"The health care website problems were a source of great frustration.... I now have a couple million people, maybe more, who are going to have health care on Jan. 1.
And that is a big deal.
That's why I ran for this office,"
Saturday 21 December 2013
Quatermass
"I wish Bernard were here..."
"Chance'd be a fine thing - British Rocket Group's got it's own problems..."
from unpersonal on Vimeo.
One morning, two hours after dawn, the first manned rocket in the history of the world takes off from the Tarooma Range, Australia.
The three observers see on their scanning screens a quickly receding Earth.
The rocket is guided from the ground by remote control as they rise through the ozone layer, the stratosphere, the ionosphere, beyond the air.
They are to reach a height of fifteen hundred miles above the Earth and there learn what is to be learnt.
For an experiment is an operation designed to discover some unknown truth. It is also ... a risk.
- Duration of copyrightThe 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act states the duration of copyright as;
- For literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works70 years from the end of the calendar year in which the last remaining author of the work dies.If the author is unknown, copyright will last for 70 years from end of the calendar year in which the work was created, although if it is made available to the public during that time, (by publication, authorised performance, broadcast, exhibition, etc.), then the duration will be 70 years from the end of the year that the work was first made available.
- Sound Recordings and broadcasts50 years from the end of the calendar year in which the work was created, or,if the work is released within that time: 50 years from the end of the calendar year in which the work was first released.
- For literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works
Friday 20 December 2013
The Simplest Explanation is Usually the Correct One
The real explanation is that he used to attach endless earmarks for his district and his far-right interests to unrelated bills that could not fail to pass Congress and then vote "No" on them when they came to the floor.
And then pretend he has moral scruples and principles.
Ralph McGehee
"The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency.
It is the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisers.
In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting "intelligence" justifying those activities.
It shapes its intelligence, even in such critical areas as Soviet nuclear weapon capability, to support presidential policy.
Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies."
The Worst People in the World - by Hunter S. Thompson
The Worst People in the World
Walter Cronkite was the natural choice, they said, but he was far too old for the weight training and his objectivity was suspect.
Ten years ago, or more, Walter had taken a profoundly personal interest in whatever he perceived at the time to be the "U.S. space program," and the boys at NASA had long since adopted him as a very valuable ally and in fact sort of a team mascot. Walter was a true believer: He was "on the team," as they say in places like Lynchburg, Va., and he was also the most trusted man in America.
I'm waiting for the phone call from the politicians of NASA. I know it will come at night. Most nights are slow in the politics business, but only lawyers complain. Never answer your phone after midnight, they say. Other people's nightmares are not billable time, and morning will come soon enough. Leave it alone, if you can; the slow nights are the good ones — because you know in your nerves that every once in a while a fast one will come along, and it will jerk you up by the roots.
There are many rooms in the mansion, and weirdness governs in most of them. Politics is not just elections, and telephones are not just for reaching out and touching someone.
If the telephone call doesn't come from NASA and they send Cronkite instead of me into space, then it will be time to deal with my notion of taking Vanessa Williams to Johannesburg for a casual Saturday night of dinner and dancing, which the Examiner contemptuously rejected for what I took to be blind-dumb reasons with roots in a classic psycho-expenso syndrome.
Which is not bad thinking, for a comptroller, but it is going to get in the way if we ever plan to start justifying the Examiner's "next generation" format and the oft-implied promise of "a thinking man's newspaper" for the '80s.
That would be a major move in any decade, but in this one it makes a certain amount of at least theoretical sense because we have what looks to me Hke a genuine Power Vacuum on our side.
The Washington Post jumped The New York Times in the '70s, mainly on Watergate, but the chaos of success and the natural human weirdness of life at the Post (Janet Cooke, Bob Woodward, etc.) led to a kind of dysfunctional stalemate that is still a big factor in contemporary journalism, where the prime movers now are in television.
"Sixty Minutes" can rock your boat worse than the Times and the Post combined, and minute-to-minute judgments made at the CNN news desk in Atlanta have more effect on morning newspaper headlines all over the country than anything else in the industry except maybe a five-bell emergency bulletin on the AP wire.
The only other newspapers that have caused any functional excitement in the business are the L.A. Times and the Boston Globe, and I think we should pay attention to both of them. They are nothing alike, on the surface, but in some ways they share the same giddy instincts that we are just beginning to flirt with.
They are both stockpiling talent at top-dollar rates, and planning to amortize their investment by reselling their talent — and the leverage that supposedly comes with it — via national or even international syndication arrangements, which in theory is not bad business. It harks back to the basic difference between "vertical" and "horizontal" corporations: i.e.. Ford and General Motors.
Jesus! And all I wanted to do here was make a pitch for going to South Africa, where TV cameras have suddenly become useless and print journalism has been elevated, by default, to a bizarre and critical level.
I assume you've been following these ominous developments on TV — (as I have, thanks to my recently installed TVRO "Earth Station") — which have effectively shut down all coverage of public violence in South Africa by our colleagues in the video press. The South African government has made it punishable by up to 19 years in prison (that's PRISON, in SOUTH AFRICA) for using a TV camera or even a sound recorder at any scene of violence.
It is an impossible situation for the kinds of people charged with TV coverage in what amounts, now, to a war zone. They are the storm troopers of journalism, for good or ill. And in the main, they are very tough-minded neo-dimensional people whose only Hnk to the mandates of traditional journalism is to get the story and get the story out.
That is going to cause them trouble in South Africa. It is like telling fish to stay out of water, and the Afrikaners are serious. They are universally recognized — even among non-political travelers — to be
The Worst People in the World.
November 11, 1985
Thursday 19 December 2013
Noam Chomsky is Hearing Voices
"9-11 was practically the only counter-narrative out there at a time when questions tended to be drowned out by a chorus, led by the entire United States Congress, of 'God Bless America.'
It was one of the few places where the other side of the case could be found."
That's a fairly remarkable statement - considering absolutely no-one has ever stepped forward to claim responsibility for the act and give their reasons.
Where is he hearing this "counter-narrative"...?
Oh, yes...
"Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."
Zbignew Brezynski,
The Grand Chessboard, 1997
(p. 211)
"The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor."
Ibid.
(pp 24-5)
"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia... Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained."
Ibid.
(p.30)
"A transformation strategy that solely pursued capabilities for projecting force from the United States, for example, and sacrificed forward basing and presence, would be at odds with larger American policy goals and would trouble American allies.
Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event –
Like a New Pearl Harbor."
Project for a New American Century
Rebuilding America's Defenses:
Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century
p 51
Some Reflections on Lunar Skepticism and Empiricism
Addendum: it turns out that the lunar surface reflects sunlight quite well...
It's known as moonlight.
Or put another way -
"It's an off-white object under direct, unfiltered sunlight - What the fuck were you expecting it to look like?!"
And no-one claims that the photos weren't optically tampered with or tweaked for the purposes of greater clarity.
That's never been NASA's position and no-one has ever stated that to be the case, because it isn't true.
No-one is suggesting that the massacre at Kent State didn't happen.
But this is a doctored photo.
Diamonds and the Apartheid States
Disclaimer: I do not endorse Murray Rothbard, or his ecconomic theories - however, his analysis of the history of the Rhodes-Round Table Commodity Cartel of DeBeers and other German, Belgian and Dutch Zionists in the Colonial conquest, occupation, exploitation and neocolonial reconquest of Africa beginning with the Cape Colony in this case is valuable.
I would also like to further make the point that American and European Jews of both an Orthodox and Hassidic background in particular have been admirably and disproportionately courageous in their criticism and condemnation of the Zionist State itself, and suffered from the association by increased persecution by both sides in the debate.
I salute them for that.
Zionism must be destroyed.
All praise and respect is due to Judaism.
May the Revolution surely come.
Are Diamonds Really Forever?
By Murray Rothbard
"The international diamond cartel, the most successful cartel in history, far more successful than the demonized OPEC, is at last falling on hard times. For more than a century, the powerful DeBeers Consolidated Mines, a South African corporation controlled by the Rothschild Bank in London, has managed to organize the cartel, restricting the supply of diamonds on the market and raising the price far above what would have been market levels.
It is not simply that DeBeers mines much of the world's diamonds; DeBeers has persuaded the world's diamond miners to market virtually all their diamonds through DeBeer's Central Selling Organization (CSO), which then grades, distributes, and sells all the rough diamonds to cutters and dealers further down on the road toward the consumer.
Even an unchallenged cartel, of course, does not totally control its price or its market; even it is at the mercy of consumer demand. One of the reasons that diamond prices and profits are slumping is the current world recession. World demand, and particularly consumer demand in the U.S. for diamonds, has fallen sharply, with consumers buying fewer diamonds and downgrading their purchases to cheaper gems, which of course particularly hits the market in the expensive stones.
But how could even this degree of cartel success occur in a free market? Economic theory and history both tell us that maintaining a cartel, for any length of time, is almost impossible on the free market, as the firms who restrict their supply are challenged by cartel members who secretly cut their prices in order to expand their share of the market as well as by new producers who enter the fray enticed by their higher profits attained by the cartelists. So, how could DeBeers maintain such a flourishing, century-long cartel on the free market?
The answer is simple: the market has not been really free. In particular, in South Africa, the major center of world diamond production, there has been no free enterprise in diamond mining. The government long ago nationalized all diamond mines, and anyone who finds a diamond mine on his property discovers that the mine immediately becomes government property. The South African government then licenses mine operators who lease the mines from the government and, it so happened, that lo and behold!, the only licensees turned out to be either DeBeers itself or other firms who were willing to play ball with the DeBeers cartel. In short: the international diamond cartel was only maintained and has only prospered because it was enforced by the South African government.
And enforced to the hilt: for there were severe sanctions against any independent miners and merchants who tried to produce "illegal" diamonds, even though they were mined on what used to be private property. The South African government has invested considerable resources in vessels that constantly patrol the coast, firing on and apprehending the supposedly pernicious diamond "smugglers."
Back in the pre-Gorbachev era, it was announced that Russia had discovered considerable diamond resources. For a while, there was fear among DeBeers and the cartelists that the Russians would break the international diamond cartel by selling in the open market abroad. Never fear, however. The Soviet government, as a professional monopolist itself, was happy to cut a deal with DeBeers and receive an allocation of their own quota of diamonds to sell to the CSO.
But now the CSO and DeBeers are in trouble. The problem is not only the recession; the very structure of the cartel is at stake, with the problem centering on the African country of Angola. Not that the communist government (or formerly communist, but now quasi-communist, government) refuses to cooperate with the cartel. It always has. The problem is three-fold. First, even though the Angolan civil war is over, the results have left the government powerless to control most of the country. Secondly, the end of the war has given independent wildcatters access to the Cuango River in northern Angola, a territory rich in diamonds. And thirdly, the African drought has dried up the Cuango along with other rivers, leaving the rich alluvial diamond deposits in the beds and on the banks of the Cuango accessible to the eager prospectors.
With the diamond deposits available and free of war, and the central government unable to enforce the cartel, 50,000 prospectors have happily poured into the Cuango Valley of Angola. Furthermore, the prospectors are being protected by a private army of demobilized but armed Angolan soldiers. As one Johannesburg broker pointed out, "If you fly a patrol over the province you can get shot down by a missile. And it's a 100-mile river. You can't put a fence around it."
So far, DeBeers has been holding the line by buying up the "over-supply" caused by the influx of Angolan diamonds; this year, the cartel may be forced to buy no less than $500 million in "illegal" Angolan diamonds, twice as much as that country's official output. Consequently, DeBeers is taking heavy losses; as a result, Julian Ogilvie Thompson, the arrogant and aristocratic chairman of DeBeers, was forced to announce that the company was slashing its dividend, for only the second time since World War II. Immediately, DeBeers' shares plummeted by one-third, taking with it much of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
Overall, DeBeers's CSO had to purchase $4.8 billion of rough diamonds in 1992, while being able to sell only $3.5 billion. This huge pileup of inventory could break the cartel price; to stave off such a perceived disaster, DeBeers ordered cartel members to cut back 25 % on the diamonds they had already contracted to market through the cartel. Such a large cutback sets the stage for individual firms to sneak supplies into the market and evade the cartel restrictions. No wonder that Sir Harry Oppenheimer, the octogenarian head of DeBeers, decided to "vacation" in Russia at the end of August, presumably to persuade the Russians to resist any temptation to engage in free-market competition in the diamond market. With luck, however, the forces of free competition--as well as the world's consumers of diamonds--may triumph."
Strange Viruses, Sheik Bin Laden and The October Surprise
"From 1981 through 1988, at least 15 individuals of various nationalities, including William Casey, Director of the Central Intelligence, died in unusual circumstances:
airplane accidents,
explosions,
strange viruses which led to virulent cancers;
sudden heart attacks or straightforward homicide.
There were attempts on the lives of a further eight and one former National Security advisor tried to commit suicide."
Havana. May 5, 2011
Bin Laden familyâs relations with the United States greater than supposed
Lázaro Barredo Medina
THE surname Bin Laden has been demonized, through now representing the boogeyman of the 21st century. Just its mention evoked terror in U.S. society; it was utilized to promote the fear syndrome and to justify the most retrograde and anti-democratic actions in the United States.
However, the Bin Laden family had and still has many more links with the United States than generally supposed.
From 1981 through 1988, at least 15 individuals of various nationalities, including William Casey, director of the CIA, died in unusual circumstances: airplane accidents, explosions, strange viruses which led to virulent cancers; sudden heart attacks or straightforward homicide. There were attempts on the lives of a further eight and one, Robert McFarlane, former National Security advisor, tried to commit suicide.
What they all had in common was a close link to the Iran-Contra affair which involved the Reagan administration and the then Vice President George Bush Sr. in a major political scandal, given that they acted in total violation of legislation preventing financial aid to the Nicaraguan Contras and, in particular, weapon sales to Iran, the declared enemy of the United States.
For Washington, the Nicaraguan Contras, as the Afghan Mujahideen in their wake, were “freedom fighters.”
One of those characters to die in a strange way and linked to those events was Sheik Salem bin Laden, whose aircraft crashed in Texas in 1988, reportedly just after he had signed an important oil deal in which the Bush clan had interests.
Various publications dating back 20 years and others later noted that, according to the U.S. pilot of the aircraft, in October 1980 Sheik Salem had taken part in a secret meeting between CIA agents and Iranian envoys in Paris. There, the release of hostages in the U.S. embassy in Tehran had been agreed for after the inauguration as President of Ronald Reagan, a ploy which influenced Jimmy Carter's failure to secure a second term.
None of this was proven, but the district attorney in the case speculated as to the possibility of Salem having been eliminated as “an embarrassing witness,” while certain analysts confirmed at the end of 1990 that the aircraft flight plans had for some time been at the center of attention of a large number of investigations, whose conclusions were never divulged.
BUSH-BIN LADEN FAMILY BUSINESSES
American journalist Jerry Urban, from the Houston Chronicle, wrote an article titled “Keeping it all in the family.”
According to Urbanâs investigations, the FBI and a government agency involved in controlling financial crimes, were reviewing accusations that James Bath, a business entrepreneur, transferred to Houston certain sums of money from Saudi investors who wanted to influence U.S. policy under the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations.
The columnist stated that in sworn depositions, Bath said that he represented four prominent Saudis as a co-signatory and was using his name in the investments. Bath declared that in payment he would receive an interest in the businesses.
The Houston Chronicle article confirmed that the tax documents and personal financial records showed that Bath had personal interests in Arbusto â79, and Arbusto â80, limited partnerships controlled by George W. Bush, the older son of President Bush.
Arbusto, the article noted, is Spanish for Bush.
Jerry Urban also noted that according to a 1976 trust agreement, drawn up shortly after Bush Sr. was appointed director of the CIA, Saudi Sheik Salem bin Laden appointed Bath his business representative in Houston and there is evidence that the businessman received a sizeable commission from companies owning and operating Houston Gulf Airport, after it was purchased by Bath for the Bin Laden family in 1977.
OTHER BUSINESSES AND CONSPIRATORIAL LINKS
As the older brother, Sheik Salem bin Laden was head of a family of numerous offspring (possibly 54 or 57 who Sheik Mohammed bin Laden fathered with 30 wives of diverse Arab nationalities) and who inherited the Bin Laden Construction Group, a corporation which he created in the 1950s in Jeddah, on the banks of the Red Sea.
When Sheik Salem bin Laden took over control of the businesses, he not only consolidated the construction enterprises but also invested in the manufacture and distribution of weapons and in Swiss-based banks with branches throughout the Middle East. He had the support of the then King Abdul Aziz and his family.
Various publications of the time commented on the Bin Laden family businesses and highlighted that their company was one of the most important in Saudi Arabia with assets of more than five billion dollars, and that Sheik Mohammed made his wealth thanks to important projects for the extension of the holy places of Islam, Mecca and Medina (west), given him by the Saudi royal palace.
At that time, 13 of his sons held posts on the groupâs executive committee, the best known of whom were Bakr, Hassan, Yeslam and Yehia. It is confirmed that Osama was the only son of a Saudi mother.
On Salemâs death, Bakr presided over the group and managed to extend its activities beyond Saudi borders, to cover a number of Arab countries and employing tens of thousands of people.
A number of media outlets stated that by then the conglomerate had become so large that they decided to divide it into the Syrian Group, the Lebanese Group, the Jordan Group and the Egyptian Group.
This last was the most developed with 40,000 employees, although a number of members of the Bin Laden family controlled the global businesses from Europe, under the leadership of Yeslam, with offices in Geneva and Paris.
Analysts agreed that prior to September 11, 2001, Bin Laden, the least favored member of the family, named Osama ben Muhammad ben Awad bin Laden, was also training for the family business by studying engineering at the King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah.
But upon graduating in 1979, he rejected taking control of a national construction company and went to fight with the Mujihadeen in Afghanistan who were resisting the Soviet invasion of that country. It was during that mission that the links between the Bin Laden family and the CIA were strengthened.
The United States had given high-technology support in war materials and military instruction to the Afghan guerrillas and Islamic combatants from the Middle East and North Africa so that they could stand up to the Soviets but the two groups were not capable of coordinating their actions on account of ideological differences and old tribal battles.
Mac Liman, a UN consultant during that period, noted that it was Bin Ladenâs support as a CIA intermediary which made it possible to bring together and accelerate the creation of a common front, while at the same time, he became, with the backing of the CIA and the Saudi Arabian secret services, the treasurer of the Afghanistan operation.
In 1988, he formed what is known as the Al Qaeda terrorist network. After the war against the Russians, he returned to Saudi Arabia and discovered that he was a celebrity. The Riyadh government began to isolate him and his star slowly began to fade. But everything changed with the war in the Persian Gulf and he was forced to abandon any connection with his brothers after being expelled from Saudi Arabia for supporting the dissident King Fahd.
However, after a few months of anxiety, the Bin Laden Group restored its relationship with the Saudi royal family and obtained multi-millionaire contracts.
The Bin Laden Group owned mother companies which appeared in all of its contracts under names such as Ditco, Saud ben Birdgis, Al Mouraiban or Kara, plus offices in all the Middle Eastern capitals from Dubai to Amman, and an operational center in Geneva with subsidiaries in Paris and Madrid.
International analysts stressed that the Gulf War and his countryâs implication in it changed Bin Laden. Stripped of his Saudi nationality, accused of being the financier of Islamic terrorism, Osama bin Laden broke off his close links with the CIA and declared a jihad against the United States. His name reemerged mysteriously in recent years every time that there were tensions in U.S. society, functioning as a convenience for the political class.
But business is business. Not even Osamaâs activities in any way affected the Bin Laden familyâs relations with the superpower via various international group connections linked to finance capital.
Terrorism, business, conspiracy, all are intermixed in the history of this family and U.S. authorities. Will the absolute truth be told some day, including what really happened on September 11?
For now, there is no need to overtax our brains. As a neighbor of mine responded to the whole saga of these family ties, with a popular philosophy: “The truth is greater than the richest imagination,” and now when it is being said that he is dead, more than ever.
Once again, one thing is crystal clear, and that is double standards. Promises, huge efforts to kill the Al Qaeda terrorist and meanwhile, in the United States itself, another terrorist, Orlando Bosch, proclaimed by U.S. justice as public enemy Number One, was buried with all due ceremony in Miami, while another one, Luis Posada Carriles, as shady a character as the Saudi Arabian, is still enjoying legal impunity.
Wednesday 18 December 2013
A Catastrophic and Catalysing Event: Millennial Futurology
"To preserve American military preeminence in the coming decades, the Department of Defense must move more aggressively to experiment with new technologies and operational concepts, and seek to exploit the emerging revolution in military affairs. Information technologies, in particular, are becoming more prevalent and significant components of modern military systems. These information tech- nologies are having the same kind of trans- forming effects on military affairs as they are having in the larger world. The effects of this military transformation will have profound implications for how wars are fought, what kinds of weapons will dominate the battlefield and, inevitably, which nations enjoy military preeminence.
The United States enjoys every prospect of leading this transformation. Indeed, it was the improvements in capabilities acquired during the American defense build- up of the 1980s that hinted at and then confirmed, during Operation Desert Storm, that a revolution in military affairs was at hand. At the same time, the process of military transformation will present opportunities for America’s adversaries to develop new capabilities that in turn will create new challenges for U.S. military preeminence.
Moreover, the Pentagon, constrained by limited budgets and pressing current missions, has seen funding for experi- mentation and transformation crowded out in recent years. Spending on military research and development has been reduced dramatically over the past decade. Indeed, during the mid-1980’s, when the Defense Department was in the midst of the Reagan buildup which was primarily an effort to expand existing forces and field traditional weapons systems, research spending represented 20 percent of total Pentagon budgets. By contrast, today’s research and development accounts total only 8 percent of defense spending. And even this reduced total is primarily for upgrades of current weapons. Without increased spending on basic research and development the United States will be unable to exploit the RMA and preserve its technological edge on future battlefields.
Any serious effort at transformation must occur within the larger framework of U.S. national security strategy, military missions and defense budgets. The United States cannot simply declare a “strategic pause” while experimenting with new technologies and operational concepts. Nor can it choose to pursue a transformation strategy that would decouple American and allied interests.
A transformation strategy that solely pursued capabilities for projecting force from the United States, for example, and sacrificed forward basing and presence, would be at odds with larger American policy goals and would trouble American allies.
Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event –
Like a New Pearl Harbor.
Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions. A decision to suspend or terminate aircraft carrier production, as recommended by this report and as justified by the clear direction of military technology, will cause great upheaval. Likewise, systems entering production today – the F-22 fighter, for example – will be in service inventories for decades to come. Wise management of this process will consist in large measure of figuring out the right moments to halt production of current-paradigm weapons and shift to radically new designs. The expense associated with some programs can make them roadblocks to the larger process of transformation – the Joint Strike Fighter program, at a total of approximately $200 billion, seems an unwise investment. Thus, this report advocates a two-stage process of change – transition and transformation – over the coming decades.
In general, to maintain American military preeminence that is consistent with the requirements of a strategy of American global leadership, tomorrow’s U.S. armed forces must meet three new missions:
• Global missile defenses. A network against limited strikes, capable of protecting the United States, its allies and forward-deployed forces, must be constructed. This must be a layered system of land, sea, air and space- based components.
• Control of space and cyberspace. Much as control of the high seas – and the protection of international commerce – defined global powers in the past, so will control of the new “international commons” be a key to world power in the future. An America incapable of protecting its interests or that of its allies in space or the “infosphere” will find it difficult to exert global political leadership.
• Pursuing a two-stage strategy for of transforming conventional forces. In exploiting the “revolution in military affairs,” the Pentagon must be driven by the enduring missions for U.S. forces. This process will have two stages: transition, featuring a mix of current and new systems; and true transformation, featuring new systems, organizations and operational concepts. This process must take a competitive approach, with services and joint-service operations competing for new roles and missions. Any successful process of transformation must be linked to the services, which are the institutions within the Defense Department with the ability and the responsibility for linking budgets and resources to specific missions.
Ronnie Biggs, MK-ULTRA and the Fourth Reich
http://jimhougan.com/wordpress/?tag=the-great-train-robbery
"How Biggs, while hiding out in Rio, came to live at Scott Johnson’s apartment, where he was patronized and protected by Huber and the others, is an important question.
[An anecdotal account of Biggs' life in Rio, which discusses his friendship with Johnson and Huber, can be found in Biggs: The World's Most Wanted Man, by Colin Mackenzie, William Morrow & Co., New York, 1975.]
Among other things, it suggests the possibility (indeed, the likelihood) that the firm which provided cover (or an alibi) for Jim Jones’s activities in Rio was part of the so-called ODESSA network.
[ODESSA is an acronym for Organization der Entlassene SS Angehorige (Organization for the Release of Former SS Members). Die Spinne (The Spider), which was also known as the "Swastika Syndicate," was the clandestine operations arm of ODESSA. See Skorzeny: Hitler's Commando, by Glenn B. Infield, St. Martin's Press, 1981 (New York).]
In this connection, Piers Paul Read’s The Train Robbers is of interest.
[The Train Robbers, by Piers Paul Read, W.H. Allen, London (1978).]
Read undertook to write the book more than a decade after the robbery, and long after several other books had already been published on the subject. What made these unpromising circumstances auger well, according to Read, were two things: first, he had the cooperation of most of the men who’d pulled off the robbery.
Previously, only Ronald Biggs had given an account, and Biggs was considered an outsider by those who’d conceived and executed the plan.
Second, and even more importantly, the gang confided important new information to Read.
This was that the train robbery, and several of the subsequent escapes, had been financed and finessed by Gen. Otto Skorzeny.
Among other things, this explained why it had never been possible to account for more than half of the money stolen in the robbery.
An unrepentant Nazi, Skorzeny had been Hitler’s favorite commando. After the war, he’d re-established himself in Madrid as an arms-dealer and, with even greater secrecy, as the mastermind behind Die Spinne—the underground railroad that obtained forged documents and plastic surgery for war criminals and others requiring safe-havens in South America and the Middle East.
As the proprietor of a de facto intelligence agency with connections throughout the world, Skorzeny made millions as a consultant to countries and organizations whose politics were compatible with his own (e.g., Nasser’s Egypt and the Secret Army Organization in Algiers).
Train-robber Buster Edwards and his wife gave Read a detailed description—names, dates and places—of how Die Spinne had smuggled him from England to Germany to Mexico.
[Since this was written, I was able to interview Buster Edwards at his flower-stall outside Waterloo Station in London. In that interview, Edwards confirmed what he'd told Read, and elaborated upon it with further details.]
A woman named “Hannah Schmid,” [The name is a pseudonym that Read used in his book ] whose father had served with Skorzeny in the Second World War, saw to it that he received plastic surgery and the documents necessary to travel. Edwards recuperated for nearly a month in the home of a Prussian aristocrat, “Annaliese von Lutzeberg,”
[This name is also a pseudonym, according to Read.] and was then sent on his way to Mexico—but not before he’d purchased shares (under an assumed name) in a business that Skorzeny owned.
[Edwards invested 10,000 pounds in a real estate firm that Skorzeny was using to develop land near Alicante.]
While in Mexico, Edwards and two of the other train-robbers reunited with Schmid, who “proposed that they should run guns to the Peronists in Argentina; or train troops for a planned putsch in Panama…”
[Ibid., p. 195. Besides Edwards, Bruce Reynolds and Charlie Wilson met with Schmid in Mexico City.]
Edwards and his friends declined: it just wasn’t their scene.
In checking Edwards’ story, and the stories of the other robbers, Read found that every verifiable detail was confirmed. Before finishing his book, however, it was left to him to interview Ronald Biggs in Rio. Accordingly, he got on a plane.
Finding Biggs was not that difficult. He was living at Scott Johnson’s apartment. What he had to say, however, was in flat contradiction to the accounts of everyone else. According to Biggs, there were no Germans.
Read was flabbergasted. Had he been hoaxed? Or was Biggs lying on behalf of what Read suspected were his Nazi protectors? Read couldn’t be sure.
“At best (Biggs) wished me to disbelieve the Skorzeny connection so that he himself could break it to the world and reap the benefit; at worst he was still in the care of Skorzeny’s organisation and had been told to persuade me that it did not exist.
“The more I pondered this last possibility, the more convinced I became that this was the explanation—for it still seemed inconceivable to me that June (Edwards) had invented her meeting with Skorzeny in Madrid, or could have discovered that he was a friend of the Reader’s Digest editor who spoke fourteen Chinese dialects. I suddenly realised how thoughtless and foolhardy I had been to come to a country (Brazil) known to be a nest of ex-Nazis. Clearly Biggs had been saved from extradition not because of his child, but because of neo-Nazi influence in government circles. The woman who had been with him at the airport, Ulla Sopher, a German-Argentinian with blonde hair and blue eyes, was part of their network. All the strands of the story came together to form a noose around my neck.” [Ibid., pp. 257-58.]
And yet, despite this cogent explanation for what had happened, and despite the evidence that Edwards and the others had provided, Read demurred. Over drinks in a sidewalk cafe, “I began to believe that Biggs was telling the truth.”
A bizarre turn-about that occurs at the very end of the book, Read’s conversion to Biggs’ account makes no sense at all. Biggs’s own fugitivity, which (like Edwards’s) was facilitated by plastic surgery and forged documents provided by an unnamed criminal syndicate, is the best argument against the story he tells.
One wonders if Read would have ended his book differently if he had known about Jim Jones, Scott Johnson and Invesco.
Not that Read didn’t have clues to the fact that Biggs was living in a kind of parapolitical twilight—a world defined by the inter-penetration of criminal syndicates and the intelligence community.
One such clue pertained to Biggs’ son, “Mikezinho,” who was born while his father was a fugitive in Rio. “Little Mikey” had a very interesting godfather, a man with powerful European connections and who, like Werner Blumer, was in the business of selling art.
This was Fernand Legros, who concerns us here only because his association with Biggs’s, and Biggs’s friends in Rio, adds perspective to what might be called “the Invesco circle.”
Legros has been described as a “playboy, millionaire, art dealer and CIA agent…”
[The Great Heroin Coup, by Henrik Kruger.]
A native Egyptian, with apartments in Switzerland, France and Spain, he was a homosexual whose lovers included the Secretary-General of the United Nations (Dag Hammerskjold) and members of French cabinet.
[ Hammerskjold died in a plane crash in the Congo on September 17, 1961. The suspicion that the plane was sabotaged is widespread, but to date unproven. See The Last Days of Dag Hammerskjold, by Arthur L. Gavshon, Barrie & Rockliff with Pall Mall Press, London, 1963.]
A naturalized American, Legros resorted to at least four passports: French, American, Canadian and British.
It is alleged (by author Henrik Kruger and others) that Legros played a lethal role in the mysterious (and still unsolved) kidnapping and murder of the Moroccan dissident, Ben Barka—who disappeared from the streets of Paris (where Legros owned an art-gallery) in October, 1965. According to Kruger, Legros had been in contact with Ben Barka in Geneva, where the art-dealer had a second gallery and both men had apartments. Lured to France, Ben Barka was kidnapped, tortured and killed. While his disappearance remains unsolved, the operation has often been attributed to French gangsters (including a man named Christian David) acting on Legros’s orders. Legros himself is believed to have been working at the time for either the CIA or France’s SDECE.
In 1967, Legros fled to Brazil upon being implicated in the authentication and sale of forgeries attributed to modern masters. Sold for millions to gullible investors around the world, the forgeries are believed to have been painted by Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving’s friend and neighbor on Ibiza.
But Legros’s influence seems not to have been much diminished by the notoriety surrounding the forgeries.
According to Kruger, the art-dealer was “a personal friend of Henry Kissinger’s,…(and) the man the CIA assigned to snoop on UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold. Legros helped the CIA kidnap the African leader Moise Tshombe…” Not finally, Legros became an associate (in France and in Brazil) of the legendary French gangster Christian David.
While in Rio and Sao Paulo, David established a Brazilian-based narcotics syndicate to fill the vacuum created when the so-called “French connection” was broken.
[Following the arrest and extradition of Paraguya's Auguste Ricard, heroin refined in Marseilles was shipped to David in Brazil for transport to the United States.]
In this task, he was abetted by fugitive French collaborators and war criminals living in Argentina, Paraguay, Chile and Brazil.
Arrested by the Brazilian authorities in 1972, David was eventually deported to the United States, and then extradited to France—where he was sentenced to death.
[The sentence appears never to have been carried out, and there are unconfirmed reports that David was freed some time ago.]
Meanwhile, David’s pal, Fernand Legros, was himself in a Rio prison—occupying the cell next to Ronald Biggs. The circumstances of Legros’s imprisonment are murky, but it has been suggested that he was locked up as an exercise in protective custody, supposedly for having helped the CIA to arrange David’s arrest. While that allegation is unproven, it is certainly true that Legros had a rather easy time of it behind bars. “Each day…he was brought lavish meals including lobster, champagne, cognac and fat Havana cigars.”
[Kruger tells us that, in 1974, French intelligence agents kidnapped Legros from Brazil, and brought him back to France. Imprisoned there, he was released upon the demands of Henry Kissinger, who protested the mistreatment of an American citizen.]
All of which is to say: what? That Jim Jones was somehow involved in the 1963 Great Train Robbery, or in the 1965 murder of Ben Barka? Hardly. Do I mean, then, to suggest that Jones was a party to the making and breaking of the “Brazilian Connection,” or that he was implicated in the wave of forgeries that culminated in Clifford Irving’s “autobiography” of Howard Hughes? Of course not.
My intention has only been to demonstrate that the milieu in which Jones found himself in 1963—the Invesco milieu, revolving around Scott Johnson, et al.—was anything but ordinary. A suspected CIA conduit, Invesco was owned and operated by men and women whose connections to criminals such as Ronald Biggs and spooks like Fernand Legros—and to gangster-spooks such as Christian David—are worth a deeper look. The coalescence of organized crime and the CIA during the early 1960s was responsible for parapolitical enormities which continue to resonate beneath the surface of American politics and culture.
Jones’s connections to Dan Mitrione and Jon Lodeesen, his resort to cover stories, his use of multiple passports, and his strange involvement with the Invesco circle, strongly suggests that the 1978 tragedy in Guyana was set in motion in Cuba and Brazil some fifteen years earlier.
"Since the founding of Israel, the Federal Republic of Germany had paid out 85.3 billion marks, by the end of 1977, to survivors of the Holocaust. East Germany ignores any such liability. From South America, where payment must be made with subtlety, the Bormann organization has made a substantial contribution.
It has drawn many of the brightest Jewish businessmen into a participatory role in the development of many of its corporations, and many of these Jews share their prosperity most generously with Israel.
If their proposals are sound, they are even provided with a specially dispensed venture capi- tal f und. I spoke with one Jewish businessmen in Hartf ord, Connecticut. He had arrived there quite unknown several years bef ore our conversation, but with Bormann money as his leverage.
Today he is more than a millionaire, a quiet leader in the community with a certain share of his prof its earmarked as always f or his venture capital benef actors. This has taken place in many other instances across America and demonstrates how Bormann’s people operate in the contemporary commercial world, in contrast to the fanciful nonsense with which Nazis are described in so much “literature.”
So much emphasis is placed on select Jewish participation in Bormann companies that when Adolf Eichmann was seized and taken to Tel Aviv to stand trial, it produced a shock wave in the Jewish and German com- munities of Buenos Aires. Jewish leaders inf ormed the Israeli authorities in no uncertain terms that this must never happen again because a repetition would permanently rupture relations with the Germans of Latin America, as well as with the Bor- mann organization, and cut of f the f low of Jewish money to Israel.
It never happened again, and the pursuit of Bormann quieted down at the request of these Jewish leaders. He is residing in an Argentinian safe haven, protected by the most efficient German infrastructure in history as well as by all those whose prosperity depends on his well-being.
Personal invitation is the only way to reach him"
Martin Bormann — Nazi in Exile
by Paul Manning 1980, Lyle Stuart, Inc.
ISBN 0–8184-0309–8
Illustrated, 302 pages.
"A revealing insight into this international f inancial and in- dustrial network was given me by a member of the Bormann organization residing in West Germany. Meyer Lansky, he said, the financial advisor to the Las Vegas-Miami underworld, sent a message to Bormann through my West German SS contact.
Lansky promised that if he received a piece of Bormann’s action he would keep the Israeli agents off Bormann’s back.
“I have a very good relation with the Israeli secret police” was his claim,although he was to be kicked out of Israel later when his presence became too noted —and also at the urging of Bormann’s security chief in South America. At the time, Lansky was in thepenthouse suite of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, in which he owned stock.
He had fled to Israel to evade a U.S. federal warrant for his arrest. He sent his message to Bormann through his bag man in Switzerland, John Pullman, also wanted in the United States on a f ederal warrant. Lansky told Pullman to make this offer “which he can’t refuse.”
The offer was forwarded to Buenos Aires, where it was greeted with laughter.
When the laughter died down, it was replaced with action.
Meyer Lansky was evicted from Israel, and was told by Swiss authorities to stay out of their country, so he flew to South America.
There he offered any president who would give him asylum a cool $1 million in cash. He was turned down everywhere and had to continue his flight to Miami, where U.S. marshals, alerted, were waiting to take him into custody".
Martin Bormann — Nazi in Exile
by Paul Manning 1980, Lyle Stuart, Inc.
ISBN 0–8184-0309–8
Illustrated, 302 pages.
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