Conventional [Free flowing] oil provides most of the oil produced today, and is responsible for about 95% of all oil that has been produced so far. It will continue to dominate supply for a long time to come. It is what matters most. Its discovery peaked in the 1960s. We now find one barrel for every four we consume. Middle East share of production is set to rise. The rest of the world peaked in 1997, and is therefore in terminal decline. World peak comes within about five years" [circa 12/2005]

Campbell is just the tip of a giant iceberg of academic Peak Oil 'experts' who suddenly appeared en-masse to give you this frightening news, right after President Saddam Hussein suddenly started trading his oil in Euros rather than in US Dollars, a devastating switch with the easy capacity to destroy the US Dollar in less than five years if it was left unchallenged and unchecked.

So these shills [decoys] were carefully positioned to deflect your attention away from the obvious greed and incompetence of the United States Government and its Wall Street masters, and focus it elsewhere instead. Then, hopefully, a few years later down the track when prices start to bounce through the roof, and America has no Euros to buy crude oil, you will blame gasoline prices of $5.00+ per gallon at the pumps on an 'inevitable decline' in world oil production, rather than march furiously on Washington DC with locked and loaded firearms.

Though attacking Campbell and his ilk is not the purpose of this report, his idiot claims can be debunked readily enough. While it is true that nowadays we only officially find one barrel of oil for every four barrels we consume, this is primarily because we temporarily stopped the incredibly expensive process of looking for crude oil when we had already physically established more than two trillion barrels of reserves in known reservoir locations around the world. When those known reserves drop to [say] one trillion barrels we may be tempted to go and find more, but not until then. And while it is true that the production rate from each individual oil well ever drilled has slowly declined over the years, there is a perfectly valid technical reason for this predictable reduced flow rate, which will be explained later.

In order to understand how Russia has left the rest of the world standing in its wake, it is essential to know a little bit about where oil is located, and how it is extracted from the ground for refining and commercial use. It is an enormously complex subject, especially when considering the ultra-deep wells, which should really have a separate category all of their own. Many years ago I was personally involved at the sharp end of two ultra-deep drilling operations [one of them in direct liaison with Russian experts from the Moscow Drilling Institute], and will try to keep this drilling lesson as simple as I can.

Full story...

Discover U.S. finger prints in Darfur!

Standard Hegelian stuff coming from Washington and London as usual, the "crisis" is Sudan has absolutely nothing to do with starving Africans because half the continent is starving and we don't lift a finger to help them. No, Sudan has OIL so it's of interest to our governments, OIL is running out and therefore our OIL-hungry western civilisations are out on a secret mission to secure all of the world's OIL supplies for the benefit of MULTI-NATIONAL CORPORATIONS. There's no way people here or in the US would support yet another invasion based on the fake "terrorist threat" or the fake "WMD" so, they create the pretext for "intervention" by paying the nasty "rebels" to kill a few brown-skinned people and then all us humanitarians-who-give-a-shit (99% of the population) will ask the 1% who don't to invade and go and save the poor starving African babies. There, can I spell it out any simpler for you? You've been had!

Uncle Sam wants YOU to die for big business Bush administration claims it’s on a mission to root out terrorism all over the world, yet it provides the Chadian military with both trainings and armaments to keep groups linked to al-Qaeda active in the Sudan.

Last month, former Chadian ambassador to the United States, Ahmat H. Soubiane, criticized Chad's President Idris Deby, a new member of the Bush administration's so-called 'global war on terrorism', at a seminar sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. Questioning Deby's plans to amend the Chadian constitution so he can become President for life, Soubiane, in an open letter to the people of Chad, urged the ruling party in Chad to reject Deby's plans.

Reacting to Soubiane's letter, Deby recalled him as ambassador to the United States in February, however, Soubiane remains in Washington under de facto political asylum.

In October 2003, with the beginning of pumping of oil from Chad through the new Chad-Cameron pipeline, a project backed by a consortium consisting of Exxon Mobil, Chevron Texaco, Petronas of Malaysia, Halliburton, and the World Bank, Deby adopted the policy of oil cronyism of Equatorial Guinea's dictator Teodoro Obiang. Although Deby is from the north of Chad, tradition is that the prime minister is from the south and vice versa. However, in June 2003, Deby appointed his inexperienced nephew as Prime Minister and in January 2004 appointed his brother-in-law to head Chad's Central African Bank and, by default, president of the 9-member Chadian Revenue Management Oversight Committee, which oversees how the oil revenues, which are deposited in an escrow account in a London bank, are spent. Deby's family are members of the northern Zaghawa tribe, which represents one percent of Chad's population.

Soubiane fears that Chad will become another Rwanda or Burundi, where a small minority ethnic group rules with an iron fist over the majority.

Soubiane criticized recent trends of African presidents who, after their mandates end, "trump up reasons -civil war, threats from abroad, domestic violence- to remain in power," in effect, becoming presidents for life. Soubiane calls this an "African comedy."

Deby has become a favorite partner of the United States through the Pan Sahel Initiative, a U.S.-European Command program to train and equip Sahel countries in the fight against groups linked to Al-Qaeda. Soubiane said that while he welcomes the initiative's recent success in stopping an Algerian group that somehow has infiltrated into Chad from Niger, he fears that leaders like Deby are joining the Pan Sahel Initiative for their own personal gain.

Chad is provided by U.S. military aid and training under Pan Sahel.

However, Soubiane cited Deby's involvement in the bloody fighting in Darfur, which he fears will eventually spill over into Chad. Soubiane said that violence in Darfur was initiated by former members of Deby's Presidential Guard who hail from the province.

As a way to repay his debt, Deby is providing advanced weaponry, to the Darfur rebels who are fighting the Sudanese central government. Chad's military equipment is being provided by the United States under the Pan Sahel Initiative. The Bush administration and its evangelical Christian allies have targeted Khartoum's Islamic government by providing weapons to various factions opposed to it. Like Chad, Sudan is also sitting on top of a treasure of huge oil reserves.

U.S. military support for Deby and his allied Sudanese rebel groups results in another African genocide, similar to those of Rwanda and Congo in death toll.

Darfur people die everyday after poverty and violent attacks, and the Bush administration keeps throwing gasoline on the flames by granting military assistance to the perpetrators of genocide.

Full story...

Guantanamo's torture regime is a shameful disgrace

The British intelligence services and the Foreign Office appear complicit in the torture

by Vanessa Redgrave


I have just returned from a theatre workshop in Croatia, with women who survived Tito's concentration camp for political prisoners on the island of Goli Otok. Officially this was a "work site" or "labour camp", and was opened by the Yugoslav State Security Service in 1948, when Tito split from Stalin.

The women prisoners were suspected of being pro-Stalin. They were never formally charged with a crime, and were never tried or given access to lawyers or a chance to defend themselves. On the island they were subjected to hideous beatings, forced to stand over urine buckets or against a wall for hours on end in "stress-positions"; they were deprived of sleep, denied food and drinking water as punishment and locked away in isolation. They were prohibited from washing even in the sea, and had to endure repeated interrogations and "self-criticism". They were called "bandits", "scum", "traitors", "enemies of the state". In effect, Stalin's methods were being used by the State Security Service against those suspected of being "pro-Stalin". No one knows how many went mad, how many died, or how many attempted suicide. In Tito's time, this was a "State Secret".

All the survivors of Goli Otok (the island had a camp for men as well) agree that under prolonged conditions of torture, they would do anything, say anything, write anything and sign anything that was demanded of them in the hope of being released.

I have also just finished reading the 115-page document Detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay compiled by Birnberg Pierce & Partners, lawyers for the three British citizens released from Guantanamo Bay without charge in March. Their accounts of detention are horrifyingly similar to the conditions in Goli Otok. In both cases, the denial of a trial, and a specified date of release added to the physical torture the three endured.

Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed were captured in northern Afghanistan in November 2001. All three state that they were physically tortured in Sherbagan, Kandahar, before being consigned to the psychological and physical hell of Guantanamo Bay. In March this year they were sent back to England and released without charges.

Asif and Shafiq say they were interrogated by an SAS officer in Kandahar before they were flown to Guantanamo. Rhuhel states that he was questioned in Kandahar by MI5 and separately by someone from the Foreign Office. He was in a terrible state from prolonged sleep deprivation, starvation and dehydration. The MI5 officer told him he would be sent home if he agreed to "admit to everything" that was put to him. "I just said 'OK' to everything they said to me. I agreed with everything, whether it was true or not. I just wanted to get out of there." During their two years of incarceration in Guantanamo M15 officers and a representative of the British embassy in Washington made six or seven visits/interrogations. All three men made complaints about the conditions under which they were being held; and about the interrogations by US military intelligence and other US agencies. The British intelligence services and the Foreign Office appear therefore to be complicit in the conditions of psychological and physical torture in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

The document depicts a Kafkaesque nightmare combined with a barbaric system of punishments, including "short-shackling" for hours on end. Any decent person, British or American, could only feel the utmost shame and revulsion that such methods should be used.

It is clear from the accounts of the three British detainees that many prisoners have gone mad and many have attempted suicide. The Foreign Office has evaded the requests of family lawyers to allow independent doctors to see the British citizens and UK residents who still remain in Guantanamo.

Full story...

Thursday 26 August 2004

Now for the politics of last resort - impeach Tony Blair

This has to be the best bit of news I've had in a long time! If, like me, you support this action then why not send an email to Adam Price to show him some love and support. He's going up against the System and he needs all of us to support him, so do something useful with your day and drop him an email to tell him you want to see Tony Blair impeached. His email is pricea@parliament.uk

Having duped us into war, the prime minister must be held to account

Adam Price MP


New Labour, new politics - that was the promise. In Blair's own words in his first speech as leader to the Labour party conference: "It means being open. It means telling it like it is. Let's be honest. Straight. Those most in need of hope deserve the truth."

Now, almost a decade later, his words sound like self-parody. And yet there remains a certain resonance about them. Truth is the foundation of democracy. Without truth, there can be no trust, and without trust, politics loses its very legitimacy. And that is the tragedy of what has befallen us all in the last three years of this premiership - alongside the personal tragedies of the 64 British service personnel and 13,000 Iraqis who have paid the highest price for what has become the cruellest of deceptions.

Faced with this charge of having duped us into war, the prime minister responds with a certain injured innocence: "Are people questioning my integrity? Are they saying I lied?" Of course, professional communicators such as the prime minister almost never tell lies. For the most part it's perfectly easy to mislead the public without resorting to that. As Robin Cook wrote in his diary, Blair was "far too clever" for that. Rather than allege there was a real link between Saddam and Bin Laden "he deliberately crafted a suggestive phrase designed to create the impression that British troops were going to Iraq to fight a threat from al-Qaida".

There is more than one way not to tell the truth: half-truths, omissions and deliberate ambiguities can be just as effective as crude lies if the mission is to mislead. All this would still be in the realm of conjecture, of course, if it had not been for the death of David Kelly and Bush's decision to have his own inquiry. Without these unforeseen events we would never have had access to the information revealed through the Butler and Hutton inquiries.

But we do. We now know what Blair knew, and when he knew it, and the contrast with his public statements at the time, which are set out in the report, A Case To Answer, by Dan Plesch and Glen Rangwala, published today. It's on the basis of that report that I am prepared to state - unprotected by parliamentary privilege, unfettered by the rules of parliamentary language and without equivocation - that the prime minister did not tell the truth. Instead he exaggerated, distorted, suppressed and manipulated the information for political ends. This was an organised deception to win over a sceptical parliament and public to the military action he had long ago promised his ally Mr Bush.

The evidence for Blair's duplicity is overwhelming. He claimed in early 2002 that Iraq had "stockpiles of major amounts of chemical and biological weapons" while the assessment of the joint intelligence committee at the time was that Iraq "may have hidden small quantities of agents and weapons". He told the TUC in September 2002 that Saddam "had enough chemical and biological weapons remaining to devastate the entire Gulf region", while the intelligence assessment was that "Saddam has not succeeded in seriously threatening his neighbours".

Blair displayed the most despicable cynicism of all when he warned that "it is a matter of time, unless we act and take a stand before terrorism and weapons of mass destruction come together", even though the government was later forced to admit to the Butler inquiry that "the JIC assessed that any collapse of the Iraqi regime would increase the risk of chemical and biological warfare technology or agents finding their way into the hands of terrorists, and that the prime minister was aware of this". He knew the nightmare scenario he painted would be more, not less, likely if we invaded Iraq, yet he gave the opposite impression to translate anxiety into support for the war.

If he was guilty of mismanagement, miscalculation or mere mistakes then the proper place to hold him to account would be the ballot box. Deliberate misrepresentation, however, is what marks this prime minister out. When Peter Mandelson caused "incorrect information" to be given to the house, and Beverley Hughes admitted giving a "misleading impression", they resigned in accordance with the ministerial code, which states: "Ministers who knowingly mislead parliament will be expected to offer their resignation to the prime minister". Unfortunately, the code is silent on what to do with a miscreant prime minister.

His refusal to resign in the face of such evidence is unprecedented. There are strong indications, detailed in the report, that he made a secret agreement with President Bush which is illegal under constitutional law. Yet there are to be no further enquiries, no further comment from the prime minister, and no hope of ever seeing the attorney general's full advice. A motion of no confidence would simply divide the house on party lines and fail to focus on the actions of Blair. And, as John Baron MP recently discovered, accusing another member of misleading the house is deemed "unparliamentary".

Accountability is the lifeblood of democracy. Why should the public bother getting involved in politics if ministers can lead us into war on a false prospectus and not even utter a single word of apology? So what remedy do parliament and people have in these desperate circumstances? Historically, impeachment has been used by parliament against individuals to punish "high crimes and misdemeanours".

Full story...

Wednesday 25 August 2004

There's A Place For US

by Judith Moriarty

If you take a right at the Baghdad airport, and walk out into the scorching sands, due west for 3.2 miles, you will enter the portal that will take you to a place removed from turbaned men from the East killing helmeted uniformed youth from the West. In times of war, mostly vague, mostly obscure mantra's, of tried and true tattered-blood soaked words from the pages of history; lead multitudes of new generations into the killing fields.

Men are fighting for words long bled of meaning. Men have fought for eons in swirling sandstorms, in swamps, on rocky beaches, in fields of poppies; for words, for honor, for each other's God of War, and paradoxically Peace. "Blessed are the peacemakers" has men piling naked "liberated" people, taken from their villages in massive sweeps, "just for fun". Soldiers, from once upon a time, idyllic small town America, become their darker sides, if not firmly anchored in moral certitude. Rather than address the carnage and bestiality that war inflicts on men/women of woods and streams and summer carnivals; of dusty lanes, the church bell's echo, the silent canvas of nature's majesty; neighbor is currently pitted against neighbor, as the venom of war, once thought so distant seeps down scented lanes and into hearts once filled with" Amazing Grace." None that plan or practice masochistic, savage torture, on the brown people of various lands will ever stand in the court's docket. Instead, the sacrificial pawns of small town America will bear the brunt of Salem Witchcraft trials. A prison called, "The Father of Strangers", in the end makes strangers of us all. No-one will think to put the authors of war on trial, that made monsters of these youngsters, who once laughed and ran down small town paths, catching fireflies in the night.

"Bring them on", so glibly spoken, behind walls of Secret Service, concrete barriers, Ninja warriors in body armor, cameras, and snipers on rooftops; has the blind, the limbless, the poisoned; of Once Upon America, the end result. Home from war, with useless medals, that will not heal or make them whole. Across the land, far from media's manufactured paranoia, and shallow, superficial sensationalism; the families and friends of America's youth, console themselves with hollow words of patriotism-and whispered readings of the Twenty-Third Psalm. These youthful warriors never lived to parade down New York City's Fifth Ave, in a confetti parade of flag waving citizens, armored might and politicians pontificating puffery. How does one win a battle against a concept? What beach do you storm on what hill do you plant our flag? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?

Men are not created to kill, maim, torture, and annihilate one another in the most heinous ways imaginable. He/she must be programmed, conditioned into non-thinking, non-questioning, passive obedience. "Just following orders"; in the end, doesn't stand up in a Nuremberg setting, but they are not to think of this. The enemy in any coinage war or act of Profits over People is dutifully labeled; as "sub-human, vermin, unclean, geek, gook, acceptable risk, collateral damage, towel head, rag head, sand nigger etc. "It's easier to kill the nameless. The wondrous gifts, culture, talents, and humanness of the "other" is forever lost in this madness called war. Pulverized, annihilated, crushed, melted, shredded in a theater of Shock and Awe. The laughter and love in desert villages, or bustling city markets, is no less important, than our own enclaves of removed tranquility, majestic marshlands, country stores, or steeple churches echoing forth on a Sunday morning; "Amazing grace how sweet the song that saved a wretch like me"

What diabolical insanity has men in secret laboratories, or industrial war machine factories, creating and building genocidal weapons? What depravity has billions upon billions being spent on bombs that have to be rolled off planes, which suck the oxygen from the air, and rupture the organs of all the brown people in its path? What lunacy invents weapons that shred the limbs from children, poisons lands and people with depleted uranium, stun guns that send electric shocks into people, sound machines that break eardrums, and computer guided missiles that kill from a distance?

Full story...

How and Why Woolsey and Clinton Saved the CIA

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Part 4


While Woolsey's CIA had patiently arranged the exposure and arrest of Aldrich 'Rick' Ames on President's Day, 1994, as a Soviet spy without President Clinton being personally involved or even knowing the mole's actual name - once the botched assassination of Stockholm squealer in the Palme shooting Viktor Gunnarsson, it seems, had been remedied in Salisbury, North Carolina at the expense of Catherine Miller's life and former city policeman L. C. Underwood's innocence - the Clintons raised such suspicions over Vince Foster's suicide the previous July that the media and the public lost all sense of what was really going on. They increasingly went wild over the prospect that he had been murdered, probably with White House complicity, causing Gunnarsson's killing and its possible relation to Ames's spying increasingly to escape everyone's attention.

Right after Gunnarsson disappeared on December 3, 1993 - presumably murdered - Robert Kaiser, managing editor of The Washington Post, called old friend and fellow graduate of Yale University, David Gergen - a former advisor of three Repubican administrations, and now brought in to help out the beleaguered Clinton administration - to complain about the failure of the White House to take seriously its unresolved questions about Whitewater. The questions had been sent to Bruce Lindsey, the President's counselor who was deeply involved in settling the threats by the former Governor's bodyguards telling tales to the press about his past activities in Arkansas, and Lindsey obviously had had neither the time nor the inclination for how to deal properly with the related issue. Gergen, though knowing little about what had gone on in Little Rock, pushed hard for Lindsey to answer Kaiser's questions, assuring him that it would be done.

When articles about Troopergate still appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and the American Spectator despite Lindsey's spirited efforts, especially the admissions by troopers Roger Perry and Larry Patterson that they still feared for their lives, the White House clammed up about telling the press anything about its troubles, a posture Gergen vowed that it would regret. A few days later, his warning proved all too true, as the Washington Post and The Times reported that files about Whitewater had been removed from Vince Foster's office shortly after he had died in Fort Marcy Park on July 20, 1993. The Times, alleging that the White House might be engaged in a cover up, immediately called for a congressional investigation into the alleged scandal.

As calls in the media for an inquiry increased, the White House soon had another crisis, one which brought Clinton's dealing with former President Richard Nixon to the fore. While writers have concentrated upon the contest between Hillary Clinton and presidential counsel Bernard Nussbaum in getting the President to agree whether to the appointment of an inquiry, obviously the advice by the former President was vital in this regard. While Mrs.Clinton, working with the Judicial Committee's chief counsel John Doar during its Watergate hearing, had learned the dangers of a sitting President letting a legal problem become a political one, Nussbaum, a partner in a leading New York law firm, was firmly committed to no client of his unnecessarily giving away any of his rights in any controversy.

Nixon, obviously with Watergate continually on his mind, had advised Clinton in great detail about how to avoid a similar scandal - what the Governor of Arkansas took on board completely shortly before he entered the White House. 'Tricky Dick' was the real maker of 'Slick Willie'. Nixon advised that the new President organize his administration so that he was the only one who really knew what was going on. The Cabinet should be little more than a symbolic organ whose leading members at State, the Pentagon, and CIA pretty much operated on their own. The Chief of Staff should be essentially a junction-box manager - what General Alexander M. Haig, Jr. had promised in theory, but failed to perform in practice.

The White House staff should be responsible mostly for just making suggestions about policy, and implementing what was agreed upon. If anything goes wrong, Nixon advised, they should be ruthlessly disposed of, not sentimentally kept around and protected at the President's expense. No one should have the information and influence of Nixon's former cronies, and the Oval Office should never be the site of dangerous, rambling discussions about operations and their fallout. Certainly, the President's personal counsel should never be in a position to become another John Dean.

When it came to covert operations, the DCI should be held at arm's length, and never beholdened to - what Nixon failed to do when he kept on Richard Helms as DCI, and called upon the Agency on many occasions to help out The Plumbers. Clinton made sure of that by having as little to do with Woolsey in his appointment, and functioning as possible. The White House, the former President advised, should never be the site of risky operations - what Clinton could avoid by using his resources back in Arkansas, and with Arthur Coia's Laborers International Union.

When disaster struck the Oval Office, as had already been the case, the President must take immediate, drastic action rather than allow himself to be blackmailed, and forced to pay hush money - what E. Howard Hunt had obliged Nixon's White House to do after the Watergate break-in. Clinton showed he had learned the lesson very well when he saw to the murder, it seems, of his former security chief, Luther 'Jerry' Parks when he tried similar stunts.

The strength of Nixon's advice resurfaced when the White House organized a Response Team to determine what to do about the revived interest in Whitewater while the President was off on a state visit to see Russia's President, Boris Yeltsin. Clinton's agenda was to see that Ames's spying was given the narrowest scope, and importance by the Russians so neither the funds proposed for the Agency nor for Moscow were reduced during a most sensitive, transitional period. With Harold Ickes serving as moderator of the Response Team, George Stepanopolous, the White House commumications director, argued for urging the appointment of a special prosecutor, while Nussbaum, using the Watergate experience, strongly urged against it. At the same time, Clinton was being hounded across Europe about charges that his counsel was helping cover up the real causes of Foster's death.

Shortly after Nussbaum conceded that Clinton's people must have done something wrong back in Arkansas for the press to be so inflamed, he shocked the bleary-eyed Clinton who was communicating with the group by speakerphone: "Mr. President, one year from now Bruce Lindsey will be under investigation. They will chase you, your family and friends, through your presidency and beyond." (Quoted from James B. Steward, Blood Sport, p. 374.) As pandemonium mounted in the meeting as Nussbaum completed his impassioned plea, Clinton, expressing that he could not take this pressure any longer, finally asked for his advice. When his personal counsel answered, calling for the release of all the papers, even the allegedly lost ones, and for congressional hearings on Whitewater, the President responded that this would be crazy, but he was ultimately obliged to "sleep on it" before making a decision.

To force the appointment of an independent counsel, Clinton had continued to duck questions about Whitewater while on his visits to the Ukraine and Russia, important ports of call if he hoped to achieve a settlement of the uncertainties in the region. Its continued reduction of WMD required the financial assistance of Congress, and the political assistance of Russia's Yeltsin - what disclosure of Rick Ames's spying for the Soviets was bound to put in jeopardy, and what Clinton did everything he could to minimize. He discussed in private with Russian politicians and intelligence officials, past and present, the scope and importance of Ames's disclosures while turning aside frenzied questions at press conferences about Whitewater. When an NBC News reporter, for example, repeatedly pressed the President in an interview about the domestic issue, Clinton shut off his microphone, causing CBS anchorman Dan Rather to intone that "a cloud has followed Mr. Clinton this entire trip." (Quoted from p. 373.)

By the time Nussbaum woke up the next day, Clinton had already approved the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate Whitewater, and to review the circumstances surrounding Foster's death. The President's last day in Moscow with Russian officials, including Yevgeny Primakov, the former KGB chief, and now head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and the meeting had not gone well regarding the Ames case. While the SVR was willing to admit that he was a spy, and even added that he had been paid more than American officials were claiming - to remain eligible for the US grants - the Russians would not acknowledge that he had ever initiated anything or was responsibile for the execution or imprisonment of any double agents. They had all gotten into trouble with Soviet counter intelligence because of poor trade craft by others. In sum, Clinton learned little more from Primakov than Woolsey had the previous summer about Soviet penetration of American secret government.

The appointment of the independent counsel, Robert Fiske, changed the whole complexion of the media's growing confrontation with the White House, especially after the New York Post's Christopher Ruddy, The Sunday Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, and Conspiracy Nation's Sherman Skolnick started weighing in, claiming that Vince Foster had been murdered. These reporters had national reputations, and one can only wonder what inducements, besides encouragement by their papers' editors and owners, made them make more and more dubious claims. Ultimately, their reports sounded like a daytime parody of what had happened to Gunnarsson, with Foster having been shot an increasing number of times by a .22 caliber weapon elsewhere by professional assassins because he was threatening to expose the Clintons' criminal activities, and the body moved from an apartment connected to them to the Virginia park where it was found with little blood around and an a .38 caliber revolver placed beside it.

Certainly, the White House supplied input for the false accounts, providing erroneous evidence of when, where, and why Foster's death had occurred, though some of them could have been honest mistakes. Troubled trooper Roger Perry back in Arkansas, for example, told Evans-Pritchard that he got a call from White House aide Helen Dickey around 6 p.m. that Foster had just shot himself in the White House parking lot. An Oxford forensic handwriting analyst claimed that an alleged Foster suicide note was a forgery. Then Nussbaum, the one who revived the Clintons' Arkansas problems, was forced to resign, scapegoated, over the mishandling of the Resolution Trust Corporation's investigation of Jim McDougal's Madison Guaranty S and L and Whitewater.

All the while, these conspiracy theorists were adding victims to the Clintons' alleged hit list, ultimately concluding, it seems, that anyone who died, and who was involved with them in any official way were murdered. Evans-Pritchard, for example, blamed the White House for the massacre at Waco, and the Oklahoma City bombing as a way to getting rid of dangerous former employees, especially troopers.

In sum, it was one of the wildest diversions in history, and soon it had the expected favorable backlash - critics of the President had gone too far in their claims - especially since the criminal process of the special counsel led to little disclosure of important information, and few convictions. In the meantime, other White House players joined Nussbaum on the political sidelines. Chief of Staff Thomas 'Mack' McLarty was sacked in July, relegated to an undefined liaison job in the White House basement with business. Gergen quit, becoming an advisor for the Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Roger Altman, the temporary head of the RTC whose misstatements to Congress about the Madison referral forced Nussbaum's resignation, joined McLarty in the basement for awhile before resigning too.

This legal way of ruthlessly resolving most messy political problems was not lost upon Woolsey when it came time to deal with Ames's spying for the Soviets. And there could be no delay, as the set up of Gunnarsson as Palme's assassin was threatening to unravel. In 1994, Kari and Pertti Poutiainen put together the first serious review of the investigations of the statsminister minister's assassination, Inuti labyrinten (Inside the Labyrinth), and it was devastating in its criticism of former Swedish police inspector Börje Wingren, particularly his latest effort, Han Sköt Olof Palme. (See especially p. 539ff.) Wingren was continually willing to do anything - change evidence, set up witnesses, etc. - to make Gunnarsson look like the Swedish equivalent of Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy's alleged assassin. Wingren had made 'solving' the Palme assassination into a dark, fine art.

As for who the Poutiainens had in mind for being behind Wingren's manipulations and lies, they left little doubt - the CIA. In the Forward, they discussed the apparent elimination of another thorn in the Anglo-American secret side, Nelson Mandela. He was caught by the South African intelligence service BOSS in 1962, with the help of CIA's First Secretary at the Embassy in Pretoria Paul Eckel, and agent Donald C. Rickard who had infilitrated the ANC. After Mandela's surprise release in 1990, President George H. W. Bush was asked by CNN if the allegation was true. Instead of giving the expected, perfunctory denial, Bush answered: "I never comment on intelligence matters." (p. 19)

The Poutiainens then wondered what had happened to the First Secretary since 1986, a most pointed allusion to First Secretary Jennone Walker of the American Embassy in Stockholm when Palme was assassinated. She was now Clinton's leading National Security Advisor on Eastern Europe. One can just imagine the legal and diplomatic turmoil if at Rick Ames's trial for spying, she was called upon to explain what she was doing on the night it occurred - an interrogation which could have gone right up the line through the double agent Operation Courtship and Oliver North's Consortium to the Agency's Deputy Director for Operations Claire George, while leaving their counterparts in the Swedish Security Service (Säpo) with similarly threatening questions to answer.

In sum, the Poutianinens were unduly pessimistic about covert government's role in the Palme assassination never coming out because responsible politicians, like President Bush, refused to release any relevant information. If Washington hoped to give Ames his apparent just desserts, it risked his forcing leading spooks back in 1986 like George, Walker, chief of the Soviet division Burton Gerber, and CI chief Paul Redmond being forced to testify in ways which would greatly mitigate his treachery.

Under the circumstances, there could be no protracted trial of Ames for fear that the whole conspiracy behind the statsminister's shooting would be exposed. After President Clinton made the expected expelling of the senior Russian intelligence officer at the Embassy responsible for the undiplomatic behavior - what the Russians reciprocated in kind by expelling Moscow station chief James Morris - a CIA team went to Moscow, allegedly in the hope of determining the scope, and importance of Ames's spying, but returned to Washington empty handed. The Senate Select Commitee on Intelligence conducted an assessment of Ames's spying, and the implications it had on intelligence gathering, talking to Woolsey along the way, and instructing him not to promote or reward anyone who had assisted his spying until the Agency's Inspector General had made his report on the scandal.

Then, on April 28th, only nine weeks after the Ameses' arrest, they were allowed to plead guilty to charges of conspiring to commit espionage, and to tax fraud - life in prison without parole for Rick, and Rosario's to be determined by how responsive Rick was in his debriefing. It was like the Ameses just got started in conspiring to commit treason, though prosecutor Mark Hulkower treated the few witnesses in the tiny courtroom to a most abbreviated assessment of the damage they had committed in personal terms to American national security.

This was a far cry from how Washington would react seven years later when the Bureau's Robert Hanssen was finally exposed for having complemented Ames's spying for 15 years. Hanssen was debriefed 75 times and for 200 hours over a period of nine months before he was allowed a plea bargain which saved his life.

Woolsey had set the stage for this farcical proceeding by announcing nine days earlier on NBC's Today show that the Ames case was just the first of "quite a few" spy scandals, a blanket condemnation of the intelligence community which made Ames's spying seem almost a matter of course. The DCI still compared Ames unfavorably to Revolutionary War spy Benedict Arnold, denying that his spying was politically motivated. Woolsey made such an "impossibly tepid" response to Ames's spying that even administration officials, including NSA Lake and Walker, were complaining.

No one was willing to admit, though, that Woolsey wanted the case settled as quickly as possible - what Ames exploited to his advantage - so that the damage he really had done could not be revealed.

Monday 23 August 2004

Mossad and Moving Companies: Masterminds of Global Terrorism?

The other day I was scanning the news reports and came across a rather mundane item that really got me to thinking. It simply read:

Cloudcroft chief stops Israelis with suspicious cargo
By Michael Shinabery Staff Writer, Alamogordo Daily News

CLOUDCROFT, NM -- That they were speeding through the school zone first got his attention.

That they had Israeli driver's licenses and expired passports made him suspicious.

Cloudcroft Police Chief Gene Green stopped the 2-ton van on Thursday, for speeding. Initially, Green thought the truck was commercial because of exterior markings. But when he found it was out of Chicago, he asked for documentation such as logs books and manifests.

"They said this is a U-Haul truck and handed me a rental agreement (for) in-town delivery only in Illinois, (which) had expired two days before," Green said. He called for backup, and Otero County Sheriff's Deputy Billy Anders, who patrols the Sacramento Mountains, arrived, along with Capt. Norbert Sanchez and Det. Eddie Medrano.

"We got them out and started digging a little deeper," Green said, "got permission to search the truck. They claimed they were hauling furniture from Austin to Chicago." When officers advised the men they were not exactly en route from one town to another, Green said the two men claimed they were Deming bound. "But they couldn't give us an address in Deming they were going to," he said. "Once we got into the truck, they had some junk furniture I wouldn't have given to Goodwill."

Also inside the vehicle were, Green said, "50 boxes" they claimed was a "private" delivery, but the men insisted they had no "idea what was in them."

At that point, the officers called for drug-sniffing and bomb-sniffing dogs. The men were turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and U- Haul recovered the truck.

Contents of the boxes remain unknown, pending investigation.

Well, don't that just beat all? Another "moving company" with Israeli drivers with bad papers, and nobody even noticed...

Well, I noticed.

Not only did I notice, I remembered a strange story about a similar event:

On May 7, 2002, local police authorities pulled over a Budget rental truck in Oak Harbour, Washington near the Whitney Island Naval Air Station. The driver and his passenger were Israeli nationals, one of which had entered the country illegally. The other had an expired visa. Tests performed on the vehicle revealed that there were traces of TNT on the gearshift and RDX plastic explosives on the steering wheel. But no actual explosives were reported to have been found in the truck. [Fox News, 5/13/02]

A report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the following day reported that the FBI performed follow-up tests on the truck which turned-up negative. One source speculated that perhaps the original tests had actually detected just cigarette residue, and not explosives. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 5/14/02, Jerusalem Post, 5/14/02].

Critics argued that it would make no sense for U.S. authorities to use a method of testing that could be skewed by cigarette residue. The website whatreallyhappened.com remarked:

“The specific claim is made that residue from a cigarette lighter confused the tests for TNT and RDX. That doesn't explain why the trained bomb-sniffing dog, who surely knows the difference between explosives and cigarettes [else he would false-positive every smoker, ashtray, and convenience store he came across] gave the first indications of explosives in the truck that led to the tests in the first place. Likewise, were the chemical tests unable to discriminate between tobacco and TNT/RDX, which are chemically quite different from tobacco combustion products, they would give false positive results for every vehicle ever tested in which smokers had ever ridden. Given the likelihood of finding tobacco residues in any car, such tests would have to be designed to tell the difference. The same is true for other products from non- electric cigarette lighters, the vast majority of which are butane.”

The same website also provided references to three documents with detailed information on the tests used to detect TNT and RDX. None of the documents indicated that the presence of cigarette residue might induce inaccurate test results. [International Society for Optical Engineering 1984; Cold Regions and Research Engineering Laboratory 5-1996; Security Management n.d.]

I also remembered another peculiar item: the so-called Urban Moving Company that some researchers suggest was a cover for Mossad.

Many observers have suggested that Israel had foreknowledge of the 9/11 terrorists attacks. Some have even argued that they may have been behind the attacks, and it seems that the funny stories about Israelis with trucks and bad papers just keep popping up here and there.

On September 11, five employees of Jewish owned Urban Moving Company were detained as a result of witness accounts that they were taking pictures of the flaming ruins of the World Trade Center and celebrating!

Yes indeedy! Shortly after the collapse of the towers a witness called the police and reported that the 5 individuals were, “going to unusual lengths to photograph the World Trade Center ruins” and they were obviously and blatantly “making light of the situation.” The witness stated that these men were on the roof of the office of their employer, Urban Moving Company, and were posing, dancing, and laughing. [New York Times 10/8/01; Bergen Record 9/12/01; Ha'aretz 9/17/01; Gotham Gazette 11/2/01]

After their indiscreet celebration on the roof of the building, the five Israelis headed down to a nearby parking lot where they mounted the roof of their truck and resumed their photographing and celebrating. Another witness called the police and told them that the men were smiling, dancing, and giving each other high-fives while viewing the destruction of the symbol of Free Enterprise in America. [Gotham Gazette 11/2/01; ABC News, 6/21/02]

A few hours later, the five Israelis were stopped by police while driving their truck. One individual had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock, while another had two foreign passports. They were also found to be in the possession of a box- cutter, which they presumably had because of their job as professional movers. [New York Times 10/8/01; Gotham Gazette 11/2/01; ABC News, 6/21/02]

On September 14, Dominic Suter, the owner of the moving company, left the country very abruptly after FBI agents indicated that they wanted a second interview with him. According to ABC News’ 2020 [ABC News 6/21/02], “Three months later 2020's cameras photographed the inside of Urban Moving, and it looked as if the business had been shut down in a big hurry. Cell phones were lying around; office phones were still connected; and the property of dozens of clients remained in the warehouse. The owner had also cleared out of his New Jersey home, put it up for sale and returned with his family to Israel.” [New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safety, 12/13/01; Gotham Gazette 11/2/01; ABC News, 6/21/02; Forward, 3/15/02]

Shortly after the arrest of the men, FBI officials suspected that the Urban Moving company was an Israeli intelligence front. Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of operations for counterterrorism, told ABC News that the FBI was concerned that the moving company had been “set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists in the area, particularly in the New Jersey-New York area.” [ABC News, 6/21/02]

The five employees that were taken into custody were all former members of the Israeli Army. After being transferred to jail, the FBI’s Criminal Division sent the case to the Counterintelligence Section on account of suspicions that they were Israeli spies. They were then detained for more that two months. Some of them spent 40 days in solitary confinement. [New York Times 11/21/01; ABC News, 6/21/02]

Naturally, several individuals attempted to research this item. One high-ranking U.S. intelligence source told Forward magazine that intelligence agents’ investigation of Urban Moving Company led them to believe it was a front for the Israeli Mossad. It should be noted that, at present there is no publicly available information that conclusively confirms this allegation. However the above described incident, reported by various news sources, certainly casts a very dark shadow of suspicion on the company and its employees.

It seems that Urban Moving Company was not an isolated phenomenon.

Full story...

Saturday 21 August 2004

Bonkers Bolton Threatens Iran

What's going on at the State Department? Can't Colin Powell keep Undersecretary John Bolton in his cage?

Apparently, not, because last week Bonkers Bolton made a mind-boggling presentation at the Hudson Institute – which was carried live on CSPAN – entitled "Preventing Iran from Acquiring Nuclear Weapons."

Virtually every paragraph in the inflammatory 2,800-word address contained allegations that were either misleading or flat-out wrong.

Here is how Bolton began, and it was downhill from then on:

"Today I'd like to speak about Iran, which has concealed a large-scale, covert nuclear weapons program for over 18 years, and which, therefore, is one of our most fundamental proliferation challenges.

"All of Iran's WMD [weapons of mass destruction] efforts – chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, and ballistic missiles – pose grave threats to international security. Iran's pursuit of these deadly weapons, despite its signature on treaties that ban them, marks it as a rogue state, and it will remain so until it completely, verifiably and irreversibly dismantles its WMD-related programs."

Iran denies that it has a covert nuke program. Yet, Bolton charged that German, French and British diplomats had told him that the Iranian representatives to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had told them that the Iranians could produce enough weapons-grade enriched uranium for a nuke within a year's time, and threatened to do so if the Brits-French-Germans didn't uphold their end of their deal.

(There were immediate news reports that French and German diplomats denied having told Bolton any such thing.)

You see, Iran had made a deal with the Brits-French-Germans about a year ago. In return for continued access to peaceful nuclear technology, Iran agreed to sign an Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In the interim, while the terms of the Additional Protocol were being negotiated, Iran granted Mohamed ElBaradei – Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency – the unrestricted access to all its nuclear-related facilities that the Additional Protocol would eventually provide.

For months, now, IAEA inspectors have been going anywhere they wanted to go and inspecting every thing they wanted to inspect. Iran may have a covert nuke program, but IAEA inspectors have yet to find any "indication" that Iran now has – or has ever had – a nuke-development program.

Yet, Bolton claims that the IAEA has found such evidence.

"Iran is pursuing two separate paths to nuclear weapons, one that would use highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and one that would use plutonium.

"As to the uranium route, Iran has tried to develop two different uranium-enrichment methods in order to produce weapons-grade uranium. First, it has established a number of facilities for the manufacture and testing of centrifuges (many of which are owned by military industrial organizations), a pilot enrichment facility designed for 1,000 centrifuges, and a large buried facility intended to house up to 50,000 centrifuges.

"In parallel, Iran has pursued another program to enrich uranium with lasers. Both of these programs were successfully concealed from IAEA inspectors in Iran for years until an Iranian opposition group disclosed their existence."

Under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Iranians have the "inalienable right" to do everything that the Iranians are known to have done thus far.

Full story...

Friday 20 August 2004

To Prime Minister Tony Blair,

Copy of a letter sent to Phony Tony by a really brave young lady who lost her big brother. I hope this letter made Tony choke on his cornflakes. But he's a heartless person anyway so he probably didn't even read it.

My name is Maxine Gentle and I am 14 years old. I am the sister of Fusilier Gordon Gentle who died in the war in Iraq on the 28th June 2004. I want my thoughts and feelings to be heard and known.

My feelings are that I think you are rubbish at your job. You don't care about the British public, armed forces or anyone in fact.

My big brother died at the age of 19, and what for? A war over oil and money, that's what I think the war is all about. There was no such thing as weapons of "mass destruction", if there were Saddam Hussein would have used them at the start of the war.

I think that you should withdraw all of our soldiers from Iraq. After all, it is not our war, it's America's. So why did we, the British, have to get involved? I think that you just don't want to get on the wrong side of George Bush.

My big brother meant the world to me. I looked up to him with pride because he made something of himself. He was well known, just like you, but everyone liked and loved him, not like you, because I have no respect for you, and nor do a lot of other people I know.

Gordon had only passed out in April, and yet by May YOU sent him and many others to a war zone.

What I find strange is that in order to be a qualified plumber or electrician you need to train for 3 or 4 years, but to be a qualified soldier, and learn to KILL someone, you only need to train for SIX MONTHS! The people that you have sent out there are still young; they have the rest of their lives to live, just like Gordon did.

My family is still hurting badly and so am I. To you he was just another number clown. From the minute that we found out Gordon was going over there we were all worried about him, right up until the minute we found out it was Gordon that was killed by the Iraqis.

We are all hurting badly, but I don't just blame Gordon's death on the Iraqis that made the roadside bomb, I blame YOU as well because it is your fault that our soldiers are over there in the first place, by agreeing with George Bush that we HAD to go to war, when we didn't!

As I said everyone is hurting badly right now, but you would not know that because your sons are all tucked up nicely in bed at night, at the same time as there are mums and dads who still have sons over there, who can't sleep at night, wondering if their loved ones are coming home or are they going to be the next ones to be killed.

You would not know how we all feel, because you're at home at night with your wife and son watching them growing up, but we will never know what Gordon would have been like in years to come.

It is okay for you sitting there with all your money and power, ruining people's lives by the decisions YOU make. I don't care who knows how I feel about you. All you care about is things that benefit you. All you and your new "best Friend" George Bush care about is Iraq's oil.

My big brother died in the early hours of the morning, and yet, when you and George Bush went on live TV in the afternoon to hand the country back over, you both stood there that afternoon smiling and acting like one big happy family when you both knew well that a British soldier had died that morning.

Nothing you can do or say will change my mind, or the fact that I am hurting badly inside. I cry myself to sleep most of the time because Gordon has gone and is never coming back.

Quite frankly I would have loved to meet you myself and tell you all this personally. But if I met you I would not shake your hand. This is my personal feelings towards you and George Bush, but I have less respect for you than him because YOU are the British Prime Minister, well supposed to be, and I am British, although sometimes I am ashamed to admit to being British when I have got such a bad prime minister as you.

I hope you have pleasure reading this as I have had pleasure writing it.

Yours Sincerely

Maxine Gentle

Chavez Victory: Defeat for Bush Policy

If you think British foregin policy has been any different to that of the USA for the last 60 years (+more) then think again, we are not a "benevolent" and "restraining" force in the world, we sell a lot more arms than we give aid and we are widely known (everywhere except our home countries) to happily assist any dictators or despots, provided they let our trans-national companies rape their people and exploit their land/resources. If you live in Britain and the USA then you are unwittingly helping to piss a lot of people off around the world, they don't hate us because "we're free" they hate us because our governments and transnational corporations are complete fucking scumbags and are utterly fucking up this world for whatever reason their diseased little minds have concocted! If the bastards really meant what they said then they would be trumpeting the Chavez victory from the highest parapet of their ivory towers! Instead we hear little of it on the news, and what we do hear points to him being some sort of dirty neo-communist. Typical fucking fascist bullshit. We are free to do as they tell us.

The Bush administration is gritting its collective teeth at the outcome of Sunday’s recall election in Venezuela, which overwhelmingly affirmed President Hugo Chavez’s tenure. If President Jimmy Carter had not lent his enormous credibility to the election results, Bush and his minions would surely be crying foul in unison with the opposition.

Chavez was popularly elected by his countrymen and women in 1998 and 2000. Yet in spite of Bush’s claims to support democracy around the world, his administration has given succor those trying to overthrow Chavez’s government before, during and since the aborted coup in April 2002.

Officials at the Organization of American States affirmed that the Bush administration had sanctioned the coup. Bush’s then-Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, Otto Reich, met with leaders of the coup for months before it was executed. Elliot Abrams, one of the neoconservative policymakers in Bush’s inner circle, approved the coup, according to the London Observer. And John Negroponte, now our ambassador to Iraq, was in on it, too.

Reich, Abrams and Negroponte comprised the troika that administered the “Reagan doctrine” in the 1980s, which supported vicious dictatorships in Central America, including those in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

As documented in the film, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” Chavez was forcibly removed from the presidential palace on April 11, 2002 by forces acting on behalf of Venezuela’s propertied class. Pedro Carmona, head of Venezuela’s confederation of business and industry, declared himself president. Within hours, Carmona purported to repeal laws enacted under Chavez that the executives of foreign oil companies opposed.

Forty-eight hours later, after thousands of workers and peasants stormed the palace demanding Chavez’s return to power, the military did an about-face and brought him back. The filmmakers, fortuitously present at the scene, were caught inside the palace and filmed the class struggle that played out with Chavez’s ouster and reinstatement.

Former U.S. Navy intelligence officer Wayne Madsen told the Guardian that our navy helped with communications jamming support to the Venezuelan military during the would-be coup. An American plane was present on the island to which Chavez was whisked away. The Bush administration provided financial backing to key participants in the coup attempt, which resulted in the deaths of 19 people.

Chavez incurred the wrath of Team Bush by championing the interests of the working class over the oil-igarchy in Venezuela. The fifth largest oil supplier in the world, Venezuela is a key provider of U.S. petroleum. By using oil profits to help his people instead of the multinational corporations, Chavez created an alternative model to Bush-backed neoliberal globalization.

Full story...

U.S. Poll Firm in Hot Water in Venezuela

Nader Calls US Govt a ‘Puppet’ of Israel

If America was a real democracy then people like Ralp NAder would get a lot more air-time. People in the UK who get their news from the gogglebox probably have no idea who this guy is. Democracy, yeah right! This is government by the rich, of the rich and for the rich.

Here’s something that has been curiously overlooked by the US press regarding a candidate running for the office of president of the United States.

At issue is Ralph Nader, the independent candidate for president. Nader has publicly accused President George W. Bush and Congress of being “puppets” of the Israeli government and the pro-Israeli lobby.

“What has been happening over the years is a predictable routine of foreign visitation from the head of the Israeli government,” Nader said at several speaking engagements in Washington. “The Israeli puppeteer travels to Washington. The Israeli puppeteer meets with the puppet in the White House, and then moves down Pennsylvania Avenue, and meets with the puppets in Congress. And then takes back billions of taxpayer dollars. It is time for the Washington puppet show to be replaced by the Washington peace show.”

Nader’s main campaign issue also accuses the Bush administration of eroding civil liberties since Sept.11 , and its refusal to debate and discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He also attacked the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby, for its influence on Capitol Hill.

Nader said that the US government, “if it was really interested” in promoting peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, would work more closely with the Israeli peace movement.

“It is time for the US government to recognize that this is not just a local conflict anymore. It is not just a regional conflict anymore. It is a conflict that is producing flashpoints throughout much of the world and endangering US citizens in those countries, US businesses in those countries, US workers in those countries, and endangering our own national security here. It is time for the US government to stand up and think for itself,” said Nader.

After Nader’s comment, the leaders of the ADL wrote to Nader, saying, “the image of the Jewish state as ‘puppeteer,’ controlling the powerful US Congress feeds into many age-old stereotypes which have no place in legitimate public discourse.”

Barbara B. Balser, Anti-Defamation League National Chair, and Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, said: “We write to object to your characterization of the White House and Congress as ‘puppets’ of the Israeli government. Reasonable people can and do disagree with American policy related to the Middle East, and specifically American support for Israel. However, there is a line between thoughtful, reasoned, constructive disagreements and offensive hyperbole.”

In a three-page letter dated Aug.5 , Nader responded to ADL leaders, saying: “The Israelis have a joke for the obvious — that the United States is the second state of Israel.”

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Thursday 19 August 2004

Al Qaeda Does Not Exist and Never Has

The basic truth is that Al Qaeda does not exist and never has. Al Qaeda is a manufactured enemy who was created by the Bush Administration in order to have an excuse to wage a war for the control of the world"s oil resources. Did an American even hear the words "Al Qaeda" before 9-11? Or were we told that its alleged leader Osama Bin Laden has family who themselves have personal business relationships with George W. Bush"s family and that both families had financially profited considerably from the "War on Terror"?

If "Al Qaeda" was such an organized group terrorists as we are being told then why weren"t we the people notified of this evil threat when the US Cole was bombed a few months before 9-11? "Al Qaeda" is nothing more than a broad euphemistic umbrella classification used to group any Middle Eastern fighter under the Sun as an enemy. The most diabolical aspect of this public relations stunt is that it enables the current Administration to label any group it feels necessary to attack to appear to be related to an unprovable organized enemy while at the same time actually increasing its approval ratings by exploiting the basic primal fears of the American public. Furthermore when one realizes the questionable motivations that this Administration has used previously to attack an enemy, as what is now surfacing about the Iraq War, one begins to get the strange feeling that this Orwellian double-speak is nothing more than a smoke and mirror illusion whose true intentions would of made Goebbels himself jealous.

Think about it: How could a bunch of technologically unadvanced group of people from third-world nations such as "Al Qaeda" ever have any real central organization structure? If they had any real organization they would have most certainly attacked us again after September eleventh. Where are all the terrorist cells in this country? Contrary to what has been implicitly presented in the media there HAS NEVER been a single domestic terror cell caught since Bush has been in office! The majority of suspects that have been arrested and detained in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 with the exception of a handful have not been charged with crimes in anyway associated with terrorism. All of their crimes are minor and for the most part are ! related to immigration violations of some sort. There is some ambiguity in all of this though because to this day the Ashcroft Justice Department has been less than forthcoming with the specifics of these arrests. Why would this be the case if the justifications for these arrests were really legitimate? We have been bombarded by the media with every indignity from the duck-tape chronicles to the crop dusting threat. You would think that with all this seeming sensitivity by our government about informing the general populace about possible terror threats, especially when some of their sources came from "unnamed and confidential secondary sources", that the Ashcroft Justice Department would have gone out of it"s way to mention to the public any terrorist connections that the people detained after 9-11 had and would of sworn by it on a stack of Bibles.

To date the only really suspicious activity of people detained after 9-11 were a group of Israelis who were caught in Jersey City, New Jersey filming themselves in the foreground of the burning World Trade Center with "looks of jubilation on their faces". It was later confirmed that two of the gentlemen detained had known Mossad ties. While they were detained it is of no matter now as they were subsequently released from jail a few! weeks later and were allowed to go back to Israel with no questions asked by the direct authorization of the Justice Department. I guess they were just dropping off a box of cigars to Governor McGreevy?

What is even more illuminating about all of this is that to this day nobody has taken responsibility for the attacks of 9-11, including "Al Qaeda". The only thing to link these attacks to anyone is the video tape of Osama Bin Laden that was conveniently found in a cave in Afghanistan that had him talking about the physical structure of the World Trade Center and the plane strike. The audio quality of this tape is so poor that any objective Arab-speaking analyst who was asked to give their opinion was unable to do so! as they claimed that just about all the words on it were inaudible. I believe an objective investigation into this original tape"s authenticity could verify if this admission is in fact genuine and could shed some light on the truth of the existence of "Al Qaeda". But even if this tape is genuine what would this really prove? As I have already mentioned it is common knowledge that Osama Bin Laden is connected to George W. Bush"s family by a minimum of two degrees of separation. So in the grand scheme of things what does this really matter? That the Cobra Commander said he did it?

In summary, "Al Qaeda" does not exist nor has it ever. If it really existed to anywhere near the extent that we have been told then there would have been an attack on our homeland. Of course this proof of a negative is used by the Administration to justify themselves to the American public that they are doing their jobs, but when one realizes that "Al Qaeda" is really nothing more than an artificially manufactured enemy then what job are they really doing other than capitalizing off of people"s fears? What other issue does the present Administration have to offer the average working-class citizen other than security? And if security is really only a Red Herring platform issue, then of what use are they to begin with? In addition, ! if there were any degree of truth in the strength of "Al Qaeda" or even of their very existence then there would have been a much larger resistance in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq. If an organization structure existed within "Al Qaeda" then you would have seen the Iraqi resistance be a much more conventional ! one. They would have had the communication capability and weapons arsenal to mount a more traditional counter-offensive against our troops and they would have been successful doing it because our force"s numbers are so minimal. This would have been a prime opportunity to defeat "the great satan" in front of the entire world. Their motivation to do so would have been so strong that in order for them to of not of done this one must make the quantum leap and conclude that "Al Qaeda" is much to do about nothing and always has been. The emperor is naked and running through the courtyard with a great big barrel of oil.

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Gods of War, Gods of Greed and Profiteers of Misery

by Manuel Valenzuela

“The process of transformation [American empire building]…is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
--- From PNAC plan entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century, endorsed by neocons in the Bush Administration, the corporate media and Washington think-tanks. Ingrained in the plan are ever-increasing levels of military spending, incessant empire building, pre-emptive invasions and, inherently, a perpetual state of war and fear.

Like bolts of lightning sent from the gods above, airline jets appeared out of parting skies, slamming thunderously into grandeurs of human achievement, transforming towering monuments of steel and glass into blinding avalanches of ashen dust and debris that have yet to clear from the residue-filled eyes of most Americans. The omnipresent haze that remains is deeply entrenched into our primitive and mammalian brain, reawakening dormant animalistic passions and emotions that are corroding our ability to think like the human beings we claim to be.

Like a pathogen this malady exists, attaching itself to the cells of reason and analytical thinking, infecting us with fear, insecurity, paranoia, hatred, anger, vengeance and a blind, degenerative patriotism that has placed the future course of American history in the claws of a small cabal of corrupt, malevolent and warmongering few.

They are the military-industrial complex (MIC) and the Corporate Leviathan, and the gods of war and greed they are called. This powerful group of elite is comprised of profiteers of misery, purveyors of death, immoral scoundrels addicted to power and debased monsters whose faces are stained with the blood of thousands upon thousands of innocent human beings. For them, the horrors perpetrated on 9/11 were the Pearl Harbor they had long been seeking.

It was on that day that the misery of millions became the fortune of a few thousand. It was on that day that the MIC and the Corporate Leviathan wrestled ultimate control from the people of the world, usurping global power and forever altering the future of humanity. Our 9/11 became their Pearl Harbor, a moment in time needed to unleash already predetermined plans to expand power and control on a now easily manipulated and mobilized citizenry. The greatest profiteers in the history of the United States were now free to release their hounds of war, conquest, greed and violence upon the rest of civilization.

On that fateful day, particles of asbestos, computers, furniture, glass, concrete and other pathogens that would eventually kill thousands had yet to settle on the street of New York and already the gods of war and greed were busy implementing their plans for empire expansion, wars for profit and revenue, battles for control, and mobilization of a perpetual war economy. Those entities with vested interests at home and those with vested interests abroad joined forces to spawn the greatest manipulation of a population in the history of the world, one that would lie, connive, distort, deceive and condition its way towards the bloody fields of war from where the human mind rarely, if ever, escapes from.

The military-industrial complex and the Corporate Leviathan, controlling government, the media and the mind of the psychologically fragile post-9/11 American citizen, quickly unfolded designs for mobilizing the richest nation on Earth towards war. All mechanisms at its disposal were used to guide America and its people down the path of invasion, death and occupation. The engines were started, the assembly lines turned on and the conveyor belts of the war machine were soon warmed up, eager to excrete instruments of death in exchange for the benefits of the grandest pilferage of the American taxpayer in the entire history of the United States.

The neocon/Likud, MIC and Leviathan cabal’s Pearl Harbor was a godsend from above, manna from heaven blessed by the gods of war and greed, the exact instrument the group of profit, greed and warmongers had been seeking for years. With the death of 3000 citizens of the world a new course of history had begun, designed years before, now being written page by page and chapter by chapter with the blood-soaked pen of those now guiding us through paths unknown inside dark and ominous forests from which humanity has never emerged out of.

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Wednesday 18 August 2004

De Facto Dictatorship USA

In case you're thinking the UK is any different, it isn't and we've been under the thumb of the elite for a lot longer, they've just fully extended their control over the USA now as well. Our governments are not the force for good we think they are, in fact they are exactly the opposite of that. They are creating a world where corporations are the boss and we are all slaves.

by Leon Fisher

Uncle Sam wants YOU to die for big business Powerful interests from within and without have collectively, and over time, by means of bribery, intimidation, blackmail, and assassination, usurped the Constitutionally-mandated government of the United States.

We are now living in a de facto dictatorship.

In the White House, we have an unelected idiot with name recognition only, useful only for those who installed him there and very little else.

In order to remain in control of the government in Washington, and to perpetuate the power of the Oligarchs, only candidates acceptable to the Oligarchs will be tolerated.
These candidates already exist, commonly called "career politicians" or "Washington insiders," etc., and any other candidates, any candidates espousing opinions and policies contrary to that of the Oligarchs, never make it past the primaries.

Both Houses of Congress are little more than a rubber stamp, with voting records proving a willingness to support legislation favorable to the ruling elite, contrary to the good of the people. As for the Supreme Court, its part in the criminal theft of the 2000 presidential election, helping precipitate the events of September 11, 2001, will live forever in infamy.

Among the many special interest groups and powerful lobbies whose wealth and influence have stolen the voice of the people, there exists an entity without conscience or loyalty, whose greed is insatiable, capable of any act which will advance its agenda. I will refer to this entity henceforth as the Oligarchs.

The dictionary defines the word 'oligarch' as a member a small exclusive class in which the supreme power of government has been placed in their hands. Although power is firmly in the hands of the Oligarchs, they remain anonymous, a shadow government.

To create the perception of normalcy for the average citizen, and to keep the more petty and mundane duties of government going, career politicians are used. But matters of real importance are decided in advance and in private by members of the Oligarchy, and only later are a powerless President and Congress allowed to engage in empty debate, and to cast a useless vote or a veto, all for the benefit of the citizenry to further the illusion of legitimacy.

Elections, an important aspect of a democracy and an indispensable exercise of a free people, are allowed to continue, but this of course has become just another illusion to keep the general public ignorant and manageable.

In order to remain in control of the government in Washington, and to perpetuate the power of the Oligarchs, only candidates acceptable to the Oligarchs will be tolerated. These candidates already exist, commonly called "career politicians" or "Washington insiders," etc., and any other candidates, any candidates espousing opinions and policies contrary to that of the Oligarchs, never make it past the Primaries.

Critisized or ignored by the mainstream media and rejected by their respective political parties, not even a candidate with popular grassroots support stands a chance. We have seen this happen many times in the recent past.

The Oligarchs have our candidates chosen for us, and there is nothing we can do about it.

Voting therefore has become irrelevant.

The freedom born in 1776 is no more.



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How and Why Woolsey and Clinton Saved the CIA

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Part 3


When Viktor Gunnarsson, a leading suspect in the assassination of Sweden's statsminister Olof Palme, was himself assassinated on, its seems, the night of December 3, 1993, only his murderer or murderers, and people working with them knew it had happened, and that his body had been disposed of in a very inaccessible place, Deep Gap, 110 miles away on an access road off U.S. Route 421, outside Boone, North Carolina. For the rest of the world, Gunnarsson had simply disappeared from where he lived in Salisbury.

For the people who murdered Gunnarsson, this limbo became almost immediately intolerable since it risked his body not being found soon enough to convict anyone of the crime - what would just compound the problems surrounding Palme's unsolved assassination. Börje Wingren had recently given cause for a wide variety of people wanting to kill Gunnarsson by writing Han Sköt Olof Palme, claiming that Gunnarsson had confessed to the killing in Stockholm. With Gunnarsson simply disappearing, though, the book, instead of putting the finishing touches on Palme's demise, would merely inflame conspiracy theories about the whole affair.

The plan to blame Gunnarsson's murder on former Salisbury policeman L. C. Underwood also hit an unexpected snag because he had an alibi for where he was when it apparently occurred. According to the sworn testimony of Rick Hillard and Shirley Scott at Underwood's trial, he was at home with Scott at 11:40 p.m. on the night of December 3rd, and he was still there when she left 45 minutes later. (Testimony, Vol. 1, p. 45) It would have taken Underwood another 15 minutes to go to Gunnarsson's apartment; some time to subdue the considerably bigger man, tie him up with tape, and bundle him silently out of the second-floor complex into his car; and drive two hours to Deep Gap where Gunnarsson was executed, and hide the body after another difficult struggle.

Around this time, beleaguered Bill Clinton was beginning to gain some respite from all his difficulties in the White House, especially those surrounding Vince Foster's suicide. Chief of the former Arkansas Governor's security BuddyYoung coerced the state troopers threatening to tell all about Clinton's immoral and illegal activites - especially in light of Luther 'Jerry' Parks's murder in September - into shutting up. David Hale, whose Small Business Administration loan to Clinton cronies Susan and Jim McDougal had permitted them to go ahead with the grandiose Castle Grande development, was indicted on September 23rd for making three false statements about it. Roger Altman, acting head of the Resolution Trust Corporation which was appointed to clean up the whole S and L scandal, alerted the White House of the referrals affecting the Clintons, and presided over their handling on October 14th in a way which least hurt them. (For details about all this, see James B. Stewart, Blood Sport, p. 168ff.)

Moreover, Clinton's bold approach for dealing with his enemies, - where nothing was ruled out, even murder - was beginning to have unexpected dividends. CIA's interest in getting rid of Gunnarsson stirred the Swedish police investigating Palme's assassination to question former officer, and friend of Gunnarsson's Bror Perä about their activities in the months leading up to the statsminister's shooting, what resulted in his committing suicide. Five days after Palme's killing, Penä had told friend Lars Lundberg, after he had been questioned by Danish police about the Stockholm shooting, that he had been involved. Up until then, investigation of this Nazi group had been left to the Swedish Security Service, Säpo, whose liberties with Palme's security, especially with Britain's MI5, had led to his undoing.

On August 15th, Jon Parnell Walker, a Resolution Trust Corporation investigator looking into the Clintons' involvement in the operation of Jim McDougal's bankrupt Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, jumped or was pushed to his death from the balcony of his Arlington, Va. apartment. The RTC criminal referral in the Madison Guaranty case from the Kansas City office to the Justice Department in Washington had dropped the previous year's language that their involvement might mean something more than their being simply potential witnesses - what leaks to important reporters in the press about its mere existence resulted in the Justice Department's Criminal Divsion even dropping a criminal investigation of it in late October.

Then there was another suicíde when Gunnarsson's murder was being set up to take place - what greatly deflated all the conspiracy theories about Vince Foster's death. During the Clintons' pursuit of the White House, they attracted the attention of the Edward E. Willey, Jrs., the wife of whom became famous for her claims of groping by the President in the Oval Office after the Monica Lewinsky story broke. The husband was the son of a famous Virginia state politician who hoped to parlay funds he made in the S and L bonanza into an important appointed post. Of course, when the Clintons surfaced as real comers in the process, the Willeys latched on to them, even flying out specially to Little Rock after Clinton was elected President to celebrate.

The only trouble with Ed Willey was that he could not play the game successfully. While he had all the right connections and many political positions to exploit, he, unlike Slick Willie, just went further and further in debt - what he tried to hide by borrowing from his friends and insurance policies, withholding rent payments in return for alleged legal services, and ultimately just stealing $255,000 from a client in a Richmond civil works project. Perhaps, the most embarrassing debt Willey incurred was the $52,000 loan from well-known Randolph Cosby, Sr. - what was only repaid because of action by the executors of his estate, and at the expense of a life insurance policy.

While the pattern reminds one of the Clintons in the State House in LIttle Rock, and at the Rose Law Firm, they at least had considerable sums coming in, and they did not live anywhere near as high on the hog as the Willeys - what the truly rich Smith Bagleys were able to afford. Elizabeth Frawley Bagley was shortly thereafter appointed US Ambassador to Portugal, a position like Kathleen Willey truly wanted.

When Willey's clients cheated out of their quarter million brought a suit against him before the Virginia Bar Association's disciplinary committee to disbar him, he decided to kill himself since his life was in ruins. By doing so, his worthless estate would be worth $350,000, and he would not have to suffer the indignity of disbarment. Earlier on the day Willey shot himself, his wife Kathleen had the appointment with Clinton in the Oval Office to convert her volunteer service at the White House Social Office into a permanent, paying position. Once it resulted in a commitment to a post in the White House Counsel's Office - what the groping charge was intended to cover up - Ed shot himself outside Richmond.

By showing that suicides, and S and L problems were not the difficulties solely of the Clintons, America's secret government was encouraged to take greater risks in the Gunnarsson debacle. The Oval Office and the CIA could not afford to wait for the possible discovery of his body. Perhaps, it would be chewed up by various carnivores beyond recognition It might well be spring before it was found, and by that time, any chance of connecting the murder to Underwood would have been lost.

North Carolina is a state, though, in which appeals of murder convictions would allow the probative introduction of nearly identical crimes, provided they apparently were committed by the same weapons, in the same manner, in the same time frame, and by the same suspect or suspects. It was, consequently, essential that a similar murder be conducted immediately, and that Gunnarsson's body be found shortly.

The recognition of taking advantage of this circumstantial pathway in the law in the botched Gunnarsson murder almost immediately surfaced. The killing was botched since no killers in their right mind would try to set someone up when he clearly had an alibi, and then compound the problem by disposing of the body in such a faraway, inaccessible place that the chances of finding it soon were practically nil.

It was only found five weeks later by state highway worker Jeff Winkler when he was making his rounds on January 7, 1994. The killers should have made it fairly obvious that foul play had occurred at Gunnarsson's apartment, and fairly quickly that Underwood had done it by disposing of the body nearby in a rather crude manner. The only unexpected thing about his apartment was that he was nowhere to be seen.

The killers showed their greatest unease over the matter when three men were seen by Kay Weden outside Gunnarson's apartment at 10 p.m. on December 5th. She was concerned about his whereabouts, and well-being, and she thought one of them might be Gunnarsson as he was wearing his brown leather jacket, though she was too far away to be sure. Inexplicably, she then withdrew without making sure or contact, though she did observe them leaving in a car, and without informing the police of possibly finding the missing Gunnarsson. (Trial, Vol. I, p. 169)

The day before, Clara Sowers and her daughter Mary Ann saw, it seems, Gunnarsson and his friend Wolfgang Nailing returning in an SUV from the area where the body was ultimately discovered, though before they could make positive identification of Gunnarsson, he had somehow disappeared from the now parked vehicle, leaving in his place, though, signs of blood, tape like Gunnarsson had been bound with, and a gun.

It seems most apparent that the killers had been in the process of retrieving Gunnarsson's gold watch which had been left in the apartment when he was bumdled out of it naked from the shower, and putting it on the corpse to make sure that he could be positively identified when found.

On December 9th, there was a surreptious entry of the home of Kay Weden's mother, Catherine Miller, and she was executed in gangland style with two .38 caliber bullets shot into her head at close range. There was a feeble attempt to make the murder look like the result of a robbery, with plastic cards from her wallet scattered nearby, but nothing of value had been stolen from her residence. Mrs Miller's deceased husband had owned a lucrative hardware store in Salisbury, and all his property had been willed to his wife. Kay Weden was the sole beneficiary in her mother's will.

The Miller killing recalled what the Mafia-infested Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) - whose president Arthur Coia had been so instrumental in securing Clinton's election (For more, see my article in the Archive about why old Democrats dread the publishing of his memoirs.) - did to squealers, and to hitmen who messed up their silencing, provided that it is put in the proper national security context. The Gunnarsson and Miller murders seem to have been ones Clinton helped arrange for the Agency's sake and his own.

The precedent for them was provided in 1983 when the head of LIUNA's Local # l in Chicago Vincent Solano arranged the murder of Ken Eto for fear that he might squeal about all its illegal operations. Two hitmen, consequently, shot him three times in the head, but Eto somehow managed to survive, resulting in his doing what Solano only suspected and feared. Five months later, the hitmen were slowly tortured to death, "a warning to other mobsters not to flab their assignments." The killers of Gunnarsson and Miller showed that they needed no reminding to do their duty but they tailored the latter one too much to suit Underwood's apparent capability, using, it seems, his .38 caliber pistol after he had turned it in when resigning from the force in November.

Actually, Gunnarsson was killed because he was threatening more than ever to squeal about the Stockholm shooting, thanks to Börje Wingren's libelling him. The morning of his murder, he had taken friend Daniel Johansson to the Charlotte Airport for his flight back to the Swedish capital, and by the time Johansson left, he had gotten an earful of what Gunnarsson planned to do with those who would make him a scapegoat for a world-threatening murder, or put words in his mouth. His killers had no doubt about what he was up to - putting him bound, gagged, and naked in the trunk of a car for a two-hour drive to his site of execution, where it was carried out by dragging him up to 50-foot high ridge, shooting him twice around the head, and dumping him down the deep gap. It was far more terrifying than most state-sponsored executions.

Mrs. Miller's murder, of course, had a tonic effect upon Kay Weden too. Right after it occurred, she told Rowan County Sheriff's officers that she was the one who was upset over the breakup with Underwood when she saw him with another woman a few days later; that an officer of the State Bureau of Investigation, Mike Culnan, tried to get her to implicate Underwood in some trouble at her house the previous March; that it was Underwood's friend, Danny Hilliard, who had caused most of the trouble when she had had dinner with David Sumner in November; that the last time she and Underwood talked before the murder "...ended up on good terms"; and that she "...does not believe L. C. Underwood killed her mother." (Case No.: 1-93-003336 ROWAN COUNTY SHERIFFS OFFICE, Witness Statement, 12-09-93)

Salisbury Post Jonathan Weaver still wrote a most provocative article about Underwood for that day's edition, volunteering that he claimed that he hadn't killed Mrs. Miller though no one had asked him if he had. Mrs. Weden told Weaver that she was concerned that Gunnarsson had not called, as they were planning to find a tree together to celebrate the Christmas holidays, and that relatives in Sweden had called because they had not heard from him for a few days since Johansson's return. "I felt," Weden told Weaver, "that if something happened (to Gunnarsson), it was connected to L. C."

By the time Gunnarsson's body was found five weeks later, Mrs. Weden, increasingly afraid that she would be suspected of the murder which finally solved all her financial problems unless another suspect quickly surfaced, completely changed her story. In a series of articles in the Salisbury Post, mostly written by Weaver, she volunteered that the connection between Gunnarsson's murder and her mother's was L. C. Underwood. Then she added to her statement about getting jealous with Underwood when she saw him with another woman at Spencer's Restaurant on December 6th that before her friends had arrived, he had told her that her mother "...had ruined their relationship and that he wished something would happen to Miller so Weden would know what he felt." (No. CO A98-648: State of North Carolina v. Lamont Claxton Underwood)


Then the attempt by SBI officer Culnan to set up Underwood in some kind of plot at Weden's house the previous March because someone was sending her anonymous, threatening letters, and damaging its garage doors was made out to be all her ex-lover's conniving: "L. C. had convinced me that there was a conspiracy to get him off the police force, to fire him, and for some reason that I never understood that the SBI had it in for him." (Jonathan Weaver "A body found...," Salisbury Post, January 7, 1994)

In fact, by the end of January, claims of Underwood's murderous activity had become so commonplace that the Watauga County Sheriff's Department, led by Sgt. Paula Townsend, put together a 10 and 1/2-page affidavit dealing with them - what resulted in the issuance of a warrant to search his house which was unprecedentedly published in the newspaper. On February 1st, while Underwood was away, his house was searched by a team led by SBI detective Don Gale, and its most important find were lengths of electrical tape, attached to the water line behind the washer and dryer, which were consistent with those which had bound up Gunnarsson's body. Apparently, Underwood, to avoid suspicion in Gunnarsson's murder, had hidden the tape in a most awkward way behind the appliances rather than simply dump it in the trash.

With his murder being firmly fixed on suspect Underwood - and one can just imagine the discomfort and fear he felt for having apparently committed such hateful murders in the community - CIA finally moved to arrest its Rick Ames for spying for the Soviets. During the past four months, the joint CIA-FBI mole hunt had come up with all kinds of new evidence of his spying, but had been unable to catch him passing it on to the Russians, or being paid for it, though it was not for want of trying. Efforts to catch him servicing dead letter drops, and meeting Soviet handlers always failed because of some unexpected slipup or mishap, not all of its own doing. Ames seems to have known that he was under the most intense surveillance.

The only disturbing new evidence it had found was the torn-up note in Ames's trash on October 6th, indicating that he, for some inexplicable reason, had been working not only with the KGB but also with the Russian Federal Ministry for Security (MBRF), the primary organization conducting counter intelligence investigations in the USSR. The Bureau seemed to think that the Soviet system was like the American one, with only the MBRF having a role in domestic counter intelligence cases.

Actually, the KGB's Directorate K was concerned with counter intelligence, as was dramatically demonstrated when it was rewarded profusely after the Stockholm shooting was not chalked up at Moscow's expense. (David Wise, Nightmover; p. 327, n.) When the FBI shortly learned of this oversight, it so pursued the Agency for more spies, resulting in Brian Kelly being placed on permanent leave on suspicion of spying, and helping the Bureau's spy, Robert Hanssen, escape disclosure for another eight years.

During February, the American intelligence community's leadership played cat-and-mouse with Ames in a way to crush him as best it could, while making President Clinton come out smelling like roses. (For details, see, e.g., Wise, p. 248ff.) With NSA Tony Lake now briefing Clinton daily on the state of the spy's exposure and capture, though the President, of course, did not know the individual's name to show that it apparently had neither a political nor a political motive, the CIA prepared Ames for his scheduled visit to Turkey, Romania, and the USSR where he would consult with his Russian handlers about how to deal with the growing narcotics trade at a drug conference, while the joint mole hunt closed in on him.

To fire Ames's hopes and ambitions, it was even suggested that he would brief the President himself on his mission, but it was reduced to several agents, including Ames but without revealing what he was, briefing various senior members of the NSC about what was in the works, insuring that the Preisdent was still insulated from what was going on. "Lake," Wise added, "approved the bogus briefing, which took place at CIA headquarters." (p. 250) In addition to the bogus briefing, DCI Woolsey made it seem that Ames would definitely be going to Moscow - what threw the molehunters into a panic until deputy CI chief Paul Redmond gave the thumbs-up for Ames's immediate arrest. This correctly occurred on President's Day, the federal holiday on February 21, the day before his scheduled departure.

The whole process had worked like a charm, with the biggest troublemakers disposed of in various ways, the President coming out of the crisis without a scratch, and the Agency finally showing some get-up-and-go when it came to its problems, especially internal ones. The lesson would be well learned by Prime Minister Tony Blair when he had to dispose of a similar troublemaker, Dr. David Kelly, turning all the dirty bits over to Campbell, Powell, Scarlett, and Dearlove when the time came, though President George W. Bush characteristically made a bit of a hash of the bit with Ambassador Joe Wilson and agent Valerie Plame when his time came.

Still, the CIA and the President had much left to do in the Ames case, as we shall see in subsequent articles.