October Surprise 2016 : The New Face(s) of The Enemy

The New Face(s) of The Enemy : Tarpley Reveals Prospective Ruling Class Manchurian Candidates for 2016 

from Spike EP on Vimeo.

Wall Street's Manchurian Candidates Then and Now and the Franklin Cover-Up

Jimmy Carter / Reubin Askew, 1976;

Barack Obama / Deval Patrick, 2008

Ben Sasse / Tom Cotton, 2016 ?

Or Mia Love...?

"Beware Outsider Non-Politicians with Elitist Resumes"

http://tarpley.net/wall-street-manchurian-candidates-beware-outsider-non-politicians-with-elitist-resumes/

That's What He Said

Barack Obama Sounds Just Like Deval Patrick.

Is That Good Or Bad?

By Adam Reilly and Boston Phoenix  

1-17-8

More than any other presidential candidate, Barack Obama owes his success to sheer rhetorical power. Obama's dazzling keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention made the thenIllinois state senator an instant presidential prospect. His breakthrough speech at Iowa's Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in November 2007 led to his caucus win earlier this month. Even conservatives dig his shtick: Republican media operative Mark McKinnon praised him as a "walking, talking hope machine."

 

Here in Massachusetts, though, Obama's oratory can also trigger déjà vu. His compelling message sounds a lot like the one that Deval Patrick who's known Obama for years, and who, like Obama, is a client of Democratic media consultant David Axelrod used during his successful 2006 gubernatorial campaign. (Axelrod also worked for Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards in 2004, the same year he helped Obama win election to the US Senate.) As David Kravitz, an editor of the liberal blog Blue Mass. Group, wrote after Iowa: "[T]here was always lots of similarity, but it's getting really dramatic."

 

This Patrick-Obama parallelism hasn't gone unnoticed in the press. In April 2007, after a New York Times Magazine profile of Axelrod mentioned it in passing, the Boston Globe examined it in greater depth two weeks later. And this past weekend after the Globe noted the two politicians' fondness for the phrase "Yes we can!" in a story on Patrick's decision to stump for Obama in South Carolina the Associated Press ran a bigger piece on the subject.

 

Overall, though, these stories have had an exculpatory gist. While the articles note that Patrick and Obama share broad themes hope, change, a faith in the power of words and the political grassroots they seem willing to attribute this commonality to shared life experiences (both are African-Americans who rose from humble circumstances to attend Harvard Law School) and shared political instincts and beliefs. As Axelrod told the AP: "It's not surprising that there would be a commonality of themes. They've been friends for so long. They talk a lot. . . . I'm sure they learned from each other."

 

 

Two Of A Kind

 

But did they overdo it? Remember: this is a presidential election in which authenticity (or the perception of authenticity) is playing a major role. Hillary Clinton's emotional moment pushed her to victory in New Hampshire, for example, while Mitt Romney's Manchurian Candidate persona is crippling his campaign.

 

To date, this dynamic has helped Obama. As Huffington Post blogger Steve Rosenbaum wrote this past year: "Simply put Obama's words feel like his own. Both convincing and colloquial. . . . His delivery is authentic."

 

Of course, no politician creates his or her message out of whole cloth. But the parallels between Patrick and Obama's messages are so close that they could end up limiting Obama's ability to play the authenticity card. Consider the following:

 

Both men depict themselves as change agents confronting stale establishments.

 

Patrick, speaking to National Public Radio (NPR) in December 2005: "The state is slipping behind, and I'm persuaded that the same old thing from the same insiders is not going to help."

·

Obama in a January 9 speech in Jersey City: "[D]o you want the same old folks out there doing the same old things? We need someone new."

 

Both say they're leading movements and minimize the hubris of this claim by crediting their supporters.

 

Patrick in his November 7, 2006, victory speech: "You are the ones who transformed this from a political campaign to a movement for change, and I am honored and awed by what you have done."

 

Obama speaking with reporters after his victory in the Iowa caucuses: "I think [Iowa voters] sparked a potential movement for change in the country that will be inspiring for a lot of people."

 

Both practice an existential brand of politics.

 

Patrick in an October 2006 speech on Boston Common, where he hammered Republican candidate Kerry Healey for a controversial ad linking Patrick to a convicted rapist: "Hers is a politics of fear. Ours is a politics of hope."

 

Obama in April 2007, responding to Republican Rudy Giuliani's suggestion that America will suffer another big terrorist attack if a Democrat wins in 2008: "Rudy Giuliani today has taken the politics of fear to a new low, and I believe Americans are ready to reject those kind of politics."

 

Both leaven their optimistic tone by emphasizing the need for hard work.

 

Patrick in a 2006 TV spot: "[M]y grandmother had a saying, 'Hope for the best and work for it.' That fundamentally is what I'm asking you to do now."

 

Obama in his official campaign kickoff speech in February 2007: "[I]t won't be easy . . . Let us begin this hard work together. Let us transform this nation."

 

Both appeal to conservatives by stressing that government isn't a panacea.

 

Patrick speaking to NPR in 2005: "There is a much more negative, much more hurtful vision of government that has been spreading. Not the vision that government can do everything for everyone nobody believes that but the vision that government is bad, rather than government is us."

 

Obama addressing the Democratic National Convention in 2004: "The people I meet in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks, they don't expect government to solve all their problems."

 

Both insist that disagreement shouldn't preclude cooperation.

 

Patrick addressing a church audience in Springfield in 2006: "In politics, we need to get past this point where the view is, 'Unless we agree on everything, we can't work together on anything.'"

 

Obama addressing supporters in Nashua, New Hampshire, prior to that state's primary, quoted by the St. Petersburg Times: "You don't have to agree on everything to agree on some things."

 

Both temper their tendencies toward political messianism with winning self-deprecation.

Patrick in an October 2006 candidates' debate: "I don't have all the answers. No candidate does."

 

Obama in a September 2005 message to readers of dailykos.com. "Let me end by saying I don't pretend to have all the answers to the challenges we face."

 

 

The Man Behind The Curtain

 

Maybe liberals and progressives should find these convergences reassuring. After all, Patrick used his message to win a competitive Democratic primary, and then a general election; he was the first Democrat elected governor in 16 years, and the first African-American governor in the state's history. Similarly, Obama is seeking to win a Democratic primary, to return the presidency to Democratic hands, and to break an even bigger racial barrier. If the same message works, why not use it?

 

For that matter, why worry about where it came from? Axelrod probably matters more than he admits. (Here's John Edwards after Iowa in 2004: "I came here a year ago with a belief that we could change this country, with a belief that the politics of what was possible the politics of hope could overcome the politics of cynicism. . . . [T]onight we started a movement to change this country that will sweep across America.") But that just means he might be the long-awaited Democratic answer to Karl Rove.

 

Still, there's that authenticity problem. Obama's message is undeniably powerful. But that power diminishes a bit when you realize it isn't his alone. Whether, after this realization becomes widespread, it will still pack enough political punch to get him to the White House is an open question.

Shell Game : The History of the Peak Oil Scam in Graphs

The price data graphed above are in nominal terms, meaning they are in "dollars-of-the-day" and have not been adjusted for inflation. 

1.OPEC begins to assert power; raises tax rate & posted prices 2.OPEC begins nationalization process; raises prices in response to falling US dollar. 

3.Negotiations for gradual transfer of ownership of western assets in OPEC countries 

4.Oil embargo begins (October 19-20, 1973) 

5.OPEC freezes posted prices; US begins mandatory oil allocation 

6.Oil embargo ends (March 18, 1974) 

7.Saudis increase tax rates and royalties 

8.US crude oil entitlements program begins 

9.OPEC announces 15% revenue increase effective October 1, 1975 

10.Official Saudi Light price held constant for 1976 

11.Iranian oil production hits a 27-year low 

12.OPEC decides on 14.5% price increase for 1979 

13.Iranian revolution; Shah deposed 

14.OPEC raises prices 14.5% on April 1, 1979 

15.US phased price decontrol begins 

16.OPEC raises prices 15% 

17.Iran takes hostages; President Carter halts imports from Iran; Iran cancels US contracts; Non-OPEC output hits 17.0 million b/d 

18.Saudis raise marker crude price from 19$/bbl to 26$/bbl 

19.US Windfall Profits Tax enacted 

20.Kuwait, Iran, and Libya production cuts drop OPEC oil production to 27 million b/d 

21.Saudi Light raised to $28/bbl 

22.Saudi Light raised to $34/bbl 

23.First major fighting in Iran–Iraq War 

24.President Reagan abolishes remaining price and allocation controls 

25.Spot prices dominate official OPEC prices 

26.US boycotts Libyan crude; OPEC plans 18 million b/d output 

27.Syria cuts off Iraqi pipeline 

28.Libya initiates discounts; Non-OPEC output reaches 20 million b/d; OPEC output drops to 15 million b/d 

29.OPEC cuts prices by $5/bbl and agrees to 17.5 million b/d output – January 1983 

30.Norway, United Kingdom, and Nigeria cut prices 

31.OPEC accord cuts Saudi Light price to $28/bbl 

32.OPEC output falls to 13.7 million b/d 

33.Saudis link to spot price and begin to raise output – June 1985 

34.OPEC output reaches 18 million b/d 

35.Wide use of netback pricing 

36.Wide use of fixed prices 

37.Wide use of formula pricing 

38.OPEC/Non-OPEC meeting failure 

39.OPEC production accord; Fulmar/Brent production outages in the North Sea 

40.Exxon's Valdez tanker spills 11 million gallons of crude oil 

41.OPEC raises production ceiling to 19.5 million b/d – June 1989 

42.Iraq invades Kuwait 

43.Operation Desert Storm begins; 17.3 million barrels of SPR crude oil sales is awarded 

44.Persian Gulf war ends 

45.Dissolution of Soviet Union; Last Kuwaiti oil fire is extinguished on November 6, 1991 

46.UN sanctions threatened against Libya 

47.Saudi Arabia agrees to support OPEC price increase 

48.OPEC production reaches 25.3 million b/d, the highest in over a decade 

49.Kuwait boosts production by 560,000 b/d in defiance of OPEC quota 

50.Nigerian oil workers' strike 

51.Extremely cold weather in the US and Europe 

52.U.S. launches cruise missile attacks into southern Iraq following an Iraqi-supported invasion of Kurdish safe haven areas in northern Iraq. 

53.Iraq begins exporting oil under United Nations Security Council Resolution 986. 

54.Prices rise as Iraq's refusal to allow United Nations weapons inspectors into "sensitive" sites raises tensions in the oil-rich Middle East. 

55.OPEC raises its production ceiling by 2.5 million barrels per day to 27.5 million barrels per day. This is the first increase in 4 years. 

56.World oil supply increases by 2.25 million barrels per day in 1997, the largest annual increase since 1988. 

57.Oil prices continue to plummet as increased production from Iraq coincides with no growth in Asian oil demand due to the Asian economic crisis and increases in world oil inventories following two unusually warm winters. 

58.OPEC pledges additional production cuts for the third time since March 1998. Total pledged cuts amount to about 4.3 million barrels per day. 

59.Oil prices triple between January 1999 and September 2000 due to strong world oil demand, OPEC oil production cutbacks, and other factors, including weather and low oil stock levels. 

60.President Clinton authorizes the release of 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) over 30 days to bolster oil supplies, particularly heating oil in the Northeast. 

61.Oil prices fall due to weak world demand (largely as a result of economic recession in the United States) and OPEC overproduction. 

62.Oil prices decline sharply following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, largely on increased fears of a sharper worldwide economic downturn (and therefore sharply lower oil demand). Prices then increase on oil production cuts by OPEC and non-OPEC at the beginning of 2002, plus unrest in the Middle East and the possibility of renewed conflict with Iraq. 

63.OPEC oil production cuts, unrest in Venezuela, and rising tension in the Middle East contribute to a significant increase in oil prices between January and June. 

64.A general strike in Venezuela, concern over a possible military conflict in Iraq, and cold winter weather all contribute to a sharp decline in U.S. oil inventories and cause oil prices to escalate further at the end of the year. 

65.Continued unrest in Venezuela and oil traders' anticipation of imminent military action in Iraq causes prices to rise in January and February, 2003. 

66.Military action commences in Iraq on March 19, 2003. Iraqi oil fields are not destroyed as had been feared. Prices fall. 

67.OPEC delegates agree to lower the cartel’s output ceiling by 1 million barrels per day, to 23.5 million barrels per day, effective April 2004. 

68.OPEC agrees to raise its crude oil production target by 500,000 barrels (2% of current OPEC production) by August 1—in an effort to moderate high crude oil prices. 

69.Hurricane Ivan causes lasting damage to the energy infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico and interrupts oil and natural gas supplies to the United States. U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham agrees to release 1.7 million barrels of oil in the form of a loan from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. 

70.Continuing oil supply disruptions in Iraq and Nigeria, as well as strong energy demand, raise prices during the first and second quarters of 2005. 

71.Hurricanes Cindy, Dennis, Katrina, and Rita disrupt oil supply in the Gulf of Mexico. 

72.In response to the hurricanes, the Department of Energy provides emergency loans of 9.8 million barrels and sold 11 million barrels of oil from the SPR. 

73.Militant attacks in Nigeria shut in more than 600,000 barrels per day of oil production beginning in February 2006. 

74.OPEC members agree to cut the organization’s crude oil output by 1.2 million barrels per day effective November 1, 2006. In December, the group agrees to cut output by a further 500,000 barrels per day effective February 2007. 

Original concept for the chart was by the Analysis Division in the Office of Management Operations; Strategic Petroleum Reserve. 

Modified and updated by the Office of Energy Markets and End Use in the Energy Information Administration.

More Memes of the 9/11 Myth

"The components of the mythological event have to be established in the psyche of the masses beforehand..." - Tarpley

By Barry Chamish :

October 7, 2001 - PRACTISING FOR THE WTC/PENTAGON BLASTS IN ISRAEL

      Operations as complicated and risky as the WTC/Pentagon attacks could not possibly have gone ahead without practise exercises. There are good reasons to suspect that Israel was chosen as the venue for at least two dry runs and that its government, under pressure, covered up both incidents. 

Consider two such exercises which preceded the Israeli events:

      Two years ago, an Egypt Air flight from New York crashed into the Atlantic when the co-pilot decided to commit suicide and take all passengers and crew down with him. Though the Egyptian government denied that any Muslim would ever commit suicide in this or any other fashion, the FAA insisted the black box recording proved that this was the case.

      The WTC/Pentagon bombers' Egyptian connection has been established. 

How the co-pilot was inducted into the terror syndicate and brainwashed to die in a plane crash on command has yet to be. Whatever the mind control techniques that were used on him, they were the products of Western technology.

      After the Egypt Air crash, the plotters knew that pilots could be brainwashed into turning their planes into potent bombs. But could the crew be overcome with just small knives?

      That was tested last Spring when a Russian passenger plane was hijacked to India. The hijackers were Chechnyan nationalists who overcame three stewardesses and stunned the passengers into inaction with the same type of knives used to the same effect in America. Lest there be any doubt that this was also a dry run, see who agrees that Chechnya was a training ground for the suspected terrorists of the WTC/Pentagon:

MOSCOW (AP) A senior aide to President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that some of the perpetrators of terror attacks on the United States had trained in the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

''At least four of the suicide perpetrators of the terror attacks on the United States passed through Chechnya,'' said Sergei Yastrzhembsky, an aide to Putin and Russia's chief spokesman on Chechnya.

''The people who sent suicide attackers against New York and Washington conducted dress rehearsals for terror attacks in Chechnya,'' Yastrzhembsky told a news conference, according to the Interfax news agency.

      A few months later, it was Israel's turn. 

A Jerusalem wedding hall, The Versailles, collapsed vertically killing 26 and wounding over 300. The 
venue had been under repair at the time and most of the workers at the site were Arab. 

One such laborer was interviewed by Israel television on the night of the disaster and blatantly lied about the type of work that was taking place in the building.

      One could easily dismiss the possibility that the Versailles was victimized by terror except for one fact: after examining the ruins for just a few days, the government refused to investigate any further. 

Despite the fact that this was Israel's worst building disaster ever and despite the pleas of the survivors and the families of the dead, the government could not be moved. 

Instead, it opened a general commission of inquiry into national building codes and practices. 

Within days of the building's collapse, the remains of the Versailles were hauled away in a blatant act of evidence destruction.

Surgical, not Structural Collapse

The (Eight Storeies Deep) Cookie-cutter Crater of WT6,

also known as the US Customs House Vault.

Simply put, 

Why wouldn't the government investigate the tragedy? 

Why was the blame put on a flooring system that never collapsed before? 

Why have no indictments come down four months after the atrocity? 

What is the government hiding and who ordered the coverup?

     The Versailles could have taught many lessons: how to drop a building straight down, how many casualties could be expected in such an operation, how to improve the percentage of dead, how quickly people could be evacuated, how rescue teams would react etc. The Israeli government's refusal to investigate the incident only fuels such, for now, speculation. 

However, if I was an American, I would be even more fearful of the significance of the next act of infamy.

     Just as Israelis were recovering from the shock of the Versailles, a third of their drinking water was poisoned. Over two million people in the Tel Aviv and central region of the country had water running through their pipes, heavily tainted with, they were told, ammonia. It took 150 million cubic meters of water, or three times the amount Israel supplies annually to Jordan, to flush out the poison.

     The public was told that agricultural waste seeped into a valve at a pumping station in the Jezreel Valley, and then flowed 80 km. undetected. 

As absurd as the explanation was, no one bothered to explain a far more frightening event.

      On the day the poisoned water entered the system, a security guard at a Water Authority station near Lod was murdered. The murder was written off as just another terrorism incident. Now why would terrorists climb over a chain link fence, risk barbed wire and entrapment in the middle of the country far from the safety of the Palestinian Authority, to murder an armed guard? Maybe they were thieves, risking life and limb to steal some water? Or maybe we should ask what the guard saw or what he stumbled into.

      This dry run was a valuable lesson. The perpetrators learned how to poison the most people possible, how many of them would be affected, how quickly the water authorities would detect the poison, how the public would be informed and how fast the system could be flushed clean.

      It might be a good idea for Americans to stock up on clean water.

end

The Georgetown Set

James and Cicely Angleton associated with a group of people who lived in Georgetown. They were mainly journalists, CIA officers and government officials. This included Mary Pinchot Meyer, Cord Meyer, Anne Truitt, James Truitt, Frank Wisner, Thomas Braden, Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Wistar Janney, Joseph Alsop, Tracy Barnes, Philip Graham, Katharine Graham, David Bruce, Ben Bradlee, Antoinette Pinchot Bradlee, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen and Paul Nitze.

Nina Burleigh, the author of A Very Private Woman (1998) has pointed out: "The younger families - the Meyers, Janneys, Truitts, Pittmans, Lanahans, and Angletons - spent a great deal of leisure time together. There were evening get-togethers, and sometimes the families took weekend camping trips to nearby beaches or mountains when husbands could get away... On Saturday mornings in the fall, the adults got together and played touch football in a park north of Georgetown while their children biked around the sidelines, then all retired to someone's house for lunch and drinks... The Janneys had a pool, and on hot summer nights the parties were aloud, drunken affairs, filled with laughter, dancing, and the sound of breaking glass and people being pushed into the pool." 

Ben Bradlee recalls in his autobiography, The Good Life (1995) that he was also part of the same group. "Socially our crowd consisted of young couples, around thirty years old, with young kids, being raised without help by their mothers, and without many financial resources." 

To Slip the Surly Bonds of Earth, And Touch the Face of God...

That's just the sort of post-industrialised, ultra-myopic, zero-growth, social Darwinist Fabian nihilistic, economically defeatist Dying Earth claptrap I'd expect from a Guardian columnist no-one's ever of.

Every person that spends a million quid or more developing a safe, reliable, reusable and mass-producible technology that will decouple the potential future capacity of mankind's experience from reference to the near-inexhaustible yet still finite resource pool of Terra, held in commons, is one less person wasting a million notes trying to help the last two Pandas left alive have a successful and memorable date.

And unlike the Panda People, a million quid invested in the Virgin Space taxi programme isn't even tax deductible as a write-off - they're not blowing a million pounds each on some vanity project lost cause, they are buying a service and a commitment in something greater than themselves that they want to help happen and be a part of.

Dingbat.

Had you gone after Branson 30 years ago, for the balloons, you may have had a valid point.

But this is space, now.

There is no more NASA any more - it died under Sequester.

And no-one else is prepared to put up the money and take the risks - this is what Capitalism looks likes in all it's own favourite wet dreams, and this time, finally, it's real and someone's actually doing it right.

Bruce Wayne, MFers....

Jack Anderson, the Mormon Mafia and the Selling of AIDS

AIDS Town Hall Forum - “Meeting the AIDS Challenge in the 90s.” MAY 14, 1990 from Spike EP on Vimeo.

The Mormon Theology is explicitly White Supremacist.

The Mormon Theology is explicitly Masonic.

Mormons are Straight Arrows - they fall outside all the "Risk Groups".

They run Vegas -  They do Missionary work all over Africa.

They hate black people, but they do missionary work in Africa.

Participants in the forum discuss “Meeting the AIDS Challenge in the 90s.” The participants include Dr. Jonas Salk, who developed an AIDS vaccine, Dr. Robert Gallo, who discovered the AIDS virus, and representatives of several AIDS advocacy organizations.

PEOPLE IN THIS VIDEO : Jack Anderson - Columnist

Dr Jonas Salk - Inventor of the Polio vaccine

Dr Robert Gallo

Anthony S. Fauci M.D. - Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

Ann Giudici Fettner - Writer, Medical World News

Allan Goldstein - Director, Institute for Adv. Studies in Immunology

Peter Hawley - Physician, Whitman-Walker Clinic

Richard Hindin - Chairman, Institute for Adv. Studies in Immunology->Board of Directors

Sandra McDonald - Chairwoman, National Minority AIDS Council

Michael Merdian - Executive Director, National Assn. of People with AIDS

Susan Okie - Writer, Washington Post

Albert Rosenfeld - Writer, Omni Longevity Magazine

Arye Rubinstein - Physician, Einstein (Albert) College of Medicine

B.J. Stiles - President, National Leadership Coalition on AIDS

Stephen Joel Trachtenburg - President, George Washington University

Barbara Culliton - Writer, Science Magazine

Tarpley to McClendon Group; National Press Club Mormonism And Mitt -- What We Can Expect from Spike EP on Vimeo.

You can't break Chinese Communisim (what's left of it) with Christianity, Shock Therapy or Levi jeans.

You *can* break it with Islam.

The British Empire learnt this lesson by the 1830s.

"What happened was the way this whole thing was uncovered was by accident, just like many other things in history. Jack Anderson, the columnist, was a much hated enemy of the Nixon White House. Anderson had his own sources in the Pentagon. He was writing about the famous tilt to Pakistan in the India-Pakistan war. He revealed some conversations that Henry Kissinger was involved in. 

An investigation ensued into who had leaked it, and the prime target became Radford because they believed that he had the documents and had turned it over to Anderson because Anderson was a Mormon and Radford's a Mormon and they thought there was a connection there and so forth. In the course of polygraphing Radford, they asked him, "Were you Anderson's source?" He said no. "

Robert Getlin

The Cancer Cold War

The Cancer Cold War from Spike EP on Vimeo.

"As a fourth great goal, I will offer a far-reaching set of proposals for improving America's health care and making it available more fairly to more people.

I will also ask for an appropriation of an extra $100 million to launch an intensive campaign to find a Cure for Cancer, and I will ask later for whatever additional funds can effectively be used. The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease. Let us make a total national commitment to achieve this goal.

America has long been the wealthiest nation in the world. Now it is time we became the healthiest nation in the world."

President Richard M. Nixon,

State of the Union Address 1971

"This conversation, unfortunately, is going to lead us into a discussion of the human genome.

And that's.... when we're into the deep water...

So, it's better to start the conversation now, before we get to the level of - God Talk" 

- Prince

"The American Capitalist System's role is to confuse the masses, that's it's purpose;

As such, it lies all the time.

Some people are confused, they think it only lies some of the time, 

but I'm a revolutionary, Jack - I know that it lies all of the time.

Even when it tells the truth, it is as the result of a Double-Lie"

Stockely Carmichael aka Bro. Kwame Ture

Updated 03:17 p.m. Moscow time

MOSCOW, October 29 (RIA Novosti) – Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday denied western reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin is allegedly suffering from pancreatic cancer.

“Bite your tongue! Everything’s fine,” Peskov said in response to Putin’s supposed illness.

Last week, The New York Post published a story, in which it claimed the Russian president was suffering from cancer and was being treated by an elderly doctor, citing unnamed sources.

The rumors quickly spread and appeared in various western news outlets however none of the stories were able to substantiate the story with direct evidence.

"There is an explanation for Vladimir Putin’s hurry to invade Ukraine — it is rumored he has cancer.

News outlets from Belarus to Poland have reported for months that the Russian strongman has cancer of the spinal cord. But my sources say it’s pancreatic cancer, one of the most lethal forms of the disease.

Putin is allegedly being treated by an elderly doctor from the old East Germany whom Putin met decades ago while serving in Dresden for the KGB. The doctor has been trying various treatments including steroid shots, which would explain Putin’s puffy appearance.

The physician, who is 84 years old, quit recently, confiding that he hated coming to Russia and was always mistreated by Putin’s security detail.

Crispin Black, the British army veteran who reports on terrorism and intelligence, reported earlier this year that recurring rumors about Putin’s health “are back again with a vengeance.”

Writing for The Week, Black said Putin’s pardon and release of his former crony Mikhail Khodorkovsky, after 10 years in prison, was an ominous sign.

“Some have suggested [Putin] is clearing his conscience,” Black wrote.

Others say Putin has three years to live and wants to leave a legacy of expanding the Russian borders just like Peter the Great or Stalin. Take your pick."

Security in an Open Society - by DCI William E. Colby, Address to the NSA, 1973

William E. Colby

Approved for release by NSA on 12-01-2011, 

Transparency Case #3852

The following is an edited version of the address given in the NSA Auditorium in November as the feature of Security Week 1973.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen.. It is a real pleasure to be be here. When I assumed this new post I made a talk to some of our people at CIA and others from the community and I made the point that my appointment by the President and my confirmation by the Senate was an appointment of the intelligence profession, not a personal thing, and that it was a mark of the confidence of the government and the Congress, and through them the people of the United States, in the long-term contribution that the profession can make. The profession has been given the responsibility for running its own affairs in the same way as some of the other professions, such as the military.

Thus it is a particular pleasure for me to be here with this part of the profession and community. I have been a customer of yours for many years. I have worked at a very low level on some of your operations and tried to contribute little bits and pieces into that enormous computer collection that you have of information from all over the world. I have gained an enormous respect for the rapidity with which you cover problems, for the depth with which you get into them, for the facets of the problem that you bring out and show that otherwise would not appear, and for the ingenuity  that you  show  in  overcoming some of the obstacles to getting that information. I first was exposed to the business of cryptography during the war when they tried to teach me how to use a one-time pad; it was quite an effort, I might add.

Today  I  want  to  talk  about  security  week,  the importance of security and some of the dilemmas that face us when we talk about security in our American open society. I think your watch words today—Honor, Peace, and Vigilance—are extremely good guides for us in the intelligence community as a whole, not just for this week and for this subject. The problems of dealing with security in an American society require a great deal of vigilance.

We are doing it in America for peace, of course. Our work also requires a great many considerations of honor. -We have a debate today as to whether it is compatible to have security and secrecy in the kind of society that we have. My best answer is to look back to the early days of our country and a remark by our first President, General Washington, who referred to the importance of intelligence and added the comment that "upon secrecy success often depends in enterprises of this kind." He was well aware that we cannot conduct successful intelligence operations unless there is a respect for the need for secrecy.

Following that general guideline we developed a whole apparatus  for  security  and  secrecy  in  the  American government. Most recently, of course, this was codified in the National Security Act of 1947, which requires me, as Director of Central Intelligence, to be responsible for the protection of intelligence sources and methods. Various other legislation, such as the Espionage Act and your own act referring to communications intelligence, indicate the necessity for us to keep secrets in this delicate field. And we have a variety of regulations that we have developed both at the national level and at the departmental and agency level for the protection of our secrets, and for decisions as to what these secrets really are.

All of these are now subject to question, because there is a very strong opinion in the country today that times have changed, that an excess of secrecy in the past has led us to mistakes, and that our people have so matured and are so well  educated  today that  it  is essential that they be informed, that they be consulted on major questions, so that they can make the wisest decisions for this great democracy, rather than leaving these to the executive, the legislative or even the judiciary.

The question today comes down to the degree to which this can be carried out, and certainly it can be to a considerable extent. There are legitimate things which, perhaps were held secret in the past which can be released today. Various matters are being released for historical purposes which were very secret at the time. And some are things that perhaps we would never have released in the past.

We also have the conflict in some people's minds between the demands of their own moral judgment as to what  should  be  released,  and  the  demands  of  the regulations and the rules. Some years ago, it was considered very reprehensible to take. unto ourselves the decision to break a rule for a greater good. There was a gentleman named Alan Nunn May in Canada who for very moral purposes in the immediate post-war era felt that it was essential that there be a balance of nuclear power between the Soviet Union and the United States. He took upon himself the decision to give the Soviets some United States secrets so that that balance could exist.

Dr. May thought he was being a moral man; he thought he was doing some great good: But what he was doing was in a prideful way taking to himself the decision which should be made not only by his immediate bureaucratic superiors, but also by the constitutional authorities of his country—the legislature, the executive; and the judiciary. He was insisting upon his right to make a very fundamental national decision and at that time even a world decision, rather than following the dictates that were laid upon him by  the  constituted  authorities,  but  at the same  time working to get a change and a relaxation of those rules. He went to jail, and properly so, because we do not have the right to insist that each one of us is sovereign. We do owe respect for our fellow citizens and for the constitutional structure that holds us together, because without it we have a kind of anarchy.

We have situations in which people today have that same feeling of moral imperative which causes them to open things up.  These involve constitutional and  legal questions, first. Our constitution does provide a structure through which authority can be imposed upon our fellow citizens and procedures through which they can be judged fairly and openly. At the same time we must admit that today the legislation affecting the problems of security is less than totally effective, to put it mildly. We have seen evidence in the past year or so that any exposure of our duly constituted secrets must be proven in court to have been with an intent to harm the interests of the United States to be punishable. The argument is then made that the individual in question, , far from wanting to hurt the interests of the United. States, was trying to help them, pursuant to his judgment of what these interests are.

Other aspects of our Constitution of course affect this problem.  Our  country  is  quite  different  from  other countries which conduct intelligence work. We know we are different from the Russians. We are resolved in the legislation that set up CIA to be different from the German Gestapo because the CIA is barred from activity within domestic affairs,  and  is held  to the area of foreign intelligence. And we are probably going to be reminded of this in some legislation this fall if any doubt arose over the past year or two. But also we are different from some of the countries that afforded us models for the development of our intelligence services, the French and even the British. In the British situation, the government has the authority to issue what is called a "D" notice, and the press is barred from printing a story about intelligence under pain of action in the courts against them.

You can imagine the reaction in this country if we gave Mr. Jack Anderson a "D" notice. This is part of our society. We deliberately adopted in the First Amendment to the Constitution, as a condition to the acceptance of the Constitution by our people, the concept of the freedom of the press, and the prevention of any prior restraint on the right of an editor to publish what he wants. This is 'an essential part of our society, and there is no merit in complaining about it. Rather we should look at it with pride; I might add that many other countries look at it with perhaps amazement but also some awe and envy.

We are not entirely helpless in the courts, however. In the past couple of years there has been a very interesting case, which unfortunately has centered around an ex-CIA employee, who just as you, when he came to CIA some 15 years ago, signed a secrecy agreement. Whe he left CIA, he was reminded of this secrecy agreement and told that the matters that he learned while he worked in CIA were to be held secret, and that if he wanted to publish anything he had  to consult with CIA so that CIA could tell  him whether certain matters were classified and could not be published, as he had learned them during the course of his employment.

"The principle constituency of the CIA is the CFR"  - Victor Marchetti 

This gentleman put out a book which was highly critical of some of the habits and even individuals in CIA and was pretty amusing in parts. It caused no problems because it did not include any classified information. But then he decided to go further and prepared an outline for another book and an article: he shopped these around and they came to our attention. We went to the courts and said that a man who went to work for General Electric and signed a secrecy agreement with respect to the kinds of equipment and formulas that he learned while he was in General Electric  could  be  barred  from  telling  Westinghouse everything he learned while he was in General Electric.

CIA asked the courts to give us the same rights that they would give General Electric in a comparable situation. While he claimed that this was an unconstitutional prior restraint on his ability to publish what he wanted, the courts upheld our position in the district and circuit courts. The case  was appealed to the Supreme Court, which refused to review it, indicating that they found nothing very wrong with it. He was put under an injunction to submit anything he wished to publish about intelligence to CIA to determine what was classified. He then wrote his book. He sent his book around to us and in the five-hundred odd pages of his book we found a number of items. that we felt were technically classified. We informed him that we had- found about 339 such items, and that those would have to be withdrawn from his book. It amounted to about one-fifth of the book. We indicated that we were prepared  to negotiate on many of these because if he phrased them slightly differently or left out a few names or places, there would be no great problem. We then got together and indicated that we were not going to argue about 114 items because they had leaked in the past.

We are now in the midst of a law suit about the remaining 225 items, and the American Civil Liberties

in.gbod conscience as patriotic Americans, feel that our  action is a  violation of the First Amendment—a restraint on his ability to publish these secrets. We feel that we are only applying the same rules that apply when anyone is exposed to confidences and agrees to respect those confidences in the course of his employment. The case is now in the courts and  will  undoubtedly go to a full decision. It shows that we are not entirely helpless, but upon the results of the case will depend a great deal of our ability to control leakages from our service.

There are other ways in which intelligence leaks, and I hardly need to remind you all of this. You are well aware of it. Policy decisions and policy necessities can override the necessity for secrecy from time to time. We are sometimes shocked when we hear that Secretary X has used our highly technical and highly classified information in a press or congressional briefing. This is something that you and I have to live with and accept as a part of the structure of American government.

Our secrets are not ours; they belong to the country and the country through its leaders. Our appropriate authorities have  the  problem  of dealing  with  and  retaining the confidence of our people, and consequently they must decide how much to inform the people so that they can understand the problems facing them around the world, as against  the  need  to  protect  the  intelligence  sources, classifications and secrecy. Sometimes it is more important to inform the country than it is to keep the secret.

This is part of life in the American democracy, and I think it is part of the rules that we have to accept. We can reduce this problem by limiting our disseminations so that only the highest levels can make deliberate decisions to reveal information. We can educate the higher levels as to the sensitivity of certain sources. We can indicate the various kinds of classification and compartmentation so that the secrecy of some things means a lot more than the secrecy of others. But I think we have to accept the fact that we are going to operate under an authority which has the right to reveal to the people of the United States, for good reason, some of the things that we gathered, analyzed and produced under the most stringent security regulations.

There is another consideration that is worth thinking about when we talk about secrecy. How much secrecy do we need in our society? Secrecy costs money. It costs a great deal of money to protect secrets, to make the security investigations, to buy the safes with three combination locks,  to  erect  the  fences  and  to  employ  the  other protections such as cryptography. Also, secrecy reduces the degree to which some of our information can be used by the people who need to use it, the particular unit someplace. that actually needs the information which is gathered by a very secret technique. How can it be gotten to him if it has some high  degree of compartmentation and he is not cleared? Do we expose him to possible danger just because we have not gone through a security clearance on him?. We must figure out ways to avoid such situations.

We are all also aware of Gresham's law in economics, which  says  that bad  money  drives  out good.  If we overclassify, we develop in people's minds a contempt for the classification rules, for if some items that really are not secret at all are classified, it means that the whole system is nonsense. Thus the question of how much secrecy should exist comes down to deciding what actually needs to be kept secret and to arrange that the things that don't really need protection are released.

This is in a way the theme of the President's Executive Order of a year ago, in which he made the point that it is in the basic interest of the people of the United States to make  information  public  and  that  only  for  good justification can matters be classified and kept from them. It starts from the premise that in our society things have to be open, and that there must be a justification in terms of national security for the classification and restriction of information. We have gone further and have developed various compartmentations. But the philosophy we should start with should not be that our secretary has only a Secret or Top Secret stamp. We must make sure she owns a Confidential one, too.

We need to recognize that many of our administrative papers really do not need to be highly classified but can be handled on an administrative basis and protected from undue exposure. Under the Freedom of Information Act your personnel record and my personnel record need not be made public, because the Act says that personnel records can be respected and restricted, not as classified matters but as personnel matters, in deference to your right of privacy. We need to ask what justification exists that I classify a document,  rather  than,  as  sometimes  occurs  in  the bureaucracy, what justification exists for me not to classify the document. The stress should be placed on the first question rather than the second.

We need rules and categories, and these categories can override individual documents. We have the category that applies  to  communications  intelligence  which is  well established, and I think this isrmerely a way of translating these  thoughts  I  expressed  here  into  practical  rules, practical decisions which can be applied over the length and breadth of the world where your operations take place, and can be translated from the most senior officials to the most junior officials in our government. But these rules and these categories require periodic review. The United States Intelligence Board is taking a look at certain of these. We are going to look-at others in the future with a view to moving toward classifying and keeping secret those things that need to be kept secret,, but not classifying and keeping secret the things that do not  We will keep secret on a highly restricted basis theyerydelicate matters, but try to keep on a much more relaxed basis, so that more people can use them, a number of things which can without great danger  be  exposed  to  a  much  larger  group  of  our government people.

The rules of intelligence and of secrecy will not do the job  alone.  You  know  the  importance  of  individual judgment in the intelligence business. The individual must put his mind to the.problem, try to look around it, weigh all the factors. This is the normal intelligence process. It is also the  process that we need when we approach the problem  of secrecy  and  of classification.  The  use  of judgment, not the rigid application of rules, a spirit of respect for the important things and a determination to protect the important things, and at the same time a respect for  our  American  democracy  and  the  need  of  our democracy that things that do not need to be classified should not be classified.

We serve the people through the executive, through the Congress,  through the judiciary and even through the fourth estate, the press, but it is the people that we are really serving. We are not serving only one part of this total American country of ours. We must translate this service into procedures, into reasonable solutions to the various dilemmas that come upon us as we are pulled between different demands.

In the area of secrecy, we have to respect the necessities of secrecy, particularly in intelligence. We obviously. are in a different business than the Fish and Wildlife Service or some of the other services. Nonetheless, underneath it we have to remember that we are in the American intelligence service,  and  that  we  conseqU'ently  have  to  have  an American approach to the problems of secrecy. We must be more open. It will be more difficult for us to serve the people, but it is also going to be much more rewarding. Thank you very much.

Mr. Colby  has  held  a  number  of executive positions in the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1973  he  was  appointed  Director,  Central Intelligence.