Media Mayhem

The lab involved in testing emissions at Times Beach was partly owned by the company that operated the dioxin incinerator

Throughout the 1990s, Steve Taylor, the former organizer for the Times Beach Action Group, continually referred to the EPA-approved incineration of the dioxin-contaminated dirt in Eastern Missouri as "destroying the evidence." The question of where the dioxin originated remains unresolved to this day.

Now Wildwood City Council member Tammy Shea is asking the same question about a dioxin-contaminated site in west St. Louis County. She wants accountability. Others within the suburban municipality's government would prefer to remain ignorant of who is responsible for poisoning the property decades ago.

One thing is for certain: the EPA has never diligently tried to determine who generated the toxic waste. The following story from 1996, shows just how far the agency was willing to go in turning a blind eye to potential fraud connected to one of the agency biggest Superfund clean ups.

But this story just like the dioxin is still hanging around despite the incineration of hundreds of tons of toxic dirt.


"... Since initiating operations, ... the incinerator has been plagued by a series of emergency releases that have spewed unknown quantities of untreated dioxin-contaminated particulate matter into the atmosphere. ..."


"... Despite the mirror windows at the lab and the smoke now flowing from the incinerator stacks, this much is clear: ... Quanterra ... is still partially controlled by IT -- the builder and operator of the Times Beach dioxin incinerator. ..."
Riverfront Times
Aug. 26, 1996
by C.D. Stelzer

When IT Analytical Services merged with another company and became Quanterra Environmental Services in 1994, the nascent laboratory didn't even bother to change the phone number. The newly formed company also remained at the same location, 13715 Rider Trail North, in a strip of innocuous one-story offices known as the Business Center in Earth City. The doors to the lab were locked last Saturday, and mirror windows made it impossible to see the interior.

Corporation records at the Missouri secretary of state's office in Jefferson City show that Quanterra was officially dissolved as a business in the state in late 1994. Nevertheless, the lab took part in important tests of stack emissions conducted in November 1995 at the Times Beach dioxin incinerator, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund cleanup near Eureka.

The test results assured the EPA, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the public that the incinerator would operate safely. Based on these test results and other criteria, the DNR issued a requisite permit for the incinerator to operate earlier this year.

Despite the mirror windows at the lab and the smoke now flowing from the incinerator stacks, this much is clear: IT Analytical was owned by International Technology Corp. (IT), and Quanterra, its successor, is still partially controlled by IT -- the builder and operator of the Times Beach dioxin incinerator.

IT, in turn, has a contract with Syntex, the corporation held liable for disposing of dioxin-contaminated soil at Times Beach and more than two dozen other sites in Eastern Missouri. In short, the lab involved in testing incinerator emissions is partly owned by the company that operates the incinerator.

Steve Taylor, an organizer for the Times Beach Action Group (TBAG), objected to the Quanterra-IT relationship in a meeting with high-level EPA officials last Wednesday night at the Hilton Hotel in Frontenac. Robert Martin, the ombudsman from the agency's Washington, D.C., headquarters, chaired the meeting, which was attended by 15 citizens, an aide to U.S. Rep. Jim Talent (R-2nd) and two other EPA officals.

"We have always had problems with how the trial burn was conducted. Now we have found that IT -- the owner of the incinerator -- was solely responsible for the physical custody of the stack samples," Taylor says. "There has always been a serious problem with credibility with (EPA) Region VII and the information that we've received pertaining to this incinerator. To date, this is probably the most blatant example of allowing those who have a financial interest in this cleanup to proceed without any oversight."

That a laboratory with ties to the incinerator operator would be allowed to handle test samples from a Superfund site is enough to raise concerns, but there is another nettlesome detail that casts doubt on the credibility of the lab work. In 1990, IT purchased the assets of metaTRACE, a laboratory located at the same address in Earth City and having the same phone number as the two previously cited labs.

In the year preceding the acquisition, metaTRACE came under scrutiny for conducting fraudulent tests for the EPA, including faulty soil analysis at Times Beach and other dioxin sites in Eastern Missouri. Ultimately, the EPA canceled metaTRACE's contracts and two company officials pleaded guilty to fraud charges. The rescinded contracts had a value of more than $8.7 million. Most of that money was earmarked for EPA Region VII, which includes the St. Louis area.

After purchasing metaTRACE, IT moved its own analytical operation into the defunct lab's Earth City office. MetaTRACE didn't dissolve until 1992, according to Martha Steincamp, head counsel for Region VII. So it appears IT Analytical in some manner shared the facility. IT even hired some of metaTRACE's employees, Steincamp concedes.

When the sign on the front door changed to Quanterra in 1994, IT Engineering conveniently moved in next door. Again, if this is not disturbing enough, state records show that Quanterra was dissolved in December 1994 for failure to file an annual report. Quanterra,in other words, doesn't even exist as a corporate fiction in the state.

IT created Quanterra in May 1994, when it merged IT Analytical with Enseco, an environmental test lab owned by Corning Inc. Originally, each company held a 50 percent stake in the joint subsidiary. IT's share of the lab has since decreased to 19 percent, following a $20 million buyout by Corning in January. The change in the percentage of ownership, however, did not take place until after critical stack-emissions tests were conducted in November. The results of those tests were published in January. Quanterra's name appears on the title page of that report.

Despite the lab's obvious role in the stack tests and its connections to IT, Bob Feild -- the EPA project manager at Times Beach -- denied knowledge of Quanterra's participation at last week's meeting in Frontenac. Under questioning by Mick Harrison, an attorney for the Citizens Against Dioxin Incineration (CADI), Feild stated: "I'm not aware of any involvement that they (Quanterra) had in the chain of custody."

Feild's denial contradicts documents provided to the RFT by the Region VII office last Friday. The documents show a representative of Quanterra signed over stack-emissions samples to an employee of Triangle Laboratories of Durham, N.C. Triangle was charged with analyzing the samples.Nevertheless, a lapse of seven to eight days existed between the time the samples were collected and the point when Quanterra handed them over to the other lab. Environmentalists familiar with the case say the time lapse could invalidate the tests results, if the samples were not stored and handled properly.

In a phone interview on Monday, Feild dismissed all of these issues as inconsequential. Feild argued that it is standard procedure for the incinerator operator to collect test samples. He claimed all aspects of the tests were overseen properly by the EPA and that safeguards prohibited any kind of manipulation of the findings. "We haven't done any research as to the current status of a company called Quanterra," Feild says. "It doesn't really matter if IT themselves did the work or if they paid a partially owned subsidiary to do the work. The contractual relationship between the operator and Syntex is really not pertinent here. It's not our concern, and we certainly don't have that information. We don't know who Quanterra is under direct contract with."

The RFT filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the EPA on this matter last Friday. In a letter to EPA regional administrator Dennis Grams last week, Rep. Talent, whose district includes Times Beach, requested "all chain of custody documents for all stack samples collected during the dioxin stack test, which took place in November of 1995." A spokesperson for Talent could not be reached for comment. Spokespersons for IT, Quanterra and Corning did not return calls placed to them.

An official at the EPA's Criminal Investigations Division in Kansas City would not confirm or deny whether an inquiry had been initiated into the matter.

This latest controversy follows an announcement in July that the completion date for the incineration has been pushed back to early next year because an estimated 70 tons of additional contaminated dirt will need to be burned.

Since initiating operations in March, the incinerator has been plagued by a series of emergency releases that have spewed unknown quantities of untreated dioxin-contaminated particulate matter into the atmosphere.

The EPA's own dioxin draft reassessment concludes that dioxin is a likely human carcinogen and is responsible for reproductive and immunological problems. EPA research further indicates that everyone is already overexposed to the toxin, and incineration is one of the sources of the pollution.
[read more]

The fight over the Bliss-Ellisville dioxin sites is heating back up after a long hiatus. For more dioxin-related stories check out The Times Beach Chronicle


Riverfront Times (Missouri)
EPA Administrator Bob Feild

June 23, 1999, Wednesday

Developing Controversy

Suburban builders plan to construct dozens of pricey houses on former hazardous-waste sites

by C.D. Stelzer

The rugged land has resisted development for a long time, so a rural atmosphere still clings to these verdant hills, despite the encroachment of affluent subdivisions on the remaining ridgetop farms. But it would be wrong to think that nature has only now come under attack in this part of West St. Louis County.

Just off Strecker Road, in the gully washes that feed into Caulks Creek, the first of thousands of barrels of toxic waste were discovered nearly 19 years ago. The initial unearthing of the contaminated caches led one state environmental official to say at the time, "People move out here to escape pollution. This is where you find it, though."

Eventually several hazardous-waste sites would be identified in the area by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The federal agency would refer to them collectively as the "Bliss-Ellisville" site.

The first half of the name refers to Russell M. Bliss, the waste hauler responsible for dumping the pollutants. Bliss' son still lives on a Strecker Road property once owned by his father, from which the EPA only a few years ago finally removed more than 900 truckloads of dioxin-contaminated dirt in addition to an estimated 1,500-2,000 barrels of toxic chemicals. The haul included drums laden with cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

The second half of the site's name is something of a misnomer, because the locations of the Bliss farm and the other hazardous-waste sites are all outside the Ellisville municipal limits. Nowadays, much to its chagrin, all of this tainted history falls under the jurisdiction of the city of Wildwood, which was incorporated in 1995.

Wildwood residents originally voted to approve the creation of the municipality to control development, thereby ensuring that greenspace would be preserved. Now the fledgling city faces a dilemma: Two developers are asking for zoning variances so that they can wedge dozens of high-priced houses on either side of Strecker Road -- on parcels of land that were once part of the Bliss-Ellisville hazardous-waste site. The next meeting on the issue is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 6, at Wildwood City Hall, 16962 Manchester Rd.

The requests to develop these two properties have dredged up a litany of questions that have never been adequately answered by EPA officials or by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR). Those same officials are now siding with the developers, claiming that the once highly contaminated land is no longer a threat to human health, that it is now safe enough for backyard swingsets and tomato patches.

If the city allows W.J. Byrne Builders Inc. to build Strecker Forest, 31 houses will be constructed on the 18.5-acre tract. As things stand, Byrne Builders holds an option to buy the land from its current owners, Gerald and Patricia Primm. The couple's property is adjacent to the Bliss farm. An early EPA investigation found portions of the Primm property and three other adjacent parcels to be contaminated.

On the other side of the road, at 210 Strecker Rd., developer Larry Wurm of James Properties Inc. is proposing to build Wildwood Ridge, an 11-home development on 7.6 acres of land now owned by Jean Callahan. Her husband, Grover Callahan, worked as a truck driver for the Bliss Waste Oil Co. in the early 1970s. Before Times Beach -- the most notorious of the sites contaminated by Bliss -- became a household word, the EPA had already rated the Callahan property one of the most contaminated hazardous-waste sites in the nation. Although the state hastened to dispose of hundreds of barrels at the Callahan site in the early 1980s, the EPA did not close its case on the property until last September.

Wildwood currently zones the Strecker Road properties as "nonurban," which requires a minimum lot size of 3 acres. When considering deviations from the existing zoning code, the city takes into account several factors, such as the availability of utility services, topography and road conditions, but nothing on the municipal books deals with building houses on top of former hazardous-waste sites.

"It's a difficult position for the city," says Joe Vujnich, Wildwood's director of parks and planning. "We do not have the expertise that the U.S. EPA and Missouri Department of Natural Resources have. Obviously I have to depend upon them to do their job and hope that we do ours."

Among those who doubt the EPA's blanket endorsement is Tammy Shea, a Wildwood resident. "If they're going to develop the Callahan property, then we need to know exactly what took place there. The version that the developer presented to Wildwood is pretty vague about what happened," Shea says. "It's very confusing, the fact that they've kind of lumped these properties together yet dealt with them differently. Why were they in such a hurry to clean up the Callahan site? They were in there in 1981, pulling out barrels and treating them differently from the rest of the waste. They didn't take the barrels from the Bliss farm until 1996, when the incinerator was here. So why were they in such a rush to get the barrels off the Callahan property?" asks Shea.

As for developer Wurm, he believes the Callahan property has been cleaned up, but he's counting on the findings of state and federal regulators to protect him against any future liability.

"It's no problem. It's clean as a whistle," says Wurm of the Callahan property. "It's clean as a whistle," he repeats. "Look at the record of decision. I've got letters from EPA and DNR also stating that everything is cool on the property." But Wurm says he doesn't want to discuss the project in detail, fearing his plans will be misrepresented. "When I talked with the (St. Louis) Post-Dispatch, I got misquoted. It was an abortion. So I'll just let the record of decision stand for itself, OK? Tom What's-his-face at the Post-Dispatch, he didn't have time. He didn't want to look at all this shit. And blah, blah, blah. You got to do your homework on these pieces, otherwise you're wasting your time.

"Nothing against journalists -- some of them are my best friends," Wurm adds.

Wurm is referring to Tom Uhlenbrock, who first reported the Wildwood development plans in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on June 11. Asked about Wurm's criticism, Uhlenbrock says the developer was "bent out of shape because he wanted the article to say that the Callahan property never had any dioxin or Russell Bliss on it." Uhlenbrock said he was unable to confirm whether dioxin had been found on the site or whether there was a Bliss connection to the property.

In 1994, the Post-Dispatch reported a dispute involving homebuyers in Turnberry Place subdivision, which abuts the Bliss farm. The buyers said they signed sales contracts without being told by their real-estate agents that their new homes were adjacent to a hazardous-waste site. Seven families sued the responsible Realtor, and they were awarded a cumulative settlement of more than $500,000. If the city approves their respective developments, Wurm and Byrne hope to avoid this legal pitfall by having buyers sign a disclosure form saying that they were told in advance of the land's history.

The full history of the Callahan site and the others in the Caulks Creek watershed remains something of an enigma. Contacted by phone last Friday at EPA headquarters in Kansas City, Martha Steincamp, regional counsel for the EPA, could not provide details on the Bliss-Ellisville cleanups and referred all questions on the matter to Bob Feild, the agency's project manager. Feild did not return phone calls.

From publicly released EPA documents, this much is known: In the winter of 1981-1982, the DNR and EPA excavated more than 1,200 barrels of toxic waste from the Callahan property. The cleanup crew immediately sent 592 drums to a landfill in Wright City, Mo., but more than 600 barrels were stored on-site, along with 500 cubic yards of soil. The EPA removed the remaining barrels in July 1983. The agency then backfilled the hole with the same soil that had been stored at the site. A Post-Dispatch story dated April 4, 1983, describes the 500 cubic yards of soil stored at the Callahan site as being "contaminated."

A later EPA inspection showed that the land had subsequently subsided and would require stabilization. Despite evidence of erosion, the EPA's investigation concluded that the "fill area of the Callahan subsite was not contaminated (and) that the original objectives of the remedial action had either been achieved through natural processes, or were no longer considered necessary due to the preference expressed by the site owner."

Aside from groundwater contamination, the most serious threat to human health posed by the contamination at the Callahan site was airborne migration, according to the EPA. It would be better to err on the side of safety, says Shea, than risk exposing people to more hazardous waste by digging foundations on the Callahan property and inadvertently excavating a heretofore undetected layer of toxic waste. "I believe that the whole area there is littered with contamination pockets," she says. "Sometimes it's just best to leave well enough alone."

Shea is being dismissed as an alarmist. Wildwood city officials have questioned her credentials, and she says a real-estate agent recently criticized the motives behind her activism. In both instances, the allegations were not based so much on environmental concerns as they were on the bottom line.

"I guess Wildwood is just going to have to look at it from a credibility standpoint," says Shea. "What I'm going to ask is that they provide the citizens with some level of accountability, because we certainly aren't getting it from the EPA and we shouldn't have to depend on the developer to provide it."

By the EPA's count, the Bliss-Ellisville site contained at least seven separate waste-disposal locations. Sewer workers discovered the first batch of barrels on the property of the Rosalie Investment Co., near the intersection of Strecker and Clayton roads, in July 1980. The Callahan dump was discovered in August of that year.

Callahan started working for Bliss in the early 1970s, which would have been around the same time Bliss started hauling hazardous waste. After the discovery of the waste a decade later, Callahan testified in St. Louis County Circuit Court that he had used a lift truck to dump drums of waste, which Bliss had picked up at local industries, on the Callahan property. DNR officials described the location of the dump as a ravine, filled 15 feet deep with rusty barrels.

Three parties -- Jean Callahan, Kisco Co. and Bliss -- refused to pay for the cleanup. By 1982, the Missouri attorney general's office had entered negotiations with two other firms, American Can and GK Technologies. Ultimately, the state accepted $94,000 in 1988 as its part of a $660,000 settlement with several companies, a fraction of the estimated overall cleanup cost.

The biggest fish appears to have either slipped off or broken the line, however. In September 1980, Gov. Joseph P. Teasdale wrote a letter to Monsanto chairman John W. Hanley, requesting that the St. Louis-based chemical company pay for the cleanup. In his bid for re-election that year, Teasdale also made a campaign stop at the Bliss-Ellisville site to again ask for Monsanto's assistance. This time Teasdale made the plea with the TV news cameras rolling. Monsanto refused to consider the governor's appeal, even though before a federal ban on the chemical the company had been the sole producer of PCBs in North America.

whitehouse.com

It's important to understand that whoever leaked word of Spitzer's tryst to the New York Times broke the law because it's against the law to reveal information on an ongoing criminal investigation. One of the most likely sources is the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York -- Michael J. Garcia.




In March 2003 President Bush appointed Michael J. Garcia as the Assistant Secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and he was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in November 2003. Assistant Secretary Garcia led the second largest investigative agency in the Federal Government with over 20,000 employees, including 6,000 investigators, and a budget of more than $4 billion. The ICE mission is to secure the homeland through enforcement of immigration and customs laws and by protecting U.S. commercial aviation and federal facilities. ...
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Los Angeles Times, March 17:

BAGHDAD -- A female suicide bomber killed 36 people and a roadside bomb claimed the lives of two U.S. soldiers today as U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Republican Sen. John McCain sought to draw attention to successes in Iraq on separate visits to the country. ...
[read more]

gregpalast.com, March 14:

While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours. ...
[read more]

To gain access to the Forest Park bicycle path at Hi-Pointe in St. Louis, cyclists must cross a exit ramp to Interstate 64/Highway 40 that has no warning signs or other saftey features to alert drivers.

At right, Irving Brown, American labor leader and CIA spy.

CD Stelzer peers into the CIA’s murky operations and finds ‘Old Europe’ ain’t what it used to be

Former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld set the stage for the conflict in January 2003. Vexed by Germany and France’s opposition to United States plans to invade Iraq, Rumsfeld labeled the two nations as ‘Old Europe.’

‘Germany has been a problem and France has been a problem,’ Rumsfeld told Washington’s foreign press corps. ‘But you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe, they’re not with France and Germany. … They’re with the US. You’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s old Europe.’

The comment led to a diplomatic war of words and pointed to the growing rift between America and its longstanding allies. Three years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, mounting domestic opposition to the war in Iraq forced Rumsfeld to resign under pressure. The administration of George W Bush now finds itself politically eviscerated, mired by escalating violence in Iraq and weakened diplomatically elsewhere abroad.

In ‘Old Europe,’ opposition to US foreign policy has moved from words to action.

German prosecutors in Munich issued arrest warrants in February for 13 Central Intelligence Agency agents for the alleged kidnapping of Khaled el-Masri, a Lebanese-born German citizen. Munich prosecutors are basing their case on evidence provided by authorities in Spain, Italy and the European Union. The German charges preceded by about a week those issued in Italy against more than two dozen CIA operatives for the alleged abduction of Hasan Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, from Milan in February 2003. The Italian trial is scheduled to begin in June. The kidnappings are part of a covert CIA programme of ‘extraordinary renditions’ in which terrorist suspects are illegally nabbed and flown to undisclosed locations for interrogations. In both cases crewmembers of Aero Contractors, a CIA-connected company based in North Carolina, are named as participants. According to the charges, Aero employees transported el-Masri to Egypt and Omar to Afghanistan, where they were allegedly tortured.

A report approved by the European parliament in mid-February accused the governments of Ireland, Britain, Germany, Italy, Poland and other European Union states of permitting the CIA flights to operate within their borders. Base on a 12-month investigation, the report found that Ireland allowed 147 CIA flights to use Irish airports. In addition, European investigators concluded that nine CIA kidnap victims passed through Ireland on their way to so-called ‘black sites,’ where torture was allegedly used to gain information. The report says the Government’s acceptance of US diplomatic assurances failed to protect human rights as obligated under the law. It also criticised Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern for withholding some information to the committee investigating the CIA flights.

As evidenced by the indictments and EU report, the CIA continues to operate in much of Europe. Some activities are apparently conducted in plain sight, more overt than covert. In Northern Ireland, for instance, the three-member Independent Monitoring Commission, which oversees demilitarisation of loyalist and republican factions, includes Richard J. Kerr, a retired deputy director of the CIA. Despite his espionage background, the involvement of a former top American spy doesn’t seem to raise any eyebrows in Dublin or Belfast.

Overall, however, the CIA’s current involvement in internal European affairs pales in comparison to the Cold War era.

The defeat of Nazi Germany by allied forces in 1945 set the stage for a power struggle between victors, with Britain and the US on one side and the Soviet Union on the other. In July 1947, fearing that Western European governments would fall under the influence of Soviet communism, the United States implemented a multi-billion-dollar foreign aid package – the European Recovery Plan – more commonly known as the Marshall Plan. The four-year programme, named after then-US Secretary of State George Marshall, is credited with leading the way for economic recovery in much of postwar Western Europe.

A few months later, US President Harry S Truman made another decision that would have lasting impact. He signed the National Security Act of 1947, creating the CIA.

In the autumn of 1947, the nascent intelligence agency would set a course of action that would be repeated dozens of times in years to come. To further US foreign policy objectives, the CIA would employ various proxies, including criminals, to infiltrate and ultimately subvert political parties, labor unions and other organizations. Politicians would be bought. Elections thrown. Coups engineered. Murders carried out. All in the name of democracy and freedom.

It all started in Marseilles, France.

In October 1947, the conservative mayor of Marseilles hiked public transit fares, sparking outrage among downtrodden workers. Fueled by the frustrations of postwar poverty, a Socialist-Communist coalition mounted a boycott of the city’s trams. Political tensions escalated for the next month, culminating in the events of November 12, when mass protests erupted. That afternoon Communist city councilmen were attacked at a city council meeting. In the evening, the violence spread. Gunfire wounded several demonstrators, killing one. The suspects in both the beatings and shootings were political allies of the mayor, members of the Corsican gangs that ruled the Marseilles underworld.

Brothers Antoine and Barthélemy Guerini, Marseilles leading Corsican gangsters, were arrested for the shootings, but within days charges were dropped, after police witnesses inexplicable recanted testimony. Meanwhile, Marseilles’ unions went on strike, which pushed the Confédération Génerale du Travail (CGT), France’s leftist labor affiliation, to follow suit nationwide. Millions of workers walked off the job in industries throughout France.

Marseilles’ dockworkers represented the most militant of the strikers. Their closing of the port of Marseilles threatened to derail the Marshall Plan. Moreover, in the eyes of Washington policy wonks, the French labor strife smacked of Soviet subversion. To stem the perceived red tide, the CIA called upon two leaders of the American labor movement to act in its behalf.

The CIA’s chief labor assets were Jay Lovestone of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and his top lieutenant Irving Brown. Over the next decades, the two men would use their respective positions in the international labor movement to clandestinely manipulate trade unions throughout the world.

For his part, Lovestone had perfect credentials: he helped found the Communist Party in the US. His long association with Local 22 of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union provided further cover. In 1929, Lovestone and the Lovestonites, as his minions came to be known, severed ties with Moscow following an ideological dispute the previous year. By 1944, Lovestone had shucked his communist ties altogether and moved up the bureaucratic ladder to head the AFL’s rabidly anti-communist Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC), the organization’s international arm.

Marching in lockstep with Lovestone’s political reversal, Brown moved the FTUC in the same direction in Europe. To counter the 1947 general strike in France, he devised a strategy of splitting the left by pitting the socialists and communist against each other. With the cooperation of Lovestone, Brown used money diverted from the US garment workers to set up Force Ouvrière, a non-communist union in France. After Brown installed Leon Jouhaux, a French socialist as its leader, the union broke with the communist-led CGT federation. When American union dollars dried up, Brown tapped the CIA for funding.

Losing little time, the agency funneled an estimated $1 million into the French Socialist Party, allowing it leadership to orchestrate a successful campaign against the strikers. CIA largesse bought cooperation of politicians such as Marseilles Socialist Gaston Defferre and Socialist Interior Minister Jules Moch. As a result, the latter official purged communist sympathisers from the ranks of law enforcement and then sanctioned savage police attacks on the picket lines.

More importantly, the CIA helped forge a lasting alliance between the Marseilles Socialist Party and the city’s Corsican gangsters. With money and arms supplied by CIA operatives, the Corsicans harassed communist union officials, and assaulted and murdered rank-and-file unionists. Overwhelmed by the reaction, the CGT called off the strike on Dec. 9. The CIA’s arranged marriage of Marseilles’ Socialists and the Corsican underworld endured for the next 25 years.

In 1950, the CIA sealed the bond by calling on Marseilles’ Socialists and their Corsican enforcers to once more do its bidding. In January of that year, Marseilles’ dockworkers, the vanguard of French labor, ordered a selective boycott of American military cargoes bound for the French colonial war in Indochina. The CGT endorsed the boycott a month later and the shutdown quickly spread to other sectors of French industry.

To crush the labor stoppage, the CIA channeled $2 million through the US government’s Office of Policy Coordination. Brown, the CIA’s European labor asset, used some of the money to furnish Corsican strongman Pierre Ferri-Pisani with Italian strikebreakers. By mid-April the dockworkers strike had been broken.

Due to their strong-armed support of the strikebreakers, the Guerinis’ political fortunes improved immediately. Having first aided Marseilles Socialist Gaston Defferre during the resistance movement, the two brothers had now established a secure footing in his postwar municipal government. Mayor Defferre and the local Socialist Party would employ Guerini bodyguards and campaign workers for the next 17 years.

The CIA nurtured partnership also wrought unintended financial benefits for the Marseilles underworld. With the waterfront now under its domination, the Guerinis and other Corsican outfits found themselves free to pursue their most profitable venture – heroin trafficking. Within months of breaking the dockworkers strike, the port of Marseilles began manufacturing and exporting large quantities of heroin to the United States, according to the Politics of Heroin by Alfred W. McCoy. At its zenith in 1965, the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics estimated that Corsican syndicates operated as many as 24 heroin-processing plants in or around Marseilles. French traffickers smuggled nearly five tonnes of pure heroin into America that year, according to the bureau. As a consequence, US heroin addiction skyrocketed.

The French connection relied on a steady supply of raw materials: opium from Turkey and morphine from Lebanon. Once refined, heroin shipments often traveled a circuitous sea route, entering the US either through Cuba or Canada. With their political connections at home, the Guerini brothers’ had literally found a safe harbour. But for the far-flung enterprise to succeed, it needed a well-established wholesale buyer.

The American Mafia filled that role.

Honouring a request by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the state of New York in 1946 granted Salvatore C. ‘Lucky’ Luciano an early parole under the condition that he be deported to Sicily. The unusual clemency was based on his supposed wartime cooperation. During his incarcertion, the ONI conducted extensive interviews with the notorious Mafia chief. With his criminal partner Meyer Lansky acting as a liaison, Luciano provided leads that, according to the Navy, helped secure New York harbor and also prepare the allies for the invasion of Sicily.

After he arrived in postwar Sicily, Luciano’s innate entrepreneurial spirit led him into the narcotics trade. He swiftly cornered the market by diverting legally produced heroin, manufactured by Shiapareilli, an Italian pharmaceutical company, to the United States. When that scheme collapsed, Luciano turned to the Corsican syndicates in Marseilles, including the Guerini brothers. Lansky again acted as the Mafia don’s emininence grise, hashing out an agreement in 1951 soon after the CIA had crowned the Guerini brothers overlords of Marseilles’ waterfront. Lansky, the American mob’s financial wizard, then went to Switzerland to set up untraceable bank accounts through which to launder the drug proceeds.

The French connection, at least the Guerinis control over it, fell apart in 1967, when a gang war claimed the life of Antoine and led to the imprisonment of Barthélemy. That same year, the United States belatedly bankrolled a crackdown on Turkish opium production.

By then, however, other Corsican traffickers had begun to shift their interests to Southeast Asia, where US troops, coincidentally, had replaced French forces. Not surprisingly, the CIA would also play a prominent part there, too. In 1973, press accounts alleged that Air America, the CIA’s proprietary airline, had participated in heroin smuggling in connection to the agency’s secret war in Laos.

In modern day Europe, 60 years after the fall of Nazi Germany, the Cold War is a fading memory, but the CIA continues its misdeeds on the continent. Only the names and faces of the enemy have changed. The communist ‘menace’ of the former Soviet Union has been replaced by the so-called ‘war on terror.’

In this new era, though, the agency no longer commands the dominant position it once did. Across the breath of Europe there has been an undeniable shift in public perception and political power. Italy, Germany and other European Union states are now demanding respect for their individual sovereignty and adherence to the rule of law. Despite this, the US is not expected to approve the extradition of the CIA agents wanted for kidnapping. The accused may, nevertheless, be tried in absentia, setting the stage for a spectacle that would further damage America’s tarnished reputation abroad.

When it comes to ‘Old Europe,’ the US may have better served its geo-political interests if it had chosen to honour its elders.

Illinois Times, April 26:
Illinois scientists search for the reasons bees are dropping like flies


The first reported disappearances came late last year in Florida. By January, investigators had determined that millions of individuals had gone missing, leaving few if any clues as to why. The bizarre phenomenon has prompted a nationwide scientific inquiry. In late March, a congressional subcommittee held a hearing on the matter.

As the quiet debate over the issue continues in the halls of government and university laboratories, the body count has risen with each passing day. Authorities in more than two dozen states have now verified similar cases. Disappearances have also occurred recently across Canada and Europe.

If it were happening to a larger species, the plight of Apis mellifera would likely have spurred greater public outcry. Instead, the mass annihilation has stayed mostly under the radar. But the dire situation has raised concerns among some scientists who are struggling to understand it.

“We don’t actually know what the cause of the problem is in honeybees,” says May R. Berenbaum, an entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “but one possibility is pesticide overload.” The scientist cautions that there are many other possible causes. ...
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More than 30 years after its theft, a Norman Rockwell painting stolen from a St. Louis art gallery was discovered earlier this year in the possession of Hollywood director Steven Spielberg. On its surface, it's an intriguing story. The details make it even more so. But nobody at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, made the effort to even look up the background information that 's available through the newspaper's own archives.

If anyone on the Post's staff had done so, they would have discovered that the missing Rockwell painting shared an interesting link to a couple of long unsolved local mysteries.

Instead, the newspaper chose to publish a wire service story on the recovered artwork, which was buried at the bottom of page 21A of its Saturday, March 3 edition.

That story reported Spielberg notified the FBI in California, after he recently became aware that the painting, "Russian Schoolroom," had been stolen before he purchased it. The filmmaker said he acquired the painting from a legitimate dealer in 1989. The Rockwell piece had been taken more than a decade earlier in a late-night burglary of a suburban St. Louis art gallery in late June 1973.

At the time, the painting was valued at between $20,000 to $25,000. Today, it is estimated to be worth $700,000. According to a FBI web site, the painting surfaced at an auction in New Orleans in October 1989. At that time, the FBI says that the painting was associated with Circle Galleries of Chicago and the Danenburg Gallery of New York. At the time of its theft in 1973, the painting had been purchased by St. Louisan Bert C. Elam.

The wire service story that ran in today's Post included some of this information. But old newspaper clips dating back to the 1970s, from the archives of the now-defunct St. Louis Globe-Democrat, as well as the Post-Dispatch, provide a fuller picture.

The painting was snatched late on a Sunday night or in the early morning hours of Monday June 24-25, 1973 from Arts International Ltd., 8113 Maryland Ave., Clayton, Mo. The out-of-town owner of the gallery, identified in today's wire service story as the aforementioned Circle Fine Art of Chicago, had arranged for the Rockwell painting to be exhibited here as part of a showing of other works by the same artist. The burglar or burglars smashed plate glass doors at the entrance to the gallery, grabbing only the one painting and leaving other Rockwell works of lesser value.

The Globe-Democrat quoted the late Marjorie Pond, the gallery's director, as saying: "That painting is known all over the country. There is no possible way they can unload that painting."

Despite its high-profile, however, the gallery director's prediction didn't prove true.

In 1978, Pond would be cited by the press again in another story having to do with stolen art from the same gallery. On Feb. 28 of that year, police raided the home of Russell Byers in the 9300 block of Frederic Court in Rock Hill, Mo., another St. Louis suburb. Law enforcement authorities seized suspected stolen artwork from Byers' residence -- including nine paintings by Norman Rockwell, according to a Globe-Democrat account. Months later, the Post-Dispatch reported that eight lithographs had been confiscated during the same raid. Those eight lithographs were also reported to have been stolen in 1976 from the same Clayton art gallery, Arts International Ltd.

The police had raided Byers' home because they suspected him of being the mastermind of one of two St. Louis Art Museum burglaries that occurred in early 1978. Investigators believed Byers had ordered the first burglary on Jan. 29 in which a valuable bronze by Frederick Remington and three other statuettes had been taken.

Two of the suspected burglars soon thereafter died violent deaths. A third burglary suspect refused to testify against Byers. Over the course of the next few months, the St. Louis police would recover all of the stolen art museum pieces. One suspect pleaded guilty in the case, but Byers managed to evade prosecution.

Byers, however, had also been charged with possessing the other stolen art from the 1976 Clayton art gallery heist. But those charges were dropped, too, on May 25, 1978, after Pond, the art gallery director, failed to appear in court to testify. Other witnesses who failed to appear on the same date included policemen who had searched Byers' home and found the stolen artwork.

Then Post-Dispatch reporter Sally Bixby Defty paraphrased Pond as saying that "that she did not appear because because she had been told that the case would be thrown out of court."

Just who told the art gallery director that the case would be thrown out of court is not made clear in Defty's story. This much is clear: Byers, a convicted felon and career criminal, walked. Prosecutors in St. Louis and St. Louis County gave him a free get of jail card.

Not long after all charges were dropped against Byers, he became a the star witness in the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations hearings into the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. That summer, Byers would testify that he received a $50,000 offer to kill King from two St. Louis businessmen, alleged racists, in late 1966 or early 1967. By the time of Byers' testimony, however, the two men, John R. Kauffmann and John H. Sutherland, were already dead.

Based on Byers' testimony, the HSCA concluded that James Earl Ray, King's alleged assassin, killed the civil rights leader as part of a St. Louis-based conspiracy. The conspiracy theory had been put together by congressional investigator Conrad "Pete" Baetz, a deputy on leave from the Madison County, Ill. sheriff's department.

Byers alleged knowledge of the assassination plot came to the attention of the FBI only after he became a suspect in the art museum burglary case in the winter of 1978. By no small coincidence, on March 19, 1978, less than three weeks after local police raided Byers' house, the FBI in St. Louis claimed that they found a misfiled report. The report -- dated March 1974 -- was based on information provided to the bureau field office by informant Richard O'Hara, a criminal associate of Byers. In the report, O'Hara claimed Byers had bragged about receiving the offer to kill King.

In 1992, as a reporter for the Riverfront Times, St. Louis' alternative weekly, I asked Baetz about Byers' involvement in the St. Louis Art Museum burglaries of 1978. Baetz said he never knew that Byers had been a suspect in the case.

The former congressional investigator's expressed ignorance, can lead to only three conclusions: Baetz's memory is bad or his investigative skills are worse or he lied.

Perhaps the new Democratically-controlled Congress should consider investigating its own 1978 inquiry into the assassination of King.

But I wouldn't bet on it.
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The Washington power shift begins to pay off for Amtrak, but the railroad still has far to go

Illinois Times, Jan. 25:

by C.D. Stelzer

Tuesday, 9:18 a.m.: The train arrives at the Alton station on time, and a mother, cradling her baby, boards. Once seated, she pounds on the window. The clamor interrupts an elderly couple’s card game and wakes the man across the aisle. On the platform below, grandma waves goodbye.

Welcome aboard the northbound Texas Eagle, one of five Amtrak passenger trains that now offer daily service between St. Louis and Chicago. Since departing St. Louis 45 minutes earlier, the Eagle has lumbered by rusty steel mills and oil refineries that parallel the Mississippi River. From here, the train gathers speed across the Illinois prairie, flashing by furrowed farm fields, grain elevators, and orchards on its way to Springfield. In an hour, it arrives in the capital city.
The sound of the baby crying is free. The cost of the trip: $12.

More than 3 million travelers bought Amtrak tickets to or from Illinois destinations last year, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation. The agency estimates that monthly ridership on state-sponsored trains on the Chicago-St. Louis runs grew by nearly 50 percent between November 2005 and November 2006. That increase is due to the $24 million appropriated by the Illinois Legislature, which doubled the state’s allocation last year. The added money funded two more daily trains on the route. It also increased service on other downstate routes by adding one train between Chicago and Quincy and another between Chicago and Carbondale.

Under a bipartisan proposal put forward last week in the U.S. Senate, Illinois passenger rail service may continue to surge. ...
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Island can be ordered from Small World Media, Knocknaquirk, Magheramore, Co Wicklow, or by emailing islandeditorial@googlemail.com or ringing Robert on 087 955 1504.
Subscriptions are €40 for 4 issues, postage and packaging inclusive.
Individual copies are €9.95 plus postage and packaging. Cheques are payable to Small World Media


Island (Ireland), Winter 2006/2007

CD Stelzer investigates the secret role of freight airlines under contract to the US military and asks why they are allowed to refuel at civilian airports all over the world


On three successive nights in early August 2006, members of the Trident Ploughshares raided Prestwick Airport in Scotland. After breaching security fences with wire cutters, the anti-war activists observed US Air Force transport planes on the tarmac and in a nearby service hangar. In two instances, they brazenly boarded military aircraft, rummaging through their interiors before being arrested.

The activists suspected the Americans of using the airport as part of an operation to resupply Israel with deadly munitions. They did not find the evidence they sought, but news of their arrests stirred a controversy in the United Kingdom. The ensuing debate over airport security among other issues overshadowed what the protesters had discovered.

At Prestwick, the ‘citizen inspectors’, as they call themselves, observed Atlas Air and Polar Air Cargo planes mixed in with the military aircraft. The same company — Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings of Purchase, New York, owns the two commercial transporters. Both are registered as private businesses, offering a wide range of services to civilian customers.

Both companies are also part of the Civilian Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) — an arm of the United States Air Force. Frequent use of Prestwick by CRAF carriers is one reason the assorted scofflaws gave for committing their acts of civil disobedience.
The activists say they knew about the suspicious activities of these particular air cargo companies because their Irish counterparts at Shannon Airport, so-called ‘plane spotters’ had long reported on them.

Despite the clamour of anti-war protesters on both sides of the Irish Sea, few details concerning these US military-sponsored flights have been released.

To date, officials in Ireland and the United Kingdom have remained mostly reticent, failing to acknowledge any impropriety with respect to the US military’s use of civilian air facilities.

When asked directly, a spokesperson for the US Air Force Air Mobility Command (AMC) at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois refused to divulge whether CRAF planes specifically carry weapons, preferring instead to generically refer to all cargoes as Defence Department ‘freight’.

The AMC spokesperson also denied that CRAF planes are engaged in any intelligence-related activities, contradicting a 1996 Defense Department regulation that allows ‘classified material up to and including Secret [to] be transmitted outside the United States’ on board CRAF aircraft.
A spokesperson for the Atlas Air Worldwide declined to comment, as well, saying only that ‘as a matter of corporate policy, we do not publicly comment on our customers, their cargo, routes or schedules’.

There is no doubt, however, that CRAF planes are hauling weapons. In a recent letter obtained by ISLAND through Senator David Norris’ office, Minister for Transport Martin Cullen cited five instances in which Polar Air Cargo flights had been granted exemptions by the Government to fly weapons or munitions through Irish air space. In September, the US Defence Department allocated another $2.3 billion to the CRAF programme for the next fiscal year. Teams of American civilian airlines bid on these lucrative military contracts.

This year, as in the past, Atlas and Polar teamed up with Federal Express, which scored a contract valued at between $185 million and $1 billion — nearly half of CRAF’s current budget. The Pentagon implemented the CRAF programme in 1991, during the first Gulf War. But doling out military air support work to the private sector goes back even further.

The US defence establishment started employing commercial airlines several decades ago, a habit that has had the side effect of blurring the line between civilian and military aviation. More important, it creates a gray area used to finance US covert operations. A close look at a company once closely affiliated with Polar Air Cargo is a good way of shedding some light on this murky netherworld....

A revised version of this story was published in Illinois Times in November.
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Chicago Tribune, Jan. 1:

by Jon Hilkevitch

The databases of various UFO-watching groups are full of accounts filed by pilots about sightings of unknown aircraft and anomalies that affected navigational equipment onboard planes.

Whether any of the UFO incidents are real or merely the result of individual perceptions, some experts say the events pose a potential safety risk to pilots and their passengers.

"There have been documented cases where safety appears to have been implicated, and more and more we are coming to the point of view that we are dealing with an intelligent phenomenon," said Richard Haines, science director at the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, a private agency.

"We must be proactive before an aircraft goes down," said Haines, a former chief of the Space Human Factors Office at NASA's Ames Research Center.

Haines is investigating the O'Hare incident. He said he has determined that no weather balloons were launched in the vicinity of O'Hare on Nov. 7.

"It's absurd that the military would be conducting aerial test flights" near the airport, Haines said.

All the witnesses to the O'Hare event, who included at least several pilots, said they are certain based on the disc's appearance and flight characteristics that it was not an airplane, helicopter, weather balloon or any other craft known to man.

United denies UFO report

They're not sure what was hanging out for several minutes in the restricted airspace, but they are upset that no one in power has taken the matter seriously.

A United spokeswoman said there is no record of the UFO report. She said United officials do not recall discussion of any such incident.

"There's nothing in the duty manager log, which is used to report unusual incidents," said United spokeswoman Megan McCarthy. "I checked around. There's no record of anything."

The pilots of the United plane being directed back from Gate C17 also were notified by United personnel of the sighting, and one of the pilots reportedly opened a windscreen in the cockpit to get a better view of the object estimated to be hovering 1,500 feet above the ground.

The object was seen to suddenly accelerate straight up through the solid overcast skies, which the FAA reported had 1,900-foot cloud ceilings at the time.

"It was like somebody punched a hole in the sky," said one United employee.

Witnesses said they had a hard time visually tracking the object as it streaked through the dense clouds.

It left behind an open hole of clear air in the cloud layer, the witnesses said, adding that the hole disappeared within a few minutes.

The United employees interviewed by the Tribune spoke on condition of anonymity.

Some said they were interviewed by United officials and instructed to write reports and draw pictures of what they observed, and that they were advised by United officials to refrain from speaking about what they saw.

Federal agency backtracks

Like United, the FAA originally told the Tribune that it had no information on the alleged UFO sighting. But the federal agency quickly reversed its position after the newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

An internal FAA review of air-traffic communications tapes, a step toward complying with the Tribune request, turned up the call by the United supervisor to an FAA manager in the airport tower, Cory said.

Cory said the weather might have factored into what the witnesses thought they saw.

"Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon," she said. "That night was a perfect atmospheric condition in terms of low [cloud] ceiling and a lot of airport lights. When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things. That's our take on it."


Some joke, others research

The databases of various UFO-watching groups are full of accounts filed by pilots about sightings of unknown aircraft and anomalies that affected navigational equipment onboard planes.

Whether any of the UFO incidents are real or merely the result of individual perceptions, some experts say the events pose a potential safety risk to pilots and their passengers.

"There have been documented cases where safety appears to have been implicated, and more and more we are coming to the point of view that we are dealing with an intelligent phenomenon," said Richard Haines, science director at the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, a private agency.

"We must be proactive before an aircraft goes down," said Haines, a former chief of the Space Human Factors Office at NASA's Ames Research Center.

Haines is investigating the O'Hare incident. He said he has determined that no weather balloons were launched in the vicinity of O'Hare on Nov. 7.

"It's absurd that the military would be conducting aerial test flights" near the airport, Haines said.

All the witnesses to the O'Hare event, who included at least several pilots, said they are certain based on the disc's appearance and flight characteristics that it was not an airplane, helicopter, weather balloon or any other craft known to man.

United denies UFO report

They're not sure what was hanging out for several minutes in the restricted airspace, but they are upset that no one in power has taken the matter seriously.

A United spokeswoman said there is no record of the UFO report. She said United officials do not recall discussion of any such incident.

"There's nothing in the duty manager log, which is used to report unusual incidents," said United spokeswoman Megan McCarthy. "I checked around. There's no record of anything."

The pilots of the United plane being directed back from Gate C17 also were notified by United personnel of the sighting, and one of the pilots reportedly opened a windscreen in the cockpit to get a better view of the object estimated to be hovering 1,500 feet above the ground.

The object was seen to suddenly accelerate straight up through the solid overcast skies, which the FAA reported had 1,900-foot cloud ceilings at the time.

"It was like somebody punched a hole in the sky," said one United employee.

Witnesses said they had a hard time visually tracking the object as it streaked through the dense clouds.

It left behind an open hole of clear air in the cloud layer, the witnesses said, adding that the hole disappeared within a few minutes.

The United employees interviewed by the Tribune spoke on condition of anonymity.

Some said they were interviewed by United officials and instructed to write reports and draw pictures of what they observed, and that they were advised by United officials to refrain from speaking about what they saw.

Federal agency backtracks

Like United, the FAA originally told the Tribune that it had no information on the alleged UFO sighting. But the federal agency quickly reversed its position after the newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

An internal FAA review of air-traffic communications tapes, a step toward complying with the Tribune request, turned up the call by the United supervisor to an FAA manager in the airport tower, Cory said.

Cory said the weather might have factored into what the witnesses thought they saw.

"Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon," she said. "That night was a perfect atmospheric condition in terms of low [cloud] ceiling and a lot of airport lights. When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things. That's our take on it."

St. Louis Globe-Democrat,June 20, 1955

Woman Tells of “Policemen’s Night” at Parlor Operated by Mrs. Lytz

About 20 police officers attended “Policemen’s Night” Christmas parties that Mrs. June Alma Lytz, slain disorderly house operator, staged in June’s Bath and Massage Parlor at 308A North Theresa Ave., a woman aquaintance has told authorities.

The woman, who said she did not know the sort of place Mrs. Lytz was running, has told investigators the parties were given every year for three or four years prior to 1947.

She said the officers, some in uniform and some in plainclothes, were served ham, roast beef, potato salad, and other food and also drinks.

The officers, she said, came in groups of about five at different times, staying from half an hour to an hour. While they did drink, none got intoxicated, she added.

In the meantime, the Globe-Democrat learned the Circuit Attorney’s office,which is directing a grand jury investigation of reported payoffs to police by Mrs. Lytz, is conducting a search for several thousands dollars worth of jewelry Mrs. Lytz is reported to have owned but which is mysteriously missing.

The woman who told of the parties for police officers said she used to help Mrs. Lytz prepare the buffet meals. Asked how she knew the men in plainclothes were officers, she said Mrs. Lytz described the affair as “Policemen’s Night.”

The woman said she never saw Mrs. Lytz give any of the officers any money, but that Mrs. Lytz always escorted the officers past a small sideroom where there was a heap of wrapped Christmas presents. Whether the officers were given any presents the woman did not know.

Mrs. Lytz’ former husband, Werner Lytz, has told the Globe-Democrat Mrs. Lytz used to give Christmas cards with money in them to police officers.

The woman acquaitance said that among the officers were former patrolman Elmer Dolan and former Police Lt. Lou Shoulders, now serving federal prison sentences for perjury in connection with the missing Greenlease ransom money inquiry.

Asked how she remembered Shoulders and Dolan, she said they “stayed longer than any of the other officers.”

She also said Mrs. Lytz was an expert Christmas package wrapper and told her that some policemen used to c ome to her to have Christmas packages wrapped for their wives.

She further quoted Mrs. Lytz as saying that some officers used to come to her place upstairs on the corner of Theresa and Olive street, to watch the Veiled Prophet parade, when it formerly followed Olive street.

A second woman acquaintance of Mrs. Lytz has told of seeing more than 100 wrapped Christmas packages in Mrs. Lytz’ place two days before last Christmas. These were packages which were going out.

This woman also said there was a ham which Mrs. Lytz told her was to go to the “police station.” She quoted Mrs. Lytz as saying she had already sent some hams to the station, which was not identified by district.

Both women said Mrs. Lytz, at various times, had shown them numerous pieces of jewelry. According to the second woman, this included a large diamond ringwhich Mrs. Lytz said was an engagement ring from an out-of-town business man.

There also was a matched set consisting of a watch, ring, pin and necklace made of white gold mesh and diamonds. The second woman quoted Mrs. Lytz as saying she kept here “good jewelry in a box” except for a pair of earrings which she wore occasionally.

Hiding Place Sought

Investigators have searched Mrs. Lytz’ place for a possible hiding place for the jewelry and also are trying to find out if she had a safe deposit box anywhere.


The second woman said Mrs. Lytz told here she kept a list of her jewelry, but none has been found.

The Public Administrator’s office, which is handling Mrs. Lytz’ estate, said there was an assortment of jewelry turned over to it but that much of it was costume jewelry and the entire lot has been appraised at something over $500.

Mrs. Lytz was shot to death on the street Apr. 21 by a man who wounded two other women during a shooting spree. The shootings had nothing to do with the operation of Mrs. Lytz’ place.

Blue collar radiation exposure lacks cachet for Fourth Estate

The media stir caused by the recent poisoning death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London recently has focused attention on Polonium-210, the radioactive isotope thought to have killed him. The chief suspect in the case is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who Litvinenko accused of orchestrating his assassination shortly before he died.

The story of Litvinenko's mysterious death has all the ingredients of a bestselling thriller worthy of Ian Fleming or Tom Clancy. The quantity of Polonium-210 used to kill the ex-spy was the size of a grain of sand. The poisoning has made headline worldwide. But the potential radioactive contamination of large volumes of beer at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis in 1988 received far less scrutiny.

Polonium-210 was also the subject of concern in that case. Government inspectors determined that static air eliminators used on production lines at the brewery were found to be leaking the nuclear material for an unspecified length of time. But when the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported the problem it downplayed the health risks to workers and consumers and misrepresented where the contamination took place.

Radioactive leaks also occurred at other St. Louis area companies, including McDonnell Douglas Corp., which sent some of its workers home after the leaks were discovered. 3M Corp. of Minneapolis produced the faulty devices that caused the hazard.

The Post-Dispatch first broached the subject on Saturday Feb. 6, 1988. In its initial story by staffers Peter Hernon and Theresa Tighe, the newspaper reported leaks in laboratories at McDonnell-Douglas. Three days later, a page one story by Christine Bertelsen reported on the radioactive contamination at Anheuser-Busch and elsewhere. The second paragraph of that story said: "Officials at Anheuser-Busch insisted that 'absolutely no health hazard existed.'" The story goes on to quote a brewery spokesman denying any risk: "There was no effect whatsoever on product quality. ... No plants were shut down."

Indeed, work continued uninterrupted at the brewery and unlike McDonnell-Douglas no workers at Anheuser-Busch were sent home or tested.

Bertelsen's story said that "areas contaminated with low-level emissions were cleaned last week." But the story gave no indication of where the leaks occurred. After the front-page coverage on Feb. 9, 1988, the story all but died in St. Louis. Three days later, on Feb. 12, 1988, then-Post reporter Joan Bray filed a story buried on page 4-C with the obituaries that reported further recalls of faulty 3M static air eliminators. Bray inaccurately reported that "laboratories where the devices were used at Anheuser-Busch ... have been decontaminated."

The faulty static air eliminators weren't used in laboratories, however. Instead, the devices were used in the production process to dust the inside of bottle caps before they were placed on the full bottles of beer coming out of the fillers.

Obviously, radioactive isotopes leaking at a point in the assembly lines where the filled beer bottles were capped posed a greater risk to consumers and workers then if the devices had merely leaked in laboratories. Whether the ceramic coating surrounding the radioactive pellets would lessen the risk of exposure wasn't cited.

I worked as a beer bottler at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis in 1988. When I learned that the leaks occurred on the bottling units and not in laboratories as reported by the Post-Dispatch, I called reporter Christine Bertelsen and informed her.

She didn't follow up on my tip.

More than two years later, Bertelsen did, however, report that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was seeking to fine 3M $160,000 over the defective devices. Her story wrongly identified the radioactive isotope that had leaked out of the devices as "polonium-20."

In March 1988, the NRC denied my Freedom of Information request on the radioactive leaks at Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, but the Food and Drug Administration released a partially redacted report of its limited inspection.

The inspection was categorized by FDA as "limited" because it did not independently test all of the suspected devices but relied largely on information provided by the NRC and Anheuser-Busch. Moreover, by blacking out the unit numbers in its report the FDA made it difficult, if not impossible, to determine which batches of beer may have been contaminated. Nonetheless, it is clear from the report that more than one bottle unit had operated with faulty static air eliminators that spewed Polonium-210. The copy of the report indicates that the FDA uncovered another bottle unit had been contaminated, which was overlooked by the NRC and Anheuser-Busch.

The FDA report says that Knut Heise, then-associate general counsel for Anheuser-Busch, "admitted that a mistake was made," by the company when it failed to initially identify the other faulty device that leaked Polonium-210. Led by Anheuser-Busch quality assurance employees, the FDA reported that it took samples of the various brands of Anheuser-Busch products for testing. The results of those tests are not contained in the report.

St. Louis-based FDA investigators Robert E. Davis and Robert Nesselhauf signed the report dated Feb. 12, 1988. The random samples taken would only represented a small fraction of the beer that could have potentially been contaminated.
Cleaning crews washed the contaminated surfaces down with water and the walls and columns were repainted. Work went on as usual and beer continued to be bottled, packaged and shipped 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Since then, of course, many Anheuser-Busch employees have died of cancer, and ingesting or breathing Polonium-210 can cause cancer. But no epidemiological studies have ever been conducted to determine whether a correlation exists that would link the leaks to cancer clusters in the work place.

Looking back on it, it's almost like the radioactive incident at the St. Louis brewery in 1988 never happened. Almost.

Off to Fight a Rich Man's War ...

or believing your own propaganda ...

An interview with John Stauber.

New Statesman, Nov. 20:

by Stephen Grey

More than 7,000 prisoners have been captured in America's war on terror. Just 700 ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Between extraordinary rendition to foreign jails and disappearance into the CIA's "black sites", what happened to the rest? ...
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RTE (Irish Public Broadcasting), Nov. 23

The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern, has told the Dáil that the Government has no plans to reconsider its decision to allow the US military to use Shannon Airport.
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Guardian, Nov. 21:

Robert Altman, arguably the most colourful and distinctive film-maker of his generation, has died in a hospital in Los Angeles, California. He was 81 years old.

A late bloomer, Altman was a middle-aged TV director when he took over the reins of 1969's Korean war satire MASH, reportedly after 17 other directors had turned it down. The movie tapped into a groundswell of opposition to the war in Vietnam and became a mammoth hit. It also established the director's genius for loose-limbed narratives and multi-tracked sound recording; a kind of controlled chaos that caught the mood of a culture in flux.
[read more]

[read more]

by Bob Dylan

Far between sundown's finish an' midnight's broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An' for each an' ev'ry underdog soldier in the night
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

In the city's melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched
With faces hidden while the walls were tightening
As the echo of the wedding bells before the blowin' rain
Dissolved into the bells of the lightning
Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an' forsaked
Tolling for the outcast, burnin' constantly at stake
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind
An' the unpawned painter behind beyond his rightful time
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken-for-granted situations
Tolling for the deaf an' blind, tolling for the mute
Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an' cheated by pursuit
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Even though a cloud's white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An' the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An' for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Starry-eyed an' laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an' we watched with one last look
Spellbound an' swallowed 'til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse
An' for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

a page from the late Danny Casolaro's Notes (click on pix to enlarge)

Student tasered at UCLA library on Tuesday night. Apparently, his papers weren't in order.

Illinois Times, Nov. 16:

Illinois senators noncommittal about the tarnished replacement for Rumsfeld

by C.D. Stelzer

The times, they are a-changin’ — or so it would appear at first glance.

Within hours of the Republican Party’s rout at the polls last week, President George W. Bush announced the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. At the same press conference, the president vowed to work with the newly elected Democratic majority in Congress. Both moves were seen as positive responses to voter dissatisfaction over the war in Iraq.

The air of bipartisanship now wafting from the White House may have a fishy smell, but Democrats, basking in their victory, don’t seem to mind the odor. Bush is already urging the Senate to fast-track confirmation of former CIA director Robert Gates to replace Rumsfeld — before the Democrats take control in January.

Neither of Illinois’ Democratic senators seems to want to slow that train down. ...
[read more]

With the Republicans taking a "thumping" in the mid-term congressional elections yesterday, the president fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The announcement of Rumsfeld's overdue departure came at the Bush's press conference early this afternoon, which is a single that his administration is finally bending to public opposition to the Iraq war. The president used the word "thumping" to describe the Republican Party's defeat, which included more than two dozen House seats and a half dozen senatorial contests.

The president prompted dispelled, however, any idea that real change would take place in his foreign policy by nominating Robert Gates, a former CIA director and Iran-Contra figure, to head the Pentagon.

In the end you could see it in his eyes, the tone of his voice and the way he held himself: Republican Senator Jim Talent didn't want to win. He had resigned himself to defeat before Tuesday's upset.

The tip off came in the incumbent's last TV ads. Gone were the attacks on his oppenent, the shrill accusations, the crude allegation tarring his opponent Missouri State Auditor Claire McCaskill and her husband and family and their dog. Those ads, paid for by the national Republican Party, were straight out of the play book of Bush's Evil Brain, Karl Rove, and Talent had tired of cutting deals with the devil to retain power.

The bells are ringing outside in the Irish-American neighborhood in which I live here in this old Midwestern city on the banks of the Mississippi, and the sky at dawn has cleared after days of gloom. With the clearing, there is a palpable sense of relief, as if a curse had finally been broken. And it was in Talent's final campaign commercial that glimmer of hope first appeared, a harbinger of a change in the current of public life in Missouri and the nation.

He stands alone among a grove silver maples, their fall colors a brilliant yellow hue. Talent looks at the camera, his head slightly downcast, hands jammed in his pockets, dressed in a casual fall wardrobe that makes him appear like he is a model posing for a JC Penney catalouge. And like a model on a photo shoot, he stands rigid. The camera stays at mid distance, tentative in its approach, seemingly afraid to move closer. As he speaks in generalities about family values and Missouri's destiny, his voice is muted. There is no fire in his oratory. And that, of course, is how the ad was made to appear. But what also inadvertently comes out in the ad is Talent's longing to done with it all. He is a beaten man. He is beaten not so much by his opponent, but by his own allies and their misguided decisions to "stay the course" in Iraq.

When the boyish Jim Talent looked in the lens of the camera, the public saw a plea for help, a begging for forgiveness, and he was granted those requests on Tuesday. Jim Talent doesn't have to hang out with the wrong crowd anymore. He can take his ball and go home. He will no longer have to associate himself with the ilk who have lied to the American people repeatedly and brought shame on the country. The men and women who he has sent to Iraq to kill or be killed have not been given such an easy reprieve. They remain there today carrying out their duties as they did yesterday, and the day before, and last year and the year before that. Some of them returning to battle more than once, separated from their friends, families and loved ones.

Jim Talent has gone home. When will they?

With a 85 percent of the Missouri precincts reporting and holding only a one percentage point lead, Missouri State Auditor Claire McCaskill, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, l declared victory at 1:00 a.m. Wednesday Nov. 8. Speaking before a partisan crowd in downtown St. Louis at the Renaissance Hotel, McCaskill, 53, invoked the memory of Missourian Harry S Truman, saying that the late president and senator would be proud of that the Democratic Party had reclaimede the senate seat he once held. Incumbent Republican Senator Jim Talent conceded minutes later.

The McCaskill victory in Missouri may swing the balance of power in both chambers of the Congress to the Democratic Party, after wins earlier Tuesday placed the Democrats in control of the House of Representatives.

The Democratic sweep is widely seen as a referendum against President George W. Bush and his policies, including the war in Iraq.

Island magazine (Ireland), June 2006:

An expatriate speaks out against the war


Senator David Norris and Caitlin O'Rudhain on O'Connell Street in Dublin, Feburary 2006

When American Caitlin O’Rudhain arrived in Ireland three years ago, she longed for a respite from the militaristic atmosphere that grips the United States. Instead of a peaceful sanctuary, however, she touched down in what appeared to be a United States airbase.

‘I just wanted to kiss the earth and smoke a cigarette,’ says O’Rudhain, recounting her landing at Shannon Airport at 4:30 a.m. on 4 February 2003. ‘Then I went into the airport (terminal) and I was greeted by 1,500 US Marines. I mean you could have knocked me over with a feather. I was flabbergasted.

‘I thought I would be coming to a neutral country,’ she says. ‘I believed I was going to experience the ultimate getaway from it all. I had a lot of romantic notions about Ireland, neutrality being one of those romantic notions.’

O’Rudhain recalls being vaguely aware that Ireland provided support to the Bush administration’s so-called war on terror, but until that moment she hadn’t realized the extent of the cooperation.

Standing in a queue at the airport coffee stand that morning, she remembers striking up a conversation with a young female recruit who expressed doubts about the morality of her pending combat duty. The brief encounter left a lasting impression on O’Rudhain. Foremost, she realized that Ireland was not a haven from the global effects of US foreign policy -- it was a staging ground.

The US had already invaded Afghanistan by the time she arrived in Ireland and was set to do the same in Iraq. She has watched with alarm as the troop numbers passing through Shannon have more than doubled in the intervening years. By 2005, the annual total had leaped to more than 300,000. Moreover, Shannon is now known to be a refueling stop for covert US Central Intelligence Agency flights, which are now under investigation by various European nations and the Council of Europe. The so-called ‘extraordinary rendition’ missions reportedly involve the illegal abductions of terror suspects in Europe. The kidnapped suspects are then reputedly flown to countries often located in the Middle East that permit torture as part of the interrogation process.

Since moving to Ireland to join her husband Eamonn Ruane, an Irish citizen, O’Rudhain, a former Texan, has adopted a Gaelic name as a gesture of respect for Irish culture. But she exhibits little or no deference towards what she sees as the Government’s complicity in aiding US war crimes.

Within a month of her arrival, in March 2003, O’Rudhain says she began to take an active interest in the Irish anti-war movement. She attended protests in Dublin in advance of the American invasion of Iraq. Initially, however, the bulk of her involvement was limited to Internet exchanges, sharing information and commiserating with war opponents online. But last year, she came to the conclusion that wasn’t enough.

Her change in attitude started with a bit of innocent reconnaissance in her own backyard. She began observing the passing aircraft from the vantage point of her garden in County Wexford, wondering whether any of them might be American warplanes. If they were US military planes, O’Rudhain wondered whether they carried weapons of mass destruction or corpses of American soldiers. The thoughts disturbed her. She felt compelled to act.

‘I really decided that this just this wasn’t going to happen unless I did something. I really had to get up off derriere and into the streets. I really had to do it. I had spent almost two years sending photographs and information, posting on Indie Media wires, different forums, and still nothing was happening.

‘You expect someone else to do something with this information and make something happen,’ O’Rudhain says. ‘Finally you realize that that someone is me. If I don’t do it, nobody else is going to.’

Her epiphany came around the time that Ciaron O’Reilly, one of the Shannon Five, gave a talk in nearby Enniscorthy. The Catholic Worker and other members of the Pit Stop Ploughshares were charged in early 2003 with damaging a US Navy aeroplane at Shannon. O’Reilly’s words of resistance had the transformative impact of attending a religious revival or camp meeting, as it is known in the American South, says O’Rudhain. She had been inspired by the willingness of O’Reilly and other Irish activists to put their lives at risk for the cause.

As she speaks, O’Rudhain absent-mindedly touches the peace sign necklace that she wears, as if it is her rosary or worry beads. Seated in the small kitchen of her rented sexton’s cottage in rural County Wexford, she pauses to a sip Diet Coke from a glass on the table beside her, after folding a batch of pink bandanas.

The bandanas are O’Rudhain’s contribution to the improvised uniform of the Irish chapter of Code Pink, the group that sprang up to aid American anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey passed through Shannon shortly before his death in Iraq in April 2004. The name of the group is a satiric jab at the US Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded terror alarm system.

Last December, O’Rudhain arranged for Sheehan to meet with Senator David Norris, an outspoken Irish critic of US foreign policy.

O’Rudhain and Norris crossed paths while attending Irish anti-war rallies. An affinity developed between the two. Both share a devotion to Irish literature: Norris being a renowned James Joyce scholar and O’Rudhain a student of poet and playwright William Butler Yeats. They share something else in common, too: a desire for peace. O’Rudhain describes Norris as “one of the most passionate, eloquent spokespersons in the Irish Government against the use of Shannon or any Irish airport for the war on terror.’

Bringing Norris and Sheehan together seemed a natural fit to O’Rudhain. ‘Cindy came to prominence because (US President) George W. Bush would not meet with her,’ says O’Rudhain. ‘I thought here’s someone in the Irish Government who will meet with her. At that point, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and the foreign minister had refused to meet with Cindy.’

Being an American protesting her own government’s foreign policies abroad has put O’Rudhain in a rather peculiar circumstance. The reaction she has received in Ireland to her anti-war activism has been at times both a blessing and a curse.

‘It really depends on the politics of the person you’re talking to, and also how the media is spinning it (the war) at the time. Sometimes it is very enthusiastic, and then there’s the negative (reactions), where they’re very suspicious of you,’ says O’Rudhain, who laughs off occasional accusations of being an American spy. ‘People think I’m CIA. That is so funny. I wonder who started that rumour?’ On a more serious note, she says: ‘It’s a difficult position to be an American in Ireland and be opposed to US foreign policy. You have to prove yourself.’

O’Rudhain is often asked quite bluntly why the American people have gone along with Bush’s policies and why he hasn’t been drummed out of from yet. ‘Then you find yourself in a position of trying to explain US constitutional law,’ she says.

On the other side of the argument, there are many Irish people who hold an allegiance to United States because of the two nations’ close historical ties. ‘This is the most pro-American country in Europe,’ O’Rudhain says. ‘The Irish seem to feel that they owe something to America. Americans sent a lot of money to Ireland after the famine. But it wasn’t the American government who was supporting them – it was Irish Americans.’

The rationale by Irish officials for supporting the US war in Iraq is equally dubious, according to O’Rudhain. ‘They’re afraid that if they oppose US foreign policy that the United States will pull its business from Ireland. But American businesses go where they’re going to make a profit. They don’t care about patriotism. During all of the French bashing, the United States corporations increased investments in France by 40 percent. They go where the money is. That’s what businesses do.’

Indeed, one of those opportunistic American businesses -- with current contractual ties to the Irish Department of Transportation -- is Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the corporation formerly headed by US Vice President Dick Cheney. Texas-based KBR, the largest beneficiary of no-bid US military contracts in Iraq, has also been awarded multiple highway construction contracts in Ireland, including the controversial Dublin Port Tunnel project.

After driving by the tunnel construction site a few years ago and seeing evidence of KBR’s involvement in the project, O’Rudhain became further dismayed. ‘I thought why did I leave America? Why did I leave? I didn’t leave’. They say Israel is the 51st state. This must be the 52nd.’

O’Rudhain, who calls Bertie Ahern the ‘Teflon taoiseach,’ begrudgingly credits the Irish leader for his ability to sidestep issues, including the use of Shannon by the US military. But she still can’t fathom why the Irish electorate so readily accepts transparent manipulations of public opinion such as Ahern’s annual pilgrimage to the White House on St. Patrick’s Day.

‘Why does the prime minister of Ireland have to go pay tribute to the president of the United States? What if George Bush came over to Ireland on 4th of July,’ she asks, referring the American national holiday. ‘The Irish are being brainwashed. They think they’re being honored. It’s just awful.’

Despite her criticisms, O’Rudhain remains confident that the Irish people will recognise the errors of its Government and ultimately hold those responsible accountable. ‘If you speak to the average Irish person,’ she says, ‘they’re not in favor of torture, they’re not in favor of killing people.’

Island magazine, June 2006

Irish Senator David Norris Sounds Off on America's Misguided Foreign Policy

Senator David Norris doesn’t mince words when it comes to his opposition to the US war in Iraq: ‘I’m opposed to the war because the war is illegal, immoral and unjustifiable,’ he says.

It is a message Norris, an Independent, has been repeating for years in the Seanad Eireann. As a member of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Oireachtas, he opposed the war before the invasion in March 2003 and has been a staunch critic of the so-called ‘war on terror’ ever since. With the ongoing revelations of kidnapping and torture by the US Central Intelligence Agency, his criticisms appear more valid than ever and show no signs of abating.

Earlier this year, the efforts of Norris and other legislators to establish a Government inquiry into the CIA’s use of Shannon Airport for its ‘extraordinary rendition’ flights failed to gain the necessary support of the ruling Fiann Fail party. But the senator, who branded the majority party’s inaction as cowardly, remains undeterred, redoubling his support of the European Union’s investigations of the issue, while continuing the debate in Ireland via the mass media.

Norris, a Trinity University graduate and noted James Joyce scholar, is no stranger to uphill political battles. Since spearheading the campaign for gay rights in Ireland 30 years ago, the indefatigable Dubliner has remained an outspoken figure in Irish politics, winning a seat in the upper house in 1987 after several unsuccessful tries.

Seated at a cluttered desk in his basement office in Leinster House, the windowsill crammed with books, the bearded Norris appears professorial in his three-piece suit, wire-rimmed specs and receding hairline. But when he launches a series of broadsides against the US, British and Irish governments’ foreign policies he sounds less like an academic lecturer and more the firebrand orator.

‘A hundred thousand civilians at least have been killed by Anglo-American bombardment,’ says Norris. There seems to be no control. Chemical weapons and torture have been used. No doubt about that.’

Unlike members of the American regime such as US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Norris says he consistently opposed Saadam Hussein’s dictatorship. But the US and British occupation of Iraq have made matter only worse.

‘Even from the American point of view the foreign policy objectives have been completely reversed,’ says Norris. ‘They went in there allegedly to find weapons of mass destruction and there were none. But the whole country has now turned into a weapon of mass destruction. Nuclear materials were not guarded. God knows where they’ve gone from the reactors and research establishments. They may have spread all over the place.’

Moreover, says Norris, Iraq is now a harbor for Al Qaeda forces, which prior to the invasion was not the case. He adds that the social conditions in the country have deteriorated under the occupation further destabilizing Iraq. Before the invasion, ‘it was a secular state, which despite the (United Nations) sanctions had reasonably efficient education and health service,’ with violence limited to relatively low levels of government repression. ‘Now it is complete and absolute chaos. And there is very little infrastructure. … So it has been an absolute disaster both in terms of achieving American foreign policy objectives and also in terms of the well being of the vast majority of the Iraqi people.’

Last year, the Irish government allowed more than 300,000 US military personnel to move through Shannon Airport. The air facility in County Clare has also been used as a refueling station for secret aircraft used in the CIA’s covert programme to kidnap suspected terrorists and fly them to countries where they are tortured as a part of the interrogation process in flagrant violation of Irish, European and international laws.

Norris faults Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s reasoning for allowing the US to appropriate Shannon as a de facto military installation. The Irish leader’s citing of precedent during the Vietnam era only buttresses his argument, Norris contends. ‘Ahern was foolish, in my opinion, to make this point,’ says Norris. ‘I thought everybody knew, especially America, that that particular escapade (the Vietnam War) was a total disaster. It cost a very large number of American lives, traumatized a lot of young American people, who went back and are now on welfare, in veterans’ hospitals or just roaming the streets in a psychotic condition because of post-traumatic stress. It was very damaging to American society.

Norris is quick to add that Vietnam and Southeast Asia fared even worse as a result of the US war. ‘The place was pounded into the earth; Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant, used all over the place. And half-a-million citizens of a neutral country, Cambodia, killed by carpet bombing without a declaration of war. So should we facilitate this kind of operation?’

Norris places the onus on the Government’s misguided belief that Irish business interests would somehow be harmed if support for the US foreign policies were questioned. ‘We know that our hospitality of our airports and air space was abused during the Vietnam War,’ he says. ‘Why should we do it again? Answer: Because Bertie has his snout in the corporate American trough. The prevailing view of our government (is) that it would be unwise to alienate the American establishment because they might clamp down on multi-nationals and implement a more severe tax regime against us.’

This presumption is a canard, too, says Norris. Though the current US regime is intimidating and vindictive, in the end, American capitalists are only concerned about the bottom line. He cites the US trade policies toward China as an example. ‘Corporate America lives in a big, tough, bad old world. They don’t even give a shit about their own employees. They move wherever they see profit. It’s the almighty dollar, that’s what they’re after,’ says Norris.

The senator is just as blunt in gauging the veracity of the US Secretary of State’s denial of American human rights violations. ‘Condoleezza Rice has unequivocally lied to the Irish government when she said there was no torture. There most definitely is (proof) even in terms of what she disclosed herself,’ says Norris, citing her admission of the use of sleep depravation and other extreme interrogation techniques on terrorist suspects. Referring to a decision by the European Court of Human Rights condemning the use of such methods by the British on IRA suspects, Norris maintains that the US, by the testimony of its top diplomat, has already confessed to torturing so-called detainees at its prison at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

Covert CIA flights to Guantanamo and other secret interrogations centres are so far known to have operated in Sweden, Germany, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom. In each case, the US spy agency has employed private airlines as front companies to carry out the missions. Flight logs, released by other European countries show that CIA aeroplanes have landed and taken off from Shannon. Of these many flights, there is at least one verifiable instance in which the CIA transported a prisoner through Shannon who was later tortured elsewhere, Norris says. Despite the evidence, the Government has yet to investigate the so-called ‘extraordinary rendition flights.’

After the Irish anti-war movement began asking questions about such aircraft using Shannon, says Norris, registration numbers on the otherwise unmarked planes quickly changed. The names of the front companies that operate the aircraft are also subject to change.

‘The CIA uses shell companies for all kinds of things,’ says Norris. ‘So it’s a series of Chinese boxes. … They don’t reflect any reality. They’re located at post office boxes.’ Citing an anonymous source, Norris alleges that CIA funding of at least part of this illegal operation is funneled through a mail drop in central Africa. He also contends that Shannon is not the only Irish airport involved in the CIA flights.

‘We know that CIA planes have gone through Baldonnel on a regular basis,’ asserts Norris, referring to the Irish military airbase north of Dublin. ‘We know that those planes were used exclusively for rendition purposes. There is no reason to imagine that they were taking people through on little holiday trips. There is no doubt that some people have actually died as a result of being rendered to this system of outsourcing of torture. And these people are tortured in the presence of CIA operatives.

‘There has been a lot of dancing around this issue,’ says Norris. ‘The British, for example, want to send people back to places like Jordan, Syria, Egypt and so on, and they know perfectly well that torture is endemic there. It’s part of the system. They go and get a kind of written excuse from the government there, which says we’ll make an exception in these cases; we won’t torture them. Like hell they won’t.’

Norris continues to be confounded by how the current US president has been able to evade accountability for conduct of the war. ‘I just don’t understand how Bush has gotten away with it because he’s broken domestic law, federal law, human rights law, international law – the whole works. I mean, they impeached Nixon over a botched burglary. They tried to impeach Clinton over a blow job. And yet they let this cowboy create a world war over bugger all. I don’t know what he has to do to get impeached. The Democrats have just laid down and let him trample all over them. I think it is about time America, which is a country I greatly admire, … (realize it) is traveling backward at the speed of light. … I think it is such a shame.’

click on map to enlarge

Island magazine (Ireland), June 2006:

by C.D. Stelzer

After the sleek Gulfstream V executive jet, tail number N379P, touched down at Stockholm's Bromma airport on 18 December 2001, two Egyptians were escorted onboard and whisked away to Cairo. Neither Muhammad Zery nor Ahmed Hussein Agiza had booked passage on the privately-owned aircraft. They weren't returning home to visit friends or family. They had no business affairs to tend to in the Egyptian capital. They weren't going on holiday to visit the Pyramids, either.
Instead, the asylum seekers had been kidnapped by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, while Swedish authorities turned a blind eye. The Americans made no pretense of abiding by any laws or diplomatic niceties. No extradition papers were served. No arrest warrants issued.

Zery and Agiza, having been deemed terrorist suspects by the US, were snatched as a part of a covert CIA operation euphemistically referred to as 'extraordinary rendition'. Piecing together evidence, human rights advocates conservatively estimate that there have been at least 150 similar abductions since 9/11, though the exact number of cases is impossible to ascertain and may be many times higher.

In Sweden and elsewhere, the precise identity of the captors remains unclear, too. But their methods are always the same. After snaring their prey, a team of black clad, masked, abductors strip, drug, blindfold, manacle, diaper, and, finally, dress their victims in orange jumpsuits.

Once in Egyptian custody, Zery and Agiza underwent interrogation that allegedly involved torture, including electrical shocks to the genitals. Ultimately, The Egyptian Supreme Military Court meted out a 25-year sentence to Agiza for his alleged ties to an armed Islamic faction. The harsh sentence came despite the defendant's renunciation of violence while in exile. President Hosni Mubarak later reduced the sentence to 15 years. Zery, on the other hand, was released without charge - after being imprisoned under abysmal conditions for two years.

Ireland has become a staging ground for such abductions, a hub for the CIA's flight plan to perdition.

The aeroplane used to fly these men to Cairo, where they were handed over to Egypt's brutal secret police, landed at Shannon Airport 22 times between February 2001 and September 2005, according to aviation records compiled by Amnesty International. In a report issued in April, the human rights agency listed a total of 77 landings by the Gulfstream V and three other CIA-linked aircraft at Shannon.

Irish anti-war activists have duly reported many sightings of these and other suspicious aircraft at Shannon. So far the reaction of the Government has been to condemn the possibility of such reprehensible behaviour, while accepting US denials of wrongdoing. This apparent duplicity is exemplified by the stance of Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern, who has evaded responsibility by adopting a see-no-evil attitude. Ahern has told the media in recent months that there is no reason to search the suspect planes for evidence of kidnapping or other US malfeasance "because we have received categorical assurances from the US that they are not using Shannon in this way". A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry reiterated those assurances to Island in late May.

US President George W. Bush and other members of his regime have repeatedly mouthed those assurances. On 25 January 2005, for instance, the US president told the New York Times that "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture". Bush reiterated that promise at a White House press conference last April, saying: "It's in our interest to find those who would do harm to us, and we will do so within the law, ... honouring our commitment not to torture people. And we expect the countries where we send somebody to not torture, as well". During her European tour in December, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "the United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured". Rice added: "Where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured".

When asked for a clarification of the Government's position last month, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry cited the US secretary of state's guarantees. "In relation to the issue of extraordinary rendition, the response again emphasises the clear, categorical and unqualified character of the assurances the Government has repeatedly received from the US authorities, including Secretary of State Rice, that prisoners have not been transferred through Irish territory, nor would they be, without our permission".

Despite diplomatic assurances on both sides of the Atlantic, however, the torture flights, as they are sometimes called, have apparently continued unabated - with Shannon playing an integral part in the operation. Indeed, reliance on assurances from duplicitous nation states that are party to the 'renditions' seems part of the strategy to circumvent inter-national, European, and American laws. Due to the CIA's use of privately registered planes, the Irish government has so far neglected to search suspected aircraft at Shannon, citing a clause within the Convention on International Civil Aviation (the Chicago Convention), which allows non-commercial flights to cross international borders and make stops without prior authorisation or notice.

It is a loophole in the law big enough to allow the CIA to fly a fleet of more than two dozen aircraft through European airspace with absolutely no oversight. Shannon is often the logical choice for refuelling because it is the westernmost air facility among European Union states, and already utilised as a pit stop by the American military. Amnesty International has tracked more than 2,600 flights over the last five years that are directly or indirectly related to CIA covert operations. Most of these flights crossed through European airspace, often stopping at one or more airports. Of those flights, nearly 1,000 have been directly linked to the CIA. About 600 are tied to CIA-linked aircraft that have been used on an interim basis. The last category - more than 1,000 flights - is reserved for aircraft associated with CIA front companies.

The actual number of flights and their respective objectives remain an enigma because of secrecy surrounding CIA operations and the limited information available to the human rights and anti-war activists attempting to monitor the situation. In a report to the Council of Europe earlier this year, Foreign Minister Ahern affirmed the Government's opposition to 'extraordinary rendition'.

The report also states that Irish authorities have the right under international law to board civil aircraft to investigate possible human rights abuses, but thus far such allegations have been deemed unwarranted by officials of An Garda S’ochána. Moreover, the Office of the Foreign Minister claims that all of the alleged CIA flights that have stopped at Shannon have been recorded, according to regular procedures.

But some available numbers still don't seem to add up. US Federal Aviation Authority data compiled by Amnesty International shows that two planes owned by a CIA front company landed 50 times at Shannon Airport between 2001 and 2005.

But the same records indicate a total of only 35 take offs for the same aircraft. The CIA started the rendition programme under a directive signed by former US President Bill Clinton in 1995. Its purpose: to quickly apprehend and interrogate alleged terrorists. An ancillary objective was to keep them locked up to prevent future terrorist acts. In the wake of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, the CIA opted to use any means necessary, including torture, to meet these ends. The agency also wanted to prevent suspected terrorists from gaining access to the US criminal justice system, through which defence attorneys could use subpoenas to pry into the agency's darkest secrets. To accomplish these goals and still retain plausible deniability, the CIA chose to use proxies. Abductees have been dispatched to prisons in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and elsewhere, where torture is routinely employed by secret services to extract information from prisoners.

The use of Syria for these purposes is ironic in that the US has charged that country with being a sponsor of terrorism. As former CIA agent Michael Scheuer, who helped create the rendition programme, told the New York Times last year, the agency "preferred to let other countries do our dirty work". In an interview with British journalist Stephen Grey, another retired agent explained it this way: "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear - never see them again - you send them to Egypt".

After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration ordered the CIA to boost its efforts. As a result, increasing numbers of flights have carried abductees to a squalid prison in Afghanistan or the detention camp at the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where approximately 550 detainees are still being held.

The US has acknowledged that about 30 so-called 'high-value detainees' have simply disappeared after being captured. Amnesty International estimates that for each of these acknowledged dis-appearances there are perhaps hundreds more that have gone unreported. Moreover, the human rights organisation claims that the CIA has operated its own secret prisons, so-called 'black sites,' in at least eight countries. In a report issued last year, Human Rights Watch, another monitoring organisation, alleged that abductees are being held in Romania and Poland.

To date, European investigators have been unable to substantiate this claim. But this spring the CIA added credence to the claim by firing a CIA analyst for allegedly leaking information on European 'black sites' to the Washington Post. Other suspected locations of the secret prisons include: Turkey, Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia Herzegovina and the Slovak Republic.

Evidence suggests the CIA rendition programme is part of broader US operations that engage the US Defence Department and White House. A former CIA agent revealed to the Chicago Tribune last year, for example, that the Gulfstream V jet, used in the Swedish abductions and other kidnappings, was operated by the Joint Special Operations Command, an inter-agency unit that coordinates counter-terrorism actions between the CIA and US military. The same CIA-linked plane is listed as doing business with the US Navy Engineering Logistics Office, a secret military intelligence agency. Landing permits for US airbases and US Defence Department fuelling contracts also connect the CIA rendition programme to the US military. More telling is the direct intercession by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a rendition case. In May 2004, as White House national security advisor, Rice ordered the release of Khaled el-Masri, a 42-year-old German citizen of Lebanese descent, mistakenly abducted by the CIA in Macedonia. After Rice interceded, el-Masri was subsequently transported from an Afghan dungeon, known as the Salt Pit, and freed in Albania.

Whereas, CIA covert operations may technically be beyond the purview of international laws, knowledge and participation of US military personnel and executive branch officials is not. This prospect places the US government and those individuals who have participated in the rendition programme in potential violation of the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention Against Torture and other laws.

After it gained worldwide notoriety, the CIA passed the Gulfstream V to N126CH Inc, a Miami-based company in late 2005. The company's name is the same as the aircraft's new tail number. This is not the first time that the ownership and tail numbers have switched. Before the latest transfer, the plane was passed from one CIA front company to another, changing tail numbers twice in the process. Records indicate that Premier Executive Transport Services, a Massachusetts corporation that folded in late 2004, transferred registration of the plane to Oregon-based Bayard Foreign Marketing, another phantom company. Besides landing at Shannon 22 times, the plane's destinations have included: Guantanamo Bay Cuba, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Gambia, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Pakistan, Qatar, Morocco, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan, as well as countries throughout Europe.

The previously cited case of mistaken identity demonstrates how a rendition can easily go awry. On New Year's Eve 2003, while on holiday, el-Masri was seized at the Macedonian-Serbian frontier. The unemployed car salesman and father of five from Neu-Ulm, Germany, had travelled to the Balkans on a spree, after having a row with his wife.

Assuming his passport was a forgery, the Macedonian police reported him as an al Qaeda suspect to the CIA station in Skopje. On or about 24 January 2004, a CIA rendition team, bundled el-Masri aboard a Boeing 737 bound for Afghanistan, where he was tortured for months before being released. Like the Gulfstream V, the 737 belonged to Premier Executive Transport Services. The same plane reputedly flew from Afghanistan to Poland and Romania twice in 2003 and 2004, leading Human Rights Watch to suspect those countries of harbouring CIA black sites.

The 737 also passed through Dublin Airport twice and Shannon 23 times in the past five years. In December 2004, the now-defunct Premier Executive Transport Services handed the plane over to Keeler & Tate Management, yet another CIA front company in-corporated in Nevada. Corporate records list the only real person connected to Keeler & Tate as solicitor Frank R. Petersen, who shares his Reno, Nevada office with Peter Laxalt, the brother and business partner of former US Senator Paul Laxalt, a confidant of the late US President Ronald Reagan. Since retiring from the public office in 1987, Paul Laxalt has headed an influential Washington D.C. lobbying firm. In recent years, besides its private clients, the Paul Laxalt Group has represented the US Defence, State and Justice Departments. Public records also show the Executive Office of the President (the White House) hired the Laxalt Group for unspecified reasons in 2003.

In a suit recently rejected in US federal court, the American Civil Liberties Union sought to sue former CIA Director George Tenet on behalf of el-Masri. The other plaintiffs were Premier, its successor Keeler & Tate and Aero Contractors Ltd of North Carolina. Some Aero employees are reported to have past connections to Air America, the notorious CIA airline of the Vietnam War era.

The abduction of Islamic cleric Hasan Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, from Milan in February 2003 illustrates just how tangled the web of affiliates involved in the rendition programme can be. After the kidnapping, pilots of CIA-linked Aero Contractors flew Omar to Egypt in a Gulfstream IV aircraft leased by Richmor Aviation of Hudson, New York. FAA registration records, however, list the actual owner of the plane as Assembly Point Aviation Inc of Glens Falls, New York. The chairman and sole officer of Assembly Point Aviation is Robert Morse, part owner in the Boston Red Sox professional baseball team.

If Omar's flight to Egypt is a reliable indicator, it would be reasonable to deduce that this gaggle of private and CIA front companies is making a tidy profit off the rendition programme at US taxpayer's expense. Richmor Aviation, for example, leases the plane on behalf of its owner for $5,365 an hour, or a little more than $900,000 a week, according to the Boston Globe. Aside from free rides given to kidnap victims bound for torture chambers in the Middle East, not too many people could afford such luxurious air travel. One notable passenger granted the privilege without being shackled or diapered is former President George H. W. Bush, the current US leader's father, who accompanied Morse on a leisurely trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York a few years ago.

If that were not a strange enough coincidence, consider the diversified interests of Richmor Aviation. Besides leasing and maintenance, Richmor also operates a flight training school. One of its dropouts, from the early 1990s, was Abdul Hakim Murad, an associate of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a lieutenant of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden. Philippine authorities arrested Murad in Manila in 1995. He was later convicted in New York for plotting to blow up a dozen US commercial passenger jets over the Pacific and then crash a plane into CIA headquarters. To date only one country has taken serious steps to reveal these intricate machinations. At press time, Italy's case against 22 CIA agents charged in the Omar kidnapping case is slowly moving forward after stalling out temporarily in the wake of this spring's contested national elections. Those indicted include former Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady. Prosecutor Armando Spataro has vowed to continue pursuing the case now that the centre-left government of Prime Minister-elect Roman Prodi is in power.

Investigations of the rendition cases elsewhere have fared even worse, with no prosecutions foreseen in the offing. The tepid response may be intentional. There is cause to suspect that European governments are dragging their bureaucratic feet on the rendition issue because they have quietly cooperated on one level or another with US efforts.

In February, law enforcement authorities in Munich initiated an inquiry into whether Germany had foreknowledge or tacitly approved the CIA kidnapping of el-Masri, a German citizen. The investigation is based on the victim's recollection that a German police official interviewed him three times while he was imprisoned in Afghanistan. Officials in the governments of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her predecessor Gerhard Schroeder have repeatedly denied any knowledge of the abduction and pressed counterparts in Washington to divulge information concerning the case.

The German doubletalk is not the only national voice lacking in candour. In December, the British press documented extensive CIA use of airbases throughout the United Kingdom, exposing earlier official denials. Such revelations, if they continue to mount, could lead to a political furore.

But that hasn't happened. Instead, an investigative report published by the Council of Europe in January failed to break any new ground. That Prime Minister Tony Blair chaired the Council's rotating presidency in the midst of the vapid inquiry gives an appearance of a conflict of interest. Blair is Bush's strongest ally, of course, and the CIA rendition flights are now known to have frequented the UK regularly. Nevertheless, Blair's former Foreign Minister Jack Straw feigned ignorance, publicly requesting that the US clarify whether CIA rendition flights used European airports - while the stifled investigation by Council rapporteur Dick Marty went nowhere.

The Venice Commission, legal advisor for the Council of Europe, has recommended that member states must inspect aircraft if there are 'serious reasons' to suspect prisoners onboard are bound for destinations where they will be tortured. But despite the urging of the Council officials, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern's government has only paid lip service to the idea.

In May, the United Nations Committee Against Torture strongly recommended that the US close any prisons known to engage in torture, including the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The committee had ruled in May 2005 that Sweden had violated international law by permitting the United States to render asylum seeker Ahmed Hussein Agiza to Egypt in December 2001 in the agency's Gulfstream V, which then displayed the infamous tail number N379P.

A lot of time has passed since then. By now the names of some of the front companies have changed and the tail numbers of the spy planes, too. But one thing hasn't. The CIA's birds of prey still roost at Shannon.
[read more]

Bloomberg Oct 22

President George W. Bush said Republicans can hold their congressional majority by focusing on national security and the economy, and that he will return to overhauling Social Security as a top domestic priority for his last two years in office. ...
[read more]

The interesting thing about this story is that the Times is already reporting that the diplomat is apologizing for what he said, instead of reporting what he said first. The British press is using this spin.

New York Times, Oct 22:

A senior State Department official apologized Sunday night for saying that the United States had acted with “arrogance” and “stupidity” in its campaign in Iraq.

The apology from Alberto Fernandez, director of the office of press and public diplomacy in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs in Washington, involved a comment that he had made during an interview conducted in Arabic and broadcast Saturday on Al Jazeera, the Arab television network.

In the 35-minute interview, Mr. Fernandez, who speaks Arabic fluently, said, “History will decide what role the United States played.” According to a translation by CNN, he said that while the United States had tried its best, its role might be criticized by future historians “because undoubtedly there was arrogance and stupidity from the United States in Iraq.” Other news sources have translated the remarks in a similar way. ...
[read more]

Illinois Times Oct. 19:

by C.D.Stelzer

... Despite the clamor of anti-war protesters, few details concerning these Air Force-sponsored flights have been publicized in the United States.

When asked directly, a spokesperson for the AMC at Scott refused to divulge whether CRAF planes specifically carry weapons, preferring instead to generically refer to all cargoes as Defense Department “freight.”

An Atlas Air spokesperson declined to comment, saying only, “As a matter of corporate policy, we do not publicly comment on our customers, their cargo, routes, or schedules.”

There is no doubt, however, that CRAF planes are hauling weapons. In a recent letter obtained by Illinois Times through the office of Irish Sen. David Norris, Irish Minister for Transport Martin Cullen cited five instances in which Polar Air Cargo flights had been granted exemptions by the government to fly weapons or munitions through Irish airspace. ...
[read more]

WPVI TV, Philadelphia, Oct. 17:


Federal agents raided the home of U.S. Representative Curt Weldon's daughter and Weldon's friend. The agents pulled into an alley behind Karen Weldon's 3-story home on Queen Street in Philadelphia and came out with armfuls of boxes. Federal agent Jerri Williams wouldn't comment further because the affidavit in the case is sealed. Meantime, in Delaware County, FBI agents blocked off Kelli Lane near

Charles Sexton's house in Springfield and took a box and other material from his home today. Sexton has been an associate of Weldon's for 3 decades and is in business with Weldon's daughter. Last Friday, word broke that the FBI is investigating whether the Delaware County congressman used his influence to help his lobbyist daughter get contracts. Weldon denies that, and says the raids are politically motivated. He is locked in a tight re-election race against Democrat Joe Sestak.

... Weldon, regarded by some as a foreign policy expert, has clashed at times with the Bush administration. In the last year, he has repeatedly said a secret military unit called "Able Danger" used data-mining to link four Sept. 11 hijackers to al-Qaida more than a year before the attacks. A Pentagon report rejected the idea. ...
[read more]

at left Khalid bin Mahfouz

A foreign company linked to an alleged terrorist financier is set to open up shop in St. Louis County – with taxpayer support.

A brief news item published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Metro Digest on Wednesday Oct. 4 reported that the St. Louis County, Mo. government plans to give tax breaks to Kerry Inc., to help the Irish-based company reopen a shuttered candy factory.

The St. Louis County Council passed a resolution supporting a 10-year, 35 percent tax abatement on real estate and personal property for Kerry Inc., a subsidiary of the Kerry Group, which is headquartered in Tralee, County Kerry, according to the news account. In return, Kerry Inc., intends to invest $3 million in real estate and up to $7 million in equipment at the former Nestle plant located at 8012 New Hampshire Avenue in Affton, a suburb in South St. Louis County.

The plant formerly manufactured Sweet Tarts brand candy. The County Council based its decision to help subsidize the plant on a report issued by the St. Louis County Economic Council.

The Kerry Group, a food processing conglomerate, had revenues of more than 4 billion Euros last year.

The Post-Dispatch story failed to report any further details of the Irish company’s corporate history.

Press accounts published in Ireland over the past decade, however, have linked the company to an influence-peddling scandal that rocked the Irish political establishment during the 1990s.

The scandal involved the granting of Irish citizenship and passports to Saudi Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz and others in return for his investment in development schemes of political supporters of high-ranking Irish politicians, including the late Charles Haughey, the former teoiseach or prime minister of Ireland.

As part of the schemes, bin Mahfouz is reported to have invested substantially in the Kerry Airport along with the Kerry Group, whose then-head Denis Bosnan was chief of the airport board. The corporation and the bin Mahfouz family are still listed as investors in the airport.

Bin Mahfouz, who controlled Saudi Arabia’s only private financial institution, National Commerce Bank, and acted as the royal family’s banker, was later fined $225,000,000 for his involvement in the fraud that led to the collapse of Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), which operated in more than 70 countries. The BCCI scandal involved a complex money laundering operation that supported drug trafficking, illegal weapons transfers, terrorism, espionage and organized crime. The CIA is known to have used the BCCI to finance some of its covert operations, including its secret war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s. In 1999, the Saudis eventually placed bin Mahfouz under house arrest after he was implicated in helping to finance terrorism through Islamic charities that had direct ties to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Moreover, bin Mahfouz is married to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s sister. He also has past business ties to President George W. Bush.

While bin Mahfouz was buying his Irish citizenship by helping develop the Kerry Airport, he put all his American investments in the hands of Jim Bath of Houston. Bath, a self-professed CIA agent, is a former Texas Air National Guard buddy and business associate of George W. Bush. In the 1980s, while representing bin Mahfouz’s business interests, Bath invested $50,000 in Arbusto, a Texas oil company then owned by Bush. Bin Mahfouz’s financial ties continued through BCCI’s investments in Harken Energy. Bush cronies William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds, owners of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball club, bailed Bush out in 1984, merging his failed business with their company, Spectrum 7, which was bought by Harken Engery in 1986. Bush became a board member of Harken and sat on the finance audit committee.

Besides the Kerry Airport, bin Mahfouz invested in the Houston Gulf Airport through a $1.4 million loan to Bath.

Under the description listed below, a reporter making a routine press inquiry with the US Air Force can and will be fingered as a terrorist suspect. I know.

... Elicitation: People or organizations attempting to gain information about military operations, capabilities, or people. Elicitation attempts may be made by mail, fax, telephone, or in person. Examples could include being approached at a gas station (or mall or airport or library, etc) and asked about what's happening at the base; getting a fax (or an e-mail or a telephone call, etc) asking for troop strength numbers... or the number of airplanes on base... or deployment procedures... or how a trash-collection truck gets on base... or the location of the HQ building... or how many people live in a certain dorm... or where the commander lives... or how many people hang out at the officers/enlisted club at night... or which nightclubs/restaurants off base are highly frequented by military people... or the workings of the base's network firewall, etc. ...
[read more]

Washington Post, Sept 8:

by Michael Powell

... A recent Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll of 1,010 Americans found that 36 percent suspect the U.S. government promoted the attacks or intentionally sat on its hands. Sixteen percent believe explosives brought down the towers. Twelve percent believe a cruise missile hit the Pentagon.

Distrust percolates more strongly near Ground Zero. A Zogby International poll of New York City residents two years ago found 49.3 percent believed the government "consciously failed to act."

You could dismiss this as a louder than usual howl from the CIA-controls-my-thoughts-through-the-filling-in-my-molar crowd. Establishment assessments of the believers tend toward the psychotherapeutic. Many academics, politicians and thinkers left, right and center say the conspiracy theories are a case of one plus one equals five. It's a piling up of improbabilities. ...
[read more]

at left Seymour Hersh at Washington University, Sept. 6


Sy Hersh visited St. Louis today, giving a lecture at Graham Chapel at Wash U. Later he took questions at the moot courtroom at the university's law school.

Most of the questions he answered revolved around military and foreign policy issues regarding the war in Iraq.

When I asked him about the latest spin on the Plame case, he gave what has become the chant by most everybody in the press.

The fact that former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage has now been revealed to be the source that leaked Valerie Plame's name to conservative columnist Robert Novak is proof positive that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's case is lame, according to the chorus, which now includes Hersh. Armitage, says Hersh, didn't even know he leaked the name to Novak, he just happened to be gossiping with the columnist when he let the name slip out. Besides, says Hersh, Armitage is one of the few voices within the administration who opposed the Iraq policy. He wasn't part of the neo-con gang that took the nation to war.

Earlier in the Q&A, Hersh made a big deal out of holding government officials to a high standard of trust. Trust, says Hersh, is what is lacking. If government officials lie, they should be held accountable.

Well, Armitage is a documented liar. So why does Sy Hersh trust him so much now? What Hersh and every other member of the press is failing to mention is Armitage's checkered past. Twenty years ago, he withheld knowledge of the illegal Iran-contra arms shipments.

The Senate panel investigating the scandal named Armitage among the top officials in the Reagan administration to participate in the cover up. He later withdrew from being nominated as Secretary of the Army under the first President George Bush to evade answering questions about his participation in Iran-contra.

If you Google Armitage's name at Google News, you will get more than 1,200 hits. But if you add the "Iran-contra" to the search terms, you get a total of just seven.

Nobody is mentioning Armitage's past. Not PBS's Jim Lehrer. Not NPR's Dan Shorr. And now Sy Hersh. All these guys are old enough to recall Armitage's Iran-contra involvement. But for some reason, it's like it didn't happen. Have they suddenly gone senile. Shorr is 90, so he may be excused for having a memory lapse. But not the rest.


Hersh didn't mention Iran-contra -- even though my question about Armitage alluded to the earlier scandal. I guess that means, in his mind, it's not relevant. Either that or he dodged the question. Maybe he was just in a hurry to catch his plane. His hour was up and he had fulfilled his end of the bargain, lecturing and taking questions for a fat fee that I'm guessing totaled more than $10k. Wash U, after all, has deep pocket.

For my efforts, I got a choclate chip cookie and a cup of coffee, the same as Sam, the aged, campus freeloader, who dines at every lecture on the university schedule. Sam knew better than to ask any questions.

While vouching for Armitage's trustworthy character, Hersh stumbled over the special prosecutor's name. "What's his name? Hersh asked. "Fitzpatrick, Fitzgerald?"
Sy, FYI, the name of the special prosecutor is Patrick Fitzgerald.

Why you wanna play coy, baby?

P.S. I hope you enjoy your complimentary copy of Island magazine that I tucked in your satchel.

Oh, just to jog your memory, here's an excerpt from the 1987 Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the Iran-contra scandal, courtesy of the New York Times:

"... On the basis of testimony and documents received by the Committee, it appears that following Administration officials and other key U.S. nationals had significant knowledge of the initiative, usually (but not always) including an understanding of the general outline and progress of the Iran program as of the following dates:

From the initial stages of the program: -The President -The Vice President -William Casey -Donald Regan -Robert McFarlane (until January 1986) -Michael Ledeen (until December 1985) -Caspar Weinberger (see additional comment below) -George Shultz (see additional comment below) -John Poindexter From (at least) September 1985 -Oliver North -Charles Allen From (at least) November 1985 -John McMahon (until March 1986) -Duane Clarridge From (at least) December 1985) -Richard Armitage From (at least) January 1986 -William Taft -Robert Gates -Clair George -Chief, C.I.A., Directorate of Operations, Near East/South Asia Division -Colin Powell -Richard Secord From (at least) March 1986 -George Cave. ..."

previously posted by Media Mayhem, July 2, 2004

We're living in a totalitarian state. Sound like an exaggeration? Think again.

The thought crossed my mind after the Treasury Department stopped by and browsed my blog repeatedly a couple days ago.

Maybe these government bureaucrats didn't have anything better to do. With a holiday weekend on tap, I know they won't be dropping by this afternoon -- because it's Friday.

I know this from working as a reporter. It's impossible to reach anybody on Friday afternoon. They're in a meeting or out to lunch. Weekends in office-world start at noon on Friday.

This theory of mine has since been confirmed by the site meter on my blog. For marketing purposes, the site meter gauges the high and low tides in my little backwater of cyberspace. Surf is up at Media Mayhem on Tuesdays and Wednesdays after lunch. I'm presuming that's when more desk jockeys take a little break from the rigors of whatever pointless task they're forced to carry out to pay the rent.

Our dedicated civil servants, at the various Treasury Department agencies, IRS, ATF, and Secret Service, aren't any different. They, too, need a little down time, a bit of stress relief from fighting terror and tedium.

Nonetheless, in the Kafkaesque world of post-constitutional America, these bureaucrats could potentially be carrying out orders to monitor me as a "belligerent."

Fancy that. I don't mind being labeled a belligerent, mind you, but I am a bit apprehensive about the ramifications of such a designation.

I heard the word used by a right-wing law professor from Pepperdine University (Malibu U) the other night, when he was being interviewed on the PBS News Hour.

According to the Malibu U law prof's interpretation of recent Supreme Court rulings, the president has the absolute power to deem anybody an "enemy combatant" or "belligerent." Thus, acting at his discretion, the president can order the indefinite imprisonment of any citizen of the United States without cause.

Hmm. bye-golly, that sounds un-American or something. Or is it just me?

Looking on the bright side, more liberal legal scholars have opined that the rulings favor the accused because they allow their legal counsels to belatedly petition the court for some kind of due process. Never mind that the people being thrown in jail haven't been legally accused of anything. Also, forget the fact that they can languish in cages for years before they see a court room.

In a sense, this isn't a whole lot different than the way things operate already. Believe me, there are plenty of people in St. Louis jail, at this very moment, who haven't been charged with anything. And they've been there for weeks or months. If traffic offenders can be incarcerated for months without receiving due process, what's so wrong with putting away a belligerent for years without a trial?

In a recently released memo, we've learned that the president also believes he has the right to torture people at his discretion in violation of U.S. and international laws. Technically, this means the president claims to have the legitimate power to sodomize prisoners, but, in his infinite wisdom, he has chosen not to invoke his authority -- yet.

The rest of us are just supposed to trust the judgment of the president, who executed more prisoners as governor of Texas than any other person in United States history. Sure, there are those nasty little rumors that the president has been invoking divine right and telling subordinates to get fucked in the same breath. But he was probably just having a bad day. That's what Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont said, after Vice President Dick Cheney told him to "go fuck yourself" last week.

I like to think of the Bush administration's more shining moments. Earlier this week, during a speech in Istanbul, the president commended Turkey for showing the world that democracy and Islamic beliefs were compatible. He then advised the rest of the Muslim world that the cheap, tawdry images of the U.S. projected by Madison Avenue and Hollywood should not be mixed up with America's own democratic values.

All of which reminds me that Bob Dylan is now doing Victoria's Secret lingerie ads. Yes, the times they-are-a-changing. I remember, in the surreal days following 9/11, a Victoria's Secret televised gala that invoked God, country and women's underwear in one fell swoop. At the crescendo of the performance, a scantily-clad model spread her wings and flew up to the ceiling and started doing somersaults in mid air. While not exactly a religious revelation, I have to admit that the stunt was a riveting spectacle and damn-fine entertainment.

Bush didn't point out this specific example of America's dysfunctional identity in Turkey this week. Nor, in his Istanbul speech, did the president mention that his re-election campaign has just put out a video comparing his political opponents to Adolph Hitler.

Meanwhile in Iraq, the Pentagon is molding that nation's fledgling media in the image of the U.S. version of a free press, awarding Harris Corp., a defense contractor, a nearly $100 million contract to oversee the "rebuilding" of the Iraqi media infrastructure. Whether the Iraqi government will create a propaganda organization such as the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence remains uncertain. But there are signs the Iraqis are starting to understand how to control the news.

At yesterday's hearing for ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, the only Iraqi reporter was ejected from the court room before the proceedings started. The reporter bitterly complained that the interim Iraqi government was already denying him and the Iraqi people their rights.

Nevertheless, credit should be given to the Iraqi government for moving swiftly to arraign Saddam. The right to a speedy trial is one of the pillars of the U.S. Constitution that has been undermined lately. Maybe the U.S. should follow Iraq's example and allow hundreds of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo to be given their day in court.

As we all are aware, although never elected, President Bush likes to extol the virtues of freedom and democracy. In that sense, he's similar to Iyad Allawi, Iraq's new interim prime minister.

The Iraqi Governing Council, a body of elitists, granted Allawi power; and another body of elitists, the U.S. Supreme Court, bestowed authority on Bush. Perhaps the U.S. media should make it a practice to call Bush "interim president," from now until the November elections.

Under the current interpretations of the law, an enemy combatant or belligerent is anybody who poses a threat to the imperial power of the interim president. If Bush is re-elected, look for a boom in new prison construction.

The "Al-Qaida types" that Cheney referred to must be any Democrat with a suntan who opposes the war in Iraq.

Canada.com, Aug. 12:

The Bush administration is under fire for trying to make political gains from the foiled London terror plot after Vice-President Dick Cheney, one day before and in full knowledge of the impending arrests, warned that the electoral defeat of a pro-Iraq war Democrat would only encourage "al-Qaida types."

Cheney's comments about the defeat of Senator Joseph Leiberman, a Democrat from Connecticut, are being viewed as a crass political effort to rehabilitate President George W. Bush and his Republican party in the eyes of the American public in the lead-up to the country's mid-term elections this November.

The above Shroud of Turin-like image is the only known photograph of Internet surfer and al-Qaeda mastermind, Rashid "Mr. Big" Rauf.

Sunday Telegram, Aug. 13:

Alleged al-Qaeda member Rashid Rauf, 26, is being held over accusations he organised a scheme to commit mass murder by blowing up passenger jets using liquid chemical bombs hidden in hand luggage.

Pakistani officials revealed yesterday British-born radical Muslim Rauf was seized near the Afghanistan border on Wednesday.

He was arrested outside an Internet cafe after security officials monitoring his movements noticed he was sending unusually high number of text messages to Britain, London's Daily Telegraph reported.

Rauf's Pakistani captors named him as a "key person" in the bomb plan and said there were strong indications of an al-Qaeda connection.

Accused "Mr Big" Rauf is understood to have lived in Pakistan since leaving Britain after the murder of his uncle Mohammed Saeed, 54, in 2002. ...
[read more]

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was once called a "stand up guy" by el Presidente Bush, vacated 10 Downing Street for a sunnier clime in advance of the attack-that-didn't-happen, choosing instead to go on hol in the Carribbean. Since the Brits knew about the alleged plotters for the better part of a year, my guess is Tony didn't want to be in town when the staged bust took place.

Day Three, and the "new" information on the alleged plot to blow up airliners bound for the US is still trinkling in. Expect a surge over the next 24 hours in advance of the Sunday editions and Sunday morning TV news talk shows.

Among yesterday's revelations:

* The Brits froze the accounts of 19 of the 24 wanna-be martyrs' bank accounts with the Bank of England. Whatya bet that their collective banks accounts could of bankrolled a round Guinness for the lot of them?

* Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, the most notoriously corrupt and terror-ridden secret police on the planet, indicated that one of the suspects it has arrested is linked to al-Qaida. ....

Still there are more questions than answers surrounding the media circus.

One sign that the release by British authorities of details of the alleged plot was orchestrated with the White House is th fact that hundreds of FBI agents were dispatched to England weeks ago to investigate.

Think Progress blog, Aug. 11:

Cheney: Lieberman Loss ‘Disturbing’ Because al Qaeda Is ‘Betting They Can Break The Will of The American People’
As the Mideast sits on the brink of regional war, Vice President Dick Cheney spent his time yesterday holding a teleconference to discuss the outcome of the Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut.

Cheney said that to “purge a man like Joe Lieberman” was “of concern, especially over the issue of Joe’s support with respect to national efforts in the global war on terror.” He explained:

The thing that’s partly disturbing about it is the fact that, the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the al Qaeda types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task. ...
[read more]

After all the president's done business with the bin Laden clan in the past. This just in! Surprise, Surprise, the The New York Fucking Times is parroting Pakistani sources who say one of those arrested in the attack-that-didn't happen is tied to al-Qaida. After Judith Miller and Jayson Blair, we're supposed to take the Times as a sorta reverse barometer.

New York Times, Aug. 12:

One day after Britain said it had thwarted a major plot to attack America-bound airliners, officials in Pakistan said today that police there had arrested a British-born terror suspect linked to Al Qaeda cells in Afghanistan. ...
[read more]

Tumerica blog, Aug. 10:

...Call me a wretched cynic, but when I heard about the foiled UK "terrorist plot" this morning, my first thought was, oh, Bush worked with Blair (everyone knows they are in each other's pants anyway) to manufacture a scare. ...
[read more]

Public Eye (CBS), Oct. 7, 2005:

by Craig Crawford

Pardon my skepticism at the breathless warnings on Thursday of yet another “specific threat” to our safety – in this case, the danger to New York City subway riders. This one could be quite real, and I don’t necessarily quarrel with that.

But I worry at how the news media seems to feel forced to take these dire warnings at face value despite the pattern of politicians provoking these episodes at suspiciously opportune moments. Most memorable was the time last summer when we heard warnings of terror attacks on the East Coast – announced just as the Democrats wrapped up their national convention in Boston and sent presidential nominee John Kerry on the road for what they hoped would be a high-profile launch of his general election campaign. ...
[read more]

Liberty Street, Aug. 11:


"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big."

That was what an unnamed White House official told Agence France Presse after the plot to blow up planes over the Atlantic Ocean was exposed.

And in the two days since that potential horror was stopped, the White House, various Bush administration officials, the head of the RNC, and pretty much the entire right side of the blogosphere has been partying hard in their exuberant, headlong stampede to portray what almost happened as a glorious vindication of their policies and an indictment of Democrats. ...
[read more]

Agence France Presse, Aug. 11:

President George W. Bush seized on a foiled London airline bomb plot to hammer unnamed critics he accused of having all but forgotten the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Weighed down by the unpopular war in Iraq, Bush and his aides have tried to shift the national political debate from that conflict to the broader and more popular global war on terrorism ahead of November 7 congressional elections. ...
[read more]

Daily KOS, Aug 11:

Sigh. They're like robots. Little metal-skulled, hive-minded robots. From Think Progress:


Today on CNN Headline News, anchor Chuck Roberts discussed the impact of the foiled British terror plot with Hotline senior editor John Mercurio. Roberts asked Mercurio, "How does this factor into the Lieberman/Lamont contest? And might some argue, as some have already argued, that Lamont is the al Qaeda candidate?"
"And might some argue that Lamont is the al Qaeda candidate?" Seriously, it's like the rainbow of terror has now crawled entirely up inside the Anus of Collective Punditry. (Actually, I think I've read Star Trek fan fiction like that, although it might have just been an exceptionally bad Ann Coulter column. And come to think of it, I've never read Star Trek fan fiction.)
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The First Post, Aug. 11:

Having pressed the panic button, Tony Blair and John Reid (left) will have to produce concrete proof that the terrorists were - or are - about to attack. Failures to back up claims in the past have backfired: remember the tanks at Heathrow and the infamous claim that Algerian terrorists were about to attack with the deadly ricin agent, though none was found in lethal doses.
Blair and Reid can no longer rely on suspicions and innuendo to back their claim that the UK is now in the grip of a global terrorist threat from "the arc of extremism" from Algeria to Afghanistan. If they want to save their reputations and their country, they must take the nation into their confidence and show what they really know - and what they don't. ...
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January 2, 2000
Pakistan & Terrorism


B. Raman
Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai
Reprinted with permission from South Asia Analysis Group

In the history of the Indian civil aviation, there have been 13 hijackings (including the latest to Kandahar), all involving the Indian Airlines (IA) aircraft. Seven of these were carried out by groups with known links to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the other six by groups or individuals with no such links.

Of the seven ISI-linked groups, six were indigenous (Sikh and Kashmiri terrorists) and the seventh (the latest) is a Pakistan-based Islamic Jihadi terrorist group, which has been active in the Philippines, Myanmar, India, the Central Asian Republics, the Xinjiang province of China and Chechnya and Dagestan in Russia, and which claims to have trained a small group of Afro-American citizens of the US in the past.

The fact that ISI-linked groups generally hijack only IA and not Air India flights is due to the fact that during their training in Pakistan, they are instructed by the ISI to avoid Air India flights, which are likely to contain a large number of foreigners. This could create problems for Pakistan with Western Governments and their intelligence agencies might focus their investigation on the Pakistani involvement.
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There is a remote possibility that NBC correspondent Paul Williams is actually a competent reporter. But it's very, very remote. Tonight on Public Television's Washington Week, Williams characterized the terrorist suspects arrested yesterday in London as having possible "remote" ties to al-Qaida. Of course, what Williams meant by using the word "remote" is that at this point there is absolutely no evidence of any direct connection. Williams and other mainstream parrots for the Bush Bund are already starting to back peddle on their trumpeting of the US regime's assertions yesterday that the attack-that-never-happened was an al-Qaida plot. No fewer than three high-ranking Bushites spread this disinformation: FBI Director Robert Mueller, Attorney General Roberto Gonzales and Homeland Security Secretary Michael "Cadaver" Chertoff.

The truth is that Pakistan's notorious secret police have closer ties to al-Qaida and they have been credited with cooperating with the British in making the bust.

In the last 24 hours, Media Mayhem's site meter has only recorded 17 hits since I began ranting about the mainstream media hype over the latest terrorist scare. But one of the those lurkers was from the Defense Information Systems Agency,which linked to the Naval Oceans Systems Center at Fort Washington, Maryland. Welcome aboard, sailor!
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While the mainstream media get their collective bowels in an uproar over another manufactured terrorist threat, a death of a banker in London with ties to the Enron debacle has received only cursory coverage.

BBC, July 12:

A body found in north-east London has been identified as that of a banker who was questioned by the FBI about the Enron fraud case.

Police said they were treating the death in Chingford of Neil Coulbeck, who worked for the Royal Bank of Scotland until 2004, as "unexplained".

He had been interviewed by the FBI as a potential witness.
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NPR Radio this morning reported that the Bank of England had released a list of names of some of the alleged terrorists in a press release. But the both the hyper-text and PDF versions of the press release don't appear to include any names.

News Release
Financial Sanctions: Terrorist Financing
11 August 2006

This news release is issued in respect of the financial measures taken against terrorism.

The Bank of England, as agent for Her Majesty’s Treasury, has today directed that any funds held for or on behalf of the individuals named in the Annex to this News Release must be frozen (see Key Resources below for Annex), and that no funds should be made available, directly or indirectly to any person, except under the authority of a licence.

Financial institutions and other persons are requested to check whether they maintain any accounts or otherwise hold any funds, other financial assets, economic benefits and economic resources for the individuals named in the Annex and, if so, they should freeze the accounts or other funds and report their findings to the Bank of England.

The names in the Annex are in addition to those listed in previous Bank Notices containing directions under Article 4 of the Terrorism (United Nations Measures) Order 2001 (S.I. 2001/3365) and under Article 8 of the Al-Qa’ida and Taliban (United Nations Measures) Order 2002 (S.I. 2002/111, as amended).

Previous Notices and news releases related to Terrorism, Al-Qa’ida and the Taliban and a consolidated list of individuals and entities subject to these and other UK financial sanctions regimes are available from the Financial Sanctions pages.
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Within hours of the arrest, FBI director Robert Mueller was being quoted in the press as saying that the thwarted plot to bomb US-bound aircraft appeared to be an al-Qaida plot. Moreover, the broadcast media quickly began airing a video clip of one of the alleged terrorist supposedly making incriminating comments in a taped suicide statement. The message was then compared to a video made by one of the London subway bombers last year.

Timing the arrest of the alleged terrorists to coincide with the news cycle in America is difficult to ignore. Not only did British authorities nab the plotters just in time for Good Morning America, they did it on a Thursday so that the mainstream media in the US could go into a rumor-feeding frenzy through the Sunday editions of the newspapers and the Sunday morning political talk shows.

The Bush Bund, with the help of Tony Blair and company and mainstream media, have teamed up for a bit of late summer fear mongering. Reports of the thwarted attack to blow up airliners bound for the US have repeatedly claimed that it had the markings of an al-Qaida plot, citing last years London subway bombings. The trouble with this comparison is that the subway bombings occurred underground not in the air. More importantly, the attackers in the subway bombings were all British citizens and had absolutely no ties to al-Qaida.

ABC News is using the same slogan to hawk the latest terror scare as NBC: "Target: America."

Asia Times, Sept. 26, 2004

.. On Sunday, Pakistan announced that paramilitary police had killed Amjad Farooqi, a suspected top al-Qaeda operative wanted in connection with the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl two years ago, as well as for two assassination attempts against Musharraf last December.

Asia Times Online contacts, however, are adamant that Farooqi was in fact arrested some months ago, and that the "incident" resulting in his death in the southern Pakistani city of Nawabshah was in fact stage-managed by Pakistani security forces. ...
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Media Mayhem, June 6, 2004:

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
September 26, 2001, Wednesday

The Assassins and Drug Dealers Now Helping U.S. Intelligence
By Rahul Bedi in New Delhi

Pakistan's shadowy intelligence service, one of the main sources of information for the US-led alliance against the Taliban regime, is widely associated with political assassinations, narcotics and the smuggling of nuclear and missile components - and backing fundamentalist Islamic movements.

Locally referred to as Pakistan's "secret army" and the "invisiblegovernment", the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) was founded soon after independence in 1948. Today it dominates the country's domestic and foreign policies. It is also responsible for manipulating the volatile religious elements, ethnic groups and political parties that are disliked by the army.

Modelled on Savak, the Iranian security agency and, like it, trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the SDECE, France's external intelligence service, the ISI "ran" the mujahideen in their decade-long fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. According to Brig Mohammad Yousaf, who headed the ISI's Afghan Bureau for four years until 1987, the counter-intelligence agency funnelled US money and weapons to the mujahideen to minister the "time-honoured guerrilla tactic of death by a thousand cuts" on the Soviet "Bear" that collapsed soon after it was driven from Afghanistan in 1989. The brigadier said: "It was the only way to defeat a superpower on the battlefield with ill-disciplined, ill-trained tribesmen whose only asset was an unconquerable fighting spirit welded to a warrior tradition." ...
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Media Mayhem, June 6, 2004

Washington Post, May 13, 1990

U.S. Declines to Probe Afghan Drug Trade; Rebels, Pakistani Officers Implicated



The U.S. government has for several years received, but declined to investigate, reports of heroin trafficking by some Afghan guerrillas and Pakistani military officers with whom it cooperates in the war against Soviet influence in Afghanistan, according to U.S. officials and Afghans. ...
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Media Mayhem, Aug 8, 2004:

... Rep. Porter Goss, the CIA agent turned lawmaker who Bush has tapped to head the agency, had breakfast with General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, on Sept. 11, 2001. Ahmed allegedly ordered an accomplice to wire $100,000 before the attacks to terrorist ringleader Mahammed Atta. Will Goss be asked about this meeting at his Senate confirmation hearings next month? ...
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Media Mayhem, July 25, 2004:

deja vu all over, again:

... During the 1980s, the C.I.A.'s two main covert action opeations became interwoven with the global narcotics trade. The agncy's support for Afghan guerrillas through Pakistan coincided wit the emergence of southern Asia as the major heroin supplier for the Eu- ropean and American markes. Although the United States maintained a substantial force of D.E.A. agents in Islamabad dring the 1980s, the unit was restrained by U.S. national security imperatives and did almost nothing to slow Pakistan's booming heroin exports to America. ...
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NBC Television Network, which is owned by General Electric, a major US defense contractor, is labeling today's alleged airliner bombing plot, which was thwarted in Britain, as "Target America." Brian Williams, the anchor of the NBC Nightly News, flew to London to further the hype over the bombing plot and the network has already created special graphics in the mass propaganda campaign.

Guardian, Aug. 10:

... Pakistani intelligence helped British security agencies crack a terror plot to blow up US-bound aircraft from Britain, and has arrested some suspects, its government said.

"Pakistan played a very important role in uncovering and breaking this international terrorist network," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Tasnim Aslam.

"Co-operation in this particular case was spread over a period of time. There were some arrests in Pakistan which were co-ordinated with arrests in the UK," she said.

She declined to give details about the arrests, including the number of suspects, their identities or when they were arrested. ...
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Times (London), Aug 10:




... The arrests were carried out with the help of the Pakistani intelligence service, which had been working closely with MI5 and Scotland Yard to foil the alleged plot. Many of those detained were said to hold dual British and Pakistani nationality and are believed to have travelled to Pakistan frequently.

British authorities had sought cooperation from Pakistani officials a few months ago and the information provided was crucial in thwarting the attacks, according to a highly placed Pakistani security source. ...
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Everybody knows that Pakistan's intelligence service can't be trusted and has been involved for years in all manner of corruption and criminal activity, including drug trafficking

Toronto Star, Aug. 10

... Pakistan intelligence helped British security agencies to crack the plot to blow up the U.S.-bound aircraft, an intelligence official said today.

The intelligence official said an Islamic militant arrested near the Afghan-Pakistan border several weeks ago provided a lead that played a role in “unearthing the plot,” that helped authorities arrest suspects in Britain.

A senior Pakistani government official also said that Pakistan had helped thwart the plot and added that the British government was fully aware of Islamabad’s role.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. ...
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Pictures this: Mothers boarding airlines throughout the US are now being forced to drink their babies' milk before being allowed fly on commerical aircraft due to the alleged thwarting of a plot hatched in Britain to unleash a wave of airliner bombings. British authorities and their American counterparts knew about the alleged plot for months, but failed to take action until early today, when the Brits made the arrests and then immediately released the information to the press just in time for Americans to hear it on their way to work this morning. Homeland Security then took the unprecedented precaution of mandating a "red alert" for all incoming flights from the UK, the first red alert since 9/11. Not even the attempt by infamous shoe bomber Richard Reid to ignite explosives onboard a commercial aircraft in the wake of 9/11 warranted a "red alert." The action comes as Bush's popularity has sunk to an all-time low, Republican incumbents in Congress are threatened with defeat in the fall elections and the war in Iraq is disapproved of by two-thirds of Americans.

President George W. Bush discusses his complex assessement of the current Mideast crisis over lunch with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair at the G8 summit meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia yesterday. "See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over," Bush told Blair as he chewed on a buttered roll. ..."
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Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 00:38:11 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bill Haas
Subject: Letter To the Editor or Op Ed: Recent SLPS Matters, the perspective of a former (1997-2005) Board Member
To: letters postdispatch ,
letters@stlamerican.com


I will not judge the decision to remove Floyd Irons as basketball coach because I was not there for the discussions, nor privy to all information.

I will say that I, like others, have great respect for all Mr. Irons is and has done, and wish there had been a way to let him serve out the rest of his career, and retiree with grace and dignity.
And I, like all others, I'm sure, including the School Board, am sad that that didn't happen.

I have some knowledge of some of the factors that may have gone into the decision, partly because I was on the Board when some of this took place, but I don't think it my place to speculate or judge at this point, especially as the decision has been made.

On the other hand, it is just my opinion that if everything could be done over again, some of those involved may have chosen to do it differently, but hind-sight is always 20-20.
Nor am I 100% convinced that the entire matter is completely played out. And if I do have any input to give, it would be behind the scenes.

As for the resignation of Superintendent Creg Williams, it is impossible for the Board to speak about it candidly if at all because, as I understand, not speaking publicly about it was part of the legal conditions of the resignation agreement.
I am not bound by that agreement, however.

On the other hand, I was not in the meetings where it was discussed, nor privy to all of the persons' thinking.
But I do have first and second hand knowledge of some of the factors which in my opinion may have entered into the Board's decision to encourage or accept his resignation:

1. First let it be known that I was on the Board when he was hired. I voted enthusiastically for him. I was excited for him and for us. I was still on the Board when he took over, and no one wanted him to succeed more than I.
2. As is always the case, he turned out somewhat differently than he interviewed. Very differently.
3. From Day 1, he treated Veronica O'Brien and Bill Purdy with extreme disrespect, if not complete neglect, as he didn't need them because he had the backing of the Board majority.
4. When the new members were elected, he seemed to still treat all 4 (O'Brien, Purdy, Downs, Jones) with disrespect and neglect, and from what I understand, bad-mouthed them publicly and privately, even though they now constituted the Board majority.
5. So if there was a fight, he asked for it, not they.
6. It appears he continued to follow the directives of City Hall even though their representatives on the Board were no longer in charge. And from what I hear, even what he was trying to do he wasn't doing very well. The district, I'm told, is in chaos, and that's his doing and responsibility not the Board's.
7. He had an obligation to work with the Board, especially the new Board majority, to work out goals,and means to implement them.
They're his boss. If he's not going to work with them, you don't need them or you don't need him. They were elected. He was hired. The choice is clear.
8. When the Board wants to go in one direction, and the Superintendent's not listening and is trying to go in another, it's only a matter of time until they part. The time seems to have been this week.
9. I am convinced beyond any doubt that the Board majority did not set out to sabotage or get rid of Creg Williams, for some obvious reasons (the fallout that has occurred), and some more complex, but and would much have much preferred to work together. Many of them told me that personally! He made that impossible, not them.
10. So when divorce is inevitable, the sooner you cut your losses and move on, the better, and that's what they Board did and it's to their credit.
11. And more to their credit, they have a plan in place with the new Interim Superintendent to move forward with nary a missed step. I'm very excited about Dr. Bourisaw and the team I understand she's put together.
12. And to those who say that the Board majority had planned this for a while, I say that if they saw that possibility coming, it was only prudent to plan for it even if at the same time they were trying their best, and hoping, to avoid it.
13. I'm more optimistic about the future of the District than I've ever been. We gave the Mayor's Board three years to bring the community together behind a cohesive educational plan. They never did. This Board majority has been in place barely three months. They were elected overwhelming by the people, especially those who care most about the District, after being outspent in the election a billion to one.
We owe them the same respect and courtesy and trust to find their voice and to find their way to making this the District we all want it to be. We owe them the chance. I'm betting they will.

permanent link posted by Delaney : 9:21 AM

On The Media, May 5:

In the space of four months, the Village Voice saw the departure of its publisher, two editors-in-chief, its storied Washington muckraker and its Pulitzer Prize-winning media critic. Sidney Schanberg quit after a confrontational meeting with the new boss. Investigative reporter James Ridgeway was terminated for reasons still unclear. Nat Hentoff, who has been covering civil liberties for The Voice for 49 years, was targeted for criticism in front of the entire staff, all of which drama leaves the survivors and many others to wonder when the shakeup of this venerable institution ends, who among the Villagers will still have a voice? Who, that is, other than Michael Lacey, the new chief?

MARK JURKOWITZ: You know, if there was any question about whether or not he was going to walk on eggshells with The Voice culture, that was answered very quickly. He just went in there and smashed all the eggs.

BOB GARFIELD: Mark Jurkowitz, media critic for the Boston Phoenix, says Lacey's tough-guy approach has been sad and ugly to witness.

MARK JURKOWITZ: Frankly, when you have people like Nat Hentoff, who is about 80, and Sidney Schanberg, who's in his 70s, men who helped define journalism for a generation or two, I don't find it particularly appealing that you would go out of your way to pick fights with folks like that. ...

SIDNEY SCHANBERG: One of the last things he said at the meeting itself was, be prepared to say goodbye to some of your friends.

BOB GARFIELD: Sidney Schanberg.

SIDNEY SCHANBERG: And there was no real need for that kind of gratuitous hostility or insult, and I didn't think it was an accident. I thought that was part of the man, and I didn't want to work for him.

Last last year, Mike Lacey, the executive editor of New Times Inc. of Phoenix, achieved one of his lifetime ambitions -- he bought out his main competitors and took control of the venerable Village Voice. But now that he controls the alternative news universe in the Big Apple he's finding that his slash and burn tactics inside the newsroom and "whacky" jouralism philosophy, which he has practiced for decades, are finally receiving the critical attention that they deserve.

San Francisco Bay Guardian, April 25:

by Tim Redmond

The guys from Phoenix seem to have their hands full these days dealing with the Village Voice. Note to Mike Lacey: It’s a different world in New York. Everything you do is going to be watched. Your policy of ducking the media isn’t going to fly. Lacey did give an interview to the New York Observer , in which he argued that he wants real reporters, not just thumbsucking columnists. Hey, so do I (and so, I think, do the folks at the Voice) - but I want reporters who care, and who take stands, and newspapers that are a part of their communities. In other words, Lacey is pushing a false dichotomy, making it look as if he’s cleaning out the dead wood, getting rid of lazy people who only pontificate - when what he’s really doing is getting rid of the people who have strong political leanings. He’s going to turn the Voice into another city magazine, and destroy it as a progressive newspaper. ...
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New York Daily News, July 11:

The Bush administration granted minimum Geneva Conventions rights Wednesday to about 1,000 suspected terrorist prisoners at Guantanamo and other U.S.-run prisons, effectively outlawing torture.

Bowing to last month's Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo, the Pentagon released a memo to all commands ordering compliance with Geneva's Common Article 3 requiring the humane treatment of prisoners. ...
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Washington Post, July 12:

The Army is discontinuing a controversial multibillion-dollar deal with oil services giant Halliburton for logistical support to U.S. troops worldwide, a decision that could cut deeply into the firm's dominance of government contracting in Iraq.

The choice comes after several years of attacks from critics who saw the contract as a symbol of politically connected corporations profiteering on the war.

Under the deal, Halliburton had exclusive rights to provide the military with a wide range of work that included keeping soldiers around the globe fed, sheltered and in communication with friends and family back home. Government audits turned up more than $1 billion in questionable costs. Whistle-blowers told how the company charged $45 per case of soda, double-billed on meals and allowed troops to bathe in contaminated water.
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Mum's the Word

NPR, July 11:

The Village Voice is the grandfather, and bellwether, of the nation's alternative press. In the 1960s, the Voice was a clear presence on the political left. Now the paper has been bought by a competitor -- the non-ideological New Times newspaper chain. ...

Listen to Lacey Before He Lost His Bark
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BBC, July 6:

A prominent Cairo lawyer says the Egyptian man identified by the US as the new al-Qaeda leader in Iraq has been in jail in Egypt for seven years.

The lawyer, Mamdouh Ismail, who has represented Egyptian Islamists for many years, says he met the man days ago in a jail on the edge of Cairo. ...
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"See Stoney ... draw ... roll over ... play guitar. Good Stoney. What else does Stoney do?"

The above caption appeared on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Metro section Thursday along with three photographs of Stoney, a horse, and its owners, former St. Louis County police detectivce Jack Patty and his wife. The photos took up so much room on the front page that the accompanying story by reporter Valerie Schremp Hahn got bumped to page B-10.

Putting aside the fact that the story has absolutely no news value, Schremp Hahn still managed to commit an error of omission, a difficult accomplishment for such a tame piece.

Schremp Hahn's story focused on the talented Stoney and another horse owned by the Pattys named Pete. Pete, according to the story, is being taught to kick a soccer ball by Patty. The horse is named after Patty's former detective partner, the late Conrad "Pete" Vasel.

Schremp Hahn also mentions that Patty was involved in "at least a dozen shootouts," and received a Medal of Valor from the St. Louis County Police Department. She doesn't mention, however, that Patty and his late partner were investigated and fired for alleged criminal activities.

When I suggested via an email that the reporter check the newspaper's morgue to verify that Patty and Vasel both had checkered career histories, she responded that she had checked the old clips and found that the two detectives had been reinstated.

Reinstated for what?

In 1971, Patty and Vasel were fired from the police department because they allegedly allowed burglaries to be conducted on a business and a home in St. Louis County.

But why let a messy little detail like this get in the way of a fun summertime horsey tale?
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St. Louis Indy Media, June 5:
by Eric B.
During morning rush hour on June 2, a deejay for the Bernie Miklasz Show on local sports station AM 1380 said the proper place for bicycles is underneath cars. This comes barely one year after local radio personalities were suspended for urging listeners to forceably disarm cops. It is unclear whether the deejay advocating violence against bicyclists could receive similar treatment. To put the seriousness of his comment in context it's worth noting that 12% of all roadway injuries in Missouri involve bicyclists. ...

[CYA Department: Miklasz (left) responded to this flap by threatening to sue online posters who attributed the "kill cyclists" comment to him.]
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President George W. Bush's appearance at a fund-raiser for Republican Sen. Jim Talent at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Clayton yesterday was akin to his recent fly-by-night visit to Baghdad's Green Zone.

Both his Baghdad and St. Louis visits were sneaky and used as publicity gimmicks for his desperate efforts to shore up support for the war in Iraq.

Wednesday, Bush tip-toed into the back entrance of the hotel for a $2,000-a-plate dinner to raise cash for Talent's re-election.

Meanwhile, hundreds of protestors outside the hotel demostrated against the war and in support of a raise in the minimum wage, which both Bush and Talent oppose. The federal minimum wage, which has been frozen for nearly a decade, is $5.15 per hour.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch heralded the presidential appearance here yesterday afternoon with front-page coverage, as is to be expected. Coverage of the protest, on the other hand, was limited to three paragraphs on the jump page, a photo and caption.

Police detained radio personality Rush Limbaugh at a Florida airport yesterday for six hours after finding a prescription bottle of Viagra in his luggage that didn't have his name on the label. Meanwhile, Limbaugh recently was photographed with a lip lock on Mary Lynn Rajskub, the actress who plays the petulant Clohe O'Brien character on Fox network's popular anti-terrorism soap opera 24. The site of the love fest was a conservative Heritage Foundation pseudo-seminar entitled America's Image in Fighting Terrorism: Fact, Fiction or Does It Matter? Limbaugh acted as the master of ceremony of the panel discussion, which also included Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Could Chloe and Rush be an item? Is Chertoff really a zombie? And does any of this really matter? Stay tuned.
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Associated Press, June 21:

Federal and local police across the country - as well as some of the nation's best-known companies - have been gathering Americans' phone records from private data brokers without subpoenas or warrants.

These brokers, many of whom market aggressively across the Internet, have broken into customer accounts online, tricked phone companies into revealing information and sometimes acknowledged that their practices violate laws, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Legal experts and privacy advocates said police reliance on private vendors who commit such acts raises civil-liberties questions. ...
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State investigating alleged illegal eavesdropping by NSA

St. Louis Post-Disptach, June 21:

by Michael D. Sorkin

State regulators in Missouri have issued subpoenas to AT&T, demanding to know whether the company is violating consumer privacy laws by sharing customer phone and Internet records with the government.

The subpoenas set a deadline of July 12. They seek records and company officials to testify under oath.

The subpoenas, along with a growing number of legal challenges here and elsewhere, set the stage for confrontations between civil liberties and national security - and between state and federal governments.

The challenges accuse the government of abusing anti-terrorism laws, and AT&T of allowing government agencies to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mails without legal authority.
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You didn't read this first in the Riverfront Times or St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Salon.com, June 20:

by Kim Zetter

In a pivotal network operations center in metropolitan St. Louis, AT&T has maintained a secret, highly secured room since 2002 where government work is being conducted, according to two former AT&T workers once employed at the center.

In interviews with Salon, the former AT&T workers said that only government officials or AT&T employees with top-secret security clearance are admitted to the room, located inside AT&T's facility in Bridgeton. The room's tight security includes a biometric "mantrap" or highly sophisticated double door, secured with retinal and fingerprint scanners. The former workers say company supervisors told them that employees working inside the room were "monitoring network traffic" and that the room was being used by "a government agency."
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Correction: The PBS News Hour's anchor Jim Lehrer's name was spelled incorrectly in the initial posting of this entry.


On the PBS News Hour this evening, New Yorker contributing writer Lawrence Wright (pictured at left), an expert on al-Qaida, said that Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who was named by the U.S. military last week as the new leader of the terrorist group in Iraq, may not exist. Wright said that al-Masri may actually be a fictional creation of the intelligence world. The revelation came within the context of a discussion of the deaths of two U.S. soldiers. The two disappeared from a checkpoint south of Baghdad last Friday. Their disappearance prompted a search of the area by 8,000 U.S. troops. The deaths have been described in the media as being in retaliation for the U.S. military's recent killing of former al-Qaida in Iraq leader Aub Musab Zarqawi. The deaths have now been attributed by the press to Zaraqawi's alleged replacement -- al-Masri -- based on a message posted at a reported terrorist web site. Jim Lehrer, the anchor of the program, asked Wright directly whether he was saying that al-Masri didn't exist, and Wright reaffirmed his opinion.

If al-Masri is a phantom terrorist, the question that Lehrer didn't ask was who created him. We do, however, know who trumpeted al-Masri's ascendency as the new face of terror: PBS News and its frequent contributor New York Times Iraq correspondent John Burns.
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