Seymour Hersh on Iran:

The “intelligence community keeps on saying, ‘There’s no bomb there.’ And Cheney keeps on saying to the young briefing officers, ‘Thank you son, I don’t buy that.’” Hersh added, “George Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s wet dream is hitting Iran.”

“The equivalent of the Pentagon Papers exist in safes all over Washington, not only in the Pentagon, but in the CIA, the State Department and elsewhere. My message is to them: Take the risk, reveal the truth under the lies of your own bosses and your superiors, obey your oath to the Constitution, which every one of those officials took, not to the commander in chief, but to the Constitution of the United States.”

--Daniel Ellsberg

"What we have seen since 9/11 is the constitutional government being replaced by deep government."-- Peter Dale Scott

"I find it very hard to believe that the Bush administration either let or made it happen. It's clear that people within government were involved, but we should avoid condemning an entire administration.""

There is a whole milieu of Saudi capital allied with Texas capital . . . somewhere within the Saudi/Texas/Geneva [banking] milieu there is the place for a meta-group . . . with resources necessary for a successful plot."

"This is the worst cover-up in the history of the military," said an unidentified military health officer who fears for his job.

A shot from a syringe is leaving some U.S. servicemen and women on the brink of death.

The Nation: Where's the CIA's Missing Jewel?

"The No. 1 jewel of the CIA's Office of Security is probably a pretty good one--especially since the second jewel in this list is the Roselli/Castro assassination program," says Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a public interest outfit that filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the "Family Jewels" fifteen years ago.

Most of the media seems to have missed the most important part of the story, that Jewel #1 is still secret. In other words, the fact that the CIA conspired with the Mafia to kill Castro was not the Agency's most important secret.

Oswald's Confession

Shock-pundit Ann Coulter dismayed her right-wing fans today when she admitted to being a cross-dressing man in Thursday's press conference. "This started as a joke, as satire, and I think that it has just gone to far." he said to a startled press.

I knew it!

The Prissy Patriot on Dick Cheney and the DC Madame

5:15 PM Update-from a VERY reliable source...and friend emailed this:

Yes, I have 3 confirmations, 1 from Pentagon, 2 from CIA that (Dick) Cheney was a client.

Cheney and possibly up to 3 GOP presidential candidates are on the list, or "a list" of clients. There were more than one escort service in those days operating in DC among the VIP community.

Via Cannonfire

JFK: Warrior for Peace

"I thought and I still feel that the CIA did wet work on its own," says John Seigenthaler, Robert Kennedy's administrative aide at the Justice Department and later publisher of the Tennessean. "They were way too in thrall to 007... We were caught in the reality of the cold war, and the agency obviously had a role to play. But I don't think the Kennedys believed you could trust much of what they said. We were trying to find our way out of the cold war, but the CIA certainly didn't want to."

Nor did President Kennedy have a firm hand on the Pentagon. "Certainly we did not control the Joint Chiefs of Staff," said Schlesinger, looking back at the Kennedy White House. It was a chilling observation, considering the throbbing nuclear tensions of the period. The former White House aide revealed that J.F.K. was less afraid of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's ordering a surprise attack than he was "that something would go wrong in a Dr. Strangelove kind of way"—with a politically unstable U.S. general snapping and launching World War III.

Kennedy often said he wanted his epitaph to be "He kept the peace."

CIA: The Family Jewels (703 pages)

Keeping Track of All the Redactions

Flash: CIA Family Jewel # 1 missing.

On Tuesday, June 26, 2007 the CIA released a memo from the CIA Director of Security to the CIA Management Committee ( CIA Director, Deputy Director, etc.) The memo lists “illegal operations” conducted by the CIA from March 1959 to June 1964. These projects are what the CIA considers the “skeletons” in the CIA closet. The memo entitled the list “FAMILY JEWELS.” JEWEL # 1 is presumably the most important and egregious on the list. Yet, it is still completely censored 35+ years after the memo was written. Given the other items on the list include CIA-Mafia plots against Fidel Castro and the role of Attorney General Robert Kennedy is planning assassinations, why is JEWEL #1 still censored? To see this page, click JEWEL # 1. Following the summary list are explanations of each item. Every single word of the 3 page description of JEWEL # 1 is completely censored. Every single word. What are they hiding 35 years later?

FOX News anchor Brit Hume surfaced in CIA documents revealed this week. Hume once worked with Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Jack Anderson and shows up in the documents as "Eggnog." The documents show that the CIA surveilled Anderson, Hume and other journalists in 1972.

Military reviews placing special ops on U.S. soil

The U.S. military command in charge of protecting the homeland asked the Pentagon earlier this year for a contingent of special operations officers to help with domestic anti-terrorism missions.

William Arkin, national security expert for the Washington Post comments:

Special Operations Prepared for Domestic Missions

The establishment of a domestic special operations mission, and the preparation of contingency plans to employ commandos in the United States, would upend decades of tradition. Military actions within the United States are the responsibility of state militias (the National Guard), and federal law enforcement is a function of the FBI.

Employing special operations for domestic missions sounds very ominous, and NORTHCOM's request earlier this year should receive the closest possible Pentagon and congressional scrutiny. There's only one problem: NORTHCOM is already doing what it has requested permission to do.

Afghanistan produced dramatically more opium in 2006, increasing its yield by roughly 49 percent from a year earlier and pushing global opium production to a new record high, a U.N. report said Tuesday.

The big question right now among Republicans is how to remove Vice President Cheney from office.

Iranian forces 'crossed Iraqi border'...

(now at the top of the Drudge Report)

Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces have been spotted by British troops crossing the border into southern Iraq, The Sun tabloid reported on Tuesday.

Britain's defence ministry would not confirm or deny the report, with a spokesman declining to comment on "intelligence matters".

An unidentified intelligence source told the tabloid: "It is an extremely alarming development and raises the stakes considerably. In effect, it means we are in a full on war with Iran -- but nobody has officially declared it."

"We have hard proof that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have crossed the border to attack us. It is very hard for us to strike back. All we can do is try to defend ourselves. We are badly on the back foot."

Urbicide in Baqubah

There is a new detailed analysis out on the "War and Operation in Iraq" written by the Global Policy Forum and some thirty non-governmental-organizations. It is impeccable sourced on mainstream news accounts and official reports.

The currently ongoing "pacification" of Baqubah, a city with 300,000 inhabitants, by some 10,000 U.S. troops is using the same methods as documented in the NGO report with regard to Fallujah and a dozen other Iraqi cities. From the executive summary (pdf):

US Coalition forces have attacked and destroyed a number of important Iraqi cities, on grounds that they were “insurgent strongholds.” The attacks have resulted in the massive displacement of people, large civilian casualties, and colossal destruction of the urban physical infrastructure. In addition to Falluja, there have been assaults on a dozen other cities including al-Qaim, Tal Afar, Samarra, Haditha, and Ramadi. The attacks include intensive air and ground bombardment and cutting-off electricity, water, food and medicines. The attacks have left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and in displacement camps.

Let’s Talk Really Crazy, Now

X. Dell of The X Spot is currently running a series about "Targeted Individuals" (TIs). Are they crazy or is someone out to get them?

By and large, TIs are quite aware that the incidents they report are bizarre, and mimic point-for-point those found in the reports of people who are actually schizophrenic. The awareness of this causes them a great deal of frustration.

Is your cell phone spying on you?

I'm not as paranoid as the people who are after me think I am.

Israel braces for July war with up to five enemies

JERUSALEM — Israel is preparing for an imminent war with Iran, Syria and/or their non-state clients.

Israeli military intelligence has projected that a major attack could come from any of five adversaries in the Middle East. Officials said such a strike could spark a war as early as July 2007.

On Sunday, Israeli military intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin told the Cabinet that the Jewish state faces five adversaries in what could result in an imminent confrontation. Yadlin cited Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and Al Qaida.

And then Jesus comes.

The CIA's Family Jewels

CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden announced today that the Agency is declassifying the full 693-page file amassed on CIA's illegal activities by order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973--the so-called "family jewels." Only a few dozen heavily-censored pages of this file have previously been declassified, although multiple Freedom of Information Act requests have been filed over the years for the documents. Gen. Hayden called the file "a glimpse of a very different time and a very different Agency." The papers are scheduled for public release on Monday, June 25.

Francis Boyle, an international law authority at the University of Illinois, Champaign, says pursuant to national strategy directives adopted by Bush in 2002, the Pentagon "is now gearing up to fight and 'win' biological warfare without prior public knowledge and review." Boyle said the Pentagon's Chemical and Biological Defense Program was revised in 2003 to endorse "first-use" strike in war. Boyle said the program includes Red Teaming, which he described as "plotting, planning, and scheming how to use biowarfare."

Vice President Exempts His Office from the Requirements for Protecting Classified Information

Washington, D.C. — The Oversight Committee has learned that over the objections of the National Archives, Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch.”

Which branch of government does his office fall under, I wonder?

A transit agency chief apologized Wednesday to two teenage girls who were kicked off a city bus for kissing each other.

New Roswell Evidence

Walter Haut was a first lieutenant assigned to the Roswell Army Air Field in July, 1947. He wrote the first press release that introduced the alleged Roswell UFO crash to the public. Haut signed an affadavit to be released only after his death. He died in 2005. This is part of it:

(12) Before leaving the base, Col. Blanchard took me personally to Building 84 [AKA Hangar P-3], a B-29 hangar located on the east side of the tarmac. Upon first approaching the building, I observed that it was under heavy guard both outside and inside. Once inside, I was permitted from a safe distance to first observe the object just recovered north of town. It was approx. 12 to 15 feet in length, not quite as wide, about 6 feet high, and more of an egg shape. Lighting was poor, but its surface did appear metallic. No windows, portholes, wings, tail section, or landing gear were visible.

(13) Also from a distance, I was able to see a couple of bodies under a canvas tarpaulin. Only the heads extended beyond the covering, and I was not able to make out any features. The heads did appear larger than normal and the contour of the canvas suggested the size of a 10 year old child. At a later date in Blanchard's office, he would extend his arm about 4 feet above the floor to indicate the height.

(14) I was informed of a temporary morgue set up to accommodate the recovered bodies.

The U.S. military acknowledged "an increasing pattern of attacks" against the Green Zone, a day after a mortar barrage against the heavily fortified area sent soldiers and contractors scrambling for cover.

Piglipstick has a funny post on Bad Ad Placement. Click on the link for more examples.

Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

Large teams of newly trained suicide bombers are being sent to the United States and Europe, according to evidence contained on a new videotape obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

Janis Karpinski, former head of Abu Ghraib prison, has told a Spanish newspaper that she is willing to testify that Rumsfeld "personally authorized" torture at Abu Ghraib.

Seymour Hersh on General Taguba

“From what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups,” Taguba told me. His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. “These M.P. troops were not that creative,” he said. “Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.”

“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

Joseph Trento Reviews New Book

There is truly astonishing information in this book. You will learn that Hoover was frantic to bury the John Kennedy and Oswald cases because he was trying to cover up the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald has been a paid FBI informant. Hersh has no document to support the Oswald informant story, but he skillfully interviewed a top FBI counterintelligence official who read files confirming that Oswald was on the Bureau payroll when he was in New Orleans. This is a vital lead that reporters should follow-up.

I can independently confirm that Hoover had tried to spy on the activities of the Warren Commission investigating JFK’s death. My late friend and co-author, Lt. Col. William R. Corson, who worked for the commission used to complain about how Hoover had tried to spy on the commission. Thanks to Hersh we now know why. This means that rather than look into the possibility that the Soviets may have been behind Kennedy’s murder, the Director of the FBI had to cover up the Bureau’s relationship with Oswald.

Bobby and J. Edgar: The Bitter Face-Off Between The Kennedys and Hoover

GIs May Be in Iraq for a Decade: General

US forces could be needed in Iraq for a decade to battle insurgents, the top coalition commander said Sunday while vowing a "forthright" review in September on whether a troop surge is working.

Speaking on Fox News, General David Petraeus said there was broad recognition in Washington that Iraq's daunting challenges would not be resolved "in a year or even two years."

"In fact, typically, I think historically, counter-insurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10 years," he said.

"The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted."

--Christopher Hitchens,

god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Obama Girl has a crush on Obama

US Official: Samarra Attack May Have Been Inside Job

Baquba, Iraq - Authorities have evidence that Wednesday's bombing of Al-Askariya Mosque in Samarra was an inside job, and 15 members of the Iraqi security forces have been arrested, a U.S. military official said.
Two minarets were destroyed at the revered Shiite shrine, the military said, in a repeat of the 2006 bombing that sparked Iraq's current wave of deadly sectarian violence. There was no immediate word on casualties in the city north of Baghdad.

The U.S. military official, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, told CNN's Karl Penhaul that he believes members of the Iraqi security forces who were guarding the site either assisted or directly took part in helping al Qaeda insurgents place and detonate explosives at the mosque's minarets.

"He told me there was no evidence at all that this was an attack using mortars or anything of the like and said, in his words, that this was an inside job," Penhaul, who's embedded with U.S. troops in Baquba, told CNN's "American Morning."

More and more, I am beginning to wonder: Who or what is al Qaeda?

UFOs, Walt Disney and "The Aviary"

Writer/researcher Gus Russo, the author of several books, including one dealing with the JFK assassination, Live By The Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK , has written a most interesting article The Real ‘X-Files’ about UFOs and some members of the US Intelligence community. A few excerpts:

The mystery seems to have its origins in 1956... and in the most unlikely of settings: the office of Ward Kimball, one of Walt Disney’s key animators. At a 1979 UFO symposium in San Francisco, Kimball told how the US Air Force had approached Disney to make a UFO documentary, the ostensible purpose being to help prepare the collective American psyche for planned revelations concerning the reality of extraterrestrials. If that wasn’t enough, the senior flyboys offered to supply actual UFO footage, which Disney would be allowed to use in his film. It must have seemed to Kimball that his character Jiminy Cricket’s “wish upon a star” had actually been answered. However, a few weeks later, the offer was withdrawn just as quickly as it had been made. Kimball said that an Air Force Colonel said brusquely, “There indeed was plenty of UFO footage, but that neither Ward, nor anyone else, was going to get access to it.”

“I believe there’s a ‘core story’,” Jim explained, “but I don’t know what it is. I have been told by people more senior than me that there is some truth to it, but they told me time and time again to stop pursuing it with CIA people and other intel types. Two very senior officials told me they saw briefing books, [however] the only ones who would be cleared to know the story are the most senior Pentagon career officers.” Jim refuses to divulge his sources, but when pressed, he reiterates what they told him: look to the Pentagon and the private sector’s aerospace and weapons labs, etc. US intelligence “doesn’t have labs capable of dealing with something this profound.” He also notes that over the years he has received thousands of UFO-related government documents in unmarked envelopes. Although some are obvious fakes, others, according to Jim, contain information that correlates with known, but still classified, scientific studies. In an intriguing footnote, Jim adds, “I have spoken to three former Presidents and the subject always comes up, not as a briefing, but they also want to know the truth. But apparently they aren’t cleared for it.”

The head of the UN's nuclear watchdog has warned that resorting to military action against Iran over its nuclear programme would be "an act of madness".

He said any use of force to shut down Iran's nuclear programme "would be catastrophic, it would be an act of madness, and it would not solve the issue".

29%.Why not 9%? Who are these people? I think I know:

Church members claim the face of God has appeared on their sanctuary's ceiling

Mideast 'may see full-scale war'

UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen has warned that the Middle East could see full-scale war.He said a fresh effort was needed to contain the current violence, or energetic diplomacy to try to bring peace.

"The picture which emerges is very dark, and apparently getting darker," he said.

Whenever a virulent form of any religion has engaged the machinery of the state -– and by that, I’m talking about the armed forces, where the sticks and stones are that break our bones -- we end up with oceans and oceans of blood. And it’s happening again now.

-- Michael "Mikey" L. Weinstein, President, Military Religious Freedom Foundation

China finds new species of big, bird-like dinosaur

China has uncovered the skeletal remains of a gigantic, surprisingly bird-like dinosaur, which has been classed as a new species.

Eight meters (26 ft) long and standing at twice the height of a man at the shoulder, the fossil of the feathered but flightless Gigantoraptor erlianensis was found in the Erlian basin in Inner Mongolia, researchers wrote in the latest issue of Nature.

REPORT: U.S. DECIDES AGAINST IRAN STRIKE

The Bush administration has decided not to strike Iran's nuclear facilities.

Administration sources said President George Bush has decided that barring a "catastrophic development," the United States would not attack Iran. The sources said the administration has been relaying the decision to U.S. allies in the Middle East.

US may collapse as a superpower: analyst

A senior Japanese diplomat said to me, last year, he said "You know the United States is a twelve year old with a shotgun". And what he meant was that as the United States begins to suspect that it's past the apogee of its trajectory, its on the way down, as a great power no longer on the way up or at the top securely, that it is becoming extremely erratic, that is lashing out in all sorts of ways to try and slow or stop what it perceives as incipient decline.

So there is concern that we're getting into rather deep water here, that we may be going into an era where the Americans become highly unpredictable and quite dangerous.

Iraq: it's worse than you can possibly imagine, and worse than we can possibly know.

US signals permanent stay in Iraq

In Washington and among American military officers in Iraq, the idea of establishing permanent US bases there is under discussion – with one official citing as an example the decades-long presence of US troops in Korea. The aim would be to keep American soldiers on Iraqi soil well into the century as a support for the Iraqi government against outside aggression, a means of training and developing a new Iraqi military, and a platform from which the US could fight Al Qaeda and other war-on-terror opponents.

Yet as early proposals in notebooks at the White House and the Pentagon are slowly revealed to a US public increasingly opposed to the Iraq war, many Iraq and Middle East experts warn that any plan for permanent bases would cement the US image in Iraq and the region as that of an occupying force.

"This is a really bad idea, one that will only feed the image of the US as the occupier, the colonial power," says Larry Diamond, a former official with the American provisional authority that governed Iraq in the two years after Saddam Hussein's ouster. "There's no way long-term military bases are going to be acceptable to a majority of the Iraqi population."

Unfortunately, the fact that something is "a really bad idea" is pretty much a guarantee that the Bush administration will do it. We've known all along that the reason there was no "exit strategy" was that they didn't plan to leave. The fact that the occupation has proven to be disastrous is no reason to change policy, in the minds of people who have never admitted to a mistake.

Now they are talking about a "Korean solution." The Korean and Iraq wars have nothing in common, of course, but we still have troops in Korea 50 years later, and that is what they envision for Iraq. In Korea, however, our soldiers are not getting blown up on a daily basis.

More and more I fear a Vietnam-style exit, with people hanging from departing helicopters.

In case you missed it, NewsNuggets provides a link to the crucial part of the Soprano's finale.

The New York Times today reveals that the United States is arming Sunni insurgents in Iraq.

With the four-month-old increase in American troops showing only modest success in curbing insurgent attacks, American commanders are turning to another strategy that they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have been their allies in the past.

Fraught with risk? To say the least. The article later describes the risk as:

the risk that Sunni groups receiving American backing could effectively double-cross the Americans, taking weapons and turning them against American and Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government forces.

Why is the Bush administration willing to take this risk? The following give us a good idea:

“They say, ‘We hate you because you are occupiers’ ” he said, “ ‘but we hate Al Qaeda worse, and we hate the Persians even more.’ ” Sunni militants refer to Iraq’s Shiites as Persians, a reference to the strong links between Iraqi Shiites and the Shiites who predominate in Iran.

At the very least we are arming both sides in a civil war, with our troops in the middle, as the Bush administration is apparently planning to widen the war to Iran.

Was General Pace Fired Because He Balked at Iran?


Jerusalem Post: 'Military plan against Iran is ready'

A high-ranking American military officer told the Post that senior officers in the US armed forces had thrown their support behind Bush and believed that additional steps needed to be taken to stop Iran.

Predictions within the US military are that Bush will do what is needed to stop Teheran before he leaves office in 2009, including possibly launching a military strike against its nuclear facilities.

The website Washington Decoded has a George Orwell quote at the top of the page:

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful . . . and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

This is a fitting quote to accompany their article A Word About Lee Harvey Oswald by suspected CIA asset Priscilla J. McMillan.

Senator Lieberman advocates military strike on Iran

"Iraq is now the main front in the long war we are fighting against the Islamist terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. In fact 90% of the suicide bombers in Iraq today killing Iraqis and American soldiers are foreign Al Qaeda fighters. Iran is training and equipping soldiers, Iraqis, to come in and kill American soldiers and Iraqis," said Lieberman.

"If we're going to sit and talk with the Iranians, tell them what we want them to do, which is to stop doing that because it's killing Americans, we can't leave it at that. I think we have to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq," he said. "To me that would include a strike into, over the border into Iran where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers."

Water on Mars?

From Variety:

HBO is near a deal with Playtone that will turn Vincent Bugliosi's 1,632-page book "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy" into a miniseries.

Ten-parter will debunk long-held conspiracy theories and establish that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Bush's America: Roach motel
Ann Coulter sees immigration bill as 'genocide' against white citizens

Maybe it's just me but isn't comparing Mexicans to cockroaches just a little bit racist?

Deep Throat Named in 1978 Herb Caen Column

JFK assassination researcher Jerry Shinley is reading Vincent Bugliosi's monumental Reclaiming History (so we don't have to) and posted this today at alt.assassination.jfk :

Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy W. W. Norton (2007)

Page 822 (of the endnotes on CD)

1351 Bill Turner: I got to know Bill Turner, a straight-arrow guy, when I worked briefly with him in 1975 in Los Angeles on the reinvestigation into the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Long before the identity of "Deep Throat" surfaced in 2005, Bill was very confident he knew who he was, someone he had worked under in the FBI's Seattle office in the1950s. Herb Caen reported in his inimitable column in the San Francisco Chronicle way back on February 13, 1978, "Ex-FBIer Bill Turner is certain that Watergate's 'Deep Throat' was former Asst. FBI Dir. W. Mark Felt, who wanted Hoover's job."

William Turner wrote several books, including his memoirs Rearview Mirror: Looking Back at the FBI, the CIA and Other Tails

So far the JFK Airport case, like previous terrorist cases, seems to be much ado about not much. My favorite blogger Joseph Cannon has been raising questions in posts like Terror plot suspect worked for the CIA's airline. It seems one of the suspects, Russell DeFreitas, once worked for Evergreen International Airlines, which is known as the CIA's favorite airline, and no doubt for good reason. Still, referring to DeFreitas as a "former employee of the CIA" is a bit of a stretch. Whatever its CIA connections Evergreen is an airline and no doubt employs a good number of baggage handlers, etc. Joseph also suggests a possible drug-smuggling connection in More on the JFK airport terror plot.

The propaganda and disinformation specialists are all over this story. NewsMax beguiles us with Nuclear Terrorist Linked to JFK Plot and Feds Probe Iran Link to JFK Terror Plot . The headlines are all you really need but go ahead and click the links if you like.

Coolest Frog

“They are dangerous men who will lie about almost anyone or anything."

--Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson on the neoconservatives

More Candy Barr

A short trip to Spookyville

Dr. Alan Cantwell M.D., the author of two books on the man-made origin of HIV/Aids, neither of which I have read, has an article today at the Rense conspiracy site. Briefly, he received an email from a Dr. Sue Arrigo M.D., allegedly an "ex- CIA physician with high level access", concerning the creation of HIV (and a vaccine, which was kept secret).

It was a crime against humanity that the virus was unleashed on the world, and it continues to be a crime that the vaccine has been kept secret and for private use only. Meanwhile, the outer research to get to a vaccine is an exercise in how not to arrive at a solution before millions more die. The initial "hopes" for HIV per its designers was to be able to walk into Africa and take the resources from a ghost continent. They had hyped it as killing everyone there within a year, in their pre-release reports.

Dr. Cantwell googled Dr. Arrigo and found that she had once posted an interesting comment to an AlterNet story on torture.

As a coerced CIA asset, I was asked by Cheney in Aug. 2004 to frame Iran as developing nuclear weapons. Because Cheney was afraid of CIA leaks, he gave me the assignment at a Chinese restaurant in DC after hours. It was not the first meeting that I have ever had privately with him as I acted as a negotiator between him and Tenet. Within the CIA I had been an outspoken critic of US wars of aggression, its nuclear first strike plans, and its breaking of nuclear arms control treaties. I spent most of my life as an operative risking my life as a remote viewing spy monitoring and recovering lost WMD.

I am a doctor and the assignment Cheney gave me was to go to Iran as a physician. Once in Iran, a camera crew would be filming when an Iranian agent would rush in to say that he knew a secret bunker where the Iranian govt. was developing nuclear weapons. Cheney admitted that the rest of the filming would occur in Hollywood with a mock up of said lab. Clearly, this was an immoral assignment. There was no way that I was going to have the blood of innocent Iranian women and children on my hands, so I refused. When I did so, Cheney threatened the life of my mother. Since my mother had recently told me she would rather die than have me be emotionally blackmailed in this way, I held to my no.

During the course of our about 40 minute talk, one of his secret service officers interrupted us twice. The next week when I was kidnapped in Virginia, raped and tortured for 4 days, I recognized the voice of that officer as one of the rapists.

I tend to be skeptical of wild unverified conspiracy claims (no, really!) Just because someone has an M.D. after her name does not mean that she may not be suffering from mental illness. Hopefully, Dr. Cantwell or others will interview this woman to establish whether or not there is any truth to her claims.

Update: The story of Dr. Sue Arrigo keeps getting wilder and wilder. I now find that she has claimed to have twice treated Osama bin Laden --after September 11.

I am a kidney specialist who trained at the University of California at Irvine Medical Center in 1983-85. (California Medical License # G 50197) I treated Bin Laden on more than one occasion since 9-11 for the US govt. who promised him safe passage out of Afghanistan and free medical care the rest of his life. He was, after all, a loyal CIA operative doing exactly what was wanted by the leaders of the New World Order.

Update 2: Just when I'm ready to dismiss this whole matter as too far-fetched to possibly be true, I find this article on Military and Civilian Perspectives on the Ethics of Intelligence on a military website. The article is written by Sue Arrigo's sister, Jean Maria Arrigo, Ph.D., who describes herself as "a social psychologist studying intelligence ethics and as daughter of an undercover intelligence officer."

A physician at the workshop, Sue Arrigo (my sister), discussed medical intelligence operations in hospital intensive care units (ICUs). Especially in regard to terminal patients, hospital administration, residents and nurses, and patients' families have competing intelligence goals. Her case of an ICU patient with Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome, among other ailments, offers a striking metaphor for small-system interdependence of operational harms and security risks. The patient "lost his ability to speak when put on a ventilator [to help him breathe], lost his clarity of mind when sedated to prevent his gagging on the ventilator tube in his mouth, lost his ability to move when tied down so as not to pull out his tubes, and finally lost his sanity as he developed ICU psychosis."

The Plan -- according to U.S. General Wesley Clark (Ret.)

TOP TEN SIGNS YOU ARE A FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIAN

This post, originally lifted from godlikeproductions, but no longer archived there, drew more visitors than anything else on Covert History in the last two years. So today--a rerun.

10 - You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by other religions, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of yours.

9 - You feel insulted and "dehumanized" when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms, but you have no problem with the Biblical claim that we were created from dirt.

8 - You laugh at polytheists, but you have no problem believing in a Triune God.

7 - Your face turns purple when you hear of the "atrocities" attributed to Allah, but you don't even flinch when hearing about how God/Jehovah slaughtered all the babies of Egypt in "Exodus" and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in "Joshua" including women, children, and trees!

6 - You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans, and Greek claims about gods sleeping with women, but you have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god who got killed, came back to life and then ascended into the sky.

5 - You are willing to spend your life looking for little loopholes in the scientifically established age of Earth (few billion years), but you find nothing wrong with believing dates recorded by Bronze Age tribesmen sitting in their tents and guessing that Earth is a few generations old.

4 - You believe that the entire population of this planet with the exception of those who share your beliefs -- though excluding those in all rival sects - will spend Eternity in an infinite Hell of Suffering. And yet consider your religion the most "tolerant" and "loving."

3 - While modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor speaking in "tongues" may be all the evidence you need to "prove" Christianity.

2 - You define 0.01% as a "high success rate" when it comes to answered prayers. You consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% FAILURE was simply the will of God.

1 - You actually know a lot less than many atheists and agnostics do about the Bible, Christianity, and church history - but still call yourself a Christian.

Tomorrow: strippers!

Report: In Meeting, ‘Wild-Eyed’ Bush Thumped
Chest While Repeating ‘I Am The President!’

But by all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness.

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated “I am the president!” He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of “our country’s destiny.”