Enlightenment:
A note to the non-ravers out there: codshit is
NOT a derogatory or insulting term and bears no relation in offensiveness to its four-letter
cousin, it's a word used to describe the nonsense that people sometimes talk
when they're off their heads.
Wisdom:
So there, we have figured it out, go back to bed America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed America, your government is in control again. Here, here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed America, here's American Gladiators. Here's 56 channels of it. Watch these pituitary retards bang their fuckin skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go America, you are free... to do as we tell you.
.: Bill Hicks :.
Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'...they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git'....
.: Alexi Sayle :.
If you confront the Universe with good intentions in your heart it will reflect that and reward your intent. It just doesn't always do it in the way you expect.
.: G'kar :.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was so alarmed, and furious over Captain Simon Hayward's draft manuscript, "Under Fire: My Own Story," scheduled for publication in September 1989, that she went berserk. It was just the kind of official expose´ by a British operator of most sensitive operations that its intelligence system had been specifically designed to prevent, and now it was appearing despite all the checks by officials, and sanctions by law, especially the Official Secrets Acts. As usual, when such an unexpected crisis occurs, Downing Street so overreacted that it put its very existence in jeopardy. It was a classic example of Lord Acton's aphorism - "every thing secret degenerates."
Thatcher had worked tirelessly since attaining power in 1979 to have an administration she could completely trust - one that was leakproof. Along the way, her biggest problems were with Foreign Secretary Francis Pym who - like his American counterpart Al Haig - thought that the crisis with the Argentine junta over the Falklands could somehow be settled peacefully after Lord Carrington had resigned, and with Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine who was not convinced that all claims by the Right-wing Freedom Association about subversives abounding, especially in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, were worthy of MI5 investigations.
Of course, this just incited more Thatcher suspicions of disloyalty - what ultimately led, according to Michel Gratton and Mike Frost in Spyworld, to her tasking in 1983 Canada's Communications Security Establishment, its equivalent of GCHQ, to check apparently on their loyalty. The Canadian establishment, with its antiquated equipment, was desperate for work. The Prime Minister had selected it because she did not trust the Security Service that much either despite efforts by DGSS John Jones to catch threats to national security. The GCHQ had declined to do the intercepts because of the consequences involved, if discovered, but invited the Canadians to come to Britain to do it with their own equipment, and without any other authority.
Whatever the Canadians determined about the ministers' real loyalties, British success against the Argentines in the Falklands permitted the sacking of Pym in 1983, and Heseltine resigned two years later when the Prime Minister overruled his rescue plan for Westland Helicopters. Thatcher loyalists Geoffrey Howe, and George Younger replaced them. In the meantime, Anthony Duff had taken over MI5 in the wake of the Michael Bettaney spying scandal, the Prime Minister insisting that senior management not be protected from criticism by the Security Commission. ("Sir John Jones: Gravity-shift at MI5," The Guardian, March 12, 1998, p. 20) Bettaney was ready to tell any of Britain's enemies, starting with the Soviets and ending with the Provisional IRA, all about the dirty war in Northern Ireland. Duff had already headed the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), making the product from the intelligence services more useful to the government, and was sent to Gower Street to clean up the public image of the Security Service - what the threatened publication of former Assistant Director Peter Wright's Spycatcher made all the more paramount.
Howe did yeoman-like work at the Foreign Office for the Thatcher government. When the Prime Minister was looking for grounds for taking counter measures against the Soviets, the Foreign Secretary made the most of what defector Oleg Gordievsky told MI6 about the Kremlin's alleged active measures against Britain, especially those by the KGB's Department V of Vladimir Kryuchkov's First Chief Directorate. In fact, Gordievsky's reports were so effective that Howe approved a complicated SIS plan to rescue him from Moscow when the KGB apparently was closing in on the Colonel's spying for London in July 1985. (Mark Urban, UK Eyes Alpha, p. 14) Then, on September 12, 1985, the Foreign Office expelled 25 Soviet diplomats for spying, setting the scene for dramatic action against Moscow.
Gordievsky's counter measures, though, especially the shooting of Swedish statsminister Olof Palme to trigger a showdown at sea with the Soviets, did not prove all that successful despite assistance from Younger at the MoD, thanks to the spying by Soviet double-agents Aldrich "Rick" Ames at CIA, Robert Hanssen at the Bureau, and Vitali Yurchenko back in Moscow. They closed down American double agents Sergei Motorin, Valeri Martynov, Boris Yuzhin, and others who conspired in the USSR to make Soviet nuclear submarines on station sitting ducks, ready for slaughter by US Navy attack submarines in the Barents Sea, when they reacted to the surprise. Only Palme bit the dust, thanks to an assassin's bullet from, it seems, Guards Captain Simon Hayward's .357 Magnum revolver. Then American Atlantic Fleet Commander Carlisle Trost refused to commit his carrier battle groups to Navy Secretary John Lehman's plan to attack the Kola peninsula across Norway, obliging SOD Younger to cancel NATO's Anchor Express Exercise, in which 16 Norwegian engineers had already been killed because of avalanches, in support of the absent American Task Force Eagle.
Then - after the KGB set the scene for defusing the crisis by getting the Libyans to blow up a restaurant in West Berlin, killing a few, and injuring many American servicemen - Younger authorised the use of British bases by American planes for bombing Libya. ("Viscount Younger of Leckie," The Daily Telegraph, January 27, 2003, p. 23) The Secretary of Defence and Howe, according to Robin Renwick, Britain's Ambassador to America during the Bush and Clinton administrations, had persuaded the Prime Minister to clarify the necessity, and legality of the attack with Washington. Three years later, when 'wet' supporters of the Thatcher administration became increasingly troubled by her leadership, Younger organized the campaign to defeat the stalking-horse challenge by Sir Anthony Meyer.
Conscientious policy-making, especially with a eye on intelligence input in the process, continued at the Foreign Office. When Nizar Hindawi tried to get his girl friend, Ann Murphy, to smuggle a bomb on an El Al airliner at Heathrow in April 1986, GCHQ at Cheltenham, and Duff's Security Service proved most effective in catching the culprit. MI5 managed to bug the Syrian ambassador's office, permitting GCHQ interception of conversations with Damascus in which he recommended Hindawi's services to Syrian Air Force Intelligence. (Urban, p. 42) (This could also have been part of the deception plan to keep people guessing about who was really behind the still, unsolved Stockholm shooting - setting up Hindawi to do something obviously foolish, and then making sure that nothing happened by alerting an El Al security guard that the pregnant lady also had a bomb in her bag.) In any case, Howe, along with Washington, used Hindawi's conviction in October to justify breaking off diplomatic relations with Syria.
Actually, Peter Wright's revelations about MI5 proved somewhat of a fillip to Thatcher's government, but by this time the Prime Minister had become so paranoid about leaks that she failed to see it. She believed that any disclosures of covert operations, even false and fanciful ones, were detrimental to government performance. She was determined to go to any length to prevent their appearance - for example, seeing to the 1987 banning of Duncan Campbell's BBC TV series Secret Society for fear of what it might divulge about buggings, and 'dirty tricks' in Northern Ireland - and to punish possible perpetrators. While Duff had gone to unprecedented lengths for her to prevent publication of Wright's claims - what he later regretted as misguided (Ibid., p. 66) - government calls for injunctions around the world against Spycatcher's appearance proved pointless by the time they reached the Lords. The book was readily available in shops.
Its revelations seriously called into question Wright's own loyalty. His lectures to CIA in 1959 and 1961 about its responsibilities in conducting assassinations also gave the declining imperial power an alibi for any similar counter measures, what apparently Hayward had just successfully pulled off in Stockholm. Moreover, Wright's disclosures of how MI5 had handled defector Anatoliy Golitsyn (Spycatcher, p. 314ff.) helped shield the Security Service from charges of complicity in the publication of the defector's New Lies for Old in the Palme affair - what had called for his elimination. (p. 55ff.) Wright even added that Prime Minister Thatcher ended his speculation that former DGSS Roger Hollis had been a KGB operative, Golitsyn's candidate for another secret agent of influence.
In sum, by the time DGSS Anthony Duff retired in late 1987 - after Thatcher had won comfortable re-election the previous spring - it was thought that the government had a firm grip on unauthorized disclosures through a host of sanctions against prying reporters, brazen whistleblowers, spineless judges, and ignorant jurors. Responsibility for government actions rested solely with the ministers, and as long as they did their jobs carefully, there was little chance of anything awkward leaking out. To make sure of the point regarding real operations, Attorney General Sir Patrick Mayhew declined shortly thereafter to prosecute those RUC officers implicated in the Stalker and Sampson Reports on the Shoot-to-Kill controversy for fear that their trials would raise questions about the activities of Hayward and leading Army double agent in the PIRA leadership (codename 'Steak Knife'), particularly when their paths crossed, which would compromise the planned SAS cull of the Provisional volunteers at Gibraltar in March 1988.
Moreover, the Prime Minister had created an inner cabinet - Foreign Secretary Howe, Foreign Office Minister of State David Mellor, Permanent Under Secretaries of the top departments, especially the F. O.'s Tim Eggar, a small number of Whitehall and Cabinet Office officials, and Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong (Urban, p. 9) - to ensure that its covert actions were in harmony with what the Joint Intelligence Committee was suggesting from reports by GCHQ, MI6, MI5, and the Defence Intelligence Staff. It was the way that Mrs. Thatcher unprecedentedly 'sexed it all up', at the expense of the intelligence services, and the Cabinet, 'by drawing a veil over everything.' (Quoted from p. 183.)
The only trouble with these arrangements was that ministers and officials did not bring to their roles the kind of scope, experience, interest, and authority that the Prime Minister did to hers. She was absolutely addicted to special operations, and, consequently, had a need, and right to know secret information which went far beyond that of anyone else. According to former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, another critic and victim of Thatcher's covert ways, she was besotted with everything about intelligence, from Frederick Forsyth's novels to the Force Research Unit's Military Intelligence Source Reports (MISRs) in Northern Ireland. "Mrs. Thatcher was a devotee of intelligence," Urban quoted a senior mandarin, sounding much like the F.O.'s Eggar. "She liked it, she respected it, she believed it gave her the truth as the Foreign Office Reports wouldn't." (pp. 9-10)
On the other hand, Eggar's political bosses, Howe and Mellor, showed almost no interest in intelligence reports, especially the JIC's Red Book. Mellor compared consuming its weekly offering as "...significantly less riveting than the novels would have you believe." (Quoted from Michael Smith, New Cloak, Old Dagger, p. 32) The Foreign Secretary experienced the same sensation, comparing their ingestion as less appetizing than metal boxes marked, "eat after reading". "It was the very blandness of this 'assessed intelligence'," Urban concluded, "that often led the small number of people who had access to raw GCHQ and SIS reports to consult them in search of a clearer picture." (p. 9)
Of course, the problem would then be who was reading which reports to clarify what relations. The fact that Howe and Younger had failed the test was established when Urban concluded his book thus: "Litte wonder that someone appointed as Defence or Foreign Secretary may have little idea about the potential of MI6 or GCHQ, if the only intelligence they may have seen in their ministerial career up to that point are the sanitized essays contained in the weekly Red Book." (p. 299) The fact that Mellor never attained higher office is explained for the same reason. Thatcher's inner circle in this regard had also been weakened by her estrangement from Ian Gow who gave up being her Private Secretary in August 1983, and resigned from the government in 1985 in protest over the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Alan Clark, in his Diaries, attributed Gow's fall to pressure from the Foreign Office to placate America's Irish-Americans. (pp. 116-7)
The raw reports especially relevant concerned special operations, especially in Northern Ireland, or against the Soviets, which involved several agencies in a most disjointed fashion, and required serious study to fathom all their pitfalls. The greatest difficulty was caused by using Army personnel, who had prevented ambushes by IRA Active Service Units, in operations to stop arms shipments from Soviet surrogates, especially Qaddafi's Libya, particularly those on the Eksund in 1987. Bettaney had simplified the problem for the Provisionals by spilling his guts about operations in Ulster while on remand in Brixton prison.
This was particularly true in understanding Palme's assassination - what was done, it seems, while Captain Hayward was ostensibly reassessing Swedish bodyguard performance of the statsminister while on leave from Northern Ireland as the 'Det's' South Detachment's Operations Officer, and what was to trigger the showdown with the Soviets. While it did not trigger one, thanks to Soviet counterintelligence efforts, British problems still escalated when the Force Research Unit's mole in the Provisionals' Army Council who was to prevent the Eksund shipment from reaching Ireland for a PIRA 'tet offensive' took revenge upon Hayward when he learned of his participation in the operation while in Ibiza.
Other problems were that neither Howe nor Younger had been on the job as long as the Prime Minister, and they had massive departmental responsibilities. Neither of them apparently understood what a hot item Hayward was. Still, according to Downing Street, they had been alerted to the dangers Hayward presented when he was arrested outside Linköping, Sweden on March 13, 1987 with 50.5 kilos of cannabis hidden in the Jaguar he was driving, thanks to input supplied by 'Steak Knife' aka DOOK, Britain's leading agent in the Provisionals' Army Council, and the FRU's Brian Nelson in the set up. Hayward had monitored 'Steak Knife's activities a few times to keep the 14 Intelligence Company informed of Libyan arms shipments to the Provisionsals while holidaying on his brother Christopher's catamaran True Love in the Mediterranean.
The Sun, for example, published deceptive stories by Neil Wallis about what Britain should do to rescue the heroic leader of the 1985 IRA ambush at Strabane who was being silently railroaded to prison in the Swedish capital, though Hayward had not even been stationed in Northern Ireland at the time. Private Eye had "Drug News" stories in the same vein about Hayward, but they were soon overshadowed by "Spy News" revelations about activities by whistleblowers Wright, Captain Fred Holyroyd, and Colin Wallace a decade earlier in the province. The Guardian created the same impression by publishing Peter Murtagh's stories from Stockholm on the trial next to Richard Norton-Taylor's coverage of the appeal to the High Court for an injunction against Wright's book. For good measure, questions in Parliament finally urged the Foreign Office to intervene in the case because Hayward might be suffering from some kind of incapacity, possibly even brain-washing. (The Times, May 8, 1987, p. 2)
Once Hayward was charged with drug smuggling, the Guards Captain found the Foreign Office completely hostile to his interests, and he wrote extensively about it while serving his sentence. Vice Counsul Jenny Cummings of the Stockholm Embassy was resigned to his being treated as if he were just another Swede suspected of criminal activities (p. 92), what Eggar, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, reinforced by refusing, on Howe's behalf, to intervene so that Hayward was provided legal aid of his choice: "It was not Government policy," Hayward explained sarcastically, "to intervene in the internal affairs of another state." (p. 162)
Then another Vice Counsul, John White, added to Hayward's frustration by helping make it seem that the Prime Minister was officially intervening to secure his release (p. 164ff., pp. 194-5, and p. 272), hopes which were cruelly dashed when the trial went ahead. SIS officers have traditionally been embassy Counsuls. White also raised the point that Hayward was quite right to think that Scot Forbes Mitchell, the principal prosecution witness, was a Swede, only to decline to testify in his defence on appeal: "White refused," Hayward added, "on the grounds that as a British diplomat he could not be seen to be taking sides!" (p. 304) Hayward concluded his description of his ordeal by contrasting how Mellor intervened to protect Palestinians from the Israelis with his inaction in his case against the Swedes. (p. 449)
For good measure, Hayward concluded: "I have many regrets, but above all my Swedish experience has taught me never to trust. There are very few people to whom I would extend that privilege today. My confidence in a system I have been brought up to believe in and to support has received an almighty dent." (p. 448) Given these sentiments, Hayward just added insult to injury when he declined to identify any politicians but MP John Gorst, and all civil servants involved in the case when he made his acknowledgements to his fellow officers for services rendered during his ordeal, though Military Attache´ in Stockholm Colonel Russell Wright was conspicuously absent from the listing.
Younger could have resolved the difficulty apparently by simply refusing to allow the manuscript to be published in the interest of national security but declined, apparently because of pressure from senior officers who thought Hayward had been harshly dealt with, and deserved to tell his side of the story. Moreover, Colonel Wright, another so-called 'friendly face', apparently never indicated to the MoD that it had anything to worry about when he visited Hayward. (p. 304) Younger's failure resulted in subsequent works dealing with the subject, starting with Mark Urban's Big Boys' Rules (p. xxi), being subjected to D-Notice Committee scrutiny before publication.
Instead of the Prime Minister simply trying to make the best of an awkward situation - assuring Hayward behind-the-scenes that matters would somehow be rectified - she compounded it by sacking Howe (Alan Clark, Diaries, 24 July 1989, p. 248), shock treatment which led to Younger's resignation. Thatcher, despite the constitutional convention, was opposed to taking responsibility for the most sensitive matters which might leak out. John Major replaced Howe at the Foreign Office. The wildest rumours about the crisis had proven all too true, something that historians have been unable to deal with ever since. They act as if Howe were sacked because of differences with the P. M. over Europe, and it occurred when Major replaced Nigel Lawson as Chancellor of the Exchequer a few months later.
Thatcher then had MPJohn Gorst refocus Hayward's complaints about his treatment, as best he could, solely on Sweden's justice system in a Foreward, hastily written just five days before. Gorst maintained that Hayward's only complaint with Britain was over the performance of the two officers of the National Drugs Intelligence Unit who relied upon hearsay evidence in helping achieve his conviction, something which would never happen in Britain, what still resulted in the Home Secretary issuing advice two years later to prevent any such recurrence! (p. 3) Gorst dismissed DOOK's role in railroading Hayward as mere fictions about "an enigmatic Irishman", only to admit that a trial before the Salford Crown Court 18 months later proved that he was deeply involved in sending Hayward falsely to prison. (p. 5) Gorst even compared Sweden's treatment of Hayward to the bungled investigation of the Palme assassination! Hayward then added an Afterword (p. 452) in praise of Sweden which took back most of Gorst's criticism.
The Prime Minister further compounded these miscalculations by sending Peter Brooke to replace Tom King as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Brooke, though obviously a most decent man, was the last person to send to Belfast under the circumstances. The PIRA, thanks to 'Steak Knife's sense of betrayal after the Gibraltar cull, and the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane, was in no mood to make peace with Britain. Ian Gow should have gotten the job, especially since he believed that the Provisionals were still trying to kill him despite the fact he had sidelined himself from the fray. Brooke was a character from one of L. P. Hartley's novels, according to Alan Clark - too nice, too Balliol College, and too transparent. (p. 166)
'Steak Knife's Provisionals showed that they understood all too well the conciliatory nature of the change in Belfast by killing 10 Royal Marine bandsmen with a bomb at its loosely protected School of Music at Deal, Kent on September 22nd. This incredible atrocity, reminiscent of the nail bombs in Hyde Park which resulted in Hayward going to Ulster on the revenge mission in the first place, was after the FRU had deliberately assassinated the UVF's Brian Robinson, a loyalist assassin of Francisco Notarantonio, Finucane, and others, three weeks before to show the Provisionals that Britain was serious about pursuing an even-handed counterterrorist strategy. Just when Hayward was returning to Britain from prison, RUC Chief Constable Sir Hugh Annesley appointed Cambridgeshire Deputy Chief Constable John Stevens to investigate the hue-and-cry which had followed the FRU/UDA assassination of Loughlin Maginn, what had been ordered to set up Robinson.
To make sure the new government, especially the ministers at the Horse Guards, and Stormont, worked in harmony with what Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey was trying to work out indirectly with Gerry Adams, MI5's G Branch Director John Deverell made available to Brooke the undated, unsigned reply that Britain had just sent to the Sinn Fein leader to get the peace process going behind the PIRA's back. (For its text, see Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, pp. 251-3.) Deverell was going to Belfast as the Security Service's DCI to make sure that the various intelligence agencies were on board - what cost him replacing Sir Patrick Walker after Duff as Director General. The reply was undated to show that Britain had been responsive to Adams' arrogant questions in 1986 about Britain's continued rule in Northern Ireland while 'Steak Knife' and Hayward had been causing difficulties, and it was unsigned to hide the fact that it had been issued without the approval of ministers. (Ibid., p. 250ff.)
On the first of November, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland shocked a press conference by stating that the British government was prepared to talk to the Provisionals, now that the Cold War was over, about the province's future when they gave up their campaign of terror. With the MI5 reply to Adams in mind, Brooke repeated it before dumb-struck dinner guests of the British Association of Canned Food Importers and Distributors at London's Whitbread Restaurant eight days later: "The British Government has no selfish strategic or economic interests in Northern Ireland; our role is to help, enable, and encourage. Britain's purpose, as I have sought to describe it, is not to occupy, oppress or exploit but to ensure democratic debate and free democratic choice." (The Irish Times, November 10, 1989)
The Provisionals were in no hurry to put down the Armalite, though, killing two British soldiers of the King's Own Scottish Borderers at the Derryard checkpoint, Count Tyrone, with the latest weapons from Libya a month later. While Moloney has compared this flying-column assault to the Loughgall Massacre (Operation Judy) during which eight volunteers were cut down by the SAS (pp. 333-4), the results were far different. Thanks to what 'Freddie' Scappaticci and John Joe Magee - British Army informants within the Provisionals in the Republic - were able to tell their handlers Major David Moyles and Edwin Bates about the impending attack, the column was repelled by a Wessex helicopter before it could detonate a 400-pound bomb outside the troops' quarters. Besides, the bomb had been sabotaged - like the one on the Eksund which failed to explode when the French authorities were closing in on it off Brittany in late October 1987 - indicating that this operation too had been betrayed on the spot.
When the flying column realized that the attack could have been decimated, the PIRA called a three-day ceasefire over the Christmas holidays, what it had last done in anticipation of productive talks back in 1975. The column, apparently composed of Magee, Scappaticci, Danny Morrison, Dessie Grew, Martin McCaughey, several members of the PIRA's East Tyrone Brigade, and possibly even 'Steak Knife' himself, was subjected to the most intense grilling by internal security chief Magee about what went wrong (For more about Magee, see Neil Mackay, "IRA torturer was in the Royal Marines," Sunday Herald, Dec. 15, 2002.), and he decided, hardly surprisingly, that Sandy Lynch, an RUC Special Branch informer, was the source of the leak. Actually, it seems Scappaticci aka 'Stake Knife' was another source, and his purpose was to convince 'Steak Knife' of the need of returning to the FRU's service. Lynch, while driving his taxi, was lured to a house in Andersonstown where he was captured, and subjected to brutal interrogation.
The significance of all this had not been lost on 'Steak Knife', apparently aka Padraic Wilson. The Derryard flying column could have been subjected to an ambush just like at Loughgall, indicating that the British Army had adopted a less proactive posture in preventing terrorism. 'Steak Knife' began to realize that a renewed effort to achieve peace with the British government was called for, especially since it offered him an opportunity to defect suspicions that he too had been a British spy. In Magee's investigation of why the Eksund operation had been betrayed, Joe Fenton, the real estate agent who allowed Belfast Brigade members to use properties up for sale for their trysts (Moloney, p. 30), soon was suspected of being the mole, and Wilson, the most regular user of Fenton's facilities, apparently rushed his execution in February 1989 to prevent him from revealing more about failed operations. Wilson, as we know, was quite the ladies' man. Fenton's murder was Wilson's answer to the FRU's killing of Pat Finucane.
To prevent a repeat of the Fenton fiasco, Danny Morrison was appointed the Provisionals' "Lord Chief Justice" to authenticate any charges of spying for the enemy. While Moloney has claimed that Morrison was always a loyal follower of Gerry Adams (pp. 334-5), he was actually a long-standing member of the Army Council, most opposed to settling the struggle for Northern Ireland simply by peaceful means. (For clarification of Morrison's reference to the "Armalite and ballot box" which Moloney somehow missed, see Peter Taylor, Brits, pp. 262-3.) If Adams was to make any headway with the Army Council in pursuing a peaceful course, Morrison had to be sidelined - what was achieved on January 8, 1990 when he arrived at the Andersonstown house to interrogate Lynch. Morrison was arrested by soldiers and RUC police officers, thanks apparently to a tipoff by 'Stake Knife', and was subsequently sentenced to eight years in prison. Scappaticci had admitted that he worked for the Provisionals at this time.
The British Army's recovery of 'Steak Knife' as a mole was delayed by Hayward's willingness to talk about its betrayal of him, revelations which just fueled Stevens' investigation of Nelson and the FRU. No sooner was the UDA intelligence chief charged with possessing classified military documents, and conspiring to commit Finucane's and other murders than the Thatcher government had the Queen award his handler, Sergeant Margaret Walshaw, with the British Empire Medal at Buckingham Palace. (Barry McCaffrey, "The Force Research Unit: Queen awarded medal to Nelson handler," North Belfast News, 2001) When Lt. Colonel Gordon Kerr, the FRU's former commanding officer, came to Nelson's defence, claiming that Nelson was "... a very courageous man whose mistakes were all very understandable" (Quoted from Tony Geraghty, The Irish War, p. 156) - testimony Kerr had been unwilling to provide the former Ops Officer for the South Detachment under more deserving circumstances in the Stockholm courtroom - Hayward told Mark Urban everything which served his purposes about misguided operations in Northern Ireland, inspiring his writing Big Boys' Rules.
Thanks to Hayward's disclosures about the lengths to which the FRU went to wipe out the earlier flying squad at Loughgall - especially allowing the murder of the UDR's William Graham on April 25, 1987 to protect 'Steak Knife' as the unrivaled informer within the PIRA - Urban compared the massacre two weeks later to the revenge murders in South Armagh: "The Graham incident may be comparable to John Stalker's discovery that the death of three police officers at the Kinnego embankment in 1982 was highly embarrassing to the RUC because the explosive used to kill them had been removed from a hayshed which was under surveillance at the time." (pp. 225-6) Until Hayward had left Northern Ireland in February 1987, he told Urban, military intelligence officers had deterred the East Tyrone ASUs engaged at Loughgall from attacking undermanned and deserted RUC police stations.
'Steak Knife's efforts, starting with the Mobile Reconnaissance Force in 1971, were dismissed as "a series of cock-ups", Hayward explaining: "It ignored the nature of the nationalist community - notably its ability to win back the loyalty of IRA men who had changed sides." (p. 37) Actually, 'Steak Knife' had been won back by the Provisionals because of the betrayals by Downing Street and Hayward himself. As for Hayward being Urban's main source, he left little doubt by gratuitously explaining that his research had had nothing to do with his own service in the Royal Tank Regiment (p. xx), also Hayward's home outfit, and making it clear that his source had left the 14 Intelligence Company early in 1987. To hide the fact, though, as best he could, Urban stated that the Company always employed the most unobtrusive agents (p. 38), what was clearly untrue in Hayward's case since he was missing the middle segments of his middle and ring fingers on his right hand because of an accident while on duty in Cyprus.
While the government successfully pressured the BBC to cancel Hayward's interview on the Terry Wogan Show, and persuaded Richard Branson's Virgin Books to buy publisher W. H. Allen so that circulation of his autobiography could be limited as much as possible (a veteran librarian at Yale University was unable to find references to it, much less a copy of it, in her searches - an unprecedented event in her career), he returned to his old haunts in Northern Ireland to defeat the FRU's continuing campaign to exonerate itself at his expense. With UVF's assassin Brian Robinson conveniently disposed of after the killings of Loughlin Maginn and Patrick McKenna, the FRU was most anxious to minimize the difficulties facing Brian Nelson, its leading agent in the UDA who had made such assassinations possible, and had apparently helped in the set up of Hayward in Sweden.
On the day before Nelson was to be arrested by Stevens' officers, Hayward infiltrated the FRU Covert Methods of Entry team from Ashford, apparently assisted by Ian Phoenix of the RUC's Special Branch, which was to destroy the evidence against Nelson by burning down its premises. As Hayward, posing as 'Martin Ingram', told the BBC's John Ware a decade later, he had overheard about the operation while visiting a bar outside Thiepval Barracks in January 1990. No sooner did Hayward hear about it than he informed Nelson, as 'Ingram' explained most revealingly: "I knew Brian Nelson and met him the day before he was due to be arrested. That very night he fled to England because, we now know, he had been tipped off." ("A sinister crime," The Guardian, April 20, 2000, bold italic mine) The only way Hayward could have known Nelson was to have met him at Ibiza.
Nelson's flight just added to his problems, especially since 'Ingram' had then told the Stevens team about the arson attack. It had taken the precaution of making copies of all its important documents, and safeguarding them back in Cambridge. Ultimately, it seems, 'Ingram' took advantage of the Castlereagh heist on St. Patrick's Day, 2002, using Army files of August and December 1988 to imply that it was involved in the murders of James Pratt Craig, and Pat Fincuane, and to maintain the myth that he was working for the FRU at the time. (Actually, Hayward was locked up in Malmö's maximum security prison in Sweden.)
The FRU's slowly regaining control of 'Steak Knife', while losing what little influence it still had over Hayward, brought out the worst among the hardliners on both sides. To settle scores with those who escaped death at Derryard, particularly 'Steak Knife', after the Stevens investigation shut down Nelson's operations, agents of the 14 Intelligence Company, while on a surveillance mission a week after Morrison's arrest, shot dead three unarmed members of the "Hole in the Wall Gang" in a hail of gunfire after they robbed bookmaker Sean Graham's shop on the Falls Road, thanks apparently to a tipoff by the mole 'Stake Knife' in the PIRA. The security forces campaign against the PIRA peaked on the night of October 9th when they cut down Dessie Grew - the leader of 'Steak Knife's counter stroke, and brother of Seamus - and Martin McCaughey when they went to collect arms from a 'hide' in a mushroom shed outside Loughgall. It was retaliation for Derryard and the murder of Graham with a vengeance. (For details, see Taylor, pp. 303-4.)
The day after Morrison was arrested, the Provisionals went on a renewed shooting spree, killing off-duty UDR officer Oliver Kirkpatrick while he was working in his shop in Castlederg, County Tyrone. Thriteen days later, off-duty police inspector Derek Montheith was murdered in his Armagh kitchen. Three weeks later, despite the RUC's Operation Leonora to prevent such assassinations, Thomas Jamison, an off-duty UDR sergeant, was shot dead after a genade stopped his lorry, and the ASU raked its cab with rifle fire.
The denouement of the destructive process occurred when Ian Gow was assassinated by a car bomb at the end of July at his home in Sussex, reminiscent of how the Provisionals had eliminated shadow spokesman for Northern Ireland Airey Neave as he was leaving the Commons carpark a decade earlier. Despite all Gow's warnings and ASU attacks, Clark explained, "now they've got her two closest confidants." (p. 320) The Prime Minister was thrown into a complete tailspin because of the tragedy, first almost comatose, despite JIC Chariman Craddock's warning minute and memo, in reaction to Saddam Hussein's proposed attack on Quwait, and then after a vist to Washington, "ultra gung-ho", according to the MoD minister, in London's response. Gow's funeral was marked by the attendance of the big winners, particularly Brooke, and losers, especially Howe, of the Cabinet reshuffle the previous year. While Clark railed against the police for not preventing the assassination, the self-tasking MI5 should have been blamed, and Home Secretary David Waddington, who was also present at the funeral, was responsible, thanks to the just passed Security Service Act.
By the time the Conservative Party elections of its leader came round, Thatcher's fate was doomed despite all the hoopla about finally going to war against Iraq with the Americans. Howe had cast the fatal stone against the 'Iron Lady' by resigning as Deputy Prime Minister, Leader of the Commons, and Lord President of the Council the week before. In a most bitter speech, Howe compared the Prime Minister's betrayal to a game of cricket where England's side had been sent in to bat, only to discover that its "...bats have been broken by the team captain." (Quoted in Clark, p. 347) Howe had been consigned to keeping the House informed of the Prime Minister's comings and goings, and the like. Clark attributed the former Foreign Secretary's rancour to the maneurvering of a small clique whose actions started occurring just three years before (ibid.) - when Hayward's appeal in Stockholm was hanging in the balance.
A week later, the party followed Howe's lead, and the Prime Minister was forced to resign in order to head off the challenge by the untrustworthy Michael Heseltine.
If you agree with the sentiment of this poem, why not share it with a friend and spread the word.
Our freedom is an illusion our liberty just a delusion we are all slaves of the Beast to It we are just the feast. Truth and justice are forsaken our dreams those cruel men have taken. They fill our heads with lies and probably laugh when one of us dies. We exist to serve their selfish greed, they care not for those of us in need. Buy, own, conquer and subvert like some heinous Internet pervert. Their lies pervade all both the big, and the small. Their plots and their schemes are more important than our dreams. So take this to heed dear readers, and confront your political leaders! The truth is what they fear so let's put this car into a high gear. Bring them down from their ivory towers show them that We are the mightiest of superpowers!
posted by ewar @ 7:56 PM
Freedom is an Illusion
Right click the link above and copy the location to link directly to this article.
If you're a spammer please do the world a favour and kill yourself.
Consider the Spammer that lowly form of life they are all below pond-scum in the evolutionary chain. Plugging their viagra and peddling their porn, polluting my inbox deserving of my scorn. Filters overloading SpamCop just got shot, next my Outlook crashes from junk even Norton can't stop. Nobody buys their shit but the bastards still press send each day brings yet more junk clogging up cyberspace and all of it is bunk! Clever little shitheads annoying little scum. When considering the filth of the Internet the Spammer rates as number 1.
posted by ewar @ 12:16 PM
Consider the spammer
Right click the link above and copy the location to link directly to this article.
The latest from Joe, as you know if you're a regular codshitter I tend to post most of his stuff here because it offers an interesting perspective. Who knows if it's true or not, work that one out for yourself.
"Yisraelim Prepare for the Invasion of America"
by Joe Vialls
Before delving any further into the detailed contingencies for Fortress Americas, it is necessary to briefly review the overall scope and sheer audacity of the Zionist plan, because this is the only way of understanding what comes next. In essence, the entire American continent, from Inuvik in northern Canada to the southern tip of Tierra Del Fuego, is to be invaded and captured for Zionist use, with the cabal exercising central command and control from New York City, currently located in the much smaller United States of America. Within this new massive fortress, the USA will be the focal point of all significant economic activities, with Canada and the former countries of Latin and South America providing the bulk of natural resources and cheap labor.
Initial military activity will consist of approximately 250,000 Mistaravim-trained Yisraelim terrorists entering the Americas by land, sea and air, thereafter splitting into cells of between four and six men, every one of them coordinated internally by various designated lodges of the B'nai B'rith Masonic order. At the same time, a further smaller block of 10,000 Yisraelim terrorists will enter Australia in order to capture and hold strategic mineral reserves, though this is an entirely separate operation that will not impact directly on the Americas. Beyond that point, strategic planning calls for the U.S. military to obey the orders of the Zionist cabal through its Yisraelim commanders, and then be used in turn as a blunt instrument to enforce 'order' across the new Fortress Americas.
Back in New York well before the invasion proper commenced, the Zionist cabal wanted American taxpayers to pre-equip the one true Zion with a workable intercontinental missile defense shield, placing them well beyond the reach of hostile nuclear weapons in the future. The cabal also wanted a comprehensive survey of all energy resources on the American continent, because once it became an independent entity, Fortress Americas had to be one-hundred-percent self sufficient in all forms of energy.
Studies of energy reserves in the United States, combined with those in Canada, Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil, which would be forcibly requisitioned after the invasion, proved that existing reserves would be woefully inadequate to even protect Fortress Americas from external attack. Because of this, the search for enhanced reserves in the Americas assumed top priority, and in late 1979 a vast two-year seismic survey of the South American Continental Shelf was commissioned through a Zionist front company in The United States, with much emphasis placed on the extended Continental Shelf surrounding the Falkland Islands.
The Falklands survey was successful beyond the wildest dreams of the Zionist cabal, indicating overall oil reserves under the Falklands Continental Shelf more than ten times as large as those existing in Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately the British administered the Falklands, and New York was determined that London would not be allowed to interfere with this staggering oil discovery, which by itself was sufficient to drive Fortress Americas for a hundred years or more. The problem was how to rid themselves of the British presence in the Falklands.
After considerable thought on the matter, the Zionist cabal finally acted on 19 March 1982, sending a hand-carried top-secret communiqué to the Argentine Government, which contained a doctored version of the Falklands report showing "about half the oil reserves as those existing in Saudi Arabia", and urging the Argentines to act quickly in regaining their birthright. It was a fine calculation, based on Britain being unwilling to react to an oil find of this particular magnitude, but sent in the certain knowledge that the Argentines would react, as indeed they did. Seven days later on 26 March 1982 the Argentine Government decided on an invasion date, and seven days after that, on 2 April 1982, Argentine forces captured and occupied the Falkland Islands.
Peter Wright of Britain's Security Service has been made the subject of ridicule for so long, especially over the plot he developed to remove Prime Minister Harold Wilson from power because he was a Soviet mole, that the leading spy and manipulator of the Cold War, if not for all time, has been reduced to the laughing stock for all concerned. Wright was the first agent to learn the spying potential of lowly counterintelligence, making so much of it that former DG Stella Rimington was reduced recently to call him facetiously "the KGB illegal", like Gordon Lonsdale, but actually the claim was all too true.
Most important, though, Wright was the Soviets' leading scientific spy whose contributions were so important in making the USSR a super power that MI5 has gone to the greatest lengths to hide them, especially because he neutralized defectors who could have stopped him. Within the Security Service, Wright created such a wave of disinformation about who were the spies in the country, and the moles within its midst, thanks to feedback by false defectors like Anatoliy Golitsyn, that it was rendered incapable of hardly anything worthwhile. Similarly, Wright, as the most important Anglo-American intelligence link, had CIA and the FBI chasing up so many wrong trees, and cutting down so many enemies Moscow really wanted gotten rid of, leaving a scene so wretched that Britain's intelligence services have gone to the greatest lengths to hide his efforts.
In fact, Wright so institutionalized wrong agendas within Western intelligence services that they worked more for Moscow than their own side. The process still could not enable the USSR to win the Cold War, as his handler Lonsdale bitterly admitted ultimately to one of his spies, George Blake, though the West's belated effort to exploit Wright's disastrous legacy almost caused it to lose it, a result which the former Assistant Director still helped cover up. Of course, Moscow was so pleased with Wright's record that it too joined the chorus of disapproval, everyone claiming that he was so bad that they almost thought of eliminating him themselves, though it protected his role and identity to the very end.
Wright, unlike the Cambridge spies, apparently became a communist sympathizer not out of ideological commitment but because of necessity. Son of Maurice Wright, who had built direction-finding stations in Norway for Captain Reginald Hall's Naval Intelligence Department during WWI, and served as the Marconi Company's Head of Research after the war, young Peter often assisted his father in wireless experiments, only to see him cut down by redundancy, and alcoholism by the consolidation of communication companies, and the Depression. Instead of going to Public School and Oxbridge, like the offspring of other members of Britain's enterprising middle classes, Wright was forced into farm work just to make ends meet, ultimately gaining a place in Oxford's hardly prestigious School of Rural Economy, thanks still to the pulling of a few strings. While Peter's father ultimately made something of a comeback, it was still too late to prevent his son from becoming SCOTT, it seems, the communist sympathizer who Edith Tudor Hart recruited as a spy for illegal Theodore Mally in the fall of 1936, and who was more valuable than Cambridge's famous spies, even Kim Philby, in identifying potential Soviet ones from university graduates going into government, the professions, and science that he was ordered to cut all ties with the CPGB.
While Wright's spying for Moscow was suspended during the Non-Aggression Pact, he resumed his activities after it became likely that the USSR would win the war with Hitler. In the meantime, he had vastly improved his credibility as a scientist at the Admiralty Research Laboratory by developing degaussing systems to protect ships against magnetic mines and torpedoes, what the Soviets were in dire need of, and it was his re-demagnetizing of the battleship Prince of Wales which enabled Churchill and Harry Hopkins, just returned from a most encouraging visit with Stalin in Moscow, to go to Placentia Bay to sign the Atlantic Charter with Roosevelt, what put Washington on a collision course with both Berlin and Tokyo. Without Wright, the battleship might well have been sunk by German U-boats, and Anglo-American cooperation in the war with it, what was essential for Soviet survival.
Little wonder that Stalin jumped into action about making an atomic bomb, once he received Wright's detailed report in December 1942 on the state of American, British, and German activities in the field. Thanks to contacts in MI6, starting with Mansfield Cumming, Wright had learned that while the German effort to produce the bomb was getting nowhere, an Anglo-American effort was finally forging ahead. Cambridge physicists Lew Kowarski and Hans von Halban had established that a chain reaction could be conducted, Oxford's Francis Simon had developed a machine for effecting isotope separation of uranium by gaseous diffusion, and scientists at Berkeley's Radiation Laboratory were seeking a simplified route to the bomb by using plutonium.
Once the KGB resident Anatoli Gorsky took Wright in tow after a face-to-face meeting where he was given the new code-name 'K' to protect his security, he soon was working so efficiently with Vladimir Barkovsky, its head of scientific and technological intelligence, in recruiting agents like MOOR and KELLY, and stealing documents from careless colleagues that Igor Kurchatov, the head of the Soviet project, wrote a memorandum in July 1943 on what needed to be learned from the Manhattan Project in America. In March, Kurchatov, after a hurried trip to Murmansk to demagmetize the vital Northern Fleet with Wright's latest expertise, had written an extensive memorandum for Mikhail Pervukhin, People's Commissar for the Chemical Industry, based upon other material from 'K', indicating that the creation of an atomic bomb was now entirely feasibile. "Kurchatov was very impressed by what he saw," David Holloway has written in Stalin and the Bomb, "all of which concerned Britain. It had 'huge, inestimatble significance for our state and science,' the wrote." (p. 91)
The young ARL scientist taught Barkovsky advanced nuclear physics, improving his running of sources, what Wright had had to teach himself at night in his flat at Hampton Wick. He provided the Soviets with everything he could find in Britain about the experiments Glenn Seaborg and Emilio Segre were conducting on uranium piles at Berkeley to produce plutonium. To answer such questions, Wright helped recruit physicists Klaus Fuchs, Alan Nunn May, and Bruno Pontecorvo to accompany Professor James Chadwick to various North American research facilities. Little wonder that neither Nigel West nor Christopher Andrew were even slightly interested in determining who 'K' was when they got the chance, the former supplying pictures of Barkovsky in The Crown Jewels as if the processor of reports had given the Soviets the bomb, and the Cambridge professor so identifying Barkovsky with 'K' in The Sword and the Shield that they became one! (Index, p. 689)
While Wright's spying trailed off with the winning of WWII, once the threat posed by Soviet defector Konstantin Volkov in Ankara against Philby and himself had been disposed of, and the Soviets were getting the bomb, the exposure and escape of Donald Mcclean, Guy Burgess, and Philby, while the Rosenbergs were executed for all the spying, forced him to resume activities. The idea of the privileged traitors escaping any kind of reckoning for another life of recognition while the struggling Jewish couple were made scapegoats by the Americans was just too much for the underpaid government scientist. At the Post Office, Wright developed for MI5 resonating devices, microphones, and bugging technics so that he became the West's master of "black bag jobs". Unfortunately, they almost all failed because of some unexpected development, e. g., bugging the wrong room, agents in the bugged room never talking, and installing a bug which still somehow failed, all apparently the result of tipoffs. In the process, he destroyed the last bit of credibility Igor Gouzenko, Wright's greatest threat, had. Its culmination was when he, as a new Ultra genius, tapped a phone in the Egyptian Embassy's cipher room, and started surprisingly reading its Hagelin machine communications (ENGULF) despite Soviet sweeping of the facility, creating a situation in which Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd took its disinformation so seriously Britain backed down during the Suez Crisis.
While London looked for fig leaves for its frustrations, Wright consolidated his position for spying as MI5's first scientist. He was so successful in getting the Secret Service to develop technical means which helped Soviet spying, claiming that they already had them, and Britain really needed them - e. g., a reagent to develop secret writing, detecting microdots through neutron activation, inspecting the interiors of dead letter containers without detection, and more X-ray methods to inspect the interiors of safes. (One can only wonder when MI6 agents in the USSR ever gained information, and transmitted it to London by these means.) Then Wright combined these technical breakthroughs with the spying potential of his new handler, Lonsdale, who had taken over from Yuri Modin because he did not want in any way to be associated with the Cambridge ones. Wright and Lonsdale independently used the debriefings of the Dragon Returnees, the German scientists forced to work in the USSR after WWII, by the Colemore Committee to squeeze every bit of information possible out of any scientists who had had any connection with the Soviets.
With this "sounding board" (Spycatcher, p. 115) as a basis, Lonsdale would seek out targets for spying, and Wright would then follow up in the unsuccessful cases with charges of treachery, forcing suspects to tell all about their associates, work, and where and how more could be learned. This resulted in masses of material to Lonsdale through dead letter drops for microdot transmission to Moscow by the Krogers aka the Cohens, and further feedback to him for exploitation. Wright made the process transparent when he justified it by claiming that Peter Kapitsa, the most anti-communist scientist the Soviets had, and 1978 Nobel Prize winner in physics, had spent his time at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, talent-spotting potential recruits for Moscow. If Kapitsa was seeking communist world-domination, everyone could be.
While Wright put this witch hunt on a worldwide basis (FLUENCY), he took his experience of trying to eliminate Cyprus's Colonel Grivas, claiming that without him the EOKA movement would collapse, to Washington for action against Cuba's Fidel Castro. In 1957, Wright had gotten to know CI Chief James Angleton in the wake of Philby's betrayal, and was convinced that his determination to win the Cold War could backfire to Soviet advantage. Two years later, right after Castro had seized power, Angleton arranged for Wright to tell DDP Richard Bissell and his assistant Richard Helms that the head of the Cuban Revolution should be cut off before it was too late. Actually, communist Cuba was an asset that Moscow had no use for. It was too far away from its real interests, and too expensive to maintain. CIA arranged for staged explosions on the French freighter La Coubra in Havana harbor, and Mafia assassins to do the job, but without success. In the meantime, Wright used his new resonating capability (RAFTER), behind CIA's back, to limit Michal Goleniewski's exposure of Lonsdale's spy ring to a minimum, obliging the Polish intelligence officer to defect in the process.
After the failed Bay of Pigs operation, which forced the retirement of Bissell and DCI Allen Dulles, Wright, bolstered by Golitsyn's defection, returned to Washington in October 1961 to give the renewed remedy in person to William King Harvey, the Agency's head of 'Executive Action'. While Chairman Khrushchev did everything he could to make JFK, now with Harvey's help, take the bait, the President refused to either assassinate Castro, or invade Cuba as the Missile Crisis developed. For his trouble, the President then became the problem, and Wright did what he could but without success as the countdown commenced in Cuba to force JFK's hand for a solution by debunking Oleg Penkovsky's claims of Soviet defensiveness and weakness. While the plan to blame the Dallas assassination upon the communists was prevented by the shooting of Texas Governor John Connally, those consumed by Soviet disinformation about Cuba's importance had to settle upon Vietnam as a substitute.
While it is easy now to debunk Wright's spying, it might well have succeeded if JFK had not been so opposed to an invasion. KGB Chief Alexandr Shelepin had concluded that with Wright's spying, and disinformation about Castro, the Soviets could well take over Western Europe, and, as Khrushchev had predicted to the 21st CPSU Congress, start completing the communist utopia. As it was, Wright had to settle, with Golitsyn's and CIA's help, in using FLUENCY to find more traitors, high and low, at home and around the world. DDP Helms expanded the program by suppying 20 technicians, and unlimited computer time to keep better track of suspects. While Premier Harold Wilson was the most prominent member of the witch hunt - Wright's critics thinking that the seriousness of the effort was somehow explained away by the fact that MI5 itself did not support the move - this was just the tip of the iceberg.
Wright had Lord Adrian, Cambridge's Chancellor, spilling his guts about who might have been spying with Kapitsa. Then MI5 somehow confused Judith Hart for Wright's recruiter, Edith Tudor Hart, ruining the Labour's minister's career. There were several suicides, thanks to Wright's probing, of suspects who had been rather imprudent in their youth. Special Branch files were filled with the names of potential subversives, and the BBC 'blacklisted' writers and intellectuals who could not appear on its programs. Of course, the most serious blunders concerned alleged moles within MI5 itself, particularly DG Roger Hollis, witch hunts which adversely affected anyone who stood in Wright's way. His parting gift to MI5, what Rimington dismissed by claiming that he had been rendered harmless by then ("Spies like us," The Guardian, September 10, 2001, G2, p. 2), was to use suspicions of Michael Hanley's leftist past to induce him to adopt a military solution to the problems of Northern Ireland, a wrong turn which Britain is still trying to recover from.
Actually, conditions beame so bad that MI5 decided in 1987 to let Wright's memoirs finally appear. DGSS Anthony Duff made an unprecedented effort to frustrate Wright's bitter effort, only to allow copies from overseas to flood into the kingdom, ruining thereby any chance of preventing its appearance by injunction. One can only wonder what prompted this diversion.
In the annals of the Cold War, no operative is more misunderstood, and marginalized than the CIA's William King Harvey.
According to Cambridge Professor Christopher Andrew, the leading historian of the services Harvey worked for, especially the Agency and the KGB, he was nothing more than the faceless husband of Libby Harvey, the spouse who Soviet spy Guy Burgess, Kim Philby's unwanted house guest in Washington, produced a pornographic cartoon of during a drunken party. Robin Winks, author of Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961, avoided Harvey like the plague in its research and writing. There is no mention of the Agency officer in Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones's The CIA & American Democracy. The only real exception among respected works is Mark Riebling's The Wedge: The Secret War between the FBI and CIA, but even here, he concentrated his description on Harvey's independent efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro, something Attorney General Robert Kennedy, it seems, finally stopped on June 20, 1963 when Harvey attended a farewell lunch with Johnny Rosselli, Sam Giancana's recruiter of anti-Castro hitmen, at Tino's Continental Restaurant in Georgetown.
Even more controversial books on operations Harvey was involved in have little to add. Jonathan Vankin & John Whalen have nothing new about Harvey in The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, though they did discuss CIA's efforts to control human behavior through chemical and psychological means, to get Castro, and to help succeed somehow in getting rid of JFK, RFK, MLK, and a few others. Anthony Summers, in The Kennedy Conspiracy, after discussing Harvey's efforts to assassinate Castro despite the opposition of the Kennedy brothers, added information about his apparent efforts to recruit through the Corsican Mafia in Marseilles Thomas Davis, Christian David, and Lucien Sarti as JFK assassins, it seems, when Harvey took up his new assignment in Rome. According to this unpursued information, the conveniently dead Sarti killed the President with a single, exploding bullet to the head, and Giancana suffered ultimately a similar fate at the Mafia's hands for his role.
Only Noel Twyman, in Bloody Treason: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, vastly expanded this claim and several others by Summers, contending that JFK stripping of Harvey's power to carry out assassinations resulted in his becoming the chief planner of the President's assassination, organizing no less than three hit squads for the job - an Agency one, a Mafia one, and the French one - an operation for which he was ultimately obliged to kill Giancana himself to keep secret. Peter Dale Scott, especially in Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, has preferred to see Harvey as simply the fall guy for darker forces in the intelligence services, particularly Director Hoover and CI Chief James Angleton, the Mafia's Santos Trafficante, and Carlos Marcello, and anti-Castro activists, especially John Martino and Rosselli.
In going from this "rags to riches" context when in comes to the JFK conspiracy in particular, and Harvey in general, though, the reader has no clearer indication of who exactly killed the President, much less an understanding of what Harvey's actual role in this killing, and several other operations was. While critics of the Warren Commission may enjoy an alternative explanation of the President's assassination in which it is portrayed as a turkey shoot in which all his enemies participate, it, in the final analysis, is no more helpful than the original cover up. In sum, it seems that a history of Harvey would be helpful, and perhaps in the process, the reader can gain a better understanding of all kinds of CIA special operations, especially its involvement in key assassinations.
William King Harvey, the son of a successful Indianapolis attorney, was born during WWI, and followed in his father's footsteps, attending Indiana University Law School, and setting up practice in Maysville, Kentucky after an unsuccessful attempt to enter local Democratic Party politics. While there, Harvey met his wife-to-be, the pretty Libby, but his failure at the Bar had him joining the FBI in December 1940. During WWII, Harvey attempted to put together double-agent cases in New York against the Nazis, including a successful one in which William Sebold ran a secret shortwave radio station on Long Island, but Director Hoover refused to sanction it for long, and others at all for fear of losing control of events and Bureau publicity, especially when the Dusko Popov Affair turned so sour. Popov was a British-German double agent who came to warn Washington about Japan's plan to attack Hawaii, but Hoover was only interested in his sexual exploits with the ladies, considering his revelations as little more than money-making schemes.
After the war, Harvey's efforts were even less successful, and recognized, though he was the agent who developed turncoat Elizabeth Bentley's leads about communist infiltration. Harvey was responsible for Hoover writing a Top Secret Report for President Truman about 12 Soviet agents, including AssistantTreasury Secretary Harry Dexter White, Truman's own assistant Lauchlan Currie, and the State Department's Alger Hiss, in the government, requesting that the Director reactivate Bentley as a communist double agent to develop more names, an enormous opportunity in light of the defection of GRU cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko in Ottawa. Hoover would have none of it, however, preferring to publicize Bentley's allegations at the expense of his pet enemies, the spies' superiors, and William Donovan's OSS. Consequently, Harvey, instead of catching a host of atomic spies, starting with Klaus Fuchs, and leading Cambridge traitors, Donald Maclean and Burgess, was reduced to pursuing rag-tag groups of dedicated communists, and fellow travellers, like the Joseph Katz, and Gregory Silvermaster groups, of which White and Currie were members.
By late 1947, Harvey was so demoralized by the process that he failed to show up for work one morning because of being in a drunken stupor, leading to his transfer back home to Indianapolis, and to his finding new employment with the CIA. While he had the highest hopes that the new agency, especially its Office of Policy Coordinaton, would fulfill its potential, its largely unsuccessful cowboy operations around the world, especially in Eastern Europe and the USSR, increasingly left something to be desired, primarily because of Soviet spying by Philby. Harvey, who was running Staff C's foreign mail-opening program (HT/LINGUAL), and was under instruction not to upset Hoover, was prepared to believe that homosexual Carmel Offie, an OPC deputy director, was the source of the leaks, thanks to a file the Bureau had prepared on him.
When OPC director Frank Wisner still refused to fire Offie, Harvey, thanks to his FBI connections, especially with his former subordinate Robert Lamphere, was brought into the Venona program behind Hoover's back to determine who the real moles were. While the Bureau was still pursuing Bentley's domestic leads with the new technology, Harvey wanted to determine who the decrypts "Homer" (Maclean), "Hicks" (Burgess), and "Stanley" (Philby) were in coded KGB and GRU messages, especially after the traumatic dinner party at the Philbys' on January 19, 1951. Hardly had Harvey commenced his inquiries than Maclean and Burgess were flushed from cover, fleeing to Moscow on May 25th. Then, after the Bureau had officially supplied CIA with the decrypts, as Harvey had requested, he zeroed in on Philby, formally accusing him of being a Soviet agent two weeks later. Hoover, though, to protect the Bureau's inflated image, was no more eager to prosecute Philby than the Agency had been to pursue Offie. In the meantime, Philby was withdrawn to Britain, and obliged to resign from MI6, resuming a newspaper career.
Harvey had no more to show for his next important effort, the famous Berlin Tunnel Operation, despite all the hoopla by Anglo-American intelligence. After Stalin's murder, when the West was caught flatfooted by the uprising in East Germany in June 1953, and was unaware of the power struggle in Moscow, Harvey was made station chief in Berlin, "...running agents, digging tunnels, and taking the battle to the Soviets wherever possible." (Peter Wright, Spycatcher, p.147)
Harvey was most eager to take advantage of what MI6, GRU double agent Pyotr Popov, and the Post Office's Wright had done since 1949 with a 70-foot tunnel up to Vienna's Imperial Hotel, tapping Red Army communications (Operation Silver), and two years later, a joint CIA-MI6 effort had resulted in the construction of a 600-yard tunnel into East Berlin for the same purpose (Operation Gold). Unfortunately, by this time, Popov, who had just been reassigned there, had been reclaimed by the KGB; Wright, now with MI5, and the KGB's most important spy, had been brought into the project to improve its technical capabilities; and MI6's George Blake, another Soviet spy, became aware of its existence. Wright's knowledge let the Soviets know just what, how, and why the West was looking for. The Soviets leaked Khrushchev's secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress to make it seem he was a faint-hearted liberal, but veiled what they wanted during the Suez Crisis, and the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution.
It was only several years later, when Harvey was deeply involved in another Wright-induced, wild-goose chase - the assassination of Fidel Castro - that he learned how wasteful and pointless the Berlin Tunnel operation had been. In 1959, Wright had sicked CIA on Cuba, and in September 1960, Robert Maheu, another former FBI agent, had cleared with DCI Allen Dulles and DDP Richard Bissell the use of Mafia hitmen against Castro. Harvey was immediately given overall control of the program, and he twice planned, with the assistance of its Technical Services Divison and a Sam Giancana cutout, but without success poisoning Castro, finally settling to coordinate his assassination with the Bay of Pigs invasion. Without the President supplying sufficient support to the anti-Castro rebels, and without E. Howard Hunt keeping from the Cuban dictator what CIA had in store for him, though, the plans came to nothing.
In October 1961, Wright was back in Washington to prime again the hopelessly dry well. To get Harvey back on board, the MI5 technical specialist discussed its RAFTER capability, what the KGB had, but CIA didn't, in a way which made the forced defection of CIA spy Michael Goleniewski crystal clear. The Polish intelligence officer knew that Blake worked for the Soviets, and threatened to blow the rest of Gordon Lonsdale's network sky high. Thanks to London's failure to inform CIA that the KGB was closing in on Goleniewski's HF radio transmissions, it was he who was sacrificed rather than Lonsdale's other important agents, starting with Wright.
Once Harvey finally calmed down enough to see Wright for dinners at James Angleton's and at a restaurant, though he still called him an "untrustworthy motherfucker", he so stressed the need of assassinating Castro that Harvey was soon working again with the Mafia on the project (ZR/RIFLE), behind the President's back, as part of the whole CIA anti-Cuban effort (Task Force W) in Operation Mongoose. The high point in this effort occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis when Harvey, contrary to Attorney General Robert Kennedy's order, dispatched a commando team to Cuba to kill Castro.
When JFK settled the Missile Crisis without the overthrowing of the Cuban regime, and ordered a domestic crackdown on anti-Castro forces the following April, Harvey was at the end of his tether about what to do, deciding to kill JFK instead. While the luncheon in June with Rosselli has been portrayed as a farewell sendoff for Harvey, actually it was a test to see if Hoover would make a fuss if he continued to contact Mafiosos. When the Director indicated that he would not, Harvey knew that he could continue to deal with the Mafia as long as he was not clearly involved in commiting a domestic crime, what would force the Bureau to get involved. Once Lee Harvey Oswald had not been successfully hypnotized to assassinate the President by rapid induction in July, Harvey, taking advantage of the newly created Domestic Operations Division, began planning operations against Cuba, and the President which would backfire on the Soviets.
To create a process which would not get the Bureau involved - what had happened when Chicago mobsters openly discussed in Miami murdering union boss Frank Esposito in 1962, obliging the FBI to use the bugged information to prevent it - Harvey created a set of coded terms, "Cleopatra Movie", "Little Egypt", "Twist Board Craze", etc., centered around advertised acts at Jack Ruby's (aka "Sparky" Rubenstein for his youthful deliveries of Iskra) Carousel Club in Dallas, and other Mafia-infested clubs around the country, to set in motion forces which would threaten the President, kill him, and make it look as if Havana had done it for Moscow.
Ruby, who had been Giancana's man in Dallas since 1947, used alleged difficulties with American Guild of Variety Artists employees to call important Mafiosos, especially Barney Baker, Dave Yaras, Irwin Weiner, Lenny Patrick, Lewis McWillie, and Rosselli, and to travel to important cities like Miami, New York, New Orleans, Las Vegas, and LA, to set operations in motion. When JFK visited these cities, thanks to Ruby's prodding, security was increasingly heightened because of threats, what reached absurd proportions in Miami just before the assassination, and JFK was bound to relax in Dallas, especially because of Nixon's actions. The only problem with these Mafia covert operations was the use of "Little Egypt", the code word for attacks on Castro, since there was actually a belly dancer with the same name, and she threatened court action with the slimy clubs which falsely advertised her performances.
In this context, it was easy for Giancana's assassination team of Richard Cain, Chuckie Nicoletti, and Felix "Milwaukee Phil" Alderisio to kill the President, while a decoy team in the nearby railroad marshalling yard confused authorities as to who were the perpetrators. The trouble was that Cain had not test fired the rifle that Larry Crafard, who had come to Dallas under the cover of making movies, and who, once cleaned up, and wearing his false teeth, impersonated Oswald on several occasions, had delivered to the Book Depository, and, consequently, Texas Governor John Connally was accidentally wounded seriously.
Cain and Nicoletti, when they were making their getaway, needlessly murdered Dallas policeman J. D. Tippitt, running into the acquaintance accidentally, and fearing that he suspected them of killing the President and wounding the Governor. In short, Ruby, who had been waiting in the ad office of The Dallas Morning News to place more coded messages for Harvey's ongoing operations in the next day's edition after JFK had been cleanly disposed of, was forced to cancel the ads, and close his club, grinding everything to a halt.
For Harvey, this meant making it appear that Oswald was not a friend of Castro's through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee's Gilberto Lopez, and a student of KGB "assassation specialist" Valeri Kostikov - a false legend that the CIA in Mexico City had put together by ordering him around - but the most unlikely acquaintance of Ruby's, explaining why he had to murder him. In the process, Harvey was as stretched out as the Pentagon's Haig, having to forget about Joe's Hyde's U-2 plane's "downing" too, all the impersonations of Oswald, Martino's Russian military defectors who would conveniently claim that Khrushchev still had offensive missiles in Cuba, and the American military responses primed to settle scores finally with Castro.
Harvey's U-turn was best illustrated by Hal Hendrix, the reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis, foregoing reporting the assassination in Dallas so that he could be with Haig's Operation Americas, only to see it suddenly reduced to defensive maneuvers on Colombia's Atlantic coast. Harvey was ultimately reduced to making CIA "Oswald free", an apparent agent the KGB had recruited through his wife, Marina.
While Harvey ultimately made a miraculous comeback through his direction of the Manchurian Candidate assassinations of MLK, RFK, and Governor George Wallace, as I have already tried to show in my article "Mind Control Experiments and The Deadliest Secret of the Cold War" in Issue Eight of Eye Spy! magazine (pp. 50-55), the JFK assassination solved nothing important for the plotters, as it left Castro's Cuba more secure than ever, explaining why he went into an alcoholic tailspin over it. When Harvey's latest achievements came under threat as Nixon's Presidency was crashing, he moved dramatically to stop the hemorrhaging - seeing to Cain's murder.
Giancana and his hitmen, especially the boss's former driver and courier, and now FBI informant, were constantly shooting off their mouths about killing the Kennedy brothers, and "the nigger", a considerable exaggeration of their role, and in the wake of Watergate, this loose talk had to be stopped. On December 20, 1973, two masked men, one carrying a walkie-talkie, and the other, wearing a black and a white glove to indicate his connection to the Mafia, and Agency, a sawed-off shotgun, walked into Chicago's Rose's Sandwich Shop.
The man with the walkie-talkie asked the party on the other end several times: "Who's got the package?" (Sam and Chuck Giancana, Double Cross, p. 351) When the reply finally came back, "Here comes a guy now; maybe he's got the package", which the walkie-talkie man repeated, the masked man with the shotgun walked up to the package-less Cain, and blew his head off.
While investigators have discounted everything the Giancanas have had to say about Sam, Paul Hoch even questioning the book's publication, this incident alone, which is a matter of public record, justified its appearance. The gloves indicated the highest sanction for the killing, the references to "the package" was to recall the oversight about "Oswald's rifle", and the walkie-talkie prop was to remind Cain of all the dressed-up accounts, involving former DD Charles Cabell, the Agency command center in a Dallas hotel, and the messages to all the hitmen with walkie-talkies, he had spread around about the assassination. When I received an account of the murder in another package, full of clippings of what had happened to stool pigeons, from a nice, anonymous source in Chicago, after I had written a series of articles on the JFK assassintion for The National Exchange, I took it most seriously, talking at length to a CID investigator of the Thames Valley Police about my concerns.
Harvey's concerns just grew, however, as Frank Church's Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigated the Agency's most criminal activities. By this time, Giancana had learned that Harvey had had more in store for him at Dallas than he had planned. Sam, still forced to remain in Mexico, and his Corsican assassins were being set up, with Oswald, as Castroite assassins of JFK while his underlings actually carried it out. The thing which really opened Sam's eyes was the five-part series that Wallace Turner had in The New York Times, straddling the assassination itself, stating that the Mafia chieftan was about to do something drastic to the Kennedys because of his plight with the Bureau, the Nevada Gaming Commission, Frank Sinatra at the Cal-Neva Lodge, etc. Giancana also knew that JFK's killers had lied to him extensively about what had happened, what had helped induce him to see that Cain was murdered.
In sum, when Giancana agreed to testify before the Church Committee on June 19, 1975, Harvey knew that he had to act quickly or else risk all being lost. That every night he visited Giancana at his Chicago home to discuss his upcoming testimony. Harvey set the Mafioso completely at ease by appearing without his famous .45 automatic pistol, what he always carried, and what he had to do if he hoped to see him alone. When Giancana, while cooking a meal, indicated that he would tell what he knew to Church's people, Harvey pulled out a sawed-off .22 pistol, just purchased in Miami, from between his buttocks, where he usually carried a backup .38, and shot him through the back of the head. To make the message plain, Harvey then shot him six times around the mouth to make it look like a Mafia killing. The Agency had its own code of honor, and Harvey was not going to be anybody's fall guy.
The toll had been too much for Harvey, though, dying from alcoholism a year later without anything substantial to show for his efforts, ultimately meaningless murders which neither got rid of Castro and communist Cuba, nor saved Nixon and South Vietnam.
Open your eyes! It may be painful to see the state humanity is in, and it may be easier to go and watch Pop Idol or some such televisual bollocks, but if we don't all take a long hard look at ourselves and ask a few big questions we're all completely fucked. It's as simple as that. Do you want to be led like a lamb to the slaughter? Do you want a radioactive cloud encircling the planet poisoning us all? Do you want evil greedy men to get so rich they own you and everyone you love? Do you want the planet to be poisoned to make corporate scumbags rich? No? I didn't think so! So what are you waiting for, spread the word and get active! Either that or bend over and get shafted by them, it's your choice. Me, I choose to fill this entire world with codshit maybe then people will realise that they've been had!
We are the juncture of the most serious crisis in modern history.
The Bush Administration has embarked upon a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity.
The wars on Afghanistan and Iraq are part of a broader military agenda, which was launched at the end of the Cold War. The ongoing war agenda is a continuation of the 1991 Gulf War and the NATO led wars on Yugoslavia (1991-2001).
The post Cold War period has also been marked by numerous US covert intelligence operations within the former Soviet Union, which were instrumental in triggering civil wars in several of the former republics including Chechnya (within the Russian Federation), Georgia and Azerbaijan. In the latter, these covert operations were launched with a view to securing strategic control over oil and gas pipeline corridors.
US military and intelligence operations in the post Cold War era were led in close coordination with the "free market reforms" imposed under IMF guidance in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Balkans, which resulted in the destabilization of national economies and the impoverishment of millions of people.
The World Bank sponsored privatization programmes in these countries enabled Western capital to acquire ownership and gain control of a large share of the economy of the former Eastern block countries. This process is also at the basis of the strategic mergers and/or takeovers of the former Soviet oil and gas industry by powerful Western conglomerates, through financial manipulation and corrupt political practices.
In other words, what is at stake in the US led war is the recolonization of a vast region extending from the Balkans into Central Asia.
The deployment of America's war machine purports to enlarge America's economic sphere of influence. The U.S. has established a permanent military presence not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has military bases in several of the former Soviet republics on China's Western frontier. In turn, since 1999, there has been a military buildup in the South China Sea.
War and Globalization go hand in hand. Militarization supports the conquest of new economic frontiers and the worldwide imposition of "free market" system.
Some positive news for a change, amidst all the hatred and violence of this world the true flame of the human spirit burns brightly in the cold Antarctic air. Photo and article segment come from the Guardian, I hope they don't mind me using it, this story brought a tear to my eye and it needs to be shared.
A team of Israeli and Palestinian peace campaigners have achieved their goal of scaling a previously unclimbed Antarctic mountain.
The frozen wastes of the Antarctic are far removed from the conflict of the Middle East but a joint team of Israeli and Palestinian amateur explorers hopes that its pioneering mission there will have a peaceful influence back home.
The six man and two woman unit, which included an Israeli special forces veteran and two former Fatah activists, set itself the goal of overcoming its divisions to work together in one of the world's most hostile natural environments and climb a previously unclimbed mountain.
At the summit, scaled with the accidental symbolism of the eight amateurs roped together in mixed groups, they unfurled the two national flags and read a declaration in support of a non-violent solution to the Middle East conflict.
"We have proven that Palestinians and Israelis can cooperate with one another with mutual respect and trust," it said. "We hereby declare that our peoples can and deserve to live together in peace and friendship."
The mission won endorsements from the Dalai Lama, Kofi Annan and Zeddy al-Refai, the first Arab to climb Everest, but there were times when it looked as if it would not go ahead.
Israeli Heskel Nathaniel, the team leader, said some of the Palestinians had received threatening messages over their participation. Two of their number had been in Israeli jails while journalist Ziad Darwish's brother was killed by Israeli troops.
It was not until all eight group members were aboard the boat heading south through the Drake Passage from Chile to the icebergs of the Antarctic that Mr Nathaniel said he could feel sure there would be no "nasty surprises".
He said he set up the project to combine peacemaking with his love of extreme sports.
Watching a peculiarly crass, inaccurate and condescending programme about the endangered historical sites of "Israel" — that is to say, the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories — on BBC2 in early June 2003, (1) I determined to try to work out, as a former BBC Middle East correspondent, why the Corporation has in the past two and a half years been failing to report fairly the most central and lasting reason for the troubles of the region: the Palestinians' struggle for freedom.
The approach of the programme — made by Arts rather than News and Current Affairs — reflected the general run of BBC domestic coverage of the issue: the strained effort at "balance"; the failure to question the circumstances of the beleaguered historical sites (why are they beleaguered?); the acceptance of the "equivalence" of the two peoples fighting over this territory, the indigenous population and an occupying army; the assumption on which the whole programme was built: that in the then looming Anglo-American invasion of Iraq these historical and holy places might be damaged by missiles fired from Iraq. Perhaps BBC Arts was not aware before their team arrived that many ancient Arab monuments had already been besieged, shelled, violated, ransacked, bulldozed, and in many cases closed to their worshippers and their inheritors by Israel's occupying army.
A week earlier, in a BBC News documentary about the wall that Israel is building between the Israelis and the Palestinians (2) — much of it encroaching on occupied Palestinian land, destroying houses and olive groves and dividing families — it was again felt necessary to leaven the images of Arab suffering with the "balance" of how awkward the wall would be for a handful of illegal Jewish settlers. To explain this, a sympathetic Irish woman settler told that side of the story in the vivid English of her people.
It was not that the BBC did not tell the Palestinian story graphically and shockingly — but that "the other side" of the story had to be told as well, diluting the central and violent issue of The Wall and all it symbolises of Israel's fears, greed and brutal dismissal of its Arab neighbours.
Since the beginning of the Aqsa Uprising, or Second Intifada, in September 2000 there have been countless examples throughout the BBC's news broadcasts, discussion programmes, features, documentaries and even online of this muddying of the clear waters of the Israel-Palestine crisis. Elsewhere in this book academics and analysts such as Greg Philo give a scientific, actuarial account of this carelessness with the public broadcaster's duty. Without the room to print my long litany of the BBC's sins of omission and commission, I can best highlight my findings this way: Channel 4 News at 7pm is the only mainstream television news/current affairs bulletin that has tried consistently to do justice to this story, which sits at the centre of world affairs and the west's political engagement overseas.
Where Carlton TV has shown John Pilger's graphic Palestine is Still the Issue (3) and Channel 4 Sandra Jordan's death-defying story of the International Solidarity Movement (4) the BBC has made no effort to tell us truly — as did these two documentaries — how this occupation demeans and degrades people: not just the killing and the destruction, but the humiliation, the attempt to crush the human spirit and remove the identity; not just the bullet in the brain and the tank through the door, but the faeces Israel's soldiers rub on the plundered ministry walls, the trashed kindergarten; the barriers to a people's work, prayers and hopes.
In the news reporting of the domestic BBC TV bulletins, "balance", the BBC's crudely applied device for avoiding trouble, means that Israel's lethal modern army is one force, the Palestinians, with their rifles and home-made bombs, the other "force": two sides equally strong and culpable in a difficult dispute, it is implied, that could easily be sorted out if extremists on both sides would see reason and the leaders do as instructed by Washington.
In London, respectful BBC presenters talk calmly to articulate Israeli politicians, spokesmen and apologists in suits in studios; from Palestine comes the bad-quality, broken voice on a dusty wire from some wreckage of a town. It is true that BBC teams risk their lives in the midst of the violence, but soon they are back in their Jewish Jerusalem studios, finding the balance for their pieces, so that the rolling tragedy of occupation can somehow be ameliorated by the difficulties inside Israel.
Possibly not a view that many people want to hear but this is a well-researched and very interesting piece of work, worth your attention. As always, please make up your own mind about it...
by Trowbridge H. Ford
Since America's national security apparatus silenced the Bureau's Robert Hanssen right before the 9/11 attacks for the rest of his life for spying for 15 years for the Soviets - what it accomplished ten years ago with the Agency's Aldrich "Rick" Ames for similar offences at the same time - the public deserves an account now since the crisis has passed of what they did, and why, especially since a trial in both cases was doggedly avoided by the authorities for fear that they would divulge information which was allegedly not in its interest. Instead the Justice Department preferred to engage in a drawn-out plea bargain-process in which it seemed to plumb the depths, risks, and costs of their betrayals ("Feds Stand By Plea Deal With FBI Spy," AP, May 14, 2002, and DeWayne Wickham, "Spy wife's pay yields truth." USA Today, May 15,2002 ) while, in fact, it was just giving other agents time to spread seemingly convincing tales of why they did it. In sum, the government avoided putting itself on trial, and in the process did the best it could to limit its losses.
The time could have been better spent in 'connecting the dots' which led to September 11th - what FBI agent Ken Williams was suggesting about Arabs attending flight training in Phoenix, agents in Minneapolis were suspecting about Zacarias Moussaoui, agent John O'Neill in NYC was claiming about Khalid Al Midhar's and Nawaq Al-Hamzi's role in Al-Qaida's attacks, and I claimed in a May letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft about the recklessness of former Director Louis Freeh, and his cohorts Buck Revell and James Kallstrom claiming that the President should take action against the biggest source of terror, the Iranians! (Julian Borger, "Test for Bush as FBI Names Bombers," The Guardian, May 9, 2001) I was so angry about the Justice Department's foot-dragging over the Hanssen affair that I wrote to Ashcroft no less than three times, describing in greater detail what this article is about, and promising to testify in his defense if it persisted in seeking his execution, a possibility counsel Plato Cacheris indicated to me over the phone in July 2001 he might take advantage of if it did. While, of course, Ashcroft never even acknowledged receipt of my letters, he let the Webster Commission, Paul Redmond's CIA Assessment Team, and the JD's Inspector General go through the 200-hour charade during 75 meetings of debriefing Hanssen to determine what he disclosed to Moscow, and whether he was being fully cooperative. Webster, as Bureau Director when his spying started, and DCI when everything had to be covered up, knows full well what Hanssen did and why, and Redmond, as you shall see, was largely responsible.
On the surface, it is hard to imagine cases more deserving of the death penalty than the spying by Ames and Hanssen. According to their accusers, they risked putting the Cold War back on a level playing field when the USSR, in fact, was starting to suffer its death throes. David Vise, in The Bureau and the Mole, claimed that Hanssen increased the risk of nuclear war, especially a first strike by Moscow, "by giving the KGB the U.S. plan to protect the president and other top government officials should the Soviets attack," and the ones for U.S. retaliatory responses. ("What made the American turncoat tick," CNN, May 10, 2002) In the process, Hanssen allegedly sold the Soviets software which enabled them to track the handling of double agents, leading to the execution of two of them, and the imprisonment of another. The espionage act under which he was charged specifically allowed for the death penalty under these circumstances. (Neil A. Lewis, "Zigs and Zags of Spy Cases Put a Damper on Predicting," The New York Times, Feb. 22, 2001, A15)
Former Director of Central Intelligence James R. Woolsey called Ames a "serial killer", comparing him to the betrayer of American independence, Benedict Arnold. (Pete Earley, Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames, p. 203) According to Earley, Ames was responsible for the execution of at least 10 double agents in the USSR. Ames even tipped off Moscow in the mid-1980s that the CIA had tapped a major underground telephone cable in the city with a miniaturized recording device, like the sea pods the US Navy was using to tap Soviet naval cables. (Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage, p. 309, note)
Neither Hanssen nor Ames did anything to soften public hostility for what they had done either. In a June 8, 2000 letter to the Russian successor service to the KGB, when Hanssen increasingly feared being exposed, and was trying to indicate that he was a different spy from the one in 1985 in order to avoid the death penalty, he, acting as if he had modeled himself on Philby since he was 14 (making Kim's autobiography appear 10 years before it did), wrote:
The U.S. can be errantly likened to a powerfully built child, potentially dangerous, but young, immature and easily manipulated. But don't be fooled by that appearance. It is also one which can turn ingenious quickly, like an idiot savant, once convinced of a goal. The (deleted) Japanese (to quote General Patton once again) learned this to their dismay. ("Excerpts from the F.B.I. Affidavit in the Case against Robert Hanssen," The New York Times, Feb. 22, 2001, A15)
FBI agent Paul Moore, a friend of Hanssen's, claimed he explained his conduct thus: "He wants to be the best spy ever," modeling himself after Britain's Kim Philby, another serial killer of Western agents in the Soviet bloc who escaped without any punishment. According to another friend, Lt. Col. Jack Hoschouer, Hanssen spied so that he could afford to observe through closed circuit TV Hanssen and his wife, Bonnie, having sex, and suggested that he give her a date rape drug so that Hoschouer could take advantage of her. Then there was the Mercedes convertible that Hanssen purchased with the $1.4 million he received from the KGB for "go-go" dancer Priscilla Sue Galey for services rendered. Vise even claimed that Hanssen's spying for the Soviets may have enabled Osama bin Laden to purchase software which permitted him to mastermind the September 11th attacks, what Vice President Dick Cheney, a central figure in the cover up of Iran Contra (Lawrence E. Walsh, Firewall, p. 48ff., and Gregory Vistica, Fall from Glory: Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy, p. 283 passim), conveniently used to justify keeping him alive.
Ames was hardly more solicitous of public sympathy during his debriefing to determine his punishment, and subsequent imprisonment. David Wise in another book ridiculed his explanation for his spying, denying that he started doing it innocently for the money, thinking that the double agents he identified risked no more than he did by spying for the Soviets, and that in any case he had not injured American national interests. (Nightmover, p. 112 passim) James Adams, in Sellout: Aldrich Ames, The Spy Who Broke the CIA, attributed his spying to simple arrogance, quoting him from an article in The New York Times Magazine shortly after he was sentenced to life in prison:
I got myself in the position where I thought, and still think - call it arrogance if you will but I'd say: I know what's better. I know what's damaging and I know what's not damaging, and I know what the Soviet Union is really all about, and I know what's best for foreign policy and national security.And I'm going to act on that. (p. 51)
When I wrote to Ames in researching this article, he manifested the same arrogance, refusing to reply to my questions until I wrote a second time, assuring him that I had never thought that he and his minders were simply working in concert. (A. H. Ames' letter, Nov. 23, 2000)
So what really did make these intelligent, anti-communist agents into Soviets spies, and why are American authorities so eager to spread the wildest stories about them; yet, suffer the most humiliating result when they escaped the expected execution? Even Ames would have received the death penalty if his fate had been left up to a jury. Students of deviant psychology, and writers on counterintelligence are inclined ultimately to explain such treacherous behavior upon the upbringing of the principals, and the nature of their assignments, though such explanations in these cases have little evidence to back them up. Both Ames (Wise, p.50 passim) and Hanssen (Pam Belluck, "Time in Elite Police Unit Included Secretive Work," The New York Times, Feb. 16, 2000, A16) followed in their fathers' footsteps, so it is difficult to believe that they were badly abused by them while growing up. Also, despite what Abram Shulsky in Silent Warfare and Tom Polgar in his biography of the CIA's infamous James Angleton have written about counterintelligence promoting paranoia, allegedly the primary breeding ground for treason, it is also the most interesting aspect of intelligence work, leading to information, and understanding which can induce underlings to second guess, and outwit their superiors on occasion, as I know from experience in the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps.
This seems to have been the case with Ames and Hanssen. Up until their service in New York City in the late 1970s, they had been advancing quite well. Ames was working in the Agency's FR/New York office under Peter Koromilas, and then Rodney Carlson, handler of the famous defector Oleg Penkovsky during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, The Spy Who Saved The World, p. 310ff.), while Hanssen was assigned to the New York Field Office's Soviet division (Johanna McGeary, "The FBI Spy," Time, March 5, 2001, p. 32) Too junior or too young to have known about the uncoordinated, rogue operations of Helms' and Hoover's time, they were involved in independent double agent operations in the wake of Watergate, and the ending of the Vietnam War which threatened to replicate the same conditions. With the weakening of the Freedom of Information Act, the consolidation of congressional oversight into just two committees, the increase of risks for any whistle-blowers through secrecy contracts, and the establishment of the Agency's Publications Review Board (Angus Mackenzie, Secrets: The CIA's War at Home, p. 58ff.), they unconsciously experienced increased tension because of the unsavory demands of their assignments.
Ames and Hanssen were responsible for recruiting Soviet agents by any means possible - bribes, blackmail, entrapment, you name it - not only to prove what defectors, especially former Soviet Ambassador Arkadi Shevchenko (cryptonym DYNAMITE), were still claiming about Moscow's aims of world domination, but also to deny them the technical means of achieving it. Carlson was totally committed to getting back at the Soviets by any means possible because of Penkovsky's fate, and the alleged fate of the IRBMs in Cuba after the Missile Crisis, and his minions were eager to oblige. The only trouble was that they were too reckless in the pursuit of targets, needlessly risking the lives of their sources, especially Alexander Ogorodnik , Dimitri Polyakov, Aleksei Kulak, and Sergei Fedorenko, in the process. Polyakov and Kulak were the FBI's most valuable agents whose loyalty to the West, however, Carlson had long denied, thanks to the claims by former CI Chief Angleton, and whose fate did not particularly concern him. Consequently, Ogorodnik was forced to commit suicide when exposed, and the others were recalled to Moscow under a cloud of suspicion. (Earley, p. 55ff.)
While Ames had expected to be richly reward for his "gangbusting" which denied Moscow much needed technical information, and rolled up Soviets assets, he wasn't. Turning more and more to drink while his marriage was falling apart, he left New York for an assignment in Mexico City in the hope of gaining more rewarding experience. Recently, Ames explained: "By the late 70s I had come to question the point, the value, of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the (CIA's) overall charter, and to question whether this was having any significant impact on American policy." ("Rationalizing Treason: An Interview with Aldrich Ames," CNN.com)
Hanssen, who had been obliged to sign a secrecy contract in 1976, became disenchanted quicker, and more surprisingly. While Fedorenko was working with Ames, KGB agent Valdek Enger was pressuring him to steal documents from the Hudson Institute, and to pacify the likeable Enger, Fedorenko fed him some information, some of it even accurate, to keep his bosses, especially Yuri Drozdov, happy. "Unknown to Fedorenko, the FBI and the Naval Intelligence Service (NIS) were running a naval officer as a double agent against Enger." (Wise, p. 84) When he and another KGB officer went to retrieve a package left by the navy man, they were arrested, and, subsequently, they were sentenced to 50 years in prison.
Two years later, Hanssen told his wife about selling some information to another agent to trick the Soviets, expecting that she would be most appreciative. Bonnie, a most devout Catholic, was outraged, making him promise never to do so again, and requiring him to confess his sins to their priest. (Kelli Arena, "Sources: Accused spy told wife he was tricking Soviets," CNN, June 16, 2001) (It was this incident that the Justice Department used during the plea-bargaining process to claim that his spying had begun earlier in order to throw the public off about its origin being contemporaneous with Ames's.) Increasingly, as the process lurched towards Armageddon, Hanssen and Ames found that the only effective operatives they could deal with for what they wanted to avoid was the Soviet enemy.
Their new assignments just increased their disaffection. In the Mexican capital, the CIA was totally committed to proving that leftist guerrillas, particularly Nicaragua's Sandinistas, were Soviet stooges, and that Castro's Cuba was a most willing helper in the process. Ames, while working for Agency "cowboy" Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, initiated a program to prove that Americans visiting the city were really spies of some sort, a project for which Clarridge, until then most unimpressed with his work, promoted him. (Earley, p. 93ff.) While Earley has indicated that it just concerned US military personnel, and was soon shelved because of legal concerns at Langley, it was the Agency's counterpart of what the FBI was doing domestically with groups opposed to Reagan's policies. (For an outline of this, see Appendix, "Targets of Domestic Spying," in Mackenzie, pp. 203-7.) It was MH-CHAOS, and COINTELPRO all over again, with the "subversives" this time being such well-known groups as the Center for Defense Information, Union of Concerned Scientists, and Central American Solidarity Association. Clarridge even went along with Ames's plans to bug Soviet luxury vehicles in the hope of obtaining vital information, totally unsuccessful operations which apparently disposed of at least one double agent.
Hanssen, who had moved to Headquarters, became increasingly troubled by similar operations, though they had finally become somewhat coordinated in Washington between the two agencies. (Operation Courtship) The biggest trouble with trying to "harmonize relationships" on a functional basis (Mark Riebling, Wedge: The Secret War between the FBI and CIA, p. 341ff.) was that it was promoted by the most unreliable people, especially the Agency's Scotty Miler. He was CI's counterpart to Carlson. Miler soon showed how obsessed he was by persuading the infamous defector Anatoliy Golitsyn to put his latest thoughts about Soviet penetration to paper (Editors' Forward, pp. xiii-xvi), resulting in the appearance in 1984 of New Lies for Old. According to Golitsyn, the Soviets' most dangerous agent of influence was Sweden's Olof Palme, not Castro and the Sandinistas, and that the West should take the necessary steps to eliminate such influences. (p. 55 passim) The agents Courtship first recruited, Valery Martynov, Sergei Motorin, and Boris Yuzhin, hardly should have inspired confidence either, men who would sacrifice anything for a waterbed, a gold cigarette lighter, and the like. They soon were supplying information that the Soviets were engaged in an aggressive, disinformation program, similar to the one before the Missile Crisis (Riebling, p. 350), music to the ears of all Reagan's "cowboys".
By the time Ames and Hanssen joined Operation Courtship, Carlson, Clarridge, Miler, and the Bureau's Buck Revell already had it well up to speed. Hanssen became a counterintelligence squad supervisor in the New York bureau. (Benjamin Weiser, "Spy Chasers Feel Betrayed by One-Time Top Gun," The New York Times, Feb. 22, 2001, A16) Carlson had taken over from Miler, and he invited Ames to take over CI's Soviet branch to penetrate and undermine the Soviet services in any confrontation. (Wise, pp. 94-5) No sooner had the now totally disaffected Ames heard that Britain and America were planning something dramatic, once the KGB's Oleg Gordievsky, who was most well-versed in operations in the northern Europe, had defected to the West, than he started singing in April 1985 to the Soviets about their double agents. The agents immediately concerned were Gennady Varenik, the Smetanins, and Adolf Tolkachev who were to supply information about the terrorist steps Moscow would allegedly take to stop the "zero option" over the installation of medium range missiles in Europe (Wise, pp. 269-70), to promote communist advances on its periphery (Earley, p. 144), and to meet any military showdown. (Adams, p.109)
Instead of reassessing operations, and cutting its losses over their disappearances, American and British intelligence services moved boldly ahead, refocusing their operations on Scandinavia, and the targeting of statsminister Palme if he won reelection in the fall with the help of the communists. (Operation Tree) It was this cynical use of double agents which led Ames to compare his bosses to British MajorJohn Andre, Benedict Arnold's handler. (Earley, p. 204) While Gordievsky went to Stockholm for MI6 in early October to tell the Swedish Commander in Chief, General Lennart Ljung, that his boss was indeed a Soviet stooge, like Afghanistan's Babrak Karmal, and Carlson apparently followed, after officially retiring (Wise, p. 139), to recruit imprisoned Soviet spy Stig Bergling as the scapegoat for the Palme shooting, hoping to persuade him to flee while on personal leave when the assassination took place, the KGB's Vitaly Yurchenko "defected", and was being debriefed, a process which enabled him to determine Ames' bona fides, and to recruit Hanssen in place of spies who had outlived their usefulness, the Agency's E. L. Howard, and NSA's Robert Pelton. (Wise, p. 127ff.) When Yurchenko "redefected" in November, taking sleeper Martynov back to Moscow as part of his honor guard, Courtship's leadership was so ecstatic about possibilities that it let Howard escape to reassure the Soviets that they were on top of things. (Riebling, p. 357ff.)
On Oct. 4th, Hanssen had sent a letter by mail for Viktor Cherkashin, the Washington Embassy's counterintelligence chief, outlining what the West was planning, how it hoped to succeed, and with whose help. Not only did he identify double agents Motorin, Martynov, and Yuzhin (op. cit - "Excerpts"), he described in detail how they would promote operations, what Ames might not have known much about. Motorin would telephone from Moscow confirmation of KGB, and hopefully Bergling's, involvement in the shooting; Martynov would inform, possibly through the network of ham radio operators, how the Soviets were reacting to the surprise; and Yuzhin, most well versed in the naval standoff in the Barents and Batlic Seas (Wise, p. 103), could supply information about how Soviet forces, especially the Red Banner Fleet, were reacting to the challenge. Hanssen described the whole electronic network by which Washington and London hoped to keep on top of Moscow's every move. A few days later, he sent Cherkashin a box of documents to confirm what he was claiming.
Washington and London received an immediate surprise of their own. Despite the widespread existence of mercenaries, and known hitmen, the CIA was unable to recruit one who would kill Palme. At this time, former SAS Major David Walker's KMS and Saladin firms were recruiting counterterrorists without difficulty to kill Sandinistas and their supporters (Nick Davies and Jonathan Foster, "British dogs of war recruited to fight in Nicaragua," The Observer, May 26, 1985, p. 1), but none were willing to shoot the statsminister despite promises of up to $2,000,000, and no worries with the police. In November, Felipe Vidal Santiago aka Charles Morgan, a famous anti-Castro recruiter of assassins, despite premature notices of his death, going all the way back to the Dallas killing (Noel Twyman, Bloody Treason, p. 598ff.), came to Stockholm to recruit a hitman, but without success. (SSI Joel Haukka's report, "Samtal med Jovan von Birchan," April1986) "Milan", another CIA agent, was no more successful in recruiting police informant Kenneth Neilberg. Then, according to Duncan Campbell in the New Statesman, they went to London looking, but still without success, though MI6 warned the Swedish secret police what these private individuals were seeking. ("MI6, Whistleblowers in Baltic Battle," June 17, 1988, p. 7)
Palme unwittingly ratcheted up operations by stopping a secret transshipment of 80 HAWK missiles through Sweden on Nov. 17, what Oliver North's Enterprise had arranged with the Israelis and Teheran to help gain the release of hostages, and for the Contras to fight better their war, but had failed to get clearance for. (William S. Cohen, and George J. Mitchell, Men of Zeal: A Candid Story of the Iran-Contra Hearings, p. ixff. N.b. that they are not permitted to identify the six countries which supplied arms to the Contras, Sweden apparently being the sixth, claiming instead that Portugal, which was not one of them, was the country concerned.) The statsminister, in doing so, was only adhering to official US policy (Operation Staunch), and quieting critics who claimed that he had long been allowing the Soviets to violate Swedish territory, and carrying on a secret nuclear weapons program to help their surrogates. (Chris Mosey, "Secret nuclear weapons row breaks in Sweden," The Observer, April 28, 1985, p. 17)
Since Palme had proved to be an outdated Soviet stooge, Courtship, now led by Paul Redmond (Wise, p. 140), planned to take him out as part of a first-strike showdown with Moscow, one which would so radically degrade its submarine-based nuclear deterrent that it would surrender. Washington and London were confident, Senator William Cohen's reservations notwithstanding, that despite the arrest of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard for providing satellite and signal intelligence to Israel, Moscow wouldn't have a clue about what was planned, not knowing that it may have been passed on to the Soviets by the Shamir government in return for emigration of Soviet Jews to the Holy Land. Since the plan would allegedly avoid a nuclear war, land damage, and civilian lives, as Joseph Nye had argued in Nuclear Ethics, operations just called for coordinating the shooting in Stockholm with biennial NATO maneurvers Anchor Express Exercise, scheduled for the beginning of March 1986. (The biggest fallacy with the plan was that the Soviets had 82 SS-23 nuclear missiles under the command of hawk Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, undiscovered by the spy satellites, and vaunted BRIXMIS missions in the GDR (Mark Urban, UK Eyes Only, pp. 79-80), so while the US subs were attempting to knock out the 12 Soviet nuclear subs on station, Ogarkov's SS-23s would have reduced Western Europe to rubble.)
In the meantime, US Navy Secretary John Lehman, Jr. would move his attack submarines into position to sink the unsuspecting Soviet nuclear ones (Sontag and Drew, p. 354ff., esp. Appendix C, U.S. Submarine Awards, pp. 426-7), then Atlantic Fleet Admiral Carlisle Trost's Task Force Eagle would come ashore in northern Norway to lead the charge into the Kola Peninsula, the public would be prepared for such events by the publication of a special January 1986 supplement of the authoritative US Naval Institute Proceedings, Europe would be put on a state of highest alert by attacks that The Enterprise's Manzar al-Kassar arranged with the PFLP's Abu Nidal on the airports in Rome, and Vienna (Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, p. 16), MI5 would see that an appropriate reassessor of the statsminister's bodyguards carried out the assassination at just the right moment, apparently Captain Simon Hayward of the Life Guards, and the Royal Tank Regiment (Raymond Murray, The SAS in Ireland, p. 343ff., and notes 122 and 123, p. 470), and American intelligence services would try to connect the shooting with the Soviets. Operations received a decided boost, as Richard Reeves described in "The Palme Obsession" in the March 1, 1987 issue of The New York Times Magazine, when an Iranian military delegation came to Stockholm three weeks before the shooting to complain about Palme's having stopped the deliveries in November (p. 56), giving Washington and London an almost iron-clad alibi for the assassination.
The only trouble with the new plans was that they drove Hanssen and Ames to even more desperate countermeasures. No sooner on Nov. 8th did Hanssen, who had already been paid $50,000, get wind of what the West was now planning with its most important double agents than he wrote hurriedly to Cherkashin by mail to explain: "I cannot provide documentary substantiating evidence without arousing suspicion at this time." (op. cit.- "Excerpts") Little wonder that when James Kallstrom, whose special operations division was supporting Hanssen's squad, heard about his betrayer, he exclaimed:
The notion that he'd sell out his country as a citizen, as an F.B.I. agent and as a fighter in the cold war - knowing what he knew, and the circumstances of what he was doing - is unbelievable. He was a lieutenant in that war, and the war was being fought in the streets of New York. (op. cit. - Weiser)
Once all the plans were falling into place, the CIA's Jennone Walker even getting the Swedish Security Service, Sapö, to bug the KGB residency, and its telephones on the night of the assassination in anticipation of party policeman Bergling calling for help while on personal leave from prison to marry, Ames, when he was briefed by Gordievsky in February in Washington (Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only, p. 499), rushed, with Hanssen's connivance, to tell Cherkashin the last details, especially its timing at the end of the month.
Little wonder that while Palme's assassination went off like clockwork on the night of the 28th, British and American intelligence services having completely hoodwinked their Swedish counterparts, the Soviets were totally prepared to avoid any final showdown with the West, thanks to the spying by Ames and Hanssen. The KGB went to the unprecedented length of having its chief, Viktor Chebrikov, announce to the CPSU Congress on the morning of the shooting that all the double agents had been rounded up (Christopher Walker, "KGB reveals big swoop on state spies,"The Times, March 1, 1986, p. 1), making the assassination pointless. It even closed down the residency that night, so there would be no calls from Bergling. Of course, there were no communications from Motorin, Martynov, Yuzhin or anyone else either. (Wise, p. 254ff.) But you know what they say about cocksure zealots, so the assassination went ahead as scheduled, making the fate of all the double agents involved a foregone conclusion. Only trouble with the weather in Norway, and with Admiral Trost's Task Force Eagle arriving prevented NATO's Anchor Express Exercise from developing into a full scale attack on the Kola peninsula - whose outcome would undoubtedly have been the incineration of us all. When the crisis finally passed by the summer, Cherkashin, and six other KGB counterintelligence officers were awarded the rarely given Order of Lenin by FCD Chief Vladimir Kryuchkov at an unprecedented ceremony at Yasnevo (Wise, note, p. 327), for work we should all applaud.
Forget Hutton. He will not reveal what the US and UK authorities really don't want you to know: that radiation illnesses caused by uranium weapons are now common in Iraq. By John Pilger
The disaster in Iraq is rotting the Blairite establishment. Blair himself appears ever more removed from reality; his latest tomfoolery about the "discovery" of "a huge system of clandestine weapons laboratories", which even the American viceroy in Baghdad mocked, would be astonishing, were it not merely another of his vapid attempts to justify his crime against humanity. (His crime, and George Bush's, is clearly defined as "supreme" in the Nuremberg judgment.)
This is not what the guardians of the faith want you to know. Lord Hutton, who is due to report on the Kelly affair, will provide the most effective distraction, just as Lord Justice Scott did with his arms-to-Iraq report almost ten years ago, ensuring that the top echelon of the political class escaped criminal charges. Of course, it was not Hutton's "brief" to deal with the criminal slaughter in Iraq; he will spread the blame for one man's torment and death, having pointedly and scandalously chosen not to recall and cross-examine Blair, even though Blair revealed during his appearance before Hutton that he had lied in "emphatically" denying he had had anything to do with "outing" Dr David Kelly.
Other guardians have been assiduously at work. The truth of public opposition to an illegal, unprovoked invasion, expressed in the biggest demonstration in modern history, is being urgently revised. In a valedictory piece on 30 December, the Guardian commentator and leader writer Martin Kettle wrote: "Opponents of the war may need to be reminded that public opinion currently approves of the invasion by nearly two to one."
A favourite source for this is a Guardian/ICM poll published on 18 November, the day Bush arrived in London, which was reported beneath the front-page headline "Protests begin but majority backs Bush visit as support for war surges". Out of 1,002 people contacted, just 426 said they welcomed Bush's visit, while the majority said they were opposed to it or did not know. As for support for the war "surging", the absurdly small number questioned still produced a majority that opposed the invasion.
Across the world, the "majority backs Bush" disinformation was seized upon - by William Shawcross on CNN ("The majority of the British people are glad he [Bush] came . . ."), by the equally warmongering William Safire in the New York Times and by the Murdoch press almost everywhere. Thus, the slaughter in Iraq, the destruction of democratic rights and civil liberties in the west and the preparation for the next invasion are "normalised".
In "The Banality of Evil", Edward S Herman wrote, "Doing terrible things in an organised and systematic way rests on 'normalisation' . .
. There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals . . . others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive Napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public."
Current "normalising" is expressed succinctly by Kettle: "As 2003 draws to its close, it is surely al-Qaeda, rather than the repercussions of Iraq, that casts a darker shadow over Britain's future." How does he know this? The "mass of intelligence flowing across the Prime Minister's desk", of course! He calls this "cold-eyed realism", omitting to mention that the only credible intelligence "flowing across the Prime Minister's desk" was the common sense that an Anglo-American attack on Iraq would increase the threat from al-Qaeda.
What the normalisers don't want you to know is the nature and scale of the "coalition" crime in Iraq - which Kettle calls a "misjudgement" - and the true source of the worldwide threat. Outside the work of a few outstanding journalists prepared to go beyond the official compounds in Iraq, the extent of the human carnage and material devastation is barely acknowledged. For example, the effect of uranium weapons used by American and British forces is suppressed. Iraqi and foreign doctors report that radiation illnesses are common throughout Iraq, and troops have been warned not to approach contaminated sites.
Readings taken from destroyed Iraqi tanks in British-controlled Basra are so high that a British army survey team wore white, full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves. With nothing to warn them, Iraqi children play on and around the tanks.
Of the 10,000 Americans evacuated sick from Iraq, many have "mystery illnesses" not unlike those suffered by veterans of the first Gulf war. By mid-April last year, the US air force had deployed more than 19,000 guided weapons and 311,000 rounds of uranium A10 shells.
According to a November 2003 study by the Uranium Medical Research Centre, witnesses living next to Baghdad airport reported a huge death toll following one morning's attack from aerial bursts of thermobaric and fuel air bombs. Since then, a vast area has been "landscaped" by US earth movers, and fenced. Jo Wilding, a British human rights observer in Baghdad, has documented a catalogue of miscarriages, hair loss, and horrific eye, skin and respiratory problems among people living near the area. Yet the US and Britain steadfastly refuse to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct systematic monitoring tests for uranium contamination in Iraq. The Ministry of Defence, which has admitted that British tanks fired depleted uranium in and around Basra, says that British troops "will have access to biological monitoring". Iraqis have no such access and receive no specialist medical help.
According to the non-governmental organisation Medact, between 21,700 and 55,000 Iraqis died between 20 March and 20 October last year. This includes up to 9,600 civilians. Deaths and injury of young children from unexploded cluster bombs are put at 1,000 a month. These are conservative estimates; the ripples of trauma throughout the society cannot be imagined. Neither the US nor Britain counts its Iraqi victims, whose epic suffering is "not relevant", according to a US State Department official - just as the slaughter of more than 200,000 Iraqis during and immediately after the 1991 Gulf war, calculated in a Medical Education Trust study, was "not relevant" and not news.
In vandalizing a Stockholm art exhibit, Israel's ambassador to Sweden showed the true face of his government
by Justin Raimondo
When Israel's ambassador to Sweden vandalized a work of art that he found offensive on exhibition at Sweden's Museum of National Antiquities, Zvi Mazel did the world a service: he opened our eyes to Israel's descent into barbarism. Just as Israeli tanks bulldoze entire blocks of Palestinian homes, so her ambassador seeks to bulldoze the rising tide of protest against Israeli government policies in the West.
The artwork, by Israeli artist Dror Feiler and his Swedish wife, Gunilla, featured a pool of red water illuminated by spotlights in which a small boat floats, its sail a photo of suicide bomber Hanadi Jaradat.
The incident was captured on video, and if you want to see the full ugliness of the face that Israel now chooses to present to the world, check it out: Real Player dialup, Real Player broadband, Windows Media dialup, Windows Media broadband.
This video is fascinating in that it thoroughly debunks the impression given by Mazel and his supporters that this was an impetuous act, brought about by righteous rage over a hideous act of anti-Semitism. Instead of Mazel on an emotional rampage, it shows the cool calculated way in which the ambassador walked unhurriedly around the pool, calmly unplugging the spotlights and pushing one of them into the water, like an actor following a script.
We are then treated to the confrontation between Mazel and the museum director, who asks, plaintively, "but didn't you read the statement?" He is referring to the artists' statement accompanying the installation, which does not in any way condone violence. Indeed, it expresses sympathy for the victims of Ms. Jaradat's act, even while seeking to explain it. But in addressing Mazel as if he were open to reason, the director was wasting his breath. If this wasn't a planned provocation, then it certainly succeeded in looking like one.
It is clear even in the title of the Feilers's work, "Snow White and the Madness of Truth," that the artists, far from endorsing, advocating, or glorifying Jaradat's mad act, are quite clearly horrified by it. The smiling face of a beautiful woman floating on an ocean of blood is hardly an image likely to generate much sympathy for suicide bombers: to characterize this as propaganda on behalf of Islamic Jihad is visibly and jarringly wrong.
But the artwork itself no longer matters, because the Israelis have now made this the latest chapter in their ongoing propaganda narrative about "anti-Semitic" and "hate-filled" Europe – where speech deemed anti-Semitic is outlawed and the faintest weakest echo of Hitlerian ideology is relentlessly silenced. But, again, none of this matters. As a propagandistic exercise, Mazel's provocation was designed to challenge the very idea that "the madness of truth" needs to be explained. Because to examine it too closely is to focus on Israel's role in perpetuating the cycle of violence – and that cannot be permitted.
This was sent in by one of the readers of codshit, most interesting...
by Trowbridge H. Ford
Before any American intelligence agents and analysts consider seriously Democratic Representative Henry Waxman's call that they come forward officially to testify before the Republican-dominated Congress about the 'sexing up' of intelligence about Iraq's WMD before the war, I suggest they look at what happened to a most senior, intelligence official in Britain who thought of doing something similar. Also, they should remember that Waxman has previously attempted in rather half-hearted ways, going back to last summer, but without success similar self-serving, political moves at the expense of his political opponents. The chances of this happening are even less than a real investigation of why the 9/11 attacks occurred.
The Briton was tricked by his employer, the Ministry of Defence, into talking to a member of the press about his experience as an UNSCOM weapons inspector, who 'sexed up' his information so at his expense that the Prime Minister authorized his outing which resulted in his murder, apparently by a group of professional killers. Blair then appointed a judicial inquiry to urgently investigate the circumstances surrounding his death in order to preempt any coroner's inquest since the record of Britain's criminal justice system in solving serious crimes is apparently so bad that The Guardian's Nick Davies has started a series on its failures, stressing the murder investigation of another judge, Crown Court Judge Andrew Chubb.
According to the 1988 Coroners Act, such an inquiry can take the place of a coroner's inquest. Once the judicial inquiry has reported, Robert Verkaik wrote in "The Hutton Inquiry" for the Sept. 4th issue of The Independent, "the Oxford Coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, will pass the verdict to the Registrar of Deaths and all other findings relating to the cause of Dr. Kelly's death."
The judge appointed to head the inquiry is Lord Brian Hutton, who worked last year with the Prime Minister to insure that MI5 whistleblower David Shayler got nowhere in trying to justify his disclosure of MI6's attempt to use Al-Qaeda agents to assassinate Libya's Muammar Qaddafi in order to cover up its convoluted dealings with the Provisional IRA, especially British Army mole 'Steak Knife's role, in gaining arms for the republicans. Hutton ruled that Shayler could neither justify his action because it put his life at risk, nor as a "public interest defence" under the European Code of Human Rights, while Blair issued a gagging order on the press reporting any evidence pertaining to Shayler's claims.
Back when The Troubles really resumed in Northern Ireland in 1969, Hutton served as junior counsel when its Attorney General introduced imprisonment of terrorist suspects without trial, requiring that he defend the UK of charges of mistreating the detainees before the European Court of Human Rights in 1978 - a case the Crown lost. Hutton also ruled with the majority of Law Lords in denying the extradition of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to Spain so that he could answer human rights violations during the ouster of former President Salvatore Allende. Hutton is no friend of whistleblowers of secret, violent regimes.
Hutton then selected as the inquiry's counsel - staff who would be crucial in determining actually what happened to the deceased through vigorous cross-examination of witnesses - James Dingemans and Peter Knox, barristers whose whole careers have been devoted to the practice of civil law - e.g., commerical and business law, banking disputes, contracts, missellings, and the like, including appeals to courts like the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. They have apparently never really practiced the basics of criminal law, as even criminal appeals rarely examine questions of fact.
I am referring, of course, to the inquiry into what happened to Dr. David Kelly, Britain's leading expert in the production of biological weapons, and its chief on the UNSCOM biological team. Thanks to his research in microbiology at Oxford and Porton Down, he knew how to make all kinds of biological weapons, especially anthrax, and what countries had the necessary capability. He particularly knew what Russia, Iraq, and Israel were doing in the field
In fact, Kelly was such a valuable resource in containing biological weapons attacks that he was considering resigning early from the MoD so that he could take up positions in the private sector, especially with defector Vladimir Pasachnik's firm Regma, since it now most needed his expertise to counter biological attacks. Pasechnik, the former director of the Soviets' Biopreparat who had died in November 2002, had blown the whistle so effectively on Moscow's illegal development of WMD after his defection in 1988 - what Kelly had assisted - that it had, according to Pearce Wright's obituary of him in The Guardian, an important influence on later assessment of what Iraq had in the way of biological weapons.
During the lead-up to the ousting of Saddam Hussein, Kelly was constantly told by his American, British, and Israeli colleagues, thanks to informers that the Iraqi National Congress (INC) had garnered, that Iraq was a real, immediate menace to Western civilization. He was so convinced that Saddam's Dr Rihad Taha was a total disinformation agent when it came to Iraq's bioterrorism capability, especially its possible use of anthrax, that she earned the sobriquet Dr Germ from him. "Mossad's dossier on Dr Germ," Gordon Thomas wrote in January for the Freedom Writer website, "details her terminal experiments on Saddam's prisoners with anthrax, bolulism, and ricin." Dr Taha was "personally supervising" what was done at places like the notorious Salman Park from what she had learned at university while studing at Norwich, and doing research at Porton Down.
Then Kelly was told that Al-Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had gotten the Ames strain of anthrax from the Iraqi dictator, and his agents had used it against Americans, particularly Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. "In mapping out Iraq's links to international terrorism before the United Nations Security Council," Matthew Levitt wrote on February 6, 2003, "Secretary of State Colin Powell highlighted the case of senior al Qaeda commander Fedel Nazzel Khalayleh, better known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi."
While Kelly remained privately somewhat dubious of these claims, he was told continually by colleagues to wait and see what was found by inspectors, especially once Iraq had been freed, explaining why Britain and America are so adamant about the truth of the '45 minute' claim, and why they are so dogged in looking for corroborating evidence. For example, Kelly's American counterpart on UNSCOM, Dr. Richard Spertzel, was so convinced of the claims that he mistakenly maintained that an Iraqi military truck was one of Zarqawi's travelling biological labs, and still maintains that Iraq was a country with enough money to have produced the most high-grade anthrax spores.
During the war, though, the Americans captured one of Zarqawi's agents, and he maintained convincingly that Iraq had nothing to do with either the 9/11 attacks or that his boss had had anything to do with the letters to the Americans, containing the deadly spores. Dr Germ, in the process, was reduced from being a danger on a par with Saddam himself to one unworthy of even inclusion in the famous deck of cards of wanted Iraqis.
Of course, the INC continued to crank out informers promoting the disinformation, but Kelly was increasingly not convinced. In fact, he started planning a book with Victoria Roddam at Oxford, claiming apparently that the anthrax attacks were essentially Israeli inspired and conducted - designed to get Washington and London behind its war to oust Saddam. While London had long learned that the alleged linkage betweeen Iraq and Al-Qaeda, especially when 9/11 occurred, was completely fabricated, Washington is now claiming that Zarqawi is orchestrating the attacks in Iraq against Coalition forces, putting a $25,000,000 bounty on his capture, the same amount as for the just-captured Saddam.
No sooner did MI5, the British Security Service, learn of Kelly's plan than it informed the MoD and No. 10 Downing Street of it, leading the former to allow him to talk to BBC journalist Gilligan about what he knew about Iraq's WMD, and his misgivings about intelligence justifying the war. Gilligan had been the first reporter to learn that the British government, politicians and intelligence officials alike, had 'sexed up' the intelligence about Iraq's WMD, especially its ability to mount a deadly anthrax attack within minutes. Gilligan dressed up his interviews with Kelly to make it appear that he was the source of the completely false claims, leading Kelly to be even more interested in writing his own book on the subject. Once Prime Minister Blair learned of Kelly's plan, he agreed to the MoD outing Kelly as Gilligan's source to make him the fallguy for the fabricated intelligence, instilling even more dedication in Kelly to tell his tale. In doing so, Downing Street was just following the procedure it had used so effectively in Northern Ireland with British Army intelligence, especially the infamous Field Research Unit, for getting rid of troublesome members of the PIRA and their helpers, especially Belfast solicitor Patrick Finucane.
When the Mossad learned of Kelly's identification, it apparently assumed that the British government was no longer interested in protecting him - an assumption that was strengthened when the MoD agreed to withdrawing his bodyguards. Consequently, when he went for a walk on July 17th, its kidon permitted to operate in the UK by MI5, apparently working out of a boat moored on the Thames, overpowered him; physically held him down until he was stuffed with 29 tablets of coproxamol, the drug of choice for people seeking suicide, until he passed out; opened a small artery on his left wrist to drain him of much blood; and then moved him to Harrowdown Hill, near where its boat was moored, where he was left to die.
In the process, Kelly suffered three abraisions to his scalp, a bruise below his left knee, two bruises below his right knee; two more to the left side of his chest; another abraision to his lower lip, and red lesions all over the lower parts of his legs. The injuries, of course, would have looked even more serious if Kelly was not having the blood drained out of him during the process. The injuries had occurred during the dark while the kidon was prying Kelly's mouth open to insert the drugs, explaining the abraision on his lower lip, and its interest in his dental records afterwards to determine if he had suffered any unexpected damage to his teeth during the struggle. Little wonder that pathologist, Dr. Nicholas Hunt, finally added this when discussing Kelly's alleged slashing his wrist: ..."the features are quite typical, of self inflicted inqury if one ignores all the other features of the case." Hunt had compounded the problem of determining what had happened, where, and when by postponing inexplicably taking the deceased's rectal temperature for seven hours. In explaining his death, no one seemed to notice that he would have needed a flashlight if it had been done during the dark.
The problem with the Hutton Inquiry was that it was conducted in a way to prevent completely this conclusion from being arrived at. While the Law Lord rightfully stressed his independence at the inquiry's outset to eliminate any claims of cowtowing to the man who actually appointed him, Prime Minister Blair's Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, Hutton conducted it in a way to suit his political superiors rather than the interests of justice. Instead of allowing the facts surrounding Kelly's death to be brought out, and then analyzed, the inquiry heard first from all the interested parties - especially the responsible decision-makers, spin doctors, and key administrators from the MoD, Foreign Office, and Downing Street, culminating in Blair's own appearance - and then tried to fashion an absolute minimum of facts to what had already been established.
From the beginning, the inquiry was trying to prove that those responsible for revealing to the press the fact that Kelly was Gilligan's source led to the microbiologist's suicide. Also, interested parties were more interested in establishing that if Kelly was murdered, British officials were not involved rather than seeing that justice was served - thanks to an unnecessary introduction of second parties in the case because of a mistake by civil law counsel Dingemans in questioning the most important witness of the first phase. The former falsehood was assisted by allowing pathologist Hunt to submit a short written report about the death long before he gave evidence, while the latter resulted in officials stating gratuitiously that no third parties were involved in his death when no one mentioned second parties, much less who they might be. Civil suits always have two parties, but suicides only have one. Murders have at least two.
The inquiry was essentially highjacked by the testimony consultant psychiatrist Keith Hawton in the Oxfordshire Mental Health Care Trust gave at the beginning of September, claiming that Kelly's death was clearly a suicide. Hawton had been hired by the inquiry's solicitors to make a report on Kelly's death. Thanks to Hunt's information about the cuts on Kelly's left wrist, he was confident that the microbiologist had killed himself because of threatened loss of self-esteem, employment, and any hope. Hawton had visited Harrowdown Hill, and was confident that no fowl play - "no signs of violence" - had occurred, given the peaceful scene Kelly so well prepared for his demise, and the fact that nothing out of the ordinary, like trampling down the nettles, had occurred.
In so testifying, though, Hawton was ignorant of the other features of the case - the fact that Kelly was stuffed with enough coproxamol in his stomach and body to kill him, and that he had been extensively hurt in the process, indicating that there had been a serious struggle somewhere else. Hawton was recalled to testify right at the end of witnesses giving testimony, and he was, as expected, even more convinced of Kelly's suicide, though he admitted that the new evidence he presented about the alleged suicide of Kelly's mother did not advance his claim. And Kelly himself had all the individual, religious, familial, and social ties which Hawton had originally stated worked against him committing suicide. Hawton was never asked by counsel if he had read the testimony of the scientists who had inspected the site, and tested Kelly's body after he had first given evidence. More important, his most questionable diagnosis was not challenged in any way by counsel.
In sum, the investigation should be called the Hawton Inquiry.
Any potential American whistleblowers should think twice about doing anything similar since the British are known for being a little more careful about legal niceties in carrying out covert operations. The numerous Mossad agents in America can obviously act with impunity against any potential troublemakers, as the five killed, and the 22 survivors of the anthrax letter attacks would readily testify if they were ever given the chance. Of course, the FBI has expended unprecedented hours in investigating the attacks, but since the real culprit is off limits, the Bureau has simply been wasting its time.
Peru's former powerfull spy, Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos, is accussed of planning a gunrunning operation to Colombian rebels.
The Peruvian former prominent official in the nineties was a close collaborator of the CIA to fight drug trafficking in South America.
Vladimiro Lenin Montesinos, the man who ran Peru from the shadows all along the nineties, as former President Alberto Fujimori right-hand man, appears in courts on Tuesday accused of planning a huge gunrunning operation to the most powerful Colombian rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, late in the 1990s. At that time, spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos was Fujimori close advisor and an ally of the CIA in the fight against drugs in South America.
Now, Montesinos in prison since June 2001, is accused of being behind "Operation Siberia", an undercovered deal to smuggle 10.000 AK-47 rifles to the FARC with support from the CIA. After allegations became known CIA agents in Washington refused to answer questions to news agencies saying the issue was under due legal process. Montesinos has also denied any participation in "Operation Siberia".
However, his repeated attempts to get the case delayed show "he fears he'll be convicted," said Ronald Gamarra, a state attorney investigating Montesinos on a host of charges. Prosecutors are seeking the maximum 20-year sentence. Fujimori himself is in self-imposed exile in Japan, and Peru is seeking his extradition to face corruption and murder charges. The former president denies the charges.
Interior Minister Fernando Rospigliosi told Reuters: "This is a very, very important case because it shows how both Montesinos and Fujimori were involved in dealings with a terrorist and drug-trafficking group like the FARC. There is abundant evidence of the participation of Montesinos, which could bring a very heavy sentence." According to the prosecutors FARC rebels paid the "cargo" -parachuted into Colombia's rainforests- with drugs.
"Operation Siberia" became known in August 2000, when Fujimori announced that Peru's intelligence services had smashed a major arms smuggling ring, code-named that way. However, prosecutors believe Montesinos and the CIA were behind the operation, despite Washington spent $2 billion in fighting Colombian guerrillas. In an interview with El Comercio newspaper on Sunday, Gamarra said: "In the case of arms trafficking to FARC guerrillas, Montesinos appears to have counted on the support of the CIA. We do not have any hard proof of that, but we do have various indications that would prove this relationship." In fact, Montesinos, has been linked to the CIA since he was in the military in the 1970s.
Fujimori's August 2000 news confernce unveiled the case only one month before a video showing Montesinos bribing a lawmaker was aired on television, ignited the scandal that toppled the government.
Yeah, Uncle Sam really went in to free the Iraqi people and bring them democracy. Pull the other one, it's got bells on! How much more transparent does this have to be?
America is getting more international help in its quest to build a peaceful, democratic Iraq but, ironically, its plans are under threat because the spiritual leader of the country’s Shia majority, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, is demanding fully democratic elections
America's proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer, met the United Nations' secretary-general, Kofi Annan, on Monday January 19th, to plead for the UN's help in salvaging America's plan to give Iraqis their sovereignty back by the end of June. The plan is in danger of collapse because Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s most senior Shia Muslim cleric, insists there should be proper elections to choose the members of an interim national assembly that will select a new, provisional government. America insists it would be impossible to organise such a nationwide vote without delaying the handover of power. Instead it proposes that assembly members be chosen by local “caucuses”, in each Iraqi province. The caucuses’ members would in turn largely be selected by the Governing Council, a group of Iraqis appointed by America, who have already been given some restricted powers.
The Coalition Provisional Authority gives Mr Bremer's statements and outlines plans for governing Iraq. See also the US State Department's information on Iraq and the UN's Iraq section. The US Defence Department and US Central Command report on the security situation.
Mr Bremer, accompanied by members of the Governing Council, pressed Mr Annan to send a mission to Baghdad to assess whether or not direct elections would be feasible in the next few months. A Governing Council member allied to Mr Sistani said that if such a team of UN advisers were sent and decided that elections were not feasible, then the ayatollah would accept this. Mr Annan said further talks were needed before he could decide whether to send the mission, but diplomats said they expected a positive response.
Considering President George Bush’s avowed desire to build a strong democracy in Iraq that would set a positive example for the rest of the Middle East, he ought to have been heart-warmed at the sight of tens of thousands of Shias chanting “Yes, yes to elections!” as they protested in the southern Iraqi city of Basra on Thursday and again in the capital, Baghdad, on Monday. But the demonstrations were manifestations of Mr Sistani’s power to whip up strong opposition among Shias—who are an estimated 60% of Iraq’s 25m population. Though he is Iranian-born and speaks Arabic with a heavy Persian accent, Mr Sistani commands strong support from Iraqi Shias and could cause serious trouble if his demands are not met.
Mr Sistani and his people fear that the caucuses will be rigged to try to exclude the Shias from power, as they were under Saddam Hussein’s Sunni Muslim regime. Last week, the ayatollah issued a fatwa (religious decree) that “every Iraqi must have the right to vote”. His aides say that unless direct elections are held, he may issue another, tougher decree which would turn the Shias—hitherto largely supporters of the American-led invasion—into opponents, resisting America's presence alongside the remnants of Saddam’s forces. If so, hopes for an orderly handover of power would be shattered. The ayatollah has refused to meet Mr Bremer so he has been relying on the Governing Council to try to talk the cleric into a compromise.
America believes there is not enough time to produce the new electoral register that would be needed for direct elections. Mr Sistani argues, however, that the ration cards used for the UN's oil-for-food programme (which have just been reissued, without many hitches) could be used as voters’ registration cards. In a last-ditch bid to persuade the ayatollah to accept the caucuses, Mr Bremer is looking at ways to make them more open. But time is short: he has only until the end of February to pass a law on how the transitional assembly should be chosen.
I keep saying it, and will keep on saying it until the world wakes up. Ariel "The Butcher of Sabra and Chatilla" Sharon is an unlimited liability to Israel and the world!
"The greatest thing the Devil ever did was convincing the world he didn't exist."
The Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon knew all the details of a secret meeting at home of Mona Juul, the Norwegian ambassador in Israel.
During a debate in the Israeli national assembly Knesset, Ariel Sharon himself revealed a possible bugging of Juul’s house in the north of Tel Aviv.
According to the Norwegian paper VG, Sharon made accusations against the opposition leader Shimon Peres because he allegedly had secret meetings with the Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie.
Present at the meeting with Quire were allegedly Saeb Erekat, negotiating minister, Terje Rød Larsen, UN’s special delegate, Shimon Peres and two of his advisors.
Described in detail In order to prove that the meeting indeed took place, Sharon described in detail what happened during the meeting at the Norwegian ambassador’s house. The opposition politicians in Knesset became infuriated and accused Sharon of having used the intelligence service to bug his political opponents in Israel.
«How do you know all this? Was the meeting bugged?» screamed Yossi Sarid from the left wing party Meretz.
Unbelievable Sharon explained that he had gotten the information from one of the people present on the meeting, but he did not manage to convince the opposition.
«It is unbelievable that the prime minister of a democratic nation would use intelligence information to aid him politically and to create an impression that all meetings with the Palestinian authorities are illegal,” stated Peres according to the Jerusalem Post.
On the other side, Sharon was infuriated by the fact that the Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Quire did not have time to meet him, but did find the time to meet with politicians on Israel’s left wing.
Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, was last night accused of a diplomatic cover-up over Colonel Gaddafi after refusing to answer questions about the seizure of uranium-enrichment equipment bound for Libya's nuclear weapons programme last October.
The capture by the United States of thousands of centrifuges on board a German-owned vessel, the BBC China, en route to Libya has raised suspicions in Washington and London that Col Gaddafi offered to abandon his weapons programme after threats from America, rather than the lengthy British and American diplomacy vaunted by Tony Blair.
Michael Ancram, the shadow foreign secretary, tabled questions for Mr Straw in Parliament concerning the shipment on a freighter owned by a German-based company, BBC Chartering and Logistic GmbH.
Mr Straw refused to give details about the seizure in his reply, citing a security exemption in the code of practice on access to government information. The code allows ministers to refuse to divulge information which may harm national security or defence, or would harm the conduct of international relations.
Mr Ancram told The Telegraph: "I find this answer incredible. The seizure of the cargo has been reported in The Telegraph and The Wall Street Journal. It is highly suspicious that the Foreign Secretary should refuse to answer on the grounds of security. This smells of a cover-up. Given the serious nature of the information so far divulged, I will be pursuing this further."
Hatred of Muslims has become the anti-Semitism of our era. The latest example of this ugly fact is the vicious prosecution by the U.S. military of a Muslim army chaplain, Capt. James Yee.
I call this disgraceful and shameful case America's Dreyfus Affair.
In 1894, a French army officer, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, who was Jewish, was wrongfully convicted of spying on the basis of forged documents. Though evidence pointed to another officer, anti-Semites in the French Army framed Dreyfus. He was given a life sentence on Devil's Island, a brutal, malarial penal colony in the Caribbean off French Guiana.
Four years later, the great French writer Emile Zola published J'accuse (I accuse), his famous newspaper expose of the Dreyfus Affair in which he demolished the case against the persecuted officer and showed how hatred of Jews had led to this outrage.
Fast forward to 2003. Capt. Yee, a native of New Jersey, West Point graduate, convert to Islam and one of the few Muslim chaplains in the U.S. armed forces, was arrested for espionage. Yee had been chaplain at the Bush administration's very own version of Devil's Island, the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp, ministering to the 660 Muslim prisoners held there in cages.
Two Muslim-Americans working at Guantanamo as interpreters for the military, Ahmed Mehalba and Ahmad al-Halabi, were arrested on suspicions of passing information to Syria and possessing classified documents. U.S. Army Reserve officers at Guantanamo somehow believed they had uncovered a nefarious Syrian spy ring.
Capt. Yee had once visited Syria for religious studies. He had dinner at Guantanamo with al-Halabi and Mehalba. So he, too, was arrested and charged with espionage - a capital offence.
Spying charges have since been dropped against Halabi, but he and Mehalba still face other flimsy charges.
Capt. Yee was charged with spying and thrown into solitary confinement in a naval prison for 2 1/2 months, where he was chained hand and foot. Jailers refused to tell him the direction in which Mecca lay so he could properly pray. He was denied family visits and repeatedly threatened with execution.
Capt. Yee was finally released to face a court martial at Ft. Benning, Ga., which is ongoing.
The military's case against him has steadily crumbled. Not a shred of evidence has emerged of spying or foreign contacts.
After espionage charges were dropped, Yee was accused of the minor infraction of mishandling classified documents. But military prosecutors didn't even know which of the supposedly classified documents Yee had were actually classified. Most were apparently hand-written notes on his religious ministering.
Do you really want to live in a world controlled by companies like Coca Cola? That's where we're going if we don't do something about it, and make no mistake about it, that world will make "1984" look positively pleasant!
by Naeem Mohaiemen
Several years ago, I was leafing through a health magazine and came across a piece about Coca-Cola. According to the story, Coke, like many other soft drinks, contains additives that eat away at tooth enamel. Ever since then, I've avoided all soft drinks. This habit presents an etiquette problem whenever I visit Bangladesh. Along with milky cups of tea, Coke-with-ice is the most frequently offered drink to visitors. My refusal of Coke is often seen an snobbishness, or some faddish "health consciousness."
This subcontinental love affair with Coke may soon change drastically. If campaigners assembled at this week's World Social Forum in Mumbai, India are successful, Coca-Cola will soon be hit by a global boycott of unprecedented scale and ferocity. Although the Indian Campaign to Hold Coke Accountable has already been in motion for a year, the WSF meet is globalizing the project. At issue are Coca-Cola's production practices in India, which are draining out vast amounts of public groundwater, turning farming communities into virtual deserts. Completing the cycle of abuse, the plants are also pumping out toxic sludge as waste product. The controversy has been aggravated by recent tests that showed levels of toxic substances in Indian Coke, which are higher than FDA-approved standards for Coke-additives in the US.
Organizers consider Coca-Cola to be one of the most abusive transnationals (TNC) operating in India today. They are particularly irked by the way that Coke, a huge foreign investor in India, has used its commercial clout to bully the government into bending the rules regarding local ownership.
After a year of Indian protests, Coca-Cola's PR department simply said they were the "target of a handful of extremist protesters." For good measure, the corporate website says, "Local communities have welcomed our business as a good corporate neighbor."
But at the end of the WSF, Coke may be facing an organized campaign that cannot be easily dismissed. One of the key benefits of highlighting the Coke case at the WSF meet is the opportunity to link up with similar cases worldwide and turn the project into a global boycott. Since international capital benefits from a borderless world, activists want to create a model where their clout is also increased by the free flow of information between world community groups. In the process they are linking up with campaigners in Colombia, who have targeted Coke for very different abuses. At WSF, the campaign has generated strong feedback from American and European organizers, many of whom see the red-and-whites of Coke as a symbol for businesses that work without accountability.
"Are the critics acting with sincerity and integrity, or are they motivated by agendas that make their words biased at best and hypocritical at worst?"
A popular saying proclaims that there are three types of criticism. The first, and most welcome, is positive criticism, because it means that one's work has been praised and/or there is agreement with one's viewpoints. The second, and equally welcomed, is negative criticism, since it confirms that one's work has been noticed. The third, and worst, is no criticism at all, because it signifies that one's work is irrelevant or unworthy of being critiqued.
But before an individual becomes too elated by positive criticisms, or too deflated by negative ones, it must first be determined whether such criticisms are legitimate or illegitimate. The essential question to be asked is, "Are the critics acting with sincerity and integrity, or are they motivated by agendas that make their words biased at best and hypocritical at worst?" Positive critics, after all, might be making sycophantic observations simply to curry favor from the person or entity they are critiquing. By contrast, negative criticism might be spawned not by reasoned analysis, but by (to quote a line from the comedy show Monty Python's Flying Circus) "the automatic gainsaying of anything the other party has to say."
Therefore it is no surprise when dealing with criticisms that the greatest hypocrisies emanate from the world of politics and from those with political agendas. In fact the only consistency in this inane realm appears to be the motto, "It is wrong for them, but it is not wrong for us."
Perhaps there is no politician today who personifies this motto more than Tom Delay, a Republican Congressperson from Texas and Leader of the House of Representatives. In 1999, when former President Bill Clinton (a Democratic) endeavored to militarily intervene in Bosnia to quell the tide of ethnic cleansing, Delay sanctimoniously declared, "Bombing a sovereign nation for ill-defined reasons with vague objectives undermines the American stature in the world. The international respect and trust for America has diminished every time we casually let the bombs fly. We must stop giving the appearance that our foreign policy is formulated by the Unabomber."
Yet, after the corruptly appointed Bush dictatorship "casually bombed the sovereign nation" of Iraq, Delay suddenly proclaimed, "Well, I think it's not the time to be questioning this president on how he is carrying out the war." Apparently in Delay's warped sense of logic, ethnic cleansing was an ill-defined reason for military intervention, but outright lies about "weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)," Iraqi "connections" to Al-Qaeda, and/or Saddam Hussein's "involvement" in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, were sufficient grounds to wage an unjust war costing billions of tax dollars and destroying thousands of lives.
Perhaps Delay takes succor in the fact that the Bush dictatorship's "objectives" were not vague. In fact, as former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill recently revealed in a television interview, they were quite clear.
O'Neill stated that "From the very beginning [of the Bush dictatorship and well in advance of the 9/11 attacks] there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go." A short time after this pronouncement a document circulated amongst Bush cronies entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." So is it any wonder that while oil fields were hastily secured by "coalition" forces, Iraqi museums were left relatively unguarded and subsequently looted? Apparently "foreign suitors" have no financial stake in priceless, historical antiquities.
Of course liars, and the lies they tell, resent being exposed to the light of day, and news reports now indicate that O'Neill is being investigated to determine how he acquired some of the documents relied upon during his interview. Of course the "investigation" of O'Neill is simply one example of the extremes the Bush dictatorship will go to (and has gone to) to cover up its lies.
Given this reality, it would be relatively easy for me to dismiss the negative comments made by Bush supporters about my recent PRAVDA article, BUSH vs. HITLER (1/3/04). But after seeing how those of Delay's ilk were willing, for the sake of politics, to minimize or ignore human suffering in Bosnia, while exploiting the human suffering caused by Hitler's Holocaust, I realized that their unconscionable hypocrisy had to be answered. Their myopic view of history, and their sense of "selective" outrage at human suffering, are an affront to those in the United States who seek to restore basic rights and freedoms stolen by the Bush dictatorship, and the corrupt legal system that supports him, as well as a threat to peace throughout the world.
The basic stratagem of these so-called "critics" is to compartmentalize Hitler's legacy into a simplistic formula: Hitler created the horrors of the Holocaust and since Bush (the argument goes) has not created a Holocaust, Bush is not comparable to Hitler. What this formula fails to acknowledge, however, is that Hitler was not created in a vacuum, and he did not ignite the horrors of the Holocaust until he had corruptly obtained the political power to do so. It was the manner in which he attained this power that is analogous to the political machinations of the Bush dictatorship.
Hitler disseminated "great lies" to obtain his political objectives. As O'Neill confirms above, so did Bush. Hitler fallaciously blamed scapegoats, primarily people of Jewish descent, for his nation's social ills. Bush blamed Saddam Hussein. Hitler destroyed civil liberties after the Reichstag fire through the "Enabling Act." Bush destroyed civil liberties after the 9/11 terrorist attacks through the "Patriot Act." Hitler used the Spanish Civil war as a testing ground for his military weaponry. Bush used Iraq. Hitler used complacency about or ignorance of history to launch the Holocaust, allegedly remarking in 1939 that nobody remembered the "annihilation of the Armenians," over a million of whom, during the First World War, were killed outright or died of starvation and disease during forced deportations. Bush used complacency about or ignorance of history-the media hyperboles that provoked the Spanish-American war, Lyndon Johnson's exaggeration of the Gulf of Tonkin incident to escalate American involvement in Vietnam, and the way Bush's father used the invasion of Panama to divert focus from domestic issues-to launch the war against Iraq.
Hitler was adept at hiding his self-serving motives for war beneath a veneer of magnanimity. So was Bush. Hitler also scapegoated the disabled and homosexuals. Supporters of the Bush dictatorship, like Republican Senator Rick Santorum and Vice President Dick Cheney, also scapegoat homosexuals, while the United States Supreme Court has all but abolished the anti-discrimination protections of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). Hitler preyed upon racial hatreds. So does Bush, despite the contrary illusion he has tried to create by having sell-outs like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice obsequiously shuffling behind him.
In fact, as I was completing this article, news reports revealed that, on the day after the birthday of famed civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and two days before the holiday that celebrates his legacy, Bush manipulatively took advantage of a Congressional recess to nominate Charles W. Pickering, a judge who has been accused of racial insensitivity, to a powerful position on a federal appeals court. Apparently the Bush dictatorship's "concern" about "protecting" the rights of ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq does not translate into a commensurate concern for minorities in the United States.
Finally, those who doubt that Bush is any different from Hitler in his callous willingness to sacrifice the lives of innocents need only be reminded of the case of Jerry Lee Hogue. Bush has repeatedly asserted that while serving as governor of Texas no innocent person had been executed "under his watch." Yet, during this tenure, Bush repeatedly denied thirty-day reprieves to death-row inmates, like Hogue, so that DNA testing, which could definitively confirm their guilt or innocence, could be performed.
The investigative news program SIXTY MINUTES sought to challenge Bush's boast by conducting posthumous DNA testing on the evidence in Hogue's case, only to be informed that, in accordance with Texas legal procedure, this evidence had been "destroyed" shortly after Hogue's state-sponsored murder. It is not hard to gauge the depravity of an individual who brags about the "infallibility" of the machinery of death while knowing that no evidence will ever exist to contradict him.
Fortunately the Jewish people have possessed both the diligence and the courage to make sure that their suffering at the hands of Hitler will never be forgotten. Unfortunately, their plight did not end the horrors sired by "man's inhumanity to man." The post-Holocaust world saw the systematic and sadistic destruction of one-third of Cambodia's population by the Khmer Rouge, genocide campaigns were conducted in the African nations of Burundi and Rwanda, ethnic cleansings occurred in the Balkans, students were massacred in China's Tiananmen Square, thousands of persons "disappeared" during Argentina's dirty war, and, as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research recently wrote, Donald Rumsfeld, now Secretary of Defense in the Bush dictatorship, had endeavored, during the Reagan administration of the 1980s, to "improve bilateral relations with Iraq" despite the fact that Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons against Iranians and Kurds "almost daily."
But what makes it particularly ludicrous, and perhaps even dangerous, to ignore the analogies between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler's horrific legacy can be examined with the benefit of hindsight, while Bush's is still unfolding. Who can say, given Bush's contempt for civil liberties and international law, his exploitation of war for self-serving purposes and his willingness to use lies to wage it, how many deaths may yet occur.
After more than 40 years as a Labour MP, Tam Dalyell has announced that he is to retire. But, as he tells Colin Brown, he won't be going quietly
A few months ago, Tam Dalyell, the veteran Labour MP and founder of Parliament's awkward squad, said Tony Blair was the "worst Prime Minister" of the eight he has known.
Over afternoon tea with strawberry jam and scones in the elegant Pugin Bar at the House of Commons, Mr Dalyell confided to me that he had changed his opinion of Mr Blair.
Mr Dalyell, 71, announced last week that he would retire at the next election after more than 40 years at Westminster. Mr Blair, perhaps thankful that his adversary was quitting, led the tributes to him. "Fiercely independent, Tam's persistence in pursuing causes close to his heart is legendary," Mr Blair told the House.
The kind remarks by the Prime Minister cut little ice with the member for Linlithgow who, as the longest-serving MP, is also Father of the House. After decades of outspokenly opposing British military interventions, from Suez to Iraq, and leading campaigns on the environment, international relations and civil liberties, he has no intention of leaving quietly.
"Tony should go," he declared. "And he should take his friend Lord Falconer [the Lord Chancellor] with him."
Mr Dalyell believes that Mr Blair has all but destroyed Cabinet government with his "presidential" style and that he is too remote from his party. "He has talented people in his Cabinet but they don't have power bases in the party," he complained.
"I am incandescent with anger with him. We had far more understanding from Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Ted Heath, Alec Douglas-Home, and from Harold Macmillan and John Major.
"Even Margaret Thatcher - whatever I have said about her role in the Falklands War - acted because we were attacked. In the war on Iraq we adopted a new doctrine of the pre-emptive strike. It is a disastrous doctrine."
His rebelliousness has included his hounding of Lady Thatcher over the sinking of the Belgrano, the Argentinian cruiser, as well as opposition to the 1990-91 Gulf war and the Kosovo campaign. Mr Blair once claimed that he had opposed "every bullet fired since 1945".
Because he has so often rebelled, many people believe that he is a Leftist, and for a period he was indeed a member of the hard-Left Campaign group, albeit its only member who regularly wears an old Etonian tie.
In truth, though, he is hard to pigeon-hole. The best description of him would be as an immensely courteous, eccentric toff: Sir Tam Dalyell Bt, a hereditary baronet, whose home is his family's turreted 17th century mansion, The Binns, at Linlithgow. Rather like the ravens at the Tower of London, it is said that while peacocks parade on the lawns of The Binns (Gaelic for hills) it will remain in Dalyell hands.
Unlike many on the hard-Left, he is a pro-European, a believer in nuclear power and a fierce opponent of devolution, even for his native Scotland. He once boasted: "I'm ancient Labour. I want nothing from the party leadership, so they cannot control me."
He tried to exculpate Col Gaddafi over the Lockerbie atrocity and last year sparked outrage by accusing the Prime Minister of being unduly influenced by "a cabal of Jewish advisers".
GCHQ worker Katharine Gun faces jail for exposing American corruption in the run-up to war on Saddam. Now her celebrity supporters insist it is Bush and Blair who should be in the dock.
She was an anonymous junior official toiling away with 4,500 other mathematicians, code-breakers and linguists at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham.
But now Katharine Gun, an unassuming 29-year-old translator, is set to become a transatlantic cause célèbre as the focus of a star-studded solidarity drive that brings together Hollywood actor-director Sean Penn and senior figures from the US media and civil rights movement, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Gun appears in court tomorrow accused of breaching the Official Secrets Act by allegedly leaking details of a secret US 'dirty tricks' operation to spy on UN Security Council members in the run-up to war in Iraq last year. If found guilty, she faces two years in prison. She is an unlikely heroine and those who have met her say she would have been happy to remain in the shadows, had she not seen evidence in black and white that her Government was being asked to co-operate in an illegal operation.
The leak has been described as 'more timely and potentially more important than The Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, the celebrated whistleblower who leaked papers containing devastating details of the US involvement in Vietnam, in 1971. Ellsberg has been vocal in support of Gun. She was arrested last March, days after The Observer first published evidence of an intelligence 'surge' on UN delegations, ordered by the GCHQ's partner organisation, the National Security Agency.
Legal experts believe that her case is potentially more explosive for the Government than the Hutton inquiry because it could allow her defence team to raise questions about the legality of military intervention in Iraq. The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, is likely to come under pressure to disclose the legal advice he gave on military intervention - something he has so far refused to do.
At a hearing last November, Gun's legal team indicated that she would use a defence of 'necessity' to argue that she acted to save the lives of British soldiers and Iraqi civilians.
At the time Gun, who was sacked after her arrest and whose case is funded by legal aid, said in a statement: 'Any disclosures that may have been made were justified on the following grounds: because they exposed serious illegality and wrongdoing on the part of the US government who attempted to subvert our own security services; and to prevent wide-scale death and casualties among ordinary Iraqi people and UK forces in the course of an illegal war.'
She added: 'I have only ever followed my conscience.'
Sean Penn and Jesse Jackson have already signed a statement of support for Gun and a broader campaign will be launched later this year. They are joined by Ellsberg, who is keen to travel to Britain soon to meet Gun.
Other signatories of the statement, to be released in the coming weeks, include Linda Foley, president of the Newspaper Guild, and Ramona Ripston of the American Civil Liberties Union, both in their personal capacities.
Don't ask me where this stuff comes from... If you can answer the question I'm asking, leave your comments in the box!
Late night small delight mushrooms and wine everyone feeling fine as we stare into the future all we see is a black vulture our lives seem small even though our dreams are tall our thoughts encompass humanity but sometimes it seems like insanity silently or with great fanfare driven insane by the "dare" stoically moving forward like some huge demeted canard lambs in the slaughterhouse of life yet innocent and without strife who are we really? do you see it clearly? do you know? if so, do you really grow? do you even care? or do you just think about the "dare"? what if all you know is wrong and you may as well be smoking a bong what if it's all a dream within a dream and you're really just blowing off steam? what if tomorrow you wake up and realise that you're just a pup the world you know gone enthroned in the zone gone without a trace leaving only an empty space caught in the mists of time the moment truely sublime and still the moment vanishes like a bunch of week-old radishes orphans at the mercy of the beast or that's what I think, at least! maniacs all of us depraved and possessed inspired by madness driven to extremes of sadness we don't want to do it nobody wants to think about it what if the future is a dream what if all is not as it may seem what if the dream is a nightmare and all we can do is stare trying to move forward but it seems we can only go backward guided only by something called instinct and yet to us, from reality, it seems distinct all thought lost all fantasy is as frost vapour that swirls endlessly unfullfilled for demons and dogs and others suitably pilled warriors and wimps we are Gods, not shrimps!
posted by ewar @ 3:03 AM
Gods, not shrimps!
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Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was so alarmed, and furious over Captain Simon Hayward's draft manuscript, "Under Fire: My Own Story," scheduled for publication in September 1989, that she went berserk. It was just the kind of official expose´ by a British operator of most sensitive operations that its intelligence system had been specifically designed to prevent, and now it was appearing despite all the checks by officials, and sanctions by law, especially the Official Secrets Acts. As usual, when such an unexpected crisis occurs, Downing Street so overreacted that it put its very existence in jeopardy. It was a classic example of Lord Acton's aphorism - "every thing secret degenerates."
Before delving any further into the detailed contingencies for Fortress Americas, it is necessary to briefly review the overall scope and sheer audacity of the Zionist plan, because this is the only way of understanding what comes next. In essence, the entire American continent, from Inuvik in northern Canada to the southern tip of Tierra Del Fuego, is to be invaded and captured for Zionist use, with the cabal exercising central command and control from New York City, currently located in the much smaller United States of America. Within this new massive fortress, the USA will be the focal point of all significant economic activities, with Canada and the former countries of Latin and South America providing the bulk of natural resources and cheap labor.
Peter Wright of Britain's Security Service has been made the subject of ridicule for so long, especially over the plot he developed to remove Prime Minister Harold Wilson from power because he was a Soviet mole, that the leading spy and manipulator of the Cold War, if not for all time, has been reduced to the laughing stock for all concerned. Wright was the first agent to learn the spying potential of lowly counterintelligence, making so much of it that former DG Stella Rimington was reduced recently to call him facetiously "the KGB illegal", like Gordon Lonsdale, but actually the claim was all too true. 
In the annals of the Cold War, no operative is more misunderstood, and marginalized than the CIA's William King Harvey. 
We are the juncture of the most serious crisis in modern history. 
Watching a peculiarly crass, inaccurate and condescending programme about the endangered historical sites of "Israel" — that is to say, the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories — on BBC2 in early June 2003, (1) I determined to try to work out, as a former BBC Middle East correspondent, why the Corporation has in the past two and a half years been failing to report fairly the most central and lasting reason for the troubles of the region: the Palestinians' struggle for freedom.
Forget Hutton. He will not reveal what the US and UK authorities really don't want you to know: that radiation illnesses caused by uranium weapons are now common in Iraq. By John Pilger
Before any American intelligence agents and analysts consider seriously Democratic Representative Henry Waxman's call that they come forward officially to testify before the Republican-dominated Congress about the 'sexing up' of intelligence about Iraq's WMD before the war, I suggest they look at what happened to a most senior, intelligence official in Britain who thought of doing something similar. Also, they should remember that Waxman has previously attempted in rather half-hearted ways, going back to last summer, but without success similar self-serving, political moves at the expense of his political opponents. The chances of this happening are even less than a real investigation of why the 9/11 attacks occurred. 
America's proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer, met the United Nations' secretary-general, Kofi Annan, on Monday January 19th, to plead for the UN's help in salvaging America's plan to give Iraqis their sovereignty back by the end of June. The plan is in danger of collapse because Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s most senior Shia Muslim cleric, insists there should be proper elections to choose the members of an interim national assembly that will select a new, provisional government. America insists it would be impossible to organise such a nationwide vote without delaying the handover of power. Instead it proposes that assembly members be chosen by local “caucuses”, in each Iraqi province. The caucuses’ members would in turn largely be selected by the Governing Council, a group of Iraqis appointed by America, who have already been given some restricted powers.
During a debate in the Israeli national assembly Knesset, Ariel Sharon himself revealed a possible bugging of Juul’s house in the north of Tel Aviv. 
Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, was last night accused of a diplomatic cover-up over Colonel Gaddafi after refusing to answer questions about the seizure of uranium-enrichment equipment bound for Libya's nuclear weapons programme last October.
Hatred of Muslims has become the anti-Semitism of our era. The latest example of this ugly fact is the vicious prosecution by the U.S. military of a Muslim army chaplain, Capt. James Yee. 
Several years ago, I was leafing through a health magazine and came across a piece about Coca-Cola. According to the story, Coke, like many other soft drinks, contains additives that eat away at tooth enamel. Ever since then, I've avoided all soft drinks. This habit presents an etiquette problem whenever I visit Bangladesh. Along with milky cups of tea, Coke-with-ice is the most frequently offered drink to visitors. My refusal of Coke is often seen an snobbishness, or some faddish "health consciousness." 
A popular saying proclaims that there are three types of criticism. The first, and most welcome, is positive criticism, because it means that one's work has been praised and/or there is agreement with one's viewpoints. The second, and equally welcomed, is negative criticism, since it confirms that one's work has been noticed. The third, and worst, is no criticism at all, because it signifies that one's work is irrelevant or unworthy of being critiqued.
A few months ago, Tam Dalyell, the veteran Labour MP and founder of Parliament's awkward squad, said Tony Blair was the "worst Prime Minister" of the eight he has known.
She was an anonymous junior official toiling away with 4,500 other mathematicians, code-breakers and linguists at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham. 
