Thursday, March 26, 2009

CIA record of running prostitution rings never permitted as evidence in last year's "DC Madam" trial.








CIA record of running prostitution rings never permitted as evidence in last year's "DC Madam" trial.

The late DC Madam's precedent and the CIPA...

As we come up on the anniversary of the late "DC Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey's "suicide" in Florida on May 1, 2008, it is important to recall that the convicted proprietor of "Pamela Martin & Associates escort agency, which, according to our past reports, serviced Halliburton Chairman and CEO Dick Cheney in the 1990s, attempted to invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) in her trial last year.

On May 3, 2008, WMR reported: "There was no mistake that when Deborah Jeane Palfrey's phone records were made public by order of US Judge Gladys Kessler, shortly before she asked to be reassigned from the case, that Palfrey's Pamela Martin & Associates escort agency had some very intriguing clientele. If one were to have mapped the phone numbers on Palfrey's list, McLean, Virginia would have looked like the epicenter of an earthquake. McLean is the home to the CIA, Washington's top politicians, and assorted foreign and domestic business movers and shakers who travel in and out of the CIA's shadow."

WMR added, "On September 1, 2007, WMR reported the following: 'WMR has learned that on August 31, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the indicted Pamela Martin & Associates (PMA) proprietor, filed a 'Motion for Pretrial Conference to Consider Matters Relating to classified information' under the 'Classified Information Procedures Act' (CIPA) with the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC. The purpose of the filing alerts the government that Palfrey's defense will likely involved the disclosure of evidence and identities presently deemed 'classified" by the U.S. government.' The CIPA is only invoked in cases when classified national security information must be revealed. It is now clear that Palfrey, who never admitted to this editor any links between her agency and the CIA, was a contractor for the spy agency."

The CIA would have us believe they never engaged in such practices but the record speaks for itself. On February 5, 1975, famed muckraking investigative journalist Jack Anderson reported in his "The Washington Merry-Go-Round" column that "For years, the Central Intelligence Agency operated love traps in New York City and San Francisco, where foreign diplomats were lured by prostitutes in the pay of the CIA."

Anderson further described the blackmail operation: "Through hidden one-way mirrors, CIA agents filmed the sexual adventures and later tried to blackmail the victims into becoming informants."

Anderson reported the CIA's San Francisco operation lasted from the late 1950s to around 1965. The San Francisco operation used only bugging devices and not the one-way mirrors. Anderson reported the New York operation lasted from around 1960 to 1966.

The New York operation used two efficiency apartments on the sixth floor of a high-rise apartment in Greenwich Village. Anderson reported, "On the wall of the blackmail apartment was hung a large painting of two ships. But the painting was actually a one-way mirror."

"On the other side of the wall, CIA agents could watch and film the action through the see-through painting. The painting was strategically placed so that it gave the CIA observers a full view of the sofa, which opened into a bed. A Japanese screen, implanted with microphones, provided the sound for the CIA's blackmail movies. The one-way mirror was hidden behind a painting with hinges. The agents merely would swing back the painting like cabinet door for the peep shows in the adjoining apartment."

Anderson suggests the blackmail operation used both female and male prostitutes. "To stage the shows, both male and female prostitutes with a variety of sexual skills were used."

To maximize government efficiency, Anderson reported that the old Bureau of Narcotics would use the apartments when not needed by the CIA. "They [narc agents] would be advised to stay away on certain nights," wrote Anderson, adding, "the rent, food, and liquor bills were paid out of a special checking account in a bank near the New York narcotics office.

There was one major difference between the CIA's 1950s and 60s prostitution operations and Palfrey's 1990s and early 2000s operation. The CIA never permitted a political vendetta-seeking Justice Department to indict its operatives in New York or San Francisco for prostitution.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

’Algérie : ces attentats qui cachent la guerre des matières premières


’Algérie : ces attentats qui cachent la guerre des matières premières

Dans le cadre de la visite d’état de Nicolas Sarkozy en Algérie nous avons décidé de reprendre ici cet article publié dans Nouvelle Solidarité N° 17, XIIIième annéé, du 28 septembre 2007.


Une série d’attentats de plus en plus rapprochés a ensanglanté l’Algérie ces derniers mois, révélant un réveil virulent de la guerre des clans au pouvoir au fur et à mesure que la prochaine élection présidentielle approche, sur fond de lutte entre grandes puissances pour le contrôle des matières premières algériennes, notamment gaz et pétrole. C’est la seule hypothèse possible pour expliquer l’activisme de l’Organisation d’Al-Qaida au Maghreb, née de la fusion, annoncée le 11 septembre 2006, entre l’ancien GSPC (Groupe salafiste de prédication et du combat) et Al-Qaida, revendication reçue avec le plus grand scepticisme par la plupart des experts et politiciens, vu le contexte dans lequel ces attentats sont intervenus.

Le 11 avril 2007, deux attentats suicides avaient visé le Palais du gouvernement à Alger et le Quartier général oriental de la Police à Bab Ezzouar, faisant 30 morts et plus de 200 blessés. Le 6 septembre dernier, c’est le président Bouteflika qui a échappé de peu à un attentat suicide alors qu’il se rendait en visite à Batna, dans l’est de l’Algérie, attentat qui a fait 22 morts et 107 blessés. Un nouvel attentat suicide a été commis le samedi 8 septembre à Dellys, faisant 30 morts et 47 blessés. Plus récemment, le jeudi 19 septembre, dans une vidéo de 80 minutes, le numéro deux d’Al-Qaida, Ayman al Zaouahri, a invité les musulmans à « nettoyer » le Maghreb des Français et des Espagnols, afin d’y rétablir le règne de l’islam. Dès le lendemain, ces menaces étaient mises à exécution : une bombe à faible puissance explosait devant une voiture transportant deux Français et un Italien entre Alger et le barrage de Koudiat Acerdoune, au sud-est de la capitale, pendant que deux employés d’Aéroports de Paris travaillant à Alger ont dû être évacués après avoir reçu des menaces.

Mais les autorités algériennes ainsi que la plupart des experts mettent en doute la véritable identité d’Al-Qaida au Maghreb et dénoncent plutôt des puissances étrangères comme étant à l’origine de ces attentats. Suite à l’attentat qui l’a visé, le président Bouteflika a dénoncé « des capitales étrangères et des dirigeants étrangers », pendant que son ministre de l’Intérieur, Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni, précisait que c’est « le retour de l’Algérie sur la scène internationale qui, visiblement, gêne certains intérêts étrangers ».

Le retour de l’Algérie sur la scène internationale

Une analyse de ce que M. Zerhouni appelle le retour de l’Algérie sur la scène internationale révèle en effet un revirement quasi total d’alliances de l’Algérie sur le plan international. Si l’on avait pu parler d’une véritable « lune de miel » entre l’Algérie et les Etats Unis, entre 2003 et 2006, avec les visites de Donald Rumsfeld en février 2006 et de Dick Cheney en avril de la même année, dont l’un des principaux centres d’intérêt avait été la collaboration dans la « Global war on terror », cette alliance privilégiée a été clairement remise en cause par la faction au pouvoir autour du président Bouteflika.

Divers facteurs seraient à l’origine de ce changement. D’abord, l’augmentation considérable de la manne pétrolière, suite à la hausse des prix, qui donne des ailes aux ambitions des uns et des autres. Surtout, on parle de l’affaiblissement relatif des Etats-Unis à cause de ses difficultés en Irak, et a contrario, du renforcement d’autres puissances, notamment la Russie, la Chine, mais aussi le Venezuela ou l’Iran. Et comme pour le Niger, qui a récemment remis en cause le monopole de la France dans l’exploitation de l’uranium sur son territoire, la concurrence entre ces puissances a permis aux factions algériennes de s’affranchir de la toute puissante tutelle américaine.

Rappelons que les enjeux dans ce domaine sont considérables et concernent, au delà de l’Algérie, toute l’Afrique du nord et le Sahel. Selon l’expert pétrolier algérien Hocine Malti, les réserves avérées de pétrole de ces pays sont conséquentes : 39 milliards de barils pour la Libye, 31,5 milliards pour le Nigeria, 11,8 milliards pour l’Algérie, 1 milliard pour le Tchad, 700 millions pour le Sénégal, 563 millions pour le Soudan, 308 millions pour la Tunisie, 300 millions pour le Niger, 200 millions pour la Mauritanie, tandis que le Sahara Occidental aurait un sous-sol très prometteur.

C’est au niveau de la politique énergétique qu’on voit le plus clairement le changement en cours. En mai 2006, l’Algérie décidait brutalement d’abandonner la loi de privatisation des hydrocarbures qu’elle venait d’adopter un mois plus tôt. C’est vrai qu’entre-temps, M. Bouteflika avait reçu la visite d’Etat du président Hugo Chavez, du Venezuela, qui l’en avait dissuadé ! En effet cette loi préconisait le retour à l’ancien système de concession, qui aurait permis aux compagnies pétrolières internationales de disposer presque totalement du sous-sol Algérien.

Mais c’est le réchauffement considérable des relations avec la Russie depuis janvier 2007 qui confirme cette tendance. Avec un contrat d’achat d’armes d’un montant de 15 milliards de dollars signé à cette date, l’Algérie est, en effet, le premier partenaire de la Russie dans le domaine de l’armement, devançant même la Chine. Si ce contrat ne provoque pas d’inquiétude chez les principales puissances, ce n’est pas le cas pour ce qui est de l’idée de la création d’une OPEP du gaz autour d’une alliance algéro-russo-iranienne.

Cette démarche inquiète les Européens, en particulier, qui dépendent de la Russie pour 23 % de leur consommation de gaz, et de l’Algérie pour 13 %. Dans une conférence de presse donnée à Alger le 11 septembre, Christof Ruehl, l’économiste en chef de British Petroleum, déclarait que « la création d’une OPEP du gaz relève davantage de la manœuvre politique que d’une démarche à objectifs économiques », avant de la qualifier de « stupide ». La visite à Alger du président iranien Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, au cours de laquelle des accords bilatéraux ont été signés notamment dans le domaine énergétique, est venue confirmer que cette option est bel et bien sur la table. La question d’une coopération dans le domaine du nucléaire civil a aussi été soulevée.

A l’arrivée de plus en plus encombrante des sociétés pétrolières et gazières russes (Gazprom, Lukoil, Rosneft, Stroytransgaz…), il faut ajouter celle, plus discrète, des chinoises et indiennes, en revanche très présentes dans les autres pays du Sahel.

Comme au Soudan ou au Niger, la Chine, n’en déplaise à la France qui se voit contrainte d’améliorer les conditions commerciales qu’elle propose à ses anciennes colonies, est de plus en plus présente en Algérie, où elle vient de rafler quelques contrats majeurs pour la construction d’autoroutes et d’un million de logements. Autre enjeu principal où la France avance elle aussi sa propre candidature, la volonté algérienne de faire de l’année 2008 l’année de l’investissement dans le nucléaire civil, un choix appuyé par un important contrat de coopération, signé juin dernier avec les Etats-Unis. L’Algérie possède déjà deux réacteurs nucléaires et la France devra, si elle veut être compétitive, proposer mieux que les Chinois et les Russes, principaux partenaires de l’Algérie dans ce domaine.

Le prétexte pour le déploiement de l’AFRICOM

Dans le domaine sécuritaire et militaire, le renversement des alliances de l’Algérie est là aussi frappant, car de principal allié des Etats-Unis dans la lutte contre le terrorisme dans la région (notamment après la prise d’otages de touristes européens par le GSPC, en janvier 2003), elle serait aujourd’hui la cible d’un terrorisme déployé par l’administration Bush/Cheney et ses contrôleurs en Angleterre. Les questions fusent à nouveau sur la véritable identité du GPSC/Al-Qaida, car l’augmentation des attentats depuis fin 2006 coïncide étrangement avec cette réorientation de la politique étrangère algérienne, et des médias tels qu’Al Watan ou les auteurs d’Algerie Watch n’hésitent pas à établir un lien entre ces actes de « terrorisme » et les pressions faites par l’administration Bush/Cheney pour obliger les pays du Maghreb à s’aligner et à accueillir des bases militaires américaines.

Pour bon nombre de spécialistes du terrorisme algérien, le GSPC a toujours représenté la faction « dure » du pouvoir - la Direction des renseignements militaires - qui est un relais en Algérie des politiques des Anglo-Américains. Lors de la prise d’otages de 2003, par exemple, le GSPC était dirigé par Abderrezak El Para, un ancien des forces spéciales algériennes et garde de corps du général Khaled Nezzar, ancien ministre de la Défense et membre du Haut Comité d’Etat.

De plus, l’action du GSPC/Al-Qaida à travers tout le Sahel bénéficie d’une aide importante du prince Bandar, ex-ambassadeur d’Arabie saoudite aux Etats-Unis et actuel patron de la sécurité dans son pays, dont le Sahel serait la chasse gardée. Le prince Bandar a récemment été attrapé la main dans le sac à financer des groupes rebelles au Darfour et au Tchad. Actuellement, des actions en justice au Royaume Uni et aux Etats-Unis mettent en cause son rôle dans un méga contrat d’armes et de pétrole, conclu entre la monarchie britannique et le régime saoudien à l’époque de Thatcher, impliquant la compagnie anglaise d’aéronautique BAE, contrat qui permet de générer des fonds abondants pour le financement d’attentats et autres sales coups.

L’activisme du GSPC/Al-Qaida à travers tout le Maghreb joue un rôle très utile pour les Américains, leur servant de prétexte pour tenter d’imposer le déploiement de bases militaires américaines à travers toute la région dans le contexte de leur nouveau commandement africain, l’Africom. C’est dans cette visée que les Américains ont conçu leur initiative « Pan-Sahel », devenue début 2005 « Initiative transsaharienne de lutte contre le terrorisme (TSCTI) », destinée à inclure dans une stratégie militaire américaine des pays comme l’Algérie, le Tchad, le Mali, la Mauritanie, le Maroc, le Niger, le Sénégal, le Nigeria et la Tunisie. Très important pour comprendre la nouvelle série d’attentats qui frappe l’Algérie, ce pays a refusé, tout comme la Libye et le Maroc, d’accueillir sur son sol des bases américaines sous couvert de lutte contre le terrorisme et de participer au projet américain de réorganisation du grand Moyen-Orient.

L’Algérie s’attaque directement à Dick Cheney

Notons que dans la même période, Bouteflika a lancé également une attaque frontale contre Dick Cheney, en démantelant Brown, Root and Condor (BRC), une joint venture créée en 1994 par la Sonatrach (Société nationale des hydrocarbures) (41 %), le CRND (Centre de recherche nucléaire de Draria) (10 %) et KBR (Kellogg Brown & Root) (49 %), filiale d’Halliburton dont le vice-président américain est toujours actionnaire.

C’est en octobre 2006 que le gouvernement algérien a lancé une enquête pour corruption à l’encontre de cette société, gérant des contrats pétroliers et d’armement. Riche en rebondissements, l’enquête a révélé, entre autres, que BRC avait sous-traité un contrat sur le gisement de Rhourde-Nouss à une société israélienne, Bateman Litwin, propriété du milliardaire israélien Benny Steinmetz, proche de la droite israélienne. Révélatrice aussi de la guerre d’influence que se livrent différentes puissances en Algérie, ce sont les services russes qui ont révélé au gouvernement algérien que des équipements de communication sophistiqués, commandés par BRC aux Etats-Unis pour le compte de l’Etat-major général algérien, étaient connectés en permanence aux systèmes d’intelligence électronique américains et israéliens ! En septembre dernier, KBR a été contraint de céder à la Sonatrach ses parts dans BRC.

Nous avons essayé, en rassemblant tous les éléments ci-dessus, de dépeindre l’environnement international complexe dans lequel est intervenue la récente vague d’attentats en Algérie. Que certaines factions au pouvoir en Algérie soient sorties des griffes de l’administration Bush/Cheney est une bonne chose.

Cependant, le tout n’est pas de jouer les uns contre les autres, mais de rétablir une politique orientée vers le bien commun, où les ressources seront développées pour le plus grand bien de l’Algérie et de ses générations futures. Avec ses quelque 100 milliards d’euros de réserves et en travaillant de concert avec la Russie, la Chine, l’Inde et les grands pays d’Amérique du Sud pour refonder l’actuel système économique et monétaire international, l’Algérie aura une chance de sortir de la crise dans laquelle elle est plongée depuis de trop longues années.

Bibliographie :



  • Al-Qaida au Maghreb et les attentats du 11 avril 2007 à Alger, par François Gèze et Salima Mellah, dans Algeria Watch (21 avril 2007).
  • Madjid Laribi, « Brown & Root Condor : une holding “militaro-énergétique”« , Le Maghrébin, 13 novembre 2006.
  • « Le P-DG de BRC sous mandat de dépôt », Le Jour d’Algérie, 1er avril 2007.
  • Madjid Laribi, « Que cache le dossier Brown Root & Condor », Le Maghrébin, 9 octobre 2006.
  • « L’un des kamikazes était un compagnon d’El Para », Le Jour d’Algérie, 14 avril 2007.
  • Hocine Malti, « De la stratégie pétrolière américaine et de la loi algérienne sur les hydrocarbures », Le Quotidien d’Oran , 9-10-11 juillet 2005.


Pour creuser le sujet : focus

Al-Qaïda au Maghreb islamique, la violence instrumentalisée par l’Europe ?

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Russian-Israeli mob Intelligence Reports


Russian-Israeli mob Intelligence Reports

Andrey Kalitin was lying on the sidewalk on a side alley in central Moscow, bleeding on the asphalt. He could have sworn he could again hear the phone ringing. As usual that week, the day Kalitin was shot at point blank began with a phone call that woke him up at an almost ungodly time. He had already gotten used to the routine: The phone buzzed, Kalitin picked up the receiver, and the dumb person on the line provided the daily dosage of huffing and puffing, waited a few seconds, and hung up . . . Kalitin, a veteran and highly appreciated correspondent, who has published some of the most outstanding investigative reports in Russian journalism in recent years, was convinced this was one more unsatisfied customer. As a member of the editorial staff of Special Investigation, a popular investigation program on Russia's Channel 1, he had acquired quite a few enemies over the past few years . . . However, on the night of 13 June 2007, a few minutes after a young man donning a baseball cap sneaked from behind and fired a revolver with a silencer, Kalitin had another idea in this context. He was going to sign a contract for the publication of a book called Zero Hour that week, which featured Israeli-Russian oligarch Mikhail Chernoy. Shortly after the attempt to assassinate him, Kalitin, who is a close associate of Chernoy's business rival Oleg Deripaska, claimed that the purpose of the assassination attempt was not to liquidate him but stop the book from being published. Chernoy, for his part, quickly filed a libel suit against Kalitin and others in an Israeli court . . . Kalitin devotes almost a full chapter in the book to the relationship between Chernoy and Avigdor Lieberman. "Why is Chernoy hanging on to Lieberman so tightly?" wondered Kalitin already two years ago, and provided the answer: "Because he hopes Lieberman would get the public security portfolio. Even if it is not Lieberman himself, then it will be one of his party comrades. This will be an achievement after all. This is what will solve Chernoy's main problem today, one which is worth all the money in the world, namely the issue of his Israeli citizenship." . . . Mikhail Semenovich Chernoy has been one of the Israel Police's topmost targets since the end of the 1990's. Until recently, the security services in the United States, Switzerland, France, Bulgaria, Russia, and Germany also expressed great interest in him. The next interior minister will have to determine whether to deny him his Israeli passport and some countries have refused to allow him entry to this day . . .

In an illustrative verdict, in which the court in London permitted Deripaska to receive the chart sheet outside the boundaries of the United Kingdom, Justice Christopher Clarke reviewed the activities of Chernoy and his associates, whom various global intelligence bodies had describes as Russian crime kingpins. One of the names on that list is Sergey Popov, whom the National Serious and International Crimes Unit (NSICU) and other Western law-enforcement agencies described as one of the leaders of the Podolsk crime gang, which is considered one of the largest and most violent in Moscow. The court described that gang as running most of the sex and drug trafficking on the streets of Moscow. Popov had previously been one of Chernoy's business partners. When Chernoy was detained in Geneva in 1996, the Swiss police also found Popov in the same hotel. One of Chernoy's closest friends was a Jew called Anton Malevskiy, who was described as the linchpin of the Russian Ismailova crime gang -- an international Russian group that specializes in collecting protection money, extortion, and mercenary liquidations. Malevskiy, whose face is scarred by a huge gash and half of whose left ear has been torn off, immigrated to Israel -- like Chernoy -- in the mid-1990's. The two purchased adjacent villas in Savyon and used to show up in social eve . . . In 1995, two private investigators from Tel Aviv, who had plotted to liquidate Chernoy, Malevskiy, and another friend of theirs, Moshe Hayimov (whose son Elisha was Chernoy's personal aide), were arrested. Chernoy maintained at the time that he had no idea who was looking to kill him . . . [In 1998] Malevskiy was deported and his Israeli citizenship was rescinded. Approximately two years later, he was killed in a freak accident during vacation in South Africa, after the parachute that he tried to eject with failed to open . . . Some of Chernoy's acquaintances, among them Malevskiy, Salim Abdulov (who is regarded as one of the chief gangsters in Uzbekistan), Sergey Lalkin (the head of the Podolskiy criminal organization), coal czar Iskandar Makhmudov (a former KGB agent in Libya), and our friend Sergey Popov -- used to come to sun-washed Israel once or twice a year for a vacation Chernoy had organized for them. The indictment filed against Oleg Chernomoretz, the deputy mayor of Elat from Yisra'el Beytenu, stated that Chernoy would rent for them entire floors in Elat's most stylish hotels and provided sumptuous entertainment, too . . . [In 2001] Chernoy began to prefer the society of top economy and political figures, such as Dudi Appel, who came to Chernoy in 2000 with a request for a $4.5 million loan toward the resumption of the stuck Greek island project. Chernoy gave him the check without thinking twice and did not even sign a contract with him. Appel evidently knew how to impress the oligarch: One day, he went into his office and invited him for lunch at Arik's. A few hours later, they were already dining at Ari'el Sharon's table on the farm. He also had the right ties to Gad Ze'evi. According to an associate of the two, in one of their joint trips abroad, Chernoy suggested that Ze'evi purchase the Betar Jerusalem soccer club. Chernoy was then the owner of Levski Sofia, one of Bulgaria's top teams. Ze'evi was turned on and bought the team through the mediation of then Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert . . . As Gidi Weitz and Uri Blau disclosed in Ha'aretz, the investigation focuses on the transfer of money from Cyprus to Israel, including, among others, $500,000 that had been traded between MCG Holdings, owned by Chernoy, and Mountain View Assets, which is owned by Lieberman. The transfer was apparently done in 2001, when Lieberman served as national infrastructure minister in the Sharon government. Lieberman's attorney argued that this was payment for a "wine deal" between the two; the NSICU suspect that this was kickback . . .There are additional suspicious payments connected to companies owned by Lieberman and his daughter Mikhal. The NSICU is now checking the source of the millions of shekels for the companies Mikhal Lieberman established when she was only 21 for "business counseling." In November 2007, during a discussion over immunity for documents that had been caught at Lieberman's attorney's office, Judge Rahel Greenberg said: "As mentioned earlier, the comprehensive confidential report presents a foundation based on facts that links the minister to the (Cyprus-based) Trasimeno Trading Ltd.'s bank accounts as well as to the bank accounts of other companies . . .

Chernoy, David and Lev's older brother, was born in 1952 in Ouman, the Ukraine. Two years after his birth, the family moved to Uzbekistan, where he grew up. After completing his military service and studies, he met Sam Kislin, a Russian émigré who was living in the United States, and who, in the late 1980's, imported all and sundry goods into the Eastern Bloc, which had just opened to the West . . . Kislin, a Jew who had donated quite substantially to Israel (and after whom the library at the Sapir Academic College in Sha'ar Hanegev was named until not long ago), currently resides in New York, where Kalitin tracked him down and interviewed him for his book . . . Shortly after Kislin's return to the United States, the brothers Chernoy found other partners: the Jewish brothers David and Simon Reuben. Together, the four set up Transworld Group, a huge conglomerate that soon eliminated its rivals and ruled the entire Russian aluminum market . . .On 9 June 1994, Chernoy was denied entry into Switzerland or Liechtenstein for two years {after his arrest in Switzerland] . . . The police tracked Chernoy for three years, waiting patiently, until in 2001 he and his aide Ze'ev Rom and businessman Gad Ze'evi were detained. The Bezeq affair, as part of which Chernoy was charged of having concealed his involvement in Ze'evi's purchase of some of the communication company's shares (because his record would not have enabled him to obtain license from the state to carry out the deal), blew up with a big bang. The file, which was dubbed "Black Spider," is admittedly progressing slowly, but a senior police officer has explained that "this affair stressed a lot of people, including in the Shin Bet." "It is not a trivial thing for a man like Chernoy to control the shares of the country's phone company" . . . In the current political situation, police sources estimate that it would not be easy to continue to follow the oligarch. "Even if the police have material about him, when the new interior minister is Yisra'el Beytenu's Yitzhaq Aharonovich, then it is doubtful anyone would launch a new investigation," maintains a very high-ranking officer in the police . . . As part of his activity in Israel, Chernoy has been financing various events attended by Israeli politicians, such as the Jerusalem Conference, which was addressed by Ehud Olmert, Binyamin Netanyahu, and Lieberman. Quite a few politicians also attend events initiated by the Mikhail Chernoy Foundation. The foundation's website includes pictures of Hayim Ramon, Olmert, and Lieberman, as well as information and reports from the world that present Chernoy as a victim of business and political persecution . . . "The information that reached the Israel Police indicates Chernoy's involvement in a series of murder cases, attempted assassinations, violence, and threats against the backdrop of 'the aluminum wars.' Specifically, we can cite information indicating his apparent involvement in the killings, perpetrated between the years 1993 and 1995, of the following victims: Igor Beletzky, Yuriy Karetnikov, Aleksandr Borisov, Feliks Lvov, and Vadim Yafyasov. There is also information on his involvement in plotting to kill Ivan Turishev....According to the information that was brought before me, the assassination and violence acts did actually take place, mainly through the Ismailova crime gang, led by Anton Malevskiy.

Police have amassed sufficient evidence to link Israel Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman with money laundering charges, a former National Fraud Unit investigator told The Jerusalem Post Thursday, citing a senior police source. Police suspect Lieberman used Cypriot bank accounts registered to his daughter's name for money laundering purposes, and possibly to also carry out fraud and bribery offenses . . . As far as Lieberman is concerned, if he does succeed in joining the government, he would be limited in the number of posts available to him, thanks to a precedent set by Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz when he placed restrictions on the ministerial jobs available to Kadima MK Tzahi Hanegbi - also the target of a police investigation. A conflict of interests would prevent Lieberman from taking up the post of public security minister, due to that job's direct oversight of the police. The same would apply to the post of justice minister. The Finance Ministry would also be off-limits to Lieberman, since police need approval from the finance minister to access bank accounts and other information belonging to Knesset members who are under investigation. Feb. 9, 2009 -- -- Born and raised in Moldova, Lieberman wants Israel's 20-percent Arab minority to prove their allegiance to the Jewish state, or give up their citizenship. He aims to re-divide Israel and the West Bank to switch Arab towns to the jurisdiction of a future Palestinian state, while Israel takes the Jewish areas. [Note: Lieberman paints a bland face on what will be "ethnic cleansing" of Arabs on a massive scale].

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Saudi Arabia is in the throes of TRIBES WITH FLAGS TO COME


Saudi Arabia is in the throes of a crisis, but its elite is bitterly divided on how to escape it. King Abdullah and Prince Bandar Bin Sultan factions lead a camp of fake liberal reformers seeking rapprochement with the West and Israel, while Prince Nayef, the interior minister, sides with an anti-American Wahhabi religious establishment that has much in common with al Qaeda. Abdullah cuts a higher profile abroad -- but at home Nayef and many others cast a longer and darker shadow....

THE QUADRUPLE MONARCHY AND HUNDREDS OF TRIBES WITH FLAGS TO COME

When an attack on a residential compound in Riyadh killed 17 people and wounded 122 in early November 2003, U.S. officials downplayed the significance of the incident for Saudi Arabian politics. "We have the utmost faith that the direction chosen for this nation by Crown Prince Abdullah, the political and economic reforms, will not be swayed by these horrible terrorists," said Deputy U.S. Secretary of State Richard Armitage, in Riyadh for a visit.

But if any such faith existed, it was quite misplaced. Abdullah's reforms were already being curtailed, the retrenchment having begun in the wake of a similar attack six months earlier. And despite what was reported in the American press, an end to the reforms was exactly what the bombers and their ideological supporters hoped to accomplish. To understand why this is the case -- and why one of Washington's staunchest allies has been incubating a murderous anti-Americanism -- one must delve into the murky depths of Saudi Arabia's domestic politics.

The Saudi state is a fragmented entity, divided between the fiefdoms of the royal family. Among the four or five most powerful princes, two stand out: Crown Prince Abdullah and his half-brother Prince Nayef, the interior minister. Relations between these two leaders are visibly tense. In the United States, Abdullah cuts a higher profile. But at home in Saudi Arabia, Nayef, who controls the secret police, casts a longer and darker shadow. Ever since King Fahd's stroke in 1995, the question of succession has been hanging over the entire system, but neither prince has enough clout to capture the throne.

Saudi Arabia is in the throes of a crisis. The economy cannot keep pace with population growth, the welfare state is rapidly deteriorating, and regional and sectarian resentments are rising to the fore. These problems have been exacerbated by an upsurge in radical Islamic activism. Many agree that the Saudi political system must somehow evolve, but a profound cultural schizophrenia prevents the elite from agreeing on the specifics of reform....

The Saudi monarchy functions as the intermediary between two distinct political communities: a Westernized elite that looks to Europe and the United States as models of political development, and a Wahhabi religious establishment that holds up its interpretation of Islam's golden age as a guide. The clerics consider any plan that gives a voice to non-Wahhabis as idolatrous. Saudi Arabia's two most powerful princes have taken opposing sides in this debate: Abdullah tilts toward the liberal reformers and seeks a rapprochement with the United States, whereas Nayef sides with the clerics and takes direction from an anti-American religious establishment that shares many goals with al Qaeda.

The Power of Tawhid

The two camps divide over a single question: whether the state should reduce the power of the religious establishment. On the right side of the political spectrum, the clerics and Nayef take their stand on the principle of Tawhid, or "monotheism," as defined by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the eponymous founder of Wahhabism. In their view, many people who claim to be monotheists are actually polytheists and idolaters. For the most radical Saudi clerics, these enemies include Christians, Jews, Shi`ites, and even insufficiently devout Sunni Muslims. From the perspective of Tawhid, these groups constitute a grand conspiracy to destroy true Islam. The United States, the "Idol of the Age," leads the cabal. It attacked Sunni Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, both times making common cause with Shi`ites; it supports the Jews against the Sunni Muslim Palestinians; it promotes Shi`ite interests in Iraq; and it presses the Saudi government to de-Wahhabize its educational curriculum. Cable television and the Internet, meanwhile, have released a torrent of idolatry. With its permissive attitude toward sex, its pervasive Christian undertones, and its support for unfettered female freedom, U.S. culture corrodes Saudi society from within.

Tawhid is closely connected to jihad, the struggle -- sometimes by force of arms, sometimes by stern persuasion -- against idolatry. In the minds of the clerics, stomping out pagan cultural and political practices at home and supporting war against Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq are two sides of the same coin. Jihad against idolatry, the clerics never tire of repeating, is eternal, "lasting until Judgment Day," when true monotheism will destroy polytheism once and for all.

The doctrine of Tawhid ensures a unique political status for the clerics in Saudi Arabia. After all, they alone have the necessary training to detect and root out idolatry so as to safeguard the purity of the realm. Tawhid is thus not just an intolerant religious doctrine but also a political principle that legitimizes the repressiveness of the Saudi state. It is no wonder, therefore, that Nayef, head of the secret security apparatus, is a strong supporter of Tawhid. Not known personally as a pious man, Nayef zealously defends Wahhabi puritanism because he knows on which side his bread is buttered -- as do others with a stake in the repressive status quo.

In foreign policy, Nayef's support for Tawhid translates into support for jihad, and so it is he -- not Abdullah -- who presides over the Saudi fund for the support of the Palestinian intifada (which the clerics regard as a defensive jihad against the onslaught of the Zionist-Crusader alliance). On the domestic front, Nayef indirectly controls the controversial Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (CPVPV), the religious police. The cpvpv came under withering attack in March 2002 when its men reportedly used batons to beat back schoolgirls as they tried to flee from a burning dormitory. The girls, so the story goes, failed to cover themselves in proper Islamic attire before running from the flames, and the religious police then mindlessly enforced the laws on public decency. More than a dozen girls were trampled to death in the incident. It is impossible to say whether the story is true in all respects, but considerable evidence indicates that the cpvpv did in some manner hamper rescue efforts. Nayef, however, flatly denies that the religious police did anything wrong.

The Call of Taqarub

If Tawhid is the right pole of the Saudi political spectrum, then the doctrine of Taqarub -- rapprochement between Muslims and non-Muslims -- marks the left. Taqarub promotes the notion of peaceful coexistence with nonbelievers. It also seeks to expand the political community by legitimizing the political involvement of groups that the Wahhabis consider non-Muslim -- Shi`ites, secularists, feminists, and so on. In foreign policy, Taqarub downplays the importance of jihad, allowing Saudis to live in peace with Christian Americans, Jewish Israelis, and even Shi`ite Iranians. In short, Taqarub stands in opposition to the siege mentality fostered by Tawhid.

Abdullah clearly associates himself with Taqarub. He has advocated relaxing restrictions on public debate, promoted democratic reform, and supported a reduction in the power of the clerics. Between January and May 2003, he presided over an unusually open "national dialogue" with prominent Saudi liberals. Two separate petitions established the essential character of the discussion: the National Reform Document, which offered a road map for Saudi democracy, and Partners in the Homeland, a call by the oppressed Shi`ite community for greater freedoms. The first endorsed direct elections, the establishment of an independent judiciary, and an increased public role for women. Its drafters also took pains to express respect for Islamic law. The clerics were not mollified, but this affront to their sensibilities was as nothing compared to the Shi`ite petition, which, in their eyes, issued straight from the bowels of hell.

The Saudi religious establishment is viscerally and vocally hostile to Shi`ism. Although Shi`ites constitute between 10 and 15 percent of the population, they do not enjoy even the most basic rights of religious freedom. Nevertheless, in an unprecedented move, the crown prince met with their leaders and accepted their petition. The controlled Saudi press did not publish the petition or even report on it, but Abdullah's move sent ripples of discontent through the Saudi religious classes.

By floating the "Saudi Plan" for Arab-Israeli peace -- traveling to Crawford, Texas, to debate the measure with President George W. Bush in April 2003 -- and accepting the notorious Shi`ite petition, the crown prince has sided resolutely with the backers of Taqarub against the hard-line clerics. To a Western eye there is no inherent connection between Abdullah's domestic political reform agenda and his rapprochement policies toward non-Muslim states and Shi`ite "heretics." In a political culture policed by Wahhabis, however, they are seen to be cut from the same cloth.

The Threat of Takfir

While Abdullah has signaled friendship with the West, Nayef has encouraged jihad -- to the point of offering tacit support for al Qaeda. In November 2002, for example, he absolved the Saudi hijackers of responsibility for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In an interview published openly in Saudi Arabia, he stated that al Qaeda could not possibly have planned an operation of such magnitude. Nayef perceived an Israeli plot instead, arguing that the attacks aroused so much hostility to Muslims they must have been planned by the enemies of Islam. This statement not only endorsed the clerics' paranoid conspiracy theory, but, more important, sent a message that the secret police saw no justification for tracking down al Qaeda.

The case of the Saudi cleric Ali bin al-Khudayr helps explain Nayef's stance. A close associate of al Qaeda, al-Khudayr is known as a leader of the takfiri-jihadi stream of Islamic radicalism -- that is, as someone quick to engage in takfir, the practice of proclaiming fellow Sunnis guilty of apostasy (a crime punishable by death).* After September 11, he issued a fatwa advising his followers to rejoice at the attacks. Depicting the United States as one of the greatest enemies that Islam has ever faced, he chided those who had misgivings about the deaths of so many innocent civilians, listing a number of American "crimes" that justified the attacks: "killing and displacing Muslims, aiding the Muslims' enemies against them, spreading secularism, forcefully imposing blasphemy on peoples and states, and persecuting the mujahideen."

Al-Khudayr was eventually arrested by Nayef's security services, but only after the May 2003 suicide bombings in Riyadh that killed 34 people -- when the cleric's brand of extremism began to threaten the political status quo. Until then, he had been allowed to operate freely and spread his violent anti-Americanism without constraint. Why? Because along the way he helped terrorize critics of the religious establishment. For Nayef, Wahhabi vigilantism is useful in keeping reformers in check.

Saudi journalist Mansur al-Nuqaydan, for example, is an open critic of the hard-line clerics. An ex-Islamic extremist himself, he went to jail in his youth for rooting out idolatry by firebombing a video store. The combination of his personal background, his mastery of the clerics' idiom, and his clear and unflinching support for Taqarub makes him particularly threatening to the religious establishment. Consequently, the extremists have singled him out for special treatment.

Along with some associates, al-Khudayr accused al-Nuqaydan of apostasy, pointing to the text of an interview in which the journalist committed the crimes of "secular humanism" and "scorn for religion, its rites, and devout people." Particularly incriminating, claimed the clerics, was al-Nuqaydan's conviction that "we need an Islam reconciled with the other, an Islam that does not know hatred for others because of their beliefs or their inclinations. We need a new Reformation, a bold reinterpretation of the religious text so that we can reconcile ourselves with the world." On the basis of this expression of Taqarub he was sentenced to death, with the edict posted publicly on al-Khudayr's Web site. For five months, the authorities did nothing. In a regime where openly practicing Shi`ism can land you in jail for years, al-Khudayr's period of freedom speaks volumes. So long as the cleric was limiting his activities to inciting violence against Americans and intimidating reformers, Nayef had no argument with him.

Around the same time that al-Khudayr was arrested, on the other hand, al-Nuqaydan lost his job and soon after was barred from writing or traveling abroad -- a casualty of a parallel crackdown on the reform movement. For Nayef, whose chief concern is to protect the status quo, there is nothing puzzling about this juxtaposition. Al-Khudayr ran afoul of him when bombs targeting the regime started going off, but al-Nuqaydan also represented something of a threat to the Saudi elite. Nayef himself does not take overt responsibility for the persecution of the reformers, but the hand of the secret police is barely hidden from view.

The sequence of events is now familiar. Either without warning or in response to a complaint by a prominent cleric, a critic of the religious establishment loses his job. His employers subsequently refuse to comment. Islamic extremists then issue a death threat to the unemployed man over the phone or on the Internet. In 1999, for example, an associate of al-Khudayr's issued a fatwa against the Saudi novelist Turki al-Hamad, who later signed the National Reform Document. Partly as a result, al-Hamad received a slew of death threats. He and his family were also harassed by the cpvpv. The novelist turned to Abdullah for help, receiving a sympathetic hearing and an offer of physical protection. By offering only bodyguards, however, Abdullah tacitly admitted that he could not control the shadowy parts of the government that belong to his half-brother.

Uncle Tom "Court Jew " Friedman

In the aftermath of September 11, informed American opinion concluded that Osama bin Laden had attacked "the far enemy" -- the United States -- in order to foment revolution against "the near enemy" -- the Saudi regime. Subsequent events have confirmed that al Qaeda does indeed use the war with the United States as an instrument against its domestic enemies. Yet the tacit cooperation between Nayef and al-Khudayr shows that the relationship between al Qaeda and the Saudi royal family is more complex than most people seem to think.

To better understand how al Qaeda reads Saudi Arabia's political map, one can turn to the work of Yusuf al-Ayyiri, a prolific al Qaeda propagandist who died last June in a skirmish with the Saudi security services. Just before his death he wrote a revealing book, The Future of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula After the Fall of Baghdad, which gives a good picture of how al Qaeda activists perceive the world around them.

According to al-Ayyiri, the United States and Israel are the leaders of a global anti-Islamic movement -- "Zio-Crusaderism" -- that seeks the destruction of true Islam and dominion over the Middle East. Zio-Crusaderism's most effective weapon is democracy, because popular sovereignty separates religion from the state and thereby disembowels Islam, a holistic religion that has a strong political dimension. In its plot to denature Islam, al-Ayyiri claims, Zio-Crusaderism embraces three local allies: secularists, Shi`ites, and lax Sunnis (that is, those who sympathize with the idea of separating religion from state). Al Qaeda's "near enemy," in other words, is the cluster of forces supporting Taqarub.

The chief difference between the ways al Qaeda and the Saudi religious establishment define their primary foes is that the former includes the Saudi royal family as part of the problem whereas the latter does not. This divergence is not insignificant, but it does not preclude limited or tacit cooperation on some issues. Although some in the Saudi regime are indeed bin Laden's enemies, others are his de facto allies. Al Qaeda activists sense, moreover, that U.S. plans to separate mosque and state constitute the greatest immediate threat to their designs and know that the time is not yet ripe for a broad revolution. So al Qaeda's short-term goal is not to topple the regime but to shift Saudi Arabia's domestic balance of power to the right and punish supporters of Taqarub.

Monday, March 16, 2009

The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD

Tales from the Crypt ...
The Depraved Spies and Moguls

of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD

The world is not the way they tell you it is."

- Adam Smith, author of
"The Wealth of Nations", published 1776

"The world is governed by very
different personages from what is
imagined by those who are not behind the
scenes."




Who Controls the Media? Operation MOCKINGBIRD


Soulless corporations do, of course. Corporations with grinning,
double-breasted executives, interlocking directorates, labor squabbles
and flying capital. Dow. General Electric. Coca-Cola. Disney.
Newspapers should have mastheads that mirror the world: The
Westinghouse Evening Scimitar, The Atlantic-Richfield Intelligentser .
It is beginning to dawn on a growing number of armchair ombudsmen that
the public print reports news from a parallel universe - one that has
never heard of politically-motivated assassinations, CIA-Mafia banking
thefts, mind control, death squads or even federal agencies with
secret budgets fattened by cocaine sales - a place overrun by lone
gunmen, where the CIA and Mafia are usually on their best behavior. In
this idyllic land, the most serious infraction an official can commit
__is a the employment of a domestic servant with (shudder) no
residency status.

This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of MOCKINGBIRD.

It was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid period of the cold
war, when the CIA began a systematic infiltration of the corporate
media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news
outlets.

In this period, the American intelligence services competed with
communist activists abroad to influence European labor unions. With or
without the cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner, an
undercover State Department official assigned to the Foreign Service,
rounded up students abroad to enter the cold war underground of covert
operations on behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination. Philip
Graham, __a graduate of the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg,
PA, then publisher of the Washington Post., was taken under Wisner's
wing to direct the program code-named Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

"By the early 1950s," writes former Village Voice reporter Deborah
Davis in Katharine the Great, "Wisner 'owned' respected members of the
New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus
stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA
analyst." The network was overseen by Allen Dulles, a Templar for
German and American corporations who wanted their points of view
represented in the public print. Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25
newspapers and wire agencies consenting to act as organs of CIA
propaganda. Many of these were already run by men with reactionary
views, among them William Paley (CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry
Luce (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).

Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been
appalled to f__ind in FOIA documents that agents boasting in CIA
office memos of their pride in having placed "important assets" inside
every major news publication in the country. It was not until 1982
that the Agency openly admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have
acted as case officers to agents in the field.

"World War III has begun," Henry's Luce's Life declared in March,
1947. "It is in the opening skirmish stage already." The issue
featured an excerpt of a book by James Burnham, who called for the
creation of an "American Empire," "world-dominating in political
power, set up at least in part through coercion (probably including
war, but certainly the threat of war) and in which one group of people
... would hold more than its equal share of power."

George Seldes, the famed anti-fascist media critic, drew down on Luce
in 1947, explaining tha__t "although avoiding typical Hitlerian
phrases, the same doctrine of a superior people taking over the world
and ruling it, began to appear in the press, whereas the organs of
Wall Street were much more honest in favoring a doctrine inevitably
leading to war if it brought greater commercial markets under the
American flag."

On the domestic front, an abiding relationship was struck between the
CIA and William Paley, a wartime colonel and the founder of CBS. A
firm believer in "all forms of propaganda" to foster loyalty to the
Pentagon, Paley hired CIA agents to work undercover at the behest of
his close friend, the busy Grey eminence of the nation's media, Allen
Dulles. Paley's designated go-between in his dealings with the CIA was
Sig Mickelson, president of CBS News from 1954 to 1961.

The CIA's assimilation of old guard fascists was overseen by the
Operations Coordination Board, directed by C.D. Jackson, formerly an
executive of Time magazine and Eisenhower's Special Assistant for Cold
War Strategy. In 1954 he was succeeded by Nelson Rockefeller, who quit
a year later, disgusted at the administration's political infighting.
Vice President Nixon succeeded Rockefeller as the key cold war
strategist.

"Nixon," writes John Loftus, a former attorney for the Justice
Department's Office of Special Investigations, took "a small boy's
delight in the arcane tools of the intelligence craft - the hidden
microphones, the 'black' propaganda." Nixon especially enjoyed his
visit to a Virginia training camp to observe Nazis in the "special
forces" drilling at covert operations.

One of the fugitives recruited by the American intelligence
underground was heroin smuggler Hubert von Blücher, the son of A
German ambassador. Hubert often bragged that that he was trained by
the Abwehr, the German military intelligence division, while still a
civilian in his twenties. He served in a recon unit of the German Army
until forced out for medical reasons in 1944, according to his wartime
records. He worked briefly as an assistant director for Berlin-Film on
a movie entitled One Day ..., and finished out the war flying with the
Luftwaffe, but not to engage the enemy - his mission was the smuggling
of Nazi loot out of the country. His exploits were, in part, the
subject of Sayer and Botting's Nazi Gold, an account of the knockover
of the Reichsbank at the end of the war.

In 1948 he flew the coop to Argentina. Posing as a photographer named
Huberto von Bleucher Corell, he immediately paid court to Eva Peron,
presenting her with an invaluable Gobelin tapestry (a selection from
the wealth of artifacts confiscated by the SS from Europe's Jews?).
Hubert then met with Martin Bormann at the Hotel Plaza to deliver
German marks worth $80 million. The loot financed the birth of the
National Socialist Party in Argentina, among other forms of Nazi
revival.

In 1951, Hubert migrated northward and took a job at the Color
Corporation of America in Hollywood. He eked out a living writing
scripts for the booming movie industry. His voice can be heard on a
film set in the Amazon, produced by Walt Disney. Nine years later he
returned to Buenos Aires, then Düsseldorf, West Germany, and
established a firm that developed not movie scripts, but anti-chemical
warfare agents for the government. At the Industrie Club in Düsseldorf
in 1982, von Blücher boasted to journalists, "I am chief shareholder
of Pan American Airways. I am the best friend of Howard Hughes. The
Beach Hotel in Las Vegas is 45 percent financed by me. I am thus the
biggest financier ever to appear in the Arabian Nights tales dreamed
up by these people over their second bottle of brandy."

Not really. Two the biggest financiers to stumble from the drunken
dreams of world-moving affluence were, in their time, Moses Annenberg,
publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and his son Walter , the
CIA/mob-anchored publisher of the TV Guide. Like most American
high-rollers, Annenberg lived a double life. Moses, his father, was a
scion of the Capone mob. Both Moses and Walter were indicted in 1939
for tax evasions totaling many millions of dollars - the biggest case
in the history of the Justice Department. Moses plead guilty and agreed
to pay the government $8 million and settle $9 million in assorted tax
claims, penalties and interest debts. Moses received a three-year
sentence. He died in Lewisburg Penitentiary.

Walter Annenbeg, the TV Guide magnate, was a lofty Republican. On the
campaign trail in April, 1988, George Bush flew into Los Angeles to
woo Reagan's kitchen cabinet. "This is the topping on the cake,"
Bush's regional campaign director told the Los Angeles Times. The Bush
team met at Annenberg's plush Rancho Mirage estate at Sunnylands,
California. It was at the Annenberg mansion that Nixon's cabinet was
chosen, and the state's social and contributor registers built over a
quarter-century of state political dominance by Ronald Reagan, whose
acting career was launched by Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

The commercialization of television, coinciding with Reagan's
recruitment by the Crusade for Freedom, a CIA front, presented the
intelligence world with unprecedented potential for sowing propaganda
and even prying in the age of Big Brother. George Orwell glimpsed the
possibilities when he installed omniscient video surveillance
technology in 1948, a novel rechristened 1984 for the first edition
published in the U.S. by Harcourt, Brace. Operation Octopus, according
to federal files, was in full swing by 1948, a surveillance program
that turned any television set with tubes into a broadcast
transmitter. Agents of Octopus could pick up audio and visual images
with the equipment as far as 25 miles away.

Hale Boggs was investigating Operation Octopus at the time of his
disappearance in the midst of the Watergate probe.

In 1952, at MCA, Actors' Guild president Ronald Reagan - a screen idol
recruited by MOCKINGBIRD's Crusade for Freedom to raise funds for the
resettlement of Nazis in the U.S., according to Loftus - signed a
secret waiver of the conflict-of-interest rule with the mob-controlled
studio, in effect granting it a labor monopoly on early television
programming. In exchange, MCA made Reagan a part owner. Furthermore,
historian C. Vann Woodward, writing in the New York Times, in 1987,
reported that Reagan had "fed the names of suspect people in his
organization to the FBI secretly and regularly enough to be assigned
'an informer's code number, T-10.' His FBI file indicates intense
collaboration with producers to 'purge' the industry of subversives."

No one ever turned a suspicious eye on Walter Cronkite, a former
intelligence officer and in the immediate postwar period UPI's Moscow
correspondent. Cronkite was lured to CBS by Operation MOCKINGBIRD's
Phil Graham, according to Deborah Davis.

Another television conglomerate, Cap Cities, rose like a horror-film
simian from CIA and Mafia heroin operations. Among other
organized-crime Republicans, Thomas Dewey and his neighbor Lowell
Thomas threw in to launch the infamous Resorts International, the
corporate front for Lansky's branch of the federally-sponsored mob
family and the corporate precursor to Cap Cities. Another of the
investors was James Crosby, a Cap Cities executive who donated
$100,000 to Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. This was the year that
Resorts bought into Atlantic City casino interests. Police in New
jersey attempted, with no success, to spike the issuance of a gambling
license to the company, citing Mafia ties.

In 1954, this same circle of investors, all Catholics, founded the
broadcasting company notorious for overt propagandizing and general
spookiness. The company's chief counsel was OSS veteran William Casey,
who clung to his shares by concealing them in a blind trust even after
he was appointed CIA director by Ronald Reagan in 1981.

"Black radio" was the phrase CIA critic David Wise coined in The
Invisible Government to describe the agency's intertwining interests
in the emergence of the transistor radio with the entrepreneurs who
took to the airwaves. "Daily, East and West beam hundreds of
propaganda broadcasts at each other in an unrelenting babble of
competition for the minds of their listeners. The low-price transistor
has given the hidden war a new importance," enthused one foreign
correspondent.

A Hydra of private foundations sprang up to finance the propaganda
push. One of them, Operations and Policy Research, Inc. (OPR),
received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CIA through private
foundations and trusts. OPR research was the basis of a television
series that aired in New York and Washington, D.C. in 1964, Of People
and Politics, a "study" of the American political system in 21 weekly
installments.

In Hollywood, the visual cortex of The Beast, the same CIA/Mafia
combination that formed Cap Cities sank its claws into the film
studios and labor unions. Johnny Rosselli was pulled out of the Army
during the war by a criminal investigation of Chicago mobsters in the
film industry. Rosselli, a CIA asset probably assassinated by the CIA,
played sidekick to Harry Cohen, the Columbia Pictures mogul who visited
Italy's Benito Mussolini in 1933, and upon his return to Hollywood
remodeled his office after the dictator's. The only honest job
Rosselli ever had was assistant purchasing agent (and a secret
investor) at Eagle Lion productions, run by Bryan Foy, a former
producer for 20th Century Fox. Rosselli, Capone's representative on
the West Coast, passed a small fortune in mafia investments to Cohen.
Bugsy Seigel pooled gambling investments with Billy Wilkerson,
publisher of the Hollywood Reporter.

In the 1950s, outlays for global propaganda climbed to a full third of
the CIA's covert operations budget. Some 3, 000 salaried and contract
CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. The cost
of dis-informing the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265
million a year by 1978, a budget larger than the combined expenditures
of Reuters, UPI and the AP news syndicates.

In 1977, the Copely News Service admitted that it worked closely with
the intelligence services - in fact, 23 employees were full-time
employees of the Agency.

Most consumers of the corporate media were - and are - unaware of the
effect that the salting of public opinion has on their own beliefs. A
network anchorman in time of national crisis is an instrument of
psychological warfare in the MOCKINGBIRD media. He is a creature from
the national security sector's chamber of horrors. For this reason
consumers of the corporate press have reason to examine their basic
beliefs about government and life in the parallel universe of these
United States....

Sunday, March 15, 2009

‘Passionate Attachment’ Costs Taxpayers Trillion$





‘Passionate Attachment’ Costs Taxpayers Trillion$


George Washington warned Americans about the high cost of permanent alliances. Cautioning future generations against the “illusion of a common interest,” he advised in his farewell address of September 1796 that the costs were particularly acute when an alliance is accompanied by a “passionate attachment” to that foreign nation.

A change in presidencies offers a timely moment to tally the costs of America’s six-decade alliance with Israel in terms of both blood and treasure. But for that alliance, would the U.S. military be waging two wars in the Middle East? The 9-11 Commission reported that the mastermind of that mass murder was motivated by his outrage at U.S. support for Israel.

With 4,195 (and counting) Americans dead, 30,000- plus grievously wounded and hundreds of billions spent, are those costs traceable to the passionate attachment that Zionists—both Christians and Jews—have for Israel? Joe Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winning economist, projects that the long-term costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will exceed $3 trillion.

Other economists include in the cost of this lengthy alliance the expense of the Arab oil embargo 35 years ago. When Arab nations sought to recover land taken by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967, Richard Nixon resupplied the Israel Defense Forces. In response, Arab oil producers hiked the price of oil, igniting a recession that cost the U.S. an estimated $420 billion in foregone economic output.

But for that alliance, higher priced energy would not have cost Americans $450 billion, according to economist Thomas Stauffer, writing in the Christian Science Monitor in December 2002. Should those embargo related costs be included? Are they rightly part of the “but for” tally? How about the $134 billion for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve established as a hedge against Arab nations again using their oil clout?

What about the $117 billion given to Egypt and $22 billion to Jordan as foreign aid in return for signing peace treaties with Israel? Those costs raise the tally to $4.3 trillion. But for this alliance, would the U.S. have incurred those costs?

If not, then all or a substantial portion of that $4.3 trillion should be included when weighing the costs and benefits of what is routinely described as the U.S.-Israel “special relationship.”

Should we include the expense of keeping oil-shipping lanes open in a volatile region that would be less volatile but for Israel’s expansionist policies in the region?

Though debates rage about how best to tally the indirect “but for” costs, little dispute surrounds the expense of direct outlays. The cumulative direct aid since 1948 was put at $113.85 billion in the November 2008 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (found at www.wrmea.com).

Direct outlays are often hidden in obscure sections of the federal budget by Israel’s allies in the congressional appropriations process. No one disputes that Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. aid since World War II. In 2007, U.S. lawmakers committed American taxpayers to pay an average $3 billion to Tel Aviv each year over a 10-year period—for another $30 billion. Those direct costs omit a 2005 defense appropriations commitment authorizing the transfer to Israel of “surplus” military equipment. The amount and cost of that equipment was not specified.

How does one tally the cost in U.S. jobs due to trade sanctions enacted at the urging of the Israel lobby that reduce U.S. exports to the Middle East? Unlike other recipients, Tel Aviv is allowed to spend in-country 26.3 percent of each year’s U.S. military aid. Israel’s defense industry now ranks ninth in global arms exports. What is the cost of that policy in U.S. jobs?

Absent from this partial tally is any mention of the strategic costs of this alliance. How does one compute the “but for” costs of an avowed ally that routinely dispatches spies who compromise U.S. national security?

What costs did Jonathan Pollard impose on American interests when he stole more than one million classified documents? Or when sensitive technologies were leaked to China? Or when officials of the Israel lobby gave Tel Aviv classified information on Iran?

In a governing system based on informed consent, the opinions of informed Americans should be surveyed before more funds are committed to this special relationship:

Should Israel remain first-ranked as a recipient of U.S. foreign aid?

Should Tel Aviv receive $8.5 million per day in U.S. military assistance?

Should Americans pay for Israel’s armed occupation of Palestinian land?

Should the U.S. military be deployed to wage war in Iran on Israel’s behalf?

After six decades, perhaps a newly elected president should heed our first president’s advice: “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”

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