General – Page 143 – Letter Never Sent

General — Comments Off
28
Jul 02

‘SECRETS: THE CIA’S WAR AT HOME’

1984
CIA organized the Unauthorized Disclosures Analysis Center (UDAC) to monitor the news media and to stop leaks. Commanded by Dell Bragan, UDAC was staffed by full-time intelligence officers. CIA officers around the nation were tasked to by UDAC to keep track of reporters who obtained news stories through leaks. Mark Mansfield said UDAC was the coordinating center to combat disclosures. In addition to UDAC, CIA had an even more secretive unit that investigates leaks, performs damage assessments, and investigates journalists. Located in the Office of Security and called the Special Security Office, the unit reports to UDAC. Journalists were analyzed by how many unauthorized disclosures they printed a year — columnist Jack Anderson, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and Bill Gertz were often at the top of the list. pp. 178-180.

1984-90
VP Bush chaired a cabinet-level Task Force on Combating Terrorism. He used terrorism as justification for domestic spying against groups lobbying Congress to ban Contra funding. This when statistics showed domestic terrorist incidents declining rapidly. But the 34-page “Public Report of the Vice President’s Task Force on Combating Terrorism of 1986 ,” urged Intel agencies involve themselves in “conventional human and technical intelligence capabilities that penetrate terrorist groups and their support systems.” This when the FBI said domestic terrorism was virtually nonexistent. Following directions, FBI conducted 8,450 domestic terrorism investigations in 86, even though they reported only 17 actual terrorist incidents that year. The FBI was conducting political spying under the terrorism label. pp. 147-151.

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28
Jul 02

Beating an FBI polygraph

Found at Cryptome.org, some useful tips and countermeasures to foil the FBI polygraph. It’s easier than you might think. Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

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27
Jul 02

No recording in the Gulag: Eroding Basic Freedoms

From NPR.org:

Jason Beaubien reports that many states have cut back on the media’s access to correctional facilities — barring cameras and tape recorders, or restricting interviews with inmates. But some critics and legal experts argue that the media plays an important role in protecting against prison corruption and abuse. (4:30)

“There are well-established conditions for granting press interviews with prison inmates, such as the safety of staff and other inmates.” writes jjgiddes. “Now, state correctional facilities in the US are starting to place further restrictions on media access: prohibiting recording equipment other than pens and paper; denying interview requests outside of normal visiting hours. and demanding that they result in ‘a significant benefit to law enforcement agencies’; and setting additional conditions on which inmates can be interviewed, and when.

“In my mind, many of these restrictions count as fairly clear cases of prior restraint: not-so-rhetorical questions about prison abuses or the wrongly convicted rear their ugly heads. As mentioned in the report, the Society of Professional Journalists notes that nine states have restricted media access to prisons, up from five a year ago. All in all, it seems as if it’s been a very bad year for the Freedom of Information Act and the Eighth Amendment. What’s the point of even having a free press if it’s going to die a death by a thousand cuts?”

Listen

Politics — Comments Off
27
Jul 02

And the rich get richer, while the rest pay taxes…

Surprise. Crafty tax lawyers for the extremely wealthy have found further loopholes to keep the elite from paying their fair share. Read it and weep for yourself. Of course, that shitbird in the Whitehouse goes making the long face for estate tax abolition and huge tax cuts for the wealthy. From the NyTimes:

Through a technique invented by a lawyer in New York and a chemical engineer in California, each dollar spent on this insurance can typically eliminate $9 in taxes. Spend $10 million on this insurance, avoid $90 million or more in income, gift, generation-skipping and estate taxes.

“I’m not saying this is the best thing since sliced bread, but it’s really good for pushing wealth forward tax free,” said Jonathan G. Blattmachr, the New York lawyer who heads the estate tax department at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy and who explained the plan in a half-dozen interviews.

The technique is legal, blessed by the I.R.S. in 1996. But some leading estate tax lawyers, as well as some accountants and insurance agents, say it shouldn’t be. They say it effectively disguises a gift to one’s heirs that should be taxed like any other gift involving millions in wealth. They also say it is but one example of how a tax exemption on life insurance that was approved by Congress in 1913 to help widows and orphans has been stretched to benefit the very richest Americans.

Several thousand of these jumbo policies have been sold, according to agents who sell them, all under confidentiality agreements with the buyers and their advisors. One member of the Rockefeller family took out a policy, according to people who have seen documents in the deal.

Politics — Comments Off
27
Jul 02

Compassionate Conservative Union Buster

Okay. So, 170,000 government employees were moved into this new ‘Homeland Security Department’. As far as I can tell the only thing new to this is a stupid Orwellian name and the fact that Bush effectively succeeded in stripping 170,000 people and an entire department of its union rights and protections. Bravo, you waterhead.

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27
Jul 02

Cheney should be dope slapped

A courier was threatened with arrest by SS (Secret Service) thugs for trying to serve Vice President Dick Cheney with a lawsuit accusing him of defrauding investors while at the helm of oil giant Halliburton. Cheney should be pilloried in the public square while wearing a tricornered hat. Do we even have public squares anymore? Ok, forget it. From Yahoo News:

Judicial Watch said its process server went the White House on July 22 to deliver the lawsuit to the vice president, who was chief executive of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. But the group said the courier was turned away by the Secret Service and allegedly threatened with arrest.

“We have served many a lawsuit on Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton when they were in the White House … Never before have our process servers been threatened with arrest,” said Larry Klayman, who serves as chairman and general counsel of the 8-year-old legal foundation that has filed a number of highly publicized lawsuits against government officials.

I’m surprised Judicial Watch has been this dogged. I admire their stance as it puts millions of dollars in Republican donations in jeopardy.

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27
Jul 02

Is bin Laden dead? Does it matter?

‘Unnamed sources’ and ‘senior U.S. intelligence officials’ are now saying Osama bin Laden is dead. Does this matter? Why are they saying this now? What’s important is what our own tax-paid terrorists want you to think. Speculating whether or not bin Laden is dead only serves craven propaganda purposes. For one, declaring bin Laden must be dead because basically ‘we haven’t seen him’ diminishes his power to those that support him and his goal of disrupting US hegemony and global domination through sabotage. It also serves as a goad to provoke bin Laden or Al Quaeda to make a statement or to appear to dispel the rumors of his demise. The fact is, the US government doesn’t know shit. They like to appear as if they do, but as long as the money keeps rolling in and they can continue with their charades it doesn’t really matter to them. Hell, even if they knew for a fact that he was dead I’m pretty sure they would keep that information to themselves as long as it serves their purposes. As long as Americans can personify the ‘enemy’ and ‘evil’ they can be more easily manipulated. The same thing happened in the Gulf War with Hussein. Who was Saddam to 99% of Americans before 1991? Nothing. It wasn’t until we needed a strawman that we built him up into the big bad wolf, the Arab Hitler with his big, bushy moustache. Of course, no one thinks its significant that he was a big bud of the CIA and the US for decades. I’m just tired of the bullshit. People have such short memories.

General — Comments Off
27
Jul 02

New World Order

US Fomenting Coup Against Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah? US must keep their vassals in line by hook or crook.
U.S. Prepares to Expand Cuban Prison No habeas corpus. Extra-constitutional. No due process. Torture?
Spain welcomes proposal to turn British base into NATO facility Someone tell me what the purpose of NATO is?
Building puppet proxy army for the new American colony Afghanistan

Military and defense — Comments Off
27
Jul 02

Post-war murder syndrome?

In Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, there have been 2 murders and 2 murder/suicides by soldiers of the US Special Forces within the past six weeks. Each case involved the murder of a military wife at the hands of her husband. Can this be what happens when you spend years molding men into cold-blooded killing machines, human weapons? Once you pass the point of justifying the taking of human life for purposes of war doesn’t that make it easier to justify it further? The Army wants to make sure we understand that this is an anomaly. Any bloodthirst is, of course, channeled cleanly toward enemies of the United States.

the old stuff