There is another category of offenses, described by the French poet André Chenier as "les crimes puissants qui font trembler les lois," crimes so great that they make the laws themselves tremble. We know what to do with someone caught misappropriating funds, but when confronted with evidence of a systematic attempt to undermine the political system itself, we recoil in a general failure of imagination and nerve.

-- Gary Sick, October Surprise (p 226)

******

It seems like a pretty half-assed coverup, really.

I mean, look at all these damn data points we have to digest. And we're supposed to somehow forget, hold as innocent / benign, fail to comprehend, etc.

The terrible thing is, I'm beginning to understand it.

Byzantine accounts of shell corporations (aka brass plates) get quite addictive. I think it's worse than the cocaine & cash they funneled in the good old days.

This gets back to the intersection of the Savings & Loan scandals & Iran-Contra, as well as many other choice items... Stew Webb is his own case altogether, he made the mistake of marrying into a high level Bush-affiliated fraudster family, the Millmans, out in Denver.

Webb launched a website with perhaps the ugliest color scheme I have ever seen (including the once-thought-extinct HTML blink tag), but there are plenty of awesome primary source documents linked off this page... Be sure to hit up the Sarah McClendon 1991 Washington Report October Surprise items, which explain quite clearly the coverup of chemical weapons to Iraq that later contributed to Gulf War Syndrome, Webb's fate and the general 1991 coverup in Congress.

Before I run the book back to Minneapolis' fab new Central Library, I have to post a review of "October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan" by Gary Sick, the 1991 first edition version.

In a lucky break, I finished this book the evening before a fresh new fake hostage crisis in Colombia. It felt like a lightning bolt to have another cheesy hostage rescue thingy, the very next day! The secret to the FARC Colombia scenario was much like the 1979-1980 classic episode: pay off the bad guys and put on a good show for the American press! CNN and the rest of them will believe every fucking word for two news cycles, and then forget it!

*****

The vast reservoir of cognitive dissonance embedded within the brains of America's Establishment political journalists and analysts makes up the foundation of accepted "consensus political reality." The weird stuff is never talked about, yet becomes heavier by the day. The room's elephants are becoming... super elephants? (Ask the accountant @ Fannie Mae.)

Prior to the emergence of the Internet, all and sundry could easily agree that if a given political fact or event did not get placed in the Washington Post, the New York Times, TIME Magazine, Newsweek, the Associated Press wire or a couple other key press outlets, everyone could safely agree the proposition in question did not exist, and they were safe from being 'burned' by further revelations. "We didn't know, it wasn't in our favorite paper!"

Of course, these outlets occasionally cut to the quick of matters like the Pentagon's military analyst PSYOP news manipulation program, the domestic wiretap program, or other affairs. However, the unique class of Establishment douchebags like David Broder will always fail to synthesize a new analysis of political/government affairs by taking into account their own paper's muckraking, and thus the ruling class can avoid swallowing the bitter pills of their own complicity in general malfeasance and alarming trends of criminality.

(Or shorter: the analysts will never place the results of muckraking in context).

*****

Such is the case with many of my favorite topics, in particular areas with huge layers of documentary evidence, eyewitness accounts and other "weird things" that get left by the wayside all too often. In the last two years I have been fascinated by the historical period of about 1977-1992, the period between when Pres. Jimmy Carter's CIA director, Stansfield "Choir Boy" Turner, fired hundreds of incensed CIA agents, and the election of Bill Clinton.

"October Surprise" was written by Gary Sick (a Carter-era National Security Council staffer with a role in the Middle East) after allegations surfaced in the 1988 presidential election that George H. W. Bush had attended secret meetings in Paris including himself, former CIA honcho and Reagan campaign manager Bill Casey, and various Iranians, with the intent of preventing the hostages from getting released before the November 1980 election. This was the famous, mythical "October Surprise".

Sick provides a sober and cautious synthesis of everything he can, without going out on a limb or offering extraneous, false nuggets that were surely offered by the shady characters that were his sources. He keeps the case minimal, and where he can't verify the names, he doesn't name them.

The American intelligence community in general got pissed at Carter after he took such measures against them, in the wake of partial exposures like the 1975-76 Church Commission, ominous mind control programs and other awesome items. Hundreds of pissed off CIA operators were suddenly cast off the government payroll, and some who you might call "The Cowboys" of the original school were pretty tight with George Bush - after all, he was a player with them since his earliest days. Many of the Cowboys entered fuzzy cargo aviation businesses and other cool cat fronts designed to be geopolitically useful.

In the old days, they knew how to fly copters in hot zones, dammit!

Gen. Claire Chennault put this all together, back then... The survivors of a geopolitically awkward venture, they deserved better than a pink slip from a uptight dude like CIA director Stanfield Turner. Back in China, Nam, elsewhere.... Many died to bring the guns over the line that the pukes in Washington didn't dare tell the public about.

This is true. And under-appreciated. If people in Washington had the guts to be more honest about things (and the press held them to it) then people like Air America and Southern Air Transport (way to go Wikipedia) would never have gotten the short end of the stick. The same is true today.

In the 1980 election, Bush elbowed aside the more regular GOP establishment for the role of Vice Presidential candidate. Bush had a lot of friends in the intelligence community, still, and the unemployed freelancers felt ready to participate in organizing serious operations monitoring Carter. After the Iranians captured the hostages (where was Ted Shackley during the pre-coup period... not sure), Bill Casey, of all people, the grizzled ex-CIA honcho and "half crazy" by all accounts, was suddenly Reagan's campaign manager.

I mean really. The ex-CIA honcho is the campaign manager, and George Bush, ex-CIA director, is the VP candidate, and somehow this does not become a huge mess of covert operations and total PSYOPS subversion?!

How is that no one reminds us how hardcore cool kats in intelligence community put together the whole Reagan campaign?

Damn...

And thus began the Perception Management expertise we know and love today... [see below]

It all began with making sure that FUCKING CARTER couldn't get the FUCKING HOSTAGES out. And all it took was some arms dealers, some arms and some of that old backdoor, secret hotels in Madrid/Paris, don't tell the nerds in the "elected" Democratic White House, old wheeler dealer Texas-sized gambles.

And where did it lead? Getting Felix Rodriguez into the White House? Hurray!

When you wins, you gets ta write the history, eh?

*****

I gotta throw in one of my favorite smoking guns: a rare 1985 document that survived the shredder, wherein Ollie describes the "Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into U.S."

They do NOT show this one on FOX News War Stories!

*****

Some morons on Amazon are claiming that Sick claims that George Bush flew to Paris in an SR71 Blackbird, which is never floated at all. In fact, Sick provides a good analysis of how the Bush-in-Paris claims acted as a "poison pill" or intentional red herring diversion to embarrass journalists and drive them away from further inquiry.

*****

Apart from the facts of the hostage crisis, the way the whole press coverage got manipulated by disinformation (propaganda) specialists becomes quite important.

Grizzled Iran-Contra-exposing reporter Robert Parry recently put out the formerly "lost chapter" of the Democrats' whitewash committee report, which has TONS of details about how the disinfo experts manipulated the scene in the 1980s. GET THE PDF fools!

In a rare new addition to Iran Contra documentation, an awesome "Lost Chapter" of the Democratically-controlled investigation committee has been unearthed. The Lost Chapter got deleted from the Final Report, because it spelled out how "perception management" type dudes got brought into the inner circle, running interference all around. The tone and substance of how these guys operated gets explained in a choice narrative style.

Of course, this surfaced from Robert Parry, who got the tar kicked out of him by pursuing Iran-Contra deeply and professionally. This turned out to be a terrible mistake, since the Establishment coverup took hold and Parry went down some of the many cul-de-sacs put there by the disinfo Beltway experts. So instead of a fancy TV spot, he is here & there, and this lost chapter turned up not in Newsweek but on ConsortiumNews.com.

*****

I will add the October Surprise book jacket notes because they encompass the most important dimensions of the case, and are well-substantiated:

This book was never supposed to have been written. It is an account of a political mystery never intended to be solved, a tale of bold deception by a few powerful men who apparently calculated that political manipulation, if conducted on a sufficiently grand scale, would be essentially invisible and ultimately beyond the law.

October Surprise reconstructs the story of how the 1980 Reagan-Bush presidential campaign, intent on delaying the release of the fifty-two Americans held hostage in Tehran until after the election, made clandestine overtures to Iran and arranged illegal arms shipments through Israel. Thiss effort, spearheaded by Republican campaign manager William Casey, not only prevented President Carter from reaping the political benefits of an early hostage release, but also hobbled his ability to exercise the full powers of his elective office.

This book brings to light startling new information, including:

• The Reagan-Bush campaign's systematic penetration of the national security complex of the U.S. government, through which a network of former and current intelligence agents kept Casey--not then in any government position--informed of highly classified military movements, diplomatic initiatives, and policy decisions.

• The secret meetings that took placed in Europe during the summer and fall of 1980, at which Casey hammered out the deal with the Iranians.

• Israel's shipment of arms to Iran during the last weeks of the presidential campaign (in deliberate violation of the U.S. embargo) and the massive covert arms transfers between the two nations that begin immediately after Reagan's inauguration.

• The connection between the Republicans' 1980 arms-for-hostages deal and the Iran-Contra Affair five years later.

The result of three years of research and hundreds of interviews, October Surprise lays bare an elaborate network of political intrigue and treachery, subversive in its actions and chilling in its implications. It is a cautionary tale about the seductions of power and the fragility of our democratic system.

He spells out the series of events, including the weird and messy power mesh that made up the nebulous Iranian ruling circles, which, in their splintering, oddly mirrored the splintered American side. (Numerous arms dealers and shadeballs, (in particular the Hashemi brothers as channels), "fairly" offered similar terms, separately, to Carter and Casey's people.)

His conclusion chapter was really interesting, as it encompassed the case of the United States of America v. Richard J. Brenneke, as they were ticked off that Brenneke

"had been accused of falsely stating that William Casey, Donald Gregg and possibly George Bush were in Paris on that particular weekend, and that he was employed by the CIA at that time.... Although this case received virtually no attention in the national media, it marked the only time that the U.S. gvoernment had systematically and athoritatively attempted to refute the allegations of an October surprise. All of those accused had an unparalleled opportunity to rebut the charges, and they had all the resources of the U.S. government at their command to research and document their case. To my surprise, and to the surprise of nearly everyone who followed the trial closely, they failed." (p 212)

All they had to do to win the case was prove that George Bush or Casey or Gregg were anywhere but Paris, in the middle of the damn campaign. And they failed. And it was forgotten.

*****

In my own fishing in the murky waters, I would be wise to remember this conclusion about the general morass.

This is hardly earth shattering, but it's a clear explanation of a fundamental principle of all stories about espionage and Deep Politics: (p 214-216):

Over the course of the next two years, during the research and writing of this book, I would meet many men like Richard Brenneke. To my frustration, Brenneke's idiosyncrasies and character flaws were too often representative of the general nature of the sources. These mens were denizens of a shadowy yet flamboyant subculture who expected absolute discretion in dealing with outsiders but tolerated boasting and exaggerated tales of past exploits among the members of the fraternity. They took pains to conceal key facts from an obvious outsider, and when they chose to talk they routinely embellished the facts and inflated their own importance.

Such characters are a researcher's nemesis; they are meant to be. When the CIA or other intelligence agencies need to hire a "contractor," who may be required to carry out tasks that are potentially dangerous and of questionable legality, they look for three things: a specific and useful skill (a knowledge of money-laundering, for example); a romantic streak that glorifies both the secrecy and the risk; and a propensity for exaggeration and trouble. One former CIA officer, David MacMichael, has said that the agency looks for these free-lancers at small community airports and gun ranges--places where men go to escape the boredom of everyday life. Looking for adventure, these men are fascinated by the imagined glamour and excitement of the world of espionage. MacMichael said that often, after one or two assignments, the agency will put the contractor on a case in which he runs afoul of the law. The contractor finds himself in a compromising position--nothing so major as to put him permanently out of commission, but significant enough that if he ever starts telling tales out of school about covert operations, his record will discredit his testimony.

Essentially, such a free-lancer is a skilled Walter Mitty, who delights in possessing arcane knowledge and who imagines himself the instrument that secretly drives events behind the scrim of history. It is a profile, alas, of a less-than-credible witness. Intelligence agencies understand this very well, and bank on it. A free-lancer is inherently difficult to control; if he wanders off the reservation and begins blabbing, it is helpful if no one believes him. A retired CIA covert-operations officer, when asked about the extravagant behavior of a former contract employee, said: "The agency likes things that way... The wilder and crazier and sillier the story, the more they like it. The agency indulges people to come up with that. It's the best defense." MacMichael confirmed that the agency permits contractors to become entangled in a legally compromising position, so that if an operation goes awry they can be cut loose. "When a contractor gets caught," he said, "all their 'friends' disappear. It happens over and over again."

In a story in which the principal actors have no desire for the facts to come out, one does not have the luxury of choosing one's sources. The "respectable" people who plotted and carried out a covert operation refuse to comment or, at worst, fabricate stories to protect themselves and their reputations; because of their "respectability," most people are inclined to believe them. The contractors who were hired to do the dirty work are not "respectable" at all, and if they decided to tell their story, most people assume they are lying.

And sometimes they are. These free-lancers, on occasion, are deliberately recruited as front men for disinformation campaigns. In 1988, when stories about possible Republican tampering with the hostage issue began to emerge in the national media, Oswald LeWinter said he was contacted by some people he had known through his intelligence background. They were concerned, he said, that the United States was once again facing the possibility of a Watergate-type scandal that risked tearing the country apart, discrediting the candidacy of George Bush, and electing a Democratic candidate who was unsympathetic to the intelligence community. He claimed to have been offered $40,000 to undertake a disinformation campaign designed to discredit the stories about the 1980 elections and the Paris meetings. He agreed, and for several months he spoke to journalists and others who were investigating the allegations of an "October surprise." He said that he used the pseudonym "Razin," and refused to be interviewed in person. INstead he spoke to reporters only by telephone, offering a few bits and pieces of accurate information laced with fanciful inventions and false leads. His purpose, as he now freely admits, was to throw dust in the air, to invent tantalizing leads that would eventually prove to be false, and thereby generate so much fruitless commotion that the story would be discredited and abandoned.

To get at the truth, one must listen to those who know something about what happened and who are willing to talk, even if they exaggerate and embroider the truth. Then every significant statement must be carefully weighed against the known facts -- dates, places, times, identities -- and other witnesses. A bald assertion, however intriguing, must be regarded as false unless it can be corroborated independently, and not just from one of the sources' cronies who may have compared stories. When the allegations of Casey's participation in the secret talks with the Iranians surfaced in 1988, the CIA director's defenders swore up and down that Casey had not traveled abroad on the dates that the Madrid meetings were said to have taken place. However, one of my researchers found an obscure item tucked away in the second section of The New York Times of July 30, 1980, in which the following sentence appeared: "A spokesman at Reagan headquarters said that the national campaign chairman, WIlliam Casey, would begin negotiations with the Right to Life group when he returns today from a trip abroad." Suddenly the denials were less convincing.

Casey died of a brain tumor on May 6, 1987, making it impossible to get his side of the story. Nevertheless, he had made several public statements which I now viewed in a new light. For example, when he was questioned in the 1984 Senate investigation into the mysterious theft of President Carter's briefing book four years earlier, he described his knowledge of the hostage crisis at the time as follows: "Information about negotiations for the release of the hostages in Iran came to me from many sources, including bankers involved in loans to Iran and frozen Iranian funds." That Casey admitted, under oath, that he was privy to inside information about the negotiations between the government of the United States and the government of Iran is itself revealing.

All right, I have to put in a couple more passages... This is taking a while, but key to the case: (p 222-223)

I would not be human if I did not confess that I have at one time or another awakened in the middle of the night with the thought: what if all of these people are lying to me? Is it possible that all of these accounts are themselves a conspiracy of lies?

In the early stages of the research, when the descritpiton of these events relied on only a handful of admittedly unreliable source, I had to take that possibility seriously. But as time went on and the number and diversity of sources increased, the likelihood of a concerted, organized disinformation campaign dwindled. At some point, I had to ask myself why all of these individuals might have decided to propagate false statements, and how they had managed to coordinate their stories. Most of these men did not know one another, and those who had met or talked at some pont in the past frequently distrusted one another. Most of them did not come forward of their own accord to publicize this story. On the contrary, most of them were discovered only as the result of persisten digging by journalists and researchers. To believe that there was an orchestrated effort to plant these individuals in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, and that each was supplied with the same false story, required a considerable leap of imagination -- a grand conspiracy theory to counter a conspiracy theory. Is it easier to believe that all of these sources surreptitiously coordinated their stories to create trouble for the Reagan and Bush administrations, or alternatively, that each of these sources may be telling the truth (or pieces of the truth) as perceived on the basis of his own personal background and personal experience? The answer seems obvious: The chance that these sources are telling their version of the truth is much higher than the chance they are all lying in concert. These sources seemed to be describing the same event, albeit from different perspectives, rather than merely improvising a description based on sketchy published accounts.

In the absence of convincing corroboration, however, I have reserved judgment. For example, several reports have surfaced claiming that vice-presidential candidate George Bush was present at least briefly in Paris during the course of negotiations in October. I have always been incomfortable about this allegation. There was little reason for a vice-presidential candidate to take such an extreme risk at the very peak of a political campaign. Besides, it would have been difficult for any candidate to slip away from his campaign responsibilities, not to mention his Secret Service protection, for a transatlantic flight. Even if the Iranians insistend on very high-level personal assurances as part of the final agreement, which would be entirely characteristic of Iranian bargaining style, surely someone would have been found to stand in for the candidate.

I was also aware that the allegation about Bush might have been deliberately floated in order to discredit the story. An effective way to divert attention from what really happened is to invent a sensational story and send the media scurrying off on a wild-goose chase. That is essentially what happened in the Iran-Contra Affair, where all journalistic resources and public attention were fixated on the question of whether the President knew about the diversion of Iranian arms-sales profits to the Nicaraguan contras. When that could not be proved, because the original memos with identifying signatures had been destroyed and because Admiral Poindexter testifeid that "the buck stopped here, with me," the entire congressional case came to an end. Other important constitutional and legal issues simply faded into the background or were shunted off to the special prosecutor's office.

When the "October surprise" story first received wide publicity in 1988, much of the media attention was devoted to the question of whether or not George Bush had been in Paris. When the evidence proved to be ambiguous, and especially after Bush won the 1988 presidential election, the entire story was shelved.

We gotta get to the nut grafs, the finale..... (p 226-228)

In the end, it is irrelevant whether Bush went to Paris or whether Reagan approved or knew of the deal. The critical question is whether representatives of a political party out of power secretly, and illegally, negotiated with representatives of a hostile foreign power, thereby distorting or undermining the efforts of the legitimate government. Even today, more than a decade later, it is still difficult to imagine that an opposition political faction in the United States would employ such tactics, willfully prolonging the imprisonment of fifty-two American citizens for partisan political gain. Nevertheless, that is what occurred: the Reagan-Bush campaign mounted a professionally organized intelligence operation to subvert the American democratic process.

We are accustomed to the petty scandals of Washington politics: A candidate for high office is a lush or a compulsive womanizer; a member of Congress diverts campaign funds to a private account; an official lies to cover up an embarrassing policy failure. These are misdeeds on a human scale, and these miscreants who are unfortunate enough or careless enough to get caught are pilloried and punished by the press and their peers in periodic cleansings. We regard such rituals with a certain satisfaction, evidence of our democracy at work.

There is another category of offenses, described by the French poet André Chenier as "les crimes puissants qui font trembler les lois," crimes so great that they make the laws themselves tremble. We know what to do with someone caught misappropriating funds, but when confronted with evidence of a systematic attempt to undermine the political system itself, we recoil in a general failure of imagination and nerve.

We understand the motives of a thief, even if we despise them. But few of us have ever been exposed to the seductions of power on a grand scale and we are unlikely to have given serious thought to the rewards of political supremacy, much less to how it might be achieved. We know that groups and individuals covet immense power for personal or ideological reasons, but we suppose that these ambitions usually will be pursued within the confines of the laws and values of our society and democratic political system. If not, we assume we will recognize the transgressions early enough to protect ourselves.

Those who operate politically beyond the law, if they are deft and determined, benefit from our often false sense of confidence. There is a natural presumption, even among the politically sophisticated, that "no one would do such a thing." Most observers are predisposed toward disbelief, and therefore may be willing to disregard evidence and to construct alternative explanations for events that seem too distasteful to believe. This all-too-human propensity provides a margin of safety for what would otheriwse be regarded as immensely risky undertakings.

Illegitimate political covert actions are attempts to alter the disposition of power. Since all of politics involves organized contention over the disposition of power, winners can be expected to maintain that they were only playing the game, while those who complain about their opponents' methods are likely to be dismissed as sore losers. Even if suspicions arose, the charges are potentially so grave that most individuals will be reluctant to give public credence to allegations in the absence of irrefutable evidence. The need to produce a "smoking gun" has become a precondition for responsible reporting of political grand larceny. The participants in political covert actions understand this and take pains to cover their tracks, so the chance of turning up incontrovertible documentation of wrongdoing--such as the White House tapes in the Watergate scandal--is thin.

This leads to a journalistic dilemma. In the absence of indisputable evidence, the mainstream media --themselves large commercial institutions with close ties to the political and economic establishment -- are hesitant to declare themselves on matter of great political gravity. The so-called alternative media are less reluctant, but they are too easily dismissed as irresponsible. By the time the mainstream media are willing to lend their names and reputations to a story of political covert action, the principal elements of the story have almost always been reported long before in the alternative media, where they were studiously ignored.

When the Iran-Contra scandal exploded in 1986, both the Congress and the media pulled up short. Neither had the stomach for the kind of national trauma that would have resulted from articles of impeachment being delivered against a popular President who was in his last two years of office. So, when it could not be proven conclusively that the President saw the "smoking gun" in the case--a copy of the memo to Reagan reporting in matter-of-fact terms that proceeds of Iranian arms sales were being diverted to the Nicaraguan contras-- the nation seemed to utter a collective sigh of relief. (The original memo, bearing the signatures of those who had seen it, had been deliberately destroyed.) The laws trembled at the prospect of a political trial that could shatter the compact of trust between rulers and ruled, a compact that was the foundation upon which the laws themselves rested. The lesson seemed to be that accountability declines as the magnitude of the offense and the power of those charged increase.

The ultimate dilemma, which Chenier captured so perfectly in his comment on the revolutionary politics of eighteenth-century France, is the effect of very high stakes. A run-of-the-mill political scandal can safely be exposed without affecting anyone other than the culprits and their immediate circle. A covert political coup, however, like the one engineered by Casey in 1980, challenges the legitimacy of the political order; it deliberately exploits weaknesses in the political immune system and risks infecting the entire organism of state and society. Such a virus of secrecy and subterfuge would permeate the Reagan administration and would culminate in the Iran-Contra Affair, the contours of which bore an uncanny resemblance to Casey's 1980 deal to swap arms for hostages. One of the more puzzling aspects of the Iran-Contra Affair was the Reagan administration's dogged pursuit of a deal in the face of repeated Iranian demands. Yet Reagan's men refused to take no for an answer. The reason now seems plain: The same parties had cut a deal once before.

The weight of the evidence speaks for itself - and the establishment arms/drugs/coverup pattern is damn thick. You can't wrap your head around the JFK assassination, 9/11, other weird political events, without taking into account the real substrate of covert operations, 'perception management' AKA PSYOPS, and the dumb rules that control Washington journalists.

After trekking through the murky wasteland of mirrors, I cannot help but reach the conclusion that the extended cloud of covert activities behind Iran-Contra makes up a totally pivotal - and misunderstood - episode of American political history. The history isn't even past. In order to process the ugly stack that makes up today's political perceptions, the old affairs have to finally get digested.

As long as the rules of the game stay this way, Iran-Contra will never be seen as a complete mesh, the opening episode of total mindwar domination, total PSYOPS, the surrender of Beltway journalism, the death of that heady Woodward-Bernstein take-em-on era.

Oliver North has his TV show, we have the Internets. One of them will finally win.

In the words of Al Martin, a self-described "fourth-level player" in Iran-Contra,

"Iran-Contra is still alive."

I have always believed, and argued, that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to `a few bad people,’ but to the institutional and parapolitical arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically governed.

--Peter Dale Scott

Currently I am reading "October Surprise" by Gary Sick... Here's a review I posted long ago...

We have to get a chunk of this! Peter Dale Scott, a Berkeley professor, is one of the classic scholars of suspicious American political conspiracies, the JFK assassination, the ongoing fake war on drugs, and other things that good kids keep their fuckin' mouths shut about.

I was impressed by the latest from ol' Scott, and it also led me around to look at L. Fletcher Prouty's "The Secret Team, The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World" which you can read for free there. Following here is an excerpt of how the Global Dominance Mindset works - and how ugly and weird events like 9/11 and the JFK assassination mark episodes of turmoil among this stratum of the American establishment.

Earlier: Feb 24 2008: What now? Homeland Security Detention Camps & Trains of course; 9/11 poisons our dreams; Zarqawi PSYOPS fake news revisited

And earlier, July 7 2007: Weekend roundup: sweeping bitesized paranoia! with some clips of Scott talking about those ol' Left Gatekeepers and 9/11... Also recommended: PD Scott on JFK and 9/11 Insights Gained from Studying Both....

**********

9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics:

9/11, Deep Events, and the Global Dominance Mindset in American Society

The continuity of past deep events is part of the problem facing those who wish to understand and correct what underlies them. For the mainstream U.S. media (as we now clearly see them) have become so implicated in past protective lies about Korea, Tonkin Gulf, and the JFK assassination that they, as well as the government, have now a demonstrated interest in preventing the truth about any of these events from coming out.

This means that the current threat to constitutional rights does not derive from the deep state alone. As I have written elsewhere, the problem is a global dominance mindset that prevails not only inside the Washington Beltway but also in the mainstream media and even in the universities, one which has come to accept recent inroads on constitutional liberties, and stigmatizes, or at least responds with silence to, those who are alarmed by them. Just as acceptance of bureaucratic groupthink is a necessary condition for advancement within the state, so acceptance of this mindset’s notions of decorum has increasingly become a condition for participation in mainstream public life.

In saying this, I mean something more narrow than the pervasive "business-defined consensus" which Gabriel Kolko once asserted was "a central reality," underlying how "a ruling class makes its policies operate." I would agree that, at least since the Reagan era, the mindset I am describing has become more and more clearly identified with the mentality of an overworld determined to protect its privileges and even enlarge them at the expense of the rest of society.

But the mindset I mean is narrower in focus – originally concerned with defending and now increasingly concerned with enlarging America’s dominance in the world, in an era of finite and increasingly scarcer resources. And it is also, increasingly, less a consensus than an arena of serious division and debate.

It is clear that the mindset is not monolithic. There have been recurring notable dissents within it, such as when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed in the New York Times that the Bush administration, in defiance of the FISA Act, was engaged in warrantless electronic surveillance of telephone calls inside the United States.47 But on other issues, notably the Iraq War, the Timeshas conspicuously failed to play the judicious critical role that it did with respect to the U.S. war in Vietnam. In general, as Kristina Borjesson reports in her devastating book, "Investigative reporting is dwindling…because it is expensive, attracts lawsuits, and can be hostile to the corporate interests and/or government connections of a news division’s parent company." And as to critical thinking about 9/11, as before about the Kennedy assassination, the Post has predictably gone out of its way to depict the 9/11 truth movement as a "cacophonous and free-range…bunch of conspiracists."

According to a survey of Lexis Nexis, the New York Times did not report Attorney General Gonzalez’ newsworthy claim that "There is no expressed grant of habeas corpus in the Constitution." (The Washington Post reported it, without comment, in a story of 197 words.) And on the question of torture even a liberal Harvard University professor, Michael Ignatieff, has argued in a University Press book from an even-handed starting point – "A democracy is committed to both the security of the majority and the rights of the individual" -- to an alarming defense of "coercive questioning."

In this state of affairs, I shall argue, the Internet provides an opportunity for opposition, of potentially immense political importance.

Deep Events as Intrigues within the Global Dominance Consensus

Many critics of American foreign policy on the left tend to stress its substantial coherence over time, from the War-Peace Studies for post-war planning of the Council on Foreign Relations in the 1940s, to Defense Secretary Charles Wilson’s plans in the 1950s for a "permanent war economy," to Clinton’s declaration to the United Nations in 1993 that the U.S. will act "multilaterally when possible, but unilaterally when necessary."

This view of America’s policies has persuaded some, notably Alexander Cockburn, to lament the displacement of coherent Marxist analysis by the "fundamental idiocy" and "foolishness" of "9/11 conspiracism." But it is quite possible to acknowledge both that there are ongoing continuities in American policy and also important, hidden, and recurring internal divisions, which have given rise to America’s structural deep events. These events have always involved friction between Wall Street and the Council on Foreign Relations, on the one hand, and the increasingly powerful oil- and military-dominated economic centers of the Midwest and the Texas Sunbelt on the other.

At the time that General MacArthur, drawing on his Midwest and Texas support, threatened to challenge Truman and the State Department, the opposition was seen as one between the traditional Europe-Firsters of the Northeast and new-wealth Asia-Firsters. In the 1952 election, the foreign policy debate was between Democratic "containment" and Republican "rollback." Bruce Cumings, following Franz Schurmann, wrote later of the split, even within the CIA, between "Wall Street internationalism" on the one hand and "cowboy-style expansionism" on the other.

Many have followed Michael Klare in defining the conflict as one, even within the Council on Foreign Relations, between "traders" and warrior "Prussians." Since the rise to eminence of the so-called "Vulcans" – notably Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz, backed by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – the struggle has frequently been described as a struggle between the multilateralists of the status quo and the unilateralists seeking indisputable American hegemony.

Underlying every one of the deep events I have mentioned, and others such as the U-2 incident, can be seen this contest between traderly (multilateralist) and warriorly (unilateralist) approaches to the maintenance of U.S. global dominance. For decades the warriorly faction was clearly a minority; but it was also an activist and well-funded minority, in marked contrast to the relatively passive and disorganized traderly majority. Hence the warriorly preference for war, thanks to ample funding from the military-industrial complex and also to a series of deep events, was able time after time to prevail.

The 1970s can be seen as a turning-point, when a minority CFR faction, led by Paul Nitze, united with corporate executives from the military-industrial complex like David Packard and pro-Zionist future neocons like Richard Perle to forge a succession of militant political coalitions, such as the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). Cheney and Rumsfeld, then in the Ford White House, participated in this onslaught on the multilateral foreign policy of Henry Kissinger. In the late 1990s Cheney and Rumsfeld, even while secretly refining the COG provisions put into force on 9/11, also participated openly in the successor organization to the CPD, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

From his office interfacing between CIA and the U.S. Air Force, Col. L. Fletcher Prouty deduced that there was a single Secret Team, within the CIA but not confined to it, responsible for not only the Tonkin Gulf incidents (timed to enable already planned military action against North Vietnam) but other deep events, such as the U-2 incident of 1960 (which in Prouty’s opinion was planned and timed to frustrate the projected summit conference between Eisenhower and Khrushchev) and even the assassination of President Kennedy (after which the Secret Team "moved to take over the whole direction of the war and to dominate the activity of the United States of America").

In language applicable to both Korea in 1950 and Tonkin Gulf in 1964, Prouty argued that CIA actions followed a pattern of actions which "went completely out of control in Southeast Asia:"

The clandestine operator… prepares the stage by launching a very minor and very secret, provocative attack of a kind that is bound to bring open reprisal. These secret attacks, which may have been made by third parties or by stateless mercenaries whose materials were supplied secretly by the CIA, will undoubtedly create reaction which in turn is observed in the United States…. It is not a new game. [but] it was raised to a high state of art under Walt Rostow and McGeorge Bundy against North Vietnam, to set the pattern for the Gulf of Tonkin attacks.

I mention Prouty’s thesis here in order to record my partial dissent from it. In my view his notion of a "team" localizes what I call the global dominance mindset too narrowly in a restricted group who are not only like-minded but in conspiratorial communication over a long term. He exhibits the kind of conspiratorialist mentality once criticized by G. William Domhoff:

We all have a tremendous tendency to want to get caught up in believing that there's some secret evil cause for all of the obvious ills of the world …. [Conspiracy theories] encourage a belief that if we get rid of a few bad people, everything will be well in the world.

My own position is still that which I articulated years ago in response to Domhoff:

I have always believed, and argued, that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to `a few bad people,’ but to the institutional and parapolitical arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically governed.

Quoting what I had written, Michael Parenti added, "In sum, national security state conspiracies [or what I would call deep events] are components of our political structure, not deviations from it."

The outcome of the deep events I have mentioned so far has been chiefly a series of victories for the warriors. But there have been other structural deep events, notably Watergate in 1972-74 and Iran-Contra in 1986-87, which can be interpreted, if not as victories for the traders, at least as temporary setbacks for the warriors. In The Road to 9/11 I have tried to show that Cheney and Rumsfeld, while in the Ford White House, bitterly resented the setback represented by the post-Watergate reforms, and immediately set in motion a series of moves to reverse them. I argue there that the climax of these moves was the imposition after 9/11 of their long-planned provisions for COG, formulated under their supervision since the early 1980s.

Thus since World War Two the warriorly position, initially that of a marginal but conspiratorial minority, has moved since the Reagan and Bush presidencies into a more and more central position. This is well symbolized by the rise in influence since 1981 of the Council for National Policy, originally funded by Texas oil billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt and explicitly designed to offset the influence of the Council on Foreign Relations. Comparing the 1950s with the present decade, it is striking how much the status of the State Department has declined vis-à-vis the Pentagon. With the accelerated militarization of the U.S. economy, the question arises whether a more traderly foreign policy can ever again prevail.

And since 9/11, especially with the institution of unknown COG procedures, some have talked of the overall subversion of democracy, by a new Imperial Presidency in the Bush White House.

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Well that's all for now, kids. Have fun in the endless rabbit holes of Deep Politics and Cryptocracies!

I noted all this nonsense a while ago: March 27, 2007: New GeoMap; Kremlin warns of "Operation Bite" American attack on Iran April 6? More rumors etc.

The latest twist is that apparently the Democrats agreed to give Bush as much money as they wanted in order to do the "U.S. Covert - BALUCHIS" attack detailed on this sketch here. At roughly the time of my post, actually!

April 4, 2007: Iran paranoia, covert war escalates; Tensions rise as Persian Gulf fills with carriers, media crews, tribal revolts; US Air Force buzzes infiltrated Iranian Khuzestan

At that time we had the excellent "Approximate Covert Crisis GeoMap: Shitstorm 2007:

April 8, 2007: Jundullah: Baluchi ally of the United States... And Al Qaeda... in covert Iran war.

Since those heady days, I haven't had too much to say about the Baluchi pawn situation. However, the drums of war have continued and my tasty diagrams are as accurate as last year. Both the CIA-sponsored tribal uprisings and the Mujahideen el-Khalq actions are going forth accordingly.

At least, that's what good ol Seymour Hersh has divined from his vast array of establishment sources, who generally seem quite frightened of the alternate chains of command that Dick Cheney has built up from his office.

Annals of National Security: Preparing the Battlefield: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Pay very close attention to this part, kiddos, because herein lies the primary potential source of a cataclysmic Iran war: the "small group" at the White House who are developing an alternate chain of command.

Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallon’s defenders is retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the President’s “czar” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he’s known to be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,” Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) “He was charged with coming up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his A.O.”—area of operations. “That was not happening,” Sheehan said. “When Fallon tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him out.”

The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, known as Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the President to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put in charge of all aspects of military operations, including joint training and logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with other echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the White House and the uniformed military.

“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”

Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”

The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”

There you have it. This is huge. Bigger than the usual British-style strategy of renting local warlords like the Baluchis. Also duly noted:

A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.”

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.

The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.

The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts—and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”

I have zero faith in any element of America's political class to even understand what is happening, let alone get some degree of control over these covert operations, ever escalating and widening out into the aggressive galaxy of contractors and militant baby boomers, all set in motion on their own, partitioned even from the regional American military commanders.

When even the President's direct regional commander, General Fallon, couldn't find out what the fuck Special Forces are actually doing, then by definition we have a serious and insane war conspiracy unfolding.

And for now, that is basically all I can say.

Antiwar.com Blog · Did Israelis Leak New Spy Info to Thwart War?

Things in the Middle East are always too thoroughly linked together, backwards, forwards, each way through the hall of mirrors. And it's going to be the traditional 'summer fightin' months' all around the region soon enough.

Deadlock in Afghanistan, Negotiations in Pakistan | The Agonist

There's a certain preamble of mega-spin going on right now. Hillary makes these weird statements about obliterating Iran, and McCain is chuckling all the way to the Big Red Button.

As usual, the rationality of the Baby Boomer generation drifts towards paranoia, incoherence, rage and infinite debt. Whether or not the American people get it together and block the Middle East mega-war from blowing up out of control seems to be the big question.

Iran gets blamed for killing American soldiers occupying Iraq. Not surprisingly, the guys selling this line never acknowledge that the arms market is quite a free market over in Iraq, with many busy arms dealers working all directions. And people are buying weapons that come from Iran. Is that some kind of surprise? "FREE MARKET WEAPONS FOR IRAQ: ALWAYS PLENTY OF DEALS!" That's a motto which the Iranians should try... Then remind everyone which country is importing the most weapons into Iraq, handing them over to parties unknown...

British dealers supply arms to Iran: The Observer

As you may have noticed, there has been a lot of extra buzz about possible American conflict with Iran in the news (after cooling for a couple months prior).

Is War With Iran Imminent?- by Justin Raimondo

A couple weeks ago, the story from last fall about the mysterious Israeli bombing of a purported nuclear-or-something site in Syria came back strong into the news: exciting tidbits that the North Koreans were propagating some nuclear research at the Syrian location. Very exciting stuff for the news.

For example, Stratfor.com is all over this case and its exciting murkiness:

What is important to note is this information is not new. It is a confirmation of the story leaked by the administration shortly after the attack and also leaked by the Israelis a bit later. The explanation for the attack was that it was designed to take out a reactor in Syria that had been built with North Korean help. There are therefore three questions. First, why did the United States go to such lengths to reveal what it has been saying privately for months? Second, why did the administration do it now? Third, why is the United States explaining an Israeli raid using, at least in part, material provided by Israel? Why isn’t Israel making the revelation?

It has never been clear to us why the Israelis and Americans didn’t immediately announce that the Syrians were building a nuclear reactor. Given American hostility toward Syria over support for jihadists in Iraq, we would have thought that they would have announced it instantly. The explanation we thought most plausible at the time was that the intelligence came from the North Koreans in the course of discussions of their nuclear technology, and since the North Koreans were cooperating, the United States didn’t want to publicly embarrass them. It was the best we could come up with.

The announcement on Thursday seems to debunk that theory, at least to the extent that the primary material displayed was U.S. satellite information and the Israeli video, which was said to have been used to convince the United States of the existence of the reactor and of North Korean involvement. So why didn’t the administration condemn Syria and North Korea on Sept. 7? It still seems to us that part of the explanation is in the state of talks with North Korea over its own program. The North Koreans had said that they would provide technical information on their program — which they haven’t done. Either the United States lost its motivation to protect North Korean feelings because of this or the Bush administration felt that Thursday’s briefings would somehow bring pressure to bear on North Korea. Unless the United States is planning to use these revelations as justification for attacks on the North Koreans, we find it difficult to see how this increases pressure on them.

More interesting is the question of why the United States — and not Israel — is briefing on an Israeli raid. Israeli media reported April 23 that the Israelis had asked the Americans not to brief Congress. The reason given was that the Israelis did not want the United States to embarrass Syria at this point. As we noted on April 23, there appeared to have been some interesting diplomatic moves between Syria and Israel, and it made sense that revealing this information now might increase friction.

Meanwhile another more original story got lost in the sea of buzz: some old defense engineer, 84-year-old Ben-Ami Kadish, got caught by the FBI stealing secret documents from his top secret research lab during his career, and has admitted everything. Antiwar.com broke that to me:

Pollard's Ghost- by Justin Raimondo. Check this out for a well-linked background in the case, though I'm not totally sold on Raimondo's spin...

Kadish would smuggle out the papers, photograph them, send 'em over to his foreign spy handler, and bring them back to the lab, no one the wiser. A pretty classic scheme which should have gotten a bit of news bounce in the War on Terror, but of course it didn't. The engineer was passing secrets to Israel. Uff da...

This raises the question of how big the Israeli espionage thingy really gets. It's a big question especially since two AIPAC officers are supposed to go on trial this summer for circulating secrets between neo-con Pentagon staffer Lawrence "Larry" Franklin and the Mossad officers over at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

In the Fed's case for this "big" AIPAC scandal, everyone pretty much got caught red-handed, so the AIPAC defense strategy appears to be "graymailing" the Justice Department into disclosing all kinds of classified stuff. (The idea is that the feds' tummies turn sour and they give up because they don't want to cough up the docs. This is the traditional strategy DC lawyers for Oliver North / Elliot Abrams type guys use to get their guys off the hook in scandals like Iran-Contra.)

But let's go back to the beginning of the "big" AIPAC scandal. How did it start? The FBI was already spying on the AIPAC officers when Franklin wandered up to them at a DC restaurant. The Feds already wanted AIPAC on espionage. Why? The short speculative answer: the FBI has continuously been looking for a high-level spy/mole known by code name MEGA.

MEGA was the secret guy somewhere in the U.S. government in the 1980s who (among other things) provided extremely secret document numbers to the Israelis. In turn, the Israelis sent a more disposable spy, Jonathan Pollard, the low-level Pentagon staffer, as a gofer to get the documents. Pollard got caught; he's still in a U.S. jail. (There's a rumor Bush might pardon him, ugh). MEGA never got caught. So we could speculate that officially the FBI was looking to see if MEGA sends AIPAC messages, enter Franklin accidentally.

Ok ok... this is pretty baroque spy stuff. Why did this engineer get exposed? How did the FBI catch him? Well, they got a tip. A tip from somewhere in Israel.

Reportedly, someone in Ehud Olmert's government tipped off the FBI about the engineer spy because they wanted to prevent the expanding middle east war. In other words, an Israeli exposed an old engineer spy in order to damage the neocons / hawks' chances of ginning up the war with Iran.

Old school ex-CIA dude Phil Giraldi spilled it:

"Israeli sources are reporting that the FBI investigation of the Ben-Ami Kadish spy case resulted from a leak coming from inside the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The information on Kadish and on a number of other Americans who have spied for Israel was provided to the FBI anonymously, leading to the Bureau's opening of a full investigation. One source reports that the National Security Agency was provided with Yosef Yagur's current phone number and address and was able to obtain corroborating information on the case by tapping the phone."

It was interesting to read that, in a change-up, some Israeli military officials would not brief the U.S. Congress about the big bad Muslim threats because the Congress would now grill them over that just-exposed Israeli espionage.

Sounds like a good time to put out some fun stories about evil Syrians and bombing their weird shacks of shadiness.

Interesting stuff I suppose... If you're into that kind of thing. Beyond that, there is of course the Sibel Edmonds scandal, which involves a certain network of nuclear secrets traffickers, intersecting with heroin and Washington lobbyists, or something.

Someone speculated that MEGA was really Marc Grossman, a longterm DC hack who is certainly in well over his head on this scandal. Grossman also has been rumored to have tipped off the Turks and Pakistanis that Valerie Plame's front company, Brewster Jennings, was really a CIA front. But he got caught on an FBI wiretap which Sibel Edmonds probably had to listen to, while she worked there.

So there is that angle. Good luck figuring it out, kids! There's a good chance this stuff will get some sunlight during the summer. I'll drink to that!!

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Some more awkward PR that had to get drowned out: Carter calls Gaza blockade a crime and atrocity | World | Reuters

Three examples of American political culture in 2008.

First, the latest efforts of the NSA to read my email and discover its exciting secrets. (Hayden's Haystacks: Chilling Effects and Fluffy Data Goodness...)

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Well well, we got a couple funny things which are probably Too Hot To link to - or something. I don't get it...

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This is pretty funny, but first I need to take note of their latest plans to spy on everybody... Wait... first, let's go back a couple years... These guys have such a great sense of humor.

I think this latest prank tops that Total Information Awareness logo in complete Maximum Conspiracy Irony. Back in the day...

2002: 'Mythical Evil Conspiracy Irony from the Establishment': We never thought anything would top the 'all seeing pyramid staring at Mideast.' But this is the Federal Government! They are Creative!

Fortunately the big pyramid is still up-n-beamin' around with it's Data Mining Sunshine and, yes, they are chucking all your emails and credit card transactions into the big Vortex. What were you expecting, punk?

The Wall Street Journal puts on their tinfoil hat to give us some nice radio waves: Via Cryptogon: NSA’s Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data:

Wall Street Journal: NSA’s Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data; Terror Fight Blurs Line Over Domain;Tracking Email By SIOBHAN GORMAN; March 10, 2008; Page A1

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system. The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence gathering has never been publicly disclosed. But an inquiry reveals that its efforts have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people’s communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Largely missing from the public discussion is the role of the highly secretive NSA in analyzing that data, collected through little-known arrangements that can blur the lines between domestic and foreign intelligence gathering. Supporters say the NSA is serving as a key bulwark against foreign terrorists and that it would be reckless to constrain the agency’s mission. The NSA says it is scrupulously following all applicable laws and that it keeps Congress fully informed of its activities.

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called “transactional” data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA’s own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge’s approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.

The NSA’s enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light. They include a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world’s main international banking clearinghouse to track money movements.

The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called “black programs” whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.

It isn’t clear how many of the different kinds of data are combined and analyzed together in one database by the NSA. An intelligence official said the agency’s work links to about a dozen antiterror programs in all....

But wait! Folks, it gets better. All they gotta do is Wire in your phone number to all the others!

Social-Network Analysis

The NSA uses its own high-powered version of social-network analysis to search for possible new patterns and links to terrorism. The Pentagon’s experimental Total Information Awareness program, later renamed Terrorism Information Awareness, was an early research effort on the same concept, designed to bring together and analyze as much and as many varied kinds of data as possible. Congress eliminated funding for the program in 2003 before it began operating. But it permitted some of the research to continue and TIA technology to be used for foreign surveillance.

Some of it was shifted to the NSA — which also is funded by the Pentagon — and put in the so-called black budget, where it would receive less scrutiny and bolster other data-sifting efforts, current and former intelligence officials said. “When it got taken apart, it didn’t get thrown away,” says a former top government official familiar with the TIA program.

Two current officials also said the NSA’s current combination of programs now largely mirrors the former TIA project. But the NSA offers less privacy protection. TIA developers researched ways to limit the use of the system for broad searches of individuals’ data, such as requiring intelligence officers to get leads from other sources first. The NSA effort lacks those controls, as well as controls that it developed in the 1990s for an earlier data-sweeping attempt.

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who led the charge to kill TIA, says “the administration is trying to bring as much of the philosophy of operation Total Information Awareness as it can into the programs they’re using today.” The issue has been overshadowed by the fight over telecoms’ immunity, he said. “There’s not been as much discussion in the Congress as there ought to be.”...

Oh yeh let's put in another tasty WSJ nibble about how the Posse Comitatus Act never covered how the Military would build the SuperOrwell HAL FBI Fishing Expedition Big Brother 2008 model...

FBI-NSA Projects

The NSA quietly redefined its role. Joint FBI-NSA projects “expanded exponentially,” said Jack Cloonan, a longtime FBI veteran who investigated al Qaeda. He pointed to national-security letter requests: They rose from 8,500 in 2000 to 47,000 in 2005, according to a Justice Department inspector general’s report last year. It also said the letters permitted the potentially illegal collection of thousands of records of people in the U.S. from 2003-05. Last Wednesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller said the bureau had found additional instances in 2006.....

Alright, so these guys are tracking all transactions, yet they can't find where the drug money goes. It just gets away every fucking time!

And just to drive the point home, the guys that specialized in the drug trafficking networks back in the 1980s get honored in a whole new way, somewhere deep in the Data System....

Now, for something completely different. But also not. Our second awesome story...

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According to the spy-exposure-weird-shit site Cryptome.org, a ton of 'telephone pseudonyms and true names' were listed at 411.com for a secret CIA phone number. That is, a ton of joke and real entries all assigned to (703) 482-1100, a CIA number in McLean Virginia.

Somehow 10,000+ records got assigned many-to-one to one phone number. Just for the CIA.

And better yet, a huge swath of the names are fucking pranks. Pranks about favorite names in the Conspiracy.

2008: 'Yes, the CIA put in all the best conspiracy names onto their own damn 411 reverse phone number lookup, just to piss me off!!!'

THIS IS TOO MUCH!!! OMG!!!! There are another 9980 fake names drawn from the great fabric of American spy conspiracy lore. Barry Seal has his place (or several). As we posted 11 months ago:

"William Buckley" has three listed CIA phone numbers @ (703) 482-1100. Don't these guys have something better to do? God damn, 'Ahmad Chelebi' is also listed @ (703) 482-1100. And 'Libby Plame.' and 'Laiffaire Plame'. And 'Judith Plame.' And Richard Secord. and Jose Rodriguez. And felix rodriguez. And Barry Seal. And Adler Seal. Covert Ops, the Skull & Bones days, all kinds of stuff. Maybe 'real names' of current people too? Put out onto the Web's 411 system? Really?

Cryptome

White House Telephone Nyms and Names

10,751 CIA Telephone Nyms and Names

4,151 NSA Telephone Nyms and Names. More aboot that last one: NSA Telephone Pseudonyms and Names: About 4,151 NSA telephone pseudonyms and true names are available via http://switchboard.intelius.com through a reverse telephone number look-up for (301) 688-0400. Some names are humorous ("Lawrence Waterhousespy," "Bin Laden") or ironic ("Hayden Lied," "Odom Warns"); others are spoofs: "Justin Rood" is the name of a national security journalist for CQ.com......

A2 provides a full index of the 10,751 CIA nyms and names, linked to Google Search for each name:

http://cryptome.org/cia-nyms-idx.htm

All right kids, now that we are really on a roll...

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Rumors of Denver Democratic National Convention deadlock to Hillary => Really pissed off Hordes vs. the Hacks? What would happen if the Hillary people went all the way to the convention and somehow ganked the nomination? Rick Perlstein passed along some emails from people comparing it to Chicago '68.

However, this kind of fucked up violent incident isn't going to happen at the Democratic National Convention, but its pretty likely to expect a lot more of Raving Loonies in Emails getting treated as proof that the end is near. Chaos looms etc. Doom memes are self reproducing!

I think it's a good example of... political science fiction, showing how people's fantasies play out in an imagined reality. Stuff like this generates an atmosphere of tension and can be used to basically troll. It's just like everything else on the Internet. combine Obama + Battle in Seattle fantasies... Huffington Post: Some Apocalyptic Observations on the Democratic Nomination Fight from Here on Out:

A young friend who lives in a small town in a rural state sent me the following observation today:

If the Clintons push for the win in Denver, they're going to split the goddamn party down the middle. I read your chapter on 1968 Chicago, obviously. I'm of the generation who supports Obama. I know what we're like. Shit, I know what I'm like.

Rick, if the Machine tries to give the Clintons the victory at the convention, I swear to God, Chicago's going to look like a Sadie Hawkins dance. People my age are going to be throwing stones. We all have transportation -- cell phones -- disposable income -- the Internet -- free time -- and Seattle as our example. Part of me is scared of a riot. Part of me isn't. The nomination belongs to Obama. Do you think we're going to let the Democratic Leadership Council take it? "God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, fire next time."

and then the ominous Iraq vet reference... A different guy who works inside the Democratic Party somewhere told Rick Perlstein:

Not to mention that there's going to be a significant Iraq veteran contingent at the convention, ready to rock 'n' roll. We've already had planning meetings about it -- we're going about it the same way that we would plan any decent military operation.... I can't emphasize enough how potentially scary things could get -- we've got folks working on the inside of the convention, and it's all done on a cell basis, so that folks only know what they need to know.

I feel like you'd get too many hits from the Man over this kind of material. On a day like today, why not?********Well, I would say that these three elements - building the Big Brother Machine, the CIA's own prank phone index, and the fantasies of militant anti-Hillaryites, it reminds me of why American political culture has that certain outrageous, cowboy, bravado thing. Read all the emails! Why not?! Are ya... yellow?!
The British are way too half-assed to have a country where such utter bullshit holds forth. That's America!

Bost