Drugs

It was just another day in Switzerland during Late Capitalism. The beloved World Trade Organization, having already helped bring about a huge collapse in global trade, decided they should have a meeting somewhere widely thought of as really rich and white.
It's been ten years since wily bad kids and the labor movement crashed their last gig... what could go wrong?
MOAR: The Associated Press: Geneva: Police use tear gas on WTO protest

So they went to Switzerland and people started lighting cars on fire... posted today:

The WTO is an avid defender of killing baby seals as well - graphic video!

Nanoparticles in Some Vitamins, Cosmetics, Sunscreens and Paint Cause Genetic Damage

Until recently, TiO2 nanoparticles have been labeled non-toxic because they do not cause chemical reactions. But new research just published in the journal Cancer Research demonstrates that it is the surface interaction the nanoparticles produce inside a body that causes genetic damage. Bottom line: the study conducted by researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has revealed for the first time that TiO2 nanoparticles induce single and double-strand DNA breaks and cause chromosomal damage, as well as inflammation, all of which increase the risk of cancer.

In a statement to the media, senior study author Robert Schiestl, a UCLA professor of pathology, radiation oncology and environmental health sciences, stated these nanoparticles wander throughout the body causingoxidative stress, which can result in cell death. Once inside the body, the TiO2 nanoparticles accumulate in different organs because there is no way to eliminate them internally. And because the particles are so tiny, they can literally go anywhere -- even glide through cells to potentially disrupt body functions on a sub-cellular level.

Taliban cash! In other marketing news, threat construction is still a hot industry in Washington: How the US Funds the Taliban via The Nation.

Kokesh gets hits: "The Federal Reserve is destroying America!" This guy Adam Kokesh is running for Congress under the hard right 'screw the fascists' sort of libertarian platform in New Mexico's 3rd CD. Yr typical liberals are upset with his style, here's a video with an ominous black balloon arc. This video from last October kind of captures the edgy somewhat PTSD/survivalism anti-fascist style, at, where else, a 9-11 Truth forum: "We're building a GI resistance movement" etc...
Kokesh is against the Federal Reserve and central banking, but pro-real 'capitalism' whatever that means these days. Kokesh, an Iraq/Fallujah veteran got arrested and has been with IVAW protests. Oh yea Wikipedia says he talked at Ron Paul's 2008 counter-RNC rally saying ""While it is our responsibility now to resist tyranny civilly, while we still can, there may come a time when we will say to the powers that be, be it with your blood or ours we have come to water the tree of liberty … who will stand with me?" So that kind of thing... If there were like fifty of these guys running for Congress would be nifty. On the other hand, the NM 3rd is very Democratic so it will be really hard for him to actually beat the incumbent there.

Morgellons update! As previously noted Morgellons are horrible weird evil fibers that are unknown in origin and the medical community doesn't really want to talk about 'em. This material is all from 2008, I haven't found new salient material...
An attorney sent over this note from GlobalResearch.ca: Agrobacterium & Morgellons Disease, A GM Connection?

Vitaly Citovsky is a professor of molecular and cell biology at Stony Brook University in New York (SUNY). He is a world authority on the genetic modification of cells by Agrobacterium, a soil bacterium causing crown gall disease in plants, that has been widely used in creating genetically modified (GM) plants since the 1980s because of its ability to transfer a piece of its genetic material, the T-DNA on its tumour-inducing (Ti) plasmid to the plant genome (see later for details).

Citovsky’s team took scanning electron microscope pictures of the fibres in or extruding from the skin of patients suffering from Morgellons disease, confirming that they are unlike any ordinary natural or synthetic fibres (see Fig. 1, assembled from Citovsky’s website [8]).

Figure 1. Scanning electron microscope images of fibres from skin biopsies of patients with Morgellons Disease - a, white fibre with calcite, scale bar 10 mm; b, green fibre with alumina ‘rock’ protruding, scale bar 20 mm; c, various ribbon-like, cylindrical and faceted fibres all coated with minerals, scale bar 10 mm; d, skin lesion with fibres stabbing through the epidermis, scale bar 300mm

They also analysed patients for Agrobacterium DNA. Skin biopsy samples from Morgellons patients were subjected to high-stringency polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests for genes encoded by theAgrobacterium chromosome and also for Agrobacterium virulence (vir) genes and T-DNA on its Ti plasmid. They found that “all Morgellons patients screened to date have tested positive for the presence of Agrobacterium, whereas this microorganism has not been detected in any of the samples derived from the control, healthy individuals.” Their preliminary conclusion is that “Agrobacteriummay be involved in the etiology and/or progression” of Morgellons Disease.

.......San Francisco physician, Raphael Stricker, one of only a few doctors who believe the disease is real, said [9]. “There’s almost always some history of exposure to dirt basically either from gardening or camping or something.” He is one of the co-authors on the Agrobacterium research done in SUNY, which reported finding Agrobacterium DNA in all 5 Morgellons patients studied. Stricker suggests it is transmitted by ticks, like Lyme disease, and in a recent survey of 44 Morgellons patients in San Francisco, 43 of them also tested positive for the bacterium causing Lyme disease. Another factor consistent with Agrobacterium being a causative agent, if not the causative agent, is that when patients are treated with antibacterials for their Lyme disease, remission of Morgellons symptoms is seen in most of them [6].

Stricker also told his audience that Agrobacterium lives in the soil, and is known to cause infections in animals and human beings with compromised immune systems. It can cause skin lesions when injected into Swiss mice, a strain that is immune deficient, he said.

At this point, the findings on the Agrobacterium connection are still preliminary, as only seven patients have been studied. Nevertheless, the implications are far-reaching if this connection is confirmed, as existing evidence (reviewed below) suggests a link between Agrobacterium and genetic engineering in the creation of new disease agents, and it is paramount for the CDC investigation to include this aspect, if only to rule it out.

Agrobacterium and the genetic engineering connection

Agrobacterium not only infects human and other animal cells, it also transfers genes into them. It was SUNY professor Citovsky and his team that made the discovery some years ago [10]. Until then, the genetic engineering community had assumed that Agrobacterium did not infect animal cells, and certainly would not transfer genes into them.

Agrobacterium was found to transfer T-DNA into the chromosomes of human cells.

In stably transformed HeLa cells, the integration occurred at the right border of the T-DNA, exactly as would happen when it is being transferred into a plant cell genome, suggesting thatAgrobacterium transforms human cells by a mechanism similar to that involved in transforming plants cells (see Box 1). Human cancer cells, neurons and kidney cells were all transformed with theAgrobacterium T-DNA. Commenting on this research in 2001, Joe Cummins had warned of hazards to laboratory and farm workers [11] (i-sis news11/12)

The Agrobacterium vector system for gene transfer

Since the discovery in the 1970s that Agrobacterium can transfer genes into plants causing crown gall disease, the soil bacterium has been developed into a vector for inserting desirable genes into the plant genome to create transgenic (GM) plants [12].

More random notes: Morgellon’s Disease Linked to GM Food and Lyme Disease and Morgellons Disease: The Result of Genetically Modified Food?
A quick note on Hemp Oil curing cancer: The post on hemp oil and cancer is persistently popular here. Home page: Phoenix Tears - Promoting Hemp Oil as a natural healing agent... Now in the mix as American Medical Association Urges Federal Government to Support Medicinal Marijuana and naturally a story in High Times, High Times > Rick Simpson’s Hemp-oil Medicine.
How can anyone support these miscreants!? Get the Hemp Oil videos here....

I was a bit surprised to see the New York Times report this evening that embattled Afghan President Hamid Karzai's brother has been taking mad CIA cash for some time. [Or rather, the three journalists who did the story are oddly emphasized, 'compartmentalized' on this risky exposure.]

Earlier William Engdahl described the need for opium money to keep Wall Street liquidity flowing:

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Obama Presidential agenda is how little anyone has questioned in the media or elsewhere why at all the United States Pentagon is committed to a military occupation of Afghanistan. There are two basic reasons, neither one of which can be admitted openly to the public at large.
Behind all the deceptive official debate over how many troops are needed to “win” the war in Afghanistan, whether another 30,000 is sufficient, or whether at least 200000 are needed, the real purpose of US military presence in that pivotal Central Asian country is obscured.
Even during the 2008 Presidential campaign candidate Obama argued that Afghanistan not Iraq was where the US must wage war. His reason? Because he claimed, that was where the Al Qaeda organization was holed up and that was the “real” threat to US national security. The reasons behind US involvement in Afghanistan is quite another one.
The US military is in Afghanistan for two reasons. First to restore and control the world’s largest supply of opium for the world heroin markets and to use the drugs as a geopolitical weapon against opponents, especially Russia. That control of the Afghan drug market is essential for the liquidity of the bankrupt and corrupt Wall Street financial mafia.

Sadly a bunch of DEA agents also got killed in some helicopter incident/accident, having arrived to perform some sort of political control upon the local opiate-oriented economy. Their deaths are yet another travesty from this terrible situation -- and we can only hope it will soon draw to a close.

DEA Identifies Special Agent Casualties OCT 27-- WASHINGTON, DC– It is with great sadness that the Drug Enforcement Administration announces the deaths of three Special Agents who were supporting counternarcotics operations in Afghanistan.
The following Special Agents died on Oct. 26:
Special Agent Chad L. Michael, 30, of Quantico, VA.
Special Agent Forrest N. Leamon, 37, of Woodbridge, VA.
Special Agent Michael E. Weston, 37, of Washington, D.C.

Special Agents Leamon and Michael were members of DEA’s FAST (Foreign-deployed Advisory and Support Teams); and Special Agent Weston was assigned to DEA’s Kabul Country Office.

People with integrity are bailing out of the bullshit fest going down in Afghanistan.
Wikileaks did everyone a favor by exposing the official "strategic communications" NATO agenda in Afghanistan -- this being the 'Powerpoint centric' root of the whole spinstorm:

The encrypted document, which is dated October 6, and believed to be current, can be found on the Pentagon Central Command (CENTCOM) website oneteam.centcom.mil. [UPDATE: Fri Feb 27 15:18:38 GMT 2009, the entire Pentagon site is now down--probably in response to this editorial, parts of the site can still be seen in Google's cache ]

The encryption password is progress, which perhaps reflects the Pentagon's desire to stay on-message, even to itself.

Among the revelations, which we encourage the press to review in detail, is Jordan's presence as secret member of the US lead occupation force, the ISAF.

Jordan is a middle eastern monarchy, backed by the US, and historically the CIA's closest partner in its extraordinary rendition program. "the practice of torture is routine" in the country, according to a January 2007 report by UN special investigator for torture, Manfred Nowak.^[1]

The document states NATO spokespersons are to keep Jordan's involvement secret. Publicly, Jordan withdrew in 2001 and the country does not appear on this month's public list of ISAF member states.^[2]

Some other notes on matters to treat delicately are:

• Any decision on the end date/end state will be taken by the respective national and/or Alliance political committee. Under no circumstances should the mission end-date be a topic for speculation in public by any NATO/ISAF spokespeople.
• The term "compensation" is inappropriate and should not be used because it brings with it legal implications that do not apply.
• Any talk of stationing or deploying Russian military assets in Afghanistan is out of the question and has never been the subject of any considerations.
• Only if pressed: ISAF forces are frequently fired at from inside Pakistan, very close to the border. In some cases defensive fire is required, against specific threats. Wherever possible, such fire is pre-coordinated with the Pakistani military.

Altogether four classified or restricted NATO documents on the Pentagon Central Command (CENTCOM) site were discovered to share the 'progress' password. Wikileaks has decrypted the documents and released them in full:

• NATO Media Operations Centre: NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative, 6 Oct 2008
• ISAF Afghanistan Theatre Strategic Communications Strategy, 25 Oct 2008
• NATO-ISAF Afghanistan Strategic Communications External Linkages, 20 Oct 2008
• NATO-ISAF Strategic Communications Ends, Ways and Means, slide, 20 Oct 2008

[There was a DOD one too.] Glenn Greenwald reflects on the resignation of Matthew Hoh, who seems basically like a tough sumbitch who's had enough of bullshitting politicians and these pot smoking hippies too, as he told WaPo.
Digby is all over this stuff:

It seems that our two abstract, endless Orwellian wars --- the War on Drugs and the War on Terror --- have officially merged. And the complications stemming from that decision are going to be immense. What are we fighting for again?

McClatchy posted the abuse of DEA agents made pawns in this lethal criminal farce:

As the Obama administration ramps up the Drug Enforcement Administration's presence in Afghanistan, some special-agent pilots contend that they're being illegally forced to go to a combat zone, while others who've volunteered say they're not being properly equipped.
In interviews with McClatchy, more than a dozen DEA agents describe a badly managed system in which some pilots have been sent to Afghanistan under duress or as punishment for bucking their superiors.
Such complaints, so far mostly arising from the DEA's Aviation Division, could complicate the Obama administration's efforts to send dozens of additional DEA agents to Afghanistan as part of a civilian and military personnel "surge" that aims to stabilize the country.

And now the big obscenity! NYTimes: Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A. Payroll

This article is by Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen.
KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.
The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.
[........]A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article.
“No intelligence organization worth the name would ever entertain these kind of allegations,” said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman. [Adding LOLOLOL]
Now, with more American lives on the line, the relationship with Mr. Karzai is setting off anger and frustration among American military officers and other officials in the Obama administration. They say that Mr. Karzai’s suspected role in the drug trade, as well as what they describe as the mafialike way that he lords over southern Afghanistan, makes him a malevolent force.
These military and political officials say the evidence, though largely circumstantial, suggests strongly that Mr. Karzai has enriched himself by helping the illegal trade in poppy and opium to flourish. The assessment of these military and senior officials in the Obama administration dovetails with that of senior officials in the Bush administration.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money are flowing through the southern region, and nothing happens in southern Afghanistan without the regional leadership knowing about it,” a senior American military officer in Kabul said. Like most of the officials in this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the information.
....A former C.I.A. officer with experience in Afghanistan said the agency relied heavily on Ahmed Wali Karzai, and often based covert operatives at compounds he owned. Any connections Mr. Karzai might have had to the drug trade mattered little to C.I.A. officers focused on counterterrorism missions, the officer said.
“Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade,” he said. “If you are looking for Mother Teresa, she doesn’t live in Afghanistan.”
The debate over Ahmed Wali Karzai, which began when President Obama took office in January, intensified in June, when the C.I.A.’s local paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, shot and killed Kandahar’s provincial police chief, Matiullah Qati, in a still-unexplained shootout at the office of a local prosecutor.
Senior Afghan investigators say they know plenty about Mr. Karzai’s involvement in the drug business. In an interview in Kabul this year, a top former Afghan Interior Ministry official familiar with Afghan counternarcotics operations said that a major source of Mr. Karzai’s influence over the drug trade was his control over key bridges crossing the Helmand River on the route between the opium growing regions of Helmand Province and Kandahar.
The former Interior Ministry official said that Mr. Karzai was able to charge huge fees to drug traffickers to allow their drug-laden trucks to cross the bridges.
But the former officials said it was impossible for Afghan counternarcotics officials to investigate Mr. Karzai. “This government has become a factory for the production of Talibs because of corruption and injustice,” the former official said.
Some American counternarcotics officials have said they believe that Mr. Karzai has expanded his influence over the drug trade, thanks in part to American efforts to single out other drug lords.
In debriefing notes from Drug Enforcement Administration interviews in 2006 of Afghan informants obtained by The New York Times, one key informant said that Ahmed Wali Karzai had benefited from the American operation that lured Hajji Bashir Noorzai, a major Afghan drug lord during the time that the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, to New York in 2005. Mr. Noorzai was convicted on drug and conspiracy charges in New York in 2008, and was sentenced to life in prison this year.
Habibullah Jan, a local military commander and later a member of Parliament from Kandahar, told the D.E.A. in 2006 that Mr. Karzai had teamed with Haji Juma Khan to take over a portion of the Noorzai drug business after Mr. Noorzai’s arrest.

[How many hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money are moving through the southern region of Manhattan?!]
It certainly appears on the surface that the death of these three DEA agents flushed the CIA hypocrisy on the "war on rival drug traffickers" to the surface!
My condolences to everyone involved in this tragedy. Best of luck to all of you....

Sibel Edmonds testimony in Ohio congressional case exposes Turkish blackmail & espionage complex, Valerie Plame, Jan Shakowsky and the whole ball o' wax

Allegations of espionage, sexual blackmail control of sitting members of Congress, the bribery of members of Congress, Dennis Hastert, Roy Blunt, and Tom Lantos, are all in the mix.

The American Turkish Council, AIPAC and the foreign lobbyist layer all stand to catch a lot of heat from the Sibel Edmonds case.

Interesting stuff finally released on the Sibel Edmonds case. Edmonds ended up testifying about the Turkish espionage complex and a ton of shady business. Edmonds defied the State Secrets privilege that was imposed after Edmonds became the first 9/11 whistleblower.

She testified about a contentious Ohio election -- one candidate accused the other of shady Turkish ties. Edmonds, being the expert on Turkish schemes, got to slip out of her gag via the lawsuit of Krikorian vs. Rep. Jean Schmidt.

Chair of US House Intelligence oversight controlled by Turkish sexual blackmail!?

At this point, why not? The name-dropping has only been done by Wayne Madsen, and rather pointedly, the proprietor of BradBlog doesn't want to go there.

One interesting tangent: Apparently Democratic U.S. Rep. Jan Shakowsky was entrapped by a classic Turkish intelligence 'honeypot' operation, and was seduced by a female Turkish operative in a bugged/taped house, thus enabling the Turks to blackmail her over an apparent lesbian indiscretion.

If true, this would be quite an epic example of how foreign intelligence operatives can create 'control files' over members of Congress. In the tactics of what you might call the 'Intelligence Power,' creating control files over members of Congress is a critical activity.

Today, Shakowsky is the Chairwoman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight - one might suspect this would make grilling the CIA over torture more difficult. And you won't see Shakowsky messing with the Turks or AIPAC anytime soon. Which is too bad, because she seems pretty cool.

Linxor: BRAD BLOG : SIBEL EDMONDS' DEPOSITION: VIDEO AND TRANSCRIPT RELEASED - watch the video or download the PDF!

Here's the PDF of the transcript Krikorian v. Schmidt!

Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds Ohio deposition (Schmidt v. Krikorian)

This is the root stuff about one of the most salient layers of the Bush Administration's shady underbrush, the hustles and the foreign intelligence games that connect with 9/11, the Valerie Plame/Brewster Jennings affair.

Also getting exposed, a bunch of shady plays involving, as she noted in an oblique way, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Eric Edelman, Marc Grossman, Brent Scowcroft, Larry Franklin, Dennis Hastert, Roy Blunt, Dan Burton, Tom Lantos, Bob Livingston, Stephen Solarz, Graham Fuller, neoconservative wonks David Makovsky, Alan Makovsky, and Turkic operative types Yusuf Turani, Sabri Sayari, Mehmet Eymur, are all involved.

Sibel Edmonds was tasked to listen to certain phone lines that carried foreign language conversations, by translating material from wiretaps in the FBI translation office. It transpired that Edmonds noticed that Melek Can Dickerson, who was of superior rank in FBI translation, was covering up the contents of wiretaps. Then Dickerson tried to get Edmonds to join the American Turkish Council.

The American Turkish Council (ATC) is the leading establishment Turkish foreign lobby, closely linked with AIPAC -- Turkey's and Israel's political establishments share a lot of strategic interests, and this has been reflected in what they've been up to in Washington over the years.

Valerie Plame, Scooter Libby, Marc Rich and the nexus of nuclear smuggling and who knows what

Sibel Edmonds attempted to inform Congress about the FBI getting penetrated by the foreign espionage conspiracy, after she tried to address her concerns within the FBI, via Inspectors General etc.

But it got nowhere fast, in early 2002. Edmonds got the States Secrets privilege-style gag from Attorney General Ashcroft, but the FBI Inspector General has released an unclassified version of their report that substantiates Edmonds' claims about Dickerson's espionage activities on behalf of the ATC and Turkey.

However, things get deeper from here.

It appears that the CIA's anti-proliferation people, in particular Valerie Plame and the Non-Official Cover people at the fake 'proprietary' or front, Brewster-Jennings, were tracking a ring of agents of foreign powers, neo-conservatives and various Washington operatives, who were involved somehow in terrorism financing, drug trafficking and nuclear smuggling.

On the surface, Valerie Plame and Scooter Libby were the two big figures in the flap -- but what's often forgotten is that Libby was the attorney for noted international criminal financier Marc Rich. Rich has cooperated often with Viktor Bout, the world's most notorious arms trafficker. Rich and Bout are both part of a far-flung global criminal mafia, known roughly (including to the Justice Department) as the Russian-Israeli Mafia.

So the idea is that Plame and Brewster-Jennings were a threat to the continued operations of the mafia, as well as its friends in the Turkish establishment. Rich and Dick Cheney took out Brewster-Jennings to defend the criminal network, not just for the petty reasons of making Plame's husband look bad.

"Covert activities" of the Turkish lobby "many of which may not be legal"

ATAA and the ATC, as well as TACA, are specified by Edmonds as part of the alphabet soup of Turkish overt organizations that the FBI was interested. Edmonds says that she knew the ATC was a target of the FBI counterintelligence operations.

A ton of stuff got spelled out about the bribes and everything in the deposition, things long covered up via the States Secret privilege.

By the way it turns out that former GOP House Speaker Dennis Hastert was really into some gay stuff, and very blackmailable about it as well. (Thus he shot down Armenian Genocide resolutions &etc.)

Here are the deposition videos:

Part 1, 51 minutes, direct (friendly) questions with a lot of interruptions from the nasty other attorney.

Sibel Edmonds Deposition, 8/8/09: PART 1 of 5 from Velvet Revolution on Vimeo.

Part 2, 35 minutes - more direct questions:

Sibel Edmonds Deposition, 8/8/09: PART 2 of 5 from Justice Through Music on Vimeo.

Part 3 - 17 minutes, more direct questions:

Sibel Edmonds Deposition, 8/8/09: PART 3 of 5 from Justice Through Music on Vimeo.

Part 4 - 43 minutes cross examination - hostile:

Sibel Edmonds Deposition, 8/8/09: PART 4 of 5 from Justice Through Music on Vimeo.

Part 5 - 54 minutes redirect & recross

Sibel Edmonds Deposition, 8/8/09: PART 5 of 5 from Justice Through Music on Vimeo.

Here are a few grafs from BradBlog rounding out the subject.

The BRAD BLOG covered details of some of Edmonds' startling disclosures made during the deposition, as it happened, in our live blog coverage from August 8th. The deposition included criminal allegations against specifically named members of Congress. Among those named by Edmonds as part of a broad criminal conspiracy: Reps. Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Dan Burton (R-IN), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Bob Livingston (R-LA), Stephen Solarz (D-NY), Tom Lantos (D-CA), as well as an unnamed, still-serving Congresswoman (D) said to have been secretly videotaped, for blackmail purposes, during a lesbian affair.

High-ranking officials from the Bush Administration named in her testimony, as part of the criminal conspiracy on behalf of agents of the Government of Turkey, include Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Marc Grossman, and others.

During the deposition --- which we are still going through ourselves --- Edmonds discusses covert "activities" by Turkish entities "that would involve trying to obtain very sensitive, classified, highly classified U.S. intelligence information, weapons technology information, classified Congressional records...recruiting key U.S. individuals with access to highly sensitive information, blackmailing, bribery."

Speaking about current members of Congress during a break in the testimony,Krikorian told The BRAD BLOG that "for people in power situations in the United States, who know about this information, if they don't take action against it, in my opinion, it's negligence." (More video statements from Krikorian, Edmonds and attorneys from all parties, taped before, during, and after the 8/8/09 testimony, areavailable here.)

Edmonds' on-the-record disclosures also include bombshell details concerning outed covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson's front company, Brewster Jennings. Edmonds alleges the front company had actually been shut down in August of 2001 --- three years prior to Bob Novak's public disclosure of the covert operative's identity --- following a tip-off to a wire-tap target about the true nature of the CIA front company. The cover was blown, Edmonds alleges, by Marc Grossman, who was, at the time, the third highest-ranking official in the U.S. State Department. Prior to that, Grossman served as ambassador to Turkey. He now works "for a Turkish company called Ihals Holding," according to Edmonds' testimony.

An unclassified FBI Inspector General's report, released on her case in 2005, declared Edmonds' classified allegations to be "credible," "serious," and "warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI." In 2002, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-NE) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), then the senior members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, co-wrote letters on Edmonds' behalf to Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and DoJ Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, calling on all of them to take action in respect to her allegations. And in a 2002 60 Minutesreport on Edmonds' case, Grassley noted: "Absolutely, she's credible...And the reason I feel she's very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story."

The 8/8/09 deposition was brought by Krikorian as part of his defense in a case filed against him before the Ohio Election Commission (OEC) by Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH). The 2nd district Congresswoman has accused Krikorian, an Armenian-American who ran against her as an independent in 2008, of "false statements" during the campaign last year alleging that she had accepted "blood money" from Turkish interests. Krikorian says that Schmidt, co-chair of the Congressional Turkish Committee, accepted more money from Turkish interests during last year's campaign than any other member of Congress, despite few, if any, ethnic Turks among her local constituency. He has suggested she may have been instrumental in helping to hold off a Congressional vote on a long-proposed, much-disputed resolution declaring the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians during WWI as a "genocide" by the Turks.

Edmonds herself happens to be a Turkish-American, though she was recently attacked by the Turkish Lobby, following her long-sought, long-blocked testimony.

All right, not too bad! I am trying to work some angles on this case, so please standby on it. Digg this post if you like :)

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)

******

I have never understood why "normal" people are supposed to believe that the Iranians let the hostages go during Reagan's inauguration because he intimidated them, but then Reagan quickly pivoted to sell them all those weapons in the 1982-1986 period traditionally known as "Iran Contra".

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."

Some links for all: Kind of casually tossed together. if you can find the thread, you get a cookie!

Spooky stuff from Michigan: Shuttered private prison could hold immigrants

Meanwhile the Ron Paul revolution continues! Minnesota Monitor:: Ron Paul confirms plan for "big rally" at RNC

In other states, Paul supporters collided with party establishments, a pattern continued here in Minnesota:

Hillary Clinton’s suicidal gamble with race poison | Andrew Sullivan. Smart stuff,

GOP State convention in Minnesota: i have to admit that i went looking around local GOP blgos on this

YouTube - Michael Brodkorb embraces fascism at GOP Convention

Republican view! MN GOP State Convention Wrap-Up: If had to describe the entire convention in one word, it would be "clusterf**k".

Ouch. In other states, it got messy too: Maine GOP 'blackballs' Ron Paul supporters, Hawaii Reporter: Hawaii Republican Convention Was Lowest Point in Party's Recent History, Idaho Republicans In Disarray, McCain gets slate as Paul's fans fume in Georgia,

Minnesota State Convention had the best possible outcome - Ron Paul Forums

Interesting to read Joe Repya's blog The Eagle's Nest Blog about Republican Disasters - "Get Over It?" and The Minnesota GOP is Hemorrhaging and Minnesota GOP - Delusional in Rochester?

********

Meanwhile, elsewhere....

Good to the last drip: Minneapolis to spend $180,000 to market its (wait for this) tap water | Twin Cities Daily Planet

Speculating in the oil market inflates prices! Oil price profiteering to be curbed at ICE Futures Europe and Nymex - Telegraph:

Two of the world’s largest energy exchanges have forced traders to deposit significantly more money when investing to curb volatility in energy markets and drive out speculators.

The exchanges and related clearing houses have found themselves at the centre of the growing storm over claims that speculators have been behind the recent rise in oil prices to record levels.

The New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex) and ICE Futures Europe in London, the former International Petroleum Exchange, have now tripled “margin calls” for some contracts.

They hope the increased margin calls will reduce volatility and force out some of the more speculative players.

witnesstoacrime.com: vote fraud in Ohio 2004 elections explained! With a lot of sample chapters: witnesstoacrime.com. Time for some webpage title attributes tho...

Meanwhile in Miami the Game continues! Miami News, 7 Fox Miami - 2 Miami officers charged in FBI corruption probe

The August Review - The Global Elite: Who are they? from an institute that studies... the global elite! Did they know that the Bilderberg Group is meeting about now??

*******

Some more of that fun NAFTA superhighway stuff! Those bad kids on the Internet disagree with the good kids: Libs in Denial: NAU, NAFTA Superhighway, and the Coming Feudalism. Not saying that I buy what they're selling, exactly. But you gotta keep it all in consideration...

******

Raft of campaign bits: CNN- Jimmy Carter says unity ticket would be ‘worst mistake'

Will Obama Stand Up to the War Party?- by Justin Raimondo

Many Blacks Find Hope and Joy in an Unexpected Breakthrough - NYT

Tech/energy stuff: From One Rat to Another / How one man went from living the urban rat race to living like a desert rat

Slashdot: McAfee Picks the Most Dangerous TLDs and McCain Supports Warrantless Domestic Surveillance

teh lolz: The Knight Shift: WARGAMES and the Great Hacking Scare of 1983

*******

Some stuff from huffpost: Soldiers Discuss Using "Drop Weapons" To Cover Up Killing Innocent Iraqi Civilians, King Abdullah II Ibn Al Hussein: The Future of the Middle East, James Zogby: Obama at AIPAC: Some Doubts Eased, Others Created, Jane Hamsher: Clinton To Obama: If You Don't Want Me, You're Gonna Have To Tell Me, Hilary Rosen: I Am Not a Bargaining Chip, I Am a Dem. Chez Pazienza: Hack Journalism.

Jerry and Joe Long: Clintons To Form Third Party - (satire)

Learn-more-about-Jack-Shepard! THe only fugitive in Italy trying to beat Norm Coleman!

*******

Jesse Ventura tries his hand to offer False flag terrorism warning updates: TwinCities IMC: Ventura and Fetzer 9/11 Interview-- Special Bulletin , and earlier: LoneStarIcon.com: MAYDAY ALERT! — Terror Drills Could Go Live! and earlier: US/BP Terror Drills -- Ron Paul's Texas City

The New Order: When reading is a crime | The Register. Oh dear.... don't go to cryptome.org... Download A Book Get Arrested, Call For Terror Attacks - No Problem! and also Gingrich quips Bush should have allowed some 'reminder' attacks

Prisonplanet: Memo To Corporate Media: Anyone Can Dress Up As An Arab Terrorist & Fake An Al-Qaeda Tape: includes stuff about the dubious IntelCenter, which somehow is the only place that modern infowar terrorists send their videos anymore. (And for some reason, the official watermark stamps of IntelCenter and Al-qaeda's media "brand" appear to have the same video compression settings, which suggests that they were stamped on together... I think that "Adam Gadahn" is probably fake, and a lazy one at that.

As we have exhaustively documented, Intelcenter is an offshoot of IDEFENSE, which was staffed by a senior military psy-op intelligence officer Jim Melnick, who has worked directly for Donald Rumsfeld. The organization released the "laughing hijackers" tape and claimed it was an Al-Qaeda video, despite the fact that the footage was obtained by a "security agency" at a 2000 Bin Laden speech.

More: IntelCenter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and also Researcher's Analysis of al Qaeda Images Reveals Surprises -- UPDATED | Threat Level from Wired.com. Strongly recommended.

Nice. Any why not: Suppressed Oliver North Confrontation Video Footage Released

George Soros: Balkans cocaine trafficking sponsored by OSI-promoted local Albanian warlord types? Sure, who cares... WayneMadsenReport.com:

June 3, 2008 -- Soros' destabilization of the Balkans: Creating a haven for drug trafficking

George Soros, the multi-billionaire funder of progressive causes, has made no secret of his desire for drug legalization. The wish has made Soros a darling for not only progressives but libertarians as well. However, according to FBI sources, Soros' support for the destabilization of the Balkans, particularly the cause of Kosovo's independence, has enabled drug trafficking in the region to increase exponentially. FBI intercepts of Turkish and Albanian intercepts have shown collusion between certain Western "pro-democracy" non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the Kosovo drug trade.

Soros' Open Society Institute (OSI) and his stewardship of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty helped elevate, with the help of then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) leader Hashim Thaci from terrorist thug and drug and arms smuggler to Prime Minister of an independent Kosovo. Kosovo, along with Israel and Greek Cyprus, now plays host to organized criminal syndicates from around the world, particularly elements of the Russian-Israeli mafia and its affiliates.

Independent Kosovo now serves as an important hub for the distribution of heroin from Afghanistan and cocaine from Colombia (mostly via Guinea-Bissau in West Africa). Afghanistan and Colombia are both surrogates of the United States and examples of the marquis "democratization" pushed by OSI and Freedom House and the International Crisis Group, other contrivances funded by Soros. The Albanian government, also enmeshed in drug smuggling, provides important diplomatic and political cover for the Kosovo criminal syndicates.

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John Zogby: The End of Boomerism as We Know It. Not a moment too soon.

Not recommended reading, except for people that want to get in trouble! Solving 9-11: THE FLORIDA CONNECTION Part 2: Olmert's Secret Visit and Israeli False Flag Operations in Florida By Christopher Bollyn . I definitely disagree with a lot of this guy's claims, however the "Israeli art student" 9/11 thing is definitely not fully explained. Much more carefully done research last year from a different Chris: Christopher Ketcham: What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

Neocon shell front shut down, still collecting big cash from government: Policy Forum Dead, Too?

Gen. William Odom, who gained notice by turning against the war in Iraq, expired at age 75. Sorry to hear: William Odom, RIP.

That's all for now - have a good one!