FBI WATCH Making Cruelty visible

[msfreeh]

TWO STORIES
1st story
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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]

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]

Code Pink shows up.
Where were you?
Thought so.
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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]

Hugo Chávez: Victim of US Germ Warfare?
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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.

[msfreeh]

see link for full story
http://www.thespectrum.com/article/2013 ... rve-S-Utah" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Robert Watkins built a career with the FBI, working as a special agent in the San Diego area for his last 20 years. Pamela managed their home and spent time with their children.

“She did a wonderful job in raising our family,” Robert Watkins says. “And she’s the world’s best grandmother.”

Both are lifelong members of the LDS Church. He has served in a variety of leadership responsibilities through the years, including bishop and member of a stake presidency. Meanwhile, she served as a Young Women president, a member of a stake Relief Society presidency and as a stake camp director.

Retirement comes in the FBI at age 57 but Robert Watkins was able to retire by 54, freeing him up for the possibility of full-time church service.

[msfreeh]

As always the material posted here is to remind you that as a voter and
taxpayer you own the criminal justice system, period! Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
The function of these posts is to create smart criminal justice consumers.
Sometimes the questions you ask about the CJ system are more important than the answers.
Today's questions are:
1.Does the criminal justice system create more disorder than the order it gives?

2. Did FBI Director J Edgar Hoover and other FBI agents help assassinate President Kennedy?


Because the issue of the JFK assassination has more layers than a vidalia onion
lets strip away one layer at a time.

Today's layer looks at FBI agents collaborating with the Mafia in assassinating President Kennedy.
What evidence exists for FBI agents collaborating with the Mafia?
see what you can come up with.

[msfreeh]

see link for full story
http://southtownstar.suntimes.com/news/ ... t-fix.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Kadner: Calling the FBI on a ticket fix

March 11, 2013



If a police officer goes to the FBI every time he’s asked to fix a traffic ticket by superiors, can he be trusted?

And if the FBI investigated every such complaint, would it ever have time to arrest an organized crime figure or terrorist?

Those and many other questions came to mind due to a decision Monday by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago regarding a lawsuit by David Kristofek, a former part-time police officer in Orland Hills.

Kristofek contends that he was fired after announcing to colleagues that he had gone to the FBI to complain about a political fix in the police department. His suit seeking financial damages names the village and Police Chief Thomas Scully, who fired him.

Orland Hills administrator John Daly said the lawsuit was “frivolous” and declined further comment.

Kristofek claims that he stopped a vehicle for traffic violations in November 2010, and the driver could not provide the car’s registration or proof of insurance.

As Kristofek was writing a ticket, the driver mentioned that his mother was a former mayor of another suburb and a passenger in the car (apparently the driver’s girlfriend) handed the officer a cellphone, according to the suit. It says the caller was the driver’s mother, who asked Kristofek not to arrest her son.

By this time, other officers arrived on the scene, and Kristofek, ignoring the mother’s request, took the motorist into custody, the suit says.

Back at the police station, Kristofek was filing paperwork on the arrest when he contends that other officers told him to stop what he was doing, delete computer files related to the case and report to a deputy chief. Kristofek told the deputy chief of his displeasure at being forced to make the arrest disappear, according to the suit.

[msfreeh]

FBI agents are pulling out all the stops to get their man Rogers elected to the US Senate.
couple of reads



1st read
see link for full story
http://rochester.patch.com/articles/roc ... enate-poll" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Rochester Congressman Leads New U.S. Senate Poll

Rep. Mike Rogers is a frontrunner for the GOP nomination to the senate seat that is being vacated by Carl Levin.

U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican who represents Rochester and Rochester Hills, is a front-runner for the GOP nomination to the state's next U.S. Senate race, according to a poll released Tuesday.

On Saturday, Rogers said he was considering a run for the Senate seat that Democrat Carl Levin recently announced that he would vacate in 2014.

"I am giving the Senate race serious consideration," Rogers told the Detroit Free Press.

Rogers has served since 2001 as the representative for Michigan's 8th District, which includes the Rochester area following last year's Congressional redistricting. He also serves as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and is a former FBI agent.

In the automated survey of 1,170 likely Republican voters conducted Monday, 31.11 percent of respondents said they would support Rogers for the GOP nomination to the senate seat, according to a news release from Murray Communications-Portable Insights-Combat Data, which conducted the poll.

Scott Romney, the brother of presidential candidate Mitt Romney, received 29.74 percent of the votes; former Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land received 20.85 percent of the votes. The margin of error in the poll was 2.86 percent.
“The poll is good news for U.S Rep. Mike Rogers,” said Christopher Mark of Portable Insights. “His support among likely Republican primary




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)

Gates testified, P. 28, "He (Gates's supervisor, Mr. Jim West,) said the programming was obtained out of California, and that the programming had been obtained through the FBI, and all this kind of stuff, and that was about it."
Page 34 excerpt: "And I knew that we did do certain things under certain court direction, under certain court orders, and I just didn't see where they would have a court order to get into that, and I expressed my concern to Mr. Dugan (President of Cincinnati Bell). Mr. Dugan said it was a very gray area, and that they were into like New York and Atlanta, Georgia, and to the other computers, you know. This was just small compared to what was going on."
Page 39, "...and I said, "Well, do you (Mr.Fedrich, vice president of Cincinnati Bell) have a blanket court order on this or what?" And he kind of weasel-worded me, to be honest with you. He said "Well, our relationship with the FBI is very, very close."

Excerpt from Nov 1996, Pandora's Black Box by Philip M. O’Halloran of Relevance, The Cincinnati Election Wiretapping Scandal:

Lewis and other skeptics of the vote-fixing scenario like to insist that there has never been any evidence of a "conspiracy" to fix elections by computer. But then, most of those we interviewed on both sides of the issue had never heard of the case of Leonard Gates of Cincinnati, Ohio. An employee of the Cincinnati Bell telephone company, Gates was watching a local t.v. news story, in which a Cincinnati man named Jim Condit was charging that the election system was vulnerable to vote fraud in the Hamilton county election process.

He based his charges on his experience as a candidate for city council in 1979, when, after an election night computer crash, Condit and seven other "feisty challengers" had suddenly "fallen to the very bottom of the heap" of 26 candidates. Gates called the station and later contacted Mr. Condit, telling him he knew firsthand how his votes were robbed. They met and shared information and ultimately Gates testified in Condit’s Cincinnatus PAC (political action committee) lawsuit against the Hamilton County Board of Elections.

The suit had earlier been decided against the plaintiffs and Gates took the stand during the appeal. He swore under oath that he was ordered by his Cincinnati Bell superiors to wiretap the election headquarters’ phones lines to provide a link-up between the county’s vote-counting computers and parties unknown on another phone line somewhere in California.

The following are excerpts from the Cincinnati Post of October, 30th, 1987:

Cincinnati Bell security supervisors ordered wire-taps installed on county computers before elections in the late 1970s and early 1980s that could have allowed vote totals to be altered, a former Bell employee says in a sworn court document.

Leonard Gates, a 23-year Cincinnati Bell employee until he was fired in 1986, claims in a deposition filed Thursday in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court to have installed the wire-taps. Cincinnati Bell officials denied Gates’ allegations that are part of a six-year-old civil suit that contends the elections computer is subject o manipulation and fraud.

Gates claims a security supervisor for the telephone company told him in 1979 that the firm had obtained a computer program through the FBI that gave it access to the county computer used to count votes. [Emphasis added].

The FBI refused comment and Cincinnati Bell spokesmen vehemently denied the allegations, claiming Gates was a "disgruntled ex-employee", yet, according to Condit, the company ultimately admitted that one of its vans was involved in the wiretapping, although it claimed they were commandeered without the company’s knowledge. The Post continued:

In the deposition, Gates claims he first installed a wire-tap on a telephone line to the county computers before the 1977 election at the instruction of James West, a Bell security supervisor.

Gates contends both West and Peter Gabor, security director, told him to install wire-taps in subsequent elections. Both men declined comment Thursday.

In the 1979 election, which is the focus of the deposition – Gates said he received instructions in the mail from West about installing wire-taps on county computers in the County Administration Building at Court and Main streets.

The wire-taps were installed on the eve of the election at Cincinnati Bell’s switching control center at Seventh and Elm Streets and terminated in a conference room in the building, Gates alleges.

In the deposition, Gates described in great technical detail installation of the wire-taps.

At about 8:30 p.m. on election day – Nov. 6, 1979 – Gates said he was called by West and told something had gone wrong, causing the elections computer to malfunction. At West’s instructions, Gates said he removed the taps.

The elections computer shutdown for two hours on election evening due to what was believed to be a power failure, Condit Sr. has said.

Gates said West told him they "had the ability to actually alter what was being done with the votes."

Gates said West told him the Board of elections did not know about the taps and that the computer program for the elections computer "was obtained out of California, and that the programming had been obtained through the FBI..."

Shortly after the 1979 election, Gates said he met with the late Richard Dugan, former Cincinnati Bell president, to express his concerns that the wire-taps were done without a court order.

"Mr. Dugan said it was a very gray area... This was just small compared to what was going on. He told me just, if I had a problem, to talk to him and everything would be okay, but everything was under control," Gates said [Emphasis added].

[Editor’s Note: This scandal’s alleged FBI connection raises the possibility of U.S. law enforcement and/or intelligence involvement in electronic vote-rigging.]

Another Cincinnati Bell employee, named Bob Draise, admitted to being involved in a second phase of the illegal operation, which involved wiretapping several prominent Cincinnati political figures including a crusader against pornography named Keating and the Hamilton County commissioner, Allen Paul.

Jim Condit told Relevance that, as a result of the ensuing scandal, Draise was convicted and five Cincinnati police officers, who were allegedly involved in the wiretapping operation, abruptly resigned. The alleged involvement of the FBI was never pursued and the Bureau itself did not follow up on the Gates allegations. In spite of all the evidence, the appeal by the plaintiff failed and the issue was laid to rest.

FEDERAL COMPLICITY IN VOTE FRAUD - excerpts from Lynn Landes's 2007 'REPORT TO CONGRESS'

The unique vulnerability of electronic voting technologies has been long known to federal authorities.

“If you did it right, no one would ever know,” said Craig C. Donsanto, head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Election Crimes Branch, Public Integrity Section (from 1970-present) in a July 4,1989 Los Angeles Times article about electronic voting machines and vote fraud.

So, why hasn't Donsanto sounded the alarm and informed Congress of this threat?

Donsanto has the reputation of a gatekeeper. He was featured in the Colliers' book, VoteScam, for his unwillingness to investigate evidence they collected over the years of rampant vote fraud involving voting machine companies, the news networks' exit polls, and election officials in Florida and other states.

Furthermore, Donsanto made it official department policy that no federal investigator should enter a polling precinct on election day, nor should they begin any serious investigation of the voting process until after the election results are certified. It is this policy that gives those who commit vote fraud ample opportunity to destroy evidence and cover their tracks. (See official policy: http://www.thelandesreport.com/Donsanto.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;)

There is more to be concerned about than obstruction of justice within the DOJ. It appears that elements within the FBI may have not only been aware of computer vote fraud, but participated in it. The following are excerpts from the Cincinnati Post of October 30th, 1987:

"Cincinnati Bell security supervisors ordered wire-taps installed on county computers before elections in the late 1970s and early 1980s that could have allowed vote totals to be altered, a former Bell employee says in a sworn court document. Leonard Gates, a 23-year Cincinnati Bell employee until he was fired in 1986, claims in a deposition filed Thursday in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court to have installed the wire-taps. Cincinnati Bell officials denied Gates’ allegations that are part of a six-year-old civil suit that contends the elections computer is subject o manipulation and fraud. Gates claims a security supervisor for the telephone company told him in 1979 that the firm had obtained a computer program through the FBI that gave it access to the county computer used to count votes." (See: http://www.ecotalk.org/Pandora'sBlackBox.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;)

No state could match the staggering number of Voting Rights complaints due to voting machines and other election irregularities as Florida did in the 2000 presidential election. Yet the Bush Administration's DOJ under Attorney General John Ashcroft did not send federal observers to Florida to monitor the voting process in 2002, although federal observers were sent to several other states. This was surprising news to many people and organizations who were told by DOJ officials that "Justice" would be down there in force.

Even if federal observers had been sent to Florida, how would they 'observe' the accuracy of the voting machines there?

"They wouldn't know that," says Nelldean Monroe, Voting Rights Program Administrator for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in a phone interview. Her agency is responsible for the recruiting and training of federal observers who are sent by the DOJ to monitor elections if violations of the Voting Rights Act are suspected.

In a November 21, 2002 e-mail Monroe elaborated, "The only observance of the tallying of the votes is when DOJ specifically requests observers to do so. This rarely occurs, but when it does, it is most often during the day following the election when a County conducts a canvass of challenged or rejected ballots. In this case, federal observers may observe the County representatives as they make determinations on whether to accept a challenged or rejected ballot. Federal observers may also observe the counting of the ballots (or vote tallying) when paper ballots are used." (See e-mail: http://www.thelandesreport.com/nelldeanmonroe.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;)

In other words, federal observers can only observe people, not machines, counting paper ballots. Monroe confirmed that there is no training and no opportunity for federal observers to observe the accuracy of voting machines.

Under Section 8 of the Voting Rights Act, 42 U.S.Code § 1973f, federal observers may be authorized to observe "... whether persons who are entitled to vote are being permitted to vote ...(and) whether votes cast by persons entitled to vote are being properly tabulated..."

America's nontransparent voting process (i.e., voting by machine, absentee, early, or secret ballot) violate those provisions. Federal observers cannot observe "whether persons who are entitled to vote are being permitted to vote” (and) “whether votes cast are being properly tabulated."

Under "Prohibited acts" in §1973i, the "Failure or refusal to permit casting or tabulation of vote"...can result in civil and criminal penalties. "No person acting under color of law shall fail or refuse to permit any person to vote who is entitled to vote...(and) Whoever...knowingly and willfully falsifies or conceals a material fact... shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."

Requiring voters to use voting machines, rather than allow them to mark and cast their own votes, constitutes "failure or refusal to permit casting". Any result produced by a machine is circumstantial (i.e., not direct) evidence of the intention of the voter.

Fundamentally, nontransparent voting makes the role of the federal observer moot and the Voting Rights Act unenforceable.
DONSANTO - WATERGATE - VOTEFRAUD

2005: From Dan Kennedy http://medialogarchives.blogspot.com/20 ... throat.asp" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Yesterday afternoon, Wendell Woodman, a freelance political columnist based at the State House, in Boston, blasted out an e-mail containing a column he wrote in 1995 in which he speculated that Felt was Deep Throat. The column was preceded by an introductory note stating that Woodman had actually fingered Felt as far back as the early 1970s.

Here is the column - and you've got to love the Florida voting-fraud angle. Some things never change. I've fixed a few spellings of names.

No, Diane Sawyer was not "Deep Throat," as Rabbi Baruch Korff, an old confidante of President Nixon, suggested Monday for the amusement of AP.

Diane may be Deep Flattered. But "Deep Throat" was Mark Felt.

The Associated Press attributed the rabbi's guess to the fact that Diane was an assistant to White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler in 1972. AP promptly added Diane into the sauce with former FBI director L. Patrick Gray and then-National Security deputy Alexander Haig as Throat candidates.

Author Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and "All The President's Men" insists the source who helped him and fellow reporter Carl Bernstein break the Watergate story was a guy.

That would be Mark Felt.

After three Miami television stations projected the results of the September, 1970 primary elections in Florida's Dade County "down to the last digit" as soon as the polls closed, Henry Petersen, who headed the U.S. Justice Department's Criminal Division, was instructed to begin an investigation.

Throughout 1971 and into 1972, the Nixon White House - notably Attorney General John Mitchell and Nixon aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman - received regular briefings. Richard Nixon, who was sure that vote fraud in Illinois and Texas had cost him the presidency in 1960, was a fanatic on the subject and in 1972 ordered Petersen to accelerate the probe.

As soon as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover died on May 2, 1972, a 27-year-old Justice Department employee named Craig C. Donsanto signed Petersen's name to a "courtesy" letter telling Democratic Congressman Claude Pepper of Miami that all hell was about to break loose. Pepper learned that Democratic National Committee offices based at the Watergate ostensibly were in cahoots with a California computing firm anxious to corner the market on the new computer voting industry and that Dade County had been a guinea pig.

Promising him assistance in his career, Pepper prevailed on Donsanto to stamp a "National Security" embargo on the FBI file. That file is still classified. But two Miami reporters, Kenneth and James Collier, managed to obtain copies of it - at about the time Bob Graham was elected Governor of Florida in 1978.

One of the three TV stations implicated in the 1970 fraud case was WPLG-TV of Miami, an affiliate of the Washington Post and Newsweek, and the property of Post owner Katharine Graham, who is Bob Graham's brother-in-law. The call letters WPLG were a tribute to her late husband, Philip L. Graham.

The Watergate burglars (from Miami, you will recall) did not break into the Watergate to tap a telephone. It doesn't take six people to do that. They were looking for evidence of vote fraud and conspiracy.

Thanks to Donsanto's counterfeit letter to Pepper, the offices were germ-free. They didn't even leave milk and cookies for the six burglars.

Thanks to a grateful Claude Pepper, Craig Donsanto quickly became chief of the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section and, by 1984, was Special Prosecutor in the Voting Fraud Section, responsible for all federal voting fraud cases in the United States. Gives you a warm feeling, right?

Although Petersen's case was derailed by the treachery in his office, those who were party to those matters viewed the Watergate debacle as a race between Nixon and the Post to see which would nail the other first.

New to his job as Acting Director of the FBI at the time of the burglary, L. Patrick Gray was forced to rely on the judgment and expertise of the man who had been J. Edgar Hoover's aide and confidante - Mark Felt.

As a junior departmental attorney whose new Godfather was Claude Pepper, Donsanto scored more career points for himself at Justice by feeding everything he had on the case to Mark Felt.

The currency of choice is Washington is information, favors.

Perhaps Mark Felt did feed some of that to Gray, but certainly Gray would not have passed it along to the Post from his tenuous role as "Acting" director of the FBI. That identifies the crafty Mark Felt as "Deep Throat." That conclusion is not a stretch (indeed, it's unavoidable) once we rid ourselves of the nursery rhyme about six burglars trying to tap a telephone.

When in 1982 the Colliers invited Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward to view a six-hour videotape of voting fraud in Dade County and inquired "what Katharine Graham knew and when she knew it?" Woodward replied, "Don't start a war with me on this."

As late as 1983, the State Attorney for Dade County, a lady named Janet Reno (ring a bell?) was urging the Governor of Florida to name a special prosecutor to press the so-called Votescam case. But the Governor, a future U.S. Senator named Bob Graham (ring a bell?) refused her requests.

By 1984, expecting a challenge from Gov. Graham for her U.S. Senate seat in 1986, Republican Sen. Paula Hawkins sponsored an order to create a special select Senate committee on voting abuse, and prevailed on then-Attorney General William Smith and two of his deputies to view the video.

Everything is under lock-and-key, at least in Florida.

Bob Woodward's source on a private Oval Office conversation between President Clinton and a member of his cabinet (related in his book, "The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House") will be revealed 74 years from now, he promises. In another book, "Veil", he related a 1986 deathbed confession of CIA Director William J. Casey about Iran-Contra thusly: "I believed."

Why a comatose patient fresh from a craniotomy would pass that along to the man who brought down Nixon just because he snuck by a committee of CIA security men at Georgetown Hospital is curious. If he was hoping that Woodward would pass it along to the Roman Catholic Church, he got his wish. It's on page 507.

As to the other matter, "Deep Throat" was Mark Felt.

[msfreeh]

TWO READS



1st read
Thursday, April 30, 2009 by Salon.com
Top Senate Democrat: Bankers 'Own' the US Congress
CLICK LINK TO VIEW LINKS AND BAR GRAPHS
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/30-8" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

PART 1

by Glenn Greenwald

Sen. Dick Durbin, on a local Chicago radio station this week, blurted out an obvious truth about Congress that, despite being blindingly obvious, is rarely spoken: "And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." The blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the financial crisis "own" the U.S. Congress -- according to one of that institution's most powerful members -- demonstrates just how extreme this institutional corruption is.

The ownership of the federal government by banks and other large corporations is effectuated in literally countless ways, none more effective than the endless and increasingly sleazy overlap between government and corporate officials. Here is just one random item this week announcing a couple of standard personnel moves:

Former Barney Frank staffer now top Goldman Sachs lobbyist

Goldman Sachs' new top lobbyist was recently the top staffer to Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., on the House Financial Services Committee chaired by Frank. Michael Paese, a registered lobbyist for the Securities Industries and Financial Markets Association since he left Frank's committee in September, will join Goldman as director of government affairs, a role held last year by former Tom Daschle intimate, Mark Patterson, now the chief of staff at the Treasury Department. This is not Paese's first swing through the Wall Street-Congress revolving door: he previously worked at JP Morgan and Mercantile Bankshares, and in between served as senior minority counsel at the Financial Services Committee.

So: Paese went from Chairman Frank's office to be the top lobbyist at Goldman, and shortly before that, Goldman dispatched Paese's predecessor, close Tom Daschle associate Mark Patterson, to be Chief of Staff to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, himself a protege of former Goldman CEO Robert Rubin and a virtually wholly owned subsidiary of the banking industry. That's all part of what Desmond Lachman -- American Enterprise Institute fellow, former chief emerging market strategist at Salomon Smith Barney and top IMF official (no socialist he) -- recently described as "Goldman Sachs's seeming lock on high-level U.S. Treasury jobs."

Meanwhile, the above-linked Huffington Post article which reported on Durbin's comments also notes Sen. Evan Bayh's previously-reported central role on behalf of the bankers in blocking legislation, hated by the banking industry, to allow bankruptcy judges to alter the terms of mortgages so that families can stay in their homes. Bayh is up for re-election in 2010, and here -- according to the indispensable Open Secrets site -- is Bayh's top donor:

Goldman is also the top donor to Bayh over the course of his Congressional career, during which Bayh has received more than $4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate sectors:

In a totally unrelated coincidence -- after the Government, as Matt Taibbi put it, enacted "a bailout program that has now figured three ways to funnel money to Goldman, Sachs"-- this is what happened earlier this month:

Goldman reports $1.8 billion profit

Goldman Sachs reported a much stronger-than-expected first-quarter profit Monday, bouncing back from its worst quarter as a public company. . . .

In reporting its results a day earlier than expected, New York-based Goldman said it earned $1.81 billion, or $3.39 a share, for the quarter ended March 31. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial were looking for a profit of $1.64 a share.

Goldman shares, which have surged more than 70% during the past month, continued rising late Monday, gaining about 4.7% for the day.

Nobody even tries to hide this any longer. The only way they could make it more blatant is if they hung a huge Goldman Sachs logo on the Capitol dome and then branded it onto the foreheads of leading members of Congress and executive branch officials.

Of course, ownership of the government is not confined to Goldman or even to bankers generally; legislation in virtually every area is written by the lobbyists dispatched by the corporations that demand it, and its passage then ensured by "representatives" whose pockets are stuffed with money from those same corporations. Just as one example, as Jane Hamsher reported about Bayh:

Bayh's little "lobbyist problem" is considered by many to be what tanked his Vice Presidential aspirations. His wife Susan earns about $837,000 a year serving on seven corporate boards, among them Wellpoint, a health insurance company for which Bayh helped secure a $24.7 million dollar grant. She's on the board of ETrade, even as Bayh is on the Senate Finance Committee.

Bayh wants people to believe he's a "moderate" who sits in the "center."


2nd read

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-revi ... the-law-4/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


ABOVE THE LAW
Secret Deals, Political Fixes and Other Misadventures of the U.S. Department of Justice
by David Burnham


America's Justice Department overkilled. Having previously taken aim at the IRS (A Law Unto Itself, 1989, etc.), investigative reporter Burnham turns his guns on the elusive, unaccountable, deeply political institution comprised of some of the nation's most potent players, including the attorney general, the FBI, the DEA, the INS, the Antitrust Division, and 93 US attorneys. According to the author, the Justice Department has functioned primarily to advance the president's political agenda and to conduct covert operations. Headed by the attorney general (frequently the president's crony), the department busies itself with PR makework (such as Nixon's ``big, bad, dumb'' war on drugs) while failing to prosecute environmental criminals and corporations that endanger health and safety. Burnham convincingly argues that the sleazy symbiosis between the president and the Justice Department has not been limited to ``ethically challenged'' administrations: Along with the predictable tales of Nixon's anti- antitrust policy, he explores LBJ's use of the FBI to tail Martin Luther King, Carter's firing a federal prosecutor investigating a Democratic congressman, and Robert Kennedy's squelching an investigation of the Mafia's hold on Philadelphia's federal judges. He assembles impressive-looking charts to illustrate how the FBI distorts crime statistics and how federal prosecutors are misallocated across the nation. But too often the author concedes that he has found no smoking guns, inviting the reader to share his ``suspicions'' about Justice Department injustice. He blasts all attorneys general of recent memory except Edward Levi, neglecting to consider the contributions of such officeholders as Nicholas Katzenbach, Elliot Richardson, and Janet Reno. The book's strident tone, overbroad scope, and strenuous avoidance of gray areas also detract from the analysis. Sprawling, unsubtle, given to rhetorical excess--like the Justice Department itself.

[msfreeh]

see link for full story
http://oraclesyndicate.twoday.net/stories/2945207/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

FBI’s Incapacitating Cover-up
William A. Hamilton / Washington DC - Resolving the FBI’s persistent and incapacitating information technology problems was one of the main recommendations of the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 in its December 2002 Final Report. The “persistence” is the result of efforts to conceal the fact that the FBI’s primary information management system is based on software the U.S. Department of Justice stole from a vendor. Justice covertly disseminated the software beyond U.S. Attorneys Offices, the entities authorized to use it, and the government then converted PROMIS to track wire transfers in banks, to track intelligence information in the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies, and to steal intelligence secrets from foreign governments by selling them a Trojan-horse version.

The FBI’s cover-up of its role in the early 1980s theft of the PROMIS case management software from INSLAW, Inc. prevented the FBI from taking advantage in the mid-1990s of new computing technology that would have enabled dramatic improvements in the software’s ease-of-use. The FBI’s decision to disguise the PROMIS origins of its software, rather than upgrade its ease-of-use, not only fooled experts appointed by a court at the behest of Congress in 1996 but also prevented the FBI from connecting the dots five years later on 9/11 between investigative leads about Arab men coming to the United States for flight training. Connecting those dots might have unraveled the 9/11 plot, according to the FBI. The FBI then wasted the first several years of the war on terrorism on a failed $170 million project to upgrade the ease-of-use on its own.

The cover-up also prompted the FBI to pull its punches when the FBI’s Albuquerque office conducted an investigation into a PROMIS sale in New Mexico during the summer of 1984, the same year the Intelligence Division at FBI Headquarters created the first Bureau-wide case management system using a stolen copy of PROMIS. Employees of New Mexico’s Sandia National Laboratory, one of the two main U.S. intelligence centers on nuclear warfare, complained to FBI Albuquerque that the foreign national who made the PROMIS sale was simultaneously doing business with the Soviet Union. The Intelligence Division supervised all FBI counterintelligence investigations. FBI Albuquerque abruptly terminated its investigation without reversing the illegal PROMIS sale, and advised the Sandia witnesses that they could appeal the decision to FBI Headquarters if they wished.

The example the FBI gave to its own employees in 1984 of the FBI as lawbreaker was not lost on an American spy, an FBI Agent with an unusual interest in software, who worked in the Intelligence Division at FBI Headquarters while it was installing PROMIS. When the FBI’s PROMIS became operational in 1985 under the name FOIMS, FBI Agent Robert Hanssen began the most productive phase of his 20 years of espionage for the Soviet Union and Russia. Hanssen made extensive use of the FBI’s software in his espionage, according to the FBI’s early 2001 complaint against him. The U.S. Government also used Hanssen, a senior FBI counterintelligence agent, to help Germany and England with the installation and use of their stolen copies of PROMIS.

Hanssen also gave the Russians copies of the PROMIS software code used in the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies to track their intelligence information, and installed by in banks to enable U.S. intelligence to track electronic fund transfers. This software later made its way on the Russian black market to al Qaeda, which used it both to find out what the United States knew about al Qaeda’s plans, by accessing U.S. Government intelligence systems, and to move its funds through the banking system.

INSLAW retained attorney C. Boyden Gray in October 2001 to seek a settlement of its PROMIS copyright-infringement claims by having the government buy a license to the new and fully-tested and debugged point-and-click generation of PROMIS for the war on terrorism. The Bush Justice Department stonewalled Gray, while the FBI worked secretly and in vain to upgrade its version of PROMIS, then and now known as ACS, on its own. Two months after Gray became Ambassador to the European Union in January 2006, Gray’s co-counsel wrote to White House Counsel Harriet Miers to arrange to send her a document on a national security case for which Gray had been lead counsel. He also explained the President’s intervention was essential. Miers telephoned to say that she had spoken to Ambassador Gray in Brussels, and that Gray identified the case as the INSLAW case and added that the government owes INSLAW money. Miers emphasized, however, that INSLAW’s problem is with the government, and she represents the President, and, consequently, INSLAW’s only recourse is to Congress.

There were three significant developments during the summer of 2001 on the connection between the PROMIS software scandal and U.S. vulnerability to al Qaeda.

The first development, the debriefing in 2001 of former FBI Agent Robert Hanssen, revealed that al Qaeda had acquired copies of PROMIS used in the FBI, U.S. intelligence agencies, and banks, and was using the software to stay one step ahead of the United States. On June 14, 2001, The Washington Times published a front-page story entitled Software Likely in Hands of Terrorist, attributed to federal law enforcement staff familiar with Hanssen’s debriefing. The story appeared three months before 9/11, on the day Justice submitted its plea agreement with Hanssen in court under seal. Through that agreement, Justice abandoned its demand for the death penalty in exchange for Hanssen’s confession. The article stated that Hanssen gave copies of PROMIS to his Russian handlers, who later sold copies to bin Laden for $2 million, and that the sophisticated software gives bin Laden access to databases on specific targets of his choosing and the ability to monitor electronic banking sources, easing money-laundering …

The second development, also in June 2001, was the FBI’s award of its Virtual Case File contract to retrofit a point-and-click User Interface to the FBI’s case management software. A point-and-click User Interface is as important to software’s ease of use as an automatic transmission is to an automobile’s ease of use. The technology for building a system with a point-and-click User Interface has been available in the computer industry since 1993, two years before the FBI began the development of the current ACS version of its PROMIS software. However, the FBI not only failed to take advantage of the new point-and-click technology under its $67 million ACS Project in 1995 and 1996, but also failed in its unacknowledged effort to retrofit point-and-click technology to ACS under its four-year, $170 million Virtual Case File project that began in 2001. The use of outdated 1980s case management software in the 21st Century leaves FBI agents at a severe disadvantage in performing their duties, according to Justice’s Inspector General.

The third development during the summer of 2001 was the failure of the FBI to connect the dots between a July 2001 lead from its Phoenix office about Arab men coming to the United States for flight training, and the FBI’s August 2001 arrest of al Qaeda terrorist, Zacarias Moussaoui, at a flight training school in Minneapolis. Both FBI Phoenix and FBI Minneapolis had entered leads into ACS about these items. Because the FBI had never upgraded ACS with a point-and-click User Interface, ACS was difficult to use, and the FBI did not bother to search it to find connections. Minneapolis sent 70 messages in the weeks before 9/11 fruitlessly seeking support from FBI Headquarters for a national security warrant to search Moussaoui’s laptop computer. Had Minneapolis checked ACS, it would have discovered the Phoenix lead, and it could have used it to bolster its request to FBI Headquarters. Minneapolis obtained the warrant after 9/11. What it found could have enabled it to unravel the 9/11 plot, according to the FBI.

Approximately a month after 9/11, on October 16, 2001, Fox News reported that it had learned from government officials that Osama bin Laden may have purchased PROMIS from Russian sources after Russia got it from Robert Hanssen and that the concern is that bin Laden or al Qaeda could get on-line and use it to monitor the worldwide criminal investigation and hide themselves, to monitor the worldwide financial investigation and hide their money, or monitor operations of governments that use the software. Fox News also reported that Hansen, on behalf of the U.S. Government, had helped allies like Germany and England with the installation and use of their versions of the PROMIS program, and that both Germany and England had stopped using PROMIS in the several months since Hanssen’s mid-2001 confession. When Fox News asked what the U.S. Government was doing to plug the holes in U.S. security caused by the software being in the wrong hands, the government’s spokesperson replied that the United States had stopped using PROMIS, but refused to say when. This was the first time the government admitted, even indirectly, its use of PROMIS for intelligence applications.

In reality, the FBI never stopped using PROMIS. The FBI used its ACS software development project in 1995 and 1996 to disguise the PROMIS origins of FOIMS, the FBI’s primary information management system, by converting (translating) the PROMIS-derivative FOIMS from the COBOL computer programming language in which INSLAW had written it, to the NATURAL language made by Software AG. The FBI also later changed the name from FOIMS to ACS. The following excerpt from a May 1996 email message from Software AG in Reston, Virginia to its parent company in Germany is about the conversion of the PROMIS-derivative FOIMS:

[msfreeh]

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/0 ... y-charges/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

IMPORTANT TO SEE LINK AND TWEET SENT BY SABU
see link for full story

US Attorney Who Prosecuted FBI Informant & Hacker ‘Sabu’ Indicts Reuters Employee for Conspiracy Charge
By: Kevin Gosztola Thursday March 14, 2013 8:27 pm


The Justice Department indicted Matthew Keys, the deputy social media editor for Reuters.com, for allegedly conspiring with members of Anonymous and giving them login information so they could “hack into and alter” the Los Angeles Times‘ website.

The indictment should raise suspicion, however, because Hector Xavier Monsegur or ”Sabu,” who the FBI flipped and used to catch and, to some extent, entrap LulzSec hackers, is likely involved in the indictment.

Keys is charged with “conspiracy to cause damage to a protected computer,” “transmission of malicious code” and “attempted transmission of malicious code.”

From Matthew Keys’ indictment, US Attorney Benjamin B. Wagner, who prosecuted “Sabu,” and Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman allege, ”Between on or about December 8, 2010, and or about December 15, 2010, in the State and Eastern District of California and elsewhere, Matthew Keys, together with at least one other person, did conspire to knowingly cause the transmission of a program, information, code and command and, as a result of such conduct, intentionally caused damage without authorization to a protected computer, causing loss to a person during a 1-year period aggregating at least $5,000 in value,” which violated a section of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Who could that other person be? On March 14, the same day as this indictment, Wagner and Assistant US Attorney Matthew D. Segal filed a “notice of related cases” to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, where the indictment was filed.

The notice:

Both cases related to computer hacking attacks by the group that called itself “Anonymous.” The Keys case alleges that Keys gave login credentials to members of Anonymous and encouraged them to vandalize the web site of his former employer, a news organization. Defendant Monsegur, who used the nickname “Sabu,” appeared in the Internet chat log at the core of the Keys case, and, in that chat log, offered advice on how to conduct the network intrusion. Monsegur later became a cooperating defendant in the Southern District of New York.

In Parmy Olson’s book, We Are Anonymous, Olson writes that Sabu claimed, “Keys had given away administrator access to the online publishing system of Tribune, his former employer, in return for a chance to ‘hang out in our channel.’” Keys denied this.

“Sabu” sent this tweet:

[msfreeh]

see link for full story of taxpayer funded FBI Operation Mop Up
http://www.blackbluedog.com/2013/03/new ... assinated/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Your Black History: Did You Know that Dr. King’s Mother was Assassinated?
March 14, 2013

Most people know the amazing stories about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They know about his most famous speech, his legendary marches and the principals by which he lived his life. What most people do not know is what happened to his family. There are stories about the numerous tragedies endured by the Kennedy family, but after reading this, you might know that the King family could give them a run for their money.

Shortly after Dr. King’s death in 1968, Martin’s brother Alfred became co-pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where his father and brother preached. In July of 1969, just a few days before his 39th birthday, Alfred was found dead in a swimming pool. The case was ruled as an accidental drowning, but many speculate something more sinister might have happened. According to his father, he was a good swimmer.

Alberta King, Dr. King’s mother, was shot and killed in 1974 while playing the organ at her church. The shooting was allegedly done by a 23-year old black man by the name of Marcus Wayne Chenault. Chenault didn’t give any reason for the shooting, except to say that “all Christians are my enemies.”

[msfreeh]

see link for full story
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/nati ... udge-rules" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

March 15, 2013
National Security Letters Are Unconstitutional, Federal Judge Rules
Court Finds NSL Statutes Violate First Amendment and Separation of Powers

San Francisco - A federal district court judge in San Francisco has ruled that National Security Letter (NSL) provisions in federal law violate the Constitution. The decision came in a lawsuit challenging a NSL on behalf of an unnamed telecommunications company represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

In the ruling publicly released today, Judge Susan Illston ordered that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stop issuing NSLs and cease enforcing the gag provision in this or any other case. The landmark ruling is stayed for 90 days to allow the government to appeal.

"We are very pleased that the court recognized the fatal constitutional shortcomings of the NSL statute," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Matt Zimmerman. "The government's gags have truncated the public debate on these controversial surveillance tools. Our client looks forward to the day when it can publicly discuss its experience."

[msfreeh]

http://www.campusactivism.org/phpBB3/vi ... a969a7dd52" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[msfreeh]

see link for full story
http://www.ammoland.com/2013/03/senator ... -book-ban/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Senator Feinstein’s Book Ban
Published on Friday, March 15, 2013


Senator Cruz recently asked the following question to Senator Feinstein:

Eatontown, NJ --(Ammoland.com)- “The question that I would pose to the senior senator from California is,” said Cruz to Feinstein, “Would she deem it consistent with the Bill of Rights for Congress to engage in the same endeavor that we are contemplating doing with the Second Amendment in the context of the First or Fourth Amendment, namely, would she consider it constitutional for Congress to specify that the First Amendment shall apply only to the following books and shall not apply to the books that Congress has deemed outside the protection of the Bill of Rights?”

Senator Feinstein should have honestly answered “Yes.”

In 1997 her bill, S.936 the so-called “Feinstein Amendment”, became law. It banned books and other speech. Her law made it illegal to distribute bomb-making information, punishable by a $250,000 fine and 20 years’ imprisonment. It became a federal crime to “… distribute by any means information pertaining to, in whole or in part, the manufacture or use of an explosive, destructive device, or weapon of mass destruction, with the intention that the teaching, demonstration, or information be used for, or in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal criminal offense or a State or local criminal …” The law was in response to the Oklahoma bombing, in which Timothy McVeigh had two books titled Homemade C-4, A Recipe for Survival and Ragnar’s Big Book of Homemade Weapons and Improvised Explosives.

There are key differences between Senator Feinstein’s attacks on the First Amendment compared to her attacks on the Second Amendment. Her law limiting free speech requires that one must distribute the information “…with the intention…” that it be used for a crime. However, no such intentions matter when it comes to her gun bans.

Not long after 9/11 I had a case in which my client worked for a scrap metals company. He would remove the mercury switches from thermostats and would get paid per switch. He had been raided by the police over a false claim of domestic violence in which they seized his guns and observed his pile of mercury switches. The police also seized some books on weapons and explosives that he had bought at a gun show. Amongst the books were Poor Man’s James Bond by Kurt Saxon and Uncle Fester’s Home Workshop Explosives. The next thing he knew was that the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Unit wanted to speak with him. I went with him to see what the FBI wanted and discovered that they were only interested in his books! Even though these books were commonly available and protected by the First Amendment, the FBI Agent frankly told us that they were desperate to get a conviction under the “Feinstein Amendment” but had been unable to do so because of the difficulty in having to prove the “intent” part of the law.

The FBI Agent had hoped that my client at some point had personal contact with the authors, who the FBI was eager to prosecute. Needless to say, my client was unable to help them. This encounter with the FBI made me reflect on how important our First Amendment rights are and how, without that amendment, American politicians would have had no hesitation in acting flat out bans on books and other speech. Unfortunately, the Second Amendment is not treated with the same respect.

[msfreeh]

see link for full story

http://www.nysun.com/new-york/ex-fbi-ag ... its/25725/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


Ex-FBI Agent Probed for Aiding Mob Hits

By JERRY CAPECI | January 12, 2006



Authorities are investigating allegations that a former mob-busting FBI agent helped Colombo capo Gregory Scarpa carry out four Brooklyn murders during the years the gangster served as a top echelon informer for the agent, Gang Land has learned.

Two of the slayings - one committed by Scarpa, the other by an associate - took place after the FBI agent, R. Lindley DeVecchio, allegedly told the gangster that two Brooklyn hoodlums were stool pigeons just like him, sources said.

Mr. DeVecchio allegedly told Scarpa that mobster Joseph "Joe Brewster" DeDomenico had "found God" and was prepared to tell the truth if subpoenaed, and that Patrick Porco, a young drug dealing buddy of Scarpa's son Joseph, was talking to police, sources said.

DeDomenico, 44, was shot to death on September 17, 1987. Porco, 18, was killed over the Memorial Day weekend in 1990.

Sources said the Brooklyn district attorney's office also has evidence that Mr. DeVecchio, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing as an FBI agent, aided Scarpa in the murders of two rival hoodlums he shot to death during the bloody 1991-92 mob family war.

The victims, mob associate Larry Lampesi and capo Nicholas "Nicky Black" Grancio, members of a rival Colombo faction headed byVictor "Little Vic" Orena, were shot to death by Scarpa's crew in 1992. Sources said Mr. DeVecchio facilitated Grancio's murder by calling off a police surveillance team to allow Scarpa to kill him, and assisted Scarpa in Lampesi's murder by letting him know where to find his target.

"The evidence is credible but it remains to be seen whether a murder case can be made," a law enforcement source said, noting that the statute of limitations has long since passed on all other possible charges.

"Lin discussed the murders with Greg before they happened, and after they happened, and knew they were going to happen - that is the allegation," a source who is familiar with the probe by the D.A.'s office said.

Just how far Mr. DeVecchio went in aiding his prized informant has been kicked around by federal prosecutors and mob defense lawyers for more than a decade. He was investigated by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Integrity in 1997, but no charges were ever brought.

Accounts by Scarpa's family detailing Mr. DeVecchio's close, allegedly corrupt, working relationship with Scarpa reached Gang Land a decade ago. Those charges could never be confirmed and Mr. DeVecchio has strongly denied any wrongdoing.

The central figure in the new investigation, sources said, is Scarpa's longtime lover, Linda Schiro, who hooked up with the then 36-year-old mobster in 1964 several months before her 19th birthday and raised two children with him. Their son, Joseph, was shot to death in a drug-related gang murder in 1995 at 24. Scarpa, who contracted the AIDS virus in a blood transfusion, died in prison a year earlier at 66. Ms. Schiro, now 60, met Mr. DeVecchio numerous times during visits to the gangster's home, according to court documents.

While Ms. Schiro is the linchpin of the investigation, the allegations were delivered to the D.A.'s office by Angela Clemente, a private investigator who obtained much of her information from a woman with whom Ms. Schiro planned to write a book several years ago, sources said.

Sources said Ms. Clemente, who has investigated Mr. DeVecchio and other alleged government abuses for years, filed a report with the D.A.'s office last year after a federal judge refused to toss Little Vic Orena's murder and racketeering conviction based on lesser allegations against the 65-year-old retired G-man.

Sources said the report is based largely on information Ms. Clemente obtained from Sandy Harmon, who had planned to pen the Schiro-Scarpa book, and that it contains allegations that have been knocked down by detectives and investigators for Brooklyn's D.A., Charles Hynes.

One discredited charge is that Joseph Scarpa killed Porco, a lifelong friend whose bullet-riddled body was found on May 27, 1990, in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, on orders from his father.

"Greg wanted him to, pushed him to do it, but the kid couldn't do it," a source said.

Prosecutors have confirmed the essence of the report, however, and plan to cajole or coerce Ms. Schiro to testify before a grand jury in the hope of lodging murder charges against Mr. DeVecchio and others, sources said.

Ms. Shiro, who implicated Mr. DeVecchio in two minor transgressions during an internal FBI probe - she said he accepted a plate of lasagna and a Cabbage Patch doll as gifts from her and Greg - declined to comment when contacted by Gang Land.

"These allegations are preposterous," Mr. DeVecchio's attorney, Douglas Grover, said. "There's no way that such a well-respected, talented agent who enjoyed a great career with the FBI was ever going to get involved in something like this. There is no doubt that Scarpa was a murderous thug, but there is nothing to suggest that Lin participated in or condoned any of Scarpa's conduct while he was a major FBI informant."

[msfreeh]

TWO STORIES
see link for full story
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/region ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Swartz protesters go to prosecutor’s home
By Dave Eisenstadter

March 17, 2013
Milton police on March 16 responded to a small demonstration by people who went to the home of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz to protest her handling of the Aaron Swartz case. The protesters, who identified with the Occupy movement, placed “Wanted” posters bearing Ortiz’s name near her Milton home and left a cake on the property with the words “Justice for Aaron” written in frosting, according to Deputy Police Chief Charles Paris. Police sent the cake to the FBI, he said. Ortiz said last week that she respected the rights of individuals to express views, but added that protesters wearing masks in her neighborhood frightened her children and neighbors. Swartz, who was charged with illegally obtaining documents from protected computers, committed suicide in January.


IMPORTANT LESSON TO LEARN ABOUT THE FBI and FBI AGENTS

In the news wires today appeared the story about the Gardner Museum heist
in Boston Mass that happened over 20 years ago. Appearing in all the news stories
was Boston FBI Office Agent in Charge Richard Dsauliers. If you actually read the stories
you discover the FBI still does not know who committed the crime.

Some of you might remember the name of FBI Supervisor Richard Dsauliers
from other posts on this forum about Aaron Swartz the creator of Reddit , a feature of the internet
that is now widely used. FBI Supervisor Richard Dsauliers recently bullied Aaron Swartz into committing suicide. see http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013/01/15/s ... s-funeral/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The FBI used it's power over the media to try and re-brand Richard Dsauliers as one of the good guys.
But you and I know better, eh?




here are just a few of the stories.


New York Times

$5 Million Reward Offered for Stolen Gardner Museum Artwork
Federal Bureau of Investigation (press release)-9 hours ago
Today, the FBI—along with Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Massachusetts—asked for the public's help in recovering ...
FBI Says It Has Clues in '90 Boston Art Theft
New York Times-1 hour ago
FBI: We know who was behind massive 1990 Boston art theft
CNN-9 hours ago
FBI: We know who carried out greatest art heist in American history
In-Depth
-Fox News-9 hours ago
FBI Says It Knows Who's Behind Biggest Art Museum Heist In History
Blog
-NPR (blog)-7 hours ago
►►
The Associated Press
►►
TheBostonChannel.com

NPR (blog)

News1130

The Atlantic Wire

Smithsonian (blog)

WBUR
all 95 news sources »
On 23rd anniversary, FBI says it has identified the thieves in Gardner ...
Boston.com-10 hours ago
“The FBI believes with a high degree of confidence in the years after the theft the art was transported to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region and some of the ...


FBI takes to the internet in search of stolen art worth $500 million
The Verge-by Chris Welch-7 hours ago
In all, the stolen goods were valued at $300 million by the FBI, though other experts say that figure should be closer to $500 million. The Gardner heist remains ...
FBI believes it knows identities of thieves in massive '90 Boston art ...
Washington Post-8 hours ago
BOSTON — The FBI says it has solved the decades-old mystery of who stole $500 million in artwork from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but it is ...


FBI turns up heat in investigation of 1990 Boston art heist
Reuters-10 hours ago
BOSTON (Reuters) - The FBI believes it has identified the thieves who stole 13 artworks from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 in the costliest ...
FBI zeroes in on $500M art heist; Philly involved?
Philadelphia Inquirer-6 hours ago
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Special Agent in Charge Richard DesLauriers, right, stands next to a poster that shows a Rembrandt painting and a reward ...
FBI: We know who stole the Gardner paintings, but we don't know ...
Boston Business Journal (blog)-by Galen Moore-10 hours ago
Mystery solved - sort of: The FBI says it knows the identity of the culprits in the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. Johannes Vermeer's "The Concert" ...

FBI Identifies Thieves In 1990 Gardner Museum Art Heist
CBS Local-10 hours ago
BOSTON (CBS) – The FBI says it knows the identities of the thieves involved in the 1990 theft of up to $500 million worth of art from Boston's Isabella Stewart ...

The FBI Says It Knows Who Committed The Biggest Art Heist Of All ...
Business Insider-by Julie Zeveloff-9 hours ago
Authorities did not identify the thieves by name, but Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston office, said in a press release that they ...
FBI Knows Suspects in $500 Million Art Theft
Voice of America-9 hours ago
The FBI says it has identified suspects in the 1990 theft of half a billion dollars worth of ... The FBI has a website aimed at getting help to crack the case at www.

FBI to Discuss Developments in '90 Mass. Art Heist
TIME-10 hours ago
BOSTON (AP) — The FBI believes it knows the identities of the thieves who stole art valued at up to $500 million from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner ...
Washington Post


FBI to reveal new details of 1990 Boston museum heist
Yahoo! News (blog)-12 hours ago
Reuters/Reuters - FBI posters displaying works by artists Johannes Vermeer and Edgar Degas are seen during a press conference held to appeal to the public ...
FBI Announces $5M Reward for Info on the $500M in Artwork Stolen ...
BostInno (blog)-9 hours ago
In a press statement today, the FBI announced that they now know the thieves' identities, but still do not know the location of the art. The FBI launched a public ...






FBI: We Know Who Robbed the Gardner Museum
Patch.com-9 hours ago
Note: This article has been updated to note the FBI is seeking the public's help to locate the 13 missing pieces of art. A previous version of article suggested the ...
FBI Identifies Thieves Behind Infamous Isabella Gardner Museum ...
Boston magazine's Boston Daily (blog)-9 hours ago
After more than $500 million of artwork was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston more than 23 years ago, FBI investigators said Monday ...
FBI Asks for Help with Gardner Heist
WGBH NEWS-7 hours ago
The FBI's Boston office announced today that it is confident it knows the identities of the thieves who stole 13 works of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner.
FBI Continues Search for Art Stolen from Mass. Museum
abc40-7 hours ago
FBI investigators announced Monday that they have are confident that the 13 works of art taken from the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum on March 18, 1990, ...

FBI says it has identified suspects in $500M art heist
Toronto Sun-9 hours ago
The FBI believes it has identified the thieves who stole 13 artworks from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, in the costliest art theft in U.S. ...



Gardner Museum Heist: FBI Close To Recovering $500 Million In Art ...
International Business Times-9 hours ago
On the 23rd anniversary of the heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the FBI and federal authorities said they were close to nabbing the ...

[msfreeh]

see link for full story
http://forums.utsandiego.com/showthread ... 39&page=42" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

FBI's Secret Spyware Tracks Down Teen Who Made Bomb Threats
Kevin Poulsen Email 07.18.07 | 2:00 AM

FBI agents trying to track the source of e-mailed bomb threats against a Washington high school last month sent the suspect a secret surveillance program designed to surreptitiously monitor him and report back to a government server, according to an FBI affidavit obtained by Wired News.

The court filing offers the first public glimpse into the bureau's long-suspected spyware capability, in which the FBI adopts techniques more common to online criminals.

The software was sent to the owner of an anonymous MySpace profile linked to bomb threats against Timberline High School near Seattle. The code led the FBI to 15-year-old Josh Glazebrook, a student at the school, who on Monday pleaded guilty to making bomb threats, identity theft and felony harassment.

In an affidavit seeking a search warrant to use the software, filed last month in U.S. District Court in the Western District of Washington, FBI agent Norman Sanders describes the software as a "computer and internet protocol address verifier," or CIPAV.

FBI Spyware in a Nutshell

The full capabilities of the FBI's "computer and internet protocol address verifier" are closely guarded secrets, but here's some of the data the malware collects from a computer immediately after infiltrating it, according to a bureau affidavit acquired by Wired News.

• IP address
• MAC address of ethernet cards
• A list of open TCP and UDP ports
• A list of running programs
• The operating system type, version and serial number
• The default internet browser and version
• The registered user of the operating system, and registered company name, if any
• The current logged-in user name
• The last visited URL

Once that data is gathered, the CIPAV begins secretly monitoring the computer's internet use, logging every IP address to which the machine connects.

All that information is sent over the internet to an FBI computer in Virginia, likely located at the FBI's technical laboratory in Quantico.

Sanders wrote that the spyware program gathers a wide range of information, including the computer's IP address; MAC address; open ports; a list of running programs; the operating system type, version and serial number; preferred internet browser and version; the computer's registered owner and registered company name; the current logged-in user name and the last-visited URL.

The CIPAV then settles into a silent "pen register" mode, in which it lurks on the target computer and monitors its internet use, logging the IP address of every computer to which the machine connects for up to 60 days.

Under a ruling this month by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, such surveillance -- which does not capture the content of the communications -- can be conducted without a wiretap warrant, because internet users have no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in the data when using the internet.

According to the affidavit, the CIPAV sends all the data it collects to a central FBI server located somewhere in eastern Virginia. The server's precise location wasn't specified, but previous FBI internet surveillance technology -- notably its Carnivore packet-sniffing hardware -- was developed and run out of the bureau's technology laboratory at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.

The FBI's national office referred an inquiry about the CIPAV to a spokeswoman for the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, who declined to comment on the technology.

[msfreeh]

see link for full story

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/56031 ... s.html.csp" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


March 20, 2013

Retired FBI Agent Jailed After Feds Accuse Him of Contacting Potential Witness



A retired FBI agent accused of trying to derail an investigation into military fraud was jailed Tuesday after a federal judge in Utah said he violated terms of his release, the Salt Lake Tribune reports.

U.S. District Court judge ordered Robert G. Lustyik Jr., 50, to jail after prosecutors provided “clear and convincing” evidence that the 50-year-old retired agent asked a third party to deliver cash to apotential witness in the case, the Tribune wrote.

[msfreeh]

What are the odds that current and former FBI agents are pulling the strings
at the A & E Cable Channel and Discovery Channel?
Where do you think FBI agents go to work after fixing cases for corporations?


Two of the most important films in the last 50 years get pulled from
A & E and Discovery then get sealed.
They will not even sell them.


1st read





For the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Nigel Turner produced three more installments of "The Men Who Killed Kennedy": The Love Affair, The Smoking Guns and The Guilty Men. The third of these documentaries looked at the possibility that Lyndon B. Johnson, Malcolm Wallace and Edward A. Clark were involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The programme used evidence from the book by Blood, Money & Power: How LBJ Killed JFK by Barr McClellan. It also used other sources such as the testimony of Madeleine Brown and Billie Sol Estes and the research of Walt Brown, Ed Tatro, Rick Russo, Glen Sample, and Gregory Burnham.

The Guilty Men, probably the best in the series, was immediately banned .

Does anyone know the latest situation concerning The Guilty Men?

answer



I watched "The Guilty Men" again last night on DVD. It is probably the best in Nigel Turner's series of "The Men Who Killed Kennedy". I noticed that Turner wrote, produced and directed the programme and the copyright was held by A & E Networks. How then were the History Channel able to make it "unavailable" to the general public?

to watch the GUILTY MEN on youtube see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m--UyT3CiD4" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


2nd read
media have consistently suppressed an even more explosive and related story.

For years, former Nebraska State Sen. John DeCamp has spearheaded an inquiry into a massive pedophile ring with a base of operations in Omaha, Nebraska, that has been linked to high-ranking political figures in Washington. Recently, DeCamp won a $1 million civil judgment against former big-name Republican Party figure Larry King (an Omaha credit union founder) on behalf of a young man, Paul Bonacci, who charged that King had molested him and brought him into the pedophile ring.

DeCamp was the guest on the February 24 broadcast of Radio Free America, the weekly talk forum sponsored by AFP (American Free Press) with host Tom Valentine. Valentine’s questions are in boldface. DeCamp’s responses are in regular text. Caller’s comments are in italics.

When your client, Paul Bonacci, filed a law suit against Larry King of the Franklin Credit Union in Omaha, you also named the Catholic Arch diocese of Omaha as a co-defendant. Why?

The reason was that my client said that it was because of a couple of Catholic priests there started doing improper things to him at a very young age that started him into the tragic life that he led. The federal judge ruled that it was not possible to name the archdiocese—that it couldn’t possibly be guilty of anything, because how would they know what individual priests had been doing. In other words: “How would the bishop have known anything to stop it?”

This sounds just like the current controversy in Boston, except this happened long before the Boston scandal.

That’s right. It was exactly like Boston. I took it so seriously at the time that I went to Rome and met with Cardinal Ratzinger. He’s the one who has been in charge of this systemic problem in the church of priests involved in pedophilia. Ratzinger is now in the limelight over this issue, but he couldn’t get anyone to do anything 12 or 13 years ago when I was writing about this and filing my lawsuit.

I appealed the decision removing the diocese from my lawsuit. I went before the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals and they upheld the judge’s decision in favor of removal of the diocese.

I went on to win the rest of the lawsuit against Larry King, but I was always bitter because I knew that I was right. This problem of priests abusing their position and abusing young children was a serious problem and not being properly dealt with by the church.

Of course, there have been some major cases in recent years, but these cases trace back to events many years ago. So now we have the Catholic Archdiocese in Boston paying out millions to settle claims. But my case in Omaha was thrown out.

When in the course of your investigations did you begin to realize that Boys Town in Omaha was essentially a “farm” for what you determined to be a national network of pedophiles that extended well beyond pedophilic priests?

When the children I was representing—and in the course of interviewing others—brought the role of Boys Town up as a central point. At least certain elements of Boys Town were being improperly used.

How did you get the British Broadcasting Company [BBC] interested in coming over and doing the explosive documentary that they produced on Boys Town (but which was never aired)?

I did nothing to get them interested. Somehow the BBC got a copy of an early edition of my book. They sent over a preliminary team and, for whatever reason unknown to me, the BBC sent over an entire investigative mission. Over a period of nine months or so they produced the program entitled Conspiracy of Silence. It was scheduled in all of the TV guides to appear on the Discovery Channel on a particular date and at the last minute it was pulled and never saw daylight.

I called the individual who handles the Discovery Channel programming and he told me that the program had been bought up and sealed and was never to be seen. However, a copy of the video was sent to me from parties unknown, who were obviously concerned that the program was not going to be aired.

Some $500,000 was paid to buy the airtime for the program. So, whoever bought it at the last minute was able to prevent it from being shown. However, the copies of the videotape are out there and are being widely distributed.*

Now you have picked up a new client and it ties directly into Boys Town.

My client is the former head of Boys Town. He was the head longer than anyone in the history of Boys Town. His name is Monsignor Robert Hupp. In 1976, he was appointed as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations, the only clergyman ever appointed to that position.

He contacted me. He’s 87 years old. I met with him and he needed some help. He felt, I guess, at his advanced age that he wanted to correct some problems and abuses that he had tried to years ago. Just after I was asked to represent him, he completed a major recorded deposition in the presence of many church lawyers, and also attorneys for a number of altar boys who had been abused by priests.

Did he come to you because there were suits against Boys Town?

There were lawsuits against the Catholic Archdiocese of Omaha and Boys Town is a part of the archdiocese. The position of the church, which was very public, was that they knew nothing about the abuse and, if they had known, they would have done something about it.

That’s very important to understand. They are saying, “We didn’t know, so how can we be held responsible. If we had known, we would have done something about it.”

However, the essence of what Monsignor Hupp asked me to do was to help get the true story out, because what he had to say was rather shocking and would totally disprove that claim here in Omaha and probably in a lot of other places.

I made the arrangements so that he could get his story out under oath. The deposition that he gave in this case may be sealed, but one way or another the story he had to tell will come out.




Press Release

DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS, INC., ANNOUNCES NEW ROLE OF FOUNDER JOHN S. HENDRICKS EFFECTIVE JUNE 17, 2004

Judith A. McHale Slated for the President and CEO Post on June 17, 2004

(Silver Spring, MD - March 9, 2004) Discovery Communications, Inc. (Discovery) announced today that Founder John S. Hendricks recommended to Discovery's shareholders at their meeting on March 8 that the currently-combined positions of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer be separated on June 17, 2004, a date which marks the beginning of Discovery Channel's 20th Anniversary Year. Mr. Hendricks currently holds the title of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. He will become Chairman on June 17, 2004 in accordance with his recommendation, and he will continue his active strategic leadership for Discovery. Judith A. McHale, Discovery's current President and Chief Operating Officer, will assume the CEO post on that date.

Mr. Hendricks, 51, issued the following statement concerning his recommendation:

"I incorporated Discovery at age 30 on September 8, 1982. During 2002, 20 years after incorporation, I began to consider a new management structure in which I could continue to provide strategic leadership by developing and overseeing an ambitious growth agenda at the board level. I strongly believe that I will be best able to focus my energies on further corporate expansion by relinquishing my daily chief executive officer duties. I think the beginning of Discovery Channel's 20th Anniversary Year on June 17 is just the right time for me to begin enjoying the creative freedom that the position of Chairman will offer. For some time now I have believed, in terms of modern corporate governance, that the skill sets and passion of a founding entrepreneur are best channeled through a Chairman role after a company has successfully navigated the challenges of early development and has clearly established a market leadership position within 20 years of the company's founding.

My fellow shareholders, Cox, Liberty, and Advance/Newhouse, are supportive of this recommendation, and together we look forward to many more years in building this global media enterprise. I remain impressed and continually amazed by the quality of insight and the depth of dedication that Dob Bennett, John Malone, Bob Miron, and Jim Robbins offer in their service on the Discovery Board. It is a privilege for me to Chair a group with such a powerful and united commitment to making Discovery the most valuable of all the world's media companies.

In like fashion, I am constantly inspired by the members of our bright and creative management team led by Judith McHale, who I am very pleased to report will assume the CEO's post on June 17. Judith's passion for the Discovery brand offers our Company a great future, and it is a pleasure for me to be able to continue to work with Judith as she represents the very best management talent in our industry. She is the best business partner that a company founder could ever hope to have."

Speaking on behalf of the Discovery shareholders, Robert Miron, Chairman and CEO of Advance/Newhouse Communications, stated: "Over the years, the shareholders of Discovery have been very rewarded by following John Hendricks' recommendations for growth. So, it should not be surprising that we support his recommendation that he be freed up to focus his creative energies on finding the right new assets to develop and acquire and to continue his visionary role as Founder and Chairman of the Board. The Board, having a first-hand knowledge of Judith's remarkable leadership skills, was equally supportive of John's recommendation that Judith succeed him in the CEO post when the currently-combined positions are separated on June 17."

"I deeply appreciate this vote of confidence from John and our Board of Directors in me and in our strong management team," Judith McHale said. "For me, the most important part of this step is knowing that I will continue to work as closely as we have for the last 16 years with John Hendricks, one of the most creative forces in the world, and with the extraordinarily supportive members of our Board of Directors. I thank them all for this tremendous opportunity and for making it possible for Discovery Communications to continue to grow well into the future."

Discovery Communications, Inc. (DCI) is the leading global real-world media and entertainment company. DCI has grown from its core property, the Discovery Channel, first launched in the United States in 1985, to current global operations in 152 countries with 180 million total subscribers. DCI's programming is tailored to the specific needs of viewers around the globe, and distributed through 77 separate feeds in 33 languages. DCI's 33 networks of distinctive programming represent 14 entertainment brands including TLC, Animal Planet, Travel Channel, Discovery Health Channel, Discovery Kids, and a family of digital channels. DCI's other properties consist of Discovery.com and 165 Discovery Channel retail stores. DCI also distributes BBC America in the United States.


A&E (Arts & Entertainment) Television Networks is a media company that owns several TV networks on cable and satellite. The company is jointly owned by ABC, Inc., The Hearst Corporation, and NBC Universal. AETN's networks include:

* A&E Network
* The History Channel
* The Biography Channel
* History International
* The History Channel en Español
* Military History Channel
* Crime & Investigation Network
NBC Universal, Inc. (a subsidiary of General Electric and Vivendi)

[msfreeh]

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/03/ ... triot-act/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
When the government demands silence -- the ugliness of the Patriot Act

Published March 21, 2013

In 1798, when John Adams was president of the United States, the feds enacted four pieces of legislation called the Alien and Sedition Acts. One of these laws made it a federal crime to publish any false, scandalous or malicious writing -- even if true -- about the president or the federal government, notwithstanding the guarantee of free speech in the First Amendment.

The feds used these laws to torment their adversaries in the press and even successfully prosecuted a congressman who heavily criticized the president. Then-Vice President Thomas Jefferson vowed that if he became president, these abominable laws would expire. He did, and they did, but this became a lesson for future generations: The guarantees of personal freedom in the Constitution are only as valuable and reliable as is the fidelity to the Constitution of those to whom we have entrusted it for safekeeping.

We have entrusted the Constitution to all three branches of the federal government for safekeeping. But typically, they fail to do so. Presidents have repeatedly assaulted the freedom of speech many times throughout our history, and Congresses have looked the other way. Abraham Lincoln arrested Northerners who challenged the Civil War. Woodrow Wilson arrested Americans who challenged World War I. FDR arrested Americans he thought might not support World War II. LBJ and Richard Nixon used the FBI to harass hundreds whose anti-Vietnam protests frustrated them.

In the post-9/11 era the chief instrument of repression of personal freedom has been the government’s signature anti-terror legislation: the Patriot Act.

In our own post 9/11 era, the chief instrument of repression of personal freedom has been the government’s signature anti-terror legislation: the Patriot Act. It was born in secrecy, as members of the House of Representatives were given 15 minutes to read its 300 pages before voting on it in October 2001, and it operates in silence, as those who suffer under it cannot speak about it.

The Patriot Act permits FBI agents to write their own search warrants and gives those warrants the patriotic and harmless-sounding name of national security letters (NSLs). This authorization is in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says that the people shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects from unreasonable searches and seizures, and that that security can only be violated by a search warrant issued by a neutral judge and based upon probable cause of crime.

The probable cause requirement compels the feds to acquire evidence of criminal behavior about the person whose records they seek, so as to prevent politically motivated invasions of privacy and fishing expeditions like those that were common in the colonial era. Judges are free, of course, to sign the requested warrant, to modify it and sign it, or to reject it if it lacks the underlying probable cause.

The very concept of a search warrant authorized by law enforcement and not by the courts is directly and profoundly antithetical to the Constitution -- no matter what the warrant is called. Yet, that’s what Congress and President Bush made lawful when they gave us the Patriot Act.

When FBI agents serve the warrants they’ve written for themselves -- the NSLs as they call them -- they tell the recipient of the warrant that he or she will commit a felony if he or she tells anyone -- a lawyer, a judge, a spouse, a priest in confessional -- of the receipt of the warrant. The NSLs are typically not served on the person whose records the FBI wants; rather, they are served on the custodians of those records, such as computer servers, the Post Office, hospitals, banks, delivery services, telephone providers, etc.

[msfreeh]

see link for full story
http://www.myfoxboston.com/story/217627 ... -informant" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
'Out of Control:' Senator blasts Boston FBI over mob informant

A top-ranking U.S. Senator is leveling harsh criticism against the Boston office of the FBI for its handling of local mob informant Mark Rossetti, saying the office needs a major shakeup.
"I thought it was pretty clear after Bulger as an example, now Rossetti coming out and not having learned any lessons. There needs to be big changes. I'm not running the FBI but this has been going on too long. There have to be big changes," Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told FOX Undercover.
Grassley launched his own investigation of the FBI's handling of Rossetti after his informant status was publicly revealed in 2011.
Rossetti is a mob captain and suspected murderer who was charged in 2010 with running an organized crime ring including heroin trafficking, loan sharking and extortion. A State Police wiretap on Rossetti that gathered evidence used to indict and ultimately convict him also recorded conversations with his FBI handler, showing he was committing crimes while acting as a paid informant.
"It's very difficult with the use of a Rossetti or a previous person that they wouldn't know it's going on and there wasn't some knowledge of it. And if there isn't knowledge of it there ought to be, otherwise the FBI is not doing its job," Grassley said.
The Boston FBI's office's use of Rossetti is particularly troubling because it was the office where corrupt former agent John Connolly dealt with former mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger.
"Going back a ways, don't you have an FBI agent that was convicted of some wrongdoing because he was involved in this process as well? Doesn't that tell you something about the local office probably being out of control?" Grassley said.
"Do the guidelines for dealing with informants need to be revised again?" Beaudet asked him.
"First of all, they revised them and then they work with Rossetti, and that's a conflict with the original guidelines. I don't know whether just a revision again is going to make any difference. There's something in the culture of the FBI in this particular part of the country that needs to be dealt with. I don't know whether another revision of guidelines would make much difference," Grassley replied.
The FBI in a statement said the internal review is still underway pending access to some state court documents.
"The review consists of thousands of documents, interviews with those directly involved in the matter, including members of the Massachusetts State Police, FBI, district attorney's office and the U.S. Attorney's Office," the FBI statement said.
The culture of the FBI office in Boston was also part of Grassley's investigation. He found that the FBI's relationship with the State Police organized crime section was still poisoned from the Bulger years.
Court records revealed that, early in the investigation, State Police asked the FBI if Rossetti was an informant, which the FBI denied.
"The FBI never communicated with authorities in Massachusetts, particularly with the State Police, that he was an informant, and there was information that was very clear to the FBI that he was involved in criminal activity," Grassley said.
After Rossetti's informant status was publicly revealed, the FBI and State Police issued a joint statement suggesting their relationship was just fine.
"The FBI cooperated for months with the Massachusetts State Police, assisting their organized crime unit until the investigation was complete," the statement said.
Grassley said the press release "was not true."
"There's a great deal of antagonism between the FBI and the State Police. The State Police does not trust the FBI," he said.
"All law enforcement in this country ought to be working together and the FBI is the granddaddy of them all in a sense of being national and federal and crossing state lines and all that. They should be setting the example for cooperation and see local police and state police as a helping hand rather than seeing them as somewhat of an enemy," he said.
The FBI statement says "(T)he FBI cooperated with the MSP in the manner requested by police officials. The FBI and the MSP work closely together on a day-to-day basis in furtherance of our mutual commitment to public safety."
Rossetti pleaded guilty last week to the last of his charges from the state police investigation. He won't be out of prison until he's in his sixties.
But Grassley says it shouldn't be case closed with the Boston FBI.
"I'm not saying just in this case in Boston, in Massachusetts, and I'm not saying it just with the FBI, I'm saying across government, if heads don't roll you don't get any change of behavior," he said.
But in the statement, FBI headquarters is standing by its Boston office.
"FBI leadership has full confidence in FBI Boston management and employees," the statement says.

[msfreeh]

The Persecution Of Barrett Brown -- And How To Fight It
By Glenn Greenwald (about the author)
OpEdNews Op Eds 3/21/2013


http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Pe ... 1-620.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;




The journalist and Anonymous activist is targeted as part of a broad effort to deter and punish internet freedom activism

Journalist and activist Barrett Brown in a 2012 interview with RT Photograph: screen grab

Aaron's Swartz's suicide in January triggered waves of indignation, and rightly so. He faced multiple felony counts and years in prison for what were, at worst, trivial transgressions of law. But his prosecution revealed the excess of both anti-hacking criminal statutes, particularly the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and the fixation of federal prosecutors on severely punishing all forms of activism that challenge the power of the government and related entities to control the flow of information on the internet.

Part of what drove the intense reaction to Swartz's death was how sympathetic a figure he was, but as noted by Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor in the DOJ's computer crimes unit and now a law professor at GWU, what was done to Swartz is anything but unusual, and the reaction to his death will be meaningful only if channeled to protest other similar cases of prosecutorial abuse:

"I think it's important to realize that what happened in the Swartz case happens in lots and lots of federal criminal cases. . . . What's unusual about the Swartz case is that it involved a highly charismatic defendant with very powerful friends in a position to object to these common practices. That's not to excuse what happened, but rather to direct the energy that is angry about what happened. If you want to end these tactics, don't just complain about the Swartz case. Don't just complain when the defendant happens to be a brilliant guy who went to Stanford and hangs out with Larry Lessig. Instead, complain that this is business as usual in federal criminal cases around the country -- mostly with defendants who no one has ever heard of and who get locked up for years without anyone else much caring."

Prosecutorial abuse is a drastically under-discussed problem in general, but it poses unique political dangers when used to punish and deter online activism. But it's becoming the pre-eminent weapon used by the US government to destroy such activism.

Just this week alone, a US federal judge sentenced hactivist Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer to 3-1/2 years in prison for exploiting a flaw in AT&T's security system that allowed him entrance without any hacking, an act about which Slate's Justin Peters wrote: "it's not clear that Auernheimer committed any actual crime," while Jeff Blagdon at the Verge added: "he cracked no codes, stole no passwords, or in any way 'broke into' AT&T's customer database -- something company representatives confirmed during testimony." But he had a long record of disruptive and sometimes even quite ugly (though legal) online antagonism, so he had to be severely punished with years in prison.

Also this week, the DOJ indicted the deputy social media editor at Reuters, Matthew Keys, on three felony counts which carry a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison for allegedly providing some user names and passwords that allowed Anonymous unauthorized access into the computer system of the Los Angeles Times, where they altered a few stories and caused very minimal damage. As Peters wrote about that case, "the charges under the CFAA seem outrageously severe" and, about Keys' federal prosecutors, observed: "apparently, they didn't take away any lessons from the Aaron Swartz case."
<a href="http://ox-d.lanistaconcepts.com/w/1.0/r ... UMBER_HERE" ><img src="http://ox-d.lanistaconcepts.com/w/1.0/a ... UMBER_HERE" border="0" alt=""></a>

But the pending federal prosecution of 31-year-old Barrett Brown poses all new troubling risks. That's because Brown - who has been imprisoned since September on a 17-count indictment that could result in many years in prison -- is a serious journalist who has spent the last several years doggedly investigating the shadowy and highly secretive underworld of private intelligence and defense contractors, who work hand-in-hand with the agencies of the Surveillance and National Security State in all sorts of ways that remain completely unknown to the public. It is virtually impossible to conclude that the obscenely excessive prosecution he now faces is unrelated to that journalism and his related activism.

A brief understanding of Brown's intrepid journalism is vital to understanding the travesty of his prosecution. I first heard of Brown when he wrote a great 2010 essay in Vanity Fair defending the journalist Michael Hastings from attacks from fellow journalists over Hastings' profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone, which ended the general's career. Brown argued that establishment journalists hate Hastings because he has spent years challenging, rather than serving, political and military officials and the false conventional wisdom they spout.

In an excellent profile of Brown in the Guardian on Wednesday, Ryan Gallagher describes that "before he crossed paths with the FBI, Brown was a prolific writer who had contributed to publications including Vanity Fair, the Guardian, the Huffington Post and satirical news site the Onion." He also "had a short stint in politics as the director of communications for an atheist group called Enlighten the Vote, and he co-authored a well-received book mocking creationism, Flock of Dodos."

But the work central to his prosecution began in 2009, when Brown created Project PM, "dedicated to investigating private government contractors working in the secretive fields of cybersecurity, intelligence and surveillance." Brown was then moved by the 2010 disclosures by WikiLeaks and the oppressive treatment of Bradley Manning to devote himself to online activism and transparency projects, including working with the hacktivist collective Anonymous. He has no hacking skills, but used his media savvy to help promote and defend the group, and was often referred to (incorrectly, he insists) as the Anonymous spokesman. He was particularly interested in using what Anonymous leaked for his journalism. As Brown told me several days ago in a telephone interview from the Texan prison where he is being held pending trial, he devoted almost all of his waking hours over the last several years to using these documents to dig into the secret relationships and projects between these intelligence firms and federal agencies.

The real problems for Brown began in 2011. In February, Anonymous hacked into the computer system of the private security firm HB Gary Federal and then posted thousands of emails containing incriminating and nefarious acts. Among them was a joint proposal by that firm -- along with the very well-connected firms of Palantir and Berico -- to try to persuade Bank of America and its law firm, Hunton & Williams, to hire them to destroy the reputations and careers of WikiLeaks supporters and, separately, critics of the Chamber of Commerce (as this New York Times article on that episode details, I was named as one of the people whose career they would seek to destroy). HB Gary Federal's CEO Aaron Barr, who advocated the scheme, was fired as a result of the disclosures, but continues to this day to play a significant role in this public-private axis of computer security and intelligence.

Brown became obsessed with journalistically investigating every strand exposed by these HB Gary Federal emails and devoted himself to relentlessly exposing this world. He did the same with the 2012 leak of millions of emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, obtained by Anonymous and published by WikiLeaks. As Gallagher describes about Brown's fixation on these documents:

"Hackers would sometimes obtain data and then pass it on to him. He would spend days and nights hunkered down in his small uptown Dallas apartment pouring through troves of hacked documents, writing blog posts about US government intelligence contractors and their 'misplaced power' while working to garner wider media coverage. ...

"Brown was frustrated that mainstream media outlets were not covering stories he felt deserved attention. He would complain that reporters would often approach him and ask about the personalities of some of the more prominent hackers ... but ignore the deeper issues about governments and private contractors contained in documents that had been hacked."

The issues Brown was investigating are complex and serious, and I won't detail all of that here. In addition to Gallagher's article, two superb and detailed accounts of Brown's journalism in these areas have been published by Christian Stork of WhoWhatWhy and Vice's Patrick McGuire; read those to see how threatening Brown's work had become to lots of well-connected people. Suffice to say, Brown, using the documents obtained by Anonymous, was digging around -- with increasing efficacy -- in places which National Security and Surveillance State agencies devote considerable energy to concealing.

All of this is the crucial background to the charges he currently faces. In March of last year, Brown's home was raided by the FBI, armed with a search warrant relating to both the HB Gary Federal and the Stratfor leaks. Brown told me they were intent on finding out what he had learned about those firms, particularly HB Gary Federal. Having apparently learned that the FBI agents were coming, Brown went to his mother's home, so the FBI broke down his door and entered his apartment. They seized various documents but could find nothing linking him to either hack, so he was not arrested.

After that, FBI agents went to his mother's home. They found Brown there and asked for his laptop, which he denied having. Over the next several months, FBI agents continued to harass not only Brown but also his mother, repeatedly threatening to arrest her and indict her for obstruction of justice for harboring Brown and helping him conceal documents by letting him into her home.

Those months of FBI pursuit, but particularly the threats against his mother, finally caused Brown to explode with rage. Brown has been open in discussing his past battles with substance abuse, and at the time, he had stopped taking various medications which he uses to control his addiction problems. In September, he posted a YouTube video detailing that the FBI and HB Gary Federal had threatened to ruin his life, and was particularly incensed about the threats against his mother. Obviously distraught, he said he intended to do the same to the FBI agent making the threats against his mother, FBI agent Robert Smith. While expressly disavowing any intent to physically harm Smith, Brown issued rambling threats to "destroy" Smith.

That was more than enough pretext to allow the FBI to do what they long wanted: arrest Brown. The same day he posted the video on YouTube, the FBI arrested him on charges of threatening a federal agent, and then kept him imprisoned with no indictment for weeks on the ground that he posed an immediate threat to Smith. Finally in October, the DOJ unveiled an indictment charging him with three counts of, essentially, harassing a federal officer online.

In December, the DOJ filed a second indictment, which is now the heart of the government's case against him. It alleged that he "trafficked" in stolen goods, namely the Stratfor documents leaked by Anonymous and published by WikiLeaks. The indictment focuses on one small part of the leak: a list of Straftor clients and their credit card numbers. Critically, the indictment does not allege that Brown participated in the hack or in obtaining any of those documents.

Instead, it simply alleges that he helped "disseminate" the stolen information. He did that, claims the DOJ, when he was in a chat room and posted a link to those documents that were online. As the harsh Anonymous critic Adrian Chen of Gawker wrote:

"Is it a crime for someone simply to share a link to stolen information? That seems to be the message conveyed by today's indictment of former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown, over a massive hack of the private security firm Stratfor. Brown's in legal trouble for copying and pasting a link from one chat room to another. This is scary to anyone who ever links to anything ...

"This charge does not allege Brown actually had the credit card numbers on his computer or even created the link: He just allegedly copied a link to a publicly-accessible file with the numbers from one chat room and pasted it into another. ... As a journalist who covers hackers and has 'transferred and posted' many links to data stolen by hackers -- in order to put them in stories about the hacks -- this indictment is frightening because it seems to criminalize linking."

What makes all of this even worse is that there is zero suggestion that Brown made use of these credit card numbers. To the contrary, when Anonymous advocated that people use the numbers to donate money to charity, Brown vocally condemned that suggestion as a distraction from Anonymous' mission. He told me in our telephone interview that he did the same privately. As McGuire wrote: "It's obvious by looking at the most recent posts on Barrett Brown's blog that while he is highly interested in Stratfor, it wasn't the credit card information that motivated him."

The documents to which he linked contained all sorts of other information that he wanted to investigate and write about, including Straftor's client list. There are countless legitimate reasons to link to those documents, particularly for a journalist. That this extremely dubious allegation now forms the crux of the DOJ's case against him reveals what a persecution this actually is.

In January, the DOJ filed yet another indictment against Brown, its third. This one added charges of "obstruction of justice" for allegedly failing to tell them about his laptop when they came to his mother's house (it also alleged that his mother "aided and abetted" him in these acts, thus maintaining the implicit threat to indict her for having let her son into her home). Those charges, by themselves, carry a possible prison sentence of 20 years.

So here we have the US government targeting someone they clearly loathe because of the work he is doing against their actions. Then -- using the most dubious legal theories, exploiting vague and broad criminal statutes, and driving him to ill-advised behavior with deliberately vindictive harassment (including aimed at his mother) -- they transform what is at worst very trivial offenses into a multi-count felony indictment that has already resulted in his imprisonment for six months and threatens to imprison him for many years more. In his great analysis of the case, Christian Stork compares Brown's treatment to Swartz's (about which Stork wrote previously) and captures perfectly what is going on here and what is at stake:

"Swartz's treatment wasn't anomalous, but 'a symptom of the entire disease' that underlies America's singular status as the world's jailer -- of those who anger formidable interests, and those without friends in the right places.

"Brown's case is even more egregious: As even the government itself concedes, ProjectPM comes under the definition of the legitimate practice of journalism. Brown simply harnessed information gathered from someone else's 'criminal' hack. Then he used it to expose the foul and potentially illegal activities of some of the world's leading corporations -- in partnership with secretive sectors of the government.

"Brown punctured a wall of secrecy, constructed over the past decade, that shields the state from accountability to its citizens. For that, he is threatened with a century behind bars.

"His tale deserves to be told, not just because of the injustice involved. It also shows the awesome power of the Internet in adjusting the balance sheet between the big guys and the small ones. And the lengths the insiders will go to keep their advantage."

Brown may not be as cuddly as Swartz, and certainly does not have the same roster of influential friends. Nor can it be categorically argued that Brown did nothing wrong (just as many of Swartz's most ardent defenders acknowledged about him): that YouTube video, made when he was admittedly struggling with impaired judgment, was certainly ill-advised.

But none of that should matter. The claim with prosecutorial abuse is never that the person targeted is a perfect being or even that he never did anything wrong. The issue with prosecutorial abuse is that the punishments being meted out are wildly disproportionate to the alleged acts when the trivial harms of the acts are considered and/or that the prosecution is being pursued for improper purposes. That's particularly true when viewed next to the far more egregious criminality the US government shields.

Both prongs of prosecutorial abuse are clearly present in Brown's case. There is no evidence that the link he posted to already published documents resulted in any unauthorized use of credit cards, and certainly never redounded in any way to his benefit. More important, this prosecution is driven by the same plainly improper purpose that drove the one directed at Aaron Swartz and so many others: the desire to exploit the power of criminal law to deter and severely punish anyone who meaningfully challenges the government's power to control the flow of information on the internet and conceal its vital actions. Brown's acts, like Swartz's, were political in nature, and the excessive prosecution is equally political.

What the US government counts on above all else is that the persons it targets are unable to defend themselves against the government's unlimited resources. It takes an enormous amount of money to mount an effective defense. That's what often drives even the most innocent people to plead guilty and agree to long prison terms: they simply have no choice, because their reliance on committed and able but time-strapped public defenders makes conviction at trial highly likely, which -- under an outrageous system that punishes people for exercising their right to a fair trial -- means a much harsher punishment than if they plead guilty.

If the US government is going to attempt to imprison activists and journalists like this, it should at the very least be a fair fight. That means that Brown, who is now represented by a public defender, should have a vigorous defense able to devote the time and energy to his case that it deserves. He told me in the telephone interview we had that he believes this is the key to enabling him to avoid pleading guilty and agreeing to a prison term: something he has thus far refused to do in part because he insists he did nothing criminal, and in part because he refuses to become a government informant.

A legal defense fund has been created by several young, smart and committed internet freedom activists, two of whom I had the chance to meet and speak with in the Boston area several weeks ago. I really hope everyone who is able to do so will donate what they can to his defense fund. You can do that at this link here, or via paypal to [email protected]. All donations will be used exclusively to hire private criminal defense counsel and to fund his defense.

The US government's serial prosecutorial excesses aimed at internet freedom activists, journalists, whistleblowers and the like are designed to crush meaningful efforts to challenge their power and conduct. It is, I believe, incumbent on everyone who believes in those values to do what they can to support those who are taking real risks in defense of those freedoms and in pursuit of real transparency. Barrett Brown is definitely such a person, and enabling him to resist these attacks is of vital importance.
Whistleblower documentary

Obviously related to all of this: the great filmmaker Robert Greenwald (no relation) has a new documentary coming out in April entitled "War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State." Among other things, it contains interviews with Dan Ellsberg, the Washington Post's Dana Priest, former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, persecuted whistleblowers and others (I'm interviewed as well). Here is the new trailer for the documentary:


Q-and-A session tomorrow

Tomorrow (Friday), we're going to have here another Q-and-A session similar to the one we did weeks ago, where I will answer reader questions. The column will be posted at noon Eastern, and you can leave your questions in the comment section. I will then begin answering them in real-time starting at 3:00 pm Eastern.

* Editor's note: this article originally referred to private security firm HB Gary Federal as HB Gary; this was amended at 3pm ET on 21 March.


For the past 10 years, I was a litigator in NYC specializing in First Amendment challenges, civil rights cases, and corporate and securities fraud matters. I am the author of the New York Times Best-Selling book, more...)

[msfreeh]

Acquitted cop sues feds for $17M

March 23, 2013

A Westchester cop who beat the rap in a criminal civil-rights case sued an FBI agent yesterday for allegedly destroying evidence favorable to him.

José Quinoy’s Manhattan federal court suit seeks $17 million in damages from Agent Catherine Pena and the US government for malicious prosecution.

In 2009, Quinoy, then a cop in Sleepy Hollow, was charged with roughing up two suspects and intimidating a fellow cop who was a witness against him.

A jury cleared Quinoy after a judge ruled that Pena had apparently destroyed secret recordings and lied about it ahead of the trial.

see link for full story

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manh ... trzg6MjrsI" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;