Friday, September 23, 2011

When Congress used to investigate the CIA


In 1977, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence conducted a detailed investigation of the CIA's mind control program MK-ULTRA. Today, discussions of MK-ULTRA are relegated to the "conspiracy theory" category, but it wasn't always that way.

Click for download of Senate hearing transcript. This report does not disappoint.

WMR previously reported on the connection of the Human Ecology Fund and the CIA-funded work of anthropologists like Stanley Ann Dunham. Was the highly classified QKHILLTOP, which became the Human Ecology Fund, the covert program under which Stanley Armour and Stanley Ann Dunham first operated?

From WMR, March 28, 2011 -- "An even darker side to the CIA's use of anthropologists in its research was the involvement of the CIA front, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology and the Human Ecology Fund, in research projects that involved the study of sex, stress, and refugees. These studies, a personal favorite of CIA director Allen Dulles, involved the study of human pain, methods of persuasion, and enhanced interrogation practices. The CIA 'human ecology' projects link the CIA's MK-ULTRA, MK-NAOMI, and MK-DELTA psychological operations to field programs such as those involving both Ann Dunham and her husband, Lolo Soetoro, a participant in counter-insurgency operations in Indonesia and West Papua on the island of New Guinea.  The [UCLA Ralph] Beals Report cites 'large and unstudied' New Guinea  as being 'saturated' by an 'increasing number of social scientists' who began encountering one another in the field."

Message from Cynthia McKinney -- Troy Davis and other issues


Cynthia McKinney
The art of leadership and the fight for justice
What role outrage?
22 September 2011 (the morning after)

After Georgia was forced by the United States Supreme Court to abandon its scheme to deny Black people the right to an undiluted vote and representation, Leroy Johnson became the first Black person elected to the Georgia State Senate since Reconstruction.  The year was 1962.  During his tenure, Johnson used his considerable influence inside the body to become the Senate's Chair of the Judiciary Committee.  From this position, he was able to bottle-up legislation that was bad for the State of Georgia, especially its Black residents.  Outside and inside the State Senate, Leroy Johnson practiced the art of leadership and engaged in the fight for justice.  He produced solid results for a people who were hungry for justice.  Who among our elected officials today exercises the art of leadership in an engaged struggle for justice?  Sadly, the numbers are way too small. It is more expedient to exchange silence for merely "being there," in the end exercising no leadership at all and becoming a spectator to power in abandonment of those who need the effective use of power the most.  The art of the struggle has veritably been abandoned for merely occupying a seat at the table when the purpose of the struggle for the seat at the table was to empower the struggle for justice.  The only reason we send people to occupy that seat is to leverage the power of the community where power is exercised, on behalf of those who need it the most.

As I was commiserating over the Troy Davis situation with a former member of the Georgia Legislature who rose to the highest possible position within that body for his party, he lamented that for all of his years in the Legislature, he had not introduced a single death penalty bill.  I quickly interjected that he was so busy putting out other fires and sticking his fingers in all the holes of the leaky dikes and schooling his colleagues on the effective use of the power of their elected positions that he couldn't do everything.  It will be interesting to see what legislative actions his former colleagues will initiate in the face of this clear act of barbarism by my state.

Occupying these "seats at the table" is important.  Engaging in the struggle for justice is important.  And contrary to what many would have us believe, leadership is important.  That's why so much effort is spent on co-opting or marginalizing the leaders of conscience that we do have and preventing authentic representatives of our values to occupy those seats at the table.

Therefore, more is required of us.  We must hone the skill of discernment.  We must not give our vote to just anybody to occupy these positions of power.  We must not allow "posers" to represent us.  Posers are those who wear the jackets of authority, who are put in positions of power by us, but who do not engage in the artful use of that power on our behalf.  Discerning who is friend and who is poser has been difficult.  But, is being made more possible by the arrogance now of those who do not have the interests of the people at heart.  They seem not to care that their "neanderthal" is showing.  But we can look at them and clearly see that they ain't us.  Their actions are a clue that they do not share our values.

Unfortunately, posers exist all around us: and in the media, too.  The job now of people of conscience is to make sure that we don't enable these posers by our own supportive behavior.  My friend reminded me that Leroy Johnson, alone in the Georgia State Senate, was more powerful in the 1960s than are the 55 Black members of the Georgia Legislature now.  We need to stop and think about that.  

More is less?  What role have we all had to play in such a circumstance?  Is our leadership more of a reflection of who we are than we have acknowledged?  What can we do differently in order to get a better result?

Abu Ghraib has its antecedents right here in the United States.  The violence sponsored by the United States abroad has its origins inside the United States.  As the United States and NATO drop bombs on unsubmitting African people in Libya, the United States kills an innocent Black man in Georgia.  There is more to come unless we affirmatively take steps to stop it.  Republican voters cheered at the prospects of more executions at a recent Presidential debate.  In a recent article, http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=65344, Africom brags on its lessons learned from Libya:  

The command had to define what effects it needed, and what specific targets would contribute to achieving those effects – a precise endeavor, Ham said. If attacking a communications node, planners must ask themselves what does that particular node do? How does it connect to other nodes? What’s the right munition to use? What’s the likelihood of collateral damage? What’s the right time of day to hit it? What’s the right delivery platform? And finally, how to synchronize attacks.
“That level of detail and precision … was not something the command had practiced to the degree that we were required to do in Odyssey Dawn,” Ham said. . . . If we were to launch a humanitarian operation, how do we do so effectively with air traffic control, airfield management, those kind of activities?” he said.
The United States has to craft those practices with African partners, he added.
U.S. allies in Libya are as barbaric as their sponsors.  Despite youtube's efforts to dissuade  it from being seen, please watch this video sent to me from France:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00LBdf1uy2E&feature=player_embedded&skipcontrinter=1

As committed Libyans valiantly resist the entire NATO arsenal of modern and old-fashioned killfare, a new kind of perverse global plantation is being created.  There is a clear and present danger that Africa and Asia will become U.S. killing fields for the next decade or more while the United States, itself, becomes a police state--unless we stop this poser leadership that really stopped representing us a long t.  If we fail to stop them, watch that video again--and welcome to the new America, hauntingly familiar to a place we never left.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Israel's nuclear smuggling network was key element in Carnaby murder in Houston


Israel, working with deeply-embedded intelligence moles in the United States, including within the U.S. government and "off-the-books" intelligence front companies, has been pilfering spent U.S. nuclear fuel from American nuclear arms caches at a phenomenal rate over the last several years. U.S. and foreign intelligence sources have confirmed that much of the nuclear fuel has been shipped to Israel and other locations via the port of Houston.

The illegal smuggling of spent highly-enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium fuel from U.S. nuclear weapons facilities is the same outbound Houston shipping pipeline used by Bush-influenced Carlyle Group and the firm's front companies in Spain and France to ship precursor nerve gas chemicals to Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s, according to one Pentagon intelligence source.

The nuclear smuggling is a major back story to a September 8 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report titled "Nuclear Nonproliferation: U.S. Agencies Have Limited Ability to Account for, Monitor, and Evaluate the Security of U.S. Nuclear Material Overseas." The most serious finding in the GAO report states:

"DOE [Department of Energy], NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission], and State are not able to fully account for U.S. nuclear material overseas that is subject to nuclear cooperation agreement terms because the agreements do not stipulate systematic reporting of such information, and there is no U.S. policy to pursue or obtain such information. U.S. nuclear cooperation agreements generally require that partners report inventory information upon request, however, DOE and NRC have not systematically sought such data. DOE and NRC do not have a comprehensive, detailed, current inventory of U.S. nuclear material--including weapon-usable material such as highly enriched uranium (HEU) and separated plutonium--overseas that includes the country, facility, and quantity of material. In addition, NRC and DOE could not fully account for the current location and disposition of U.S. HEU overseas in response to a 1992 congressional mandate. U.S. agencies, in a 1993 report produced in response to the mandate, were able to verify the location of 1,160 kilograms out of 17,500 kilograms of U.S. HEU estimated to have been exported. DOE, NRC, and State have established annual inventory reconciliations with five U.S. partners, but not the others it has transferred material to or trades with."

The report also states that a nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and Israel was allowed to lapse. The GAO report also states: "DOE's Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) removes U.S. nuclear material from vulnerable facilities overseas but can only bring back materials that have an approved disposition pathway and meet the program's eligibility criteria." WMR has been informed that because of the amount of HEU and plutonium smuggled from the United States outside of "approved disposition pathways," there is no way for the United States to know exactly where HEU and plutonium has been distributed, especially to unauthorized end-users who have been using the spent nuclear material in violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) or U.S. export control laws. Countries that fall into this category, according to our sources, include Japan, Israel, South Korea, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, India, Syria, Iran, Burma, Egypt, Turkey, Taiwan, and Pakistan.

The major reason behind the nuclear material smuggling from the United States stems from Israel quietly re-establishing its global nuclear smuggling operations, rampant during the 1960s when it was working to acquire nuclear weapons. Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor capabilities have always been clouded in maximum secrecy but it is known that the facility suffered a major equipment failure in the 1990s that impacted on Israel's ability to re-process nuclear fuel. The diminished capabilities of the Negev Nuclear Research Center prompted Israel, in the 1990s, to actively smuggle nuclear materials, including enriched plutonium, to Israel. The smuggling operations immediately became known to the CIA's Counterproliferation Division and its non-official cover (NOC) Brewster Jennings & Associates operation headed up by Valerie Plame Wilson's. It was a major reason why Vice President Dick Cheney, his counsel Scooter Libby, State Department Undersecretary for Political Affairs (and President Obama's current envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan) Marc Grossman, and others within the Bush administration exposed the Brewster Jennings operations.

Israel's search for replacement enriched plutonium hit pay-dirt when its intelligence service discovered that the Pantex nuclear facility near Amarillo, Texas, stores enriched plutonium fuel that is 99 percent pure plutonium that does not require reprocessing for another 60 to 90 years. Israel gained access to the classified details of the Pantex operation by tapping into classified government communication networks through the Israeli-owned communication company AMDOCS.

The Israelis discovered that only U.S. nuclear cores composed of plutonium alloys were ripe for theft at Pantex. The 99 percent plutonium fuel was more well-guarded. However, the older plutonium alloy cores were unstable and the shipment of the cores through the port of Houston required refrigerated containers to keep them cooler than 150 degrees.The Israelis used refrigeration trucks to move the cores through the port of Houston from Amarillo and into refrigeration containers loaded on board ships belonging to Zim-American Israeli Shipping Company, a firm with close links to the Mossad. The plutonium cores were shipped to Israel and Dimona.


One individual who had the port of Houston under close scrutiny was CIA contractor/informant/source Roland "Tony" Carnaby. Carnaby had set up a number of video surveillance cameras at the port of Houston and routinely uploaded the stored videos from the camera units to his Macintosh computer. WMR has learned from intelligence sources that Carnaby possessed a major secret about the smuggling operation: much of the nuclear material being shipped through Houston by Israel, more than its needs, was being re-sold by Israel on the international black market. On April 29, 2008, Carnaby was shot to death by two Houston police officers after what was reported to have been a high-speed chase by police. After he was killed, the Houston police took possession of Carnaby's Macintosh computer. WMR previously reported that Carnaby kept Israeli intelligence assets and agents under close scrutiny in Houston and that he had a strange encounter with an Israeli Consulate General official the evening before he was shot. WMR also previously reported on Mossad's penetration of the Houston Police Department and the Harris County Sheriff's Office. Radiation detectors routinely scan containers at Houston for the presence of nuclear materials, hence, it was important for the Mossad to counteract Carnaby's security systems at the port.


It is known that Carnaby used a number of cell phones to dial into port video cameras to turn them on, stop them, and download captured video data. However, an Israeli firm, Orsus, was scheduled to begin installation of its own surveillance at the port, putting Carnaby's surveillance operations in jeopardy. The financial backers of Orsus include ComSor Venture Fund LDC, a joint operation of Comverse Technology, which includes its subsidiary Verint Systems, and Soros Fund Management's Quantum Industrial Holdings Ltd. Other investors in Orsus include Israel's Koor Industries, the leading shareholder of Tadiran, the Israeli defense electronics firm; Cial Industries and Investment, an Israeli holding company; the Cedar Fund, an 'Israeli-related' venture capital firm; Israel Infinity Venture Capital Fund; and Poalim Capital Markets, a subsidiary of Bank Hapoalim, Israel's largest bank."

Carnaby was, reportedly, working with the FBI on the Israeli nuclear smuggling issue and the FBI office in Houston requested that the Houston police call off their chase of Carnaby. It was too late for Carnaby. He was marked for assassination by Mossad and its friends in Houston area law enforcement because of his knowledge of the nuclear smuggling program. Israel was also concerned that Carnaby, a Lebanese-American with close ties to some of Lebanon's political groups opposed to Israel, might leak details of the operations to his Lebanese friends, information that would soon end up in the hands of Iranian and Syrian counter-intelligence.

One of the countries that received re-sold American plutonium fuel from Israel was Japan. However, the Japanese soon discovered that the plutonium for which they were paying the Israelis top dollar was too old and provided only short-life usable nuclear weapons. Japan decided to go it alone on their nuclear weapons development but not before they planned to blow the whistle on the Israeli and American smuggling operation to the International Atonic Energy Agency (IAEA). Before the Japanese could act, the super-quake struck Japan, along with the devastating tsunami. At that point in time, Israel and the Americans programmed their Stuxnet computer virus to trigger the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima, the major site for Japan's nuclear weapons development program. Stuxnet, developed to disrupt Iran's nuclear program, is also effective against the nuclear power generation systems of other nations using standard supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software, including the plutonium MOX fuel processing operations at Fukushima. Stuxnet can be used to blackmail recipients of the smuggled plutonium material, including MOX fuel, into silence. The Fukushima disaster destroyed physical evidence of the Israeli smuggling operation to Japan. However, Japanese intelligence possesses other evidence of the Israeli smuggling operations.

The recent explosion at a MOX fuel plutonium processing facility at the French Marcoule nuclear power plant was a warning to France, courtesy of Stuxnet, not to support Palestine's bid for UN membership. It is not yet clear whether the MOX being used at Marcoule was developed from the unstable and old American plutonium cores smuggled and re-sold by Israel. However, U.S. intelligence has evidence that Israel has re-sold some of its stolen plutonium material to India in return for that nation providing Israel with missile systems and related technology.
The disassociation of the CIA and FBI from interest in Carnaby's murder in Houston was directly linked to the power of the Israel Lobby in Washington, which will stop at nothing to ensure that Israeli crimes and intelligence activities in the United States remain unexposed and unpunished.