Sinister Public-Private Partnership to Spy on Web Users

June 23rd, 2011

Via: Guardian:

When President Eisenhower left office in 1960, he provided the American people with a warning.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Sixty years later, the military-industrial complex has been joined by another unprecedented centre of what has increasingly proven to be “misplaced power”: the dozens of secretive firms known collectively as the intelligence contracting industry.

Last February, three of these firms – HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico, known collectively as Team Themis – were discovered to have conspired to hire out their information war capabilities to corporations which hoped to strike back at perceived enemies, including US activist groups, WikiLeaks and journalist Glenn Greenwald. That such a dangerous new dynamic was now in play was only revealed due to a raid by hackers associated with the Anonymous collective, resulting in the dissemination of more than 70,000 emails to and from executives at HBGary Federal and its parent company HBGary.

After having spent several months studying those emails and otherwise investigating the industry depicted therein, I have revealed my summary of a classified US intelligence programme known as Romas/COIN, as well as its upcoming replacement, known as Odyssey. The programme appears to allow for the large-scale monitoring of social networks by way of such things as natural language processing, semantic analysis, latent semantic indexing and IT intrusion. At the same time, it also entails the dissemination of some unknown degree of information to a given population through a variety of means – without any hint that the actual source is US intelligence. Scattered discussions of Arab translation services may indicate that the programme targets the Middle East.

Despite the details I have provided in the document – which is also now in the possession of several major news outlets and which may be published in whole or in part by any party that cares to do so – there remains a great deal that is unclear about Romas/COIN and the capabilities it comprises. The information with which I’ve worked consists almost entirely of email correspondence between executives of several firms that together sought to win the contract to provide the programme’s technical requirements, and because many of the discussions occurred in meetings and phone conversations, the information remaining deals largely with prospective partners, the utility of one capability over another, and other clues spread out over hundreds of email exchanges between a large number of participants.

The significance of this programme to the public is not limited to its potential for abuse by facets of the US intelligence community, which has long been proverbial for misusing other of its capabilities. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect is the fact that the partnership of contracting firms and other corporate entities that worked to obtain the contract was put into motion in large part by Aaron Barr, the disgraced former CEO of HBGary Federal who was at the centre of Team Themis’s conspiracy to put high-end intelligence capabilities at the disposal of private institutions. As I explain further in the linked report, this fact alone should prompt increased investigation into the manner in which this industry operates and the threats it represents to democratic institutions.

Altogether, the existence and nature of Romas/COIN should confirm what many had already come to realise over the past few years, in particular: the US and other states have no intention of allowing populations to conduct their affairs without scrutiny. Such states ought not complain when they find themselves subjected to similar scrutiny – as will increasingly become the case over the next several years.

—

More: Romas/COIN

Via: Echelon2:

Romas/COIN

For at least two years, the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once. And with an upgrade scheduled for later this year, the top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr – the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients. The new revelation provides for a disturbing picture, particularly when viewed in a wider context. Unprecedented surveillance capabilities are being produced by an industry that works in secret on applications that are nonetheless funded by the American public – and which in some cases are used against that very same public. Their products are developed on demand for an intelligence community that is not subject to Congressional oversight and which has been repeatedly shown to have misused its existing powers in ways that violate U.S. law as well as American ideals. And with expanded intelligence capabilities by which to monitor Arab populations in ways that would have previously been impossible, those same intelligence agencies now have improved means by which to provide information on dissidents to those regional dictators viewed by the U.S. as strategic allies.

The nature and extent of the operation, which was known as Romas/COIN and which is scheduled for replacement sometime this year by a similar program known as Odyssey, may be determined in part by a close reading of hundreds of e-mails among the 70,000 that were stolen in February from the contracting firm HBGary Federal and its parent company HBGary. Other details may be gleaned by an examination of the various other firms and individuals that are discussed as being potential partners.

Of course, there are many in the U.S. that would prefer that such details not be revealed at all; such people tend to cite the amorphous and much-abused concept of “national security” as sufficient reason for the citizenry to stand idly by as an ever-expanding coalition of government agencies and semi-private corporations gain greater influence over U.S. foreign policy. That the last decade of foreign policy as practiced by such individuals has been an absolute disaster even by the admission of many of those who put it into place will not phase those who nonetheless believe that the citizenry should be prevented from knowing what is being done in its name and with its tax dollars.

To the extent that the actions of a government are divorced from the informed consent of those who pay for such actions, such a government is illegitimate. To the extent that power is concentrated in the hands of small groups of men who wield such power behind the scenes, there is no assurance that such power will be used in a manner that is compatible with the actual interests of that citizenry, or populations elsewhere. The known history of the U.S. intelligence community is comprised in large part of murder, assassinations, disinformation, the topping of democratic governments, the abuse of the rights of U.S. citizens, and a great number of other things that cannot even be defended on “national security” grounds insomuch as that many such actions have quite correctly turned entire populations against the U.S. government. This is not only my opinion, but also the opinion of countless individuals who once served in the intelligence community and have since come to criticize it and even unveil many of its secrets in an effort to alert the citizenry to what has been unleashed against the world in the name of “security.”

Likewise, I will here provide as much information as I can on Romas/COIN and its upcoming replacement.

Although the relatively well-known military contractor Northrop Grumman had long held the contract for Romas/COIN, such contracts are subject to regular recompetes by which other companies, or several working in tandem, can apply to take over. In early February, HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr wrote the following e-mail to Al Pisani, an executive at the much larger federal contractor TASC, a company which until recently had been owned by Northrop and which was now looking to compete with it for lucrative contracts:

“I met with [[[Mantech]] CEO] Bob Frisbie the other day to catch up. He is looking to expand a capability in IO related to the COIN re-compete but more for DoD. He told me he has a few acquisitions in the works that will increase his capability in this area. So just a thought that it might be worth a phone call to see if there is any synergy and strength between TASC and ManTech in this area. I think forming a team and response to compete against SAIC will be tough but doable.” IO in this context stands for “information operations,” while COIN itself, as noted in an NDA attached to one of the e-mails, stands for “counter intelligence.” SAIC is a larger intelligence contractor that was expected to pursue the recompete as well.

Pisani agreed to the idea, and in conjunction with Barr and fellow TASC exec John Lovegrove, the growing party spent much of the next year working to create a partnership of firms capable of providing the “client” – a U.S. agency that is never specified in the hundreds of e-mails that follow – with capabilities that would outmatch those being provided by Northrop, SAIC, or other competitors.

Several e-mails in particular provide a great deal of material by which to determine the scope and intent of Romas/COIN. One that Barr wrote to his own e-mail account, likely for the purpose of adding to other documents later, is entitled “Notes on COIN.” It begins with a list of entries for various facets of the program, all of which are blank and were presumably filled out later: “ISP, Operations, Language/Culture, Media Development, Marketing and Advertising, Security, MOE.” Afterwards, another list consists of the following: “Capabilities, Mobile Development, Challenges, MOE, Infrastructure, Security.” Finally, a list of the following websites is composed, many of which represent various small companies that provide niche marketing services pursuant to mobile phones.

More helpful is a later e-mail from Lovegrove to Barr and some of his colleagues at TASC in which he announces the following:

Our team consists of: – TASC (PMO, creative services) – HB Gary (Strategy, planning, PMO) – Akamai (infrastructure) – Archimedes Global (Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning) – Acclaim Technical Services (specialized linguistics) – Mission Essential Personnel (linguistic services) – Cipher (strategy, planning operations) – PointAbout (rapid mobile application development, list of strategic partners) – Google (strategy, mobile application and platform development – long list of strategic partners) – Apple (mobile and desktop platform, application assistance -long list of strategic partners) We are trying to schedule an interview with ATT plus some other small app developers.

From these and dozens of other clues and references, the following may be determined about the nature of Romas/COIN:

1. Mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program.

2. There’s discussion of bringing in a “gaming developer,” apparently at the behest of Barr, who mentions that the team could make good use of “a social gaming company maybe like zynga, gameloft, etc.” Lovegrove elsewhere notes: “I know a couple of small gaming companies at MIT that might fit the bill.”

3. Apple and Google were active team partners, and AT&T may have been as well. The latter is known to have provided the NSA free reign over customer communications (and was in turn protected by a bill granting them retroactive immunity from lawsuits). Google itself is the only company to have received a “Hostile to Privacy” rating from Privacy International. Apple is currently being investigated by Congress after the iPhone was revealed to compile user location data in a way that differs from other mobile phones; the company has claimed this to have been a “bug.”

4. The program makes use of several providers of “linguistic services.” At one point, the team discusses hiring a military-trained Arabic linguist. Elsewhere, Barr writes: “I feel confident I can get you a ringer for Farsi if they are still interested in Farsi (we need to find that out). These linguists are not only going to be developing new content but also meeting with folks, so they have to have native or near native proficiency and have to have the cultural relevance as well.”

5. Alterion and SocialEyez are listed as “businesses to contact.” The former specializes in “social media monitoring tools.” The latter uses “sophisticated natural language processing methodology” in order to “process tens of millions of multi-lingual conversations daily” while also employing “researchers and media analysts on the ground;” its website also notes that “Millions of people around the globe are now networked as never before – exchanging information and ideas, forming opinions, and speaking their minds about everything from politics to products.”

6. At one point, TASC exec Chris Clair asks Aaron and others, “Can we name COIN Saif? Saif is the sword an Arab executioner uses when they decapitate criminals. I can think of a few cool brands for this.”

7. A diagram attached to one of Barr’s e-mails to the group (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/7/pmo.png/) depicts Magpii as interacting in some unspecified manner with “Foreign Mobile” and “Foreign Web.” Magpii is a project of Barr’s own creation which stands for “Magnify Personal Identifying Information,” involves social networking, and is designed for the purpose of storing personal information on users. Although details are difficult to determine from references in Barr’s e-mails, he discusses the project almost exclusively with members of military intelligence to which he was pitching the idea.

8. There are sporadic references such things as “semantic analysis,” “Latent Semantic Indexing,” “specialized linguistics,” and OPS, a programming language designed for solving problems using expert systems.

9. Barr asks the team’s partner at Apple, Andy Kemp (whose signature lists him as being from the company’s Homeland Defense/National Programs division), to provide him “a contact at Pixar/Disney.”

Altogether, then, a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms – capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence. All this is merely in addition to whichever additional capabilities are not evident from the limited description available, with the program as a whole presumably being operated in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners.

Whatever the exact nature and scope of COIN, the firms that had been assembled for the purpose by Barr and TASC never got a chance to bid on the program’s recompete. In late September, Lovegrove noted to Barr and others that he’d spoken to the “CO [contracting officer] for COIN.” “The current procurement approach is cancelled [sic], she cited changed requirements,” he reported. “They will be coming out with some documents in a month or two, most likely an updated RFI [request for information]. There will be a procurement following soon after. We are on the list to receive all information.” On January 18th of next year, Lovegrove provided an update: “I just spoke to the group chief on the contracts side (Doug K). COIN has been replaced by a procurement called Odyssey. He says that it is in the formative stages and that something should be released this year. The contracting officer is Kim R. He believes that Jason is the COTR [contracting officer's technical representative].” Another clue is provided in the ensuing discussion when a TASC executive asks, “Does Odyssey combine the Technology and Content pieces of the work?”

The unexpected change-up didn’t seem to phase the corporate partnership, which was still a top contender to compete for the upcoming Odyssey procurement. Later e-mails indicate a meeting between key members of the group and the contracting officer for Odyssey at a location noted as “HQ,” apparently for a briefing on requirements for the new program, on February 3rd of 2011. But two days after that meeting, the servers of HBGary and HBGary Federal were hacked by a small team of Anonymous operatives in retaliation for Barr’s boasts to Financial Times that he had identified the movement’s “leadership;” 70,000 e-mails were thereafter released onto the internet. Barr resigned a few weeks later.

Along with clues as to the nature of COIN and its scheduled replacement, a close study of the HBGary e-mails also provide reasons to be concerned with the fact that such things are being developed and deployed in the way that they are. In addition to being the driving force behind the COIN recompete, Barr was also at the center of a series of conspiracies by which his own company and two others hired out their collective capabilities for use by corporations that sought to destroy their political enemies by clandestine and dishonest means, some of which appear to be illegal. None of the companies involved have been investigated; a proposed Congressional inquiry was denied by the committee chair, noting that it was the Justice Department’s decision as to whether to investigate, even though it was the Justice Department itself that made the initial introductions. Those in the intelligence contracting industry who believe themselves above the law are entirely correct.

That such firms will continue to target the public with advanced information warfare capabilities on behalf of major corporations is by itself an extraordinary danger to mankind as a whole, particularly insomuch as that such capabilities are becoming more effective while remaining largely unknown outside of the intelligence industry. But a far greater danger is posed by the practice of arming small and unaccountable groups of state and military personnel with a set of tools by which to achieve better and better “situational awareness” on entire populations while also being able to manipulate the information flow in such a way as to deceive those same populations. The idea that such power can be wielded without being misused is contradicted by even a brief review of history.

History also demonstrates that the state will claim such powers as a necessity in fighting some considerable threat; the U.S. has defended its recent expansion of powers by claiming they will only be deployed to fight terrorism and will never be used against American civilians. This is cold comfort for those in the Arab world who are aware of the long history of U.S. material support for regimes they find convenient, including those of Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and the House of Saud. Nor should Americans be comforted by such promises from a government that has no way of ensuring that they will be kept; it was just a few months ago that a U.S. general in Afghanistan ordered a military intelligence unit to use pysops on visiting senators in an effort to secure increased funding for the war, an illegal act; only a few days prior, CENTCOM spokesmen were confidently telling the public that such other psychological capabilities as persona management would never be used on Americans as that would be illegal. The fact is that such laws have been routinely broken by the military and intelligence community, who are now been joined in this practice by segments of the federal contracting industry.

It is inevitable, then, that such capabilities as form the backbone of Romas/COIN and its replacement Odyssey will be deployed against a growing segment of the world’s population. The powerful institutions that wield them will grow all the more powerful as they are provided better and better methods by which to monitor, deceive, and manipulate. The informed electorate upon which liberty depends will be increasingly misinformed. No tactical advantage conferred by the use of these programs can outweigh the damage that will be done to mankind in the process of creating them.

Barrett Brown

Project PM

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Supreme Court: Individuals May Challenge Federal Law for Violating States’ Rights

June 20th, 2011

Hmm. I didn’t think that such an apparently desirable decision would come about this late in the game. Am I missing something? This seems too good to be true.

Via: Jurist:

The US Supreme Court Thursday ruled in Bond v. United States that a private individual can challenge whether a federal criminal law passed to implement an international treaty is valid under the Tenth Amendment.

…Bond has standing to challenge whether the federal law interferes with the powers left only to the states. The court said:

to argue that the National Government has interfered with state sovereignty in violation of the Tenth Amendment is to assert the legal rights and interests of States and States alone. That, however, is not so. … Bond seeks to vindicate her own constitutional interests. The individual, in a proper case, can assert injury from governmental action taken in excess of the authority that federalism defines. Her rights in this regard do not belong to a State.

…

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg concurred, joined by Stephen Breyer, arguing that Bond had standing because “Bond, like any other defendant, has a personal right not to be convicted under a constitutionally invalid law.”

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Problem, Reaction, and Solution: Lawmakers Weigh Harsher Penalties In Wake Of CIA, FBI Attacks

June 20, 2011

Source: Reuters

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• Pentagon says ships preparing for no-fly zone or humanitarian aid missions
• British Prime Minister vows military action if killings continue
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• Refugee crisis as 140,000 flee to Tunisia and Egypt borders
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• Rebels celebrate after fending off attack on closest city to Tripoli, Zawiya

Hillary Clinton today warned that Libya faces a drawn-out civil war as the U.S. stepped up pressure on ‘delusional’ Moammar Gaddafi to quit.

America has deployed hard-hitting naval and air force units around the North African country and Britain has begun drawing up plans for a no-fly zone in a concerted effort to hasten the tyrant’s downfall.

The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, which had been had been on pirate-hunting duty off the coast of Somalia, is now steaming to the mouth of the Suez Canal in the Red Sea.

The deadly strike force aboard the nuclear-powered carrier is already within flying distance of Libya but the Enterprise is said to be heading closer to the country and its rogue dictator.

Desperate: Refugees fleeing the unrest queue up at the Libya-Tunisia border. The UN has warned that the situation ‘is reaching crisis point’. Some 15,000 people are expected to cross the border today alone

Closing in: The nuclear-powered USS Enterprise, bristling with warplanes, has left pirate-hunting duty off Somalia and is now heading towards Libya

Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, urged U.S. lawmakers not to cut spending on diplomacy and foreign aid too deeply despite concern about the national debt, saying Libya was an example of how America needed funds to deal with crises abroad.

‘In the years ahead, Libya could become a peaceful democracy or it could face protracted civil war,’ she said.

Just hours before, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice had warned of a ‘humanitarian crisis’ in the country.

But the international community is already showing signs of a split over its plans for Libya – with Russia ruling out the idea of creating a no-fly zone.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described the idea of imposing limits on Libyan air space as ‘superfluous’ and said world powers must instead focus on fully using the sanctions that the U.N. Security Council approved over the weekend.

More than 140,000 people have now fled Libya – half crossing over into Egypt and half into Tunisia, the UN high commission for refugees said.

A UN refugee agency spokesman said today that the situation at the Libya-Tunisia border, where more than 75,000 have fled since February 20, is ‘reaching crisis point’.

A further 15,000 are expected to cross the border today alone.

Many of the refugees have little or no money and have been camping out in freezing temperatures in makeshift camps on both sides of the border.

At least one young Egyptian boy is reported to have died from the cold overnight.

Other aid officials say humanitarian aid workers are being blocked from reaching western Libya and patients reportedly are being executed in hospitals and struck by hidden gunmen in ambulances.

Closing in: The command ship USS Mount Whitney is already in the Mediterranean, while the the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge is in the Red Sea behind the Enterprise

Supplies: A convoy of 18 trucks loaded with humanitarian aid bound for Benghazi travels past a Libyan army tank and a mural adulating Gaddafi in the Tripoli suburb of Gaser Ben Ghisher today

Miss Rice today told CBS: ‘The preparations that are under way are for the possibility, we hope not the likelihood, that there could be a real humanitarian disaster in Libya as the situation unfolds.’

She called exile ‘an option’ for Gaddafi but said he’ll also have to answer to the International Criminal Court. She also said it was time for Gaddafi to ‘get off that stage’, calling him an obstacle to the achievement of peace and stability in Libya.

‘One has to question his grip on reality,’ she said, echoing her earlier statement that he was ‘delusional’.

Today it emerged that Gaddafi’s forces had failed in a bid to retake the rebel-held city closest to the capital, Tripoli.

Witnesses said pro-Gaddafi troops, supported by tanks and anti-aircraft guns, tried to retake Zawiya in six hours of fighting last night, attacking rebel positions from six directions.

They said the rebels managed to push back the attackers in Zawiya which is 30 miles west of Tripoli.

‘We will not give up Zawiya at any price,’ said one witness.

While the Pentagon would not confirm whether the Enterprise was preparing for an intervention mission, world leaders last night dramatically ramped up pressure on Libya – with British Prime Minister David Cameron vowing to use ‘military assets’ to protect the Libyan people against further attack.

Mr Cameron said: ‘We must not tolerate this regime using military force against its own people. In that context I have asked the Ministry of Defence and the Chief of the Defence Staff to work with our allies on plans for a military no-fly zone. My message to Colonel Gaddafi is simple: “Go now”.’

The Prime Minister threatened Colonel Gaddafi with military action, saying if he turned his air force on the rebels, RAF warplanes would be able to intervene.

Delusional: Gaddafi showed no sign of quitting last night as he told reporters: ‘They love me, all my people love me. They would die to protect me’

Assets: This $15bn house in London, England, is thought to be owned by Gaddafi’s son Saif. It has eight bedrooms, a large jacuzzi pool and a suede-lined cinema room. The British government has seized around $600m of the Gaddafi family’s assets so far

Last night Gaddafi showed no sign of wanting to quit, giving a deranged interview to world’s media. ‘They love me, all my people love me,’ he told the BBC. ‘They would die to protect me.’

Asked why so many appeared to be rebelling, he blamed Osama Bin Laden: ‘This is Al Qaeda, not my people. They come from outside.’

Gaddafi’s remarks were met with derision in Washington. ‘It sounds, just frankly, delusional,’ said Miss Rice.

She said Gaddafi’s behaviour, including laughing on camera in TV interviews amid the chaos, ‘underscores how unfit he is to lead and how disconnected he is from reality’.

Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said the military was ‘repositioning’ forces to be ready to assist in case a no-fly zone was enforced.

But today General James Mattis, commander of U.S. Central Command, told a Senate hearing that imposing one would be ‘challenging’ – and that it would be a military operation.

‘You would have to remove air defense capability in order to establish a no-fly zone, so no illusions here,’ he said. ‘It would be a military operation – it wouldn’t be just telling people not to fly airplanes.’

The Enterprise is not the only warship closing in on Libya – a fact of which Colonel Gaddafi will be only too aware.

The USS Mount Whitney command ship has changed its position in the Mediterranean as well, and the amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge is in the Red Sea behind the Enterprise.

A U.S. Navy map reveals that there are a total of 23 warships and support vessels of the 2nd and 6th fleets in and around the African continent.

A senior U.S. military official told Fox News: ‘We are exploring all options and moving assets in case they are needed.’

Another military official said U.S. commanders were trying to second a battalion of Marines to attach to the Marine Expeditionary Unit on board the Kearsarge.

The unit’s ground troops are currently deployed in Afghanistan, but the ship itself is within helpful distance from Libya and could provide humanitarian aid if other ground troops can be cound.

Its helicopter force – compiled mainly of the double-rotor Chinook heavy lifters – would be invaluable in a large relief operation.

Enlarge   Concentrating on Libya: A U.S. Navy map shows the USS Enterprise in the Suez Canal, the USS Mount Whitney command ship in the Mediterranean, and the USS Kearsarge Amphibious Assault ship in the Red Sea

Stalemate: Libyan anti-government fighters celebrate as they control a checkpoint on the outskirts of the southwestern town of Nalut. But there has been no gains by either side in another day of fighting

Getting deperate: Anti-Gaddafi protesters in Al-bayda. As the violence escalates, more Libyans are fleeing the country – and the ones left behind are pleading for help

Washington has said about $30 billion in assets in the U.S. had been blocked from access by Gaddafi and his family.

In addition, Britain has frozen some $600million worth of their assets, and the UK’s asset-tracing unit is trying desperately to track down other family funds.

Gaddafi’s son Saif is thought to own a $15million home in North London. The luxurious house has eight bedrooms, a large jacuzzi pool, and an extravagant cinema room lined in suede.

The U.S., Canada and Switzerland have also frozen the family’s assets.

Forces loyal to Gaddafi carried out airstrikes and skirmished with rebels in parts of Libya yesterday, but neither side appeared to gain ground.

Paramilitary groups and mercenaries allied with Gaddafi were unable to recapture any of the cities or territory held by the rebels.

Gaddafi’s forces continued to use helicopters and fighters on the rebels, who themselves have not been able to make any inroads into Gaddafi’s Tripoly stronghold.

The airstrikes demonstrated that the regime remained in command of sophisticated weaponry – and that a no-fly zone might be inevitable.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has already set aside $10 million for any future humanitarian assistance in Libya.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury Department has announced that around $30 billion in Libyan government assets have been frozen.

Earlier in the day French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said ‘is far from being obtained today’.

Evidently things have moved on quickly since then, as both the UK and U.S. are now being more robust with their talk about a no-fly zone.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in Geneva yesterday to press European allies to take action against Libya.

President Barack Obama announced American sanctions on Friday and the UN Security Council followed suit on Saturday with its own sanctions.

The no-fly zone option was being strongly backed by some U.S. politicians.

Republican Senator John McCain told NBC’s Meet the Press flight restrictions would send ‘a very strong signal’.

He said: ‘They’re using air power and helicopters to continue these massacres.’

Independant Senator Joe Lieberman gave his outline of what may be to come: ‘I begin with the imposition of a no-fly zone so that Gaddafi can’t be attacking his own people from the air or flying in more mercenaries.‘

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• ‘Protests? What protests’ Ranting Gaddafi branded delusional after telling the world ‘all my people love me’
• Council spend £5m building Olympic swimming pool… then find it’s TWO INCHES too short
• 3 children kidnapped by Somali pirates
• Murder probe launched after schoolboy, 14, is found stabbed to death in house
• Schoolgirl treated for alcoholism after becoming hooked on drink at the age of EIGHT
• Sailor who launched foul-mouthed rants at TV’s Question Time is jailed for upsetting neighbours
• Britons face soaring food prices as supermarkets boost margins and blame inflation, analysts warn
• Father’s battle to bring autistic son home after a YEAR in enforced council care
• Pilot cheats death after his propeller falls off and his radio breaks down
• Criminals should be sentenced ‘according to how MATURE they are’
• Mother reveals how daughter, 23, who died in internet suicide pact left dozen goodbye notes
• Housewife who faked her own ‘Reggie Perrin-style’ death to claim £2m insurance jailed
• Four in ten children could miss out on their first-choice secondary school place
• Binge-drinking is in the genes: Scientists isolate brain chemical that makes us crave alcohol
• First ‘reliable’ test for prostate cancer: urine screening detects 50 per cent more cases
• Girl, 3, died from swine flu at short-staffed hospital days after baby was sent home with the virus
• One in 10 adults are permanently overdrawn (and a third have been in the red in the last year)
• Three-quarters of children aged five used the internet EVERY DAY
• Fresh earthquake strikes New Zealand as the country falls silent to remember Christchurch victims
• VW takes us back to the Summer of Love: iconic car gets a very modern makeover
• Scientists ‘make diesel fuel using sun, water and carbon dioxide’
• Knighted head arrested in alleged ‘£1.6m fraud’
• Total wipeout: Sickening moment motorist ploughed through 40 cyclists in road horror (but amazingly no one was killed)
• Fuel crisis pushes petrol prices to £1.30 a litre and puts £160 on the price of a family holiday
• MORE HEADLINES

• Car-crash mother ‘killed son, 11, in her rush to get to school’
• Car insurance for women to soar by up to 25% and men face a 10% CUT after EU rules firms can’t sell single-sex policies
• Forget health and education… son of African despot splashes out £233m on a yacht
• Jailed: The soldier’s cheating wife who claimed she was raped to cover up pregnancy while husband was in Afghanistan
• Koo Stark defends her ‘war hero’ ex Prince Andrew
• Migrant cover-up: Reports kept secret by Labour show mass immigration cut wages, raised tensions and that too many stayed too long
• We’ll use military force to free Libya, vows PM: Cameron plans no-fly zone over country and even threatens to send British troops
• Is this Banksy? Elusive graffiti artist caught on camera in Santa Monica
• Bungling council spends £5m on Olympic swimming pool…to be told it was TWO INCHES too short for competition
• ‘Drunken’ Saudi princess wins fight to hide her identity in court as she’s accused of sexually harassing her British bodyguard
• In court, the girlfriend who ‘lured Sikh TV chief to his death’
• Britain’s saddest puppy cheers up! Hairless Princess makes incredible recovery and is now in search of a home
• X Factor’s Gamu and her family WILL be deported to Zimbabwe, Home Office rules
• Gunman Derrick Bird shot his own brother 11 times before gunning down 11 strangers: Full horror of the massacre in Cumbria is revealed
• ‘Suicide websites must be closed down’: Heartbroken mother calls for ban after her daughter is found gassed in car
• Uncovered by the earthquake: Time capsules buried beneath iconic 19th century Christchurch statue
• World’s oldest aircraft carrier discovered rusting by the River Thames
• Caught on camera: The moment skier cheats death after tumbling down sheer face of rocky mountain… and walks away unscathed
• Somali pirate warns family of Danish hostages will be killed if any rescue attempt is made
• Nelly Furtado pledges to give to charity the $1m she earned at private gig for Colonel Gaddafi
• Britons face soaring food prices as supermarkets boost margins and blame inflation, analysts warn
• Schoolgirls who triggered huge police search by creating fake Facebook suicide victim are questioned
• ‘Your forefathers would all have been gassed’: John Galliano questioned by French police as tape of second anti-Semitic rant emerges
• Swooping assassin: Pictured for the first time in Britain, a soaring golden eagle clutches a bloodied lamb in its razor-sharp talons – confirming farmers’ worst fears for their flocks
• Murder probe launched after schoolboy, 14, is found stabbed to death ‘by relative’
• MOST READ IN DETAIL

EDITOR’S SIX OF THE BEST

• With the Oscars out of the way for another year, RICHARD LITTLEJOHN is examining the police for early contenders in Mind How You Go Awards 2011
• Is this Banksy? Elusive graffiti artist caught on camera in Santa Monica
• Scientists say homeopathy is undiluted hogwash. But it CAN work – and that’s all that matters
• Uncovered by the earthquake: Time capsules buried beneath iconic 19th century Christchurch statue
• The female Mark Zuckerberg: How 21-year-old created a social network because she didn’t like her school yearbook photo… and is now worth $20m
• Britain’s saddest puppy cheers up! Hairless Princess makes incredible recovery and has loving new home

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• Just Like Bush

Editor’s Note: Once again we see a coordinated effort of similar policies and legislation being implemented simultaneously in different countries, as the system inches toward a standardized code of behavior (ACTA) to be decided by a global governing bureaucracy. 

Police could soon have the power to seize any domain associated with criminal activity, under new proposals published today by UK domain registrar Nominet.

Thinq.co.uk

At present, Nominet has no clear legal obligation to ensure that .uk domains are not used for criminal activities. That situation may soon change, if proposals from the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) are accepted.

SOCA wants Nominet to change its registration terms and conditions, giving the registrar the power to suspend domains if it has “reasonable grounds to believe they are being used to commit a crime”.

And Nominet gives us an example of what those “reasonable grounds” might consist of – “a request from an identified UK Law Enforcement Agency”.

Read Full Article

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• DEMYSTIFYING 9/11: ISRAEL AND THE TACTICS OF MISTAKE

Source: Global Research – Andrew Gavin Marshall

Part I

Introduction

As the 9th anniversary of 9/11 nears, and the war on terror continues to be waged and grows in ferocity and geography, it seems all the more imperative to return to the events of that fateful September morning and re-examine the reasons for war and the nature of the stated culprit, Al-Qaeda.

The events of 9/11 pervade the American and indeed the world imagination as an historical myth. The events of that day and those leading up to it remain largely unknown and little understood by the general public, apart from the disturbing images repeated ad nauseam in the media. The facts and troubled truths of that day are lost in the folklore of the 9/11 myth: that the largest attack carried out on American ground was orchestrated by 19 Muslims armed with box cutters and urged on by religious fundamentalism, all under the direction of Osama bin Laden, the leader of a global terrorist network called al-Qaeda, based out of a cave in Afghanistan.

The myth sweeps aside the facts and complex nature of terror, al-Qaeda, the American empire and literally defies the laws of physics. As John F. Kennedy once said, “The greatest enemy of the truth is not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic.”

This three-part series on “The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda” examines the geopolitical historical origins and nature of what we today know as al-Qaeda, which is in fact an Anglo-American intelligence network of terrorist assets used to advance American and NATO imperial objectives in various regions around the world.

Part 1 examines the origins of the intelligence network known as the Safari Club, which financed and organized an international conglomerate of terrorists, the CIA’s role in the global drug trade, the emergence of the Taliban and the origins of al-Qaeda.

The Safari Club

Following Nixon’s resignation as President, Gerald Ford became the new US President in 1974. Henry Kissinger remained as Secretary of State and Ford brought into his administration two names that would come to play important roles in the future of the American Empire: Donald Rumsfeld as Ford’s Chief of Staff, and Dick Cheney, as Deputy Assistant to the President. The Vice President was Nelson Rockefeller, David Rockefeller’s brother. When Donald Rumsfeld was promoted to Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney was promoted to Chief of Staff. Ford had also appointed a man named George H.W. Bush as CIA Director.

In 1976, a coalition of intelligence agencies was formed, which was called the Safari Club. This marked the discreet and highly covert coordination among various intelligence agencies, which would last for decades. It formed at a time when the CIA was embroiled in domestic scrutiny over the Watergate scandal and a Congressional investigation into covert CIA activities, forcing the CIA to become more covert in its activities.

In 2002, the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal gave a speech in which he stated that in response to the CIA’s need for more discretion, “a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran [under the Shah].”[1] However, “The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations. With the official blessing of George H.W. Bush as the head of the CIA,” Saudi intelligence chief, Kamal Adham, “transformed a small Pakistani merchant bank, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a world-wide money-laundering machine, buying banks around the world to create the biggest clandestine money network in history.”[2]

As CIA director, George H.W. Bush “cemented strong relations with the intelligence services of both Saudi Arabia and the shah of Iran. He worked closely with Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi intelligence, brother-in-law of King Faisal and an early BCCI insider.” Adham had previously acted as a “channel between [Henry] Kissinger and [Egyptian President] Anwar Sadat” in 1972. In 1976, Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia formed the Safari Club “to conduct through their own intelligence agencies operations that were now difficult for the CIA,” which was largely organized by the head of French intelligence, Alexandre de Marenches.[3]

The “Arc of Crisis” and the Iranian Revolution

When Jimmy Carter became President in 1977, he appointed over two-dozen members of the Trilateral Commission to his administration, which was an international think tank formed by Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller in 1973. Brzezinski had invited Carter to join the Trilateral Commission, and when Carter became President, Brzezinski became National Security Adviser; Cyrus Vance, also a member of the Commission, became Secretary of State; and Samuel Huntington, another Commission member, became Coordinator of National Security and Deputy to Brzezinski. Author and researcher Peter Dale Scott deserves much credit for his comprehensive analysis of the events leading up to and during the Iranian Revolution in his book, “The Road to 9/11”,* which provides much of the information below.

Samuel Huntington and Zbigniew Brzezinski were to determine the US policy position in the Cold War, and the US-Soviet policy they created was termed, “Cooperation and Competition,” in which Brzezinski would press for “Cooperation” when talking to the press, yet, privately push for “competition.” So, while Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was pursuing détente with the Soviet Union, Brzezinski was pushing for American supremacy over the Soviet Union. Brzezinski and Vance would come to disagree on almost every issue.[4]

In 1978, Zbigniew Brzezinski gave a speech in which he stated, “An arc of crisis stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries.” The Arc of Crisis stretched from Indochina to southern Africa, although, more specifically, the particular area of focus was “the nations that stretch across the southern flank of the Soviet Union from the Indian subcontinent to Turkey, and southward through the Arabian Peninsula to the Horn of Africa.” Further, the “center of gravity of this arc is Iran, the world’s fourth largest oil producer and for more than two decades a citadel of U.S. military and economic strength in the Middle East. Now it appears that the 37-year reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi is almost over, ended by months of rising civil unrest and revolution.”[5]

With rising discontent in the region, “There was this idea that the Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets. It was a Brzezinski concept.”[6] A month prior to Brzezinski’s speech, in November of 1978, “President Carter named the Bilderberg group’s George Ball, another member of the Trilateral Commission, to head a special White House Iran task force under the National Security Council’s Brzezinski.” Further, “Ball recommended that Washington drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the fundamentalist Islamic opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini.”[7] George Ball’s visit to Iran was a secret mission.[8]

Throughout 1978, the Shah was under the impression that “the Carter administration was plotting to topple his regime.” In 1978, the Queen and Shah’s wife, told Manouchehr Ganji, a minister in the Shah’s government, that, “I wanted to tell you that the Americans are maneuvering to bring down the Shah,” and she continued saying that she believed “they even want to topple the regime.”[9] The US Ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, thought that the revolution would succeed, and told this to Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General under the Johnson administration, as well as professor Richard Falk, when they were visiting Sullivan in Iran in 1978. Clark and Falk then went from Iran to Paris, to visit Khomeini, who was there in exile. James Bill, a Carter adviser, felt that, “a religious movement brought about with the United States’ assistance would be a natural friend of the United States.”[10]

Also interesting is the fact that the British BBC broadcast pro-Khomeini Persian-language programs daily in Iran, as a subtle form of propaganda, which “gave credibility to the perception of United States and British support of Khomeini.”[11] The BBC refused to give the Shah a platform to respond, and “[r]epeated personal appeals from the Shah to the BBC yielded no result.”[12]

In the May 1979 meeting of the Bilderberg Group, Bernard Lewis, a British historian of great influence (hence, the Bilderberg membership), presented a British-American strategy which, “endorsed the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement behind Khomeini, in order to promote balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. Lewis argued that the West should encourage autonomous groups such as the Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites, Ethiopian Copts, Azerbaijani Turks, and so forth. The chaos would spread in what he termed an ‘Arc of Crisis,’ which would spill over into the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union.”[13] Further, it would prevent Soviet influence from entering the Middle East, as the Soviet Union was viewed as an empire of atheism and godlessness: essentially a secular and immoral empire, which would seek to impose secularism across Muslim countries. So supporting radical Islamic groups would mean that the Soviet Union would be less likely to have any influence or relations with Middle Eastern countries, making the US a more acceptable candidate for developing relations.

A 1979 article in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, described the Arc of Crisis, saying that, “The Middle East constitutes its central core. Its strategic position is unequalled: it is the last major region of the Free World directly adjacent to the Soviet Union, it holds in its subsoil about three-fourths of the proven and estimated world oil reserves, and it is the locus of one of the most intractable conflicts of the twentieth century: that of Zionism versus Arab nationalism.” It went on to explain that post-war US policy in the region was focused on “containment” of the Soviet Union, as well as access to the regions oil.[14] The article continued, explaining that the most “obvious division” within the Middle East is, “that which separates the Northern Tier (Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan) from the Arab core,” and that, “After World War II, Turkey and Iran were the two countries most immediately threatened by Soviet territorial expansionism and political subversion.”[15] Ultimately, “the Northern Tier was assured of a serious and sustained American commitment to save it from sharing the fate of Eastern Europe.”[16]

While Khomeini was in Paris prior to the Revolution, a representative of the French President organized a meeting between Khomeini and “current world powers,” in which Khomeini made certain demands, such as, “the shah’s removal from Iran and help in avoiding a coup d’état by the Iranian Army.” The Western powers, however, “were worried about the Soviet Union’s empowerment and penetration and a disruption in Iran’s oil supply to the west. Khomeini gave the necessary guarantees. These meetings and contacts were taking place in January of 1979, just a few days before the Islamic Revolution in February 1979.”[17] In February of 1979, Khomeini was flown out of Paris on an Air France flight, to return to Iran, “with the blessing of Jimmy Carter.”[18] Ayatollah Khomeini named Mehdi Bazargan as prime minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government on February 4, 1979. As Khomeini had demanded during his Paris meeting in January 1979, that western powers must help in avoiding a coup by the Iranian Army; in that same month, the Carter administration, under the direction of Brzezinski, had begun planning a military coup.[19]

Could this have been planned in the event that Khomeini was overthrown, the US would quickly reinstate order, perhaps even place Khomeini back in power? Interestingly, in January of 1979, “as the Shah was about to leave the country, the American Deputy Commander in NATO, General Huyser, arrived and over a period of a month conferred constantly with Iranian military leaders. His influence may have been substantial on the military’s decision not to attempt a coup and eventually to yield to the Khomeini forces, especially if press reports are accurate that he or others threatened to withhold military supplies if a coup were attempted.”[20] No coup was subsequently undertaken, and Khomeini came to power as the Ayatollah of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

As tensions increased among the population within Iran, the US sent “security advisers” to Iran to pressure the Shah’s SAVAK (secret police) to implement “a policy of ever more brutal repression, in a manner calculated to maximize popular antipathy to the Shah.” The Carter administration also began publicly criticizing the Shah’s human rights abuses.[21] On September 6, 1978, the Shah banned demonstrations, and the following day, between 700 and 2000 demonstrators were gunned down, following “advice from Brzezinski to be firm.”[22]

The US Ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, a Trilateral Commission member, said that, “Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint,” and the US Ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, said, “Khomeini is a Gandhi-like figure,” while Carter’s adviser, James Bill, said that Khomeini was a man of “impeccable integrity and honesty.”[23]

The Shah was also very sick in late 1978 and early 1979. So the Shah fled Iran in January of 1979 to the Bahamas, allowing for the revolution to take place. It is especially interesting to understand the relationship between David Rockefeller and the Shah of Iran. David Rockefeller’s personal assistant, Joseph V. Reed, had been “assigned to handle the shah’s finances and his personal needs;” Robert Armao, who worked for Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, was sent to “act as the shah’s public relations agent and lobbyist;” and Benjamin H. Kean, “a longtime associate of Chase Manhattan Bank chairman David Rockefeller,” and David Rockefeller’s “personal physician,” who was sent to Mexico when the shah was there, and advised that he “be treated at an American hospital.”[24]

It is important to note that Rockefeller interests “had directed U.S. policy in Iran since the CIA coup of 1953.”[25] Following the Shah’s flight from Iran, there were increased pressures within the United States by a handful of powerful people to have the Shah admitted to the United States. These individuals were Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, John J. McCloy, former statesman and senior member of the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, who was also a lawyer for Chase Manhattan, and of course, David Rockefeller.[26]

Chase Manhattan Bank had more interests in Iran than any other US bank. In fact, the Shah had “ordered that all his government’s major operating accounts be held at Chase and that letters of credit for the purchase of oil be handled exclusively through Chase. The bank also became the agent and lead manager for many of the loans to Iran. In short, Iran became the crown jewel of Chase’s international banking portfolio.”[27]

The Iranian interim government, headed by Prime Minister Bazargan, collapsed in November of 1979, when Iranian hostages seized the US Embassy in Teheran. However, there is much more to this event than meets the eye. During the time of the interim government (February, 1979 to November, 1979), several actions were undertaken which threatened some very powerful interests who had helped the Ayatollah into power.

Chase Manhattan Bank faced a liquidity crisis as there had been billions in questionable loans to Iran funneled through Chase.[28] Several of Chase’s loans were “possibly illegal under the Iranian constitution.”[29] Further, in February of 1979, once the interim government was put in power, it began to take “steps to market its oil independently of the Western oil majors.” Also, the interim government “wanted Chase Manhattan to return Iranian assets, which Rockefeller put at more than $1 billion in 1978, although some estimates ran much higher,” which could have “created a liquidity crisis for the bank which already was coping with financial troubles.”[30]

With the seizure of the American Embassy in Iran, President Carter took moves to freeze Iranian financial assets. As David Rockefeller wrote in his book, “Carter’s ‘freeze’ of official Iranian assets protected our [Chase Manhattan’s] position, but no one at Chase played a role in convincing the administration to institute it.”[31]

In February of 1979, Iran had been taking “steps to market its oil independently of the Western oil majors. In 1979, as in 1953, a freeze of Iranian assets made this action more difficult.”[32] This was significant for Chase Manhattan not simply because of the close interlocking of the board with those of oil companies, not to mention Rockefeller himself, who is patriarch of the family whose name is synonymous with oil, but also because Chase exclusively handled all the letters of credit for the purchase of Iranian oil.[33]

The Shah being accepted into the United States, under public pressure from Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller, precipitated the hostage crisis, which occurred on November 4. Ten days later, Carter froze all Iranian assets in US banks, on the advice of his Treasury Secretary, William Miller. Miller just happened to have ties to Chase Manhattan Bank.[34]

Although Chase Manhattan directly benefited from the seizure of Iranian assets, the reasoning behind the seizure as well as the events leading up to it, such as a hidden role for the Anglo-Americans behind the Iranian Revolution, bringing the Shah to America, which precipitated the hostage crisis, cannot simply be relegated to personal benefit for Chase. There were larger designs behind this crisis. So the 1979 crises in Iran cannot simply be pawned off as a spur of the moment undertaking, but rather should be seen as quick actions taken upon a perceived opportunity. The opportunity was the rising discontent within Iran at the Shah; the quick actions were in covertly pushing the country into Revolution.

In 1979, “effectively restricting the access of Iran to the global oil market, the Iranian assets freeze became a major factor in the huge oil price increases of 1979 and 1981.”[35] Added to this, in 1979, British Petroleum cancelled major oil contracts for oil supply, which along with cancellations taken by Royal Dutch Shell, drove the price of oil up higher.[36] With the first major oil price rises in 1973 (urged on by US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger), the Third World was forced to borrow heavily from US and European banks to finance development. With the second oil price shocks of 1979, the US Federal Reserve, with Paul Volcker as its new Chairman, (himself having served a career under David Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan), dramatically raised interest rates from 2% in the late 70s to 18% in the early 80s. Developing nations could not afford to pay such interest on their loans, and thus the 1980s debt crisis spread throughout the Third World, with the IMF and World Bank coming to the “rescue” with their Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), which ensured western control over the developing world’s economies.[37]

Covertly, the United States helped a radical Islamist government come to power in Iran, “the center of the Arc of Crisis,” and then immediately stirred up conflict and war in the region. Five months before Iraq invaded Iran, in April of 1980, Zbigniew Brzezinski openly declared the willingness of the US to work closely with Iraq. Two months before the war, Brzezinski met with Saddam Hussein in Jordan, where he gave support for the destabilization of Iran.[38] While Saddam was in Jordan, he also met with three senior CIA agents, which was arranged by King Hussein of Jordan. He then went to meet with King Fahd in Saudi Arabia, informing him of his plans to invade Iran, and then met with the King of Kuwait to inform him of the same thing. He gained support from America, and financial and arms support from the Arab oil producing countries. Arms to Iraq were funneled through Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.[39] The war lasted until 1988 and resulted in over a million deaths.

This was the emergence of the “strategy of tension” in the “Arc of Crisis,” in particular, the covert support (whether in arming, training, or financing) of radical Islamic elements to foment violence and conflict in a region. It was the old imperial tactic of ‘divide and conquer’: pit the people against each other so that they cannot join forces against the imperial power. This violence and radical Islamism would further provide the pretext for which the US and its imperial allies could then engage in war and occupation within the region, all the while securing its vast economic and strategic interests.

The “Arc of Crisis” in Afghanistan: The Safari Club in Action

In 1978, the progressive Taraki government in Afghanistan managed to incur the anger of the United States due to “its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies.”[40] The Afghan government was widely portrayed in the West as “Communist” and thus, a threat to US national security. The government, did, however, undertake friendly policies and engagement with the Soviet Union, but was not a Communist government.

In 1978, as the new government came to power, almost immediately the US began covertly funding rebel groups through the CIA.[41] In 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski worked closely with his aid from the CIA, Robert Gates (who is currently Secretary of Defense), in shifting President Carter’s Islamic policy. As Brzezinski said in a 1998 interview with a French publication:

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.[42]

Brzezinski elaborated, saying he “Knowingly increased the probability that [the Soviets] would invade,” and he recalled writing to Carter on the day of the Soviet invasion that, “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.” When asked about the repercussions for such support in fostering the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, Brzezinski responded, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”[43]

As author Peter Dale Scott pointed out in, The Road to 9/11:*

For generations in both Afghanistan and the Soviet Muslim Republics the dominant form of Islam had been local and largely Sufi. The decision to work with the Saudi and Pakistani secret services meant that billions of CIA and Saudi dollars would ultimately be spent in programs that would help enhance the globalistic and Wahhabistic jihadism that are associated today with al Qaeda.[44]

Hafizullah Amin, a top official in Taraki’s government, who many believed to be a CIA asset, orchestrated a coup in September of 1979, and “executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military.”[45] The Soviets also intervened in order to replace Amin, who was seen as “unpredictable and extremist” with “the more moderate Barbak Karmal.”[46]

The Soviet invasion thus prompted the US national security establishment to undertake the largest covert operation in history. When Ronald Reagan replaced Jimmy Carter in 1981, the covert assistance to the Afghan Mujahideen not only continued on the path set by Brzezinski but it rapidly accelerated, as did the overall strategy in the “Arc of Crisis.” When Reagan became President, his Vice President became George H.W. Bush, who, as CIA director during the Ford administration, had helped establish the Safari Club intelligence network and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in Pakistan. In the “campaign to aid the Afghan rebels … BCCI clearly emerged as a U.S. intelligence asset,” and CIA Director “Casey began to use the outside – the Saudis, the Pakistanis, BCCI – to run what they couldn’t get through Congress. [BCCI president] Abedi had the money to help,” and the CIA director had “met repeatedly” with the president of BCCI.[47]

Thus, in 1981, Director Casey of the CIA worked with Saudi Prince Turki bin Faisal who ran the Saudi intelligence agency GID, and the Pakistani ISI “to create a foreign legion of jihadi Muslims or so-called Arab Afghans.” This idea had “originated in the elite Safari Club that had been created by French intelligence chief Alexandre de Marenches.”[48]

In 1986, the CIA backed a plan by the Pakistani ISI “to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad.” Subsequently:

More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by CIA and MI6, with the SAS [British Special Forces] training future al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called Operation Cyclone and continued long after the Soviets had withdrawn in 1989.[49]

CIA funding for the operations “was funneled through General Zia and the ISI in Pakistan.”[50] Interestingly, Robert Gates, who previously served as assistant to Brzezinski in the National Security Council, stayed on in the Reagan-Bush administration as executive assistant to CIA director Casey, and who is currently Secretary of Defense.

The Global Drug Trade and the CIA

As a central facet of the covert financing and training of the Afghan Mujahideen, the role of the drug trade became invaluable. The global drug trade has long been used by empires for fuelling and financing conflict with the aim of facilitating imperial domination.

In 1773, the British colonial governor in Bengal “established a colonial monopoly on the sale of opium.” As Alfred W. McCoy explained in his masterful book, The Politics of Heroin:

As the East India Company expanded production, opium became India’s main export. [. . . ] Over the next 130 years, Britain actively promoted the export of Indian opium to China, defying Chinese drug laws and fighting two wars to open China’s opium market for its merchants. Using its military and mercantile power, Britain played a central role in making China a vast drug market and in accelerating opium cultivation throughout China. By 1900 China had 13.5 million addicts consuming 39,000 tons of opium.[51]

In Indochina in the 1940s and 50s, the French intelligence services “enabled the opium trade to survive government suppression efforts,” and subsequently, “CIA activities in Burma helped transform the Shan states from a relatively minor poppy-cultivating area into the largest opium-growing region in the world.”[52] The CIA did this by supporting the Kuomintang (KMT) army in Burma for an invasion of China, and facilitated its monopolization and expansion of the opium trade, allowing the KMT to remain in Burma until a coup in 1961, when they were driven into Laos and Thailand.[53] The CIA subsequently played a very large role in the facilitation of the drugs trade in Laos and Vietnam throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s.[54]

It was during the 1980s that “the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan transformed Central Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin for the world market,” as:

Until the late 1970s, tribal farmers in the highlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan grew limited quantities of opium and sold it to merchant caravans bound west for Iran and east to India. In its decade of covert warfare against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the CIA’s operations provided the political protection and logistics linkages that joined Afghanistan’s poppy fields to heroin markets in Europe and America.[55]

In 1977, General Zia Ul Haq in Pakistan launched a military coup, “imposed a harsh martial-law regime,” and executed former President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (father to Benazir Bhutto). When Zia came to power, the Pakistani ISI was a “minor military intelligence unit,” but, under the “advice and assistance of the CIA,” General Zia transformed the ISI “into a powerful covert unit and made it the strong arm of his martial-law regime.”[56]

The CIA and Saudi money flowed not only to weapons and training for the Mujahideen, but also into the drug trade. Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq appointed General Fazle Haq as the military governor of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), who would “consult with Brzezinski on developing an Afghan resistance program,” and who became a CIA asset. When CIA Director Casey or Vice President George H.W. Bush reviewed the CIA Afghan operation, they went to see Haq; who by 1982, was considered by Interpol to be an international narcotics trafficker. Haq moved much of the narcotics money through the BCCI.[57]

In May of 1979, prior to the December invasion of the Soviet Union into Afghanistan, a CIA envoy met with Afghan resistance leaders in a meeting organized by the ISI. The ISI “offered the CIA envoy an alliance with its own Afghan client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,” who led a small guerilla group. The CIA accepted, and over the following decade, half of the CIA’s aid went to Hekmatyar’s guerillas.[58] Hekmatyar became Afghanistan’s leading mujahideen drug lord, and developed a “complex of six heroin labs in an ISI-controlled area of Baluchistan (Pakistan).”[59]

The US subsequently, through the 1980s, in conjunction with Saudi Arabia, gave Hekmatyar more than $1 billion in armaments. Immediately, heroin began flowing from Afghanistan to America. By 1980, drug-related deaths in New York City rose 77% since 1979.[60] By 1981, the drug lords in Pakistan and Afghanistan supplied 60% of America’s heroin. Trucks going into Afghanistan with CIA arms from Pakistan would return with heroin “protected by ISI papers from police search.”[61]

Haq, the CIA asset in Pakistan, “was also running the drug trade,” of which the bank BCCI “was completely involved.” In the 1980s, the CIA insisted that the ISI create “a special cell for the use of heroin for covert actions.” Elaborating:

This cell promoted the cultivation of opium and the extraction of heroin in Pakistani territory as well as in the Afghan territory under Mujahideen control for being smuggled into Soviet controlled areas in order to make the Soviet troops heroin addicts.[62]

This plan apparently originated at the suggestion of French intelligence chief and founder of the Safari Club, Alexandre de Marenches, who recommended it to CIA Director Casey.[63]

In the 1980s, one program undertaken by the United States was to finance Mujahideen propaganda in textbooks for Afghan schools. The US gave the Mujahideen $43 million in “non-lethal” aid for the textbook project alone, which was given by USAID: “The U.S. Agency for International Development, [USAID] coordinated its work with the CIA, which ran the weapons program,” and “The U.S. government told the AID to let the Afghan war chiefs decide the school curriculum and the content of the textbooks.”[64]

The textbooks were “filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings,” and “were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines.” Even since the covert war of the 1980s, the textbooks “have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books.” The books were developed through a USAID grant to the “University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies,” and when the books were smuggled into Afghanistan through regional military leaders, “Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines.” USAID stopped this funding in 1994.[65]

The Rise of the Taliban

When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the fighting continued between the Afghan government backed by the USSR and the Mujahideen backed by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, so too did its aid to the Afghan government, which itself was overthrown in 1992. However, fighting almost immediately broke out between rival factions vying for power, including Hekmatyar.

In the early 1990s, an obscure group of “Pashtun country folk” had become a powerful military and political force in Afghanistan, known as the Taliban.[66] The Taliban “surfaced as a small militia force operating near Kandahar city during the spring and summer of 1994, carrying out vigilante attacks against minor warlords.” As growing discontent with the warlords grew, so too did the reputation of the Taliban.[67]

The Taliban acquired an alliance with the ISI in 1994, and throughout 1995, the relationship between the Taliban and the ISI accelerated and “became more and more of a direct military alliance.” The Taliban ultimately became “an asset of the ISI” and “a client of the Pakistan army.”[68] Further, “Between 1994 and 1996, the USA supported the Taliban politically through its allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, essentially because Washington viewed the Taliban as anti-Iranian, anti-Shia, and pro-Western.”[69]

Selig Harrison, a scholar with the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars and “a leading US expert on South Asia,” said at a conference in India that the CIA worked with Pakistan to create the Taliban. Harrison has “extensive contact” with the CIA, as “he had meetings with CIA leaders at the time when Islamic forces were being strengthened in Afghanistan,” while he was a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As he further revealed in 2001, “The CIA still has close links with the ISI.”[70] By 1996, the Taliban had control of Kandahar, but still fighting and instability continued in the country.

Osama and Al-Qaeda

Between 1980 and 1989, roughly $600 million was passed through Osama bin Laden’s charity front organizations, specifically the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), also known as Al-Kifah. The money mostly originated with wealthy donors in Saudi Arabia and other areas in the Persian Gulf, and was funneled through his charity fronts to arm and fund the mujahideen in Afghanistan.[71]

In the 1980s, the British Special Forces (SAS) were training mujahideen in Afghanistan, as well as in secret camps in Scotland, and the SAS is largely taking orders from the CIA. The CIA also indirectly begins to arm Osama bin Laden.[72] Osama bin Laden’s front charity, the MAK, “was nurtured” by the Pakistani ISI.[73]

Osama bin Laden was reported to have been personally recruited by the CIA in 1979 in Istanbul. He had the close support of Prince Turki bin Faisal, his friend and head of Saudi intelligence, and also developed ties with Hekmatyar in Afghanistan,[74] both of whom were pivotal figures in the CIA-Safari Club network. General Akhtar Abdul Rahman, the head of the Pakistani ISI from 1980 to 1987, would meet regularly with Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, and they formed a partnership in demanding a tax on the opium trade from warlords so that by 1985, bin Laden and the ISI were splitting the profits of over $100 million per year.[75] In 1985, Osama bin Laden’s brother, Salem, stated that Osama was “the liaison between the US, the Saudi government, and the Afghan rebels.”[76]

In 1988, Bin Laden discussed “the establishment of a new military group,” which would come to be known as Al-Qaeda.[77] Osama bin Laden’s charity front, the MAK, (eventually to form Al-Qaeda) founded the al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, New York, to recruit Muslims for the jihad against the Soviets. The al-Kifah Center was founded in the late 1980s with the support of the U.S. government, which provided visas for known terrorists associated with the organization, including Ali Mohamed, the “blind sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman and possibly the lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta.[78]

This coincided with the creation of Al-Qaeda, of which the al-Kifah Center was a recruiting front. Foot soldiers for Al-Qaeda were “admitted to the United States for training under a special visa program.” The FBI had been surveilling the training of terrorists, however, “it terminated this surveillance in the fall of 1989.” In 1990, the CIA granted Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman a visa to come run the al-Kifah Center, who was considered an “untouchable” as he was “being protected by no fewer than three agencies,” including the State Department, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA.[79]

Robin Cook, a former British MP and Minister of Foreign Affairs wrote that Al-Qaeda, “literally ‘the database’, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.”[80] Thus, “Al-Qaeda” was born as an instrument of western intelligence agencies. This account of al-Qaeda was further corroborated by a former French military intelligence agent, who stated that, “In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database,” and that it remained as such into the 1990s. He contended that, “Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden’s personal property,” and further:

The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the ‘TV watcher’ to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money.[81]

Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)

The creation of Al-Qaeda was thus facilitated by the CIA and allied intelligence networks, the purpose of which was to maintain this “database” of Mujahideen to be used as intelligence assets to achieve US foreign policy objectives, throughout both the Cold War, and into the post-Cold War era of the ‘new world order’.

Part 2 of “The Imperial Anatomy of al-Qaeda” takes the reader through an examination of the new imperial strategy laid out by American geopolitical strategists at the end of the Cold War, designed for America to maintain control over the world’s resources and prevent the rise of competitive powers. Covertly, the “database” (al-Qaeda) became central to this process, being used to advance imperial aims in various regions, such as in the dismantling of Yugoslavia. Part 2 further examines the exact nature of ‘al-Qaeda’, its origins, terms, training, arming, financing, and expansion. In particular, the roles of western intelligence agencies in the evolution and expansion of al-Qaeda is a central focus. Finally, an analysis of the preparations for the war in Afghanistan is undertaken to shed light on the geopolitical ambitions behind the conflict that has now been waging for nearly nine years.

* [Note on the research: For a comprehensive analysis of the history, origins and nature of al-Qaeda, see: Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the Future of America, which provided much of the research in the above article.]

Andrew Gavin Marshall is a Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).  He is co-editor, with Michel Chossudovsky, of the recent book, “The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century,” available to order at Globalresearch.ca.

Notes

[1]        Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: page 62

[2]        Ibid, page 63.

[3]        Ibid, page 62.

[4]        Ibid, pages 66-67.

[5]        HP-Time, The Crescent of Crisis. Time Magazine: January 15, 1979:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,919995-1,00.html

[6]        Peter Dale Scott, op. cit., page 67.

[7]        F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New  World Order. London: Pluto Press, 2004: page 171

[8]        Manouchehr Ganji, Defying the Iranian Revolution: From a Minister to the Shah to a Leader of Resistance. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002: page 41

[9]        Ibid, page 39.

[10]      Ibid, page 41.

[11]      Ibid.

[12]      F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New  World Order. London: Pluto Press, 2004: page 172

[13]      Ibid, page 171.

[14]      George Lenczowski, The Arc of Crisis: It’s Central Sector. Foreign Affairs: Summer, 1979: page 796

[15]      Ibid, page 797.

[16]      Ibid, page 798.

[17]      IPS, Q&A:  Iran’s Islamic Revolution Had Western Blessing. Inter-Press Service: July 26, 2008:

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43328

[18]      Michael D. Evans, Father of the Iranian revolution. The Jerusalem Post: June 20, 2007:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181813077590&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

[19]      Peter Dale Scott, op cit., page 89.

[20]      George Lenczowski, The Arc of Crisis: It’s Central Sector. Foreign Affairs: Summer, 1979: page 810

[21]      F. William Engdahl, op cit., page 172.

[22]      Peter Dale Scott, op cit., page 81.

[23]      Michael D. Evans, Father of the Iranian revolution. The Jerusalem Post: June 20, 2007:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=118181307759
0&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

[24]      Peter Dale Scott, op cit., page 83.

[25]      Ibid, page 84.

[26]      Ibid, page 81.

[27]      Ibid, pages 85-86.

[28]      Ibid.

[29]      Ibid, page 87.

[30]      Ibid, pages 88-89.

[31]      Ibid.

[32]      Ibid, pages 87-88.

[33]      Ibid, page 85.

[34]      Ibid, page 86.

[35]      Ibid, page 88.

[36]      F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New  World Order. London: Pluto Press, 2004: page 173

[37]      Andrew Gavin Marshall, Controlling the Global Economy: Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the Federal Reserve. Global Research: August 3, 2009:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14614

[38]      Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: page 89

[39]      PBS, Secrets of His Life and Leadership: An Interview with Said K. Aburish. PBS Frontline:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saddam/interviews/aburish.html

[40]      Michael Parenti, Afghanistan, Another Untold Story. Global Research: December 4, 2008:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11279

[41]      Oleg Kalugin, How We Invaded Afghanistan. Foreign Policy: December 11, 2009:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/12/11/how_we_invaded_afghanistan

[42]      ‘’Le Nouvel Observateur’ (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76:

http://www.ucc.ie/acad/appsoc/tmp_store/mia/Li
brary/history/afghanistan/archive/brzezinski/1998/interview.htm

[43]      Ibid.

[44]      Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: page 73

[45]      Michael Parenti, Afghanistan, Another Untold Story. Global Research: December 4, 2008:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11279

[46]      Peter Dale Scott, op cit., page 78.

[47]      Ibid, page 116.

[48]      Ibid, page 122.

[49]      Ibid, page 123.

[50]      Ibid,.

[51]      Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. (Lawrence Hill Books: Chicago, 2003), page 80

[52]      Ibid, page 162.

[53]      Ibid.

[54]      Ibid, pages 283-386.

[55]      Ibid, page 466.

[56]      Ibid, page 474.

[57]      Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: page 73

[58]      Alfred W. McCoy, op cit., page 475.

[59]      Peter Dale Scott, op cit., page 74.

[60]      Ibid, pages 75-76.

[61]      Ibid, page 124.

[62]      Ibid, pages 75-76.

[63]      Ibid, page 124.

[64]      Carol Off, Back to school in Afghanistan. CBC: May 6, 2002:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/afghanistan/schools.html

[65]      Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway, From U.S., the ABC’s of Jihad. The Washington Post: March 23, 2002:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5339-2002Mar22?language=printer

[66]      Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Penguin Books, New York, 2004: Page 328

[67]      Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 11, 2001. (London: Penguin, 2005), page 285

[68]      Steve Coll, “Steve Coll” Interview with PBS Frontline. PBS Frontline: October 3, 2006:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/taliban/interviews/coll.html

[69]      Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005), page 326

[70]      ToI, “CIA worked in tandem with Pak to create Taliban”. The Times of India: March 7, 2001:

http://www.multiline.com.au/~johnm/taliban.htm

[71]      Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005), pages 279-280

[72]      Simon Reeve, The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden, and the Future of Terrorism. (London: André Deutsch Ltd, 1999), page 168

[73]      Michael Moran, Bin Laden comes home to roost. MSNBC: August 24, 1998:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3340101/

[74]      Veronique Maurus and Marc Rock, The Most Dreaded Man of the United States, Controlled a Long Time by the CIA. Le Monde Diplomatique: September 14, 2001: http://www.wanttoknow.info/010914lemonde

[75]      Gerald Posner, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11. (New York: Random House, 2003), page 29

[76]      Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens. (New York: Penguin, 2008), pages 7-9

[77]      AP, Al Qaeda Financing Documents Turn Up in Bosnia Raid. Fox News: February 19, 2003:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,78937,00.html

[78]      Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: pages 140-141

[79]      Ibid, page 141.

[80]      Robin Cook, The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means. The Guardian: July 8, 2005:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jul/08/july7.development

[81]      Pierre-Henri Bunel, Al Qaeda — the Database. Global Research: November 20, 2005:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c
ontext=viewArticle&code=BUN20051120&articleId=1291

Related Posts:

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• Where was Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001?
• Brazilians will be forced to use RFID chips and GPS trackers in their cars
• The Zionist Nexus Linking 9-11 and the Financial Crisis
• Britain: CIA Lobbies for Secret Courts

Headline today (August 8, 2010) [Notice the word "apparently" in the title]

Matt Simmons “apparently” drowned at his home Sunday night

NORTH HAVEN, Maine (NEWS CENTER) – The Knox County Sheriff’s Department says Matthew Simmons, the founder of the Ocean Energy Institute, drowned at his house on North Haven late Sunday night.

Simmons was a leading investment banker for the energy industry and had recently retired to work full time on the new Ocean Energy Institute.

He was a leading proponent of offshore wind power and had started raising money to develop and build offshore turbines.

The news release fails to mention Simmons was the leading proponent of sending a small nuclear bomb down the BP leaking well:

May 29 – Simmons, a “prominent energy expert” and investment banker known for predicting the oil price spike of 2008, tells Bloomberg News on Friday, sending a small nuclear bomb down the leaking well is “probably the only thing we can do” to stop the leak.

I have been working with Dr. Tom Termotto, the National Coordinator of the Gulf Oil Spill Remediation Conference to ensure that the BP oil spill didn’t become “A radioactive oil spill.”

Below is an expose on Matt Simmons, which was ready for publication when the BP well was finally capped without resorting to a nuclear device.

The material was useful to Dr. Tom Termotto when he was interviewed on Rense Radio July 19 just four days before the BP well was finally capped.

Jeff Rense’ first question was, if Dr. Termotto would consider Matt Simmon’s nuclear option to cap the well? Tom immediately interjected and made it clear that we should never, never ever consider a nuclear option to cap the well, and went on to relentlessly discredit Matt Simmons throughout the interview.

Here is the expose provided to Dr. Termotto:

The Well is Capped, So why is Matt Simmons Still in this Picture?

By Katherine Smith

“The cap on the BP horizon well bore, which on July 15 stopped the crude for the first time since the April 20 explosion unleashed the spill is still holding and the media is reporting the public beach at Gulf Shores, Alabama, had its busiest day in weeks on Saturday [despite oil-stained sand and a dark line of tar balls left by high tide].”

Should we celebrate?

No, not while Matt Simmons is still in the picture.

Something is Wrong Here

A few days ago you couldn’t go to a Gulf Coast beach without getting arrested for a Class D felony and fined $40,000 but today you can go fishing on the pier beside the Grand Isle Bridge and throw a Frisbee on the beach.

We may never know the real story behind the blow out on April 20^th that killed 11 people and created an environmental disaster for the U.S. Gulf Coast region. [1] However, it doesn’t matter because as long as Matt Simmons insists that “the only possible solution to capping the well is a small diameter low level nuclear device” we need to remain on guard (vigilant) to ensure that the BP oil spill doesn’t become “A radioactive oil spill.”

Matthew R. Simmons Recent Titles

Prior to May of 2010 –Chairman of Simmons & Company International, the company he founded in 1974.

May 29 – Simmons, a “prominent energy expert” and investment banker known for predicting the oil price spike of 2008, tells Bloomberg News on Friday, sending a small nuclear bomb down the leaking well is “probably the only thing we can do” to stop the leak.

June 21 – Abruptly Retires as Chairman Emeritus of Simmons & Company
International [2]
July 18 – Founder of the Ocean Energy Institute

Matt the “expert” told Ian Masters on KPFK’s Daily Briefing and King World News July 16 that nuking the well is “totally safe” because he is attributing the idea to “all the best scientists” and that we should try it because the Russians did it five times.

Komsomoloskaya Pravda suggested that the United States might as well take a chance with a nuke, based on the historical 20-percent failure rate. Still, the Soviet experience with nuking underground gas wells could prove easier in retrospect than trying to seal the Gulf of Mexico’s oil well disaster that’s taking place 5,000 feet below the surface.

The Russians were using nukes to extinguish gas well fires in natural gas fields, not sealing oil wells gushing liquid, so there are big differences, and this method has never been tested in such conditions, not to mention the risks when dealing with radiation.

Contrary to Matt Simmons’ assertion that he is attributing this idea to “all the best scientists”, the scores of scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and other government labs ridicule the nuke option.

In theory, the nuclear option seems attractive because the extreme heat might create a tough seal. An exploding atom bomb generates temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun and, detonated underground, can turn acres of porous rock into a glassy plug, much like a huge stopper in a leaky bottle.

Kevin Roark, a spokesman for Los Alamos in New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, said that despite rumors to the contrary, none of the laboratory’s thousands of experts was devising nuclear options for the gulf.

“Nothing of the sort is going on here,” he said in an interview. “In fact, we’re not working on any intervention ideas at all. We’re providing diagnostics and other support but nothing on the intervention side.”

A senior Los Alamos scientist, speaking on the condition of anonymity because his comments were unauthorized, ridiculed the idea of using a nuclear blast to solve the crisis in the gulf.

“It’s not going to happen,” he said. “Technically, it would be exploring new ground in the midst of a disaster — and you might make it worse.”

President Barack Obama Wants to Kill the Well

Our current president is still making cryptic remarks about this disaster. [3]

On July 16 President Obama called the apparent success of BP’s efforts to cap well good news but underscored the problem would not be resolved until relief wells had been completed and

“We won’t be done until we actually know that we killed the well and that we have a permanent solution in place.”

Relief Wells Won’t Work

Matt Simmons tells Ian Masters (and he is correct) that technically without casing a relief well cannot work, “it’s just a technical fact.”

Ian replies: “Lets look ahead a few weeks for now and we just discount the possibility that the relief well which they will announce in a few weeks has struck, and is not going to work, at what point. “

Simmons Interrupts: “it will be only the 45^th announcement that something was going to work…and didn’t. The only possible solution is a small diameter low-level nuclear device. They insert it down the well 18,000 feet, and set it off. It will fuse the rock and glass, and it’s totally safe, three miles under the seabed.”[KPFK’s Daily Briefing ]

No, that isn’t the only possible solution just ask Dr. Tom Termotto, National Coordinator for the Gulf Oil Spill Remediation website.

Simmons the former energy advisor to the President with the worst environmental record in history shouldn’t make such irresponsible statements. [5]

Fortunately Lisa Margonelli (Oil on the Brain) follows Simmons and his nightmare scenario,

“here is the really scary thing, if we basically have a storm let alone a hurricane, what the hurricanes do is the churn up all the cold water from the base of the Gulf of Mexico. This time around it’s not going to be cold water it’s going to be this black poisonous crude and, and it will also shut down their 18 power plants along the gulf coast that will have shut down and create a black out and we’ll have to shut down the refineries so we’ll have trapped 20 million people in harms way.”

When Ian Masters asked for her reaction to the Simmons doomsday scenario, she replies:

“There is a lot we don’t know…some of the things that he says… gosh there is just a lot we don’t know. First of all we need to step back from this nightmare scenario and look at what we know… We have an overwhelming disaster that has changed the whole eco-system of the Gulf which is North Americas most important fishing ground, in the world.. and 40% of our wetlands.

So then to move on to some of the specific points. Let’s just back up.. one thing that I would caution about this sort of information is that I have found people commenting on Mathew’s comments and what he has been saying since May 26^th, so this is not the first time he said it.

He told Barons that he hosted Susan Collins and Stephen Chu on June 14^th, so he would have been able to talk to them. There is no higher person than Stephen Chu to talk to about this. So this is not the first time he has been saying this stuff. He says he has also been talking to people from Noah, and that is a full month ago.

So presumably those scientists should have felt there was open and enough space to come forward with this, umm, that doesn’t mean that what’s going on down there is something that is easily under control.. I don’t know whether he… I don’t know where he gets his information… we can’t track it down.

Given that he spoke to them more than a month ago, in theory more articles would have shown up. I am not saying some of this isn’t true, I am saying the conspiracy of this doesn’t work out. And there is a lot we just don’t know.”

She finally concludes talking about Boots and Coots, experts in which drill relief wells.

I will say there is an article in Barons… I will say that I have talked to… I will say there is an article in Barons that people may want to read more about from a month ago about him (simmons) talking about the hole… and uh.. I will also say I have spoken with various Oil executives who have been involved in drilling in the Gulf and um who have said and assumed that one way or the other the Relief well will WORK. It may not work on the first try and it may take several months, um but one or the other they expect to be able to get it to work. Uh you know everything in this whole accident has been so completely beyond what people conceived of before it’s totally possible that something else will happen. We don’t know.

Never Again (September 2008)

We must not allow our frustration with any of BP’s failed attempts to manipulate us into giving the green light for a Nuclear option to cap the well.

This reminds me of September 2008, when the American people against all logic, (according to the EIA) agreed to drill for oil in the ANWR because they couldn’t tolerate $4.55 a gallon gasoline. [Appendix B]

NPR reports (date):

“This scares everybody — the fact that we cannot make this well stop flowing,” Suttles and BP CEO and chief spinmeister Tony Hayward is lowering expectations. This mess is officially out of control.

One listener called in with a “suggestion”

“The environmental effects of all this oil spewing out are pretty bad,” he says. “Could it be that worse if we knew that a small bomb would plug the hole? I say explode it.”

On CNN, reporter John Roberts suggested last month, “Drill a hole, drop a nuke in and seal up the well.”

There are solutions to this crisis, but inexplicably our elected officials are not listening, and I am concerned that when our frustration reaches a critical threshold (as it did in September 08, See Appendix B) we will demand they do something… anything… and that will give them an excuse to nuke the well.

Let’s not fall for this ruse a second time. Appendix C has the information for you to send a message to everyone you know to raise awareness about this very important issue.

Drilling offshore & in the ANWR, are there benefits? (reprinted below) is my attempt at humor and an explanation of why Matt Simmons was able to predict the oil price spike of 2008.

Don’t let him con us into turning an oil spill into a “A radioactive oil spill.”

Katherine Smith, PhD mandrell2010@gmail.com

Drilling offshore & in the ANWR, are there benefits?

Why did President Bush and his buddies want to drill, drill, and drill (in 2008)? Hot, Flat Friedman wonders, “what planet are they on?” Vote for the best explanation or post your own in comments.

President Bush was concerned about American families,

The President cites tough times for families in urging lawmakers to allow a vote on the bill to open ocean drilling: “American drivers are counting on Congress to lift the ban and so are American workers.” Bush said that high gas prices are cutting into consumers’ food and housing budgets. “The time for action is now, this is a difficult period for millions of American families,” July 30, 2008 [Gasoline $4.32, Oil $122.46]

Psychological affect on speculators

Even though the drilling would not produce results, “It Would Help America Now!”

Oil prices are high now because of the speculators. From a psychological point of view, if news came out that we were going to open up offshore drilling or even ANWR, prices would start to drop because the speculators would have to start selling off their position because they would know the prices wouldn’t be able to go much higher. I think we would start to see a decrease within weeks of an announcement.

Psychological affect on Bush’s buddies

So, the thinking goes if we relax federal prohibitions against drilling offshore and in the ANWR, knowledge of this fact will cause Bush’s Oil buddies to change their pumping decisions today. Though the additional barrels from ANWR wouldn’t physically hit the market for years, it will lead to immediate relief at the pump. Beyond that, the ideal solution would be to completely privatize federal lands.

SWW

The members of a club were getting bored and thought it would be interesting to see how high the price of gasoline would have to go to get Americans to give up their last Arctic wilderness, a 1.5 million-acre habitat for seabirds, caribou, and polar bears. The winning ticket had $4.79 a gallon. In 1973 (the Oil Embargo) the same members of the club had a bet to see if long gas lines would get the public to agree to the Alaskan Pipeline, Within weeks of the Arab oil embargo, President Nixon signed into law the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act, which authorized the completion of 800 miles of pipeline through the frozen passes of the Brooks Range, and through some of the most pristine country in North.

[Today they are betting on how many times they have to fail to cap the well]

Local control and Jobs in Alaska

Governor Palin stressed the need (in 2008) to enact an energy policy that includes oil and gas production from domestic sources, since failure to enact a sound energy policy is having real-life consequences. Alaskan residents pay higher prices for their gas than residents in other states do, and everything is far away. The state is as big as a third of the continental US, which means Alaskans have to drive further to get their gas than most people do in other states. Finally, because of the rugged terrain up there, everybody has big cars. If ANWR were opened for business, Alaskans might see a decrease in oil and gas prices or, at the very least, receive reimbursements because of the stipends. The people in Alaska overwhelmingly want it. “In my opinion, if they want to look at an oil well outside their back door, that’s their decision, not mine. I find that part of this argument persuasive.”

Reduce our dependence on foreign oil

The oil companies and the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), an independent statistical agency within the Department of Energy, estimate that new oil from ANWR could lower the world price of oil by a minimum of .44 cents and as much as a whopping $1.44 per barrel but, that won’t take effect for 20 years. The EIA projection for oil production in the ANWR is 0.4 to 1.2 percent of total world oil consumption in 2030 and that amount would reduce our foreign oil dependence.

Oil companies are greedy and hoarding

Oil companies only have 70 million “offshore acres leases” remaining from a total 90 million; they are concerned they will run out of places to drill for oil in 3030 (yes, I meant 3030). Some Democrats also charge that oil companies are deliberately not drilling on the land to limit supply and drive up oil prices.

Oil companies prefer to drill in cold climates.

Huh?

I don’t have an answer but neither does Hot Flat Friedman

Thomas Friedman author of Hot Flat and Crowded doesn’t know about any wager because when interviewed on NPR about drilling in the North Slope to promote the burning of coal, oil and gas exclaimed loudly:

drill, drill – what am I missing here

drill, drill – what planet are they on?

it’s crazy, the Ohio senator actually voted against it (tax credits)

Pollution

Maybe President Bush wasn’t joking when, after rejecting the global climate change targets of the July 2008 G8 summit, he said, “Goodbye, from the world’s biggest polluter.” Maybe he covets and wants to retain that title?

“Give Us the ANWAR and Keep Shopping”-They Found They Can’t Have Both

[Essay at OpedNews in 2008]

Associated Press (AP) reported on September 13th, 2008 that the unprecedented rise in gas prices had brought a change to the American way of life that even a drop in oil prices below $100/barrel won’t erase. As AP put it, “Public transportation is in. Hummers are out. Frugality is in. Wastefulness is out.”

Apparently, the worst gas price hike has produced the worst-case scenario for the select group of people who raised the price of gasoline to almost $5.00/gallon, smug in their belief they could get Americans to give up their last Arctic wilderness while continuing to buy useless, wasteful consumer goods.

Two significant things happened recently after gas approached $5 a gallon and oil was selling for $142 a barrel:

• Retail sales fell in July as shoppers shunned autos and other big-ticket items. In spite of government stimulus payments to U.S. households, retail sales dipped 0.1 percent last month when a variety of economic woes including skyrocketing gas prices combined to blunt America’s shopping habits—habits which wreak havoc on the environment.

• August 14, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) signaled her willingness to consider opening up more coastal areas to oil and gas exploration. Just weeks before, Pelosi was resolved to block any votes to allow offshore drilling.

Once the environment’s last bastion of defense (Congress) had fallen, and gasoline prices rose so high, it tremendously curbed American buying habits, gasoline prices mysteriously came down almost a dollar and oil is now under $100 a barrel.

Really? Solely because a month ago we agreed to consider more drilling, oil drops by $45 a barrel? Is that possible?

No. It appears the price of gasoline stayed high too long. A $45/barrel drop in oil isn’t enough to fool anyone into thinking the “economy” is back to normal. You can’t cover up bank failures, home foreclosures, high unemployment and experts like Warren Buffett predicting major disruptions in financial markets.

Even with the recent drop in gas prices, Americans seem to have realized they can live comfortable lives by returning to a time when they valued stewardship, resourcefulness, and thrift…and that just might be good for everyone who has to live on this planet.

So the same select group of people who were betting on trashing the ANWR and the planet by getting the public to shop for billions of dollars of useless, non-recyclable consumer goods appear to be losing. As the AP press said, “Americans have changed; being frugal is the thing.” And that makes winners of the rest of us, for now. [End of my attempt at humor. (The same group are betting we will agree to nuke the well. Don’t let them!)]

Katherine Smith, PhD mandrell2010@gmail.com

Footnotes:

[1] Thank God the devastating 2010 Deepwater Horizon Spill has finally been capped. While the media focuses our attention on cleanup of 219 million gallons of crude oil the real doomsday trigger was that unleashed with the oil goes largely unnoticed. A catastrophic legacy that we leave behind for future generations, with far greater long term danger to life on Earth than the leaked oil, is the impacts of the leaked methane from the failed 2010 Deepwater Horizon Spill. Doomsday: How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a ‘world-killing’ event by Dave Nocera

[2] I think it’s VERY important to compare what [Chairman Emeritus] Simmons is saying in the last video at this link with what Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist and host of Sci-Fi Science, is saying in the video at this link. It’s really not that hard to imagine what these lunatic oil people might end up doing especially if what Simmons is postulating is decided to be the only viable option to halt this out-of-control oil volcano! THIS IS TOTAL MADNESS!! Editorials : Those Crazy Cassiopaean’s

Steven Earl Jones is an American physicist. For most of his career, Jones was known mainly for his work on muon-catalyzed fusion. In the fall of 2006, amid controversy surrounding his work on the collapse of the World Trade Center (which Jones believes was as destroyed by controlled demolition during the September 11 attacks), he was relieved of his teaching duties and placed on paid leave from Brigham Young University. He retired on October 20, 2006 with the status of Professor Emeritus.

[3] On June 15, 2010, Barack Obama addresses the nation on the BP Oil Spill:

“The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years. But make no mistake: we will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long it takes. Tonight I’d like to lay out for you what our battle plan is going forward: what we’re doing to clean up the oil, what we’re doing to help our neighbors in the Gulf, and what we’re doing to make sure that a catastrophe like this never happens again.”

[4] Gulf Oil Spill Remediation website

[5] If “trashing the planet” was his military objective, our last President Bush was not stupid, but a brilliant commander-in-chief waging an all-out war on biodiversity, animals and rainforests. He wanted to drill in the ANWR to trash America’s last Arctic Wilderness. Sonar Testing is about torturing whales and dolphins. And the Border Fence that keeps everything out but illegal’s will disrupt an extraordinary source of biological diversity along the 2,000-mile long region.

Appendix B

The oil companies and the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), an independent statistical agency within the Department of Energy, estimate that new oil from ANWR could lower the world price of oil by a minimum of .44 cents and as much as a whopping $1.44 per barrel but, that won’t take effect for 20 years. The EIA projection for oil production in the ANWR is 0.4 to 1.2 percent of total world oil consumption in 2030 and that amount would reduce our foreign oil dependence.

Chronology of the price of Gasoline and Oil

April 29, 2008 [Gasoline $3.89, Oil $113.86] (Gasoline is average regular gasoline in California (Consumer Reports), Oil is Spot Brent Crude (Energy Information Administration, official statistics from the U.S. Government))

President George W. Bush in his speech in the Rose garden

“Americans are concerned about energy prices, and I can understand why. The past 18 months, gas prices have gone up by $1.40 per gallon. I’ve repeatedly submitted proposals to help address these problems. Yet time after time, Congress chose to block them. They repeatedly blocked environmentally safe exploration in Alaska National Wildlife Reserve ANWR.” Later the president says, “If you mention ANWR it means you don’t care about the environment. Well, I’m hoping now people, when they say “ANWR,” means you don’t care about the gasoline prices that people are paying”.

June 12-14 [Gasoline $4.43, Oil $132.11]

Zogy takes a poll about drilling offshore and the ANWR

June 26 [Gasoline $4.59, Oil $136.82]

Zogby poll Released. Three in four likely voters – 74 percent – support offshore drilling for oil in U.S. coastal waters and more than half (59 percent) also favor drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge

July 3 [Gasoline $4.55, Oil $143.95]

Makes for a depressing July 4th

July 14 [Gasoline $4.49, Oil $142.43]

Bush lifted a presidential moratorium on drilling for oil and natural gas on the Outer Continental Shelf

July 16, 2008 [Gasoline $4.52, Oil $133.11]

the Federal Reserve reported holding $2,349 billion of US government paper in custody for central banks.

July 30, 2008 [Gasoline $4.32, Oil $122.46]

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — President Bush called Wednesday for Congress to allow offshore oil drilling, citing an “urgent” need to reduce pressure on crude and gas prices.

President cites tough times for families in urging lawmakers to allow vote on bill to open ocean drilling. “American drivers are counting on Congress to lift the ban and so are American workers,” “I’ve lifted the ban, I’ve done my part,” Bush said. Bush said that high gas prices are cutting into consumers’ food and housing budgets. “The time for action is now, this is a difficult period for millions of American families,”

July 30, 2008 [Gasoline $4.32, Oil $122.46]

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — As the nation struggles to meet its energy needs, a majority of Americans think offshore drilling for oil and natural gas is a good idea, according to according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released Wednesday. The debate over offshore drilling has become an increasingly important political issue in the era of $4 a gallon gas. The bans prohibiting offshore drilling, which were put in place decades ago, are outdated and should be lifted, proponents say. But opponents argue that more drilling offshore could damage sensitive ecosystems.

Lifting the ban would send a “strong signal” to the oil futures market, which could help bring the price of crude down immediately, she said. (Is this possible, lifting a ban on drilling oil that would take 15 years to access could affect the price of oil in the next 7 days?)

August 1, 2008 [$4.36, Oil $124.16]

In some key battleground states, (like Florida) voters are shifting toward support of offshore drilling to reduce dependence on foreign oil and to ease those bug-eyed shocks at the pumps as the numbers keep moving upward,

August 5 [$4.21, Oil $116.50]

During his speech, Obama admitted he is no longer opposed to expanding offshore oil drilling if it is part of a broader energy plan. Sen. John McCain: “I call on Senator Obama to call on Congress to come back into town and come back to work. Democrat joining together: And a very vital part of that is nuclear power, and another vital part of that is offshore drilling. We have to drill here and drill now.”

August 7 [$4.23, Oil $116.94]

the Federal Reserve reported holding $2,401 billion, a 38.4% annual rate of growth.

August 12 [$4.16, Oil $108.98]

Democrats’ stance against offshore drilling has shifted more.

Pelosi’s radio remarks were the latest to hint that the energy debate in Congress is still evolving, and that Democrats are budging on the issue.

August 13 2008 [$4.22, Oil $111.33]

Retail sales fell in July, the weakest performance in five months, as shoppers shunned autos and other big-ticket items. The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that retail sales dipped 0.1 percent last month when a variety of economic woes combined to blunt the impact of billions of dollars in government stimulus payments to U.S. households. “Cautious and uncertain consumers are watching their wallets and with the back-to-school shopping season under way, that does not bode well for retailers,” said Joel Naroff, chief economist for Naroff Economic Advisors.

August 14, 2008 [$4.20, Oil $110.16]

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaling her willingness to consider opening up more coastal areas to oil and gas exploration. Just weeks ago Pelosi seemed resolved to block any votes to allow offshore drilling.

Conclusion:

Once the last holdout Pelosi signaled her willingness to drill the markets responded. The U.S. Energy Information Administration says it would take about 20 years for increased offshore drilling to have an effect on world oil prices, and even then it would be a small one. To step up domestic drilling now when we wouldn’t see the results until 2030 would be like investing in steamboats after the invention of the nuclear submarine. Therefore there is no other conclusion other than the Administration wants to drill in the most environmentally sensitive places on the planet. [End of Appendix B]

Appendix C

Normally I don’t recommend those “take action”- campaigns: the ones that tell us, it’s not too late, click-here to importune our “elected”- representatives with emails and faxes.

But the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf is different.

The inconvenient truth for our elected representatives, their families and staff who live in the Gulf states is that this disaster will affect them, they need a fighting chance to know if and when this perfect storm will hit and can get out of the way.

And for those of us who don’t live in the path of this disaster we will be affected as well.

A disaster of this magnitude will have an impact on everything we take for granted on a daily basis, food, shelter, energy and social order.

So go ahead and email, fax and phone, this is one email campaign that might just work.

Here is a sample draft that you can customize with your personal concerns.

President Obama: The BP Oil disaster in the Gulf has the makings of a perfect storm.

The time for bold, decisive leadership is now.

1. We will not tolerate any nuclear option to cap the Oil spill in the gulf.
2. Demand BP release the Mud Log Data.
3. Begin to implement proven mitigation technology NOW.

Sincerely, [Your Name] [Your Address] [City, State ZIP]

Start with the website on How to Answer President Obama’s Call to Action to Fix the Gulf Coast Spill and then Contact The U.S. Department of Energy

The Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, By Email: The.Secretary@hq.doe.gov

By Phone: 202-586-5000, By Fax 202-586-4403

By the Website contact form

Follow up by Contacting the Elected Officials where you live

If we work together we can make a difference in the lives of millions of Americans.

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• On The Way To Copenhagen We Added A World Food Crisis
• The Future For Most Americans: Pathetic Jobs, Bad Debts And A Crappy Economy
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You can, however, search by city and company names come up there.

The spiral thingy under EXPLORE CONNECTIONS is interesting, but it doesn’t show you which companies are associated with the government and military organizations in question. Blah.

Via: Washington Post:

“Top Secret America” is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked – with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.

The articles in this series and an online database at topsecretamerica.com depict the scope and complexity of the government’s national security program through interactive maps and other graphics. Every data point on the Web site is substantiated by at least two public records.

Because of the nature of this project, we allowed government officials to see the Web site several months ago and asked them to tell us of any specific concerns. They offered none at that time. As the project evolved, we shared the Web site’s revised capabilities. Again, we asked for specific concerns. One government body objected to certain data points on the site and explained why; we removed those items. Another agency objected that the entire Web site could pose a national security risk but declined to offer specific comments.

We made other public safety judgments about how much information to show on the Web site. For instance, we used the addresses of company headquarters buildings, information which, in most cases, is available on companies’ own Web sites, but we limited the degree to which readers can use the zoom function on maps to pinpoint those or other locations.

Our maps show the headquarters buildings of the largest government agencies involved in top-secret work. A user can also see the cities and towns where the government conducts top-secret work in the United States, but not the specific locations, companies or agencies involved.

Within a responsible framework, our objective is to provide as much information as possible, so readers gain a real, granular understanding of the scale and breadth of the top-secret world we are describing.

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Darkness in America: Lynne Stewart’s Resentencing

by Stephen Lendman

:: Article nr. 67998 sent on 17-jul-2010 04:46 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=67998

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Apparently not just because we’re in a never-ending crisis, either. Time reports on why Moonshine is the trendiest bottle on the shelf:

“They call it that old mountain dew, and thems that refuse it are few…” So goes the old song, and it gets truer every month. Yes, the distilled spirit known as moonshine, white lightning, white dog, or simply white whisky is the liquor of the moment, bringing together whiskey geeks, home distillers, and high-end mixologists, all of whom find in the formerly clandestine rotgut a new means of expression, both for their palates and their politics.

Why is moonshine making a comeback? For the same reason absinthe did a few years ago. Because it’s delicious. Because it’s illegal. And because it’s cool. Moonshine, both then and now, is whiskey as it comes out of the still: no oak barrels, no caramel color, no aging. It’s just straight liquor from fermented corn or wheat mash. None of the luxury-tinged language that surrounds its grown-up siblings, like bourbon or Scotch, apply to the dog. There are no 12 years of “mellowing,” no “complex vanilla notes.” If you get one flavor out of a white whiskey you’re doing well. Historically, you’re doing well if you don’t die or go blind after drinking it; the standards of moonshine manufacture, from George Washington’s time forward, have not been especially high.

The Washington reference, by the way, isn’t a random one: in his second term as President, a major rebellion based on untaxed moonshine tested the new nation’s mettle. Washington fought the bootleggers back into their hills and holes, where they have remained ever since…

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Japan Focus – 2010-04-05
by Prof Peter Dale Scot

Alfred McCoy’s important new article (TomDispatch, posted on Global Research, April 5, 2010) deserves to mobilize Congress for a serious revaluation of America’s ill-considered military venture in Afghanistan. The answer to the question he poses in his title – “Can Anyone Pacify the World’s Number One Narco-State? – is amply shown by his impressive essay to be a resounding “No!” . . . not until there is fundamental change in the goals and strategies both of Washington and of Kabul.

He amply documents that

• the Afghan state of Hamid Karzai is a corrupt narco-state, to which Afghans are forced to pay bribes each year $2.5 billion, a quarter of the nation’s economy;

• the Afghan economy is a narco-economy: in 2007 Afghanistan produced 8,200 tons of opium, a remarkable 53% of the country’s GDP and 93% of global heroin supply.

Map of Afghanistan showing major poppy fields and intensity of conflict 2007-08

• military options for dealing with the problem are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive: McCoy argues that the best hope lies in reconstructing the Afghan countryside until food crops become a viable alternative to opium, a process that could take ten or fifteen years, or longer. (I shall argue later for an interim solution: licensing Afghanistan with the International Narcotics Board to sell its opium legally.)

Perhaps McCoy’s most telling argument is that in Colombia cocaine at its peak represented only about 3 percent of the national economy, yet both the FARC guerillas and the right-wing death squads, both amply funded by drugs, still continue to flourish in that country. To simply eradicate drugs, without first preparing for a substitute Afghan agriculture, would impose intolerable strains on an already ravaged rural society whose only significant income flow at this time derives from opium. One has only to look at the collapse of the Taliban in 2001, after a draconian Taliban-led reduction in Afghan drug production (from 4600 tons to 185 tons) left the country a hollow shell.

On its face, McCoy’s arguments would appear to be incontrovertible, and should, in a rational society, lead to a serious debate followed by a major change in America’s current military policy. McCoy has presented his case with considerable tact and diplomacy, to facilitate such a result.

The CIA’s Historic Responsibility for Global Drug Trafficking

Unfortunately, there are important reasons why such a positive outcome is unlikely any time soon. There are many reasons for this, but among them are some unpleasant realities which McCoy has either avoided or downplayed in his otherwise brilliant essay, and which have to be confronted if we will ever begin to implement sensible strategies in Afghanistan.

The first reality is that the extent of CIA involvement in and responsibility for the global drug traffic is a topic off limits for serious questioning in policy circles, electoral campaigns, and the mainstream media. Those who have challenged this taboo, like the journalist Gary Webb, have often seen their careers destroyed in consequence.

Since Alfred McCoy has done more than anyone else to heighten public awareness of CIA responsibility for drug trafficking in American war zones, I feel awkward about suggesting that he downplays it in his recent essay. True, he acknowledges that “Opium first emerged as a key force in Afghan politics during the CIA covert war against the Soviets,” and he adds that “the CIA’s covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world’s largest heroin producing region.”

But in a very strange sentence, McCoy suggests that the CIA was passively drawn into drug alliances in the course of combating Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the years 1979-88, whereas in fact the CIA clearly helped create them precisely to fight the Soviets:

In one of history’s ironic accidents, the southern reach of communist China and the Soviet Union had coincided with Asia’s opium zone along this same mountain rim, drawing the CIA into ambiguous alliances with the region’s highland warlords.

There was no such “accident” in Afghanistan, where the first local drug lords on an international scale – Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abu Rasul Sayyaf – were in fact launched internationally as a result of massive and ill-advised assistance from the CIA, in conjunction with the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. While other local resistance forces were accorded second-class status, these two clients of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, precisely because they lacked local support, pioneered the use of opium and heroin to build up their fighting power and financial resources.¹ Both, moreover, became agents of salafist extremism, attacking the indigenous Sufi-influenced Islam of Afghanistan. And ultimately both became sponsors of al Qaeda.²

CIA involvement in the drug trade hardly began with its involvement in the Soviet-Afghan war. To a certain degree, the CIA’s responsibility for the present dominant role of Afghanistan in the global heroin traffic merely replicated what had happened earlier in Burma, Thailand, and Laos between the late 1940s and the 1970s. These countries also only became factors in the international drug traffic as a result of CIA assistance (after the French, in the case of Laos) to what would otherwise have been only local traffickers.

One cannot talk of “ironic accidents” here either. McCoy himself has shown how, in all of these countries, the CIA not only tolerated but assisted the growth of drug-financed anti-Communist assets, to offset the danger of Communist Chinese penetration into Southeast Asia. As in Afghanistan today CIA assistance helped turn the Golden Triangle, from the 1940s to the 1970s, into a leading source for the world’s opium.

In this same period the CIA recruited assets along the smuggling routes of the Asian opium traffic as well, in countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, Italy, France, Cuba, Honduras, and Mexico. These assets have included government officials like Manuel Noriega of Panama or Vladimiro Montesinos of Peru, often senior figures in CIA-assisted police and intelligence services. But they have also included insurrectionary movements, ranging from the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s to (according to Robert Baer and Seymour Hersh) the al Qaeda-linked Jundallah, operating today in Iran and Baluchistan.³

CIA map tracing opium traffic from Afghanistan to Europe, 1998. The CIA cite, updated in 2008 states “Most Southwest Asian heroin flows overland through Iran and Turkey to Europe via the Balkans.” But in fact drugs also flow through the states of the former Soviet Union, and through Pakistan and Dubai.

The Karzai Government, not the Taliban, Dominate the Afghan Dope Economy

Perhaps the best example of such CIA influence via drug traffickers today is in Afghanistan itself, where those accused of drug trafficking include President Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai (an active CIA asset), and Abdul Rashid Dostum (a former CIA asset).4 The drug corruption of the Afghan government must be attributed at least in part to the U.S. and CIA decision in 2001 to launch an invasion with the support of the Northern Alliance, a movement that Washington knew to be drug-corrupted.5

In this way the U.S. consciously recreated in Afghanistan the situation it had created earlier in Vietnam. There too (like Ahmed Wali Karzai a half century later) the president’s brother, Ngo dinh Nhu, used drugs to finance a private network that was used to rig an election for Ngo dinh Diem.6 Thomas H. Johnson, coordinator of anthropological research studies at the Naval Postgraduate School, has pointed out the unlikelihood of a counterinsurgency program succeeding when that program is in support of a local government that is flagrantly dysfunctional and corrupt.7

Thus I take issue with McCoy when he, echoing the mainstream U.S. media, depicts the Afghan drug economy as one dominated by the Taliban. (In McCoy’s words, “If the insurgents capture that illicit economy, as the Taliban have done, then the task becomes little short of insurmountable.”) The Taliban’s share of the Afghan opium economy is variously estimated from $90 to $400 million. But the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that the total Afghan annual earnings from opium and heroin are in the order of from $2.8 to $3.4 billion.8

Clearly the Taliban have not “captured” this economy, of which the largest share by far is controlled by supporters of the Karzai government. In 2006 a report to the World Bank argued “that at the top level, around 25-30 key traffickers, the majority of them in southern Afghanistan, control major transactions and transfers, working closely with sponsors in top government and political positions.”9 In 2007 the London Daily Mail reported that “the four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government.”10

The American media have confronted neither this basic fact nor the way in which it has distorted America’s opium and war policies in Afghanistan. The Obama administration appears to have shifted away from the ill-advised eradication programs of the Bush era, which are certain to lose the hearts and minds of the peasantry. It has moved instead towards a policy of selective interdiction of the traffic, explicitly limited to attacks on drug traffickers who are supporting the insurgents.11

This policy may or may not be effective in weakening the Taliban. But to target what constitutes about a tenth of the total traffic will clearly never end Afghanistan’s current status as the world’s number one narco-state. Nor will it end the current world post-1980s heroin epidemic, which has created five million addicts in Pakistan, over two million addicts inside Russia, eight hundred thousand addicts in America, over fifteen million addicts in the world, and one million addicts inside Afghanistan itself. Nor will it end the current world post-1980s heroin epidemic, which has created five million addicts in Pakistan, over two million addicts inside Russia, eight hundred thousand addicts in America, over fifteen million addicts in the world, and one million addicts inside Afghanistan itself.

The Obama government’s policy of selective interdiction also helps explain its reluctance to consider the most reasonable and humane solution to the world’s Afghan heroin epidemic. This is the “poppy for medicine” initiative of the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS, formerly known as The Senlis Council): to establish a trial licensing scheme, allowing farmers to sell their opium for the production of much-needed essential medicines such as morphine and codeine.12

The proposal has received support from the European Parliament and in Canada; but it has come under heavy attack in the United States, chiefly on the grounds that it might well lead to an increase in opium production. It would however provide a short-term answer to the heroin epidemic that is devastating Europe and Russia – something not achieved by McCoy’s long-term alternative of crop substitution over ten or fifteen years, still less by the current Obama administration’s program of selective elimination of opium supplies.

An unspoken consequence of the “poppy for medicine” initiative would be to shrink the illicit drug proceeds that are helping to support the Karzai government. Whether for this reason, or simply because anything that smacks of legalizing drugs is a tabooed subject in Washington, the “poppy for medicine” initiative is unlikely to be endorsed by the Obama administration.

Afghan Heroin and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection

There is another important paragraph where McCoy, I think misleadingly, focuses attention on Afghanistan, rather than America itself, as the locus of the problem:

At a drug conference in Kabul this month, the head of Russia’s Federal Narcotics Service estimated the value of Afghanistan’s current opium crop at $65 billion.  Only $500 million of that vast sum goes to Afghanistan’s farmers, $300 million to the Taliban guerrillas, and the $64 billion balance “to the drug mafia,” leaving ample funds to corrupt the Karzai government (emphasis added) in a nation whose total GDP is only $10 billion.

What this paragraph omits is the pertinent fact that, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, only 5 or 6 percent of that $65 billion, or from $2.8 to $3.4 billion, stays inside Afghanistan itself.13 An estimated 80 percent of the earnings from the drug trade are derived from the countries of consumption – in this case, Russia, Europe, and America. Thus we should not think for a moment that the only government corrupted by the Afghan drug trade is the country of origin. Everywhere the traffic has become substantial, even if only in transit, it has survived through protection, which in other words means corruption.

There is no evidence to suggest that drug money from the CIA’s trafficker assets fattened the financial accounts of the CIA itself, or of its officers. But the CIA profited indirectly from the drug traffic, and developed over the years a close relationship with it. The CIA’s off-the-books war in Laos was one extreme case where it fought a war, using as its chief assets the Royal Laotian Army of General Ouane Rattikone and the Hmong Army of General Vang Pao, which were, in large part, drug-financed. The CIA’s massive Afghanistan operation in the 1980s was another example of a war that was in part drug-financed.

Video shows the CIA’s Hmong Army led by Gen. Vang Pao in action in Laos

Protection for Drug Trafficking in America

Thus it is not surprising that the U.S. Government, following the lead of the CIA, has over the years become a protector of drug traffickers against criminal prosecution in this country. For example both the FBI and CIA intervened in 1981 to block the  indictment (on stolen car charges) of the drug-trafficking Mexican intelligence czar Miguel Nazar Haro, claiming that Nazar was “an essential repeat essential contact for CIA station in Mexico City,” on matters of “terrorism, intelligence, and counterintelligence.”¹⁴ When Associate Attorney General Lowell Jensen refused to proceed with Nazar’s indictment, the San Diego U.S. Attorney, William Kennedy, publicly exposed his intervention. For this he was promptly fired.¹⁵

A recent spectacular example of CIA drug involvement was the case of the CIA’s Venezuelan asset General Ramon Guillén Davila. As I write in my forthcoming book, Fueling America’s War Machine,¹⁶

General Ramon Guillén Davila, chief of a CIA-created anti-drug unit in Venezuela, was indicted in Miami for smuggling a ton of cocaine into the United States. According to the New York Times, “The CIA, over the objections of the Drug Enforcement Administration, approved the shipment of at least one ton of pure cocaine to Miami International Airport as a way of gathering information about the Colombian drug cartels.” Time magazine reported that a single shipment amounted to 998 pounds, following earlier ones “totaling nearly 2,000 pounds.”¹⁷ Mike Wallace confirmed that “the CIA-national guard undercover operation quickly accumulated this cocaine, over a ton and a half that was smuggled from Colombia into Venezuela.”¹⁸ According to the Wall Street Journal, the total amount of drugs smuggled by Gen. Guillén may have been more than 22 tons.¹⁹

But the United States never asked for Guillén’s extradition from Venezuela to stand trial; and in 2007, when he was arrested in Venezuela for plotting to assassinate President Hugo Chavez, his indictment was still sealed in Miami.²⁰ Meanwhile, CIA officer Mark McFarlin, whom DEA Chief Bonner had also wished to indict, was never indicted at all; he merely resigned.²¹

Nothing in short happened to the principals in this case, which probably only surfaced in the media because of the social unrest generated in the same period by Gary Webb’s stories in the San Jose Mercury about the CIA, Contras, and cocaine.

Banks and Drug Money Laundering

Other institutions with a direct stake in the international drug traffic include major banks, which make loans to countries like Colombia and Mexico knowing full well that drug flows will help underwrite those loans’ repayment. A number of our biggest banks, including Citibank, Bank of New York, and Bank of Boston, have been identified as money laundering conduits, yet never have faced penalties serious enough to change their behavior.²² In short, United States involvement in the international drug traffic links the CIA, major financial interests, and criminal interests in this country and abroad.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, has said that  “Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis.” According to the London Observer, Costa

said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result…. Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. “In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor,” he said.²³

A striking example of drug clout in Washington was the influence exercised in the 1980s by the drug money-laundering Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). As I report in my book, among the

highly-placed recipients of largesse from BCCI, its owners, and its affiliates, were Ronald Reagan’s Treasury Secretary James Baker, who declined to investigate BCCI;²⁴ and Democratic Senator Joseph Biden and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which declined to investigate BCCI.²⁵

In the end it was not Washington that first moved to terminate the banking activities in America of BCCI and its illegal U.S. subsidiaries; it was the determined activity of two outsiders  – Washington lawyer Jack Blum and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.²⁶

Conclusion: The Source of the Global Drug problem is not Kabul, but Washington

I understand why McCoy, in his desire to change an ill-fated policy, is more decorous than I am in acknowledging the extent to which powerful American institutions—government, intelligence and finance—and not just the Karzai government, have been corrupted by the pervasive international drug traffic. But I believe that his tactfulness will prove counter-productive. The biggest source of the global drug problem is not in Kabul, but in Washington. To change this scandal will require the airing of facts which McCoy, in this essay, is reluctant to address.

In his magisterial work, The Politics of Heroin, McCoy tells the story of Carter’s White House drug advisor David Musto. In 1980 Musto told the White House Strategy Council on Drug Abuse that “we were going into Afghanistan to support the opium growers in their rebellion against the Soviets. Shouldn’t we try to avoid what we had done in Laos?”²⁷ Denied access by the CIA to data to which he was legally entitled, Musto took his concerns public in May 1980, noting in a New York Times op-ed that Golden Crescent heroin was already (and for the first time) causing a medical crisis in New York. And he warned, presciently, that “this crisis is bound to worsen.”²⁸

Musto hoped that he could achieve a change of policy by going public with a sensible warning about a disastrous drug-assisted adventure in Afghanistan. But his wise words were powerless against the relentless determination of what I have called the U.S. war machine in our government and political economy. I fear that McCoy’s sensible message, by being decorous precisely where it is now necessary to be outspoken, will suffer the same fate.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His book, Fueling America’s War Machine: Deep Politics and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection is in press, due Fall 2010 from Rowman & Littlefield.

He wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal.

Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, “Can the US Triumph in the Drug-Addicted War in Afghanistan? Opium, the CIA and the Karzai Administration” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 14-5-10, April 5, 2010.

See the following articles on related subjects:

Alfred W. McCoy, “Can Anyone Pacify the World’s Number One Narco-State? The Opium Wars in Afghanistan.”

Peter Dale Scott, America’s Afghanistan: The National Security and a Heroin-Ravaged State

Peter Dale Scott, Martial Law, the Financial Bailout, and the Afghan and Iraq Wars

Jeremy Kuzmarov, American Police Training and Political Violence: From the Philippines Conquest to the Killing Fields of Afghanistan and Iraq

MK Bhadrakumar, Afghanistan, Iran and US-Russian Conflict

Peter Van Agtmael, All You Need is Heroin: U.S. Troops in Their Own Hand

Notes

¹ Eventually the United States and its allies gave Hekmatyar, who for a time became arguably the world’s leading drug trafficker, more than $1 billion in armaments. This was more than any other CIA client has ever received, before or since.
² Scott, The Road to 9/11, 74-75: “Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, said by the 911 Commission to have been the true author of the 9/11 plot, first conceived of it when he was with Abdul Sayyaf, a leader with whom bin Laden was still at odds [9/11 Commission Report, 145-50]. Meanwhile several of the men convicted of blowing up the World Trade Center in 1993, and the subsequent New York “day of terror” plot in 1995, had trained, fought with, or raised money for, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. [Tim Weiner, “Blowback from the Afghan Battlefield,” New York Times, March 13, 1994].
³ Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, July 7, 2008
⁴ New York Times, October 27, 2009.
⁵ Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 536. At the start of the U.S. offensive in 2001, according to Ahmed Rashid, “The Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA’s new NA [Northern Alliance] allies” (Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia [New York: Viking, 2008], 320).
⁶ Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin, 1997), 239. Cf. New York Times, October 28, 2009.
⁷ Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason, “Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template,” Military Review, November-December 2009, 1.
⁸ The alert reader will notice that even $3.4 billion is less than 53 percent of the $10 billion attributed in the previous paragraph to the total Afghan GDP. These estimates from diverse sources are not precise, and cannot be expected to jibe perfectly.
⁹ “Afghanistan: Drug Industry and Counter-Narcotics Policy,” Report to the World Bank, November 28, 2006, emphasis added.
¹⁰ London Daily Mail. July 21, 2007. In December 2009 Harper’s published a detailed essay on Colonel Abdul Razik, “the master of Spin Boldak,” a drug trafficker and Karzai ally whose rise was “abetted by a ring of crooked officials in Kabul and Kandahar as well as by overstretched NATO commanders who found his control over a key border town useful in their war against the Taliban” (Matthieu Aikins, “The Master of Spin Boldak,” Harper’s Magazine, December 2009).
¹¹ James Risen, “U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Lords Tied to Taliban,” New York Times, August 10, 2009: ”United States military commanders have told Congress that…only those [drug traffickers] providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.”
¹² Corey Flintoff, “Combating Afghanistan’s Opium Problem Through Legalization,” NPR, December 22, 2005.
¹³ CBS News April 1, 2010, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/01/world/main6353224.shtml.
¹⁴ Cables from Mexico City FBI Legal Attaché Gordon McGinley to Justice Department, in Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 36.
¹⁵ Scott, Deep Politics, 105; quoting from San Diego Union, 3/26/82.
¹⁶ Fueling America’s War Machine: Deep Politics and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection (in press, due Fall 2010 from Rowman & Littlefield).
¹⁷ Time, November 29, 1993: “The shipments continued, however, until Guillen tried to send in 3,373 lbs. of cocaine at once. The DEA, watching closely, stopped it and pounced.” Cf. New York Times, November 23, 1996 (“one ton”).
¹⁸ CBS News Transcripts, 60 MINUTES, November 21, 1993.
¹⁹ Wall Stree Journal, November 22, 1996. I suspect that the CIA approved the import of cocaine less  ”as a way of gathering information” than as a way of affecting market share of the cocaine trade in the country of origin, Colombia. In the 1990s CIA and JSOC were involved in the elimination of Colombian drug pingpin Pablo Escobar, a feat achieved with the assistance of Colombia’s Cali Cartel and the AUC terrorist death squad of Carlos Castaño. Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 86-88.
²⁰ Chris Carlson, “Is The CIA Trying to Kill Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez?” Global Research, April 19, 2007.
²¹ Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA (Springfield, OR: TrineDay, 2009), 400; Time, November 23, 1993. McFarlin had worked with anti-guerrilla forces in El Salvador in the 1980′s. The CIA station chief in Venezuela, Jim Campbell, also retired.
²² The Bank of Boston laundered as much as $2 million from the trafficker Gennaro Angiulo, and eventually paid a fine of $500,000 (New York Times, February 22, 1985; Eduardo Varela-Cid, Hidden Fortunes: Drug Money, Cartels and the Elite Banks [Sunny Isles Beach, FL: El Cid Editor, 1999]). Cf. Asad Ismi, “The Canadian Connection: Drugs, Money Laundering and Canadian Banks,” Asadismi.ws: “Ninety-one percent of the $197 billion spent on cocaine in the U.S. stays there, and American banks launder $100 billion of drug money every year. Those identified as money laundering conduits include the Bank of Boston, Republic National Bank of New York, Landmark First National Bank, Great American Bank, People’s Liberty Bank and Trust Co. of Kentucky, and Riggs National Bank of Washington. Citibank helped Raul Salinas (the brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas) move millions of dollars out of Mexico into secret Swiss bank accounts under false names.”
²³ Rajeev Syal, “Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor,” Observer, December 13, 2009.
²⁴ Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993), 357.
²⁵ Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 373-77.
²⁶ Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 449.
²⁷ Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/ Chicago Review Press, 2003), 461; citing interview with Dr. David Musto.
²⁸ David Musto, New York Times, May 22, 1980; quoted in McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 462.

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Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s “triumph over race.” Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.

Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the land of the free” has finally made good on its promise of equality. There’s an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.

Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.

Most people don’t like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

• There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
• As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

Excuses for the Lockdown

There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. We’re told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades — they are currently are at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

The drug war has been brutal — complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods — but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison.

This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. That’s why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle-class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It has nothing to do with race; it’s all about violent crime.

Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it.

The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes — sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries.

Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs. In President Bill Clinton’s boastful words, “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.” The facts bear him out. Clinton’s “tough on crime” policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. But Clinton was not satisfied with exploding prison populations. He and the “New Democrats” championed legislation banning drug felons from public housing (no matter how minor the offense) and denying them basic public benefits, including food stamps, for life. Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic, and social life is now perfectly legal, if you’ve been labeled a felon.

Facing Facts

But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn’t the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that’s where the violent offenders can be found? The answer is yes… in made-for-TV movies. In real life, the answer is no.

The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80% of the cash, cars, and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.

The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses. In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s — the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war — nearly 80% of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.

In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time — a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.

Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers — not to mention president of the United States — causes us all to marvel at what a long way we’ve come.

Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries. And that’s with affirmative action!

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our “colorblind” society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure — the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.

This is not Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream. This is not the promised land. The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.

Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010). The former director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU in Northern California, she also served as a law clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court. Currently, she holds a joint appointment with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. To listen to a TomCast audio interview in which Alexander explains how she came to realize that this country was bringing Jim Crow into the Age of Obama, click here.

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By Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post Staff Writer

Link: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/03/AR2010020303968_pf.html

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The Departments of Defense (DoD) and Homeland Security (DHS) today announced an initiative to grant select state and major urban area fusion center personnel access to classified terrorism-related information residing in DoD’s classified network.

Under this initiative, select fusion center personnel with a federal security clearance will be able to access specific terrorism-related information resident on the DoD Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet)—a secure network used to send classified data. This classified data will be accessed via DHS’ Homeland Security Data Network (HSDN). DHS will be responsible for ensuring that proper security procedures are followed.

“With this action, DoD continues its work in supporting states and localities who are leading our efforts to secure the nation from domestic terrorism attacks, said Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs Paul N. Stockton. “We look forward to exploring other opportunities where DoD can help our state and local partners effectively defeat terrorism.”

“This initiative reflects the federal government’s strong commitment to improve information sharing with our state, local, and tribal partners,” said DHS Acting Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Bart R. Johnson. “Fusion centers are a critical part of our national security enterprise, and this new tool enables federal agencies to share information with these partners while utilizing our advanced technical capabilities for secure information sharing.”

This joint initiative will promote collaboration between DHS, DoD and other federal departments and agencies, enabling the trusted and secure exchange of terrorism-related information in order to detect, deter, prevent and respond to homeland security threats.

State and major urban area fusion centers provide critical links for information sharing between and across all levels of government, and help fulfill key recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. This initiative will serve as a valuable resource to enhance situational awaeness and support more timely and complete analysis of national security threats.

Increasing the breadth of law enforcement that have access to terrorism-related data will further improve the ability of fusion centers to prevent, detect, deter, and respond to terrorist attacks, and advance the combined missions of DHS and DoD to protect the nation’s security.

DHS and DoD remain committed to protecting privacy and civil liberties as well as data and networks in an increasingly vulnerable cyber environment.

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