corruption

There is something creepy and un-American about such clandestine and underhanded behavior. To those of us who have lived under a totalitarian regime, there is an eerie feeling of déjà vu. This case, if any, deserves the comprehensive, mature and diverse consideration that an en banc panel can provide. We are taking a giant leap into the unknown, and the consequences for ourselves and our children may be dire and irreversible. Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania.
--Kozinski Chief LOLcat of the 9th Circuit

Via Chief Judge of 9th Circuit: “1984 here at last,” especially for poor. | Dailycensored.com -

So frequently these authoritarians schemes get one greenlight after another. This dissent nails down a wide variety of problems, from GPS spying to the distinct pattern of only appointing rich people with rich friends to the judiciary. This is a really nice dissent from Chief Judge Kozinski, who is regarded apparently as a bomb-throwing libertarian.

I'll post it in full, because we gotta pay some respect when one of these cats actually earns his paycheck.

******

VIA Laws, Life, and Legal Matters - Court Cases and Legal Information at Leagle.com - All Federal and State Appeals Court Cases in One Search

See also: Judges Divided Over Growing GPS Surveillance - NYTimes.com

U.S. v. PINEDA-MORENO

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
JUAN PINEDA-MORENO, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 08-30385.

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Filed August 12, 2010.

Before: Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain and N. Randy Smith, Circuit Judges, and Charles R. Wolle, Senior District Judge.[1 ]

Order; Dissent by Chief Judge Kozinski, Dissent by Judge Reinhardt.

The petition for rehearing en banc is DENIED.

ORDER

Judges O'Scannlain and N.R. Smith have voted to deny the petition for rehearing en banc, and Judge Wolle has so recommended.

The full court was advised of the petition for rehearing en banc. A judge requested a vote on whether to rehear the matter en banc, and the matter failed to receive a majority of the votes of the nonrecused active judges in favor of en banc consideration. Fed. R. App. P. 35.

Chief Judge KOZINSKI, with whom Judges REINHARDT, WARDLAW, PAEZ and BERZON join, dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc:

Having previously decimated the protections the Fourth Amendment accords to the home itself, United States v.Lemus, 596 F.3d 512 (9th Cir. 2010) (Kozinski, C.J., dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc); United Statesv. Black, 482 F.3d 1044 (9th Cir. 2007) (Kozinski, J., dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc), our court now proceeds to dismantle the zone of privacy we enjoy in the home's curtilage and in public. The needs of law enforcement, to which my colleagues seem inclined to refuse nothing, are quickly making personal privacy a distant memory. 1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last.

The facts are disturbingly simple: Police snuck onto Pineda-Moreno's property in the dead of night and attached a GPS tracking device to the underside of his car. The device continuously recorded the car's location, allowing police to monitor all of Pineda-Moreno's movements without the need for visual surveillance. The panel holds that none of this implicates the Fourth Amendment, even though the government concedes that the car was in the curtilage of Pineda-Moreno's home at the time the police attached the tracking device. The panel twice errs in very significant and dangerous ways.

1. The opinion assumes that Pineda-Moreno's driveway was part of his home's curtilage, yet concludes that Pineda-Moreno had no reasonable expectation of privacy there. Curtilage is a quaint word most people are not familiar with; even among judges and lawyers, the word is seldom well understood. Yet, it stands for a very important concept because it rounds out the constitutional protections accorded an individual when he is at home.

Curtilage comes to us by way of Middle English and traces its roots to the Old French courtillage, roughly meaning court or little yard. In modern times it has come to mean those portions of a homeowner's property so closely associated with the home as to be considered part of it. The walkway leading from the street to the house is probably part of the curtilage, and the stairs from the walkway to the porch almost certainly are, as is the porch where grandma sits and rocks most afternoons and watches strangers pass by. The attached garage on the side of the house is part of the curtilage, and so is the detached shed where dad keeps his shop equipment and mom her gardening tools—so long as it's not too far from the house itself. The front lawn is part of the curtilage, and the driveway and the backyard—if it's not too big, and is properly separated from the open fields beyond the house.

Whether some portion of property—the porch, the stairs, the shed, the yard, the chicken coop—is part of the curtilage is sometimes a disputed question. But once it is determined that something is part of the curtilage, it's entitled to precisely the same Fourth Amendment protections as the home itself. How do we know? Because the Supreme Court has said so repeatedly.

In Oliver v. United States, the Court said as follows:

[O]nly the curtilage . . . warrants the Fourth Amendment protections that attach to the home. At common law, the curtilage is the area to which extends the intimate activity associated with the "sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life," and therefore has been considered part of home itself for Fourth Amendment purposes. Thus, courts have extended Fourth Amendment protection to the curtilage.

466 U.S. 170, 180 (1984) (quoting Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 630 (1886)) (emphasis added). Three years later, the Court reiterated the same view in United States v. Dunn, 480 U.S. 294, 300 (1987):

[In Oliver] we recognized that the Fourth Amendment protects the curtilage of a house and that the extent of the curtilage is determined by factors that bear upon whether an individual reasonably may expect that the area in question should be treated as the home itself.

(Emphasis added). See also Dow Chemical Co. v. United States, 476 U.S. 227, 231 (1986) (citing Oliver, 466 U.S. at 170). There's no disputing that the Court considers the curtilage to stand on the same footing as the home itself for purposes of the Fourth Amendment.

While it can be unclear whether a particular portion of the homeowner's property is part of the curtilage, there's no doubt here because the government concedes that Pineda-Moreno's driveway is a part of his curtilage, and the panel expressly assumes that it is. United States v. Pineda-Moreno, 591 F.3d 1212, 1214-15 (9th Cir. 2010). Having made that assumption, Oliver and Dunn require the panel to "treat[ ] [it] as the home itself." Dunn, 480 U.S. at 300. Instead, the panel holds that Pineda-Moreno was required to separately establish a reasonable expectation of privacy in the curtilage. That— according to Oliver and Dunn—is like requiring the homeowner to establish a reasonable expectation of privacy in his bedroom. We are often reminded that we must follow Supreme Court precedent, see, e.g., Winn v. Ariz. Christian Sch. Tuition Org., 586 F.3d 649, 658-59 (9th Cir. 2009) (O'Scannlain, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc), but the panel here forgets this advice.

The panel does cite California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207 (1986), but that case undermines its position. Ciraolo held that a homeowner has no reasonable expectation of visual privacy in his property as to activities that might be seen from a low-flying airplane. The activity there in question— cultivation of marijuana—took place in the homeowner's yard, so the Court could have limited its discussion to the curtilage. Instead, Ciraolo quoted a passage from Katz v.United States, 389 US. 347, 361 (1967), to the effect that "a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the `plain view' of outsiders are not `protected' because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited." Ciraolo, 476 U.S. at 215 (quoting Katz,389 U.S. at 361). This passage applies equally to a person's yard as his porch and his bedroom window: If what you do in your home is visible to the public, you have no reasonable expectation that it will remain private. Ciraolo citesOliver and follows its analysis by treating the curtilage and the home as exactly the same for Fourth Amendment purposes.

The panel's rationale for concluding that Pineda-Moreno had no reasonable expectation of privacy is even more worrisome than its disregard of Supreme Court precedent: According to the panel, Pineda-Moreno's driveway was open to the public in that strangers wishing to reach the door of his trailer "to deliver the newspaper or to visit someone would have to go through the driveway to get to the house." Pineda-Moreno, 591 F.3d at 1215. But there are many parts of a person's property that are accessible to strangers for limited purposes: the mailman is entitled to open the gate and deposit mail in the front door slot; the gas man may come into the yard, go into the basement or look under the house to read the meter; the gardener goes all over the property, climbs trees, opens sheds, turns on the sprinkler and taps into the electrical outlets; the pool man, the cable guy, the telephone repair man, the garbage collector, the newspaper delivery boy (we should be so lucky) come onto the property to deliver their wares, perform maintenance or make repairs. This doesn't mean that we invite neighbors to use the pool, strangers to camp out on the lawn or police to snoop in the garage. See United States v. Hedrick, 922 F.2d 396, 400, 402 (7th Cir. 1991) (Cudahy, J., dissenting).

The panel authorizes police to do not only what invited strangers could, but also uninvited children—in this case crawl under the car to retrieve a ball and tinker with the undercarriage. But there's no limit to what neighborhood kids will do, given half a chance: They'll jump the fence, crawl under the porch, pick fruit from the trees, set fire to the cat and micturate on the azaleas. To say that the police may do on your property what urchins might do spells the end of Fourth Amendment protections for most people's curtilage.

The very rich will still be able to protect their privacy with the aid of electric gates, tall fences, security booths, remote cameras, motion sensors and roving patrols, but the vast majority of the 60 million people living in the Ninth Circuit will see their privacy materially diminished by the panel's ruling. Open driveways, unenclosed porches, basement doors left unlocked, back doors left ajar, yard gates left unlatched, garage doors that don't quite close, ladders propped up under an open window will all be considered invitations for police to sneak in on the theory that a neighborhood child might, in which case, the homeowner "would have no grounds to complain." Id.

There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist: No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter. Judges, regardless of race, ethnicity or sex, are selected from the class of people who don't live in trailers or urban ghettos. The everyday problems of people who live in poverty are not close to our hearts and minds because that's not how we and our friends live. Yet poor people are entitled to privacy, even if they can't afford all the gadgets of the wealthy for ensuring it. Whatever else one may say about Pineda-Moreno, it's perfectly clear that he did not expect— and certainly did not consent—to have strangers prowl his property in the middle of the night and attach electronic tracking devices to the underside of his car. No one does.

When you glide your BMW into your underground garage or behind an electric gate, you don't need to worry that somebody might attach a tracking device to it while you sleep. But the Constitution doesn't prefer the rich over the poor; the man who parks his car next to his trailer is entitled to the same privacy and peace of mind as the man whose urban fortress is guarded by the Bel Air Patrol. The panel's breezy opinion is troubling on a number of grounds, not least among them its unselfconscious cultural elitism.

2. After concluding that entering onto Pineda-Moreno's property and attaching a tracking device to his car required no warrant, probable cause, founded suspicion or by-your-leave from the homeowner, the panel holds that downloading the data from the GPS device, which gave police the precise locus of all of Pineda-Moreno's movements, also was not a search, and so police can do it to anybody, anytime they feel like it. Contra United Statesv. Maynard, No. 08-3030, slip op. at 19 (D.C. Cir. Aug. 6, 2010). Our panel relies on United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983), a case from the early 1980s, which involved very different technology.

The Knotts Court refers to the device used there as a "beeper" and describes it as "a radio transmitter, usually battery operated, which emits periodic signals that can be picked up by a radio receiver." Id. at 277. The beeper helped police follow a vehicle by emitting a signal that got stronger the closer the police were to it. The Court considered the beeper to be an aid to following a vehicle through traffic: "The governmental surveillance conducted by means of the beeper in this case amounted principally to the following of an automobile on public streets and highways." Id. at 281. Individuals traveling on streets and highways can be seen by the public, so they have no reasonable expectation that they won't be followed. The beeper helped the police follow the suspect more effectively—the way binoculars enhance the ability to see what is otherwise visible. But the beeper could perform no tracking on its own, nor could it record its location. If no one was close enough to pick up the signal, it was lost forever.

The electronic tracking devices used by the police in this case have little in common with the primitive devices inKnotts. One of the devices here used GPS satellites to pinpoint the car's location on a continuing basis—much like the electronic maps that are now popular in cars. The other type of device was, essentially, a cell phone that tracked the car's movements by its proximity to particular cell towers.

Beepers could help police keep vehicles in view when following them, or find them when they lost sight of them, but they still required at least one officer—and usually many more—to follow the suspect. The modern devices used in Pineda-Moreno's case can record the car's movements without human intervention—quietly, invisibly, with uncanny precision. A small law enforcement team can deploy a dozen, a hundred, a thousand such devices and keep track of their various movements by computer, with far less effort than was previously needed to follow a single vehicle. The devices create a permanent electronic record that can be compared, contrasted and coordinated to deduce all manner of private information about individuals. By holding that this kind of surveillance doesn't impair an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy, the panel hands the government the power to track the movements of every one of us, every day of our lives.

The Supreme Court has recognized that advances in "police technology [can] erode the privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment." Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27, 34 (2001). To guard against this, courts "must take the long view, from the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment forward." Id. at 40. Kyllo followed a line of cases going back to United States v. Karo, 468 U.S. 705 (1984), Katz, 389 U.S. at 353, and Silverman v. United States,365 U.S. 505, 512 (1961), which stemmed the erosion of personal privacy wrought by technological advances.

In Kyllo, the Court held that use of a thermal imager to detect the heat emanating from defendant's home was a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment because the then-new technology enabled police to detect what was going on inside the home—activities the homeowner was entitled to consider private. Any other conclusion, the Court noted, "would leave the homeowner at the mercy of advancing technology—including imaging technology that could discern all human activity in the home." Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 35-36 (citing Karo, 468 U.S. at 705). "While the technology used in the present case was relatively crude," the Court continued, "the rule we adopt must take account of more sophisticated systems that are already in use or in development." Id. at 36. In determining whether the tracking devices used in PinedaMoreno's case violate the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of personal privacy, we may not shut our eyes to the fact that they are just advance ripples to a tidal wave of technological assaults on our privacy.

If you have a cell phone in your pocket, then the government can watch you. Michael Isikoff, The Snitch in Your Pocket, Newsweek, Mar. 1, 2010, available at http:// www.newsweek.com/id/233916. At the government's request, the phone company will send out a signal to any cell phone connected to its network, and give the police its location. Last year, law enforcement agents pinged users of just one service provider—Sprint—over eight million times. SeeChristopher Soghoian, 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight, Slight Paranoia (Dec. 1, 2009) http://paranoia/dubfire. net/2009/12/8-million-reasons-for-real-surveillance.html. The volume of requests grew so large that the 110-member electronic surveillance team couldn't keep up, so Sprint automated the process by developing a web interface that gives agents direct access to users' location data. Id. Other cell phone service providers are not as forthcoming about this practice, so we can only guess how many millions of their customers get pinged by the police every year. See Justin Scheck, Stalkers Exploit Cellphone GPS, Wall St. J., Aug. 5, 2010, at A1, A14 (identifying AT&T and Verizon as providing "law-enforcement[ ] easy access to such data").

Use LoJack or OnStar? Someone's watching you too. E.g., OnStar Stolen Vehicle Assistance, http://www.onstar.com/ us_english/jsp/plans/sva.jsp (last visited July 17, 2010). And it's not just live tracking anymore. Private companies are starting to save location information to build databases that allow for hyper-targeted advertising. E.g., Andrew Heining, What's So Bad About the Google Street View Data Flap?, Christian Sci. Monitor, May 15, 2010, available at http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0515/What-s-sobad-about-the-Google-Street-View-data-flap. Companies are amassing huge, ready-made databases of where we've all been. If, as the panel holds, we have no privacy interest in where we go, then the government can mine these databases without a warrant, indeed without any suspicion whatsoever.

By tracking and recording the movements of millions of individuals the government can use computers to detect patterns and develop suspicions. It can also learn a great deal about us because where we go says much about who we are. Are Winston and Julia's cell phones together near a hotel a bit too often? Was Syme's OnStar near an STD clinic? Were Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford at that protest outside the White House? The FBI need no longer deploy agents to infiltrate groups it considers subversive; it can figure out where the groups hold meetings and ask the phone company for a list of cell phones near those locations.

The panel holds that the government can obtain this information without implicating the Fourth Amendment because an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements through public spaces where he might be observed by an actual or hypothetical observer. But that's quite a leap from what the Supreme Court actually held inKnotts, which is that you have no expectation of privacy as against police who are conducting visual surveillance, albeit "augmenting the sensory faculties bestowed upon them at birth with such enhancements as science and technology afford[s] them." 460 U.S. at 282.

You can preserve your anonymity from prying eyes, even in public, by traveling at night, through heavy traffic, in crowds, by using a circuitous route, disguising your appearance, passing in and out of buildings and being careful not to be followed. But there's no hiding from the all-seeing network of GPS satellites that hover overhead, which never sleep, never blink, never get confused and never lose attention. Nor is there respite from the dense network of cell towers that honeycomb the inhabited United States. Acting together these two technologies alone can provide law enforcement with a swift, efficient, silent, invisible and cheap way of tracking the movements of virtually anyone and everyone they choose. See, e.g., GPS Mini Tracker with Cell Phone Assist Tracker, http://www.spyville.com/passive-gps.html (last visited July 17, 2010). Most targets won't know they need to disguise their movements or turn off their cell phones because they'll have no reason to suspect that Big Brother is watching them.

The Supreme Court in Knotts expressly left open whether "twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country" by means of "dragnet-type law enforcement practices" violates the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of personal privacy. 460 U.S. at 283-84. When requests for cell phone location information have become so numerous that the telephone company must develop a self-service website so that law enforcement agents can retrieve user data from the comfort of their desks, we can safely say that "such dragnet-type law enforcement practices" are already in use. This is precisely the wrong time for a court covering one-fifth of the country's population to say that the Fourth Amendment has no role to play in mediating the voracious appetites of law enforcement. But see Maynard, slip op. at 19.

* * *

I don't think that most people in the United States would agree with the panel that someone who leaves his car parked in his driveway outside the door of his home invites people to crawl under it and attach a device that will track the vehicle's every movement and transmit that information to total strangers. There is something creepy and un-American about such clandestine and underhanded behavior. To those of us who have lived under a totalitarian regime, there is an eerie feeling of déjà vu. This case, if any, deserves the comprehensive, mature and diverse consideration that an en banc panel can provide. We are taking a giant leap into the unknown, and the consequences for ourselves and our children may be dire and irreversible. Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania.

REINHARDT, Circuit Judge, dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc:

I concur in Chief Judge Kozinski's dissent.

I have served on this court for nearly three decades. I regret that over that time the courts have gradually but deliberately reduced the protections of the Fourth Amendment to the point at which it scarcely resembles the robust guarantor of our constitutional rights we knew when I joined the bench. See Fisher v. City of San Jose, 558 F.3d 1069, 1089 (9th Cir. 2009) (en banc) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Ankeny, 502 F.3d 829, 841 (9th Cir. 2007) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Crapser, 472 F.3d 1141, 1149 (9th Cir. 2007) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Gourde, 440 F.3d 1065, 1074 (9th Cir. 2006) (en banc) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting);United States v. Kincade, 379 F.3d 813, 842 (9th Cir. 2004) (en banc) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Hudson, 100 F.3d 1409, 1421 (9th Cir. 1996) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); Acton v. Vernonia Sch. Dist. 47J, 66 F.3d 217, 218 (9th Cir. 1995) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Barona, 56 F.3d 1087, 1098 (9th Cir. 1995) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Kelley, 953 F.2d 562, 566 (9th Cir. 1992) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting);United States v. Alvarez, 899 F.2d 833, 840 (9th Cir. 1990) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Flores, 679 F.2d 173, 178 (9th Cir. 1982) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting).

These decisions have curtailed the "right of the people to be secure . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures" not only in our homes and surrounding curtilage, but also in our vehicles, computers, telephones, and bodies — all the way down to our bodily fluids and DNA.

Today's decision is but one more step down the gloomy path the current Judiciary has chosen to follow with regard to the liberties protected by the Fourth Amendment. Sadly, I predict that there will be many more such decisions to come.

I dissent.

Goldman Sachs Settlement 'Victory' Ushers Change to Wall Street

BusinessWeek - ‎1 hour ago‎

July 16 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s $550 million settlement with US regulators yesterday will benefit the firm by ending three months of uncertainty at an affordable price.

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Another nice thing is that settling the case will help dent the discovery of other Goldman Sachs crimez. More fun GoldmanSachs666: Goldman Sachs Information, Comments, Opinions and Facts and of course the delightful ZeroHedge.com: Guest Post: Why Goldman Could Pull It Off, Goldman SEC Settlement Vote Split Along Party Lines, Goldman Statement On SEC Settlement, "We believe that this settlement is the right outcome for our firm, our shareholders and our clients." And now, back to recommending the worst possible trades to these very clients.Artist's Rendering Of Tim Geithner's Desktop, Full Goldman Judgment And Consent Documents:

Goldman acknowledges that the marketing materials for the ABACUS 2007-ACI transaction contained incomplete information. In particular, it was a mistake for the Goldman marketing materials to state that the reference portfolio was "selected by" ACA Management LLC without disclosing the role of Paulson & Co. Inc. in the portfolio selection process and that Paulson's economic interests were adverse to CDO investors.Goldman regrets that the marketing materials did not contain that disclosure.

Unprecedented SPY-ES Divergence On Goldman Settlement News, BP Non-

Meanwhile this is a bigger deal in some ways: Another Day, Another Baltic Dry Decline: Longest Sequential Drop In 15 Years. The Baltic Dry Index is a representation of ocean-going shipping demand / prices -- as global trade has crumbled, the index is crashing. A very fundamental indicator.

God's work here, people. Move along.

Jesse Trentadue: …who’s testifying about Howe had reported that the plan to bomb the Murrah building four months in advance, had gone with Strassmeir and others to scout the target – the first thing the U.S. Attorney does when Graham stops testifying is ask the judge to seal the transcript, and the judge says why, and he says, "We don’t want it getting out and mucking up the McVeigh trial: the fact that here an ATF agent, an informant, had gone to Oklahoma City to scout the Murrah building to be bombed with people other than McVeigh four months in advance." And the judge granted the order, and he ordered the transcript sealed.

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Jesse Trentadue is an attorney whose brother got killed in prison, probably because the FBI thought he was the Oklahoma City Bombing's enigmatic John Doe #2. Trentadue has been seeking justice for years and has finally hit an unexpected CIA FOIA lawsuit wall in the cases.

The line is still more-or-less that McVeigh was in with a bunch of FBI / ATF informants -- making the whole thing a preventable false flag attack. Also discussed here is the role of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which may have done cutout informant operations for the FBI because they couldn't get into Elohim City as a specifically "religious" compound.

Also a white supremacist style Midwestern bank robbery ring that McVeigh apparently ran with had some undercover operatives. Roger Moore, a gun dealer and wealthy veteran of the aviation world, was "held up" by Terry Nichols apparently to provide the Kinestiks needed for the Murrah bombing.

Nichols claims McVeigh spilled the beans that one top FBI agent named Potts was controlling or handling McVeigh. The a Nichols deposition about the subject is in the file directory listed below.

Additionally the FBI has obviously tampered with the videocamera evidence and in fact the video expert from the OJ Simpson trial died of a "heart attack" after telling them the tapes were obviously erased! Between that, Trentadue's unlucky brother, and one of the bank robbers, the full spectrum of international and domestic espionage operations setting up Oklahoma City emerge.

Nichols claimed McVeigh knew Elohim City was "ATF City", i.e. obviously loaded with informants, but he wanted to go there and do it anyway with the various other agencies, almost as a kind of audience or support grid for a false flag attack in Oklahoma City -- perhaps McVeigh wanted to play it out and see if they would let him pull this off?

The new CIA angle is probably related to information about Andreas Strassmeir, the German national who was involved as an informant for possibly the German BND service as well as the FBI or ATF.

Additionally there is a good discussion of how the oh-so-wonderful Southern Poverty Law Center was running informant activities, probably operating as an FBI cutout, at Elohim City. Another element is how current US Attorney General Eric Holder was the direct lead DOJ goon for covering up Trentadue's murder.

Previously in 2007: New 1995 Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy video from BBC! GOP's Rohrabacher rebukes FBI for coverup?? | HongPong.com.

First a couple other things from Antiwar.com. Kudos to them for following this. The wall of secrecy goes right to the usual suspects.

Populism, Left and Right by Justin Raimondo -- Antiwar.com

At Least 50 Killed in Pakistan’s Weekend of Bombings -- News from Antiwar.com

Defense Spending Is Much Greater than You Think | The Beacon

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Key interview lays it out: They Are Lying to You About the Oklahoma City Bombing by Scott Horton -- Antiwar.com

Scott Horton interviews Jesse Trentadue, April 19, 2010

Interview conducted March 30, 2010. Listen to the interview. Scott’s collection of OKC audio clips here. Scott’s collection of Jesse Trentadue’s court files here.

For Antiwar.com and KAOS radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I’m Scott Horton. This is Antiwar Radio. And our first guest on the show today is Jesse Trentadue. He’s an attorney from Salt Lake City, Utah. Welcome to the show, Jesse, how’re you doing?

Jesse Trentadue: Thank you very much.

Scott Horton: I really appreciate you joining us here. All right, so, I guess I’ll give a short introduction to the story here, just to catch everybody up, and I’ll try to make the long story short if I can: Jesse’s brother, Kenneth Michael Trentadue, was tortured to death in federal custody in the summer of 1995. And it turns out the reason, the probable reason anyway that he was tortured to death in federal custody, was because it was a case of mistaken identity. They were trying to get him to admit that he was a guy named Richard Lee Guthrie, who was one of the John Does suspected in the Oklahoma City bombing. And Kenneth Trentadue, unfortunately, was just at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong color hair, the wrong truck, the wrong dragon tattoo on his arm, and they were just convinced that he was Richard Guthrie, and he paid for it with his life. And a massive cover-up commenced, but they didn’t realize that they were messing with Jesse Trentadue, who happens to be a lawyer in Utah and knows how to work the system to, well, approach a remedy and justice. And so this is how Jesse’s story has become one with the story, the true story, of what happened behind the Oklahoma City bombing. And just in the last week Jesse has gotten refused by the court on some motions, some Freedom of Information Act suits that he had filed against the Central Intelligence Agency for any files that they had about the Oklahoma City bombing, and even though the files that he was suing for were denied, the judge’s decision on why he was denied was full of all kinds of extra interesting things itself. So, do I have that basically right, Jesse? Please correct me if I went off the story anywhere there, and then maybe please let’s get into what the judge’s decision actually said here.

Trentadue: Nope, I think you’re absolutely right. And one of the things your listeners should know is, I didn’t start out to solve the Oklahoma City bombing. I started out to find out who killed my brother, and as it happened, every lead I came across took me back to the bombing in Oklahoma City in April of 1995, including a message I received from Tim McVeigh shortly before he was executed. I mean they sent me a message that when he saw my brother’s picture and heard what happened to him, he said that I want you to know that essentially the FBI probably killed him because they thought he was John Doe 2, who was Richard Lee Guthrie.

[......]Horton: All right, well, so, what do we find out this week? What’s in these new documents? This judge told you, no, basically, your latest suit from Freedom of Information Act against the CIA has failed, correct?

Trentadue: It has, but, as you pointed out, [the judge] did a lot for me and he did a lot for the American people. He told us things that otherwise we would never have known. What happened is, I, in order to document the link between my brother’s murder and the bombing, and the connection to Guthrie, I filed a number of Freedom of Information Act suits. I sued the FBI. This time I sued the CIA. And it was sort of on a hunch, I said to the CIA I want all documents showing your involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing or prior knowledge of that attack. And they came back and gave me 37 blank pages, 12 documents all together, 37 blank pages, and they were stamped Secret, National Security. And they said, "Oh by the way, we have all these other documents that are so super secret we can’t even give you blank pages." So…

Trentadue: Well, I sued them and said I want those documents, and the judge, of course, they came in, and it’s the very first time anyone in my Freedom of Information suits has ever asserted national security and the exemption of producing. And that’s like, it’s a rock that you can’t get around, once the government throws up national security. And they did more than that. They said to release these documents would pose a grave threat to the security of the United States of America. And the judge’s hands are tied at that point. It’s like a shield that he can’t go beyond, behind. But what he did, and I think he did this intentionally, is he wrote his opinion to let me know and the public know that there was a foreign connection to the Oklahoma City bombing. And he goes through it and he discusses the CIA’s assistance in helping prosecute Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols. And he talks about the contacts with foreign informants, foreign witnesses. He paints a very clear picture that there was foreign involvement, and of course there has to be because the CIA is a foreign intelligence agency. By law it cannot operate within the borders of the United States unless, unless there is a foreign element here.

......Horton: Well, now, do you have any real indication as to what he’s talking about, if this is perhaps, you know, has to do with Andreas Strassmeir or whether this is, you know, along the lines of Jayna Davis and the American Enterprise Institute and trying to pin it on Middle Easterners?

Trentadue: I think it, I think it was Strassmeir, a German national and a former Army officer and counterterrorist person from the Republic of Germany. That’s my opinion. Of course he doesn’t say who, but it’s my feeling that’s the person.

.......Trentadue: No, but I think it’s significant, what he’s done. I mean, in one of the documents is talking about trying to extradite an organized crime figure from another country, that’s part of the bombing prosecution. And these things are, this is happening after, after the FBI says "We’ve caught Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols, they’re the ones who did it, end of story." So, long after they’re telling the American public that, the CIA is running down witnesses and suspects in foreign countries for the FBI and the Department of Justice. But, I think this was important for a number of reasons. It’s the first time it’s ever been documented, no one even suspected, that the CIA was involved in the Oklahoma City bombing. And, more than that, one of the things that came out is they actually had the Geospatial Intelligence Agency involved. Now I imagine very few if any of your listeners know what that is, and I certainly didn’t until the name came up in these CIA documents. And that’s the spy satellite program the CIA operates. So you have not only the CIA involved, you have the spy satellite folks involved.

Horton: Well, you know, I wonder, after all these releases, have you figured out who was running Strassmeir exactly? I mean, it seems like it would be kind of strange if the CIA was running him the whole time and then they go doing a big investigation about him after the fact, you know?

Trentadue: I think it was a joint operation between the FBI and the German government. You remember the people they targeted were the emerging neo-Nazi movement. It came to life in the United States. It was being exported back to Europe. The German government was petrified that this would take root there. And so I think it was a joint effort by the German government and the United States through the FBI to do this, infiltrate these groups. And I’ve come across a name that makes me believe that is so, because they refer to this operation as PatCon, the FBI did, P-A-T-C-O-N, which was an acronym for Patriot Conspiracy. And I think the objective was to infiltrate the militia movement, and they targeted this group, a potentially dangerous group in eastern Oklahoma who lived in a compound called Elohim City. Strassmeir worked his way into that compound as the explosives and weapons inspector, and I think he was an agent provocateur. I think he ginned those folks up to bomb the Murrah building.

Horton: Yeah, it does seem to be a question of – well and I don’t to get too far into speculation here because honestly after all these years, you know, my memory fails, and also I’m not so sure anymore about some of the things I used to think I was more sure about, but it certainly seems as though, you know, Strassmeir was not the only FBI agent or informant in on this and that there’s enough hard evidence to show, well for example, the last time we spoke we talked about how the ATF informant, Carol Howe, was reporting back on this group of, you know, terrorist plotters and even as admitted by her ATF handler under oath, she even went with them to case the building, and then the next day drove her ATF handler on the same route and said "That’s the building we cased," before the bombing ever even happened. And, so it sure is, it sure seems pretty clear to me that, you know, there was some kind of infiltration, as you said, going on there, but then I guess the question comes down to, doesn’t it, whether it was a sting that got out of control or whether this guy Strassmeir’s mission actually was to get a bombing done. I mean, after all, there was a bombing, killed 168 people. Somebody built that bomb.

Trentadue: Carol Howe reported that four months before the bomb went off. In one of the documents reported this to the ATF, she went with Strassmeir and others to scout the target. One of the documents that came out as a result of my suing the FBI was a teletype from FBI headquarters, then Director Louis Freeh, to his field office in Oklahoma City saying that two days before the bombing McVeigh had called Elohim City to speak with Strassmeir asking for more help to carry out the attack. I mean, they clearly knew, clearly knew in advance it was going to happen. Now this is something you struggle with and I struggle with, did it go south on them, was the plan to catch the people in the act, or did they really want it to happen. I – God I had to think it – as much as I hate the FBI, I hate to think it’s the latter. You have to look at what they get when there’s a terrorist attack. They get all new funding, they get the Patriot Act, they get all these other laws that take away our rights.

.......Horton: All right, now, for anybody who remembers back then who paid attention and tried to have an unbiased eye to what was going on, I think it was pretty apparent that the trials of McVeigh and Nichols both in Denver were ridiculous sham fake trials, the kind that you would expect to see in some Third World dictatorship or something. They did nothing but bring witness after witness to talk about how sad they were and then they did nothing but exclude anybody who could shed light on what actually happened there. And in fact, I have the clip here, I guess I won’t play it now, I might try to stick it on the end of the interview here, but there’s a clip from "60 Minutes" where one of McVeigh’s jurors says, "Well, you know, if he didn’t do it, I would expect for someone to come in and testify that, you know, he was with me that day or something, and since that didn’t happen, I had to go ahead and convict." In other words, the state did not prove their case at all, the national government, the U.S. Attorney’s office, did not prove their case beyond saying we’re really, really sure it was McVeigh. Now, I don’t doubt that it was McVeigh, or not very much, I guess I got a 1% doubt, but – maybe less than 1% – but certainly there is no doubt whatsoever that they refused to put on a real trial because if they put on a real trial all this stuff about the prior knowledge and Andreas Strassmeir and Carol Howe and all the rest of it would have come out. In fact, you know, if I’m going to go as far as compare it to a Third World dictatorship, let me go ahead and add the detail, they indicted Carol Howe for having a pipe in her garage and white supremacist literature consistent with her costume as undercover informant and charged her with conspiracy to bomb people so that she would be under indictment at the time of the McVeigh trial and unable to testify. And then as soon as the trial was over they dropped the charges against her, they didn’t even try to prosecute her. It was just a scheme to keep her off the stand, even though Stephen Jones, the lawyer, tried to subpoena her over and over again, obviously.

Trentadue: …who’s testifying about Howe had reported that the plan to bomb the Murrah building four months in advance, had gone with Strassmeir and others to scout the target – the first thing the U.S. Attorney does when Graham stops testifying is ask the judge to seal the transcript, and the judge says why, and he says, "We don’t want it getting out and mucking up the McVeigh trial: the fact that here an ATF agent, an informant, had gone to Oklahoma City to scout the Murrah building to be bombed with people other than McVeigh four months in advance." And the judge granted the order, and he ordered the transcript sealed.

.......Trentadue: And it gets more incredible, I mean, one of the things I have is I have affidavits from the people who knew how the surveillance system worked in the Murrah building including one from an Oklahoma City police officer who was on the scene immediately after the blast trying to find survivors and rescue them and they’re ordered out of the building and the FBI takes the cameras down. I mean…

Horton: Mmhmm. Well, and you know there were three different bomb scares after the bombing where they said "We found an undetonated bomb, everybody run." And I guess I used to just be convinced that that meant that they found an undetonated bomb, but maybe there was something else going on there. I guess JD Cash thought that there were not internal explosives but that the ATF, for example, had a tow missile up in their offices that they had to get rid of and maybe some other things. And I guess you’re saying it sounds like one of these bomb scares was about getting rid of the security cameras.

Trentadue: It was. They went in immediately and took the cameras down off the building. And why, within minutes of the blast, when people are searching frantically due to rubble trying to rescue the people and save lives, would the FBI order the rescuers out and then remove the cameras?

........Horton: All right, now, what do you have, and you know, I just, I shouldn’t make this personal, but I guess I kind of am making it personal. Every day I turn on TV and somebody from the Southern Poverty Law Center is saying that anyone who does not approve of whatever the administration is doing at any given time is basically a neo-Nazi, basically responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing. If you’re a member of the Tea Party movement, which I am certainly not and have not much in common with, but according to them, if you’re a member of the Tea Party movement, then, well, you’re basically John Doe No. 2. And, you know, it’s extra frustrating to me since John Doe 2 apparently was an undercover FBI informant and they get to go ahead and continue to, you know, beat any dissent against a Democratic [Party] controlled government over the head with this bombing. Um, but it’s always somebody from the Southern Poverty Law Center who is the guest, the expert guest, who gets to tell us how many hate groups there are in America at any given time and conflate basically anybody to the right of Rachel Maddow together with Timothy McVeigh. And so I’m kinda curious to know what evidence you have, Jesse, that the Southern Poverty Law Center was in any way involved with the neo-Nazi/cops who did the Oklahoma bombing.

Trentadue: Well it appears, and first of all, I agree with you, it’s a sad state in our country’s history where to voice an opinion means you’re attacked from one side or the other. It means you no longer discuss things as a nation or a people. That we’ve become so divided now that you’re either one side or the other or forced into one side or the other. But for the Southern Poverty Law Center, they had, and they’ve had – they had apparently informants, another level of informant, at Elohim City at the same time that Strassmeir and Carol Howe and the other government informants were there. These documents that I’ve had them produce, and not widely reported on, refer to the Southern Poverty Law Center reporting to the FBI the information it was receiving from its informants at Elohim City about the bombing.

Horton: Now do you know who those informants were?

Trentadue: I do not.

Horton: Are there any indications whether…

Trentadue: The names are blacked out. The FBI pleaded with the judge not to turn over any of the documents because they said they had guaranteed five or six people anonymity and confidentiality and it would expose them to risk of their life if their names were disclosed, and the judge said "Well, black out the names but turn the documents over." So I have documents talking about the informants, but the informants’ names are redacted or blacked out. By their own admission they’ve had five or six there that they had promised protection.

Horton: Hmm. But I guess, are there any other… because, you know, I remember JD Cash talking about this back in the day and I forget whether he said there was any other indication as to the identities of the informants that were working with Morris Dees.

Trentadue: I suspect that Strassmeir was reporting to the Southern Poverty Law Center too.

Horton: See that was something about this, right? – was Janet Reno’s order restricting, I think this is what JD Cash told me, that there was a guideline from the Justice Department that went down that said or that in some way restricted the authority of the FBI to infiltrate groups.

Trentadue: A religious compound. I talked to JD about that and he’s absolutely right. He believed that it was a cutout operation that the FBI was, that the Southern Poverty Law Center was a straw man being run by the FBI in this operation because the FBI could not, because it was a governmental entity, invade this religious compound. And Elohim City claimed to be a right-wing Christian fundamentalist compound.

Horton: Well but there’s all kinds of other evidence that any number of these guys were actually working for the FBI as either cops or like perhaps Strassmeir paid informants, people who’ve been, you know, threatened with prosecution and then turned state’s witness and, you know, should we go down the list here? I mean there’s quite a bit of FBI work going on at Elohim City. Was it all being outsourced through the SPLC?

Trentadue: I don’t know, but I think a large part may have been, at least from the documents that I’ve been given, I mean, or that the judge has ordered released. They were very active there. But I don’t think it was all run through them. The ATF for example had Carol Howe and probably others.

Quick hits for the fans of stuff & things. Welcome to the Fishbowl says a sad federal judge upon the abandonment of the 4th Amendment. Alex Kozinski in the 9th Circuit has some integrity... via Reason:

This is an extraordinary case: Our court approves, without blinking, a police sweep of a person’s home without a warrant, without probable cause, without reasonable suspicion and without exigency—in other words, with nothing at all to support the entry except the curiosity police always have about what they might find if they go rummaging around a suspect’s home. Once inside, the police managed to turn up a gun “in plain view”—stuck between two cushions of the living room couch—and we reward them by upholding the search.

Did I mention that this was an entry into somebody’s home, the place where the protections of the Fourth Amendment are supposedly at their zenith?…

The opinion misapplies Supreme Court precedent, conflicts with our own case law and is contrary to the great weight of authority in the other circuits. It is also the only case I know of, in any jurisdiction covered by the Fourth Amendment, where invasion of the home has been approved based on no showing whatsoever. Nada. Gar nichts. Rien du tout. Bupkes.

Whatever may have been left of the Fourth Amendment after [United States v. Black] is now gone. The evisceration of this crucial constitutional protector of the sanctity and privacy of what Americans consider their castles is pretty much complete. Welcome to the fish bowl.

Meahwhile.... The dumb ban on short selling should increase fake puffing up of the market nicely.

First off Iran and Pakistan cooperated to grab Abdolmalek Rigi, leader of the shady terrorist/militant ring Jundullah, which seems to have been an American (and possibly Indian &/or Israeli) supported Baluchi militant ring, the cats-paw for Chalabi-like gooning around. Wayne Madsen (waynemadsenreport.com) claimed Rigi was around on shady American bases and got snagged in a clever ISI-Iran op, forcing his plane to land in Dubai. Nice!

REUTERS: ANALYSIS - Rigi arrest may show easing Afghan regional tensions

On the flip side is Ergenekon, which is a humorous Turkish establishment conspiracy of secular ultranationalists perpetually plotting against the Islamists in that unique post-Byzantine way. A ton of people just got arrested and it's all really quite awesome.

NEWBORN DNA SCHEMEZ: I am glad to see the Newborn DNA scheme is getting more attention. AP story. NewScientist. Popsci.

MTV exec says Jersey Shore is civic minded for GenY.

Joe Stack and likely coming attractions. People need to stay peaceful and chill out in these dire times. However as usual with 'lone wolves' like poor Mr Stack, strange links to the military-industrial complex were close at hand. Stack shared a hangar with some guy all up in the L3 shady ops biz. What else is new?

Financial Chaos Beckons (dunnn dunnn dunnnn, sez my roommate) : California edging closer to BondFail. Europe hit by waves of strikes and tumult. A summer of discontent in the works eh? ZeroHedge is just great, read it! Everyday Greece insurrection. Eurostat debt adjustment. Downgrades. Moar downgrades.

FDIC reports NEGATIVE balance. The FDIC is reporting bad things to come and is opening a satellite office in Illinois. Moar on FDIC. Speaking of Illinois they had an interesting secret meeting of their legislators and the National Conference of State Legislatures,  and we can only fear the collapse/martial law style content, or whatever doomladen scenario you care to assume. {they said it was just so people felt comfortable to talk, however it did sound exciting in a way :-P }

GOP wants statutory limit to include GSEs, a risky bizniss. GSE whacks the dollar. Ron Paul and the amusing Watergate/Saddam Hussein/Federal Reserve nexus. SPY bumps from key algo. Record US debt vs Keynesianism from Bloomberg. Gold Market irregularities? Nifty story of Yamashita's epic lost gold. Maestro sez its tha worst evar. Gunning the mkt in afterhours bumps!

RBS is on the hook for all this Greekness and the UK govt is on the hook for RBS! Tobin Tax in EU??

HUD REO sales seems to be some kind of racket via this page including in Minnesota. BestAssets of Sugarland TX.

BOMBSTATE: Garry Wills and the Bomb State, national security coldwar bloat & more. The nukes really launched the secret state.

TERRORSTATE: Glenn Greenwald blew my mind with this bizarre Newsweek editorial roundtable about how the writers & editors define terrorism. w0w!

SAVVY PRESS: An intriguing philosophy of the Kool Kats in the press.

Quick tour of South America narconews stuff. Uribe has messe dup recelection in some unexpected petition mess.

Coca Cola is going into Mezcal in Oaxaca, Mexico and corruption and taking the community water are the usual items on the neo-capitalist entree.

For Haiti travesties see mediahacker.org.

Natural Health crackdown is coming for your vitamins and McCains trying to make it happen. So that we can be all forcefed cornsyrup or something. Aloe Vera FDA Crackdown:: let's learn!

There are over 300 aloe vera species on earth. But the Aloe Barbadensis Miller species has been the favorite for study in scientific literature today. The main focus in ongoing research is a group of polysaccharides that contain the healing agents known as aloe polymannans. They all have different healing potentials.

The polymannan sizes range from small to medium to large and very large. Each one has a level of healing that corresponds in magnitude with its size. It's the very large molecular weight and long chain polymannans that Dr. Danhof extracted for use on cancer patients. Injecting the large molecule extract was necessary because it is very difficult to absorb through the digestive system.

Another aspect of these polymannans, especially the larger ones, is their capacity for organizing the immune system. These polymannans provide a detection capacity for cells to determine exactly what is needed for various pathogenic invaders. Without them, the cells are shooting wildly in the dark, and that can lead to damaging cytotoxic autoimmune responses.

From researcher Dr. Ivan Danhof: "The very large molecules are immune modulating, which have a powerful healing effect on AIDS, cancer and many different immune system disorders. It is also this large molecule that causes the body to produce a natural chemical, tumor necrosis factors, which functions to shut off the blood supply to tumors."

Anywhooo... Chronic health problems in children soar! Start with Bisphenol-A.

Lawyer goons peddling authoritarian concepts of 'intellectual property' come out against Open Source via the RIAA/MPAA Intellectual Property Alliance.

Tech tip for Final Cut Pro captioning, try Caption In Yourself or Jubler. Also the OSX Fluid App makes embeddable apps.

Reviews of Collapse movie with Michael Ruppert. Great review from Roger Ebert (4/4) HipHop Republican, Metro students, WhatWouldtowatch, some jackass, Enviralment, good review @ dangerousintersection, Montreal Gazette. I will have a kewl Ruppert Q&A video up pretty soon here.

For those of you just tuning in... Sibel Edmonds worked at the FBI after 9/11, bumped into a big criminal conspiracy, tried to blow the whistle in 2002, got the "States Secret Privilege" gag, which she defied a couple months ago for a deposition in an Ohio case.

In a new interview with Phil Giraldi, Edmonds takes us into the deeper details officially gagged until now. It's a good read...

The coverage on the Sibel Edmonds case here has turned out to be pretty solid. Check out, for example, the 2006 writeup here on Hongpong.com which covers the Grossman angle in detail... The Shadows around Sibel Edmonds: Plame spied on neocons? Turkish agents, Special Plans teams, Afghan heroin, 9/11 intel ... Sounds about right!

*****

Backing this up, a former FBI counterintelligence manager confirmed the FBI's many years of work versus Marc Grossman. Right around here is the part where the FBI can't get anywhere vs the Israelis...

"I read the recent cover story by The American Conservative magazine. I applaud their courage in publishing this significant interview. I am fully aware of the FBI's decade-long investigation of the High-level State Department Official named in this article [Marc Grossman], which ultimately was buried and covered up. It is long past time to investigate this case and bring about accountability..."

[ Back in 2006 ] “John M. Cole, an FBI spy catcher who retired in 2004, says that from 1993 to 1995 alone, he had “125 open cases” of Israeli espionage, representing nearly half of all the investigations carried on in his Global Unit, part of the now-defunct National Security division.” Inside the FBI itself, Cole said, tracking suspected Israeli spies was hush-hush.In a sharp break with FBI procedures, he was prohibited from notifying field offices when an investigation crept into their jurisdictions. “No one was supposed to know we were investigating the Israelis,” Cole said.”
Via Sibel Edmonds blog 123 Real Change "Grossman confirmed as FBI Target in Espionage Investigations"

*****

It has been rolling around for a long time -- the criminal network in Washington, the transnational, sleazy culture of stolen secrets and long-running shady hustles and two-bit shadow player conspiracies.

Finally another turn spills out: The think tanks and the lobbyists working for foreign powers have dirty hands, indeed!

The FBI has been tapping Marc Grossman, in particular, nibbling around Douglas Feith and Richard Perle throughout the Clinton years. The idea that Sibel Edmonds spells out here is that AIPAC funneled intelligence out to Israel, kicked the leftover stolen stuff to Turkey, who would then sell it to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia etc.

Edmonds makes the case that Grossman, as a guy playing ball with this kind of thing, was key to a number of things. In particular he was the guy that busted up the CIA Brewster-Jennings front, (Valerie Plame's project) which was getting close to their Pakistani/Saudi/Turkish buddies.

The really nasty idea is that Feith and Perle were selling out the personnel "control files" i.e. the blackmailable points of vulnerability, in government employees out to foreign actors. The number of good Americans harmed under this despicable scheme is truly amazing... Funny how 9/11 lies so close to the Turkish/Saudi/Pakistani scene.

I have followed this case for years -- only now are certain things spelled out. It seems pretty obvious when you look at it. The depressing thing is that Chicago seems to be central to the Turkish spy complex and under the Obama Administration, Chicago has a really strong hand.

*****

NOVEMBER 01, 2009 ISSUE © 2009 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE

Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?       PDF

The gagged whistleblower goes on the record.

BY SIBEL EDMONDS AND PHILIP GIRALDI

Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She went to work as a Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI five days after 9/11. Part of her job was to translate and transcribe recordings of conversations between suspected Turkish intelligence agents and their American contacts. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after she raised concerns that one of the translators in her section was a member of a Turkish organization that was under investigation for bribing senior government officials and members of Congress, drug trafficking, illegal weapons sales, money laundering, and nuclear proliferation. She appealed her termination, but was more alarmed that no effort was being made to address the corruption that she had been monitoring.

A Department of Justice inspector general’s report called Edmonds’s allegations “credible,” “serious,” and “warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI.” Ranking Senate Judiciary Committee members Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have backed her publicly. “60 Minutes” launched an investigation of her claims and found them believable. No one has ever disproved any of Edmonds’s revelations, which she says can be verified by FBI investigative files.

John Ashcroft’s Justice Department confirmed Edmonds’s veracity in a backhanded way by twice invoking the dubious State Secrets Privilege so she could not tell what she knows. The ACLU has called her “the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America.”

But on Aug. 8, she was finally able to testify under oath in a court case filed in Ohio and agreed to an interview with The American Conservative based on that testimony. What follows is her own account of what some consider the most incredible tale of corruption and influence peddling in recent times. As Sibel herself puts it, “If this were written up as a novel, no one would believe it.”

* * *

PHILIP GIRALDI: We were very interested to learn of your four-hour deposition in the case involving allegations that Congresswoman Jean Schmidt accepted money from the Turkish government in return for political favors. You provided many names and details for the first time on the record and swore an oath confirming that the deposition was true.

Basically, you map out a corruption scheme involving U.S. government employees and members of Congress and agents of foreign governments. These agents were able to obtain information that was either used directly by those foreign governments or sold to third parties, with the proceeds often used as bribes to breed further corruption. Let’s start with the first government official you identified, Marc Grossman, then the third highest-ranking official at the State Department.

SIBEL EDMONDS: During my work with the FBI, one of the major operational files that I was transcribing and translating started in late 1996 and continued until 2002, when I left the Bureau. Because the FBI had had no Turkish translators, these files were archived, but were considered to be very important operations. As part of the background, I was briefed about why these operations had been initiated and who the targets were.

Grossman became a person of interest early on in the investigative file while he was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey [1994-97], when he became personally involved with operatives both from the Turkish government and from suspected criminal groups. He also had suspicious contact with a number of official and non-official Israelis. Grossman was removed from Turkey short of tour during a scandal referred to as “Susurluk” by the media. It involved a number of high-level criminals as well as senior army and intelligence officers with whom he had been in contact.

Another individual who was working for Grossman, Air Force Major Douglas Dickerson, was also removed from Turkey and sent to Germany. After he and his Turkish wife Can returned to the U.S., he went to work for Douglas Feith and she was hired as an FBI Turkish translator. My complaints about her connection to Turkish lobbying groups led to my eventual firing.

Grossman and Dickerson had to leave the country because a big investigation had started in Turkey. Special prosecutors were appointed, and the case was headlined in England, Germany, Italy, and in some of the Balkan countries because the criminal groups were found to be active in all those places. A leading figure in the scandal, Mehmet Eymür, led a major paramilitary group for the Turkish intelligence service. To keep him from testifying, Eymür was sent by the Turkish government to the United States, where he worked for eight months as head of intelligence at the Turkish Embassy in Washington. He later became a U.S. citizen and now lives in McLean, Virginia. The central figure in this scandal was Abdullah Catli. In 1989, while “most wanted” by Interpol, he came to the U.S., was granted residency, and settled in Chicago, where he continued to conduct his operations until 1996.

GIRALDI: So Grossman at this point comes back to the United States. He’s rewarded with the third-highest position at the State Department, and he allegedly uses this position to do favors for “Turkish interests”—both for the Turkish government and for possible criminal interests. Sometimes, the two converge. The FBI is aware of his activities and is listening to his phone calls. When someone who is Turkish calls Grossman, the FBI monitors that individual’s phone calls, and when the Turk calls a friend who is a Pakistani or an Egyptian or a Saudi, they monitor all those contacts, widening the net.

EDMONDS: Correct.

GIRALDI: And Grossman received money as a result. In one case, you said that a State Department colleague went to pick up a bag of money…

EDMONDS: $14,000

GIRALDI: What kind of information was Grossman giving to foreign countries? Did he give assistance to foreign individuals penetrating U.S. government labs and defense installations as has been reported? It’s also been reported that he was the conduit to a group of congressmen who become, in a sense, the targets to be recruited as “agents of influence.”

EDMONDS: Yes, that’s correct. Grossman assisted his Turkish and Israeli contacts directly, and he also facilitated access to members of Congress who might be inclined to help for reasons of their own or could be bribed into cooperation. The top person obtaining classified information was Congressman Tom Lantos. A Lantos associate, Alan Makovsky worked very closely with Dr. Sabri Sayari in Georgetown University, who is widely believed to be a Turkish spy. Lantos would give Makovsky highly classified policy-related documents obtained during defense briefings for passage to Israel because Makovsky was also working for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

GIRALDI: Makovsky is now working for the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, a pro-Israeli think tank.

EDMONDS: Yes. Lantos was at the time probably the most outspoken supporter of Israel in Congress. AIPAC would take out the information from Lantos that was relevant to Israel, and they would give the rest of it to their Turkish associates. The Turks would go through the leftovers, take what they wanted, and then try to sell the rest. If there were something relevant to Pakistan, they would contact the ISI officer at the embassy and say, “We’ve got this and this, let’s sit down and talk.” And then they would sell it to the Pakistanis.

GIRALDI: ISI—Pakistani intelligence—has been linked to the Pakistani nuclear proliferation program as well as to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

So the FBI was monitoring these connections going from a congressman to a congressman’s assistant to a foreign individual who is connected with intelligence to other intelligence people who are located at different embassies in Washington. And all of this information is in an FBI file somewhere?

EDMONDS: Two sets of FBI files, but the AIPAC-related files and the Turkish files ended up converging in one. The FBI agents believed that they were looking at the same operation. It didn’t start with AIPAC originally. It started with the Israeli Embassy. The original targets were intelligence officers under diplomatic cover in the Turkish Embassy and the Israeli Embassy. It was those contacts that led to the American Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations and then to AIPAC fronting for the Israelis. It moved forward from there.

GIRALDI: So the FBI was monitoring people from the Israeli Embassy and the Turkish Embassy and one, might presume, the Pakistani Embassy as well?

EDMONDS: They were the secondary target. They got leftovers from the Turks and Israelis. The FBI would intercept communications to try to identify who the diplomatic target’s intelligence chief was, but then, in addition to that, there are individuals there, maybe the military attaché, who had their own contacts who were operating independently of others in the embassy.

GIRALDI: So the network starts with a person like Grossman in the State Department providing information that enables Turkish and Israeli intelligence officers to have access to people in Congress, who then provide classified information that winds up in the foreign embassies?

EDMONDS: Absolutely. And we also had Pentagon officials doing the same thing. We were looking at Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. They had a list of individuals in the Pentagon broken down by access to certain types of information. Some of them would be policy related, some of them would be weapons-technology related, some of them would be nuclear-related. Perle and Feith would provide the names of those Americans, officials in the Pentagon, to Grossman, together with highly sensitive personal information: this person is a closet gay; this person has a chronic gambling issue; this person is an alcoholic. The files on the American targets would contain things like the size of their mortgages or whether they were going through divorces. One Air Force major I remember was going through a really nasty divorce and a child custody fight. They detailed all different kinds of vulnerabilities.

GIRALDI: So they had access to their personnel files and also their security files and were illegally accessing this kind of information to give to foreign agents who exploited the vulnerabilities of these people to recruit them as sources of information?

EDMONDS: Yes. Some of those individuals on the list were also working for the RAND Corporation. RAND ended up becoming one of the prime targets for these foreign agents.

GIRALDI: RAND does highly classified research for the U.S. government. So they were setting up these people for recruitment as agents or as agents of influence?

EDMONDS: Yes, and the RAND sources would be paid peanuts compared to what the information was worth when it was sold if it was not immediately useful for Turkey or Israel. They also had sources who were working in some midwestern Air Force bases. The sources would provide the information on CD’s and DVD’s. In one case, for example, a Turkish military attaché got the disc and discovered that it was something really important, so he offered it to the Pakistani ISI person at the embassy, but the price was too high. Then a Turkish contact in Chicago said he knew two Saudi businessmen in Detroit who would be very interested in this information, and they would pay the price. So the Turkish military attaché flew to Detroit with his assistant to make the sale.

GIRALDI: We know Grossman was receiving money for services.

EDMONDS: Yes. Sometimes he would give money to the people who were working with him, identified in phone calls on a first-name basis, whether it’s a John or a Joe. He also took care of some other people, including his contact at the New York Times. Grossman would brag, “We just fax to our people at the New York Times. They print it under their names.”

GIRALDI: Did Feith and Perle receive any money that you know of?

EDMONDS: No.

GIRALDI: So they were doing favors for other reasons. Both Feith and Perle were lobbyists for Turkey and also were involved with Israel on defense contracts, including some for Northrop Grumman, which Feith represented in Israel.

EDMONDS: They had arrangements with various companies, some of them members of the American Turkish Council. They had arrangements with Kissinger’s group, with Northrop Grumman, with former secretary of state James Baker’s group, and also with former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft.

The monitoring of the Turks picked up contacts with Feith, Wolfowitz, and Perle in the summer of 2001, four months before 9/11. They were discussing with the Turkish ambassador in Washington an arrangement whereby the U.S. would invade Iraq and divide the country. The UK would take the south, the rest would go to the U.S. They were negotiating what Turkey required in exchange for allowing an attack from Turkish soil. The Turks were very supportive, but wanted a three-part division of Iraq to include their own occupation of the Kurdish region. The three Defense Department officials said that would be more than they could agree to, but they continued daily communications to the ambassador and his defense attaché in an attempt to convince them to help.

Meanwhile Scowcroft, who was also the chairman of the American Turkish Council, Baker, Richard Armitage, and Grossman began negotiating separately for a possible Turkish protectorate. Nothing was decided, and then 9/11 took place.

Scowcroft was all for invading Iraq in 2001 and even wrote a paper for the Pentagon explaining why the Turkish northern front would be essential. I know Scowcroft came off as a hero to some for saying he was against the war, but he was very much for it until his client’s conditions were not met by the Bush administration.

GIRALDI: Armitage was deputy secretary of state at the time Scowcroft and Baker were running their own consulting firms that were doing business with Turkey. Grossman had just become undersecretary, third in the State hierarchy behind Armitage.

You’ve previouly alluded to efforts by Grossman, as well as high-ranking officials at the Pentagon, to place Ph.D. students. Can you describe that in more detail?

EDMONDS: The seeding operation started before Marc Grossman arrived at the State Department. The Turkish agents had a network of Turkish professors in various universities with access to government information. Their top source was a Turkish-born professor of nuclear physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was useful because MIT would place a bunch of Ph.D. or graduate-level students in various nuclear facilities like Sandia or Los Alamos, and some of them were able to work for the Air Force. He would provide the list of Ph.D. students who should get these positions. In some cases, the Turkish military attaché would ask that certain students be placed in important positions. And they were not necessarily all Turkish, but the ones they selected had struck deals with the Turkish agents to provide information in return for money. If for some reason they had difficulty getting a secuity clearance, Grossman would ensure that the State Department would arrange to clear them.

In exchange for the information that these students would provide, they would be paid $4,000 or $5,000. And the information that was sold to the two Saudis in Detroit went for something like $350,000 or $400,000.

GIRALDI: This corruption wasn’t confined to the State Department and the Pentagon—it infected Congress as well. You’ve named people like former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, now a registered agent of the Turkish government. In your deposition, you describe the process of breaking foreign-originated contributions into small units, $200 or less, so that the source didn’t have to be reported. Was this the primary means of influencing congressmen, or did foreign agents exploit vulnerabilities to get what they wanted using something like blackmail?

EDMONDS: In early 1997, because of the information that the FBI was getting on the Turkish diplomatic community, the Justice Department had already started to investigate several Republican congressmen. The number-one congressman involved with the Turkish community, both in terms of providing information and doing favors, was Bob Livingston. Number-two after him was Dan Burton, and then he became number-one until Hastert became the speaker of the House. Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, was briefed on the investigations, and since they were Republicans, she authorized that they be continued.

Well, as the FBI developed more information, Tom Lantos was added to this list, and then they got a lot on Douglas Feith and Richard Perle and Marc Grossman. At this point, the Justice Department said they wanted the FBI to only focus on Congress, leaving the executive branch people out of it. But the FBI agents involved wanted to continue pursuing Perle and Feith because the Israeli Embassy was also connected. Then the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted, and everything was placed on the back burner.

But some of the agents continued to investigate the congressional connection. In 1999, they wiretapped the congressmen directly. (Prior to that point they were getting all their information secondhand through FISA, as their primary targets were foreigners.) The questionably legal wiretap gave the perfect excuse to the Justice Department. As soon as they found out, they refused permission to monitor the congressmen and Grossman as primary targets. But the inquiry was kept alive in Chicago because the FBI office there was pursuing its own investigation. The epicenter of a lot of the foreign espionage activity was Chicago.

GIRALDI: So the investigation stopped in Washington, but continued in Chicago?

EDMONDS: Yes, and in 2000, another representative was added to the list, Jan Schakowsky, the Democratic congresswoman from Illinois. Turkish agents started gathering information on her, and they found out that she was bisexual. So a Turkish agent struck up a relationship with her. When Jan Schakowsky’s mother died, the Turkish woman went to the funeral, hoping to exploit her vulnerability. They later were intimate in Schakowsky’s townhouse, which had been set up with recording devices and hidden cameras. They needed Schakowsky and her husband Robert Creamer to perform certain illegal operational facilitations for them in Illinois. They already had Hastert, the mayor, and several other Illinois state senators involved. I don’t know if Congresswoman Schakowsky ever was actually blackmailed or did anything for the Turkish woman.

GIRALDI: So we have a pattern of corruption starting with government officials providing information to foreigners and helping them make contact with other Americans who had valuable information. Some of these officials, like Marc Grossman, were receiving money directly. Others were receiving business favors: Pentagon associates like Doug Feith and Richard Perle had interests in Israel and Turkey. The stolen information was being sold, and the money that was being generated was used to corrupt certain congressmen to influence policy and provide still more information—in many cases information related to nuclear technology.

EDMONDS: As well as weapons technology, conventional weapons technology, and Pentagon policy-related information.

GIRALDI: You also have information on al-Qaeda, specifically al-Qaeda in Central Asia and Bosnia. You were privy to conversations that suggested the CIA was supporting al-Qaeda in central Asia and the Balkans, training people to get money, get weapons, and this contact continued until 9/11…

EDMONDS: I don’t know if it was CIA. There were certain forces in the U.S. government who worked with the Turkish paramilitary groups, including Abdullah Çatli’s group, Fethullah Gülen.

GIRALDI: Well, that could be either Joint Special Operations Command or CIA.

EDMONDS: Maybe in a lot of cases when they said State Department, they meant CIA?

GIRALDI: When they said State Department, they probably meant CIA.

EDMONDS: Okay. So these conversations, between 1997 and 2001, had to do with a Central Asia operation that involved bin Laden. Not once did anybody use the word “al-Qaeda.” It was always “mujahideen,” always “bin Laden” and, in fact, not “bin Laden” but “bin Ladens” plural. There were several bin Ladens who were going on private jets to Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. The Turkish ambassador in Azerbaijan worked with them.

There were bin Ladens, with the help of Pakistanis or Saudis, under our management. Marc Grossman was leading it, 100 percent, bringing people from East Turkestan into Kyrgyzstan, from Kyrgyzstan to Azerbaijan, from Azerbaijan some of them were being channeled to Chechnya, some of them were being channeled to Bosnia. From Turkey, they were putting all these bin Ladens on NATO planes. People and weapons went one way, drugs came back.

GIRALDI: Was the U.S. government aware of this circular deal?

EDMONDS: 100 percent. A lot of the drugs were going to Belgium with NATO planes. After that, they went to the UK, and a lot came to the U.S. via military planes to distribution centers in Chicago and Paterson, New Jersey. Turkish diplomats who would never be searched were coming with suitcases of heroin.

GIRALDI: And, of course, none of this has been investigated. What do you think the chances are that the Obama administration will try to end this criminal activity?

EDMONDS: Well, even during Obama’s presidential campaign, I did not buy into his slogan of “change” being promoted by the media and, unfortunately, by the naïve blogosphere. First of all, Obama’s record as a senator, short as it was, spoke clearly. For all those changes that he was promising, he had done nothing. In fact, he had taken the opposite position, whether it was regarding the NSA’s wiretapping or the issue of national-security whistleblowers. We whistleblowers had written to his Senate office. He never responded, even though he was on the relevant committees.

As soon as Obama became president, he showed us that the State Secrets Privilege was going to continue to be a tool of choice. It’s an arcane executive privilege to cover up wrongdoing—in many cases, criminal activities. And the Obama administration has not only defended using the State Secrets Privilege, it has been trying to take it even further than the previous terrible administration by maintaining that the U.S. government has sovereign immunity. This is Obama’s change: his administration seems to think it doesn’t even have to invoke state secrets as our leaders are emperors who possess this sovereign immunity. This is not the kind of language that anybody in a democracy would use.

The other thing I noticed is how Chicago, with its culture of political corruption, is central to the new administration. When I saw that Obama’s choice of chief of staff was Rahm Emanuel, knowing his relationship with Mayor Richard Daley and with the Hastert crowd, I knew we were not going to see positive changes. Changes possibly, but changes for the worse. It was no coincidence that the Turkish criminal entity’s operation centered on Chicago.
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Sibel Edmonds is a former FBI translator and the founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. Philip Giraldi is a former CIA officer and The American Conservative’s Deep Background columnist.