November 22, 2013

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Operation Gladio and the Assassination of JFK

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Operation Gladio and the Assassination of JFK

As I've written in my previous blog post in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, my understanding of the culprits ultimately responsible for conceiving this atrocity are the Military-Industrial Complex. But I am also convinced that the upper echelons of the CIA, particularly the right-wing cadre loyal to Allen Dulles bears responsibility as well for carrying out the crime. How can both scenarios be possible? District Attorney Jim Garrison, as quoted in Joan Mellen's account of his investigation of the JFK assassination A Farewell to Justice on page 318 explained it best: In implementing the assassination, the CIA was functioning as "the clandestine arm of the warfare interests in the United States government."

snip

So if the secret to shielding a conspiracy lies in compartmentalization, the key to unraveling it lies in finding the various compartments and the characters within those compartments with means, motive and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy. There has been an enormous amount of research documenting the involvement of the CIA and the mafia in the assassination of JFK. So many of the strange actors in New Orleans during the summer of 1963 surrounding the strange activities at 544 Camp Street, the address stamped on Oswald's Fair Play for Cuba flyers, can be traced to either of those compartments. But there's another compartment I would like to explore that's even more obscure, but that ties in with the "military" part of the Military-Industrial Complex in an intelligence capacity: the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

There is a cruel irony that the DIA might have played a part in the assassination of JFK along with the CIA. The DIA was created by President John F. Kennedy in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 to coordinate all US Military Intelligence activities. At this time, though JFK took personal responsibility for the Bay of Pigs, he fired Allen Dulles from his position of Director of Central Intelligence. Though Dulles publicly objected to the DIA, as author Dick Russell explains on page 142 of his book The Man Who Knew Too Much, the situation behind the scenes was that "the triumvirate that ran the DIA had stronger ties to Dulles - by then dismissed from the CIA - and to J. Edgar Hoover than they had to Kennedy's new team at the CIA."

snip

Two of the men Russell is referring to are Joseph Carroll and William Quinn. Director Joseph Carroll had been a leading assistant to Hoover during his employment at the FBI in the 1940's. While both of Carroll's top subordinates were ex-CIA working closely with Dulles, Russell focuses on Major General William "Buffalo Bill" Quinn. Quinn worked within an elite group which saw the careers of James Angleton and Richard Helms promoted. He served as Allen Dulles' personal courier on Nazi troop movements during World War II. While I found this fact ominous in light of Dulles' history with helping Nazis escape war crimes that I have posted about previously, Russell provides further confirmation of exactly how ominous this relationship was on page 142: "Quinn had also pushed forward an overseas spy network aimed at the Soviets and run by Hitler's ex-intelligence chief, Reinhard Gehlen." The Gehlen Org, which I've written about previously, was part of a NATO "stay-behind" paramilitary organization "born in the head of Allen Dulles" called Operation Gladio. More about Gladio later.

MORE...

http://americanjudas.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-defense-intelligence-agency-dia.html

November 20, 2013

JFK Was Assassinated By Space Aliens

JFK Was Assassinated By Space Aliens

Go ahead and laugh, the title is intended to be humorous. What I find personally amusing, as we approach the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is what a concerted effort our Radical Establishment Media (REM) is engaged in trying to convince the public that the Warren Commission really did get it right. That Lee Harvey Oswald really did act alone and did not conspire in any way, shape or form with any other individuals in arranging the assassination of JFK. That Jack Ruby in turn murdered Lee Harvey Oswald simply out of personal grief for the Kennedy family and did not conspire in any way, shape or form with the Mafia, law enforcement or any other organization or individuals with an interest in silencing Oswald. In the past 10 years, this concerted effort has shown some results. A poll earlier this year conducted by Associated Press-GfK shows 59% of Americans think multiple people were involved in a conspiracy to kill JFK, whereas a 2003 Gallup poll found 75% of Americans felt there was a conspiracy.



Part of the reason for this drop over the last decade is meme management. In order for the public to be convinced the Warren Commission was right, it is important that the perception of competing theories spelling out conspiracy not only be made to appear incorrect, but absolutely ridiculous. Generally, the REM will use this by taking some aspect of the JFK assassination that the general public regards in connection with conspiracy, like the grassy knoll, and applying it to the latest controversy of the day where a conspiracy hypothesis can be disproved. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post did this recently, by correctly disputing the Benghazi hypothesis posited by Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy In Media and former CIA officer Clare Lopez that the Obama administration "flipped our policy" and was arming al-Qaeda. (Really, Clare? Like you were completely unaware of any 'black ops' by your former employer at odds with the stated "policy" of previous administrations?) But then Milbank gilds the lily by describing their "lunacy" as being "around the grassy knoll." The clear implication is that the belief that a shot hit Kennedy from the front, all visual indications in the Zapruder film aside, should be disregarded as hallucinatory, otherwise noted journalists like Milbank will roll their eyes and say, "I've got an appointment back on Earth."

This sentiment expressed above has become a verbal shorthand among the REM and self-appointed "debunkers" hell-bent on pigeon-holing good conspiracy theories and bad conspiracy hypotheses into the same goofy trashcan of public perception. It is their go-to moniker for disrespecting any and all conspiracy research: 'tin foil hat'. The origin of this adjective is from mentally ill/traumatized people who believe that wearing tin foil on their head in the shape of a hat will prevent the transmission of voices into their head. While there is some scientific validity for the effectiveness of reducing radio wave radiation this way, it is the stated reason by a few unfortunate souls that this will prevent harassment by paranormal beings that has lead to the use of the phrase 'tin foil' for cheap laughs at the expense of any conspiracy theory deemed delusional by those who claim to speak for all things rational. Thus, in their mind, Grassy Knoll=Aliens.

I'll grant them the fact that many alien visitation/UFO incidents have been either disproved with earth-bound explanations or debunked as elaborate hoaxes. Unfortunately, many in the self-styled "skeptics" community and the REM seem unwilling to exhibit the same generosity regarding the possibility that some of the alien visitation/UFO incidents that have not been explained might possibly have an explanation that is 'not of this Earth'. George Carlin did a brilliant job of illustrating this contradiction in his clever book When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?:

You may have noticed that, in the media, UFO believers are usually referred to as buffs, a term used to diminish and marginalize them by relegating them to the ranks of hobbyists and mere enthusiasts. They are made to seem like kooks and quaint dingbats who have the nerve to believe that, in an observable universe of trillions upon trillions of stars, and most likely many hundreds of billions of potentially inhabitable planets, some of those planets may have produced life-forms capable of doing things that we can't do.

snip

To my way of thinking, there is every bit as much evidence for the existence of UFOs as there is for the existence of God. Probably far more. At least in the case of UFOs there have been countless taped and filmed and, by the way, unexplained sightings from all over the world, along with documented radar evidence seen by experienced military and civilian radar operators.

This does not even begin to include the widespread testimony of not only highly trained, experienced military and civilian pilots who are selected for their jobs, in part, for their above-average eyesight and mental stability, but also of equally well-trained, experienced law-enforcement officers. Such pilots and law-enforcement people are known to be serious, sober individuals who would have a lot to lose were they to be associated with anything resembling kooky, outlandish beliefs. Nonetheless, they have taken the risk of revealing their experiences because they are convinced they have seen something objectively real that they consider important. All of these accounts are ignored by the media.

With this in mind, I would like to seriously entertain a goofy possibility: JFK was assassinated by space aliens. Notice I said possibility, not probability. Personally, I think the probability of this occurrence about as realistic as the probability that The Matrix is real, that Elvis is actually Sasquatch and that hedge fund managers really give a shit about the homeless. But rather than engage in the blithe eye-rolling dismissal that the so-called skeptics (I call them "septics") use to disparage in the name of 'debunking', I would like to give this subject a deeper examination to separate the smoke from the fire where real evidence of conspiracy in the assassination of JFK exists. To do that, that means a deeper examination of the roots of UFO and alien visitation possibilities where government involvement is alleged. That means looking into Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 and Area 51. Yeah, Ground Zero where "tin foil hat" lunacy as determined by Our Trusted Authorities mentioned above are concerned.

To guide us through this terrain of High Weirdness, I am primarily using as my compass the research of Peter Levenda. Levenda is the author of Unholy Alliance, a book praised by no less than Norman Mailer (he also wrote the Foreword) for its "scholarly details" on the history of Nazi involvement with the occult. (You didn't think that plot detail from Raiders of the Lost Ark was something Lucas or Spielberg just made up, did you?) For this post I will be quoting from Levenda's Sinister Forces, a trilogy that he subtitles: A Grimoire of Political Witchcraft. In Book One: The Nine, he documents some strange UFO sightings in 1947 in Chapter 5: Bluebird. While most people are aware of the Roswell sightings on July 1, 2 and 3 culminating in the crash on July 4 and discovery of wreckage on July 5, 1947, there were a high number of UFO sightings preceding Roswell throughout the United States that are equally important. Levenda begins in Washington on page 168:



MORE...

http://americanjudas.blogspot.com/2013/11/jfk-was-assassinated-by-space-aliens.html

September 26, 2013

30 Years Ago Today, The World Almost Ended

Thursday, September 26, 2013

30 Years Ago Today, The World Almost Ended

Each generation faces its own unique threat. In the context of modern warfare, I think this partially accounts for that perennial misunderstanding, the so-called generation gap. We all want to feel special, so to some degree this translates to infusing the unique threat we face with hyperbole; that our threat is somehow the worst, the greatest, the most insidious, evil, pick whatever adjective suits your passion. It gets more passionate, of course, if you subscribe to dispensationalist religious beliefs. Surely, this new threat is worse than all previous threats, so get ready for that Book of Revelations Armageddon, for truly we must be in the End Times.

Except we're not. And it isn't. The threat that we currently face from terrorism is real and serious. It is hardly existential. Previous generations had it far worse. As far as immediate military threats spearheaded by a fanatical madman, no one beats Hitler. Period. Compare the last 12 years including 9/11 living through al-Qaeda compared with what Germans and the rest of the world had to deal with in the 12 years comprised of 1933-1945. I rest my case. And as much as it irks me to hear any geezer have the egocentricity to call themselves The Greatest Generation, I have to say thank you. I wish the leaders of your generation had the foresight, as Clemenza said in The Godfather, to have "stopped Hitler at Munich." But that point aside, stop him you did, and the civilized world is eternally grateful to you.

The one caveat to this argument is that Hitler didn't really represent an existential threat. (Unless, of course, you happened to be Jewish, or homosexual, or Gypsy, or just plain having enough conscience and guts to oppose the perverted Nazi ethos.) But neither does terrorism, unless you happen to believe the Chechens can overcome their snowball's chance in hell odds of overthrowing the Russian government, gain possession of their nuclear arsenal and break the codes to unleash Apocalypse Now. Which brings me to the main point of this post: if the greatest military threat is an existential threat, i.e. the ability to wipe human existence off the face of the earth, then the greatest threat ever occurred during the Cold War with the threat of nuclear annihilation. If the Cold War got hot enough to unleash World War III, the hundreds of millions incinerated in the cities targeted would be the lucky ones. The unlucky would be the rest of the world's population facing the prospect of Nuclear Winter. As the speed of environmental existential threats go, if Global Warming is a marathon, Nuclear Winter is a 100 meter sprint.

Many people think the only time we ever came close to nuclear war was during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. But there was another crisis behind the scenes in 1983 that most people were not aware of. If not for the cool head and accurate "gut" of one Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, we might not be here:

Sept. 26, 1983: The Man Who Saved the World by Doing ... Nothing
By Tony Long Email 09.26.07
[img][/img]
Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov prevented a Soviet retaliation against the United States by detecting a satellite error.
Photo: Gyori Antoine / Corbis

1983: A Soviet ballistics officer draws the right conclusion -- that a satellite report indicating incoming U.S. nuclear missiles is, in fact, a false alarm -- thereby averting a potential nuclear holocaust.

Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the secret bunker outside Moscow that monitored the Soviet Union's early-warning satellite system, when the [url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/coldwar/shatter021099b.htm]alarm bells went off[/url] shortly after midnight. One of the satellites signaled Moscow that the United States had launched five ballistic missiles at Russia.

Given the heightened tensions between the two countries -- the alarm coincided with the beginning of provocative NATO military exercises and barely three weeks after the Russians shot down a South Korean airliner that had wandered into Soviet air space -- Petrov could have been forgiven for believing the signal was accurate. The electronic maps flashing around him didn't do anything to ease the stress of the moment.

But Petrov smelled a rat. "I had a funny feeling in my gut" that this was a false alarm. For one thing, the report indicated that only five missiles had been fired. Had the United States been launching an actual nuclear attack, he reasoned, ICBMs would be raining down on them.

"I didn't want to make a mistake. I made a decision, and that was it." Petrov's gut feeling was due in large part to his lack of faith in the Soviet early-warning system, which he subsequently described as "raw." He reported it as a false alarm to his superiors, and hoped to hell he was right.

Petrov was initially praised for his cool head but later came under criticism and was, for a while, made the scapegoat for the false alarm. Further investigation, however, found that the satellite in question had picked up the sun's reflection off the cloud tops and somehow interpreted that as a missile launch.

Petrov lives today on his army pension in a village outside of Moscow.

(Source: Washington Post)

What's really scary is that this false alarm that happened 30 years ago today was only the beginning. It's easy to forget the level of tension that existed then if you didn't live through it, but I did. I remember the brinksmanship practiced during the first term of Reagan's presidency, exemplified in the phrase he used to describe the Soviet Union: "evil empire." I remember the incident alluded to above, the Soviet shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (no kids, 007 is not a sick joke on my part) on September 1, 1983, killing all 269 passengers aboard, including sitting Congressman Lawrence McDonald, which seemed to give teeth at the time to the "evil empire" accusation. Later, evidence was revealed through Project Censored that US intelligence had an overriding interest in Soviet military activities in the area overflown by the Korean airliner. (Maybe the 007 flight designation really was a sick joke!) But at the time, even without the intimate knowledge of behind the scenes details, the tension was real and palpable. It's no coincidence that two major Hollywood productions dealing with nuclear holocaust, the Oscar nominated Testament and the highly rated TV movie The Day After were made in 1983. President Reagan even saw a special screening of The Day After on October 10, more than one month prior to the national broadcast, which "greatly depressed" him, but didn't affect him enough to put a hold on Exercise Able Archer 83, which really kicked the nuclear brinksmanship crisis between the US and USSR into high gear in November.

[img][/img]
The Day After movie still


The existence of Exercise Able Archer 83 has been public knowledge for many years. But earlier this year, newly declassified documents gave a more complete picture of just what a threat to the existence of humanity this exercise presented:

New Documents Reveal How a 1980s Nuclear War Scare Became a Full-Blown Crisis

By Robert Beckhusen
05.16.13
3:43 PM


[img][/img]
Photo: Department of Defense

During 10 days in November 1983, the United States and the Soviet Union nearly started a nuclear war. Newly declassified documents from the CIA, NSA, KGB, and senior officials in both countries reveal just how close we came to mutually assured destruction — over a military exercise.

That exercise, Able Archer 83, simulated the transition by NATO from a conventional war to a nuclear war, culminating in the simulated release of warheads against the Soviet Union. NATO changed its readiness condition during Able Archer to DEFCON 1, the highest level. The Soviets interpreted the simulation as a ruse to conceal a first strike and readied their nukes. At this period in history, and especially during the exercise, a single false alarm or miscalculation could have brought Armageddon.

According to a diplomatic memo obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by National Security Archives researcher Nate Jones, Soviet General Secretary Yuri Adroprov warned U.S. ambassador Averell Harriman six months before the crisis that both countries “may be moving toward a red line” in which a miscalculation could spark a nuclear war. Harriman later wrote that he believed Andropov was concerned “over the state of U.S.-Soviet relations and his desire to see them at least ‘normalized,’ if not improved.”

The early 1980s was a “crisis period, a pre-wartime period,” said Gen. Varfolomei Korobushin, the former deputy chief of staff of the Soviet nuclear Strategic Rocket Forces, according to an interview conducted by the Pentagon in the early 1990s and obtained by Jones. The Kremlin’s Central Committee slept in shifts. There were fears the deployment of Pershing II ballistic missiles to Europe (also in November 1983) could tip the balance. If a conventional war erupted, Soviet planners worried their troops would come close to capturing the nuclear-tipped missiles, prompting the United States to fire them.

The Soviet Union, according to an unclassified article written for the CIA’s classified Studies in Intelligence journal and provided to Jones, notes that Soviet fears of a preemptive American nuclear attack “while exaggerated, were scarcely insane.” This stemmed from the Soviet experience during World War II, when the Third Reich launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in human history. Soviet officials worried history might be repeated by NATO.

Oleg Gordievsky, a CIA and MI6 source during the Cold War, was previously known to have warned the West about these fears, but the CIA article identifies a second source of this information: a Czech intelligence officer with ties to the KGB who “noted that his counterparts were obsessed with the historical parallel between 1941 and 1983. He believed this feeling was almost visceral, not intellectual, and deeply affected Soviet thinking.”

President Reagan wasn’t sure, and in March, 1984, asked Arthur Hartman, his ambassador to the Soviet Union, “Do you think Soviet leaders really fear us, or is all the huffing and puffing just part of their propaganda?” We don’t know what Hartman said in response, but John McMahon, the CIA director at the time, believed the Soviets were simply “rattling their pots and pans” to stop further Pershing II deployments.

It’s unclear how much of the fear was just pots and pans. Jones writes that although “real-time analysts, retroactive re-inspectors, and the historical community may be at odds as to how dangerous the War Scare was, all agree that the dearth of available evidence has made conclusions harder to deduce.” Jones did not get all the information he asked for. (The complete list of unclassified documents are collected at the Archives’ website, with two more sets of documents to follow.) The NSA told him it had 81 more documents, but did not release them. However, it did “review, approve for release, stamp, and send a printout of a Wikipedia article,” he noted.

Still, we do have more evidence of serious Soviet preparations. Documents obtained by Jones detail a massive KGB intelligence-gathering mission called Operation RYaN. (The name is a Russian acronym for “nuclear missile attack.”) According to the CIA article, RYaN was “for real” and accelerated in the early 1980s during the scare. The goal was to find out if and when the United States and NATO would attack. According to KGB instructions sent to agents in London, Soviet spies were to monitor bomb shelters, blood banks, military bases and key financial and religious leaders for signs of war preparations. “Many of the assigned observations would have been very poor indicators of a nuclear attack,” Jones warns.

But in another sense, the scrambling for any scrap of intelligence — whether good or bad — reflected a feverish belief among some quarters that war was just around the corner. “[T]he Reagan administration marked the height of the Cold War,” notes one declassified history published by the National Security Agency. “The president referred to the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire, and was determined to spend it into the ground. The Politburo reciprocated, and the rhetoric on both sides, especially during the first Reagan administration, drove the hysteria. Some called it the Second Cold War. The period 1982-1984 marked the most dangerous Soviet-American confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

Worse, there were “a lot of crazy people” in the Kremlin and Soviet military command, according to Vitalii Tsygichko, an analyst for the Soviet General Staff who was interviewed by the Pentagon. “I know many military people who look like normal people, but it was difficult to explain to them that waging nuclear war was not feasible. We had a lot of arguments in this respect. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there are a lot of stupid people both in NATO and our country.”

Considering the consequences of a war, and how close it came, those comments certainly ring true.

It would be comforting to think that with the end of the Cold War in 1991, the threat of nuclear annihilation has vanished. But that isn't the case. On January 25, 1995, a Norwegian missile launched to study the aurora borealis was mistaken by Russian military as a US Trident missile flying over Russian airspace. President Boris Yeltsin had actually opened the nuclear briefcase when Russian radar confirmed the missile was heading out harmlessly to sea. But that's hardly comforting to know how close we can come to suicide as a species by complete accident!

Why is it that the civilized world has banned chemical weapons, but has yet to outlaw the greatest WMD of all, nuclear bombs? I give credit to President Obama for his recent attempt to reduce the number of nuclear warheads down to 1,000 each, (current totals: US - 4,650 Russia - 5,200) but that's still 2,000 warheads capable of creating the Mother Of All Accidents. It's a great first step, too bad Congressional Republicans and Vladimir Putin are unified in opposing it. Perhaps they've forgotten their history, how close we've come to extinction.

Or maybe they remember and are nostalgic for the good old days of nuclear paranoia! Dovetails nicely with the current 80's nostalgia!

[center]Yes, the world is headed for destruction.
Is it a nuclear war?
What are you asking for?[/center]

August 19, 2013

I'm adding that to my journal for permanent reference.

So that anyone wondering what the whole brouhaha over Assange/Manning/Greenwald/Snowden was who happens to wander through can just click this to get the real answer.

Dammit Octafish, I fuckin' love you! Seriously! You make wading through an absolute ocean of bullshit worthwhile, which was what this thread was until you posted the Truth and posted it well. So many times I'm tempted to walk away and give up because of the tidal wave of stupidity at hand. Then I read something like what you wrote above and tell myself, "No way! Speak truth to power! Spread truth to the masses!"

August 1, 2013

Al-Qaeda Backers Found With U.S. Contracts in Afghanistan

I found this story a little too late to post in Latest Breaking News. But as this is not a conspiracy website, it's Bloomberg for Christ's sake, it beggars the question: who are we really fighting? Who is the real enemy? As Bill Hicks said, ""Go back to bed, America! Your government has figured it out!"

Seems like Bloomberg is trying to make al-CIAda a mainstream concept!

July 14, 2013

10 Years Ago Today - Valerie Plame's CIA Cover Was Compromised FOR THE SECOND TIME

Sunday, July 14, 2013

10 Years Ago Today - Valerie Plame's CIA Cover Was Compromised FOR THE SECOND TIME

July 14, 2003: I thought I had seen the breadth and depth of how low the Bush administration was willing to sink in defense of the lies that drove this country to go to war in Iraq. Finally, as the promised finds of WMD failed to materialize, exposure of one of the primary lies arose in the form of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's column, [iWhat I Didn't Find in Africa], published eight days earlier. Suddenly, the prick-waving "Mission Accomplished" crew was in damage control; first shamefacedly admitting that the infamous 16 words in the State of the Union address "should never have been included", then backtracking the regret by going into attack-the-messenger mode, which the ever-compliant mainstream media (MSM) went along with, making the headlines about Wilson's character, as opposed to the content of his message. But it wasn't enough to just smear Wilson. On this day 10 years ago, conservative columnist Robert Novak scraped the bottom of the barrel with this particular revelation:

"Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report."

There was nothing in Novak's column to disprove that the Bush propaganda about WMD in Iraq was a lie; now that MSM had followed the reich-wing wurlitzer into Get Wilson gear, there was no need to even try. But the two "senior administration officials" who told Novak that Wilson's wife is a CIA operative crossed a line they shouldn't have. At the time of this revelation, Plame was covert. Publicly stating her employment by the CIA compromised her cover. As David Corn pointed out a couple days after Novak's column, by exposing Plame the Bush administration may have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. The CIA requested an investigation through the Department of Justice which, under the leadership of John Ashcroft, dragged their heels until the fall of 2003, when he reluctantly announced they had opened an investigation.


MSM interest in the story briefly heated up around this time. There were news accounts that Karl Rove was a possible target which noted that he had once done campaign work for Attorney General John Ashcroft. Many Congressional Democrats pushed for a special counsel and even Republican Senator Arlen Specter said, “Recusal is something Ashcroft ought to consider.” Press Secretary McClellan told the White House press corps that he had spoken to Rove, Vice President Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and National Security Council (NSC) aide Elliott Abrams and that each had categorically denied they had leaked information on Valerie Wilson. Novak doubled down on his earlier damage by publishing a column in October that revealed the name of her cover company, stating that when Valerie Wilson made a contribution to Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 1999, she listed her employer as “Brewster-Jennings & Associates”. Fascinated with these revelations and hoping to learn more from a group as interested in finding out the truth behind this story as I was, I joined Democratic Underground (DU) on October 14, 2003. Through following their Latest Breaking News forum, I found out in December that Ashcroft was indeed recusing himself and that Deputy AG James Comey had appointed Patrick Fitzgerald as Special Counsel to handle the grand jury investigation.


But in early 2004, news on the Valerie Plame case seemed to have dried up. I noticed
while the rest of MSM was more absorbed in trivialities like Howard Dean’s Scream, DU turned out to be a great place to discuss not only the news covered on TV and newspapers, but also stories from alternative media outlets. Nobody felt compelled to shy away from stories that explored the possibility of conspiracy where the government was concerned. It was in this manner that I first discovered the story of Sibel Edmonds while looking for stories on Valerie Plame. I found the similarities fascinating: two beautiful women, both doing classified work for the government, both betrayed by the government during the Bush administration, both seeking justice in a court of law. But at that time, I had no proof their stories were connected in any way.


I tried to keep abreast of any new developments in Plame’s case looking at Latest Breaking News, but rarely found news in the spring of 2004. Often I would see people post questions in General Discussion wondering how Fitzgerald’s investigation of the case was going. I would try participating in these threads and on days when I didn’t see one, I would type up my own OP and try to find out if there had been any new revelations. Post by post, I began to notice it was a lot of the same posters who kept showing up at these threads about the Plame case. They all seemed to be dedicated to the same quest for the truth that attracted me, but there never seemed to be any cohesiveness in any thread in the pursuit of information.


On July 1, 2004, a member of DU with the username shraby started a thread with the title “If and when indictments come down in the Plame case." Somehow, something struck a collective chord which generated a huge response. When the moderator locked the thread after 311 posts, it was not to discourage activity, but to encourage it because the length of the thread was creating loading problems for users with a dial-up internet connection. (Remember those days?!) The second thread created by the moderator titled “If and when indictments come down in the Plame case-thread2” attracted even more members and was locked for the same reason after 295 posts. By the time the third thread was opened, everyone there was aware of what was being referred to as “The Plame Threads.”


What was it that made these threads so popular? There were a number of great contributions, but what really jumpstarted the first thread was a member with the username H2O Man highlighting Joe Klein’s recent article in Time magazine revealing that Valerie Plame, at the time she had her cover blown, was working on a “sting operation” regarding the trafficking of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Suddenly, there was tangible proof that Plame was no simple secretarial desk jockey, as the neo-con meme of that time went; this was a serious undercover agent in a serious covert operation. It made the possibility of indictments seem imperative. This, along with H2O Man’s opinion that the indictments from the grand jury proceedings would come out soon and could create a constitutional crisis unlike any in our nation’s history, was what really got the ball rolling.

Throughout that summer until August 19, 2004, when after over 5,600 posts the moderator locked the 20th and final Plame Thread, we became a team of detectives dedicated to discovering the evidence detailing this operation. While I got to know some better than others, the most dedicated researchers each had their own distinctive approach to fueling the collective effort. Sometimes conflicts would erupt over the significance of certain pieces of evidence and sometimes just over personality conflicts, but for the most part the collaboration was beautiful harmony as each new revelation in DU's own organic "think tank" built upon the next. In addition to uncovering what evidence I could by googling leads, I felt my role was to compile as much evidence by everyone from the Plame Threads as I could into a cohesive structure to illustrate the hypothesis we were testing. In the context of trying to discover the details of the “sting operation”, many on the Plame Threads devoted their time to researching the dark underworld of WMD proliferation. One possible lead presented in the first thread by a member with the username seemslikeadream concerned a possible connection Plame had through her cover company Brewster, Jennings & Associates tracking the nuclear proliferation network of A.Q. Khan.

Khan turned out to be the most promising lead in WMD proliferation, because VP Dick Cheney knew about Khan's nuclear black market since he was Secretary of Defense in 1989 and did nothing to stop it. Cheney was fast becoming the Plame Threads' Most Likely Mastermind orchestrating the outing of Valerie Plame due to the wonderful Waterman Paper written by H2O Man. After uncovering deeper financial links between Khan's chief financial officer and a subsidiary company of Halliburton, I presented my compilation of our research to explore The Waterman Paper's Goal #3: Why Cheney Exposed Plame. I titled my paper American Judas. Our think tank had tested the hypothesis and now had a "peer-reviewed" theory we could stand behind as we spread the word in pursuit of justice.

In the aftermath of the Plame Threads, my focus renewed on the possibility of a connection between the Plame case and Sibel Edmonds. Through my own research and the help of other DU investigative threads between 2004 and 2007, I wrote American Judas 2nd Edition: INVESTIGATE CHENEY & UNRAVEL THE CABAL. This was published here while the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was still ongoing. There had been a great amount of publicity on MSM that Dick Armitage had actually been the first person in the Bush administration to leak the CIA identity of Valerie Plame to a reporter, Bob Woodward. Popular opinions over blame in the Plame case seemed to be divided into two camps: either the benign, "Armitage-the-gossiper-made-a-boo-boo" or the malignant, "Neo-cons-made-Plame's-CIA-cover-Fair-Game-for-hubby-criticizing-Bush." While I always leaned toward blaming the neo-cons, I knew from my research that the reality behind this crime was something deeper. Something darker. Uglier. Something like a military-industrial complex on steroids.

Why did Armitage feel so secure in telling Woodward that "everyone knows" Wilson's wife works for the CIA as early as June 13, 2003? It's important to remember his social milieu as Deputy Secretary of State, the Department's second ranking official; the third ranking State Department official was Marc Grossman, who told Libby that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA on June 11 or 12, 2003, right around the time Cheney told Libby. According to the FBI, Libby admitted that he and Cheney may have talked of outing Plame to reporters one month later. Cheney's motive has been established, but what motive would Grossman have? According to Sibel Edmonds, Grossman was one of three officials – the other two, she says, are Richard Perle and Douglas Feith – who had been watched by both Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA team, and by the major FBI investigation of organized crime and governmental corruption on which she herself was working until being terminated in April 2002. Edmonds always intimated there was more she could reveal, but the multiple gag orders placed on her by Attorney General John Ashcroft prevented her from doing so.

Prevented, that is, until August 8, 2009. Edmonds was subpoenaed for a case before the Ohio Elections Commission; Schmidt v. Krikorian. This was the first time during the Obama administration that an opportunity arose where her attorneys requested that Attorney General Holder review the state secrets privilege invoked in her case and reverse the decision made under former President Bush. While the FBI attempted to block her testimony with a two page letter of objection to her attorneys and the Department of Justice pressured the Ohio Commission to drop the subpoenae, ultimately no one showed up in court to stop her deposition and on August 8, 2009, she provided what any rational person would describe as explosive testimony. MSM gave the news a complete blackout. Too bad, they missed out on informing the world about how Valerie Plame's CIA cover company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, initially had their cover blown:

"Basically," she said, "I told them how [third-ranking State Dept. official in the Bush Admin and former Ambassador to Turkey] Marc Grossman disclosed" that Brewster Jennings was a CIA front company to the target of an FBI investigation.

snip

"Grossman and [Richard] Armitage, they are the only two people involved. Later on Cheney and his people may have used it, but it had nothing to do with those other things, [Brewster Jennings] was completely destroyed and gone by the summer of 2001."

Does this revelation absolve Cheney? Absolutely not! First, the Grossman/Armitage revelations do not change the documented links between Cheney and the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network where the motive to blow Valerie Plame's CIA cover is concerned. Second, considering both Cheney and Armitage were affiliated with the Project for the New American Century, it's quite possible Cheney already knew Plame's cover company had essentially been gutted from the inside two years prior which gave him further justification. Third, Cheney's and Armitage's affiliation with the American Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce (AACC), which I proved in American Judas 2nd edition, shows that they are part of the "other things" that Edmonds has elaborated on: a criminal network described by the FBI as Gladio B, whose roots trace back to 1947 under the stewardship of former Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles.


While the pathway to understanding the truth was long and circuituous, I think the best way to commemorate this shameful anniversary is to celebrate the contributions of everyone who participated in the Plame Threads. I might not have uncovered the full story if not for their commitment and devotion. There are some in particular I want to single out, though many may have left DU over the years. First, I must give a shout out to H2O Man, who I believe still posts at DU. Your wisdom, insight and hope provided an inspiration to everyone who dared to dream that there might be some measure of justice against the criminal Bush administration. Pallas180: you were not only the "den mother" who organized so many of the threads, you gave me the name American Judas to describe what we had discovered. seemslikeadream: you were one of the biggest diggers and unearthed mountains of evidence; I'm so glad our paths crossed. arbustochupa, who I believe now posts under the name coeur_de_lion, you not only organized one of the threads, you were one of the biggest contributors and helped get the conversation flowing. Me., you got your start at DU on the Plame Threads and did some great digging yourself. RebelYell: you helped me distinguish valuable alternative media from trash and did some excellent detective work. calimary: you always kept us updated with media contact info so we could alert them to our discoveries. kohodog: you wrote a great form letter for alerting the media and many other contributions to the Plame Threads. Finally, I want to thank shraby for starting it all and keeping the ball rolling in DU's finest moment.

Here is the honor roll:



Thread 1 - shraby, LosinIt, fizzana, seemslikeadream, ewagner, tnlefty, GreenPartyVoter, gandalf, billybob537, Cyrano, Rosco T., are_we_united_yet, H2O Man, chiburb, lancdem, sniggles, merh, redstateliberal, frank frankly, truth2power, Eloriel, Fla Dem, goclark, TNOE, lil-petunia, Jazzgirl, dweller, juajen, Political_Junkie, FoeOfBush, calimary, burrowowl, kgfnally, scottxyz, scarletwoman, mzmolly, maxpower, Jim Sagle, thinkingwoman, TreeHuggingLiberal, jubug3, Waverley_Hills_Hiker, 2dumb2beprez, serryjw, Stephanie, LizW, Ugnmoose, Dookus, jmowreader, cryingshame, TruthIsAll, iconoclastic cat, Disturbed, wrate, Marianne, Generator, shimmergal, NRK, birdbrain, LeftHander, TWiley, Ripley, hansolsen, KoKo01, PATRICK, StandUpGuy, alfredo, Bush_Eats_Beef, KYDEM, loudsue, hedda_foil, arbustochupa, leftchick, Cheswick, oasis, Oaf Of Office, HootieMcBoob, Dems Will Win, tableturner, Zynx, 0007, FrustratedDemInNC, SharonAnn, Kimber Scott, vidali, kohodog, faithnotgreed, VoteDemocratic2004, cease_fire, floda, Pallas180, flpeach, Rockholm, TacticalPeak, mopaul, nolabels, Wilber_Stool, Moderator


Thread 2 - steviet_2003, Lone_Wolf, Ewan I Bushwackers, ClassWarrior, RainDog, Zan_of_Texas, Swamp_Rat, TheStranger, wtmusic, Crisco, AlinPA, Tellurian, Roon, ABB_15501, RFSea, Mallove Fan 71, bigskydem, Crachet2004, RightDem, Hippo_Tron, Lars39, party_line, Bleachers7, ktf23t, Pobeka, myrna minx


Thread 3 - newyawker99, azmesa207, legolassie, dansolo, OhMyGod, spokane, Kool Kitty, starroute, Zorra, Tight_rope, cthrumatrix, amBushed, Beetwasher, rman, fedupwithbush, xocolatl, mdmc, Papa, jumptheshadow, Snazzy, daria_g, Lestatdelc, LibertyorDeath


Thread 4 - beam_me_up, Kanary, juslikagrzly, GoreN4, catlawyer, librechik, SpiralHawk, robertpaulsen, yodermon, NewJeffCT, flutter by


Thread 5 - RatTerrier, spotbird, Cassandra, lanparty, AZDemDist6, ramblin_dave, nannah, johnfunk, salin, tblue37, JellyBean1, pbl, demgrrrll, KleverKittie, tjfreeman, Me.,


Thread 6 - swag, 7th_Sephiroth, Prodemsouth, progressivebebe, wurzel, Mike Niendorff, FascistAdder, milkyway, alilenas, DeepModem Mom, liberalnproud, KansDem, TacoUnderpants, Langis


Thread 7 - doctorbombeigh, Elginoid, jbutsz, DavidFL, leesa, donkeyotay, ralps, wishlist, RebelYell, Timefortruth


Thread 8 - Jacobin, BeFree, yowzayowzayowza, warrior1, saywhat, ozymandius, TheCentepedeShoes, huckleberry


Thread 9 - MidwestTransplant, liburl, sadiesworld, bobbieinok, sal, midwayer


Thread 10 - Trajan, seventhson, mandyky, sampsonblk, Gregorian, zidzi, lastknowngood, maggrwaggr, zydeco


Thread 11 - LunaC, mountainvue, DrBB, SayitAintSo, bezdomny, Sugarbleus


Thread 12 - NightOwwl


Thread 13- ayeshahaqqiqa, wolfgirl, snippy, SilasSoule, skip fox, shockingelk, ignatius 2, tom_paine, sheelz


Thread 14 - Scagbearer, crozet4clark, napi21, linazelle


Thread 15 - PDittie, carols, gtrump, maryallen, grasswire, muriel_volestrangler


Thread 16 - democrat_patriot, pacoyogi, bobbyboucher, Roy Robertson, stepnw1f, donhakman, dist22dem


Thread 17 - teryang, drfemoe, Minstrel Boy, wiggs, proud patriot, FizzFuzz


Thread 18 - whistle, LiberalSam, slutticus, Dr_eldritch


Thread 19 - Tweedtheatre, tishaLA, peace4allpeople, sgr2


Thread 20 - buycitgo, Sophree


I salute you all!

June 20, 2013

Gun Control in America – 50 Years of Shooting Blanks

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Gun Control in America – 50 Years of Shooting Blanks

By Eric Frost-Barnes

I love our nation, and I believe in the 2nd Amendment. I also believe in the 1st Amendment, as well as the 13th and 19th Amendments. Truth is, I’m a big fan of nearly all our Amendments, with the notable exception of that self-righteous 18th one (but since the 21st Amendment got it drunk and rolled it under our national porch, it’s remained relatively mellow). But I digress – back to focusing my sights on the 2nd Amendment. I firmly believe in an individual’s right to bear arms with that right being a vital aspect toward maintaining the security of a free state. And that is exactly what the 2nd Amendment says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Personally, I think anyone debating gun control, regardless of their position, needs to fully understand exactly what the 2nd Amendment states. The words “well regulated” are right there at the very beginning, and the amendment ends with the final four words, “shall not be infringed.” The word “infringed” means violated, and given the fact the 2nd Amendment begins with the term “well regulated,” it seems more than safe to surmise that our nation’s Founding Fathers recognized that guns, much like government itself, should not be allowed to get out of control – for it would be the nation’s citizens who would likely suffer the most. I also believe it’s safe to say that history has repeatedly proven our Founding Fathers to be extremely intelligent, forward-thinking men. They weren’t only interested in their own rights and safety, but the rights and safety of future generations (except maybe for Founding Father Pierce Butler of South Carolina – 18th Century rumors have him painted as kind of a selfish tool).

This November marks the 50th Anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy. It’s been half a century since he was murdered by a man with a rifle. And in between 1963 and the present, we’ve witnessed the fatal shootings of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X, as well as failed assassination attempts directed at Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, Alabama Governor George Wallace, and U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

· In that same fifty-year time span the American people have seen the horror of the University of Texas (1966) massacre that left 17 fellow citizens dead.

· We witnessed 21 Americans die at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California (1984), and another 14 innocent civilians die at a post office barely two years later (1986) in Edmond, Oklahoma.

· 23 more Americans died in a cafeteria shooting (1991) in Killeen, Texas.

· We watched as 13 students and teachers were killed in a mass shooting at Columbine High School (1999) in Littleton, Colorado.

· 32 students were shot to death at Virginia Tech (2007) in Blacksburg, Virginia.

· We witnessed two horrific shooting sprees (2009) where 13 innocent Americans died in each: first at an Immigration center in Binghamton, New York, and then again at a soldier readiness processing center in Fort Hood, Texas.

· Our nation grieved for 12 more Americans killed while watching a midnight movie at a theatre (2012) in Aurora, Colorado, as well as the terrible mass murder of 26 faculty and young children at Sandy Hook Elementary School (2012) in Newtown, Connecticut.

That final grim statistic of twenty-six Americans killed at Sandy Hook coincidentally matches the number of Constitutional Amendments dismissed and left for dead by your more wild-eyed vocal opponents of any kind of common-sense gun laws; even as those same zealots rant and rave about the sanctity of our Constitution when it comes to the absolute protection of their favorite Amendment: the 2nd. But again, I digress.

more...

http://americanjudas.blogspot.com/2013/06/guest-blogger-post-gun-control-in.html

November 1, 2012

Taking Nate Silver's football analogy and running with it.

5 more days. I don't think I'm alone here in getting a bit obsessive with my poll watching. Where do we really stand? It seems there's analogies all over the place trying to provide perspective. But whereas most polling analogies try to compare this Presidential election with other Presidential elections in the past (2012 is like 2004, 2012 is like 1980, etc.), I like Nate Silver's most recent sports analogy the best:

Mr. Obama is not a sure thing, by any means. It is a close race. His chances of holding onto his Electoral College lead and converting it into another term are equivalent to the chances of an N.F.L. team winning when it leads by a field goal with three minutes left to play in the fourth quarter. There are plenty of things that could go wrong, and sometimes they will.

But it turns out that an N.F.L. team that leads by a field goal with three minutes left to go winds up winning the game 79 percent of the time. Those were Mr. Obama’s chances in the FiveThirtyEight forecast as of Wednesday: 79 percent.

Not coincidentally, these are also about Mr. Obama’s chances of winning Ohio, according to the forecast.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/oct-31-obamas-electoral-college-firewall-holding-in-polls/#more-36981

I would agree with this analogy, but I think more details are necessary to provide the proper perspective of President Obama's chances of winning the election. So Obama leads by 3 points with 3 minutes left. Who has possession of the football in this analogy? I believe Hurricane Sandy has put possession squarely in Obama's hands. It's an important possession. He can't just run out the clock by spiking the football (i.e. flying over the damage for a photo-op of him looking out the window with a look of grave concern) and high-fiving his teammates. ("You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie!&quot Obama needs a first down to win the whole game.

How close are we? I would say that President Obama just completed a nine yard run with a helpful block, inadvertent or not, from Governor Christie. It's second down with one yard to go for victory. There are no timeouts left and the clock is still ticking. Also, if you take into account our GOTV ground game in the swing states, I would say we're inside the 20 yard line in Romney territory.

I'm liking this analogy a lot! Help me out if you think I'm missing any details.

September 6, 2012

Exclusive: Paul Ryan Quietly Requested Obamacare Cash

Just got this from The Nation:

Exclusive: Paul Ryan Quietly Requested Obamacare Cash

Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan is barnstorming the country, promising to repeal every provision of the Affordable Care Act if the Romney-Ryan ticket is elected. But a letter he wrote to the Obama administration may undermine this message.

On December 10, 2010, Ryan penned a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services to recommend a grant application for the Kenosha Community Health Center, Inc to develop a new facility in Racine, Wisconsin, an area within Ryan’s district. “The proposed new facility, the Belle City Neighborhood Health Center, will serve both the preventative and comprehensive primary healthcare needs of thousands of new patients of all ages who are currently without healthcare,” Ryan wrote.



The grant Ryan requested was funded directly by the Affordable Care Act, better known simply as healthcare reform or Obamacare.

The letter, among several obtained by The Nation and The Investigative Fund through a Freedom of Information Act request, is a stark reminder that even the most ardent opponents of Obamacare privately acknowledge many of the law’s benefits.

more...

http://www.thenation.com/blog/169757/exclusive-paul-ryan-quietly-requested-obamacare-cash?rel=emailNation

I hope VP Biden uses this to crush him in the debate!

August 13, 2012

"President Ryan" - Another Shrewd Move in the Corporate State's Long Game

"President Ryan" - Another Shrewd Move in the Corporate State's Long Game

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

August 12, 2012 - 5:01pm ET

Paul Ryan's looks are often compared to an actor's, and that's no accident: He's being groomed for the role of a lifetime. When Mitt Romney accidentally introduced Ryan as "the next President" he may have been displaying the same predilection for accidental honesty - for truth-telling as political gaffe - that he showed when he praised Israel's socialized health system.

And Romney may be right. The most likeable and electable extremist in the country just became the GOP's 2016 front-runner. That's no accident either.

All the signs suggest that the economy will struggle for years unless progressive steps are taken. Worse, another steep decline into recession or depression could occur at any time. If Obama's re-elected and we're still suffering in 2016, as now seems likely, our "electable extremist" will be in the perfect position to become the next President.

Heads we win, says Corporate America, and tails you lose.

more...

http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2012083212/president-ryan-another-play-corporate-rights-long-game