FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

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msfreeh
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Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

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see link for full story
http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/14/3 ... leges.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Thursday, 02.14.13
Top FBI agent in Seattle alleges sexual bias, claims superiors undercut her


WASHINGTON -- The Seattle-based FBI special agent who oversees all bureau operations in Washington state is embroiled in a legal fight with officials who she says have discriminated against her and undermined her work.

In a revealing lawsuit that partially cleared a key hurdle Thursday, Special Agent-in-Charge Laura M. Laughlin complained that she has been denied at least 10 promotions since she took over the FBI’s Seattle field office in early 2005. She also asserts she’s been pressured since 2007 to retire from the high-profile position and has been denied requests for added staffing.

“As a combined effect of all these matters, she is not respected as a leader by her subordinates and management chain in the way that (special agents-in-charge) normally are,” attorneys David Wachtel and Eliza Dermody wrote in one legal brief.

On Thursday, in a 31-page decision, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates sided with the FBI in dismissing some of the complaint that Laughlin filed in 2011. Bates, for instance, rejected Laughlin’s age discrimination claim with the observation that “pressure to retire, without more, does not constitute objectively tangible harm.” Laughlin turned 55 last year. Bates also dismissed Laughlin’s claims that the FBI created a hostile work environment through its actions.

“The acts span a period of several years and were relatively infrequent,” Bates concluded, adding that “these isolated incidents are not fairly characterized as pervasive.”

But in a blow to the agency that Laughlin joined in 1985, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Bates said the longtime law enforcement officer can proceed with her sex discrimination and retaliation claims.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/14/3 ... rylink=cpy" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

Post by msfreeh »

How else would you expect a taxpayer funded crime family to behave?

see link for how your taxpayer funded workfare program for sociopaths is working

http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/ ... rsxml.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

February 15, 2013
Visiting Libyan doctor reports harsh treatment by FBI

Three Libyan doctors, visiting Boston and Seattle to begin a health-care partnership with U.S. physicians, say they were detained and interrogated as soon as they arrived in the U.S.





When Dr. Laila Taher Bugaighis landed in the United States with two other Libyan physicians Sunday, all she was expecting was the beginning of an exciting partnership with hospitals in Seattle and Boston — one that would help elevate sorely lacking health care in her own country.

The partnership was the kind of outreach former U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens had been trying to create when he was killed in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11. His sister, Seattle Children’s Dr. Anne Stevens, has since collaborated with Dr. Thomas Burke of Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital to make that dream happen.

So it shocked everyone when, as soon as they landed in Boston, Bugaighis and the other physicians were immediately detained by people she believed to be Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and then interrogated for hours, she said.

Bugaighis, deputy director general of Benghazi Medical Center, hadn’t been to the United States since before Stevens’ death. So when their passports were taken and their baggage searched, Bugaighis said, she thought the security measures might be routine, considering the current uneasy relations between Libya and United States. The trip, after all, had been cleared through her government and the U.S. State Department.

But then the group was put in a van, driven to another part of Logan Airport, isolated and interrogated, Bugaighis said. Though agents weren’t rough on the two other physicians — Dr. Naseralla El Saadi and Dr. Naeima Gaubaa — Bugaighis said agents were harsh with her and called her names so offensive she wanted to leave the country immediately.

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

Post by msfreeh »

If you are an activist being tracked by the FBI and someone tries to kill you
and you make a call on your cell phone to get help and alert someone
the FBI has the ability to misdirect your phone call
File under George Orwell just tweeted Charles Darwin and said "LOL"

see link for how the FBI crime family spends your tax dime
Oh, just a reminder . The FBI is just three letters of the alphabet.
Three letters of the alphabet are not doing this. People with names are. Do you
know who they are? Do you know where they live? Nah.......


http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense ... cking.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI Files Unlock History Behind Clandestine Cellphone Tracking Tool

Friday, Feb. 15, 2013

FBI documents show how easy it is for them to monitor your movements using cellphones



It was described recently by one rights group as a “secretive new surveillance tool.” But documents just released by the FBI suggest that a clandestine cellphone tracking device known as the “Stingray” has been deployed across the United States for almost two decades—despite questions over its legality.

Stingrays, as I’ve reported here before, are portable surveillance gadgets that can trick phones within a specific area into hopping onto a fake network. The feds call them “cell-site simulators” or “digital analyzers,” and they are sometimes also described as “IMSI catchers.” The FBI says it uses them to target criminals and help track the movements of suspects in real time, not to intercept communications. But because Stingrays by design collaterally gather data from innocent bystanders’ phones and can interrupt phone users’ service, critics say they may violate a federal communications law.

A fresh trove of FBI files on cell tracking, some marked “secret,” was published this week by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. They shed light on how, far from being a “new” tool used by the authorities to track down targets, Stingray-style technology has been in the hands of the feds since about 1995 (at least). During that time, local and state law enforcement agencies have also been able to borrow the spy equipment in “exceptional circumstances,” thanks to an order approved by former FBI Director Louis Freeh.

EPIC, a civil liberties group, obtained the documents through ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation that it is pursuing in order to get the feds to hand over some 25,000 pages of documents that relate to Stingray tools, about 6,000 of which are classified. The FBI has been drip-releasing the documents monthly, and there have been a couple of interesting nuggets in the batches so far—like a disclosure that the FBI has a manual called “cell tracking for dummies” and details hinting that the feds are well aware the use of Stingrays is in shaky legal territory.

The latest release, amounting to some 300 selectively redacted pages, not only suggests that sophisticated cellphone spy gear has been widely deployed since the mid-‘90s. It reveals that the FBI conducted training sessions on cell tracking techniques in 2007 and around the same time was operating an internal "secret" website with the purpose of sharing information and interactive media about "effective tools" for surveillance. There are also some previously classified emails between FBI agents that show the feds joking about using the spy gear. "Are you smart enough to turn the knobs by yourself?" one agent asks a colleague.

On a more serious note, EPIC attorney Alan Butler told me he believes the release raises further legal questions about the technology. It shows that the bureau has been classifying the use of “cellsite simulator” as a “pen register device,” following guidance issued by the Department of Justice. “Pen register” is a term used to describe a type of surveillance that does not usually require a search warrant because it records only metadata—the who, where, and when of a communication but not the content. However, Butler pointed out, a June 2012 ruling in the Southern District of Texas found that Stingrays should require a warrant, with the judge concluding that “the government has not provided any support that the pen register statute applies to stingray equipment.”

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

Post by msfreeh »

The backstory is how is the FBI crime family still able to get taxpayer
funding with the mounting evidence they were principal architects behind the assassination
of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King?
google mlk douglass rockwell

google the guilty men youtube jfk

Watch the 45 minute version


see link for full story
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/p ... -behind-pe" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



F.B.I. destroyed file on Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, 'Times' publisher behind the Pentagon Papers
fbi-destroyed-file-arthur-ochs-sulzberger-times-publisher-behind-pe

Feb. 16, 2013

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has destroyed its file on Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the late New York Times publisher who defied the federal government in the twilight of J. Edgar Hoover’s reign, Capital has learned.

The file’s existence and its destruction were acknowledged to Capital by the F.B.I. through the National Archives and Records Administration.

Sulzberger’s 1971 decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the Vietnam War, was met with an unprecedented federal restraining order and angered the administration of President Richard M. Nixon at a time the White House was instructing F.B.I. Director Hoover to provide them with damaging personal information on journalists who crossed the White House.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, F.B.I. records pertaining to Sulzberger became accessible upon his death on Sept. 29, 2012, but the Sulzberger file had been destroyed less than 10 months earlier.

I filed a Freedom of Information request with the F.B.I. in October, and they replied 11 weeks later to say that unreviewed but potentially responsive records had been sent to the National Archives. I then filed a second Freedom of Information request with the National Archives.

“We could not locate the file among our holdings and contacted the FBI for assistance,” the National Archives’ chief of Special Access and FOIA staff responded on Tuesday. “The FBI has informed us that the file was destroyed on December 1, 2011, according to an authorized agency records disposition schedule.”

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

Post by msfreeh »

see link for full story
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2003/au ... el-cooler/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


FBI agent pays fine in shooting into hotel cooler

Aug. 29, 2003

An FBI agent who fired two rounds into a walk-in cooler at a Strip hotel in May has paid the Barbary Coast $12,517 for the damage and paid a $105 fine after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge, authorities said.

John Hanson III still faces investigation by his agency, said Special Agent Todd Palmer, spokesman for the FBI Las Vegas office.

Police reports indicate that Hanson, who was in Las Vegas to attend an accounting seminar, was caught on surveillance cameras firing his .45-caliber handgun into the walk-in cooler. No one was inside at the time, although there was a lobster.

Hanson was charged only with a misdemeanor because of the late-night time of the incident, and the fact that the freezer was in a back area with no one inside, District Attorney David Roger said.


Roger said Hanson did not receive preferential treatment in court.

msfreeh
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Posts: 7684

Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

Post by msfreeh »

FBI agents open file on Betty Friedan while planning assassination of MLK


see link for full story

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/books ... d=all&_r=0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Criticisms of a Classic Abound
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: February 18, 2013

When the proposal for a book about the plight of the American housewife by a little-known journalist named Betty Friedan began circulating at the publishing house W. W. Norton in early 1959, not everyone was convinced that it was a world-changing blockbuster.
Marilyn K. Yee/The New York Times

“The Feminine Mystique,” by Betty Friedan, seen in 1980, is commonly hailed as the book that started second-wave feminism.
The Feminine Mystique, 50 Years Later

Watch a roundtable moderated by Gail Collins about why women are still frustrated 50 years after the publication of “The Feminine Mystique.”

True, George Brockway, Norton’s president (and a suburban father of six), was enthusiastic, writing on the official evaluation form, “Overstated at almost every point, yet entirely stimulating and provocative,” to which two other employees added, “I’m for it!”

But in a two-page memo to Brockway, preserved in the Norton archives at Columbia University, another employee identified only as “L M” laid out a withering dissent.

Friedan’s theories were “too obvious and feminine,” L M wrote, her approach was “unscientific,” her remarks on Freud were “snide,” her depiction of suburban life was selectively self-serving, and her excoriating portrait of women’s magazines was motivated by “guilt” over her own contributions to them.

Besides, L M concluded, “I got very tired of phrases like ‘feminine mystique.’ ”

That phrase, of course, became famous when “The Feminine Mystique” was published, 50 years ago on Tuesday, to wide acclaim and huge sales, and it remains enduring shorthand for the suffocating vision of domestic goddess-hood Friedan is credited with helping demolish. But her book has been shadowed by its share of critics ever since, including many otherwise sympathetic scholars who have doggedly chipped away at its own mystique.

Friedan, who died in 2006, was not just the frustrated “housewife” of her official biography, they point out, but a former left-wing journalist and activist whose jeremiad appeared in a climate that was more primed to receive it than she might have admitted.

“The Feminine Mystique” tends to be hailed simply as “the book that started second-wave feminism,” said Lisa M. Fine, a historian at Michigan State University and a co-editor of the first annotated scholarly edition, just published by Norton. “But it’s a much more complicated text.”

Indeed, some cracking its spine for the first time — as more than one commentator on the 50th anniversary has sheepishly confessed to doing — may be surprised at just how scholarly the book is. Friedan, who claimed she gave up a prestigious Ph.D. fellowship in psychology after a boyfriend said it would threaten their relationship, spent years in the New York Public Library, digging as deeply into the theories of Freud, Margaret Mead, A. H. Maslow and David Riesman as into the women’s magazines she blasted for perpetuating the mythology of the “happy housewife.”

Today that immersion in midcentury social science may make the book feel dated and more of a symbolic totem than a direct inspiration to current feminists. But to historians “The Feminine Mystique” remains a rich keyhole into the popular culture of the 1950s — even if, as scholars increasingly argue, that decade was far less monolithic in its stultifying conformism than Friedan’s best seller suggested. In an influential 1993 paper on postwar popular culture, the historian Joanne Meyerowitz argued that mass-circulation magazines of the 1950s frequently profiled women with careers, although the articles emphasized the importance of maintaining a traditional feminine identity.

More recently, other scholars have pointed out that readers encountering “The Feminine Mystique” through the excerpts that appeared in women’s magazines might not have heard an entirely empowering message. In “Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America” (2010), the historian Rebecca Jo Plant argued that to many readers, the book seemed less like a progressive rallying cry than a continuation of the housewife-bashing of books like Philip Wylie’s 1942 best seller, “Generation of Vipers,” which blamed over-involved mothers for all manner of social ills.

For all she got right, Ms. Plant wrote, “Friedan missed — indeed, she contributed to — the frustrations many women felt due to a cultural climate that constantly denigrated mothers and homemakers.”

Still, few historians quarrel with the idea that the book galvanized women, including some who would hardly seem like natural political allies of a writer who (as the historian Daniel Horowitz revealed in his 1998 biography, to Friedan’s displeasure) cut her teeth as a reporter for radical newspapers and had a file with the F.B.I.

msfreeh
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Posts: 7684

Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

Post by msfreeh »

https://www.eff.org/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


CISPA, the Privacy-Invading Cybersecurity Spying Bill, is Back in Congress

It's official: CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, has been reintroduced in the House of Representatives. It's the contentious bill that would provide a poorly-defined "cybersecurity" exception to existing privacy law. CISPA offers broad immunities to companies who choose to share data with government agencies -- including the private communications of users -- in the name of cybersecurity. It also creates avenues for companies to share data with any federal agencies, including military intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency.

EFF is adamantly opposed to CISPA. Join us in calling on Congress to stop this and any other privacy-invasive cybersecurity legislation.
New Bill Helps Expand Public Access to Scientific Knowledge

Internet users around the world got a Valentine's Day present last week in the form of new legislation that requires U.S. government agencies to improve public access to federally funded research. Under the bill's proposal, agencies like the National Science Foundation, which invests millions of taxpayer dollars in scientific research every year, must design and implement a plan to facilitate public access to -- and robust reuse of -- the results of that investment.
Rebooting Computer Crime Law: The Punishment Should Fit the Crime

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act's broad language and draconian penalty scheme allows overreaching prosecutors to abuse their discretion. This can turn minor incidents with no real harm into serious criminal prosecutions, with the threat of long prison sentences and the consequences that go along with a felony conviction -- like not being able to vote. Computer crime can be serious and law enforcement should properly investigate and prosecute those who use computers to cause financial harm and violate the privacy of others. But at the same time, punishments should fit crimes.

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

Post by msfreeh »

see both links
1st link
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2002-0 ... -fbi-agent" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
2nd link

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2002-0 ... del-county" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Probe of FBI shooting begins
June 26, 2002|

A grand jury investigating an FBI agent's mistaken shooting of an unarmed Pasadena man in March began taking testimony yesterday, with the wounded 20-year-old as one of the first witnesses.

The Anne Arundel County grand jury is expected to hear many more witnesses as it considers whether to indict FBI Special Agent Christopher Braga for shooting Joseph Charles Schultz on March 1 as Schultz and his girlfriend returned from a trip to a mall.

Braga mistook Schultz for a bank robbery suspect the agent and his unit were searching for that day and shot him in the face with an M-4 rifle.

The FBI admitted the error. Schultz had nothing to do with the bank robbery, and a suspect was arrested two days later.

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

Post by msfreeh »

FBI agents drop charges against pedophile to buy his testimony in another case


1st read
see link for full story
http://www.independentmail.com/news/201 ... itia-case/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Sex offender is new witness in Ga. militia case

February 22, 2013

GAINESVILLE, Ga. — A convicted sex offender from Wisconsin has emerged as a new witness in the federal criminal case against two northeast Georgia men accused of trying to manufacture a deadly toxin.
According to recently filed court papers, inmate David Watts told federal authorities that defendant Ray H. Adams made incriminating statements to him last month while they shared a cell at the Hall County Jail in Gainesville. Watts is serving a 180-year prison sentence after being convicted of kidnapping and five counts of first-degree sexual assault in 1996.
Court papers say Watts told FBI agents in a Jan. 15 interview that Adams said he was “connected with several militias” and that he had hidden 11 containers of a biological agent called ricin. Watts said Adams also told him that he was involved in a plot to blow up the Atlanta Underground, Stone Mountain Park and the Six Flags Over Georgia amusement park.
Adams and Samuel Jerry Crump, both of Toccoa, Ga., are charged with conspiring and attempting to produce ricin. They and two other militia members — Toccoa resident Emory Dan Roberts and Frederick W. Thomas of Cleveland, Ga. — were arrested on Nov. 1, 2011. The four men were between 55 and 73 years old at the time of their arrests.
Roberts and Thomas pleaded guilty to conspiring to obtain a silencer and an unregistered explosive device. Each received a five-year prison sentence last August.
Adams, a retired United States Department of Agriculture lab technician, and Crump are awaiting trial.
Watts submitted to a polygraph examination during his interview with FBI agents last month. According to court papers, the examiner found “no deception indicated” when Watts was asked about Adams’ alleged statements regarding the 11 hidden containers of ricin.
John Horn, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said Friday that FBI agents “are certainly looking into the information that Mr. Watts provided.”
In court documents, a lawyer for Adams has described Watts as an unreliable “Johnny-come lately” jailhouse informant.
If FBI agents thought Watts was telling the truth, they would be “digging up” Adams’ farm in Stephens County to search for the hidden ricin, said attorney Edward D. Tolley of Athens, Ga.
Nancy Krejsa, a spokeswoman for Six Flags, said she was unaware of any plot against the park.
“According to the U.S. attorney’s office in Atlanta, Six Flags was never contacted because the FBI investigated the situation and found no merit to the claim,” she said.
Stone Mountain Park Police Chief Chuck Kelley said he asked state and federal law enforcement agents Friday about whether the comments that Adams allegedly made to Watts should be taken seriously.
Adams was “just bragging to this guy, according to the FBI,” Kelley said.
An FBI spokesman in Atlanta and Underground Atlanta officials did not return phone calls Friday.
Tolley filed a motion last week asking a judge to keep Watts from testifying at the trial of Adams and Crump. The trial, which was scheduled to begin Monday in Gainesville, has been delayed indefinitely.
Watts is not the only sex offender who may take the stand against Adams and Crump during the trial.
Joseph Harold Sims Jr. also is expected to serve as a government witness. Acting as an FBI informant, the 47-year-old Iva man secretly recorded hours of conversations with Adams, Crump, Roberts and Thomas over a seven-month period beginning in March 2011, according to court documents.
Earlier this month, more than 100 sex-related charges against Sims — including offenses such as incest and attempting or committing a lewd act on a child under 16 years of age — were dropped in Anderson County.
As part of a deal with prosecutors, Sims pleaded guilty to 21 counts of third-degree sexual exploitation of a minor. These charges involved images that Sims stored on a computer showing minors engaged in sexual activity, according to indictments in the case. He received a 10-year suspended sentence and one year in prison with credit for 219 days of time served at the county jail following his arrest in March 2010, court record show. He also must register as a sex offender.
Tolley said Adams is “absolutely innocent” and that he doubts testimony from two sex offenders will convince jurors otherwise.
“These are the people that the federal government are using to prosecute two old men,” he said.

msfreeh
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Posts: 7684

Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

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see link for full story
http://www.wwl.com/Orleans-sheriff-s-de ... b/15622545" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Posted: Saturday, 23 February 2013 5:22AM

Orleans sheriff's deputy resigns amid federal probe


WWL.com Reporting
Orleans Parish Sheriff's Deputy John Sens has resigned amid a federal investigation.

Sens was reassigned from director of purchasing when the federal probe began last year. A statement from Sheriff Marlin Gusman's office last June said that Sens had been "relieved of his duties...until recent questions about the construction of the Temporary Detention Center are resolved."



Sources have told WWL that Sens is the focus of that grand jury probe regarding contracts connected to the building of a new temporary jail.
Records showed that 11 change orders were used to drive the price of the temporary jail up from $8.4 million to $9.6 million before it was substantially completed by Alabama-based DRC Group. Authorities are also looking into that company, which is owned by former New Orleans FBI agent Robert Isakson.

msfreeh
Level 34 Illuminated
Posts: 7684

Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

Post by msfreeh »

see link for full story
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/20 ... cumenting/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Settlement to unveil photos, records documenting Ernest Withers' work as FBI informant

By Marc Perrusquia
February 25, 2013
Ernest Withers, who covered many of the major events in the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 60's, in his studio in February 1990.
Photo by Michael McMullan // Buy this photo
Ernest Withers, who covered many of the major events in the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 60's, in his studio in February 1990.
Ernest Withers, at right, was a witness to the turmoil of 1968 in downtown Memphis. (Courtesy Special Collections/University of Memphis Libraries)
Ernest Withers, at right, was a witness to the turmoil of 1968 in downtown Memphis. (Courtesy Special Collections/University of Memphis Libraries)
Ernest Withers Files

Informant: Beloved Memphis photojournalist Ernest Withers, seen in a 1999 photograph, has been identified as one of several racial informants used by the FBI in the 1960s. (Claude Jones/The Commercial Appeal)
Tent City: Withers made this photo of children huddled in the entrance of a tent in Tent City near Somerville, Tenn., in 1960. The dirt-floor tents became homes to black sharecroppers who were kicked off white-owned lands in retaliation for registering to vote. Tent City resulted in the first federal lawsuit brought under the 1957 Civil Rights Act to ensure the right to vote without interference or economic reprisal. (AP Photo/Ernest C. Withers)
Two famous personalities: Johnnie Cochran (right) greets photographer Ernest Withers and his wife Dorothy at a 2001 open house for The Cochran Firm, which just opened an office in One Commerce Square. Cochran was signing copies of his book for those in attendance. (Lance Murphey/The Commercial Appeal)
A bold photographer: Deputy Sheriff Ben Selby searches Ernest Withers at the trial for the accused murderers of Emmett Till in Sumner, Miss., in September 1955. Despite a ban on photography in the courtroom, Withers managed to sneak a shot of Till’s uncle pointing out the accused killers, half-brothers J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who were later acquitted. Till, a 14-year-old African American, had been beaten, shot and tossed in a river after he was thought to have whistled at a white woman. (The Commercial Appeal)
Marching with leaders of the movement: Ernest Withers (right) was there on June 7, 1966, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (left), Rev. James Lawson (center) and others participated in the James Meredith March Against Fear. Meredith had been wounded by a sniper the day before near Hernando, Miss. He was the first African-American enrollee at the University of Mississippi in 1962, an historic act that led to a bloody standoff and the eventual integration at Ole Miss. (Fred Griffith/The Commercial Appeal)
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A legal settlement finalized Monday is expected to unearth photographs and records documenting the late Ernest Withers’ secret work as an FBI informant in Memphis during the civil rights era.
The agreement between the FBI and The Commercial Appeal allows the newspaper to access portions of 70 investigative files in which Withers participated as an informant.
Those 70 cases, ranging from the FBI’s investigation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while in Memphis in 1968 as well as examinations of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP and the black power and peace movements here, represent a fraction of the celebrated photographer’s work for the FBI between 1958 and 1976.
As part of the settlement, the FBI released a statement reporting that agents were authorized to pay Withers $20,088 between 1958 and 1976 but could not confirm how much he actually received.
That’s a signficant sum for the notoriously tightfisted FBI which paid its informants sparingly — the vast majority got nothing. Though the FBI’s Memphis field office had scores of informants reporting on “racial” matters and civil unrest here in 1968, records show only five of those informants were paid. Much of Withers’ pay is believed to have come after 1967.
The settlement also requires the FBI to pay $186,000 in attorney fees and legal costs the newspaper accumulated since filing suit in 2010. In turn, the newspaper agreed to drop its lawsuit, which it did Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington.
The settlement, believed to be the first of its kind involving a civil rights era informant, is expected to provide a rare look inside the FBI’s domestic intelligence operation that kept a close eye on black America in search of Communist and militant influences.

msfreeh
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Posts: 7684

Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

Post by msfreeh »

http://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

see link for full story


UPDATE 2/26/13
Another 3 months have passed. There is no GAO report. There is no indication as to when, or if, a report will ever be issued. This is a disgrace, which more and more looks like a cover-up. Who is afraid of the truth?

***
UPDATE 11/20/12
What we have now learned is that the GAO has apparently
not even started its investigation, more than a year
after they said it would likely be completed.
We’re trying to get a reaction and statement from Congressman Holt’s office.

******

The GAO began its review of the FBI’s investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks in March 2011. At the time they said a report was expected in September 2011. We are now well past that deadline.

DXer believes the longer the GAO takes the better the job they will do. I disagree. I think the longer they take, the more interest will wane, and the more likely there will never be a report, and the whole matter will just fade away.

It is abundantly clear, from this blog and from many other sources, that the FBI’s assertion that Dr. Bruce Ivins was the sole perpetrator of the 2001 attacks, or even that he was involved in any way, is not proven by the evidence the FBI has issued in support of their allegations. The NAS, for instance, was clear that the scientific evidence the FBI said proved Ivins was the perpetrator did no such thing.

The crime is too serious, the current and future implications too dire, to simply leave the matter with a flawed FBI conclusion. America deserves better. It is time for GAO to speak, at the very least to issue a progress report, indicating what they have looked at, what remains to be reviewed, and when they think they will complete their task.

In other words, it is time for the Government Accountability Office to itself be accountable.

******

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: *** 2001 anthrax attacks, *** Amerithrax, *** Dr. Bruce Ivins, *** FBI anthrax investigation, Congressman Rush Holt, GAO review of FBI anthrax investigation, Government Accountability Office | 81 Comments »
* Amerithrax Science Update (B3D1, p. 270) States that Missions By FBI Personnel Detected DNA from the Ames strain of Bacillus anthracis on both the May 2004 and November 2004 Missions; Samples From The First Mission Were Processed By NBFAC and Samples From the Second Mission Were Processed At Aberdeen Proving Ground

msfreeh
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Posts: 7684

Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

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see link for full story
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national ... fbi/51027/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

What J. Edgar Hoover Did to a New York Times Critic of the FBI

In the early 1970s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation considered it pertinent biographical information that The New York Times' Tom Wicker suffered from “mental halitosis.” Since this is not, strictly speaking, a medical condition, they qualified the classification with “apparently.” Internal documents obtained by Capital New York through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the bureau began keeping tabs on Wicker, who died last November, after he published a wide-ranging article for the New York Times Magazine asking, “What Have They Done Since They Shot Dillinger?”

The 1969 article took the F.B.I. to task for expending its resources on bank robberies and sensational murders that garnered them publicity while doing little to no work investigating criminal syndicates and the nuanced financial crimes of much more consequence to the national public interest. Wicker laid the blame at the feet of the man who embodied the bureau—its one and only director, J. Edgar Hoover—for being a practiced P.R. man more than a crime fighter, too concerned with bureaucratic protocol, too slow on civil rights, and too long in the job to right the bureau’s course.

With that article, the F.B.I. began a file on a man they had ignored as “a screwball” despite his having been the Washington bureau chief for the most influential newspaper in the country. It would contain rumors from an unknown third-hand source, a hunt for ulterior motives, and the director’s general disdain. In short, Wicker’s file provides a case study of the personal terms in which the bureau dealt with critical journalists in the final years of Hoover’s reign.

ON MARCH 30, 1970, A LETTER REACHED HOOVER at his desk in F.B.I. headquarters. It had been expedited in its delivery via the director’s “Special Correspondents List,” from a retired special agent named Leon A. Francisco. Francisco felt it his duty to report a conversation he’d had with “an acquaintance of mine here in Washington, Connecticut … a professional writer,” in which he learned that Wicker had received a $60,000 advance—approximately $350,000 today—to write a book “which will attack you and the Bureau.”

“The book is to come out within about six months, and, presumably, will be along the scurrilous lines of Wicker’s New York Times Magazine article of December 28, 1969,” Francisco wrote. His writer friend did not know the name of the publisher, only that his source was reliable and that “a $60,000.00 advance is an unusually large one.”

In an accompanying memo, assistant director for the Criminal Records division Thomas E. Bishop noted that a review of bureau files showed “previous cordial relations” with the professional writer—whose identity was not released as it might constitute an invasion of privacy—“whom we have assisted in connection with his writing.” As for his recommendation on Wicker, Bishop wrote, “This matter is being followed by the Crime Records Division with a view toward obtaining an advance copy of Wicker’s forthcoming book.”

This was not the first they’d heard of a Wicker book. An earlier F.B.I. memo recorded that on the morning of February 9, 1970, Wicker’s research assistant—name redacted—called to request an interview with someone knowledgeable at the bureau to discuss items for a possible book. Wicker, the caller said, “wanted to get the “other side,” that is “both sides,” of the various matters discussed by Wicker concerning the Director and the F.B.I. in the magazine article.”

The caller, who identified himself as “regularly employed as a reporter for Congressional Quarterly,” was likely Dupre Jones, who had managed the Times’ Washington research library and assisted Wicker on his 1968 book, JFK and LBJ. Jones passed away in January.

In fact, another bureau memo indicates that Wicker did his due diligence: His secretary phoned the director’s office five weeks in advance of the article’s publication. Hoover declined to speak with him then, too.

ON NOVEMBER 19, 1970, THE TIMES PRINTED A WICKER column titled “Calvin Coolidge’s Revenge,” after Hoover’s latest broadside against his critics. Wicker playfully mocked the director’s hypersensitivity, but noted “this kind of thing stops being funny when it is realized that the F.B.I. is a police agency” with a mountain of personal dossiers on American citizens. He concluded that no president would dare fire him or even simply “tell the old boy to shut up.”

Hoover had the article duplicated for nearly every high-ranking bureau member listed on his interoffice stationery, including a note, in excellent penmanship: “This jerk has mental halitosis,” with his powerful “H” struck beneath.

The column appeared just as Hoover received an update from Special Agent Francisco, with more news from the professional writer. “[Name redacted] informed me yesterday that the publishing of the book had been held up for reasons not known to him, but that now his agent has advised him that the book is being prepared for publication on an unknown date by Random House.”

The publisher identified, they now had leverage. Milton A. Jones, a top aide in the Crime Records division, wrote in a memo, “As you are aware, Random House published Don Whitehead’s 'The F.B.I. Story,' as well as a young reader’s edition of this work, and 'J. Edgar Hoover on Communism,' and has indicated an interest in publishing a book by the Director on the New Left movement.”

Jones also dug up some pertinent information on Wicker at the request of Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s faithful Number Two. The memo included a brief sketch of Wicker’s early life, career, and his relationship with the F.B.I.

“The Bureau has never conducted an investigation concerning Wicker,” the final memo said. “Files do reflect that he was characterized by at least one associate as a 'screwball.' In 1957, he reportedly went over Great Falls in the Potomac River and received considerable publicity.” Wicker, then a correspondent for the Winston-Salem Journal, capsized in his canoe and became one of two people known to have survived the 76-foot plunge and its multiple drops over massive, craggy rocks.

More to the point of Jones’ memo was determining the source of Wicker’s discontent with the F.B.I. It reported that Wicker had taken his son and a group of boys on a tour of bureau headquarters in 1967, and that the journalist had once been invited to a party for a Communist leader held at the Cuban mission to the United Nations (it could not be confirmed whether he attended). The memo catalogued his criticisms of Hoover going back five years, taking offense at a 1968 column that suggested President-elect Nixon could have gotten dovish presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy to join his administration if he had named McCarthy director of the F.B.I. and Hoover ambassador to the United Nations.

Yet finding no outwardly symptoms for his criticisms, Jones pointed the finger at two familiar culprits: the Kennedys and the Times.

“A review of [Bureau files] fails to indicate any obvious reasons for Wicker’s antagonism towards the F.B.I. Would appear he is strongly entrenched in the Kennedy political camp and the longtime antipathy of 'The New York Times' is well known.”

It continued, “Wicker wrote the introduction to [name redacted’s] current book and probably wrote most of the book for [redacted].” This almost certainly refers to John Osborne’s first annual installment of The Nixon Watch, which had just been published.

And, as with many small insults the director bothered to write, Hoover’s diagnosis became F.B.I. dogma. Regarding the “Coolidge’s Revenge” piece, the memo on Wicker to the bureau files would read, “In connection with this column the Director commented that Wicker is apparently suffering from mental halitosis.”

"MENTAL HALITOSIS" WAS A FAVORITE INSULT OF HOOVER'S, one he used many times over the years. That it was directed at Wicker was originally reported by Anthony Summers in his 1993 book Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, along with other instances of the Director’s hyperbolic media commentary. Drew Pearson was “a jackal” and Jimmy Wechsler “a rat,” while Walter Lippmann was the “coyote of the press” and Art Buchwald a “sick alleged humorist.” Hoover did worse to others, maliciously divulging secrets, like telling the White House that columnist Joe Alsop was gay.

More slights toward Wicker would follow and be filed away for reference. Hoover distributed a 1971 William F. Buckley, Jr., column that accused Wicker of selective reporting on the prison death of Black Panther George Jackson. “This clearly portrays Wicker’s bias + tendency to angle the real facts. H.” He had this to say about a 1971 Wicker article in the Boston Globe: “The usual Wicker lies interspersed with innumerable “faceless informers.” H.” (Along with that clipping, the name of the paper’s editor was attached.)

In the meantime, the F.B.I.’s concerns over a Wicker book had been put to rest. A December 11, 1970 memo from Bishop relayed a conversation he had had with someone—name redacted—at Random House, who “emphatically stated that Random House was not in the process of publishing any book written by Wicker and would not under any circumstances publish a book by him that would be critical of the Bureau or the Director.” (Though Wicker may have explored the idea, his high-dollar book advance was nothing but a rumor.)

The redacted Random House employee “stated that he would like Mr. Hoover to know that he considers the Director a “friend” and would never publish any book critical of him.” Furthermore, the source “stated that he saw Wicker a week or so ago at a cocktail party, at which time Wicker told him he was very busy with his normal duties for the “New York Times” and that he has no time to write any books.” Yet, the Random House source couldn’t rule out whether Wicker might be collecting material for a future publication.

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When you think KY Jelly Think FBI, eh?

see link for full story
Investigation: AG, FBI Abusing Use of Corporate-Style Jets Intended to Fight Terrorism

Atty. Gen. Eric Holder Jr.
Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

Two corporate-style jets that the FBI insisted it needed for the global fight against terrorism are primarily being used for personal and business trips by Attorney General Eric Holder, the former AG and FBI Director Robert Mueller, the Washington Guardian reports.

Taxpayers financed “non-mission flights” on the luxury Gulfstream V jet to the tune of $11.4 million between 2007 and 2011, the Guardian reported, citing an investigation by the Government Accountability Office.

Holder and his predecessor under the Bush administration took 88 personal trips, the Guardian wrote.

“If somebody asks for the expenditure of federal money for the Gulfstream, it’s to be used for the purpose it was meant to be be used for,” said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has oversight of the Justice Department and FBI.
- See more at: http://ticklethewire.com/#sthash.7tII9bsc.dpuf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... z2MCbKiGw5" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
FBI jets for war on terror used for top officials’ personal, business travel

-

Washington Guardian

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Two corporate-style jets that the FBI persuaded Congress to lease for fighting global terrorism have instead been used the majority of the time to ferry Attorney General Eric Holder, his predecessor in the Bu

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... MCbKiGw5sh" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; administration and FBI Director Robert Mueller on business and personal trips at an expense of millions of dollars to taxpayers, an investigation has found.

The bureau’s state-the-art, sleek Gulfstream V jets logged 60 percent of their hours between 2007 and 2011 on “non-mission flights” that cost taxpayers $11.4 million, fbi_jet_02-27-13_gao_report_final.pdf” target=”_blank”>according to an investigation by the Government Accountability Office obtained by the Washington Guardian.

The travel included 88 personal trips for Holder and former Republican Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who stepped down in 2009, and 10 for Mueller, the review found. Taxpayers were reimbursed only pennies on the dollar for those personal trips under the current rules, the audit found.

On at least one occasion a trip by Holder in 2011 left the FBI without access to a Gulfstream during a counterterrorism operation, forcing agents to scramble to charter a private plane, according to documents reviewed by the Washington Guardian.

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Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

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WELLSTONE:
THEY KILLED HIM
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http://beforeitsnews.com/9-11-and-groun ... 82848.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.wellstonetheykilledhim.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
watch the preview, pass it on and
order a dvd to contribute to our next projects.
2 hours of documentary evidence

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Friday, March 1st, 2013
see link for full story

http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2013 ... er-appare/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Officer admits pulling over FBI agent after apparent wreck

A Fort Oglethorpe police officer has admitted to his supervisor that when employed by Catoosa County he pulled over a federal agent whose “bumper was almost dragging the ground” after an apparent wreck but didn’t arrest him.
Officer Greg Cross also told his boss, Chief David Eubanks, that he suspected that Special FBI Agent Ken Hillman may have been under the influence of alcohol at the time.
Cross made his statement to Eubanks after Catoosa County Sheriff Gary Sisk told the Times Free Press “there is no evidence” that anyone on his staff ever pulled Hillman over under suspicion of drinking and driving and then let him go.
The alleged incident involving Hillman occurred last year.
Cross, a former Catoosa County Sheriff’s deputy, now works for the Fort Oglethorpe Police Department.
Cross’s statement is the latest in a string of revelations this week concerning multiple North Georgia law enforcement agencies and a federal agent who was already under scrutiny.

ALSO SEE
see link for full story
http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2013 ... fired-cop/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Friday, February 22nd, 2013
FBI, millionaire's wife linked to fired Ringgold cop


It was late October 2012 when Ringgold, Ga., police Sgt. Tom Evans drove to the Acoustic Cafe to check on a report of a drunken driver.
He found FBI Special Agent Ken Hillman with Angela Russell, the estranged wife of millionaire local businessman Emerson Russell, and their daughter Katherine. The three were trying to drive away from the nightspot on RBC Drive.
Records show at least one of the three had been refused drinks after dancing and weaving through the live music cafe making a scene, and they all appeared drunk.
Instead of arresting someone on a DUI charge, Evans left his post in Ringgold and drove the three out of state to Chattanooga. Then, when Katherine Russell needed a ride back to Ringgold, she flashed her breasts to Evans, according to the results of a Ringgold Police Department internal investigation.
Officer Evans said, "If you take your shirt off, I'll take you back to your car," Katherine Russell told Assistant Chief Greg Wingo, the investigator. Evans denied the allegation.
The police investigation, which led to Evans being fired from the department a week ago today, also revealed that Hillman -- who leads the Northwest Georgia Crimes Against Children Task Force -- is under investigation himself by the FBI.

msfreeh
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Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

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couple of reads


FBI AGENT JOHN LANDS IN JAIL - AGAIN

By Ryan McBride - The Sun Staff



WAKEFIELD - A former FBI agent from Westerly has returned to prison
after a series of recent arrests for violating a court order to stay
away from his ex-wife.
John served 15 months at the ACI for a criminal conviction of violating a
restraining order in March 2002. His suspended sentence and probation
from the conviction end in 2012.
According to court records, state police arrested John in February 2002
on a disorderly conduct charge for exposing himself in public.

2nd read

http://www.thelandesreport.com/Donsanto.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Why won't the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigate electronic vote fraud?
Is it because the DOJ and FBI have long been involved in it, themselves?

Meet Craig C. Donsanto, head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Election Crimes Branch, Public Integrity Section (from 1970-present).

Photo of Craig Donsanto (left) and Ernest Locker Jr., former special agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, spoke at IFES and discussed their careers investigating electoral fraud. Source: http://www.ifes.org/newsinbrief.html?ti ... 0at%20IFES" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

READ:

PROSECUTION OF ELECTION OFFENSES (see: DOJ/DonsantoElectionManuel.pdf) January 1999, Sixth Edition, by Craig C. Donsanto, Director, U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division, Public Integrity Section -- This manual is a study in how NOT to investigate election crimes. There is little mention of voting machines or the threat they pose to the process. Check out page 62 and see democracy.ru article (at bottom of this page) that tipped this editor off as to the existence of the manual, and is a good summary of the manuel --Excerpt: "Since the voting process is at bottom primarily a state-regulated activity, federal authorities should not interfere with it. This means that until the votes have been canvassed and the outcome of all the election contests on the ballot certified by the competent state authority, the documentation generated by the election process must remain in state hands. Also, while this may not be possible in all situations, it is preferable that the predication of federal voter fraud investigations above «preliminaries» await the conclusion of the election and the certification of results. Again, close consultation with Public Integrity is encouraged." (In other words, after the fox has left the henhouse, Donsanto allows his agents to investigate.)
A FEDERAL OBSERVER REPORT (See: FederalObserverReport.pdf) Once again, this report is a study in how NOT to effectively observe the election process. No meaningful information is collected as a result of federal observers filling out these reports.

The Cincinnati Bell-FBI scandal: Leonard Gates, a Cincinnati Bell employee for 23 years, testified that in the late 1970's and 80's, the FBI assisted telephone companies with hacking into mainframe election computers in cities across the country. He spoke with agents from both the DOJ (U.S. Attorney Kathleen M. Brinkman) and FBI (Agent Love), but to his knowledge, neither agency took further action. Leonard Gates 1987Deposition, plus 1985 Background Material from Jim Condit, Jr. //Pandora's Black Box & http://www.votefraud.org/expert_strunk_report.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; (contains case number)

msfreeh
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see link for full story

http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Ex-b ... 21961.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Ex-bodyguards claim cover-ups, sex harassment by Paul Allen family
By Levi Pulkkinen, seattlepi.com staff Published: Mar 2, 2013

SEATTLE - Luggage packed with giraffe bones could mean trouble for Vulcan CEO Jody Allen and her brother -- Microsoft co-founder and Seahawks owner Paul Allen -- as lawsuits filed by the siblings’ bodyguards proceed.

The allegation – that Jody Allen tried to sneak home the bones while on safari in Botswana – is the most concrete claim made so far by a group of former Vulcan Inc. bodyguards who’ve sued both Allens and their firm, which was founded by Paul Allen, who remains the company's chairman. But the giraffe’s bones may turn out to be the smallest skeleton tucked in the Allen family closet.

Silenced by court orders and confidentiality agreements, the former members of the Allens’ personal security detail have made vague claims that the Allens were involved in criminal activity and bribery, and that Jody Allen sexually harassed security officers. They also claim other Vulcan executives turned a blind eye or worse to the behavior.

At least five former members of the Allens’ personal security team have sued the siblings and Vulcan. Court documents indicate that 10 other former members of the team have previously settled with Vulcan after closed hearings before a private mediator.

In a series of lawsuits filed in King County Superior Court, the security officers accused Jody Allen of sexually harassing members of the executive protection team. They’ve also claimed she, her brother and others with the firm have committed and covered up crimes, which have yet to be described in detail.

Those alleged crimes may be revealed later this year, when attorneys for two former leaders of the executive protection team – a retired FBI special agent among them – are scheduled to take their cases to a jury. The Allens would be called to testify, as would dozens of current and former Vulcan employees alleged to have witnessed illegal or unethical activities.



A tiny piece of the Allens’ operation, the Vulcan executive protection team is staffed by elite security contractors – SEAL-school trained combat veterans among them – paid to protect Paul and Jody Allen, as well as Jody Allen’s children. Members of the team, which numbered eight to 14 people from 2010 to 2011, accompany the Allens when they travel and provide security for their properties.

In a sworn statement, former team leader and retired FBI special agent Kathy Leodler said the Allens are now trying to hide criminal activity behind confidentiality agreements.

“Let me be clear, I do not accept the assertion that crimes of corporate executives can be covered up by an agreement to protect trade secrets or Allen ‘privacy,’” Leodler said in a declaration to the court.

msfreeh
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Re: FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

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attorney Jesse Trentadue sent me this email today.



see link for full story

http://bobmccarty.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Are FBI Informants Working Inside America’s Churches?


Posted on March 1, 2013 by BobMcCarty

Jesse Trentadue’s ongoing effort to obtain information from the FBI continued this week when he filed a motion Wednesday aimed at convincing a federal judge in Utah to allow him access to information about the FBI’s “Sensitive Informant Program. The move was made one month after the Salt Lake City attorney filed his first motion — the details of which appeared in a post Jan. 30 — seeking, among other things, to learn whether the FBI has informants working inside American churches.
Trentadue Motion for Limited Disc 2-27-13

Click to download motion (PDF).

Why is Trentadue seeking the information? Because he believes it will lead him closer to the truth about the 1995 death of his brother, Kenneth Trentadue, under suspicious circumstances while in custody at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City.

Below, I share the fascinating details of his most-recent motion (PDF). Beginning with the “Background” which begins on page one of the document, the details contained in the document appear below, minus the footnotes contained in the actual document:

The FBI devotes a considerable portion of the Memorandum that it submitted in opposition to Plaintiff’s Motion to arguing that this is a typical Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) case involving the adequacy of the FBI’s search for responsive documents and/or the applicability of the exemptions claimed by the FBI for not releasing the documents/records. But this is not a typical FOIA case. Neither is it an isolated or stand alone case. This case, as the FBI well knows, is the latest front in Plaintiff’s long war with the Bureau to discover and uncover the truth about the Oklahoma City Bombing and a related matter: the murder of his brother, Kenneth Michael Trentadue.

Untold Stories of the OKC BombingThe first battle in this almost decade long FOIA war was fought before this very Court in Trentadue v. FBI, which revealed that persons other that Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier had participated in the Bombing. That first battle, and the documents/records that Plaintiff obtained as a result, also disclosed: (1) the existence of the FBI’s I-Drive and S-Drive computer systems wherein evidence related to the Bombing was kept hidden so as not to be subject to a FOIA request and/or not made part of the FBI’s official Bombing case file; (2) the CIA’s involvement in the Oklahoma City Bombing; (3) “Patriot Conspiracy” or “PATCON” that was a decade or more long FBI undercover operation designed to infiltrate and monitor or perhaps even incite various right-wing organizations; and (4) the existence of a surveillance camera videotape taken on the morning of April 19, 1995, which according to federal government documents purportedly shows not only the destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah Building, but also the persons who carried out that attack. That first FOIA battle also disclosed the existence of the FBI’s “Sensitive Informant Program,” which is at the heart of this current FOIA discovery dispute.

The Sensitive Informant Program is the FBI’s disturbing practice of using private citizens as spies on the staffs of members of Congress and perhaps even federal judges, in the national media, within other federal agencies, on defense teams in high profile federal and/or state criminal prosecutions, inside state and local law enforcement agencies and even among the clergy of organized religions. The Sensitive Informant Program is designed to and does result in the circumvention of the protections guaranteed to American citizens by the Bill of Rights and the Separation of Powers Doctrine.

In response to Plaintiff’s FOIA request for the policies, rules, protocols and/or procedures governing the FBI’s recruitment and use of such informants in this secret surveillance program which spies on United States’ citizens on United States’ soil, the FBI produced 205 pages, which appear to be but a small portion of its: “Corporate Policy Directive” on the use of confidential human sources, “Confidential Human Source Validation Standards Manual,” “Confidential Human Source Policy Manual,” and “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide” (collectively the “Manual”). Those portions of the Manual that the FBI actually provided to Plaintiff were heavily redacted. The FBI withheld all of these portions of the Manual on the basis of various exemptions from disclosure under FOIA.

It is Plaintiff’s belief, however, that NO exemption can be asserted to conceal this unconstitutional domestic spy/surveillance program. Simply put, FOIA, which has as its stated purpose the disclosure of the federal government’s wrongdoing, cannot and should not be used to shield the FBI’s unconstitutional actions undertaken on what appears to be a national scale. However, in order to properly frame and present to the Court his challenge to the FBI’s claims of exemption Plaintiff needs to conduct limited discovery into the scope and duration of this Sensitive Informant Program.

msfreeh
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The Squad: The U.S. Government’s Secret Alliance With Organized Crime
Michael Milan (1989) Shapolsky, New York, 304 pp.

Michael Milan is a pseudonym for a person who claims to be a former hit man on a death squad of Mob killers organized by J. Edgar Hoover and run outside the FBI. While on the squad, Milan’s day job was selling automobiles on Long Island. His night job was to rub out undesirable for Hoover. He would get orders with his serial number in the upper right-hand corner of the page, and would then “foreclose the loan,” “deliver the package,” or “terminate the employment” of someone he had never met—all euphemisms for rubbing out a stranger. The book consists of a series of breathless tales of such adventures.
This is not the only report of dangerous alliances between Hoover and the Mob. Ralph Ranalli has told many details in his 2001 book Deadly Alliance, The FBI’s Secret Partnership With The Mob, which describes the FBI’s “Top Echelon” informant program. The Squad proposes to be a first-person account by a killer in a similar program. Milan does not use the words “Top Echelon,” however, and so we cannot tell whether he and Ranalli as describing the same thing.
This review concerns itself solely with Milan’s chapter entitled “Dallas,” in which he describes a killing immediately after the JFK assassination.
On the day of the assassination, Milan was busy enough selling cars that he didn’t hear the immediate news of the killing. Instead, he saw people milling around and crying, and eventually found out from them. Upon hearing the news, he first was shocked that anyone would hit the president, and then wondered whether he would become involved. Then he realized that he was surprised that Kennedy hadn’t been hit earlier, because he had so many enemies and didn’t know how to properly protect himself from them.
He had the manager close the shop, and he went down to the precinct station, where he found an urgent call waiting for him. It came from his contact inside the FBI, a person code-named “Pencil.” Milan was to proceed immediately to Dallas and rub out a cab driver named Gerald Brinkman. He told his wife that he had to leave for two days on “business,” but she saw through the ruse and started to worry about him. He got to Dallas, met the cab driver the next morning at seven, and drove to a building outside the city where he was alleged to meet someone. Along the way, the driver told him he could have some real action by going to Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club. (You just know that Ruby somehow had to be worked into this story.) At the destination, Milan tried to beat information out of the driver before killing him with one clean pistol shot to the head. Thinking that he would be allowed to live, the driver revealed that he had been working for Jack Ruby, whom he had been introduced to at the Carousel Club by a woman, that he didn’t shoot anyone, that he and two others were really trying to shoot Governor Connally, that he didn’t know who had let the original contract, but that Ruby, in need of money to pay off “some of the boys in Chicago,” had used this way to earn it. The driver further revealed that he had become part of the hit because he needed money to pay off gambling debts and because Governor Connally had fired him from a job. He was promised that he could walk away clean. When Milan later met Hoover in Washington National Airport, the “Old Man” simply said to him, “You already know too much. So I’ll just say: Johnson. No doubt. We stand away. Do you get it?” In other words, Vice President Lyndon B. John commissioned the hit, hired the Mob to do it, and Hoover cleaned up for him.

msfreeh
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TWO STORIES
1st story
see link for full story

http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/03/0 ... -research/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Yale denies knowledge of FBI-sponsored interview research

Staff Reporter
Monday, March 4, 2013

School of Medicine Psychiatry Professor Charles Morgan has allegedly been conducting private research involving interview techniques with local immigrants using funding from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to a Friday article in the New Haven Independent.

In a Friday statement, the University said Yale was unaware of Morgan’s private work until the Independent published the findings. Recently, Morgan has been at the center of a controversy involving a military training center he had planned to propose to the School of Medicine using a $1.8 million grant from the United States Special Operations Command, but both the Department of Defense and Yale said on Feb. 22 that the center would not move forward.

The Independent article reported that Morgan has been paying local Colombians, as well as other immigrants, $150 to answer a set of questions on camera truthfully and then again untruthfully. Dean of the School of Medicine Robert Alpern told the News that as a voluntary faculty member, Morgan is not required to disclose research he is not conducting on Yale’s behalf.

“I think the point is [Morgan’s research is] not done through Yale,” Alpern said. “[Morgan is] what we call a volunteer faculty member, which means he’s not employed by us and he’s free to do whatever he wants to do outside of Yale.”

Representatives of Yale’s Office of Public Affairs and Communications, University President Richard Levin and Morgan could not be reached for comment Sunday night. Alpern said that the University released the Friday statement to clarify that the FBI-sponsored study was not conducted within the University so it would not seem like the School of Medicine was concealing a study it never reported.

Morgan conducted the research through the “Center for Research and Development,” the Independent reported. The center is run by School of Medicine Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Vladimir Coric, according to a number of business records and directories.

Alpern said it is “hard to tell” from the Independent article whether Morgan’s study dependent on FBI funding complies with Yale research standards. The Independent reported that the informed consent form that participants sign states that the FBI is the sponsor for the study, titled “Efficacy of Interviewing to Detect Lies about Beliefs.” The article did not say how the newspaper obtained the form, but one study participant was interviewed. The Independent also reported that FBI Special Agent Ann Todd said she did not have any information immediately available about Morgan’s study.

Like the FBI study, the University also first learned about the potential Department of Defense-sponsored center through outside media coverage.

“We’re tired of being surprised,” Alpern added. “Right now we’re mostly trying to build up credibility with the community.”

Confusion over the USSOCOM center followed conflicting stories from news outlets in January regarding its alleged involvement of the city’s immigrant residents.

Some members of the Yale and New Haven communities protested the University’s involvement with the military and the center’s reliance on disenfranchised immigrants, but

After initially stating that the USSOCOM had provided the University with money for the center, Ken McGraw, deputy public affairs officer of USSOCOM, told the News on Feb. 24 that the USSOCOM had decided not to fund a center based on Morgan’s research roughly a year ago. Yale confirmed the center would not be opened the same day.

Morgan has conducted his research study out of his third-floor office in the Gold Building on 234 Church Street near Timothy Dwight College, the Independent reported.
Third Story
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Coleen Rowley: Ten years after Iraq

Article by: COLEEN ROWLEY
: March 2, 2013 - 4:42 PM

Preemption, from wars to detention to drone strikes, lacks justification, draws retaliation.

Ten years ago, I made the ultimately futile effort of writing to FBI Director Robert Mueller warning that he needed to tell the truth about the Bush administration’s unjustified decision to preemptively invade Iraq and the likelihood it would prove counterproductive. To its credit, the Star Tribune ran the story on March 6, 2003 (“Agent: War would unleash terror, and FBI not ready”), one of only a handful of such cautionary news stories in the war-fevered weeks before the United States launched its catastrophic invasion.

At the time, Mueller well knew of Vice President Dick Cheney’s lying about Saddam’s connection to 9 / 11 and other administration exaggerations to gin up the war.

My letter compared Bush-Cheney’s rush to war with the impatience and bravado that had led to the FBI’s disastrous 1993 assault at Waco, where “the children [the FBI] sought to liberate all died when [David] Koresh and his followers set fires.” On a much more tragic scale, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and millions more were wounded or displaced. Iraq’s infrastructure was destroyed. Severe problems remain with lack of clean drinking water, electricity and a lack of professionals in Iraq to help rebuild.

msfreeh
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THREE STORIES


1st read
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published Tuesday, March 5th, 2013
Multiple lawyers allege prosecutors holding back evidence in FBI task force cases



PREVIOUS ARTICLES
FBI, millionaire's wife linked to fired Ringgold cop
FBI sex crime task force work questioned
Local attorney McCracken Poston seeks inquiry of FBI agent
Catoosa sheriff says office did nothing criminal
North Georgia officers covering for FBI agent
FBI confirms investigation of Special Agent Ken Hillman
Multiple defense attorneys have filed motions in Catoosa County Superior Court alleging prosecutors are holding back on information about the Northwest Georgia FBI sex crime task force, and they want details about a civilian’s involvement in their clients’ arrests.
After a police officer was fired two weeks ago, an investigation revealed Angela Russell was working on the Northwest Georgia Crimes Against Children task force with FBI Special Agent Ken Hillman, and that she may have been allowed to slap the handcuffs on suspects.
Now five area defense attorneys, who represent several defendants arrested by the task force, are alleging the information about the investigation that were given involving members of the task force and those they arrested is “false and incomplete.”
Currently, there are 17 attempted child molestation cases on the trial docket that could be affected.



2nd READ


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FBI Makes Odd Sequester Claim Regarding Wall Street Crime
By: DSWright Tuesday March 5, 2013 9:16 am

In a letter to lawmakers, the Federal Bureau of Investigation claims that the across the board cuts in the sequester will damage their ability to pursue financial crimes.

Sequestration will cause current financial crimes investigations to slow as workload is spread among a reduced workforce. In some instances, such delays could affect the timely interviews of witnesses and collection of evidence. The capacity to undertake new major investigations will be constrained. Left unchecked, fraud and malfeasance in the financial, securities, and related industries could hurt the integrity of U.S. markets.
In addition, the public will perceive the FBI as less capable of aggressively and actively investigating financial fraud and public corruption, which would undercut the deterrence that comes from strong enforcement.

Are you done laughing yet? I know I’m not.
The public already rightly sees the FBI as complete screw-ups regarding the bureau’s handling of financial crime due to the fact that not one major Wall Street criminal that caused the 2008 financial crisis has gone to jail. Not one. A public perception not at all altered by a recent Frontline expose on the incredible failures of the FBI and Justice Department in taking on blatant crime on Wall Street.
The FBI instead spent its time and resources in the wake of the financial crisis investigating Aaron Swartz as well as treating Occupy Wall Street protesters as “terrorists.” With some truly asine agent provocateur activity that even judges considered pretty stupid. The FBI is rightly losing much of its social cache and has damaged its reputation from the incompetence and corruption it demonstrates when the bureau targets innocent people while letting the clearly guilty walk. So the FBI is rapidly losing credibility with the public due to its obvious disinterest in holding Wall Street accountable not for lacking the resources to do so.


3rd READ


03/04/2013
FBI
NYT Reports on Hate Crimes FBI Refused to Investigate, Uncovered by ACLU Racial Mapping FOIA
By Robyn Greene, Washington Legislative Office at 4:25pm
On Friday, The New York Times published an excellent report about the FBI's failure to investigate two 2007 hate crimes that was based on FBI documents the ACLU of Northern California, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian uncovered through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on the FBI's Racial Mapping program.
The first incident involved seven gunshots fired at a Northern California Islamic community center in January 2007. The FBI report documented a series of escalating acts over the previous years – threatening messages, a brick thrown through a window and a single gunshot fired at the mosque – but the FBI still refused to investigate the 2007 incident as a possible hate crime. The mosque was later destroyed in an unsolved arson attack. The second incident, also in 2007, concerned threatening and racially charged phone calls received by a student activist at UC Berkeley. The FBI memo shows that the investigating agent reviewed FBI files and located some of the student's e-mails, which the agent claimed "expressed conveyed hatred toward the United States and Israel and support for the Palestinian cause." The student rejects this characterization of his views, but the more important issues are why a crime victim's political viewpoints are allowed to influence the FBI's decision whether to open an investigation, and why the FBI retained these e-mails in its files in the first place.
The ACLU uncovered thousands of FBI documents through a nationwide FOIA campaign to uncover information about the FBI's racial and ethnic mapping program, which was authorized in 2008 through amendments to the Attorney General Guidelines. We have detailed some of the most severe abuses in our "Eye on the FBI" alerts regarding the Bureau's Racial Mapping and Mosque and Community Outreach programs as well as it's racially biased and inaccurate counterterrorism training materials, but many other stories from these documents remain untold. Investigative reporters, activists and the interested public can browse through the FBI documents by topic or do keyword searches here. The portal is also a great resource for research by academics and defense attorneys, as it includes many FBI manuals and internal policies, such as this informant policy manual and this counterintelligence policy guide, among many others.
Radical changes to FBI policy over the last decade have opened the door to abuse, and we hope the documents continue to be useful to educating the public and policy makers about the need to rein in the FBI's unchecked authorities.

msfreeh
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The FBI’s shameful recruitment of Nazi war criminals
By Richard Rashke
March 6, 2013

This essay is adapted from Useful Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals, which was recently published by Delphinium Books.

A trove of recently declassified documents leads to several inescapable conclusions about the FBI’s role in protecting both proven and alleged Nazi war criminals in America. First, there can be no doubt that J. Edgar Hoover collected Nazis and Nazi collaborators like pennies from heaven. Unlike the military and its highly structured Operation Paperclip — with its specific targets, systematic falsification of visa applications, and creation of bogus biographies — Hoover had no organized program to find, vet, and recruit alleged Nazis and Nazi collaborators as confidential sources, informants, and unofficial spies in émigré communities around the country. America’s No. 1 crime buster was guided only by opportunism and moral indifference.

Each Nazi collaborator that his agents stumbled upon, or learned about from the CIA, was both a potential spy and a potential anticommunist leader. Once they were discovered, Hoover sought them out, used them, and protected them. He had no interest in reporting alleged Nazi war criminals to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Justice Department, or the State Department for possible deportation or extradition. He appeared smug in his simplistic division of Americans into shadeless categories of bad guys and good guys, communists and anticommunists.

Hoover was careful about the number of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators he placed on the FBI payroll. If Congress or its investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, ever insisted on a tally, he could say with a straight face that there were only a handful of paid confidential sources and informants. But if one adds the war criminals he informally cultivated and used, the number ranges well into the hundreds. Although some of the snapshots may be out of focus, the big picture is now clear. Hoover and the FBI knew the identities, addresses, and backgrounds of up to a thousand alleged Nazis and Nazi collaborators on whom he had files but did not report to INS, Justice, State, or the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) unit of the Justice Department.

Among the newly revealed Nazi collaborators that Hoover and the FBI used and protected were John Avdzej, Laszlo Agh, and Vladimir Sokolov. During the war, Belorussian John Avdzej had been installed as the Nazi’s puppet mayor of the Niasvizh district in western Belorussia, once part of Poland. His first mayoral job was to rid his district of all Poles. As a first step, he gave the Gestapo a list of 120 Polish intelligentsia that included journalists, professors, priests, and former military officers, according to recently declassified intelligence files. Then he took part in their execution, as well as in the murder of thousands of Jews under his political jurisdiction.

The Polish Home Army condemned him to death in absentia. The United States was responsible for bringing Avdzej to America. Hoover snapped him up and protected him until 1984, when OSI charged him with visa fraud. Facing trial and possible extradition for war crimes, Avdzej voluntarily left the United States for West Germany, where he died a free man in 1998.

Laszlo Agh was a wartime member of the Hungarian Arrow Cross, an anti- Semitic group of fascists responsible for the murder of 10,000 to 15,000 Hungarian Jews and the deportation to Auschwitz of another 80,000. According to 12 eyewitnesses, Agh had personally rounded up, imprisoned, tortured, and killed hundreds of Hungarian Jews. The torture included forced calisthenics to the point of unconsciousness, burial in the ground up to the neck until dead, and orders to jump on ground studded with partially buried bayonets.

Agh intrigued Hoover. A bitterly anticommunist leader had fallen into his lap and Hoover quickly recruited him as an unofficial informant. When the INS began to investigate Agh, the FBI refused to cooperate. As a result, Agh was never tried for visa fraud. Like Avdzej, he died a free man.

Russian Vladimir Sokolov (aka Vladimir Samarin) was a senior editor and writer for Rech (Speech), a German-controlled, anti-Semitic Russian newspaper. He entered the United States in July 1951. Sokolov penned articles calling for the extermination of Russian Jews as enemies of the people. Jews advised Stalin, he wrote, started the German-Soviet war, and controlled the White House. Only Germany and its allies had the wisdom to understand the international Jewish conspiracy and the courage to fight “the Kikes of the world.” After the war, Moscow placed Sokolov on its most-wanted list, claiming it had concrete proof that he had worked with the Gestapo as a propagandist and had personally identified Jews for execution. The FBI, on the other hand, considered Sokolov a “sincere, outspoken anti-Communist [and] a potential source.”

At one point, he even taught Russian language and literature at Yale University. “How a man with no high academic credentials suddenly procured such a prestigious position is a mystery,” wrote historian Norman Goda. “It is clear that the FBI used him as an informant while at Yale, possibly to report on Russian students.”

However shocking and reprehensible, Hoover’s use of alleged Nazis and Nazi collaborators is just a small part of the FBI story. To focus only on that dimension diverts attention away from a more important issue. In choosing to take the low moral ground, Hoover and the FBI betrayed the trust of Americans, living and dead. And in perpetrating a 50-year conspiracy of silence, the FBI shamed Americans and made them unwitting hypocrites in the eyes of the world. Most Americans find morally repugnant — if not criminal — the behavior of European citizens who cheered or merely stood by in silence while Nazis and Nazi collaborators dragged away their neighbors, looted their homes, shot them in the forest, or crammed them into boxcars heading east. How then must Americans judge the cadre of unelected, powerful men who welcomed some of those same murderers to America and helped them escape punishment in the name of national security?

msfreeh
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Code Pink shows up.
Where were you?
Thought so.
http://www.mainjustice.com/2013/03/06/h ... otethical/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Holder Says Use of Drones Inside U.S. ‘Entirely Hypothetical’
By Mary Jacoby | March 6, 2013 10:30 am


Attorney General Eric Holder said at a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing today that his letter Monday to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) regarding use of drones inside the United States was “entirely hypothetical.”

Code Pink protesters during Attorney General Eric Holder's testimony before Senate Judiciary Committee today. (Getty Images)

“What I said in the letter was the government has no intention to carry out any drone strikes in the United States,” Holder said in response to a question from Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).

He said the use of drones in places like Afghanistan is based on the difficulty of capturing targets. “That is not the same thing here in the United States,” Holder said. “As a result the use of drones is from my perspective entirely – entirely – hypothetical,” Holder said.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) pressed Holder with a hypothetical: “If an individual is sitting quietly at a café in the United States, in your legal judgment does the Constitution allow” use of lethal drone action “if that individual is not posing an imminent threat of bodily harm.”

Holder answered: “The use of lethal force would not be appropriate” in such a situation.

Parried Cruz: “You keep saying appropriate. My question isn’t about propriety. It is about whether it is constitutional.”

“Well then, no,” Holder said.

Paul has threatened to filibuster the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director over use of the secret drone program.

In his letter on Monday to Paul, Holder wrote:

msfreeh
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Hugo Chávez: Victim of US Germ Warfare?
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/03/hugo- ... m-warfare/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


by Ron Ridenour / March 8th, 2013

Venezuela Vice-President Nicolás Maduro said on March 6th, just hours after President Hugo Chávez death, that the US might have infected their president with poisonous bacteria. He also expelled two US diplomats for planning yet another coup with rightist anti-Chávez Venezuelans. Is the current transitional president crazy, as Western elitists claim?

It is not as though the US never uses bacteriological warfare to murder, or attempt to murder its enemies—most having democratically chosen leaders—as well as spreading diseases that randomly kill or disable masses of people, kill their animals and destroy crops. Genocide!

In July 2006, documents released by the United States government revealed that the CIA had plotted assassination. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb played a role in the CIA’s attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo; he took a vial of poison to the Congo with plans to place it on Lumumba’s toothbrush in the summer of 1960. Gottlieb transported these ‘toxic biological materials’ to the CIA station in the Congo, though a military coup deposed the Prime Minister before agents could deliver the poison.1

“U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had said “something [to CIA chief Allen Dulles] to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated.” This was revealed by a declassified interview with then-US National Security Council minute keeper Robert Johnson released in August 2000 from Senate intelligence committee’s inquiry on covert action. The committee later found that while the CIA had conspired to kill Lumumba, it was not directly involved in the actual murder.”

In 1975, the Church Committee went on record with the finding that Allen Dulles had ordered Lumumba’s assassination as “an urgent and prime objective.”

“Furthermore, declassified CIA cables quoted or mentioned in the Church report and in Kalb (1972) mention two specific CIA plots to murder Lumumba: the poison plot and a shooting plot Although some sources claim that CIA plots ended when Lumumba was captured, that is not stated or shown in the CIA records.”2

In Counterpunch’s story “CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb: Pusher, Assassin & Pimp: US Official Poisoner Dies,” it is stated:

By the early 1960s Gottlieb’s techniques and potions were being fully deployed in the field. Well-known is Gottlieb’s journey to the Congo, where his little black bag held an Agency-developed biotoxin scheduled for Patrice Lumumba’s toothbrush. He also tried to manage Iraq’s general Kassim with a handkerchief doctored with botulinum and there were the endless poisons directed at Fidel Castro, from the LSD the Agency wanted to spray in his radio booth to the poisonous fountain pen intended for Castro that was handed by a CIA man to Rolando Cubela on November 22, 1963. [A poisoned cigar was another of hundreds of plots to murder Fidel Castro.]

In my book, Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn, I reported how Cubela, a Cuban CIA agent, was handed “a ball-point pen fitted with a fine hypodermic needle that a victim could not feel upon penetration of his skin. Cubela was to use a lethal poison, Blackleaf-40” to murder Fidel Castro.

Cubela met in Paris with his handler, CIA’s Cuba project task force chief, Desmond Fitzgerald. At the close of this meeting, the assassins learned that President Kennedy had been murdered that same day. It has been well exposed that the CIA was one of three groups that murdered Kennedy, the same groups which on several occasions tried to murder Fidel. The others were the Mafia, kicked out of Cuban black profiteering operations by Fidel, and disgruntled Cuban exiles in the US.

Cubela was later captured through information obtained by Cuba’s counter-intelligence agency. Cubela’s code name for the CIA was AM/LASH. He admitted his role in assassination attempts and received 15 years imprisonment. In part of testimony, he asserted that he arrived in Cuba with a new plan to “shoot Premier Castro with a high-powered telescopic rifle and later share in top posts of a counter-revolutionary regime.”

Iraq’s Kassin must be eliminated

The CIA attempted to assassinate General Abd al-Karim Kassin following a 1958 anti-monarchy coup he led against King Faisal 11. The US viewed the king as an important ally, and once Kassim became prime minister the US sought to assassinate him using a Gottlieb plan with a poisoned handkerchief. Among Kassin’s “crimes” was support for the Algerian and Palestinian against France and Israel.

Kassin’s policies included many that Hugo Chávez undertook, such as land reform introduced to benefit small farmers. Education and social welfare were increased for ordinary people. Women were granted greater equal rights. Kassin, like Chávez, especially irritated US corporations and their governments by nationalizing oil for greater national income and widespread distribution.

In September 1960, Prime Minister Kassin demanded that the Anglo American-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company (IPC) “share 20% of the ownership and 55% of the profits with the Iraqi government. Then, in response to the IPC’s rejection of this proposal, Kassin issued Public Law 80, which would have taken away 99.5% of the IPC’s ownership and established an Iraqi national oil company to oversee the export of Iraqi oil. British and US officials and multinationals demanded that the Kennedy administration place pressures on the Qasim regime.”3

While the CIA did not succeed in murdering Kassin, they aided national efforts to overthrow him. Ironically, one of the leaders was Saddam Hussein—“the Ba’ath Party leadership was planning to assassinate Qasim. Saddam Hussein was a leading member of the operation.”3 After invading Iraq, in 2003, the US eventually captured Hussein and had him hung.

CIA Bacteriological warfare against Fidel and Cubans at random

In 1987-8 I interviewed many Cubans, and a Frenchman living in Cuba, who had been recruited by the CIA to spy on Cuba’s government and to carry out sabotage, including attempts to assassinate President Fidel Castro. Some of the plans and attempts included poisons and bacteriological warfare. The CIA spread various diseases, some by using infected birds and weather manipulation, which resulted in the random murder of hundreds of ordinary people, destroyed massive crops, and caused the death of hundreds of thousands of animals, especially pigs and turkeys.

In Cuba, I was allowed access to CIA-introduced spying apparatuses. I saw secret messages that the CIA sent to its supposed Cuban spies. Cuba’s intelligence service followed CIA agents, working in the US Interests Section in Havana, whom they photographed and even recorded when meeting with their assumed agents. These moles were able to divert many murderous planned attacks on the people, on their animals and crops, and on the life of Fidel.

Cuba’s government presented its knowledge beginning on July 6, 1987. The stories of 27 double-agents were broadcast on television. I soon began my research and interviews. My book, Backfire, was published by Cuba’s foreign publishing house, Editorial José Martí, in 1991. Here are some excerpts:

Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn

backfire_DV“The Senate Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities held hearings in September 1975 into CIA usage of poison dart guns, manufacture and storage of diverse lethal toxins, and the destruction of records of their venomous activities.

“DCI William Colby testified but would not explain why his Company had secretly kept 10.9 grams of lethal shellfish toxin—a much larger amount than needed for experiments—as part of a poison project known by the code name MK Naomi.

“Colby also demonstrated the use of a black pistol with telescopic sight, which could shoot poison darts accurately at a distance of about 100 meters…he admitted the weapon was designed to kill an enemy silently without leaving a trace.”

The Los Angeles Times wrote, on September 22, 1975, congress had acquired evidence “that CIA poison capsules figured in an abortive plot to kill Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro in 1960 or 1961. Similar pills were forwarded to an African agent about this time for use against the late Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.”

Fisherman Juan Luis Acosta Guzmán was the first of the 27 double agents to come out of the cold, in 1987. The CIA gave him the code name Àngel. He was known as Mateo by Cuban intelligence.

On Cuban TV, Acosta said:

I had two friends who worked on boats used by Cuban leaders for fishing and diversion…The CIA wanted me to get a job on these boats. They told me I’d receive all the money I wanted, and all their assistance, if I could help with this very, very special project. They thought they could produce a sickness in Fidel that would kill him slowly, leaving no trace.

CIA officer Rudy Herrera talked to me about this in Las Palmas, in April 1985. ‘Look, we are most interested in eliminating Fidel. We win 90% of the battle against Cuba by eliminating him.’

The CIA “wanted me to get on a boat that took our Commander-in-Chief out fishing and skin diving. They wanted a man who could throw something in the water near Fidel. Later, he could become unnoticeably sick, and die in two or three years. So that was my task.”

“When Rudy Herrera and I finished our talk, he raised his glass in a toast. ‘Let us toast now for the next time we meet when we can toast to the non-existence of Fidel Castro.’”

While the CIA failed in its hundreds of plans and attempts to “eliminate” Fidel, it was more successful in murdering ordinary people, animals and crops.

“Message 40Xpossibility of learning what types of Dengue is known in Cuba X Details about what virus sicknesses affect the population X Medicines Cuba imports X Countries X Greetings X Julia.”

“Dengue fever type 2 broke out in Cuba two months after this CIA message was sent, on February 16, 1981, to María Santiesteban Loureiro, agent Regina to the CIA”; agent Any to Cuba’s intelligence service.

This dengue fever type, and type 1 infiltrated earlier, killed 158 persons, including 101 children, before they could be controlled.
“On April 6, 1981, agent Regina received another message asking about infectious diseases, including hemorrhagic conjunctivitis. By September, 143,643 people were sick…within two months, 600,000 cases were treated.”

Over one million cases of conjunctivitis, one tenth the population, had been affected by the eye disease before Cuba could eliminate the disease. The CIA repeatedly told its agents, many of them working for Cuba clandestinely, to obtain all possible information about its effects and if treatment was effective or not.

Authors Warren Hinckle and William Turner (a former FBI officer) wrote in The Fish is Red about the CIA’s “nefarious list of subversive techniques biological and weather warfare.”

The CIA was able to destabilize Cuba’s food crops in 1969-70 with futuristic weather modification. Planes from the China Lake Naval Weapons Center, in the California desert flew over Cuba “seeding rain clouds with crystals that precipitated torrential rains over non-agricultural areas and left cane fields arid,” Hinckle-Turner wrote. Killer flash floods were the result in some areas causing crucial export income losses.

Sudden outbreaks of sogata rice blight occurred in 1971; African swine fever (1971 and 1979), sugar cane rust and smut (1978-9), blue tobacco mold (1979), Newcastle disease that killed at least 8000 turkeys (1962 and 1982), and coffee smut (1983). These diseases caused serious loss of thousands of hectares of farm land. The blue mold losses alone were over $250 million.

The way these diseases spread was atypical, and several had never appeared in Cuba before. CIA case officers asked their Cuban agents about these diseases, sometimes even before they appeared. Cuban intelligence could record 200 such inquiries just between 1980 and 1986.

Sugar industry advisor Orlando Argudín López, one of the 27 moles, was told by his CIA handler, Bernardo, in Paris, in May 1979, that the CIA was introducing diseases to affect people and animals.

“Bernardo assured me he was optimistic about the results,” Argudín told Cuban news bureau National Information Service (AIN). On other occasions, Argudín was asked about sugarcane blights, smut and rust.

Cuba’s dean of double agents, Ignacio Rodríguez-Mena, a Cuban Airlines chief steward and instructor and a former professional baseball player for the Washington Senators, told me that the CIA was keen for him to assess damage done by plagues, and about the state of Fidel’s health.

“My handler, Nicolás, asked me in Madrid’s Hotel Sideral to get close to places where I could plant a virus. They asked me if we carried pesticides or other chemicals on our flights, which could combat the germ carrying mosquitoes” and how Cuba combated swine fever. “The wanted whatever I could give them so they could trace the producer-seller of these products, in order to stop them from selling to us, or to sabotage them.

“When they found out where we bought the containers for fumigating mosquitoes that carry the dengue fever, they convinced the producer to make them without the head of the fumigator, rendering the equipment useless. How far does their arm reach?”

Some Cuban terrorists, such as Rolando Cubela, working for the CIA from Miami were involved in spreading diseases that could kill people at random. Eduardo Victor Arrocena Pérez had been head of the counterrevolutionary terrorist group, Omega 7, which the CIA funded. He was one of the few terrorists in the US actually tried for a terrorist crime, that of the assassination of Cuban diplomat Félix García, September 11, 1980, in New York City. He later admitted to more than a dozen sabotage actions in Cuba using dynamite.
At his murder trial, he testified, September 10, 1984, that the CIA had given him chemicals to be introduced into Cuba with the objective of producing lethal sicknesses.

The 91st session of Congress, meeting in November 1969, disclosed that the US had plans to use biological warfare against the Cuban people. On September 16, 1977, the Washington Post reported that the CIA “maintained a clandestine anti-crop warfare research program targeted during the 1960s at a number of countries throughout the world.”

Former CIA officer John Stockwell, who left the CIA in 1977, wrote the book, In Search of Enemies. He was interviewed on Cuban television, September 28-9, 1987:

He said that the US had even released viruses in several US cities to observe how the population was affected. The Congress investigated the CIA’s MK Ultra program and found that the CIA leaked a virus from a ship in San Francisco to “see the impact on the population.”

“It is quite possible that the CIA was experimenting with biological warfare germs in Africa and Haiti, and the germs changed form, developing into the AIDS epidemic… AIDS is a virus similar to the one that killed your swine,” he told the Cuban people.

This account does not go into many other forms of US sabotage, assassination attempts against Fidel, and the murder of Cuban people, nor in other countries such as previously in Nicaragua and currently in Afghanistan, much of the Middle East and coming to Africa. But if the US is willing to use poisons to try to kill individual leaders they dislike in several countries, why not introduce a cancer germ into the person of their arch enemy Hugo Chávez? I Have a Dream Obama has access to genocidal bacteriological weapons.

Dr. Sidney Gottlieb citing the Senator Frank Church-led Senate Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. 111. Assassination Planning and the Plots, Congo. Citing the Senator Frank Church-led Senate Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. [↩]
See “In Dulles’ own words,” William Blum, Killing Hope. See also, “Mr. Garsin from Kinshasa: Tempelsman’s Man Weigh in on the Murder of Patrice Lumumba,” Susan Mazur and also “CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb: Pusher, Assassin & Pimp: US Official Poisoner Dies.” [↩]
See: Abd al-Karim Qasim, and the Church Committee findings: Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (20 November 1975), “C. Institutionalizing Assassination: the ‘Executive Action’ capability,” Alleged Assassination Plots involving Foreign Leaders, p. 181. [↩] [↩]

Ron Ridenour is a veteran journalist and author of nine books, the latest is Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka. Read other articles by Ron, or visit Ron's website.

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