So, let's see. First we have news reports that the Pentagon is considering "the Salvador option"—that is, death squads.

Jan. 14, 2005-NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/

And now, it appears that, lo and behold, there are death squads in Iraq. Who'd have thought?

Hundreds of accounts of killings and abductions have emerged recently, most of them brought forward by Sunni civilians, who claim that their relatives have been taken away by Iraqi men in uniform without warrant or explanation. Some Sunni males have been found dead in ditches and fields, with bullet holes in their temples, acid burns on their skin, and holes in their bodies apparently made by electric drills. Many have simply vanished.

www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/29/news/sunnis.php

CIA Veterans Condemn Torture

Speaking at a College of William and Mary forum last year, for example, Burton L. Gerber, a decorated Moscow station chief who retired in 1995 after 39 years with the CIA, surprised some in the audience when he said he opposes torture "because it corrupts the society that tolerates it." This is a view, he confirmed in an interview with National Journal last week, that is rooted in Albert Camus's assertion in Preface to Algerian Reports that torture, "even when accepted in the interest of realism and efficacy," represents "a flouting of honor that serves no purpose but to degrade" a nation in its own eyes and the world's. "The reason I believe that torture corrupts the torturers and society," Gerber says, "is that a standard is changed, and that new standard that's acceptable is less than what our nation should stand for. I think the standards in something like this are crucial to the identity of America as a free and just society."

http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2005/1119nj1.htm

British-trained police in Iraq 'killed prisoners with drills'

By Francis Elliott, Raymond Whitaker and Kim Sengupta
Published: 20 November 2005

Britain has been dragged into the growing scandal of officially condoned killings in Iraq. British-trained police operating in Basra have tortured at least two civilians to death with electric drills, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

John Reid, the Secretary of State for Defence, admits that he knows of "alleged deaths in custody" and other "serious prisoner abuse" at al-Jamiyat police station, which was reopened by Britain after the war.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article328214.ece

Torture

Frontline has posted an interview with Spc.Tony Lagouranis (Ret.), a U.S. Army interrogator from 2001 to 2005.

When we were trained in the schoolhouse about what we could and couldn't do, it was very strict and it came from the Geneva Conventions, the law of land warfare based on enemy prisoners of war. And we never expected that we would interrogate anybody who wasn't an enemy prisoner of war.

And it's still unclear to me what the status of the Iraqis that we had were. Well, I know that they weren't being afforded the legal status of enemy prisoners of war. But supposedly, we were treating them as though they were, but we weren't. I mean, there's just no way that what we were doing and what was sanctioned by the Pentagon through the IRE, the interrogation rules of engagement -- there's no way that fit in within the Geneva Conventions. …

What was happening, for example?

Well hypothermia was a widespread technique. I haven't heard a lot of people talking about that, and I never saw anything in writing prohibiting it or making it illegal. But almost everyone was using it when they had a chance, when the weather permitted. Or some people, the Navy SEALs, for instance, were using just ice water to lower the body temperature of the prisoner. They would take his rectal temperature to make sure he didn't die; they would keep him hovering on hypothermia. That was a pretty common technique.

A lot of other, you know, not as common techniques, and certainly not sanctioned, was just beating people or burning them. Not within the prisons, usually. But when the units would go out into people's homes and do these raids, they would just stay in the house and torture them. Because after the scandal, they couldn't trust that, you know, the interrogators were going to do "as good a job," in their words, as they wanted to.

The worst stuff I saw was from the detaining units who would torture people in their homes. They were using things like … burns. They would smash people's feet with the back of an axe-head. They would break bones, ribs, you know. That was serious stuff.

www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/interviews/lagouranis.html

Ann Coulter calls Democrats traitors

In her latest column titled "New Idea for Abortion Party: Aid the Enemy" Ann Coulter once again shows just how vile she really is.

The Democrats are giving aid and comfort to the enemy for no purpose other than giving aid and comfort to the enemy. There is no plausible explanation for the Democrats' behavior other than that they long to see U.S. troops shot, humiliated, and driven from the field of battle.

They fill the airwaves with treason, but when called to vote on withdrawing troops, disavow their own public statements. These people are not only traitors, they are gutless traitors.

www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=10514

Free speech, I suppose, but then Ann does not believe in free speech:

She also criticized the media for being liberal and Democrats for whining about their rights under the First Amendment.

"They're always accusing us of repressing their speech," she said. "I say let's do it. Let's repress them."

She later added, "Frankly, I'm not a big fan of the First Amendment."

www.alligator.org/pt2/051021coulter.php

A very interesting article by Robert Dreyfuss in the November issue of The American Prospect. There is a definite pro-CIA bias, not surprising since most of his sources were former or current CIA officials. Here are a few excerpts:

Since Goss took over, between 30 and 90 senior CIA officials have made their exit, according to various sources, some fleeing into retirement, others taking refuge as consultants.

The agency's vaunted Near East Division, in particular, which served as the "pointy end of the spear," as one CIA veteran put it, in simultaneous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the "global war on terror," has been decimated.

Another former CIA chief of station said: There aren't any Arabists left in the CIA. They're gone. They weren't with the program. It's like Pol Pot, who killed anybody wearing glasses because they might be able to read.

From 2001 on, its covert opertives and analysts were ignored, pressured, and forced to toe the administration's line; neconservative ideologues considered those operatives to be virtually part of the enemy camp. Many of those who remain inside the CIA are distraught, convinced that their work is wasted on an administration that doesn't want to hear the truth."How do you think they feel?" asked one recently retired officer with three decades of experience. "They're watching a fucking idiotic policy, run by idiots, unfold right before their eyes."

Emphasis added.

Although two "official" inquires have found that CIA analysts were not pressured to provide intelligence to support the Bush adminstrations decision to go to war, the CIA itself dissents. Richard Kerr, a 32 year CIA veteran, was brought out of retirement to lead the agency's own internal review, resulting in four reports that have not been made public. Kerr, however, shared the conclusions with the author of this article.

"Everybody felt pressure. A lot of analysts believed that they were being pressured to come to certain conclusions ... There were certainly people who felt they were being pushed beyond the evidence they had."

Michael Scheuer, who headed the Osama bin Laden unit, had this to say:

"I know a lot of people in the Iraq shop who were dissenting. There were people who were disciplined or taken off accounts ... One gentleman that I talked to, a senior Iraq analyst, regrets to this day that he did not go public."

Nonetheless, the CIA got some things right. They concluded that Saddam Hussein did not pose a threat to the U.S. They concluded there there was no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, or between Iraq and 9-11. They concluded that Iraq was not even close to developing nuclear weapons. And they concluded:

Long before the war, the CIA told the White House that if the United States invaded Iraq and carried out a prolonged occupation, it would spark an insurgency like the one now tearing Iraq apart.

It has been clear for at least two years that Bush has pissed of the CIA, which usually does not end well for American presidents. I will close with one last excerpt:

Having clashed early with the Directorate of Operations, Goss has alienated--some say irreparably--the heart of the CIA: its clandestine service.

Clearly the Bush adminstration did not go to war because the CIA provided bad intelligence. They found the intelligence they wanted to support a decision already made. When the CIA was not sufficiently cooperative they created the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon. As the Guardian reported more than two years ago:

According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.

The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.

www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html

Happy Thanksgiving!

If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal." - John F. Kennedy

Albert Camus on Terrorism and Torture

Reprisals against civilian populations and the use of torture are crimes in which we are all involved. The fact that such things could take place among us is a humiliation we must henceforth face. Meanwhile, we must at least refuse to justify such methods, even on the score of efficacy. The moment they are justified, even indirectly, there are no more rules or values; all causes are equally good, and war without aims or laws sanctions the triumph of nihilism.

Torture has perhaps saved some, at the expense of honor, by uncovering thirty bombs, but at the same time it arouses fifty new terrorists who, operating in some other way and in another place, will cause the death of even more innocent people. Even when accepted in the interest of realism and efficacy, such a flouting of honor serves no purpose but to degrade our country in her own eyes and abroad.

But, to be both useful and equitable, we must condemn with equal force and in no uncertain terms the terrorism applied by the F.L.N. to French civilians and indeed, to an even greater degree, to Arab civilians. Such terrorism is a crime that can be neither excused nor allowed to develop.

. . . it seemed to me harmful and indecent to condemn terrorism in the company of those who are not bothered by torture.

www.cadaverpolitik.com/essays/Camus/Algeria/Preface-To-Algerian-Reports.html

I'm with you Barbara. Personally, I prefer to waste my beautiful mind on images like this:

“Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951” - Federal Documents

By John Buchanan and Stacey Michaelfrom

The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 3, November 7, 2003

After the seizures in late 1942 of five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, failed to divest himself of more than a dozen "enemy national" relationships that continued until as late as 1951, newly-discovered U.S. government documents reveal.

Furthermore, the records show that Bush and his colleagues routinely attempted to conceal their activities from government investigators.

Bush's partners in the secret web of Thyssen-controlled ventures included former New York Governor W. Averell Harriman and his younger brother, E. Roland Harriman. Their quarter-century of Nazi financial transactions, from 1924-1951, were conducted by the New York private banking firm, Brown Brothers Harriman.

The White House did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Although the additional seizures under the Trading with the Enemy Act did not take place until after the war, documents from The National Archives and Library of Congress confirm that Bush and his partners continued their Nazi dealings unabated. These activities included a financial relationship with the German city of Hanover and several industrial concerns. They went undetected by investigators until after World War Two.

At the same time Bush and the Harrimans were profiting from their Nazi partnerships, W. Averell Harriman was serving as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's personal emissary to the United Kingdom during the toughest years of the war. On October 28, 1942, the same day two key Bush-Harriman-runbusinesses were being seized by the U.S. government, Harriman was meeting in London with Field Marshall Smuts to discuss the war effort.

Denial and Deceit

While Harriman was concealing his Nazi relationships from his government colleagues, Cornelius Livense, the top executive of the interlocking German concerns held under the corporate umbrella of Union Banking Corporation (UBC), repeatedly tried to mislead investigators, and was sometimes supported in his subterfuge by Brown Brothers Harriman.

All of the assets of UBC and its related businesses belonged to Thyssen-controlled enterprises, including his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam, the documents state.Nevertheless, Livense, president of UBC, claimed to have no knowledge of such a relationship. " Strangely enough, (Livense) claims he does not know the actual ownership of the company," states a government report.H.D Pennington, manager of Brown Brothers Harriman and a director of UBC "for many years," also lied to investigators about the secret and well-concealed relationship with Thyssen's Dutch bank, according to the documents.

Investigators later reported that the company was "wholly owned" by Thyssen's Dutch bank.

Despite such ongoing subterfuge, U.S. investigators were able to show that "a careful examination of UBC's general ledger, cash books and journals from 1919 until the present date clearly establish that the principal and practically only source of funds has been Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart."

In yet another attempt to mislead investigators, Livense said that $240,000 in banknotes in a safe deposit box at Underwriters Trust Co. in New York had been given to him by another UBC-Thyssen associate, H.J. Kouwenhoven, managing
director of Thyssen's Dutch bank and a director of the August Thyssen Bank in Berlin. August Thyssen was Fritz's father.

The government report shows that Livense first neglected to report the $240,000, then claimed that it had been given to him as a gift by Kouwenhoven. However, by the time Livense filed a financial disclosure with U.S. officials, he changed his story again and reported the sum as a debt rather than a cash holding.In yet another attempt to deceive the governments of both the U.S. and Canada, Livense and his partners misreported the facts about the sale of a Canadian Nazi front enterprise, La Cooperative Catholique des Consommateurs de Combustible, which imported German coal into Canada via the web of Thyssen-controlled U.S. businesses."

The Canadian authorities, however, were not taken in by this maneuver," a U.S. government report states. The coal company was later seized by Canadian authorities.

After the war, a total of 18 additional Brown Brothers Harriman and UBC-related client assets were seized under The Trading with the Enemy Act, including several that showed the continuation of a relationship with the Thyssen family after the initial 1942 seizures.

The records also show that Bush and the Harrimans conducted business after the war with related concerns doing business in or moving assets into Switzerland, Panama, Argentina and Brazil - all critical outposts for the flight of Nazi capital after Germany's surrender in 1945. Fritz Thyssen died in Argentina in 1951.

One of the final seizures, in October 1950, concerned the U.S. assets of a Nazi baroness named Theresia Maria Ida Beneditka Huberta Stanislava Martina von
Schwarzenberg, who also used two shorter aliases. Brown Brothers Harriman, where Prescott Bush and the Harrimans were partners, attempted to convince government investigators that the baroness had been a victim of Nazi persecution and therefore should be allowed to maintain her assets."

It appears, rather, that the subject was a member of the Nazi party," government investigators concluded.

At the same time the last Brown Brothers Harriman client assets were seized, Prescott Bush announced his Senate campaign that led to his election in 1952.

Investigation Investigated?

In 1943, six months after the seizure of UBC and its related companies, a government investigator noted in a Treasury Department memo dated April 8, 1943 that the FBI had inquired about the status of any investigation into Bush and the Harrimans."

I gave 'a memorandum' which did not say anything about the American officers of subject," the investigator wrote. "(Another investigator) wanted to know whether any specific action had been taken by us with respect to them."

No further action beyond the initial seizures was ever taken, and the newly confirmed records went unseen by the American people for six decades.

What Does It All Mean?

So why are the documents relevant today?"

The story of Prescott Bush and Brown Brothers Harriman is an introduction to the real history of our country," says L.A. art book publisher and historian Edward Boswell. "It exposes the money-making motives behind our foreign policies, dating back a full century. The ability of Prescott Bush and the Harrimans to bury their checkered pasts also reveals a collusion between Wall Street and the media that exists to this day."

Sheldon Drobny, a Chicago entrepreneur and philanthropist who will soon launch a liberal talk radio network, says the importance of the new documents is that they prove a long pattern of Bush family war profiteering that continues today via George H.W. Bush's intimate relationship with the Saudi royal family and the bin Ladens, conducted via the super-secret Carlyle Group, whose senior advisers include former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

In the post-9/11 world, Drobny finds the Bush-Saudi connection deeply troubling. "Trading with the enemy is trading with the enemy," he says. "That's the relevance of the documents and what they show."

Lawrence Lader, an abortion rights activist and the author of more than 40 books, says "the relevance lies with the fact that the sitting President of the United States would lead the nation to war based on lies and against the wishes of the rest of the world." Lader and others draw comparisons between President Bush's invasion of Iraq and Hitler's occupation of Poland in 1939 - the event that sparked World War Two.

However, others see an even larger significance.

"The discovery of the Bush-Nazi documents raises new questions about the role of Prescott Bush and his influential business partners in the secret emigration of Nazi war criminals, which allowed them to escape justice in Germany," says Bob Fertik, co-founder of Democrats.com and an amateur 'Nazi hunter.' "It also raises questions about the importance of Nazi recruits to the CIA in its early years, in what was called Operation Paperclip, and Prescott Bush's role in that dark operation."


Fertik and others, including former Justice Department Nazi war crimes prosecutor John Loftus, a Constitutional attorney in Miami, and a former Veterans Administration official, believe Prescott Bush and the Harrimans should have been tried for treason.

What Next?

Now, say Fertik and Loftus, there should be a Congressional investigation into the Bush family's Nazi past and its concealment from the American people for 60 years."

The American people have a right to know, in detail, about this hidden chapter of our history," says Loftus, author of The Secret War Against the Jews. "That's the only way we can understand it and deal with it."

For his part, Fertik is pessimistic that even a Congressional investigation can thwart the war profiteering of the present Bush White House. "It's impossible to stop it," he says, "when the worst war profiteers are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who operate in secrecy behind the vast powers of the White House."

Blakey Loses Confidence in the CIA

The committee's chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, whose main suspect remains the late New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, explained his loss of confidence in the CIA in a talk Saturday night. The committee had relied on the late George Joannides, a CIA officer called out of retirement, to help it find and review CIA documents during its investigation. But the agency never told the committee that Joannides had been the case officer for a CIA-funded anti-Castro exile group that had contacts with Oswald and an ostensible confrontation with him in New Orleans before the assassination.

"The agency set me up," Blakey said. Joannides, he recalled, frequently blocked the efforts of the House panel's young researchers to obtain relevant CIA records, but when they complained to him, Blakey said he accepted the CIA's assurances that his aides were being too pushy and suspicious. Looking back on it, he said, "I have no confidence in anything the agency told me."

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Dyck said the agency had no immediate comment.

(Emphasis added)

WARS AND RUMORS OF WARS

Gingrich sees Iran threat to U.S. like Nazi Germany
Ex-speaker latest official to raise alarm on threat of nuclear EMP attack by Tehran
www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47501

WASHINGTON – The threat posed to the national security of the United States by Iran was likened only to the one posed by Nazi Germany in the 1930s, by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who suggested Tehran could be planning for a pre-emptive nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack on America that would turn a third or more of the country "back to a 19th century level of development.".

I guess we better get them before they get us.

"We also have to work sort of the dark side. It's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically." --Dick Cheney quoted in Time magazine.

"Luke . . . . You do not know the power of "sort of" going over to the dark side."

Our Fearless Leader

Admiral Stansfield Turner calls Bush a liar

Speaking of Bush's claims that the US does not use torture, Admiral Turner, who ran the CIA from 1977 to 1981, said: "I do not believe him".

www.itv.com/news/index_1447362.html

Neither do I.

The Strange Death of Dr. Mary Sherman

On July 21, 1964 the body of Dr. Mary Sherman was found in her apartment after Juan Valdes, a Cuban customs house broker, phoned the police. According to Joan Mellen in A Farewell to Justice:

Mary Sherman's body was found with unspeakable wounds: on the right side of her body, flesh and bone had evaporated so that her right rib cage and all of her right arm had disintegrated. The massive conflagration necessary to cause her bones to evaporate would have converted the entire apartment complex to ashes had her injuries been inflicted at the Patios. Yet the curtains hadn't even caught on fire.

Mary Sherman, however, was not killed by spontaneous human combustion. The immediate cause of death was a knife wound in the heart. Ed Haslam, in his book Mary, Ferrie and the Monkey Virus, speculates that Dr. Mary Sherman was so tragically disfigured in either an accident or act of sabotage at a linear particle accelerator at the soon to be vacated U.S. Public Health Hospital, where he believes some sort of covert research took place.

Mr. and Mrs. Owen Hawes were neighbors of Juan Valdes during the summer of 1963. Mrs. Hawes got to know Valdes who asked her to accept packages for him. Also, he asked to use her phone for long distance calls, although he had his own phone. Many of the calls were to Cuba and Miami.

One day a caller appeared at her door asking, "Is this Juan's apartment?" In one of history's strange coincidences she recognized him. They had attended Beauregard Junior High School together. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald, although she had known him as "Harvey." After that, she saw Lee Oswald frequently with Juan Valdes. Victoria Hawes also observed that both Oswald and Valdes were friendly with Dr. Mary Sherman.

(According to researcher John Armstrong, in his mammoth book Harvey and Lee, school records show that Oswald attended Beauregard Junior High School beginning in the Fall of 1953. Oddly, other records show that at the same time Oswald attended PS#44 in New York. Armstrong theorizes that there were in fact two people sharing the identity of Lee Harvey Oswald as far back as Junior High School.) This seems unlikely but I do not have a better explanation.

CIA-linked reporter Hoke May told journalist Don Lee Keith that Mary Sherman had been a close friend of David Ferrie, an associate of Guy Banister, whose detective agency served as a focal point for CIA activities in New Orleans, some apparently involving Lee Harvey Oswald. At this time Oswald was contacting anti-Castro Cubans, while demonstrating in favor of Castro.

From The Wayne Madsen Report:

U.S. intelligence sources: Sexually-explicit photos at Abu Ghraib special ordered by a homosexual and pedophile ring inside the BushWhite House

There is good reason for the embarrassment of the Pentagon in the affair. The orders to take the sexually-oriented photos and videos, some of which involve teenage Iraqi boys and girls and sodomization by their guards, came directly from a pedophile and closeted male homosexual ring operating in the White House, according to the intelligence sources. Copies of the tapes and photos were sent directly to the White House for the entertainment of senior members of the Bush WhiteHouse, including officials in the Vice President's office and the Executive Office of the President.

Bush Breakdown!

What every American needs to know.

President Bush is drinking heavily again as he's overwhelmed by crisis after crisis, GLOBE has learned exclusively. "Bush is breaking down. He's boozing and that's a dangerous personal situation, " a source tells us. "It's an open secret in the Inner circle, no one is happy about it. He's fallen back into it. He's under so much stress that he just cracked. The White House is hiding this from America. They don't want anyone to know.

"The President is hanging in there by a thread thanks to Laura's unwavering support." Shockingly, insiders have even whispered that the president has been seeing atherapist to help hm cope and in several emotional outbusts, told Laura he just can't take it anymore.

In one outburst, a source reveals that Bush "actually had tears in his eyes as he said, "I'd just walk away from all of this if I could. The price is too high!"

Oswald and U.S. Customs

Joan Mellen, in her new book A Farewell to Justice, reveals that Lee Harvey Oswald was not only an FBI informant, and an employee of CIA contract agent Guy Banister, but also had an affiliation with U.S. Customs. Bar owner and FBI informant Orestes Pena testified under oath that he saw Oswald with Customs officials on a regular basis. His handler at Customs was a man named David Smith.

In the morning, Pena revealed, Oswald frequented a Greek restaurant on Decatur and Iberville with "other federal agents from the Customs House Building," which housed FBI, ONI, CIA and Immigration. At least ten or twelve times, Pena testified, he observed Oswald having breakfast with his Customs handlers. He had witnessed his own handler Warren de Brueys at that same Greek restaurant when Oswald was there with federal agents. "I believe they knew each other very, very well," Pena said of Oswald and de Brueys...

Pena had also observed Oswald, de Brueys, David and Wendall Roache of the Immigration Service leave the restaurant and head for the Customs House building."

So explosive were Pena's revelations about Oswald's relationships with Customs officers that Pena's files were systematically destroyed by the FBI in a multicity effort that stretched across Europe. A document survives, a teletype directed to J. Edgar Hoover, dated January 14, 1976: "Rome file regarding Orestes Pena: IS-Cuba' Destroyed."

After the assassination David Smith was transferred to Uruguay. Wendall Roache was moved to Puerto Rico. When Roach was finally contacted by the Church Committee in 1975, he said, "I've been waiting twelve years to talk to someone about this." His testimony remains classified to this day.

Another document from the files of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission.

Our Fearless Leader

From a man who knows:

From a post today on John Simkins JFK forum (see links) from legendary retired soldier-of-fortune Gerry Patrick Hemming:

Most of what is in print, including what is at NARA is "Legend" and "backstop" files !! CYA flows through the blood of the Intel Community -- when it clots, we get 9/11s !!

NARA is the National Archives and Records Adminstration.

Ex-KGB Colonel: Leaders of the USA and Israel Were Victims of Conspiracy
www.axisglobe.com/article.asp?article=474

The link above is to a rather poorly written article which attempts to give the impression that the KGB was behind the JFK assassination, with references to the long-discredited theories of Michael Eddowes the author of Khrushchev killed Kennedy, and the man whose theories led to the exhumation of the body of Lee Harvey Oswald.

What is of interest in this article is that it gives the views of a high-ranking former KGB officer, Dmitry Fonarev, as related to the Russian publication Moscowski Komsomolets. Read carefully, the statements of Fonarev do not support the theory of KGB involvement in the assassination--to the contrary.

American President John Kennedy and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin were killed as a result of a plot, the former high-ranking KGB officer Dmitry Fonarev declared yesterday in the interview to the Russian edition "Moscowski Komsomolets". He clearly specified that in both cases the plots were hatched by the supreme levels of state leadership, or by the secret services. In 1982-91 Fonarev served in 9-th Department of the KGB charged with security of the first persons of the state.

Anyway, it is curious that two weeks prior to the 42-nd anniversary of Kennedy's murder the former bodyguard of the Soviet heads decided to speak up. It is also interesting that Dmitry Fonarev speaks not only on his own behalf: "From our point of view, it was a plot." In confirmation of his version, an authoritative professional, he marks: "The route of Kennedy's ride was changed at the last moment. This means that security simply had no opportunity to check up the route. The feeling is that the President was intentionally brought to this street where the murder awaited."

Then, in the ballistic laboratory of the Moscow department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs a special investigation of circumstances of Kennedy's death was carried out. According to the conclusion of the Soviet experts, the bullets that killed the US President where not shot by Oswald, but someone else shooting from completely another position.

Fourenev also gives his views on the assassination of Robert Kennedy:

The recent interview in the "Moscowski Komsomolets" newspaper is not the first time when Dmitry Fonarev sounds rather non-standard comments concerning attempts at the statesmen in the various countries of the world. It is curious that, as a rule, he talks on this issue during his conversations with the journalists of "Moscowski Komsomolets". In the interview to the same edition, in March 2001 Fonarev stated the version of murder of the brother of the late President Kennedy and a favorite of presidential pre-election race Robert Kennedy in June, 5, 1968. Under the official version, the murderer was the 24-years old immigrant of the Palestinian origin from Jordan Sirhan Abu Hattar (known in the West as Sirhan Sirhan). He shot his victim almost at a point-blank before the eyes of the numerous security men and journalists. However, the former bodyguard of the Soviet heads categorically rejects the official version. As he said: "Sirhan was shooting, but he missed, and Robert was casually shot by his security guard…".

The Axis Globe also attempts to give its own interpretation on this, derived from its own "Israeli sources":

Sirhan Abu Hattar came from East Jerusalem, which up to 1967 was a part of Jordanian Kingdom. He lived in the USA since 1957, but starting from 1964 frequently visited the Middle East. His trips and contacts have drawn attention of the Jordanian and Israeli secret services. According to our Israeli sources, archival materials of that period testify that in Lebanon and Jordan Abu Hattar had connections with activists of left-wing radical fraction "Al-Qaumiun Al-Arab" (Arab Nationalists Movement.) Besides, in 1967 in a secret apartment in the south of Beirut he met the assistant to the trade attaché of the Soviet embassy Vladimir Vasiliev,who was actually the representative of the KGB "residentura" in Lebanon.

Fourenev then gives his view on the Rabin assassination:

In his interview, Dmitry Fonarev together with John Kennedy's murder mentioned the killing of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He died in November, 1995, under the official version from the hands of the lone Jewish terrorist Yigal Amir. As Fonarev said: "In this case we also see that it was plot ". The President of the Russian association of bodyguards explains this version by a fact that "Rabin was shot practically at point-blank when he was standing between two security guards. The one who worked on such a post it is obvious that it is impossible."

After which the author of the Axis Globe article also attempts to link Rabin's alleged assassin to the KGB.

By the way, similarly to Oswald, shortly before an attempt at the Prime Minister, Yigal Amir have spent rather long time in the territory of the former USSR...

The views of Dmitry Fonarev, an intelligence professional, regarding the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin are extremely interesting and certainly make sense. The attempts of Axis Globe to twist the story so as to blame the KGB for the assassinations are deplorable and unsupported, although I am grateful that they reported Fonarev's comments, as originally made to the Russian-language publication Moscowski Komsomolets.

War Crimes in Iraq

US forces 'used chemical weapons' during assault on city of Fallujah
By Peter Popham Published: 08 November 2005

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article325560.ece

Stories that the United States military used napalm and white phosphorus in the attack on Fallujah have been circulating for a year. Initial reports were from Islamic websites and were firmly denied by the United States government. But now "new information has surfaced, including hideous photographs and videos and interviews with American soldiers who took part in the Fallujah attack, which provides graphic proof that phosphorus shells were widely deployed in the city as a weapon."

A U.S. soldier had this to say:

"Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a radius of 150 metres is done for."

Photographs on the website of RaiTG24, the broadcaster's 24-hours news channel, www.rainews24.it, show exactly what the former soldier means. Provided by the Studies Centre of Human Rights in Fallujah, dozens of high-quality, colour close-ups show bodies of Fallujah residents, some still in their beds, whose clothes remain largely intact but whose skin has been dissolved or caramelised or turned the consistency of leather by the shells.

A war based on lies, the military occupation of another country whose people do not want us there, reports of torture and war crimes. Fears that our government will expand that war into neighboring countries. The lessons of history, the lessons of Vietnam, are lost on this administration. It is time to protest.

Thanks to Larry C. Johnson of No Quarter (see links) for clearing this up. Mr. Johnson is a counter-terrorism expert who has worked previously with the CIA.

For starters, why can’t conservative talkers and bloggers accept the fact that Valerie Plame was undercover until exposed in Bob Novak’s column? Patrick Fitzgerald spoke in English and did not stutter when he said very clearly at the start of his press conference last Friday, “Valerie Wilson’s cover was blown”. You can only blow a cover if a cover exists.

Then there is the claim that the law to protect intelligence identities could not have been violated because Valerie Wilson had not lived overseas for six years. Too bad this is not what the law stipulates. The law actually requires that a covered person “served” overseas in the last five years. Served does not mean lived. In the case of Valerie Wilson, energy consultant for Brewster-Jennings, she traveled overseas in 2003, 2002, and 2001, as part of her cover job. She met with folks who worked in the nuclear industry, cultivated sources, and managed spies. She was a national security asset until exposed by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

How about the charge that Joe Wilson lied because he denied that it was his wife who got him sent to Niger in February 2002 to check out claims that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium? Ladies and gentlemen, pay close attention—CIA officials in July 2003 and in July 2005 have said on the record that Valerie Wilson played no role in the decision to send Joe Wilson to Niger. Although the Senate Intelligence Committee report from July of 2004 tried to insinuate otherwise, Valerie’s bosses asked her to write a memo outlining her husband’s qualifications for a mission to Niger and she introduced her husband at a meeting (and then left). She was an undercover case officer, not a manager with the authority to make such a decision.

To read the whole article:

Full story

From the archives of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commision. Notice that it says "A custom's agent in Lorado is reported to have stated that Oswald was in Mexico from Sept. 26 to Oct. 3." Joan Mellen in A Farewell to Justice presents strong evidence that Oswald was actually an agent of Customs.

QKENCHANT

From A Farewell To Justice, by Joan Mellen, p.132, quoting from CIA documents:

In 1952, Shaw had been cleared for project QKENCHANT, along with E. Howard Hunt and Monroe Sullivan, his San Francisco host during the weekend of the assassination. QKENCHANT authorized trusted CIA personnel for clearance to recruit or enlist "civilians," people not officially with the Agency, to discuss "projects, activities and possible relationships." It supported "an array of CIA activities.: An author named Hugh Chisholm McDonald was cleared under QKENCHANT to be "used for intelligence procurement."

QKENCHANT clearance meant you were a safe contact, and could be utilized as a "cutout" with the CIA giving you only a certain amount of information. You might be told to contact someoneyou didn't know. You might not know the planner of an operation or its ultimate sponsors. You might know something about who is running an operation, but not everything. But QKENCHANT, in CIA's own words, was an "operational project."

Shaw, then, could recruit other agents, granting them security approvals. His QKENCHANT records resided not with Domestic Contact, but in the Agency's "operational files." Shaw used his QKENCHANT clearance "to plan or coordinate CIA activities", as well as to "initiate relationships with ...non-Agency persons or institutions." Shaw was part of the Agency's clandestine services with Covert Security Approval, working under cover.

Among those who Shaw recruited under his QKENCHANT clearance was Guy Banister. The date was August 1960. A recently uncovered "Secret" CIA document reveals that Guy Banister Associates, Inc., was of interest to the Agency "for QKENCHANT purposes."

The Louisiana Psychoanalytic Association

Thomas H. Purvis today posted this document along with this commentary:

The "Intelligence Agency" was nothing more than a "Front" which has at time becomes known in NO, among those aware of it, as the "Garrison Detective Agency".

As you can see, Garrison was smart enough to file the Corporation as a "Non-Profit" entity. Which thereafter eliminated the need for various State & Federal document submission.

As a separate "Corporation", Garrison was thereby personally protected by the laws which separate the Corporate entity from the personal entity.

And, although the Corporation may have received funds which derived from it's activities, Garrison was responsible only for filing documentation relative to salaries paid to it's employees.

Therefore, good ole Mr. Jack Martin/aka Suggs, could be paid a salary from the "Detective Agency" /Intelligence Agency activities, and all other funds received expended as "expenses" related to the "Non-Profit" status of the corportion.

In that regard, one might want to look at how much of the New Orleans Taxpayers monies/DA budget was expended into "Investigation". Also, this kept Martin/Suggs happily employed with more than adequate funds to keep him on the "happy" sideline, out out of the line of fire and away from "inquiring minds".

In that regard, it is also no coincidence, (some would obviously call it irrelevant) that prior to his employment with the "Garrison-Intelligence-Agency", Mr. Martin/aka Suggs was a part of the phony front organization "Louisiana-Psychoanalytic-Association".

It is also "possibly" irrelevant that the co-founder/registered agent with Martin in this venture was none other than Thomas Juse Baumler, father to the "Hon" Thomas J. Baumler, Jr of the Garrison-Intelligence-Agency.

The Garrison Intelligence Agency

Thomas H. Purvis has been posting on John Simkin's JFK forum (see links) for several months now. His posts have consisted of scattered bits of information that has been difficult to put together. Yesterday he posted this document which caught my eye. Thomas Baumler is an extreme rightwinger who worked for Guy Banister. Harold Weisberg described him this way:

He delineated a self-portrait of an unabashed facist, congenital and conscious. He is aware of the meaning of his beliefs and considers what he describes as his beliefs as proper. He is an exponent of the rights of power. (HSCA Record# 1801007610190)

Jack Martin also worked with Banister and Ferrie. Joan Mellen, in her new book A Farewell to Justice presents evidence that Martin was CIA, and much more important than previously realized. Another piece of the puzzle.