[Eyes Wide Open]

KESQ-TV: Jimmy Hughes is arrested for the 1981 Rancho Mirage "Octopus murders". He's caught at Miami Airport just before takeoff to Honduras.

[Eyes Wide Open]

Danny Casolaro-Unsolved Mysteries part 1



Danny Casolaro-Unsolved Mysteries part 2

[Eyes Wide Open]

 The Dulce Book


"Those conspiracies that are too incredible to be believed, are by the same right those which most often succeed."

* * * * * * *

THE OCTOPUS, BLACK PROJECTS AND THE DULCE FACILITY

 

 

The following article comes from the 'TC TECHNICAL CONSULTANT', Nov.-Dec., 1991 issue:

 

"The death of a journalist in West Virginia, plus the jailing of an alleged CIA computer consultant in Washington State may be elements of a much wider scandal that could have serious implications...

"What started out as an investigation of an apparent case of pirated software has grown to be a project involving hundreds of journalists all over the world.

"The dead journalist, Joseph Daniel 'Danny' Casolaro was found dead August 10th in a motel room in West Virginia. His wrists were slashed seven times on each wrist and a suicide note was found nearby. The only manuscript of his book, with accompanying notes, WAS MISSING.

"The book, provisionally titled 'The Octopus', was meant to be an explosive expose of misdeeds by the Justice Department under the Reagan administration. Time Magazine also reported that Casolaro's research centered on gambling and attempted arms deals at the Cabazon reservation near Indio [California].

"Indeed, the scope of Casolaro's investigation was so large that any one of a large number of areas of research could have been the trigger for a possible hit.

"While authorities declared his death a suicide, his relatives definitely stated that Casolaro's mental state was sound, indeed upbeat, after the completion of his book.

"Casolaro started his work nearly two years before, investigating the bankrupting of a small computer software company called Inslaw, allegedly by the U.S. Justice Department. INSLAW, a company headed by Bill and Nancy Hamilton of Washington D.C., (no connection to researcher Bill Hamilton, whose writings on the Dulce enigma appear later in this volume. - Branton) had developed a package known as PROMIS -- short for Prosecutor's Management Information System -- to act as a case management tool for the Justice Department's unwieldy work load.

"Inslaw President Bill Hamilton has claimed that Ed Meese associate EARL BRIAN was given control of pirated versions of the PROMIS software by Meese to sell back to different U.S. government agencies for great profit. Two courts have so far agreed with Hamilton, awarding an 8 million dollar judgment, but a higher ('Justice Dept.'? - Branton) court of appeal has quashed the award and the verdict, declaring that it was not the jurisdiction of the lower courts. As of October 9, the case has moved into the realm of the Supreme Court.

"EARL BRIAN OWNS UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL [UPI] and FINANCIAL NEWS NETWORK [FNN].

"According to a Washington man, who claims to have modified the cobol-based software for the CIA and other intelligence agencies, the software was a reward for Earl Brian's role in arranging the so-called 'October Surprise' gambit, the alleged conspiracy to withhold the American hostages in Iran until after the 1980 election which saw Carter removed from power. The 'October Surprise' scandal has taken some time to emerge.

"In a Paris meeting, President Bush is alleged to have met with Ali Akabar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Mohammed Ali Rajai, the future President of Iran and Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer with connections to Mossad, according to Navy Captain Gunther Russbacher who claims to have flown Bush, William Casey -- the CIA chief -- and Donald Gregg, a CIA operative to that location. Russbacher, who made these allegations in May is now in jail on Terminal Island, convicted on the charge of impersonating a U.S. Attorney. (Note: Russbacher 'defected' from the CIA with 12 Navy Seals under his command, and was on at least two occasions the target of attempted CIA hits. The would-be assassins attempted to drive Gunther and his wife off of roads and down the side-cliffs to their deaths, however according to Russbacher his SEAL-team agents who were watching over him unbeknownst to the intended assassins, moved up quickly from behind and sent the CIA "hit men" to THEIR deaths instead. - Branton)

"The Washington man is MICHAEL RICONOSCIUTO who is now waiting for a trial in a Washington jail on conspiracy to sell drugs charges, charges which Riconosciuto claims are manufactured. Indeed, the charge made against Riconosciuto were made one week after Riconosciuto authored and signed an affidavit describing his role in modifying the pirated software.

(Note: It is interesting what connections we can find here. Michael Riconosciuto was a Wackenhut-CIA employee who told researcher Michael Lindemann that he had attempted to get a whole helicopter full of documents and evidence detailing illegal biogenetic activities and non-Congressionally sanctioned projects involving 'illegal aliens' out of the Nevada Test Site. The chopper was blown out of the sky, killing all five personnel on board. Michael's father happened to be Marshall Riconosciuto, a fascist and a supporter of Adolph Hitler who was a very close friend of Fred L. Crisman. Crisman was involved in the Maurey Island 'UFO' sighting incident in 1947 near Tacoma, Washington, which researcher Anthony Kimory believes involved the test-flight of hybrid CIA - PROJECT PAPERCLIP - NAZI aerial disks. There are several sources which claim that by the early 1940's the Nazi's had succeeded in test-flying wingless lenticular craft powered by rotary devices, rocket power, and DONUT CONFIGURATION jet turbine engines -- rather than cylindrical -- with the cabin stabilized by gyro, the compressors rotating in one direction and the expansion chambers and vectored exhausts rotating in the opposite direction. In fact the movie "THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE" correctly implies that this, one of the largest military battles during World War II between American and German forces, was an attempt by the Germans to buy time and prolong the war just a little while longer, for within a few more months the Germans would have been mass-producing jet fighters, bombers and other super-weapons that would have been invincible to the turbo-prop fleets of the Allies. With the Allied invasion of Germany just before mass-production began, many of the prototypes and plans of the Nazi military machine were captured. However most of the most sophisticated prototypes, plans and even scientists mysteriously turned up missing following the war. We will reserve further discussion on this subject until later in this volume. After the war had ended several of the Nazi scientists who WERE captured -- and who had helped to develop the revolutionary aircraft -- were recruited by the CIA as a result of a secret deal that had been made between Allen Dulles, a member of the Bavarian Illuminati; and Nazi S.S. General Reinhard Gehlen, a member of the Bavarian Thule Society. The deep connections between the Bavarian Illuminati which sponsored the CIA and the Bavarian Thule society which sponsored the Nazi's allowed for the upper covert-ops levels of the CIA to be manned by nothing less than the core of the Nazi S.S. itself, with the help of fascist sympathizers and fifth column double-agents working within American intelligence, although some leading Nazi's were 'sacrificed' to the Nuremberg trials to appease the Allies and establish the illusion that Europe had been de-Nazified. Fred L. Crisman incidentally was a 'witness' to the Maurey Island event and had helped two Army G-2 agents acquire 'slag samples' which fell from one of the six DONUT-SHAPED ships observed. On their way to deliver the samples to Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, their plane crashed and both G-2 agents were killed. Some people at the time insisted that the plane had been sabotaged. Two of the reporters who investigated the incident lost their lives, and Kenneth Arnold who investigated the incident after being commissioned by AMAZING STORIES editor Ray Palmer, claimed that his conversations with a high Air Force official concerning the subject were electronically monitored. Also, strange government agents in dark suits were seen in the area. Shortly after his investigation Kenneth Arnold, during an air-search for a crashed plane over Mt. Rainier, saw 9 crescent-shaped discs which he called 'flying saucers'. The news media publicized the incident and the term stuck and became a media catch word ever since. Also around this same time -- 1947 -- Arnold escaped a near-fatal crash when his airplane mysteriously lost power. The connections do not end here. Fred L. Crisman was a close friend to Clay Shaw, whom Louisiana District Attorney James Garrison -- see the movie 'JFK' -- accused of being the CIA-Mafia go-between in the John F. Kennedy murder. Garrison arrested Shaw in an effort to charge him and the CIA with the JFK assassination, however only a few days before the hearing Garrison's star witness David Ferry was killed, and Garrison's remaining evidence was not enough to bring about a conviction. Fred Crisman was the first man Clay Shaw called when he heard that Garrison intended to implicate him. Garrison also believed that Clay Shaw himself was involved with PROJECT PAPERCLIP, the secret operation to bring Nazi war criminals into the United States by the hundreds -- some say thousands -- and give them immunity and new identities in such institutions as U.S. Intelligence, the Military-Industrial complex, the Space agencies, and the various Rockefeller-connected oil cartels such as ARCO, STANDARD [EXXON], ZAPATA, etc., corporations that were supported by the Bavarian-based secret-society lodges, corporations that had actually sold oil to the Nazi's during World War II and helped keep the Nazi "war machine" operating. According to Garrison, Crisman worked as a middle-man between the fascist policy makers and the lower echelons of the Military-Industrial Complex. "Oh what a tangled web..." These American mega-bankers and traitors to freedom had supported the Nazi's in an effort to initiate a Bavarian-backed "New World Order", under the cover of the "Third Reich". Read the book NONE DARE CALL IT CONSPIRACY, by the late Gary Allen for more on the Rockefeller connection, and also the various works by Dr. Antony Sutton. - Branton)

"The affidavit also claimed that he [Michael Riconosciuto], had been contacted by phone and threatened by PETER VIDENIEKS -- a Justice Department employee and Customs official who Riconosciuto alleged had intelligence ties -- as to the possible consequences of his going public with certain information.

"According to Riconosciuto, Videnieks was a frequent visitor to the Cabazon Indian reservation near Palm Springs and visited with tribal manager, John P. Nichols. Nichols was in essence Riconosciuto's boss in a number of enterprises conducted on reservation land and the PROMIS modification was just one of these projects. According to Riconosciuto, in an interview with T.C. conducted from jail, the PROMIS software was modified to install a backdoor access for use by American intelligence services. The software was then sold to 88 different countries as a sort of 'Trojan horse' package enabling us to access their intelligence systems. According to Riconosciuto these countries included Iraq and Libya.

"Correspondence between Nichols and other companies, if authentic, indicates that Riconosciuto's claims of his expertise in the area of electronics and armaments appear to be true. Marshall Riconoscuito, Michael's father, is a reputed former business partner of Richard Nixon.

"According to Riconosciuto, the fuzzy status of reservation land as 'sovereign' allowed elements of the CIA and organized crime to conduct business uniquely.

"Among the projects worked on during this time were joint projects with WACKENHUT, a company loaded with former CIA and NSA personnel and business ventures with the Saudi Arabian royal family and other unusual projects.

"A joint venture with Southern California Edison will soon be generating power for bio-mass drawn from local waste outlets. Biological warfare projects were investigated with Stormont laboratories looking into the creation of 'pathogenic viruses' and enhanced fuel-air explosive weapons were created and tested in league with Meridian Arms at the NEVADA TESTING RANGE which matched the explosive power of nuclear devices.

"These enhanced weapons gained their power from polarizing the molecules in the gas cloud by modification of the electric field, a technology developed from exploring Thomas Townsend Brown's suppressed work, a knowledge which Riconosciuto claims he gained from working at LEAR in Reno, Nevada.

"Riconosciuto is said to have worked on the enhanced fuel-air explosive weapons with Gerald Bull of Space Research Corporation. Bull, now deceased, later became an arms advisor to Saddam Hussein. It is said that HUSSEIN POSSESSES THE FAE TECHNOLOGY.

"In July, Anson Ng, a reporter for the Financial Times of London was shot and killed in Guatemala. He had reportedly been trying to interview an American there named Jimmy Hughes, a one-time director of security for the Cabazon Indian Reservation secret projects.

"In April, a Philadelphia attorney named Dennis Eisman was found dead, killed by a single bullet in his chest. According to a former federal official who worked with Eisman, the attorney was found dead in the parking lot where he had been due to meet with a woman who had crucial evidence to share substantiating Riconosciuto's claims.

"Both Eisman's and Ng's deaths were declared suicides by authorities.

"Fred Alvarez, a Cabazon tribal leader who was in vocal opposition to the developments on the reservation, was found shot to death WITH two friends in 1981. Their murder remains unsolved.

"The leader of the House, Thomas Foley, announced last month that a formal inquiry will be initiated into the Inslaw case. Foley appointed Senator Terry Sanford as co-chairman of the joint congressional panel. Prior to his election, Senator Sanford was the attorney REPRESENTING Earl Brian in his 1985 takeover bid for United Press International and was instrumental in appointing Earl Brian, a medical doctor, to the board of Duke Medical School, of which Sanford is President.

"However, despite repeated requests from journalists to produce photographs showing Riconosciuto together with Brian, and requests to produce his passport showing his alleged trip to Iran, he has not yet done so. Also Riconosciuto failed to be able to describe Peter Videnieks to CNN's Moneyline program, claiming a medical condition prevented him from remembering clearly.

"This led one former intelligence operative to speculate that we may be witnessing a very sophisticated intelligence operation being played out in public.

"Former F.B.I. Special Agent, Ted Gunderson, speaks FOR Riconosciuto's credibility. Gunderson, who lives in Manhattan Beach, has worked with Riconosciuto for many years in his capacity as private investigator.

"Together, according to Gunderson, they were responsible for thwarting a terrorist operation during the Los Angeles Olympics. According to Gunderson, Riconosciuto was well known in certain circles as a genius in almost all sciences.

"The so-called drug operation broken up in Washington State was an electrohydrodynamic mining operation claimed Gunderson, using Townsend Brown technology. A videotape viewed by this journalist revealed metallic powders and apparent processes unrelated to drug manufacture. Indeed, a government analysis of soil samples revealed the absence of drug contamination, but a high concentration of barium. Barium is often found in high voltage related work.

"Unsubstantiated information from an intelligence source claims that the current situation is THE VISIBLE EFFECT OF A WAR CURRENTLY GOING ON IN THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY between a group centered in the CIA called AQUARIUS [around a powerful center known as MJ-12] and a group known as COM-12 centered around Naval Intelligence. COM-12 is reputedly trying to sustain a rearguard action to sustain and preserve constitutional government and is deliberately LEAKING INFORMATION damaging to the former group."

 

In the same publication, same issue, there appeared a follow-up article just following the one given above. Written by Thomas Zed, the article, titled "WACKENHUT'S CONNECTION WITH THE BLACK PROJECT WORLD" stated:

"The Wackenhut company has a very close connection to the world of BLACK BUDGET PROJECTS. Besides being connected with the Cabazon venture mentioned in this issue it is also responsible, according to jailed computer consultant Michael Riconosciuto, FOR THE SECRET PROJECTS BEING UNDERTAKEN IN DULCE, NEW MEXICO where the JICARILLA INDIAN RESERVATION IS BEING SIMILARLY USED.

"After sending two of my colleagues there recently AND RECEIVING CONFIRMATION THAT THERE WAS A TOP SECRET MILITARY TYPE INSTALLATION, I decided to call the newspaper office and make an educated bluff.

"I identified myself as a freelance reporter from Los Angeles -- and told the newspaper that I was doing a story on the Cabazon reservation biological warfare projects that had been undertaken there on behalf of the CIA. I told her that I had heard that there were similar things being done in Dulce and would like to know what was going on.

"The official I spoke to BECAME FRIGHTENED and said, 'I can't talk to you about that! It would be very unprofessional of me to talk to you about that. You'll have to speak to the President of the tribe.' She then hung up.

"I have yet to call back and ask the President of the tribe, but will report on that in the next issue.

"Wackenhut is also responsible for security of a lot of UNDERGROUND FACILITIES in California and Nevada, including the notorious S-4 or AREA 51 in Nevada where Townsend Brown flying disk technology [written about in a T.C. recent issue] has been flying and developing for decades.

"A recent helicopter crash at the area, where two pilots and three security guards from Wackenhut flying in a Messerschmit BO-105 helicopter were killed was not at all accidental claimed Riconosciuto, who said that the individuals aboard the helicopter were traveling with sensitive documents.

"Groups are now investigating Riconosciuto's claims..."

[Eyes Wide Open]

$250 Billion Treasury Note Cloaked in Mystery – Evades Public Scrutiny

[Eyes Wide Open]

US Govt Spy Program: Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government: Part I

by Ed Encho     Page 1 of 3 page(s)



    [Editor’s Note:  On Monday, 2 February 2009, OEN premieres Ed Encho’s newest update of his investigative series, “Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government (Pt. 3), which brings to the forefront recent revelations on the expansion of the US government’s surveillance apparatus and the stolen technology that makes it all possible.   On the heels of NSA whistleblower Russell Tice allegations of a government intelligence community that has crossed the line and trashed the Constitution, Ed Encho covers a span of investigations throughout the years that reads like a Tom Clancy suspense thriller.  OEN is republishing Part I and Part II.  You will want to catch up. ]

 

“Over the last two weeks I have encountered just such an apocalyptic situation, where I and the Department of Justice have been asked to be part of something that is fundamentally wrong.” (Excerpt from Deputy Attorney General James Comey’s draft letter of resignation to President Bush, dated March 16, 2004, which Comey did not in the end send.)

"Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull" (George Orwell: 1984)
I: Main Core and PROMIS

Suppose that the United States Government, or more likely an unaccountable privatized intelligence colossus empowered by the reaction to the 9/11 attacks and fueled by the rampant cronyism of a system long ago gone rotten had a surveillance tool capable of peering into the most private aspects of American lives on a whim. Now suppose that the new growth industry of a previously unthinkable futuristic police state was already in place, fully operational and has been online and has actively been being utilized for domestic spying for years before those two airplanes slammed into the World Trade Center. The 'terrorist' attacks were used as the justification for every unconstitutional reigning in of civil liberties ever since that heinous September morning seven years ago when the reset button was hit on two and a quarter centuries of American history and we all stepped forth into the brave new world of perpetual war, fear, suspicion and vengeance into a parallel reality in a place that would come to be known as The Homeland. What if this surveillance industrial complex was in possession of a database that was so large and so powerful that not only could it instantly process and retrieve the most minute or intimate aspects of a citizen’s lives but was also able to utilize extremely sophisticated artificial intelligence capabilities to actually predict likely patterns of future behavior.

Such a huge database would be able to use cutting edge technology funded with taxpayer dollars and awarded to unaccountable private corporations largely through ‘business as usual’ no bid contracts to create the most invasive tool of oppression this country has ever seen. This database would rely on software that was capable of performing social network analysis based on block modeling technology to monitor all forms of electronic communications, all internet searches, all debit and credit card transactions, all travel arrangements, all library records, all bank activity and all telephone records. It would then be able to use the data to not only find links between persons who already know and interact with each other but to categorize each individual into a particular group that possess similar behavioral and purchasing habits. These groups could then be further divided into subgroups and further analyzed in order to determine under some loosely defined and largely unknown guidelines whether they could potentially represent a threat. While all of this may sound like some sort of futuristic dystopian nightmare straight out of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report and "Precrime" it is very real and it goes by the name of Main Core. For example, if you are selling a bicycle and run an advertisement in your local newspaper and you happen to receive a call from a Muhammad who is interested in your bicycle and Muhammad happens to have certain friends who have relationships with an organization that is determined by some unknown criteria to be a potential terrorist organization then the call that you received from Muhammad would then in all likelihood place you in the database and subject to an increased level of scrutiny at best and at worst in jeopardy of being picked up and held indefinitely without any sort of judicial review.

This technology is being used today absent any form of legitimate oversight, with a Constitution that has been eviscerated by the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil, a vast gulag network of top secret prisons and 'detention facilities' and the decidedly anti-American new phenomenon of state sanctioned torture. Throw in an overworked, systematically dumbed-down populace that has been propagandized by the corrupt institution that is the corporate media machine with it's clever use of fear and loathing and scientific development of advanced mind control techniques who despite the infinite wisdom of our forefathers would gladly sacrifice their liberty for the any sort of temporary safety (no matter that it is fleeting) and there exists today in 'The Homeland' a perfect Petri-dish for an authoritarian fascist society.

It is though a very sophisticated form of fascism unlike more outwardly obvious regimes that we have known in the past. Author Bertram Gross published a book back in 1980 that was entitled Friendly Fascism, Jim Garrison once said that "fascism would come to America in the name of national security", and author Kevin Phillips in his 1983 book Post-Conservative America warned of the potential of an "apple pie authoritarianism" and a coming society in which: "the Star Spangled Benner would wave with greater frequency and over many more parades; increased surveillance would crack down on urban outbreaks and extreme political dissidents". This very accurately describes post 9/11 America where any semblance of reason has been abandoned for cheap flag-waving pimped off as patriotism, criticism of authority has made into potential treason by the highly paid shills for neoconservative doctrine, sloganeering and demagoguery have replaced discourse, critical thinking is becoming extinct and just as George Orwell so accurately predicted Big Brother is now watching over us, protecting us and ensuring that we understand that war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

But I digress...

Main Core has received attention in two 2008 articles, one a piece by investigative journalist Christopher Ketcham entitled The Last Roundup (which also looks at Continuity of Government programs but more on that in a little while) and Tim Shorrock entitled Exposing Bush’s Historic Abuse of Power. Both articles tie Main Core to the now legendary PROMIS software, an extremely advanced program designed to aid federal prosecutors in case management tracking. PROMIS could pull and put together a wide range of data from disparate sources into a single record. The PROMIS software was created by INSLAW Inc., a company owned by a former NSA intelligence officer named William Hamilton. PROMIS was to have been licensed to the U.S. government in the early 1980’s before the technology boom became widespread but was then stolen by the seamy officials in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department. The software was modified for espionage purposes to include a ‘back door’ that could be used for spying on those that it was sold to and in a detail that should be especially relevant with the economic crisis that threatens to crash the global financial system, the software could also be used to track in real time (in order to manipulate?) stock market transactions, once can certainly speculate as to how such a tool could have contributed to an economic catastrophe as we are now facing if it were used for such a thing. It is important to keep in mind the period when PROMIS was stolen in the early 1980's and the fact that the technology boom was still years in the future which should give one an idea to just how far advanced and therefore how important that it was to those who would use it in order to promote a sinister agenda.

Mr. Shorock's piece goes into the relationship between PROMIS and Main Core in some detail:  According to William Hamilton, a former NSA intelligence officer who left the agency in the 1970s, that description sounded a lot like Main Core, which he first heard about in detail in 1992. Hamilton, who is the president of Inslaw Inc., a computer services firm with many clients in government and the private sector, says there are strong indications that the Bush administration's domestic surveillance operations use Main Core.

Hamilton's company Inslaw is widely respected in the law enforcement community for creating a program called the Prosecutors' Management Information System, or PROMIS. It keeps track of criminal investigations through a powerful search engine that can quickly access all stored data components of a case, from the name of the initial investigators to the telephone numbers of key suspects. PROMIS, also widely used in the insurance industry, can also sort through other databases fast, with results showing up almost instantly. "It operates just like Google," Hamilton told me in an interview in his Washington office in May.

Since the late 1980s, Inslaw has been involved in a legal dispute over its claim that Justice Department officials in the Reagan administration appropriated the PROMIS software. Hamilton claims that Reagan officials gave PROMIS to the NSA and the CIA, which then adapted the software -- and its outstanding ability to search other databases -- to manage intelligence operations and track financial transactions. Over the years, Hamilton has employed prominent lawyers to pursue the case, including Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general and secretary of defense who died in 1999, and C. Boyden Gray, the former White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush. The dispute has never been settled. But based on the long-running case, Hamilton says he believes U.S. intelligence uses PROMIS as the primary software for searching the Main Core database.

Hamilton was first told about the connection between PROMIS and Main Core in the spring of 1992 by a U.S. intelligence official, and again in 1995 by a former NSA official. In July 2001, Hamilton says, he discussed his case with retired Adm. Dan Murphy, a former military advisor to Elliot Richardson who later served under President George H.W. Bush as deputy director of the CIA. Murphy, who died shortly after his meeting with Hamilton, did not specifically mention Main Core. But he informed Hamilton that the NSA's use of PROMIS involved something "so seriously wrong that money alone cannot cure the problem," Hamilton told me. He added, "I believe in retrospect that Murphy was alluding to Main Core." Hamilton also provided copies of letters that Richardson and Gray sent to U.S. intelligence officials and the Justice Department on Inslaw's behalf alleging that the NSA and the CIA had appropriated PROMIS for intelligence use.

Hamilton says James B. Comey's congressional testimony in May 2007, in which he described a hospitalized John Ashcroft's dramatic standoff with senior Bush officials Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card, was another illuminating moment. "It was then that we [at Inslaw] started hearing again about the Main Core derivative of PROMIS for spying on Americans," he told me.

Through a former senior Justice Department official with more than 25 years of government experience, Salon has learned of a high-level former national security official who reportedly has firsthand knowledge of the U.S. government's use of Main Core. The official worked as a senior intelligence analyst for a large domestic law enforcement agency inside the Bush White House. He would not agree to an interview. But according to the former Justice Department official, the former intelligence analyst told her that while stationed at the White House after the 9/11 attacks, one day he accidentally walked into a restricted room and came across a computer system that was logged on to what he recognized to be the Main Core database. When she mentioned the specific name of the top-secret system during their conversation, she recalled, "He turned white as a sheet."

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3

 
Ed Encho is a free lance writer, activist and consultant who resides in West Central Florida and author of the upcoming "A Monolithic and Ruthless Conspiracy". 

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

[Eyes Wide Open]

US Govt Spy Program: Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government (Pt.2)

By Ed Encho (about the author)     Page 1 of 3 page(s)

opednews.com     Permalink



For OpEdNews: Ed Encho - Writer

    [Editor's Note:  On Monday, 2 February 2009, OEN premieres Ed Encho's newest update of his investigative series, "Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government (Pt. 3), which brings to the forefront recent revelations on the expansion of the US government's surveillance apparatus and the stolen technology that makes it all possible.   On the heels of NSA whistleblower Russell Tice allegations of a government intelligence community that has crossed the line and trashed the Constitution, Ed Encho covers a span of investigations throughout the years that reads like a Tom Clancy suspense thriller.  OEN is republishing Part I and Part II.  You will want to catch up. ]


Spy Satellite

Photo by Christian Meichtry


"In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can't spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can't look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line."

-Earling Carothers 'Jim' Garrison


II: The Shadow Government

To say that the 'terrorist' attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were an incredible boon to the shadow government and its long running agenda would be quite the understatement. Never before in American history has this particular element been so visible and brazen than in the aftermath of 9/11 which has since become the ultimate trump card to be played against the forces of reason, judiciousness and the rule of law. The frenzied spree to dismantle the republic and reinterpret the Constitution to implement the fascist police state that would suppress the domestic populace while the business of expanding the empire abroad has gone on unabated for over seven years now. The ascendance of the shadow government into the open began on that morning and the events have been instrumental in allowing for every outrageous violation of civil liberties, international law and the very bedrock principle upon which civilized societies are built being habeas corpus. America is now known worldwide as a torture state, a pariah and a rogue nation to be hated and feared and is ruled by an imperial presidency or as it is formerly known a Unitary Executive (translation: dictator). The current state of affairs are primarily due to the policies of the cabal of one Richard B. Cheney, the most powerful Vice President in history as well as a longtime shadow government figure who activated Continuity of Government on the morning of 9/11.

Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who have been collaborators in a war against the basic tenets of American Constitutional democracy since their days together in the Ford administration were active participants in Continuity of Government throughout the Reagan years and afterwards. With C.O.G. being highly secretive it is not widely known due to a lack of official media coverage of the programs so few questions have been asked, no oversight exists and it has been a useful place for a renegade cabal with an acute distaste for democratic principles. One of the most often referenced pieces on this was James Mann's 2004 piece for the Atlantic Magazine entitled The Armageddon Plan. Another shadow government figure who would later become instrumental in the transformation of America into the fascistic Homeland is one David Addington, Cheney's crackerjack legal mind and longtime hatchetman who has along with others such as John Yoo (a man who once said that the president had the legal authority to crush a child's testicles were it deemed necessary) have toiled to change the law of the nation into something dark and foreign. In Addington's world there is legitimacy to engage in illegal (at least until now) domestic spying, abduction and detention without trial, torture both physical and mental (a horrifying example is that of Jose Padilla (an American citizen who would be the precedent for future actions against other Americans) who was imprisoned and psychologically destroyed through the application of mind control techniques straight out of the infamous CIA program MKULTRA to the point where his mental capacities were that of "a piece of furniture". Padilla was not only a precedent setter but also a warning of what the government could do to a person deemed to be a 'terrorist' or 'terrorist sympathizer', the definitions of which are intentionally vague for a very terrifying reason.

David Addington, more than once referred to as Cheney's Cheney was a key player in the implementation of the shadow government infrastructure now that it has come out from under the cover of darkness in the post-9/11 era. Jane Meyer of the New Yorker speaks of their relationship in the following interview from which I excerpt a piece from here:

How did David Addington get to know Vice-President Cheney, and how long have they worked together?

They met on Capitol Hill in the mid-eighties, when Cheney was a Republican congressman from Wyoming and Addington was a young staff lawyer working for the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees. So they have worked together for about two decades. Their partnership was cemented when they worked together on the Minority Report on the Iran-Contra affair. Both Addington and Cheney took the idiosyncratic position that it was Congress, not President Reagan, that was in the wrong. This view reflected the opinion, held by both men, that the executive branch should run foreign policy, to a great extent unimpeded by Congress. It's a recurring theme-pushing the limits of executive power and sidestepping Congress-in their partnership. One example is their position that the President, as Commander-in-Chief in times of war, had the inherent authority to ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Congress passed in an effort to make sure that Presidents don't violate citizens' right to privacy by spying on them without warrants.

After meeting and working together in Congress, Cheney and Addington continued their partnership at the Pentagon, where, during the Presidency of George H. W. Bush, Cheney was Secretary of Defense and Addington was his special assistant and, later, general counsel. There, Addington was known as a powerhouse, a stickler who controlled access to Cheney and marked up others' memos in red felt-tipped pen, returning the memos for rewrites that would make them sharper-and more protective of executive power.

At the Pentagon, the two exhibited a similar pessimism about world affairs, in particular about the possibility that Mikhail Gorbachev represented true change, and also an unusually deep interest in "continuity of government" planning-how the government survives in the event of a doomsday attack. Addington kept the constitutional provisions for Presidential succession in his pocket at all times, a colleague told me.

Addington is still largely a mystery man but his connections to Continuity of Government during the Reagan era are documented as well as his ties to Cheney. Another common denominator is the Iran-Contra affair, Addington was a big player in it as well as most of the current crop of neocons who returned to power under Bush II. Addington also is connected to spook master and former CIA head William 'Bill' Casey (a man whose history and past associations is a veritable almanac of American fascism dating from WWII through the Reagan years and who played a key role in the theft of the PROMIS software) through The Lawless Group (named for CIA operative Richard Lawless, a close associate of Casey). Sidney Blumenthal's article for Salon entitled The Sad decline of Michael Mukasey provides some additional background on Mr. Addington:

Addington's dominion over the law -- controlling the writing of the president's executive orders and the memos from OLC, the office of the White House counsel and the carefully placed network of general counsels throughout the federal government's departments and agencies -- is a well-established and central aspect of Cheney's power. Addington has been indispensable to the vice president since he served as his counsel on the joint congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal, when Cheney was the ranking minority member. In that capacity, Addington wrote, under Cheney's signature, the notorious minority report that was an early clarion call for the imperial presidency.

Addington and Cheney's report decried Congress for its "hysteria" over the Iran-Contra scandal, which involved the selling of missiles to Iran to finance arms for the Nicaraguan Contras against explicit congressional legislation. The Constitution, they argued, "leaves little, if any doubt that the president was expected to have the primary role of conducting the foreign policy of the United States." They added: "Congressional actions to limit the president in this area therefore should be reviewed with a considerable degree of skepticism. If they interfere with the core presidential foreign policy functions, they should be struck down."

The Cheney minority report was the doctrinal basis for the Bush presidency: the unitary executive, the commander in chief ruling in wartime by fiat and, ultimately, torture being defined as whatever the president, not the Geneva Conventions, said it was. Addington's authorship of the Cheney Iran-Contra report was largely overlooked until fairly recently, but his deeper connection to that scandal and its resonance have received little attention.

In the 1980s, Addington, then in his 20s, served as deputy counsel to CIA director William Casey, the moving force behind the Iran-Contra affair and the most powerful figure in the Reagan administration after the president. Along with other hotshots in the counsel's office, Addington was part of what became known within the agency as the "Lawless Group," named after Richard Lawless, a CIA operative who was a close assistant to Casey, according to a former senior CIA official. After Casey's death, Rep. Dick Cheney co-opted the "Lawless Group," putting its members in key positions when he was secretary of defense during the first Bush administration and vice president in the second. (Lawless, for example, after working as Jeb Bush's business partner, served as deputy undersecretary of defense, retiring this past April.)

"A lot of the decisions on Iran-Contra were signed off by the counsel's office," a longtime senior CIA official told me. "It was not a renegade operation. It had lawyers, just like now. Everything they were doing was run by the general counsel's office and Addington was deputy. You may draw your own conclusions, as the Russians say." In fact, the role of the counsel's office surfaced in the trial of Alan Fiers, the CIA agent in charge of the Central American Task Force, who pleaded guilty to misleading Congress. But that role was never investigated or ever really reported.

"These guys don't like the mainstream CIA. In fact, they hate it," the CIA official explained. "They don't like information unless it fits what they want to hear. They hate the CIA because the CIA tells them what they don't want to hear. They want assessments that prove ideological points. They are looking for simplistic answers to complicated issues. They inhabit a make-believe world of moving up into perceived areas of expertise. It's the same guys; they all resurface when Republicans are back in power. It's the same group. It's a system. The similarities are amazing in all these wars we've been dragged into."

That 9/11 enabled Cheney, Addington and the rest of the neocons to brutally enforce their long planned agenda and has served as the basis for all that has changed since that day there remains a truly legitimate question as to what their role or knowledge of those attacks may have been. It has been a matter of intense debate in the alternative media as to what level of involvement that this cabal may have had in ensuring that the attacks took place (stay away from the Bush Did It canard which is only a straw man), they did after all write in a document for the Project For A New American Century (PNAC) entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses of the need for a "New Pearl Harbor" in order for the public to accept their radical doctrine and there never has been a legitimate investigation of 9/11 free of conflicts of interest and with full subpoena power so as to ask the serious questions in a public forum about the event that hit the reset button on over two and a quarter centuries of American history and the subsequent implementation of a fascist infrastructure.

In a fairly recent article that I wrote entitled 9/11: Cover for a Coup d'Etat?, I mused as to whether the 'terrorist' attacks merely provided cover for an Edward Luttwak style coup d'etat to be piggybacked on top of the incidents using the Continuity of Government infrastructure. The massive USAPATRIOT Act was already awaiting a rollout and there is the still lingering question of who was really behind the Anthrax attacks that were directed at those who were in positions to stop its implementation. 9/11 would be consistent with historical black operations and false flag attacks and the festering disregard for American democracy by those who assumed control in the aftermath is widely known but I am not going to revisit that in this particular writing other than to ask the obvious question of Cui Bono? Whether 9/11 was indeed a coup by an alliance between the shadow government along with rogue elements of foreign intelligence services is of less importance than the consistent pattern of below the surface influence and interactions of non-elected government officials and foreign and domestic criminal elements. Author and researcher Professor Peter Dale Scott refers to a "Deep State" and I would refer readers of this article to one of his entitled 9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics in which Professor Scott provides an in depth look into not only the deep state but asks serious questions about whether Continuity of Government was implemented in the aftermath of 9/11. I excerpt the following from this piece:

In my book The Road to 9/11, I have argued that there has existed, at least since World War Two if not earlier, an analogous American deep state, also combining intelligence officials with elements from the drug-trafficking underworld. I also pointed to recent decades of collaboration between the U.S. deep state and al-Qaeda, a terrorist underworld whose drug-trafficking activities have been played down in the 9/11 Commission Report and the mainstream U.S. media.

The book referenced by Professor Scott is The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the Future of America and it is an essential read for those seeking to understand America as it exists today.

Pictures of the Homeland

That the United States of America has nearly completed the tragic transition to a fascist form of government becomes more apparent with each passing day and each additional outrage and the cancer has so thoroughly metastasized there is little hope that a new regime in Washington is going to be able to bring it to a halt. Whether it be the hijacking of the financial system by the Wall Street banking cartel that is abetted by yet another capitulation by a quisling Congress, more evidence of the desecration of privacy rights by a surveillance industrial complex run amok, the alarming and ongoing militarizing of the nation's police, the assignment of combat hardened troops to domestic duty (with a mandate to quell civil unrest despite the now for all intents and purposes rendered irrelevant Posse Comitatus Act) or the constantly morphing and open ended definition of what exactly constitutes being a 'terrorist' to name only a few of the more alarming changes to the republic, those who are able to recognize such things as what they truly are should be increasingly aware that the dreaded and ubiquitous pejorative of conspiracy theorist is (as it always has been) one gigantic sick joke. The pushback against President Obama for announcing the planned closure of the Gitmo torture gulag by the neocon embeds in the media has been significant.

As the saying goes, if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water it will react by jumping out immediately, but if you put that same frog into a pot of lukewarm water and then very slowly increase the temperature of the burner on the stove upon which it sits, that frog will stay in the pot until it becomes soup. My fellow Americans, that frog is us and the parallel reality that is so essential for the transformation of a state from one of benevolent democracy to one of totalitarianism as set forth by Hannah Arendt, is in the final stages of being swapped out. The apple pie authoritarianism becomes more entrenched, political discourse has been reduced to nothing more than demagoguery, lies (either outright or more commonly, through omission) clever and highly sophisticated propaganda, race-baiting, fear-mongering and all delivered through a corrupted and complicit corporate media machine and the celebrity shills that it employs as barkers in the carnival of immorality and perversion that is the shell of American now known as the Homeland.

In the run-up to the election, millions of little plastic pieces of vile filth (that hew to the established storylines formerly established as an example in one Julius Streicher's publication Der Sturmer) in the form of a DVD version of a deceitful and meticulously designed and professionally produced (in order to evoke a proper emotional response from certain credulous or otherwise mentally unstable fringe elements) propaganda film Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West and sponsored by a well-funded, shadowy front group were mass distributed (28 million) in many of the nation's newspapers and specifically in swing states in advance of the coming election. The obvious intent was to generate fear and hatred and to manufacture consent as well as swing the election to McCain. It worked to perfection as Muslim children were gassed in the nursery of a Dayton, Ohio mosque just after the Obsession DVD was distributed locally. Of course in the land of Orwellian newspeak it wasn't ruled an act of domestic terrorism. For that matter, neither was Kristallnacht in a certain European closing society that eerily parallels what has been going on in the post 9/11 'Homeland' although it is far more subtle for the original prototype was far too ostentatious to endure for very long.

The Republican presidential campaign of John McCain (once again reverting to true form in his opposition to the stimulus) and the shrill, strident kewpie doll Sarah Palin used political rallies to whip up fear and loathing among the worst fringe elements of society, inciting largely angry and easily duped supporters into shouting "terrorist", "off with his head" and even "kill him" in reference to Obama who has been the victim of a long-running, highly coordinated, well financed campaign to paint him as a Manchurian Candidate, a secret Muslim, a terrorist collaborator and a wolf in sheep's clothing. This sort of sentiment continues to be encouraged by extremist fifth columnists and will only fester more as the economy deteriorates and scapegoats are manufactured. Multi-millionaire fascist demagogue Rush Limbaugh (a modern day Father Charles Coughlin) has become a defacto spokesman for the GOP and will continue to foment hatred amidst those most susceptible. The more paranoid elements are already being whipped into a frenzy over Obama's second swearing in (the first was botched by Federalist Society stooge Chief Justice John Roberts) in that he didn't place his hand on a bible, and of course the dirty little rumors that Obama was not born in the U.S. continue to be circulated.

Such vitriolic rallies became veritable lynch mobs and have merely gone underground now that the people have spoken. In a time of an unprecedented domestic economic crisis that already has Americans on the edge are extremely dangerous and will inevitably lead to violence – of course this may be the intent as it is consistent with more traditional versions of fascism. In his study The Authoritarians, Bob Altemeyer identified a certain demographic segment of any society that are hard-wired for serving authoritarians, susceptible to demagogy and subservient to perceived authority figures. This particular part of a population is essential to supporting totalitarian figures who rise to power during troubled times and offer simple answers to complex problems, they are essential components of any fascist regime and their near psychotic fervor can be channeled to the point where they are nothing more than automatons or tools to the dangerous leaders of mass movements. Such behavior was on full display at many Sarah Palin rallies and it wouldn't take much to turn such gatherings into staging grounds for organized pogroms that could then be unleashed when the time is right.

It certainly brings to mind George Orwell's 1984, but then these are truly the times which Orwell so brilliantly prophesied, Oceania has always been at war and always will be at war, for that is what we are and all that we shall ever be in the land of the shadow government. No fascist system can for long exist without a certain die-hard percentage of the population who can be mobilized as shock troops, don't ask questions and are full of resentment and hatred, only seeking a strong leader on a white horse with simple answers to complex problems and who will point them in the direction of those who can be easily scapegoated. History always repeats but it never repeats exactly. Yesteryear's Juden are today's liberals.

"The preparations for Hate Week were in full swing, and the staffs of all the Ministries were working overtime. Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxworks, displays, film shows, telescreen programmes all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked..".

-George Orwell

The ramming through of the Wall Street bailout (TARP), the financial equivalent of the USA Patriot Act in that it placed unaccountable power in a Treasury Department that has become an occupied colony of Goldman Sachs despite a huge public outcry is another indication of just how much power has been transferred into the executive branch. The usual rubber-stamping by a corrupt and (very likely threatened and blackmailed) Congress was a foregone conclusion in the land of sham elections and an increasingly tyrannical government. The passage of this monstrosity was allegedly aided by a threat of martial law, this according to Representative Brad Sherman of California. Former President George W. Bush took to the television airwaves to once again sow fear over an economic Armageddon and also what could be perceived as an implied threat of martial law in the language "America could slip into a financial panic and a distressing scenario would unfold." One could speculate that the "distressing scenario" which Bush mentioned could activate conditions as set forth in NSPD-51 in order to deal with domestic unrest due to bank holidays, food shortages and any sort of uprising as a result of the financial collapse. Main Core would be utilized to produce the lists of those among the millions already deemed to be suspect and prone to 'subversive' behavior, the 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team already in place stateside would be required to 'maintain the necessary order' (augmented by Blackwater and other private mercenaries of course) and the roundups and internments would begin. It was an eerie déjà vu moment in which America was transported back to 2002 and 2003 with the apocalyptic conjecture of smoking guns as mushroom clouds, phantom weapons of mass destruction, sleeper cells, biological weapon spewing gliders that could transverse the ocean and an evil dictator who was a "new Hitler".

Some Historical Context

The United States has had a history of influential groups and individuals that have a serious fascist bent. Some of the most powerful bankers and industrialists of the Great Depression era did plot a coup d'etat (The Business Plot) in order to topple the hated Franklin D. Roosevelt, but were thwarted when the man who they attempted to recruit to lead it, former Marine Corps General Smedley D. Butler instead exposed them to Congress. So shocking was this that the media of that era closed ranks to protect the traitors and erase the ugly blight from our sanitized version of history. It was no secret that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (once featured in a fawning puff piece in Fortune Magazine) and even Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had ardent American admirers and influential supporters who were enthralled with their highly efficient, corporate friendly authoritarian states and their ability to propagandize the masses and crush labor unions.

A trusted servant of robber barons and financial oligarchs named Prescott Bush, a man whose lineage would include two future U.S. Presidents actually engaged in doing business with the Nazis until the Union Banking Corporation was shut down by FDR under the Trading With the Enemy Act. The OSS and later the CIA actively recruited Nazis and assimilated Hitler's Eastern European intelligence arm, The Gehlen Organization ostensibly to fight communism. Many top Nazi scientists and intelligence operatives including many who were full blown war criminals were allowed entry into the U.S. under Operation Paperclip after the WW II had ended, they were then assimilated into what would become the military industrial complex as rocket scientists, psychiatrists and medical 'experts' (whose labs were the Nazi concentration camps where gruesome medical experiments were performed on human prisoners, I note that similar amnesty was given to Japanese war criminals who participated in the infamous Unit 731) whose wartime experience with mind control and torture techniques would be of use to the CIA. Some former Nazis were allowed to migrate to Central and South America where they established expatriate communities and joined forces with U.S. sponsored fascists to crush leftist democratic movements in the most brutal of manner all under the cover of defeating communism. Former Nazis played key roles in the carrying out of the wet work of the American empire in Latin America, notably Argentina and their influence would set the precedent for the unimaginable cruelty and repression that would later be used in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Pinochet's Chile as well as much later in Iraq.

Klaus Barbie aka the Butcher of Lyons was one of the more notable names and is a perfect example of an asset being used to further American interests in the southern cone, Barbie was a key part of the 'Cocaine Coup'. The corrupting influence that was asserted on intelligence, the military and deep state movers and shakers by such a close affiliation with Nazi war criminals and the inevitable damage done in terms of moral authority is as difficult to fathom as it is extremely disturbing but that is a story for another time. So as not to overly dwell on the Nazi connection (the amount of material on it is voluminous) I do want to comment that it shows the depths to which the National Security State will go in order to ensure its own perpetuation and ability to lay down with wolves so that the real power structure in this country is allowed to function with ruthless, Machiavellian precision in the darkness that exists just below the façade of legitimate public and private institutions in the United States.

The Cold War gave the intelligence apparatus and the military industrial complex the cover that was needed in order to build the infrastructure of an extra-Constitutional government. Almost from the very inception of the CIA the United States became involved in the assassinations and overthrow of legitimate democratically supported governments all undertaken for big business and to crush resistance to western capitalism. The obvious Nazi influence manifested itself in the extreme cruelty of the methods used to expand the empire and death squads were sanctioned, torture was widespread to the extent that it was even taught at the far-right School of the Americas and the agency participated in sadistic and immoral mind control experimentation programs such as the notorious MKULTRA. It is of the utmost importance to understand the root of evil that is the Central Intelligence Agency that was put together by the American capitalist elite in the aftermath of World War II to act as a Gestapo for Wall Street and business interests not confined to the spheres of legality. I would like to make reference to a that summarizes this much better than I could ever hope to do in a well documented story How the CIA Created a Ruling, Corporate Overclass in America that is a must read for everyone who really is serious about going at the existing order.

The cover of darkness allows for the breeding of mutations and the CIA itself eventually was able to reconfigure into compartmentalized factions, some of the more militant joined forces with organized crime, extreme right-wing groups, and elements of the military and foreign intelligence services to carry out clandestine and black ops domestically. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy for all of the research, investigations and time elapsed has never truly been solved and it is highly likely that a Secret Team (to use the term of L. Fletcher Prouty) may have been involved in the assassination, a moment in our history after which everything changed. Kennedy dared to challenge the power structure when he spoke of:

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3

 
Ed Encho is a free lance writer, activist and consultant who resides in West Central Florida and author of the upcoming "A Monolithic and Ruthless Conspiracy". 

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

[Eyes Wide Open]

US Spying: Main Core, PROMIS, and the Shadow Government (Pt. 3)


By Ed Encho (about the author)     Page 1 of 5 page(s)

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For OpEdNews: Ed Encho - Writer


Photo by Steve Rhodes

I: WATCH LISTS, BLACK LISTS, ENEMIES LISTS.....HIT LISTS?

With the long overdue departure of the Bush administration from the White House it is the hope many that the myriad of transgressions against the Constitution and the people of America will begin to seep out into the public domain. It took a remarkably short time. The day after the helicopter hauled ole George away like so much rubbish a major story broke. In an astonishing shot across the bow directed at the shadow government the first significant whistleblower has already come out with a story (once again ignored by the corporate media) and delivered a devastating blow to the premise that the massive illegal domestic spying programs of the Bush administration were undertaken in order to protect America from terrorism in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001.


Former NSA analyst Russell Tice during two recent interviews on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann (pt 1, pt 2)confirmed that the Bush-Cheney-Rove phony war on terror was as people like myself have always strongly suspected in actuality a war on America itself. According to the patriotic Mr. Tice the targets of the domestic spying included news organizations and journalists and that the surveillance for specific targets was not limited to professional matters alone, they were spied on 24/7.

"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications," he said. "Faxes, phone calls and their computer communications. ... They monitored all communications."

Tice said the NSA analyzed metadata to determine which communication would be collected. Offering a hypothetical example, he said if the agency determined that terrorists communicate in brief, two-minute phone calls, the NSA might program its systems to record all such calls, invading the privacy of anyone prone to telephonic succinctness.

Tice was involved in only a small part of the project, that involved trying to "harpoon fish from an airplane."

He said he was told to monitor certain groups in order to eliminate them as suspects for more intense targeting. Those groups, he said, were U.S. journalists and news agencies. But rather than excluding the news organizations from monitoring, he discovered that the NSA was collecting the organizations' communications 24 hours a day year round.

"It made no sense," he said.

Tice did not identify the reporters or organizations allegedly targeted.

Olbermann asked if this means there's a file somewhere containing every e-mail and phone conversation these reporters ever had with sources, editors and family members.

"If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything, yes." Tice answered.

(Excerpted from Wired's Kim Zetter's blog)


The Tice interviews followed another former insider speaking out on the gross illegality of the Bush administration programs, a former DOJ employee named Thomas Tamm was featured in a Newsweek magazine cover story by Michael Isikoff entitled The Fed Who Blew the Whistle from which I excerpt the following:

In the spring of 2004, Tamm had just finished a yearlong stint at a Justice Department unit handling wiretaps of suspected terrorists and spies—a unit so sensitive that employees are required to put their hands through a biometric scanner to check their fingerprints upon entering. While there, Tamm stumbled upon the existence of a highly classified National Security Agency program that seemed to be eavesdropping on U.S. citizens. The unit had special rules that appeared to be hiding the NSA activities from a panel of federal judges who are required to approve such surveillance. When Tamm started asking questions, his supervisors told him to drop the subject. He says one volunteered that "the program" (as it was commonly called within the office) was "probably illegal."

The name of the program was Stellar Wind and please pay particular attention to this next excerpted piece from Isikoff's story:

Next Page

[Eyes Wide Open]

Main Core, PROMIS and the Shadow Government (Pt. 4a)

Diary Entry by Ed Encho

 

In the first three installments of this series I examined the existence of the massive surveillance state database MAIN CORE and how similar tools of oppression are destroying American civil liberties. I also took a look at the criminality of many members of the Bush administration (especially Dick Cheney) and their crusade against The Constitution as well as Cheney's involvement in Continuity of Government programs. I wrote of the targeting of journalists by the rogue cabal operating out of Cheney's office (which is even more relevant with the news of CIA death squads) to crush dissent. In this installment I want to draw a bigger picture of how a network of Wall Street oligarchs, rogue intelligence operatives, organized crime figures and the mysterious alliances that have led to the hostile takeover of the United States. This is the story of what 'suicided' investigative journalist Danny Casolaro called "The Octopus" and it's ascendance to the highest levels of power.

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For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

- President John F. Kennedy

Secrecy is the slayer of liberty, it is the essence of which dictatorships are made, of which free societies are suffocated by and of which people are subjugated by. When that secrecy becomes institutionalized in the most powerful corridors of government then it is only a matter of time until that government becomes a weapon of the powerful to be used against the people. Today, in mid-2009 we here in the United States of America (or at least those of us who are awake) are bearing witness to the last vestiges of a once vibrant democracy slowly strangled to death by a deeply embedded culture of secrecy. There has been a hijacking of the intentions of the founders who envisioned a free people by a corrupt and immoral oligarchy and those who serve it. It is backed by the rise of a high-tech police state built on on our backs and enforced by Big Brother style surveillance, incessant propaganda and the vicious undercurrent of social manipulation in order to sow the seeds of hatred necessary for divisiveness and ignorance that are protection for the gangster state. Our last great leader, President John F. Kennedy once warned of the danger of secrecy in a 1961 speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association:

    The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.

Contrast those words with the acts of the government today, and of the government and of its agents (both official and clandestine) since Kennedy's public brutal murder in Dealey Plaza which served as a crystal clear message to all that if he could be executed publicly in such a manner that nobody was safe. In the subsequent administrations following that of JFK's, the power of the state was slowly, incrementally increased so as to not alarm a somnolent citizenry. The rise of the authoritarian fascists who now are at the very pinnacle of their meticulously planned police state did not occur either quickly or without warning, it has been a well thought out, intricately constructed plan that has succeeded largely due to the immersion of official business in a cloud of secrecy.

The early days were largely the work of a small cabal, a few rogue networks run by the real owners of America to implement a system that would serve their interests alone and to brutally put down challenges. They would count on the ability of the media and the lies to anesthetize the public at large, amuse them, distract them with emotional appeals, ball games, contests and triviality to provide distractions and to remove the necessary civic involvement for democracy to exist. Today, as we stumble about in a fog amidst the wreckage of the Bush years, the trap is almost closed, facilitated by that holiest of holies that is 9/11, jusfification for everything.
Our newly minted Emperor Barack Obama has continued the repressive policies of the post 9/11 fascist state. Our bondage is now sold to us by a charismatic pitchman with the gleaming smile instead of a sneer, the iron fist is covered by a velvet glove. Obama is the bookend to JFK, the flipside of the coin, most of the dirty work has already been done and he will close the deal now that the hostile takeover has been completed. He will now carry out the policies of war, oppression, debt slavery and be a guardian of the oligarchy. Change has indeed come to America, we are now a lawless, modern feudal state ruled by corporations, banks, arms manufacturers, extortionists, gangsters and corrupted politicians who are protected by paramiltary police forces and a media that no longer even pretends to tell the truth.

This is the story of the Octopus...
 


I: Cabazon

I am going to begin this installment where I left off with part three , the story of the strange dealings and murders at the Cabazon Indian Reservation in the California desert. Emmy award winning investigative reporter Nathan Baca of KESQ, a Palm Springs television station has just come out with his latest installment in the excellent series The Octopus Murders. The series developed out of a Riverside County Sheriff's Department cold case squad investigation into the 1981 execution style murders of three people in a Rancho Mirage home and the swirling dark dealings that have been associated with those murders. Cabazon Indian tribe Vice Chairman Fred Alvarez had grown suspicious of shadowy government operatives and arms dealers using the reservation as a testing and development ground from which to profit through the supply of weapons to third world regimes, the type of countries in which the U.S. funded vicious thugs, death squads, assassinations, black ops and in which the American intelligence services such as the CIA played a hand in training the torturers and killers. The recent Honduran coup and the revelations that some of the leaders received training at Fort Benning's notoriously vile School of the Americas puts this sort of destabilization (which was especially in vogue during the era of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush) back into the headlines albeit several layers below the ongoing Michael Jackson saturation coverage.

Fred Alvarez was going to blow the whistle on how Cabazon sovereign land was being used for nefarious purposes by national security state operatives and the contracting outfits (CIA fronts?) Wackenhut Corporation and Meridian Arms Company. When interests of this nature are threatened there is a long history of the 'meddlers' ending up dead (typically suicides, accidents or 'heart attacks') but the chances of Alvarez blowing up this particular operation which would prove to be huge and multi-faceted, a veritable nexus of clandestine activity during the Reagan years had to be halted with extreme prejudice. So on July 1, 1981 Alvarez along with two friends were professionally executed. The names of the other victims were Patty Castro and Ralph Boger, just collateral damage to the ice cold killers, professionals when it came to protecting the interests of those they were hired by. But sometimes things like this come back to haunt, Mr. Boger's daughter, Rachel Begley has tirelessly investigated the murder of her father (her website is Desertfae and she also maintains The Octopus Wiki) and the cold case investigation had worked it's way through the system to the California Department of Justice where it is now effectively stalled. These murders are the key to a dangerous Pandora's box that if opened would implicate numerous top political figures, expose the way that the deep state really operates and offer a true glimpse behind the star spangled façade of false morality that America exists behind. It would also show that the PROMIS software, the legendary, highly advanced program that has been integral in the formation of the police state infrastructure was modified for espionage and profit on Cabazon Indian land. To say that this is the story of the century is not mere hyperbole, the trail of dead bodies over the years can attest to that and it is time that it be told.

 


Joseph Daniel Casolaro 1947-1991

 

II: Danny Casolaro and the Octopus

How much violence was there in Nazi Germany...before the old Germany, the center of theatre, opera, philosophy, poetry, psychology and medicine was destroyed? How many incidents took place that were not coincidental before it was called Fascism? What were the transitions? How many people? Was it when the first tailor disappeared? Or librarian? Or professor? Or when the first press was closed or the first song eliminated? Or when the first political science teacher was killed coming home on his bike? How many incidents happened that were perfectly normal until people woke up and said, 'Hey, we're in a police state!'

-Mae Brussell

According to the book The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro by Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith casolaro had identified a core group of individuals operating within the national security apparatus and their influence in post WW II political history:

    Danny Casolaro believed the Octopus responsible for criminal conspiracies, which, linked, formed a virtual history of intelligence double dealing from 1950 to the present. These events, in Casolaro's view, included the ousters of US President Richard Nixon, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, the Shah of Iran, and the murders of Chilean President Allende, and of course, of President John F. Kennedy. Casolaro saw the Octopus' tentacles entwined throughout the creation of the Golden Triangle and the Latin American drug trade, the Cuban Bay of Pigs debacle, the October Surprise, the BCCI banking scandal, and, almost as an afterthought, the theft of PROMIS software.

    Casolaro found a "Secret Team", a high cabal of players operating a clandestine, parallel government, identified previously by other writers [Col. L. Fletcher Prouty]. The cabal had operated beyond the control or scrutiny of elected government, financed by drug-running from Southeast Asia and the Americas.

    Other researchers tended to see the Octopus as a fog of political crimes ascribed to the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies, institutions or even the modern terrorist state and its citizenry. Casolaro's Octopus, however, was no grand, unified mega-conspiracy theory. Casolaro believed the crimes could best be identified by linking them to a small network of named individuals that made up his Octopus. He outlined their hierarchy and provided specific detail about their behind-the-scenes role in contemporary political history.

    Casolaro named people both familiar and unfamiliar to other researchers. He deemed the "first level" operatives to be Richard Helms, George Pender, John Philip Nichols and Ray Cline. The second level included Robert Chasen, E. Howard Hunt, Edwin Wilson, Thomas Clines and Ted Shackley. Working backward from the PROMIS theft, Casolaro saw them in a new relationship, a nearly organic entity that impacted both past and then current events.

When it comes to the mysterious deaths related to this story, free lance investigative journalist Danny Casolaro, who was 'suicided' in a Martinsburg, West Virginia hotel room in August 1991 is the most notable for he was getting close to the truth. His body was found by a maid in the bathtub in a grisly blood-spattered bathroom, his wrists had been deeply slashed numerous times. In what is a discernable pattern, many of those who threaten the hidden power are found in hotel rooms, allegedly the victims of suicides even though as in Casolaro's case the victim did not appear to friends, family and associates as being despondent or otherwise suicidal. In his case it was quite the opposite, Casolaro had been devoted to an investigation into a covert network of spooks, criminals and government officials that he had called 'The Octopus.' He had been working on a book and according to sources, had gone to West Virginia in pursuit of a final piece of evidence that would break the case. His files, which he carried everywhere, were missing when his body was discovered. Adding to the suspicious circumstances, the room where he was found was professionally cleaned preventing further investigation and the body was illegally embalmed before the family could claim his remains.

Casolaro had been putting together connections involving some of the most critical and dangerous elements of the deep state and he was threatening powerful interests. He had traced an 'dirty old boy' network of the OSS/CIA that had gotten together for profit in the aftermath of WW II. That critical period for the U.S. presented an unprecedented opportunity for some to profit from the military industrial complex (which has never been dismantled despite the ominous warnings from President Eisenhower in his farewell address) and the wave of anti-communist paranoia that would be used in order to justify the most extreme and immoral conduct by elements connected to the U.S. Government.

 
It is well documented that the CIA assimilated former Nazi war criminals into the ranks ostensibly to be used in the fight against the red menace but many of the scientists ended up participating in the darkest forms of research involving mind control techniques and the evolution of the American space/defense sector where they worked on weaponry. Rescued Nazis were also sent to South America where they would assist in supporting right-wing regimes to against the rise of popular movements that could threaten western business interests. In addition to the merger with some of the most foul remnants of Hitler's Reich such as the Gehlen Org, the bogeyman of an international communist conspiracy also gave rise to networks of money laundering, drug trafficking and arms dealings that would make the business of the warfare state into a very lucrative trade. Corrupt insiders were able to play both ends against the middle and had no qualms about cutting deals with some of the most unsavory and violent types.
But I am getting ahead of myself so I digress...

Danny Casolaro had been able to find a common denominator, a thread that ran through some of the most prevalent schemes and scandals of the time. Iran-Contra, Reagan's secret wars in Latin America, BCCI, The October Surprise, the INSLAW case and PROMIS and was set to visit Indio California and the Cabazon reservation. He was onto something and it was big enough to put the fear into some very serious people. Not only was he investigating ties between global arms dealers and government operatives tied to Iran-Contra (one of the greatest scandals of the 20th century in both audacity and magnitude one which is still not completely understood) but the very ascension of Reagan to the presidency (along with the true power that was George H.W. Bush) which was facilitated when a deal was cut to prolong the Iran hostage crisis until after Jimmy Carter was defeated. This is high treason of course, something that the Bushes and their ilk are intimately familiar with but the manipulation of the 1980 election could be viewed as a bloodless coup in that it brought the deep state and the shadow government into the White House itself. Now another person of interest involved in the Iran hostages deal includes a figure named Earl Brian, an intimate of Reagan who was in on the Paris sessions to delay hostage release for political benefit. For a payment he was allegedly allowed to profit from the sale of the stolen version of INSLAW's PROMIS software.

Brian's Hadron Inc, in which he was allied with longtime Reagan crony Edwin Meese would be instrumental in the misappropriation, modification and subsequent sale of PROMIS to foreign governments. The entire sordid business of what was done is a proverbial snakepit without a bottom and it taps into many elements of the vast criminality that had infected the system. There is a very good reason for the trail of dead bodies (including Casolaro), wrecked careers, ginned up charges leading to imprisonment and disinformation that has orbited the PROMIS scandal.
 
The foreign governments included Israel (a country with a long running  symbiotic relationship with the National Security State) which now has a massive intelligence and telecommunications infrastructure in place in the United States and it's all legitimate. I am not going to get into this right now but for the sake of reference please see the following pieces by Gordon Thomas on PROMIS and the Mossad, Christopher Ketcham (whose article The Last Roundup was instumental in breaking the news on the Main Core database) on the ongoing programs of Israeli espionage - Trojan Horse and Breaking the Taboo on Israel's Spying Efforts in the United States) as well as the following from James Bamford (author of The Shadow Factory) - a Democracy Now interview and the Haaretz article on Bamford Is Israel's booming high-tech industry a branch of the Mossad?. It is no secret that Israel plays a major part in the PROMIS saga and that will be covered in the next part of this series in more depth.

Again, PROMIS plays an integral part in the subversion of the system itself in order to allow the relatively few with juice who are connected to profit obscenely due to its at the time highly advanced technological capabilities to implement it as a tool of control in order to engage in monitoring and spying on potential threats. In part one of this series I mentioned that according to a Wired Magazine piece entitled The INSLAW Octopus that none other than rogue Colonel Oliver North was using the PROMIS software to support his extra constitutional programs like REX 84:

    Lt. Col. Oliver North also may have been using the program. According to several intelligence community sources, PROMIS was in use at a 6,100-square-foot command center built on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. According to both a contractor who helped design the center and information disclosed during the Iran-Contra hearings, Oliver North had a similar, but smaller, White House operations room that was connected by computer link to the DOJ's command center.

    Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States as part of a domestic emergency preparedness program, commissioned under Reagan's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to sources and published reports. Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crude. This operation was so sensitive that when Rep. Jack Brooks asked North about it during the Iran-Contra hearings, the hearing was immediately suspended pending an executive (secret) conference. When the hearings were reconvened, the issue of North's FEMA dealings was dropped.

Casolaro had been concentrating on the INSLAW case around the time of his demise. He had been receiving information from insiders within the intelligence community that would bring to light the use of PROMIS by the government. One source was a civilian employee of the NSA named Alan Standorf whose body was found in the back seat of his car in an airport parking lot, it was set up to look like he was the victim of a robbery. Sources say that he may have been providing Casolaro with proof that the NSA was using PROMIS but as with so many others who crossed paths with The Octopus he became collateral damage.

As to who 'suicided' Danny Casolaro and most importantly why, there may never be an answer. Casolaro had his fingers in too many pies and the nexus of evil that he was untangling was just too huge for the investigation to have ended any way but badly for him.
 


III: Common Threads

When researching the shadow government or Deep State it is amazing how so many of the same names keep popping up. One of those names belongs to Robert Booth Nichols, a longtime player who was recently back in the news. Mr. Nichols, who died under strange circumstances back in February was involved with the current financial crisis through Sam Israel, one of the thousands of Bernie Madoffs that have been using intricately structured financial instruments, shady hedge funds and offshore banking to destabilize America from within as though it were just another banana republic. The opaque, above the law, rigged games that have brought the country to the brink of ruination for the benefit of a corrupt oligarchy have working blueprints in CIA/shadow government fronts of the past such as BCCI and the Nugan Hand Bank and there is no reliable way of knowing just how much of the finance, insurance and real estate (F.I.R.E.) economy is derived from such shady organizations.

 
I would strongly suspect that the amount of money laundering, involvement with organized crime, narcotics and weapons dealing that is being currently conducted is stunning. Only the recent high profile cases like that of Alan Stanford who has been tied to such dirty activities as well as Madoff and Israel get the attention but they are the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Without digressing too much I just want to point out that much of the post WW II intelligence apparatus including the cowboys who were at the heart of the original Octopus were directly tied to the Eastern establishment, Skull and Bones types from which the OSS/CIA was comprised of. This being said, it is only natural that such grand scale financial chicanery and speculation has come to dominate both the U.S. economy as well as the government itself which is so thoroughly intertwined with the pirates that the schemes of the Wall Street high rollers are preserved at the expense of the millions of lesser beings whose lives are being destroyed by the ongoing greed and the subsidizing of such by a system gone cancerous.

Now back to Robert Booth Nichols who prior to his death was involved in a complex financial scheme with Samuel Israel and Bayou Investments involving a fee of $10 million to be paid to Nichols for services rendered for assistance in the locating of a mysterious $250 billion U.S. treasury note that is secured by 2,500 metric tons of gold that sits in the Atlanta Federal Reserve. Israel, who after being convicted for large scale financial fraud faked his own suicide, allegedly jumping off of a bridge and leaving on the hood of his SUV traced in dust the words "Suicide is Painless" never was able to obtain the T-Note (which was sitting in a London Safe Deposit Company and has been seized) subsequently sued Nichols for get this, cheating him. Now here is the kicker, according to papers filed by Nichols the transaction was conducted under the premise of "matters of national interest" and according to a Bloomberg story (Bayou's Israel Was Cheated in Scam Investigator Says) was vouched for by a member of the Bush family, John P. Ellis whose previous claim to fame was calling the rigged 2000 election for George W. Bush while working for FOX News. When doing an objective review of the myriad scandals and dirty deeds in America over the past 50 or so years it is astounding just how many times that a member of the Bush crime family is involved but more on them later.

Now what is of greater interest pertaining to Nichols is that he was deeply involved in the Cabazon Reservation activities as well as tied in to Danny Casolaro's doomed investigation of The Octopus. Nichols had contributed much to Casolaro and he had previously worked as a partner of political prisoner Michael Riconosciuto on projects on weapons development at the Cabazon Indian Reservation and the ongoing activities there through the company Meridian Arms.

Riconosciuto was the technical wizard who performed the alteration of the PROMIS software on the reservation to include the "back door" feature that would go on to figure so prominently in the espionage activities that it was later used for - political and financial. With the activities at the reservation including weapons development, training of paramilitaries and money laundering it was a veritable spook nest and the use of sovereign Indian lands for unauthorized purposes is something that needs to be seriously investigated. Author Joel Bainerman, in his book The Crimes of a President referred to the reservation as a "CIA cutout", with the revelations in Baca's KESQ series that three other local Indian tribes were also being investigated in the Alvarez murders and the weapons testing activities at the Cabazon reservation the question is to what extent has this sort of piggybacking of black ops on sovereign land existed throughout the and for how long.

With Nichols being a connected guy he would be a hugely important source for Casolaro, or was he a disinformation agent? According to sources, Nichols and Casolaro spoke often and at length in the month before Casolaro's demise. Nichols, it must be noted also allegedly had organized crime ties to the Gambino crime family as well as to the Japanese Yakuza. It has already been established that the CIA and Shadow Government had regularly worked with organized crime figures (see Operation Underworld) including those who had been burned by Castro's takeover of Cuba. Again, the war against communism, Cuba in this case provided blanket justification for lawlessness, nefarious alliances and the deviation from accepted American ideals.With Nazi war criminals already on board with the CIA, ties with The Syndicate were consistent with the pattern. In this context, the question must be asked regarding Robert Booth Nichols and whether he was sanctioned as a contact with the organized crime elements on behalf of the establishment. It should be recognized that the mob played a part in forging the political careers of many an influential U.S. figures, Ronald Reagan and Richard M. Nixon to name a few. and, it would be naïve to not believe that many of our elected representatives are not just as much in the pockets of organized crime as they are with other interests that threaten the system as a whole. (I would recommend this piece as food for thought as it references a current influential politican who has been a party to much of the overt criminality of the past several years, primarily as an accomplice).

The presence of Robert Booth Nichols in the milieu surrounding Casolaro's research as well as with Bayou Investments and the $250 billion treasury note is just another example of the interconnectivity between the underworld and the overworld. The financial aspects of this cannot be downplayed in the wake of the global meltdown that is largely due to the shadow banking system comprised of offshore banks largely exempt from U.S. laws, money laundering, pools of black money, narcotics/weapons dealing profits and speculative finance that have been a permanent fixture of the oligarchy's financial matrix. Any legitimate investigation of power in the U.S. must include an analysis of intricate financial institutions, layered in Enron style subversion and patterned after CIA/Wall Street front companies expressly created for the purpose of funding off the books operations.
 

 

IV: Tentacles of the Octopus

"We will know that we have succeeded when everything the public believes is false."

- William J. Casey


It must be understood that there has always been a powerful segment of this country that has been enamored with fascism as the perfect sort of government that would support the long-term evolution of capitalism itself. Fortune Magazine once featured a fawning cover story extolling the virtues of Benito Mussolini's corporatist/fascist state in pre-WW II Italy and even Hitler had ardent admirers in America. It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that the precursors to today's Wall Street ruling elite were perfectly willing to do business with the Nazi regime as long as it was in their short term financial interests to do so. Let me be emphatic that this is NOT an attack on capitalism itself but rather on those who are able to use the system to advance their interests and agendas and to destroy any and all impediments and obstacles. I would like to opine that the system is fatally flawed and like communism, contains the seeds of its own demise, what is going on right now is a testament to that
In order for the bastardized form of capitalism that exists today (largely through the machinations of those that I am addressing in this section) to continue to evolve it mush become much more authoritarian in nature, the early forms of fascism are too ostentatious for the more sophisticated era in which we now live so we need to look more to China as the current role model. For profit prisons, all encompassing surveillance, a militarized police state, compromised courts and above all the possibility of disappearance into a gulag system with no trial and the nearly codified indefinite detention along with torture must be a tool for which to exercise control over the dissenters and the rabble.

The conditions for the creation of the Octopus, or as Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty would refer to it, a Secret Team were set into motion with Harry S. Truman's much maligned creation of the National Security State with the signing into law of the National Security Act of 1947. This set into up the post WW II world and allowed for the use of the intelligence services to be used to perpetuate their wartime stance into a permanent fixture of U.S. policy. The act also created the CIA although its original mandate would be expanded to include the anti-democratic functions that it has since become known for. In creating the CIA, the successor of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) there would be no end to the warfare state, only a redirection into clandestine and covert activities that would include destabilization of governments deemed 'unfriendly' to U.S. interests, propaganda, sabotage, training and support of paramilitary forces and above all snooping.
 
Being that the OSS largely grew out of the Eastern Establishment and the Skull and Bones types (from which it drew recruits) it would naturally serve the interests of Wall Street finance oligarchs, corporations, industrialists, oil barons and other moguls.It would also due to the very nature of secrecy under which it existed be a fertile ground for rogue elements, private CIA's within the CIA so to speak.
I do want to state that the CIA is far from the only U.S. intelligence agency, there are many and too often they are lumped in with the CIA as it is the most prominent. There are at least sixteen separate intelligence agencies and those are only the ones that we know about and there is often collaboration with foreign intelligence to circumvent laws and ensure plausible deniability. The CIA though is unique in that it was created to serve as an enforcement arm for the Wall Street elite and the money power, its primary obligation is not to the United States itself but that element that exists in the shadows. I recommend reading: How the CIA Created a Ruling, Corporate Overclass in America for some very good examples.
 
 
Former Nazi CIA Asset Reinhard Gehlen


The Wall Street cultivated OSSwas established in 1942 by the hated Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man whom the financial elite once tried to overthrow(see the Business Plot) to consolidate intelligence during the war. William 'Wild Bill' Donovan, a powerful member of the Eastern Establishment and a Wall Street lawyer would head it up. Other OSS luminaries with elite pedigrees would include Allen Dulles (of firm Sullivan and Cromwell, another Wall Street business that didn't shy away from doing business with the Nazis) who would go on to play an integral role in the CIA as it developed. Dulles would be a key force in Operation Paperclip, the assimilation of Third Reich refugee war criminals into the CIA and sciences where their Nazi experience could be drawn upon to serve what would one day become The Homeland. Dulles, who would later become head of the CIA was unceremoniously forced out after the botched Bay of Pigs invasion by John F. Kennedy who was sufficiently aware of the dirty deeds of America's unofficial terrorist organization would threaten to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds". The accompanying blowback took care of Kennedy and in what should go down as one of the greatest conflicts of interest in American history Allan Dulles would go on to become a member of the Warren Commission 'investigating' the assassination and coming up with the crazed lone gunman conclusion.

It also should be recognized that the fight against Fidel Castro for his takeover and subsequent nationalization of Cuba's resources as well as property 'owned' by U.S. interests including that of organized crime figures who operated casinos out of Havana represented opportunity. With the common interests of both the mob and U.S. oligarchs threatened it would provide a good excuse for the for the CIA and mob to join forces against Castro. The precedent for alliances with organized crime had already been set during the war and the CIA would welcome with open arms such notorious mobsters as Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, Charles 'Lucky' Luciano and Meyer Lansky brokered by veteran operative Robert Maheu who would later go on to work for Howard Hughes in Las Vegas. The joint venture against Castro would allow the mob to get the proverbial camel's nose under the tent with certain elements of the government and very likely would lead back to domestic black operations associated with the JFK assassination.
Now let me make it clear that I personally have an attitude of ambivalence towards mob and organized crime in general, it's just another line of work as far as I am concerned. So with that out of the way what I do have a problem with are government bureaucrats, U.S. military and intelligence and elected officials crossing the line into where they become gangsters themselves by working with organized crime. This is a very important aspect in what has gone seriously wrong in America post WW II in that the lines were not only blurred but the shadow government and the mob (as well as international organized crime syndicates) actively joined forces, knowingly and willingly for an agenda that ran counter to long term American interests and the CIA was responsible for allowing this to happen.

But I digress....

The OSS was also a breeding ground for virulent right-wingers, military men and dyed in the wool fascists with axes to grind against the communist devils. One of these men was General Edward Lansdale, a serious reactionary who was involved in anti-Castro plotting and allegedly, according to some, notably L. Fletcher Prouty was in Dallas on the day of the Kennedy assassination (as were others including Richard M. Nixon and George H.W. Bush but more on that in the next section) where he was allegedly seen in the vicinity of the 'three tramps'. Other prominent spooks from the OSS would include future CIA chiefs William Colby (also of the Phoenix Program) and William Casey whose tenure under Reagan would occur during the Iran-Contra period and intersect with the PROMIS software ordeal.

General Lansdale, as legend has it, was involved with gold taken from vanquished WW II enemies (see Yamashita's Gold) and using it to provide funding for black operations. The illegal narcotics trade would also prove to be a useful source in providing operational money for secret wars and off the books operations. Lansdale's work against the Castro regime would bring him into contact with Theodore Shackley aka The Blond Ghost out of the Miami JMWAVE headquarters [note that George Bush's Zapata Corporation also allegedly had ties to this operation, likely a CIA front]. Ted Shackley would go on to turn up in an astounding number of scandals and shadow government operations over the years. Shackley was identified by Danny Casolaro as a part of the dirty old boy network that would become The Octopus so keep that in mind. When the work against Cuba was no longer a top priority with the Vietnam War ratcheting up,
 
 
Ted Shackley aka The Blond Ghost
 
Shackley was sent to Southeast Asia where he was involved along with other anti-Castro operatives namely Felix Rodriguez, Thomas Clines and Edwin Wilson (among others) in CIA operations such as the Phoenix Program (note also that the aforementioned Earl Brian who was a benefactor of the illegal sales of PROMIS was associated with this fearsome assassination and torture venture as well), the Secret Team was now up and running in another war zone where their skills could be fully utilized. I also want to note that regarding the anti-Castro operation from which so many of these rogue operators sprang also produced the infamous E. Howard Hunt, a veteran spook who at least according to a deathbed 'confession' recording had inside knowledge of the Kennedy assassination (this from a Rolling Stone article The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt). Interestingly enough, Hunt would go on to be one of the Watergate burglars who Nixon feared was going to spill his guts about that "Bay of Pigs thing". Hunt's wife Dorothy would be killed in a suspicious plane crash which is described in Carl Oglesby's book The Yankee and Cowboy War in chapter seven which is transcribed here. Hunt, like Shackley was suspected by Casolaro to be a member of The Octopus.

Once in Vietnam, the Shackley operation would draw in the next generation of shadow government figures including Richard Secord, Richard Armitage and Oliver North who would all turn up later during the ongoing operations of "The Enterprise" during Iran-Contra. North and Secord specifically would play key roles, augmented by key neocons within the bureaucracy such as Elliott Abrams, John Negroponte, Michael Ledeen, John Poindexter and most importantly Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush. The Vietnam group that had coalesced around Shackley would also be involved in the Nugan Hand Bank, a conduit for dirty money (drugs, guns) that would be redirected to fund the secret off the books spook wars under the ideological cover of the battle against communist influence. The Nugan Hand Bank operated until 1980 when Frank Nugan, an Australian lawyer with more shady connections than the proverbial switchboard and under investigation for stock fraud was found dead in his Mercedes-Benz, the victim of what appeared to be a self inflicted gunshot wound, his wallet contained the business card of William Colby in his wallet. The other half of Nugan Hand was former Green Beret Michael Jon Hand whose special operations experience allegedly included a good amount of work in the Golden Triangle with the heroin trade. Hand disappeared and was never seen again after Nugan's death.

The Nugan Hand bank with its extremely high rates of return, tax-free accounts and promises of anonymity was a model that would eventually be replicated and in today's convoluted morass of offshore banking and fraudulent high finance there are likely thousands of smaller operations, of note is the recent scandal involving high rolling Texan investment guru Alan Stanford and his suspected involvement in money laundering for Mexican drug cartels. The system has become thoroughly polluted, corrupted and rigged in order to benefit the Wall Street oligarchy that was so instrumental in originally setting up the CIA. With the blueprint for such grand scale financial chicanery that was originally a big part of black ops monetary alchemy available and the entire system eventually honeycombed with the sort of illicit, amoral types that were all too willing to grab onto the teats of the anti-communist cash cow. With the Vietnam experience an ugly and tragic blight on the American consciousness, Nixon run out of Washington in disgrace and the ruling corporate establishment hydra reconfiguring itself out of the ashes there would be a haven for The Octopus and its operatives within the shining palace of American renewal that would be erected as a temple for the soon to be annoited savior and heroic all-American warrior king Ronald Reagan and Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush - the man who would claim be "out of the loop" during the Iran-Contra operations .
 
To Be Continued...

 

Ed Encho is a free lance writer, activist and consultant who resides in West Central Florida and author of the upcoming "A Monolithic and Ruthless Conspiracy". 

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

[Eyes Wide Open]

 

Part 30: 1981 Triple Murder Tied to McGowan Murders-Suicide?
Updated: July 16, 2008 11:06 PM
The Riverside County Sheriff's Department is looking into possible connections between a triple murder in 1981 and murder-suicide in 2005 that claimed six lives. In a story you'll only see on News Channel 3, we have internal documents from the Cold Case Division of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department showing the depth of the investigation.
More >>
Part 31: Secret Government Program Linked To Local Murders?
The Riverside County Sheriff's Department is looking into possible connections between a triple murder in 1981, and murders-suicide in 2005 that claimed 6 lives.
More >>
Part 32: Chilling E-Mail Details 'Dangerous' Triple Murder Case
Updated: Aug 20, 2008 06:13 PM
The Riverside County Sheriff's department is looking into possible connections between a triple murder in 1981 and murder-suicide in 2005 that claimed six lives. A chilling email written by a detective shows just how dangerous this case was.
More >>
Part 33: Local Indian Tribe Investigated in 'The Octopus' Murders
Updated: Sep 11, 2008 05:34 PM
Three people were executed in 1981 at a Rancho Mirage home off Bob Hope Drive. There are few clues and no arrests.
More >>
PART 34: Cold Case Murder Squad Investigating Three Local Indian Tribes
Updated: Oct 10, 2008 07:16 PM
The three tribes under investigation are the Cabazons, the Santa Rosa, and the Torres Martinez. News Channel 3 has learned three local indian tribes are under investigation for possible involvement in a 1981 Rancho Mirage triple murder.
More >>
PART 35: State Justice Department Stalls Murder Case Arrests
Updated: July 3, 2009 05:04 PM
Riverside County Sheriff's Department has suspects in 1981 Rancho Mirage triple murder case. California D.O.J. takes over case because of local conflict of interest, but stalls on arrests.
More >>
ONLY ON 3: The Money Behind the "Octopus Murders"
Updated: July 2, 2009 03:17 PM
ONLY ON 3 - There are new developments in a Rancho Mirage cold case murder investigation. We are following the money, finding out what secret these murder victims died for.
More >>
Only On 3: "Octopus Murder" Suspect Caught On Hidden Camera
Updated: Sep 29, 2009 01:07 AM
ONLY ON 3 - Jimmy Hughes arrested at Miami airport for 1981 Rancho Mirage triple murder. Hughes caught on hidden camera talking about the crime.
More >>
District Attorney Related To Triple Murder Suspect
Updated: Sep 29, 2009 07:22 PM
RIVERSIDE - State Attorney General's Office will prosecute murder suspect Jimmy Hughes for 1981 Rancho Mirage Murder because D.A. Rod Pacheco is his cousin.
More >>

[Eyes Wide Open]

KESQ- "Octopus Murders:" Co-Conspirators Named

[Eyes Wide Open]

KESQ-"Octopus Murders:" District Attorney Related To Murder Suspect

[Eyes Wide Open]

 



Jimmy Hughes Arrested on Murder Charges: 1981 Triple Homicide

Picture taken 09/26/09

October 2, 2009

Self-described Mafia hit-man James “Jimmy” Hughes, 52, was arrested on September 26 as he boarded a plane at Miami-Dade International Airport heading for Honduras.  The fugitive warrant lists three counts of murder and conspiracy to commit a crime for the 1981 execution-style murder of Cabazon Tribal Council Vice-Chairman Fred Alvarez, his friend Ralph Boger, and Patricia Castro in Rancho Mirage, California.

Detective John Powers at the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department in California, Central Homicide Unit – Cold Case Division, was assigned  to investigate the 28-year-old triple homicide case about 2 years ago when Rachel Begley, the daughter of victim Ralph Boger, convinced the sheriff’s department to re-open the case.

Both Powers and Begley were aware of what they were stepping into when they launched their investigations.  Today, their respective findings resemble the stuff of spy novels, comprised of all the dynamics of clandestine government agents and organized crime figures involved in murder, money laundering and covert arms deals while exploiting Indian sovereignty (independent of most U.S. laws) at the Cabazon reservation.

 

Rachel Begley and Det. John Powers:  3-2-09

Jimmy Hughes had been security director of the Cabazon tribe’s casino and bingo operations for four years, until 1984 when he fled the U.S. and hid out in Guatamala, then joined FGBMFI (Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International) in 1987 and subsequently founded Jimmy Hughes Ministries – Free the Oppressed in Honduras.

At the FGBMFI website:  Hughes declares he was a Mafia hit-man before he found God.  An excerpt reads as follows:  “ --- "After a six-year hitch in the military, I became a professional hit man for the Mafia. I collected money, hurt a lot of people and saw a lot of blood. I know what it’s like to cut the throat of a man, see a man die, or throw a man in the trunk of a car and take him to his death. I did many horrible things. I allowed myself to do whatever was necessary.

"One day I had a contract on a man. They had paid me a lot of money to kill this person. I travelled over many states, and walked into the man’s house one day, pulled out my pistol, and put a bullet in everybody’s head.“There were many people there that day because he was having a party. As I stood there with the gun in my hand, I suddenly realized that all those people were dead. They had died instantly. I had been paid to kill one man, but had killed half a dozen people. The rest had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time  ---“

Rachel Begley, whose father is named in the arrest warrant for Hughes, set out years ago to identify and bring to justice the killer(s) of her father.  Her logo at the bottom of her signature on e-mails reads: "Let Justice Be Done, Though The Heavens May Fall"  ~Fiat justitia, ruat coelum.~

About a year ago, she confronted Jimmy Hughes at a FGBMFI church meeting and introduced herself as the daughter of Ralph Boger.  She wanted Hughes to say he was sorry for the murder of her father, Fred Alvarez and Patti Castro, but he did not.

Hughes didn’t want to talk about his past.  Nevertheless he confided, “Your parents got killed in a Mafia hit.  That’s life.  That’s what happened.”

Hughes added:  “ --- I don’t care about my past.  My past is my past.  It’s none of your business.  It’s nobody’s business.  I don’t care who died.  I don’t care who got killed.  I was trained in the military.  I killed people all over the world, right or wrong, because the government ordered me to.  Your dad and I were friends.  He touched somebody --- they gave an order and that’s what happened to him.  It’s a lot bigger than the murder of this guy or the murder of that guy.  It’s big --- you’re talking political people ---”

Hughes was unaware that Rachel had her camcorder turned on and everything he said was recorded.  The recording can be viewed at this website: 

Reporter Nathan Baca at KESQ-TV, News Channel 3, won an Emmy for his 35-part series entitled “The Octopus Murders.”  See Rachel Begley’s Blog for details (scroll down):    From the podium at the San Diego Hilton as he accepted his Emmy Award, Nathan Baca announced: (Excerpted) “I do this in memory of murder victims Ralph Boger, Fred Alvarez and Patti Castro.  I hope and pray that justice, a justice that has been delayed for far too many years, will soon be had by the families of these victims.  Thank you.”

The series of KESQ-TV stories can be found at: 

KESQ Videos on The Octopus Murders:   

Meanwhile, Detective John Powers, with the full support and backing of the Riverside Sheriff, relentlessly followed the cold-case trail from 1981 to the present, examining thousands of old documents across the state, resurrecting  police reports from forgotten archives (which were not computerized 28 years ago), and interviewing dozens of hostile witnesses who feared to come forward in 1981. 

Ultimately, Powers formed a secret investigative alliance with Begley, a computer whiz, and their work came to fruition last week when Detective Powers was notified by authorities in Miami, Florida that Jimmy Hughes was in the U.S. and preparing to depart for Honduras.

Media reports to date have been confused or misleading about the details of the arrest.  This is how it went down:  Detective Powers flew to Miami and subsequently met authorities at the airport.  He went to the gate where the passengers were boarding the plane and quickly scanned the crowd for Jimmy Hughes.   He was the only person who could pick Hughes out of the crowd, so the other officers awaited his signal.

When Powers motioned to the other officers that Hughes was not in the crowd, two Customs Officers boarded the plane and located Hughes’ assigned seat.  They found Hughes on the plane with his wife and after identifying him by his passport, took him into custody.

Two uniformed Customs Officers escorted Hughes off the plane in handcuffs. When they came down the ramp, Det. Powers confirmed they had the right man.

Three agencies assisted Detective Powers with the arrest.  US Customs and Border Protection were the primary agency making the arrest.  They processed Hughes in their facility at the airport and then turned custody over to Miami-Dade County Police Department - Airport District.  The police department took custody of Hughes on the warrant and booked him into the County Jail located at 1321 N.W. 12th Street in Miami.  An officer with Department of Homeland Security / I.C.E was also present and provided some assistance.

Although Det. Powers was there, he was not the arresting officer because he did not have jurisdiction in Miami.  His purpose for being there was to make sure Hughes did not slip through their fingers and make it out of the country.  Det. Powers was the only person who could identify Hughes on site and he provided photographs of Hughes to the other officers.  Det. Powers also wanted to attempt an interview with Hughes once he was arrested but Hughes invoked his Miranda rights and refused an interview.  Det. Powers also was hopeful that Hughes would waive extradition so he could bring him back to California, but Hughes chose to fight extradition.

One of the arresting officers who assisted Detective Powers and wrote the report was CBP (Customs Border Patrol) Officer Dale Munson.  One of the two Miami-Dade Police Officers who assisted was Detective Richard Wilkinson.   Both were uniformed officers assigned to the Airport District.  Details of the arrest can be obtained through any of the above agencies.  Chief of Customs is Elbin Rodriguez.   

Det. Powers is currently in the process of getting the Governor's Warrant to have Jimmy Hughes brought back to California.  He filed a Felony Complaint for Extradition in Indio Court on October 1, case number INF-066719.   

The California state attorney general will prosecute the case because the Riverside County district attorney, Rod Pacheco, is a second cousin of the defendant.  Pacheco also worked in the Riverside District Attorney’s office in 1984 when Jimmy Hughes fled to Guatamala.

NOTE:  For in-depth BACKGROUND details on the history of the triple homicide and Cabazon investigations see:  “Octopus Cold Case File” dated June 23, 2009   

Rachel Begley can be contacted at:

                                                            -END-